Robert Bennett

Mr. BENNETT

Mr. BENNETT. Thank you. I thank the Senator.

Mr. BENNETT. I am thrilled with the presentation of the Senator from Texas. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that when he is through I be recognized.

Mr. BENNETT. Mr. President, will the Senator yield for a quick unanimous consent request?

Mr. BENNETT

Mr. BENNETT. Mr. President, I thank the senior Senator from Texas for that most enlightening presentation. I agree with him we probably should not be debating the Presidential race on the floor. I noticed the Senator from Massachusetts comes to the floor every day and talks about education, very often giving the same speech using the same set of charts. So I have decided I ought to respond to some of those charts to set the record straight. One of the charts which the Senator from Massachusetts uses shows the increased school enrollment in the Nation, and he uses it to justify the Democratic position that we ought to require spending for new school construction. He says: Where are these students going to be housed if we do not pass this bill in the Federal Government that will mandate school construction? We Republicans have always said we are willing to spend the money on education. Make no mistake, we are not talking about dollars here. Indeed, the bill that is working its way through the process and may come to the floor this week has more money for education than the President initially requested. Understand that. We are not talking about dollars, we are talking about control. Who is going to control the spending of those dollars? Will it be the Federal Government or will it be the people in the local areas? I came across this chart, which I have had reproduced. It demonstrates what is happening with the percentage changes in public elementary and secondary school enrollment. The Senator from Massachusetts has a chart showing enrollment going up, and I agree with that, but this is a different chart, and it comes from the U.S. Department of Education. This, obviously, is not Republican propaganda. This comes from the administration. It breaks down school enrollment by region. You will notice that there is an increase in school enrollment in the West, where I live. It shows an increase from 1988 to 1998 and a projected increase from 1998 to 2008. It is a tremendous increase. There is an increase in the South. This shows the increase from 1988 to 1998 and the projected increase from 1998 to 2008. But when we go to the Northeast, we find that the projection is the other way. In the Northeast, the projected percentage change in public elementary and secondary school enrollment is going down, not up; and in the Midwest, it is going down, not up--down by an even greater amount. It has gone up less than any other region in the 10-year period prior to 1998, and will go down more than any other region in the years from 1998 to 2008. When you see the breakdown coming from the Department of Education, I think you see the flaw in the argument of the Senator from Massachusetts. And I think you see the reason to support the position the Republicans have taken. Yes, we need new school construction in this country, but we do not need it everywhere. We do not need it mandated from Washington. Washington, I have discovered, has a way of adopting formulas. Boy, have I learned about formulas since I have been in the Senate. We had a debate on this floor about funds to address class size, and everyone was saying: We must reduce class size if we are going to improve education. I am all for reducing class size. Then I looked at the formula, and I discovered a very interesting thing. Do you know the State that has the largest class size? It is a tossup. Sometimes it is California; sometimes it is Utah. When I looked at the formula for how Washington would allocate the money that we were supposedly adopting to reduce class size, I found that it had nothing whatever to do with class size. It was a formula based on poverty, and States that already had smaller class sizes would get most of the money for the purpose of reducing class sizes. And my State, which vies for having the largest class size, would get precious little of that money. So I opposed that proposal. And I got beaten up in my campaign: Senator Bennett, you are not in favor of reducing class size because you didn't vote for the proposal. I said to my opponent: Read the bill and you will find that it would not have done much for Utah. Once you got past the title, it had little to do with reducing class size where enrollments are highest. The same thing is true here. We are talking about the need for new construction, but are we going to have a Federal formula that will determine how the money is allocated per State? Every State, I guarantee you, will get money to increase school construction, including States in the Northeast, where enrollment is projected to go down, not up. The money would be allocated the way Washington allocates, and those of us in the West would get hurt. We need to understand that when we use these educational slogans about ``we must build new schools because our enrollment is going up,'' we are glossing over the issue, and we are not paying attention to what it really is. This is why I am proud to be supporting the Republican position that says: Federal spending for education, yes. Federal dominance of education, no. Increased money from the Federal Government for the districts that need it, absolutely. Federal dictating to the districts, no. So every time the Senator from Massachusetts shows us his charts and tells us about enrollments going up, let's remember that enrollments are not going up uniformly. Enrollments are going up differently. If we pass the bill that the Senator from Massachusetts daily demands that we pass, I'm afraid that those of us in the West would get shortchanged, those in the South would get shortchanged, and those in the area of the Senator from Massachusetts would get extra money at the expense of the rest of the country. Should we spend more money on education? Yes. Should we dictate it from Government? No. Ignoring local needs is not good for education. It is not good for our schoolchildren. It would not be the smart thing to do. Now, with regard to another education issue, I have listened to the Senator from Massachusetts attack Texas. Yesterday, I pointed out that the quoting of the Rand report as a vehicle for attacking Texas demonstrated that someone had not read the Rand report. I pointed out that the President of Rand himself said, as the second report was issued, that it did not negate the findings of the first report, which said that Texas was No. 1--that Texas had done the best job--in a number of areas. When the second report came out, which dealt with Rand's analysis of the Texas test procedures, the President of Rand said, this is not in conflict with our earlier findings that said that Texas leads the Nation in increases in improvements in education. But those who use the Rand report to bash Texas did not bother to quote the President of Rand, did not bother to look at the earlier Rand report; they just picked out those things that they thought would be good for them. So it has been injected into the Presidential campaign, whether we like it or not. And in that spirit, I went to the web site of Gore- Lieberman, Inc. to find out some of the things that we could expect from Vice President Gore if he were elected. I found some very interesting things. I now refer to the Gore-Lieberman web site. It states that Gore would test students with real tests for real accountability. He would require testing to measure achievement and attach real consequences to the results of those tests. I find that very interesting. Is the Federal Government going to write the tests? And is the Federal Government going to mandate the test and come down on schools that do not meet the achievements of the tests? And what are the real consequences that he is talking about? In the campaign, sometimes the rhetoric can get fuzzy. But this is the one I find most interesting: Gore would offer choice of high- caliber preschool. He would make high-quality voluntary preschool available to all 4-year-olds so that every family can have a choice in preschool. Dare I use the hated word, Mr. President? Are we talking about ``vouchers''? Are we saying that money would go to families for a choice in preschool that would be funded by the Federal Government? Are we talking about the Department of Education mandating preschool availability to every 4-year-old in the country, and then following that 4-year-old with some money? Are we talking about the GI bill for 4-year-olds? Congress passed the GI bill after the end of the Second World War, and established the precedent that the money goes with the student, not to the school. That is a precedent I applaud. All of those who talk about vouchers in elementary and secondary schools say it is terrible that you might spend money on a religious school, that it violates the separation of church and state. I did not notice that with the GI bill. With the GI bill, if a veteran wants to take the money and go to Notre Dame and study to be a Catholic priest, the Federal Government says: It's none of our business. We are giving you the money. You go where you want. So I ask the question: When the Vice President says that he would make available high-quality voluntary preschool to all 4-year-olds, would he object if a 4-year-old decided to go to a Montessori school, a Montessori school where he might learn a little bit of Catholic history? Would we have that happen under the program that is touted on the Gore-Lieberman, Inc. web site? What do they mean when they say preschool for all 4-year-olds? We have not had any indication of how much that is going to cost or how that would be administered in the Department of Education. Based on past experience, I am afraid how it would be administered, that it would take us back into the same morass I was referring to with respect to this chart. We would see a Federal program that does not address real needs. That would be the case with school construction. That would be the case, by the way, in the proposal for 100,000 new teachers. We looked at the proposal of 100,000 new teachers in the State of Utah. We can use new teachers in the State of Utah. Everyone can use new teachers. We found out that the program for 100,000 new teachers would give us a few additional teachers per school district--not per school, per school district. We have school districts in Utah that have 100,000 students in them. We would get a few additional teachers for each school district in the State of Utah. The thing I am afraid of is that with even one additional teacher would come a whole host of Federal controls, a whole host of Federal requirements. As I have said on the floor before, I was lured back into public life, away from my business career, when I was asked to serve as chairman of the Strategic Planning Commission for the Utah State school board. I found out the degree to which the Federal Government controls local decisions. The Federal Government puts up 6 percent of the money, but controls 60 percent of the decisions. I didn't like that when I had nothing to do with elective politics, when I was just serving a public service responsibility trying to improve education. I don't like it now, when I am in a policy position. I don't think it is sound policy. I think you are going to see the same kind of thing apply to this suggestion from ``Gore-Lieberman, Inc.'' that says there will be preschool available to all 4-year-olds. I think the process would be that the Federal Government might put up 6 percent of the money and make 60 percent or more of the decisions. I am guessing because we don't have any of the specifics. Let me leave the education issue and make one final observation in response to the comments of the senior Senator from Texas. He talked about tax cuts and how, in fact, they benefited people other than the rich. Let me give, if I may, briefly, my own experience. This is not theoretical. This is not out of some think tank. This is not some group of academics. This is a real experience of a real person in real life. It was in 1984 that I received a phone call from a friend of mine in Salt Lake City. At the time I was living in California. I was asked: Would you come to Salt Lake and consult with us as we try to start a little business? At the time I flew to Salt Lake to sit down with those people to talk about that business, they had four full-time employees. They were literally operating out of the basement of the man who had the business card that said he was the president of that company--a grandiose title, a lot of dreams, and four people. Mr. President, 1984 is smack in the middle of what we have heard some people call ``the decade of greed,'' because that was the period of time when the top marginal tax rate was 28 percent. And that is terrible, some people said, because the rich are getting by only having to pay 28 percent on their income. Well, I moved to Utah. I became the president of that company. We grew that company through the decade of greed with internally generated funds. The reason we were able to grow that company with internally generated funds is because we filed as an S corporation under the tax law, which meant our top tax rate was 28 percent. That meant for every dollar we earned trying to get that company going, we could keep 72 cents to fund its growth. The company today has over 4,000 employees, 1,000 times what it had when it was founded. The company pays millions of dollars today in corporate income tax. The suppliers that supply goods to that company pay millions of dollars in corporate income taxes. Those 4,000 employees of the company pay millions of dollars in income tax. If you will, that company is making its significant contribution to today's surpluses as those millions and millions of dollars come into the Federal Treasury. If the top corporate tax rate, top effective tax rate, had been 39.6 percent, as it is today, instead of 28 percent, I can tell you from firsthand knowledge that we could not have grown that company in that atmosphere. Instead of keeping 72 cents out of every dollar we made in order to grow the company, if we had only been able to keep 60, that extra 12-cent difference would have sunk us. I know. I sweat over the books. I worried about meeting payroll. I worried about cash-flow. It is the harvest of the seeds that were planted in the decade of greed that are now producing the tremendous income that is coming into this economy. Look at the companies that have built over time and ask how many of them were started in the period when the tax rate was lower and paid S chapter funds. When I first came to the Senate, I tried to explain how all this worked. I asked the question on the Senate floor: Is there anybody here who understands what a K-1 is? I asked the question when the chairman of the Budget Committee at the time was on the floor. He was debating the tax structure. He had no idea what a K-1 was. I asked others in my own party: Does anybody know what a K-1 is? They had no idea. They knew what a W-2 was. That is the form that indicates your wages. But they didn't know what a K-1 was. A K-1 is the tax form that is filed that tells you what percentage of your income has to be paid on your individual income tax because it is a flowthrough in an S corporation structure. Most entrepreneurs all start out in that structure, and most Americans have no understanding of how it works. That is the area where the high marginal tax rates bite, and that is the area where the entrepreneur feels it. Just because there is a tiny percentage of the population who understands, it doesn't mean that it is a tiny percentage of the population who pays those taxes. The argument being made by the Senator from Texas is a correct one. We should recognize that in America the economy and our place in the economy is not static. We are fluid, all of us. We move up and down. There have been times when I have been in the top 1 percent and I have paid millions of dollars in taxes. There have been times in my life in my entrepreneurial cycle when I have been in the bottom 1 percent and paid no taxes. It is the opportunity to move from the bottom 1 percent to the top 1 percent that motivates all Americans. It is the tax burden the Senator from Texas was talking about that de-motivates the Americans who want to make that move. Ultimately, it is the revenue that comes from Americans who take those risks and make those moves that gives us the budget surplus. I close with an observation. It came from another politician who made it very clear. He said: We must remember, money does not come from the budget. Money comes from the people. Money comes from the economy. If we assume that money comes from the budget and is therefore ours to spend, we make a serious mistake. As long as we remember that money comes from the people, we will make intelligent decisions as to how we treat the people's money. I yield the floor.

Mr. BENNETT

Mr. BENNETT. Mr. President, I thank the Senator from Vermont for his courtesy. I was more than happy to give him whatever leeway he wanted, but I appreciate the opportunity to make a comment. Given the nature of the session in which we find ourselves, we have to take every opportunity as it comes along. As the chairman of the subcommittee, the Senator from Kentucky, indicated, the time will be taken off the bill. I rise to take the opportunity to respond to the comments that were made earlier by the Senator from Massachusetts in his scathing attack on the education system in Texas. The Senator from Massachusetts, as well as Senator Harkin yesterday, referred to a Rand Corporation study on the State of Texas schools. They would have us believe that based on that study, the Texas schools are terrible and, further, that those of us who are saying nice things about Texas schools are deliberately misleading the public. I want to make it clear that the people who are missing this story are the people who sit in the gallery above the Chair. The press has missed the story here because they have bought the line laid down by the Senator from Massachusetts and others in his party that somehow the Rand Corporation has denounced Texas schools as being terribly inferior. The Rand Corporation has done no such thing. Democrats have used the recent Rand study to try to tell everybody that the Rand Corporation has done that. If I may, too many journalists have taken the press release as it has come out of the Democratic headquarters and not read the record for themselves. I took a class in journalism. The first thing they said was, check the facts yourself. I didn't follow that career, but I have tried to remember that advice. So I have checked the facts myself. The place I went to begin with, with the help of my staff, was the Rand Corporation. Let us go back to the Rand Corporation and see what they have to say about Texas schools. I will leave aside the argument as to whether or not they are right. There is always the possibility that even these so-called experts could be wrong in their analysis. Let us set that aside for just a minute and ask ourselves, what does the Rand Corporation have to say about Texas schools? This is what the Rand Corporation has to say about Texas schools. I am reading from a news release issued by the Rand Corporation itself. I ask unanimous consent that this be printed in the Record at the conclusion of my remarks.

Mr. BENNETT. Absolutely.

Mr. BENNETT. The Rand Corporation says: The education reforms of the 1980s and 1990s seem to be working, according to a new RAND report, but some states are doing far better than others in making achievement gains and in elevating their students' performance compared with students of similar racial and socioeconomic background in other states. Texas and Indiana are high performers on both these counts. I will repeat that last sentence: Texas and Indiana are high performers on both these counts. This is not a Republican speaking. This is not the Bush campaign speaking. This is the Rand Corporation speaking. Texas, a high performer. It goes on: Math scores are rising across the country at a national average rate of about one percentile point per year, a pace outstripping that of the previous two decades and suggesting that public education reforms are taking hold. Progress is far from uniform, however. One group of states--led by North Carolina and Texas and including Michigan, Indiana and Maryland--boasts gains about twice as great as the national average. This is the Rand Corporation, Mr. President, saying Texas is boasting rates of improvement twice the national average. Back to the report: Even more dramatic contrasts emerge in the study's pathbreaking, cross-state comparison of achievement by students from similar families. Texas heads the class in this ranking with California dead last. Interesting. They go on to say: Although the two states are close demographic cousins, Texas students, on average, scored 11 percentile points higher on NAEP math and reading tests than their California counterparts. In fact, Texans performed well with respect to most states. On the 4th-grade NAEP math tests in 1996, Texas non-Hispanic white students and black students ranked first compared to their counterparts in other states, while Hispanic students ranked fifth. On the same test, California non-Hispanic white students ranked third from the bottom, black students last, and Hispanic students fourth from the bottom among states. How can this be, for the Rand Corporation to be saying such wonderful things about Texas and then having Democratic Senators come to the floor and quote the Rand Corporation as saying terrible things about Texas? If I were a conspiracy theorist, I would think the release of the latest Rand study might have something to do with the fact that there is an election in less than a week. But the president of the Rand Corporation has insisted that is not the case. He has insisted that the timing of the release of this second study, which is being used to trash Texas, was entirely coincidental and had nothing whatever to do with the election. All right. Let's take him at his word and read his words to see how he reconciles the earlier Rand statement with the later one. I didn't tell you, but that first study I quoted from was released in July, before either of the conventions took place, before the question of Texas performance in education became a national priority or a national issue. How does the president of Rand reconcile these two apparently irreconcilable positions, one where Rand says, in July, Texas is No. 1, Texas comes in first with California last, and the two States are demographically very similar--how do they reconcile that statement with the statements we are hearing on the floor today? Read what he has to say, I say again to my journalist friends, who take the press release from the Democratic headquarters, put it in the headlines--top story in today's television--that the Rand Corporation has trashed the Texas record. I don't think any of them read what the president of Rand had to say because if they had, the story would have been different on this morning's news. This is what he has to say: The July study ``Improving Student Achievement'' touched on the Texas schools and received widespread press play. Both efforts-- Talking about the July study and this last one-- draw on NAEP scores. The new paper suggests a less positive picture of Texas education than the earlier effort, but I do not believe these efforts are in sharp conflict. Together, in fact, they provide a more comprehensive picture of key education issues. So Rand is not backing away from their earlier statement that Texas is No. 1 in the areas that they quoted and covered in their first statement. They are not repudiating that. They are not contradicting it. They are not backing away from it. Again, the president of Rand says: I do not believe that these efforts are in sharp conflict. It is the politicians who have put them in sharp conflict, not the researchers. Let's examine the research and see what it says. Quoting again from the president of Rand: The July report differed in scope. Then in parentheses he says: (It covered almost all States, not just Texas.) Therein lies the answer to this dilemma. The July report that says Texas ranks No. 1 was a comparative study of Texas against other States. In that study, they said: In these areas we are checking, Texas is the best. The Rand Corporation said ``Texas is the best.'' Now, they came back to Texas to do a different study on an entirely different issue, and the issue they studied the second time was whether or not the Texas test system was a good one. They came to their own conclusion that the Texas system of testing needs to be improved. Their judgment, their opinion. Never at any time did they say that Texas was not getting better results than any other States, even with a system they claim needs to be improved. I see the chairman of the subcommittee has returned. I will be happy to yield the floor now and get back to the foreign operations bill, which is before us. I could not pass the opportunity to straighten out the Record. The Senator from Massachusetts and the Senator from Iowa have misled us because they have not read the fine print of the report they are quoting from, and they have not consulted the opinion of the president of the organization they are citing. At no time, in no place, in spite of what the political headline said, has the Rand Corporation backed away from its conviction that Texas is first in many, if not all, of the categories they examined on education. The Governor of Texas and the two Senators from Texas who spoke earlier are rightly entitled to be very proud of the progress that has taken place in education in their State. Exhibit 1 Rising Math Scores Suggest Education Reforms Are Working state achievement differences tied to spending, policies texas first, california last in test scores of similar students Washington, D.C., July 25--The education reforms of the 1980s and 1990s seem to be working, according to a new RAND report, but some states are doing far better than others in making achievement gains and in elevating their students' performance compared with students of similar racial and socioeconomic background in other states. Texas and Indiana are high performers on both these counts. The study is based on an analysis of National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) tests given between 1990 and 1996. The authors rank the 44 participating states by raw achievement scores, by scores that compare students from similar families, and by score improvements. They also analyze which policies and programs account for the substantial differences in achievement across states that can't be explained by demographics. Here are the key findings: Math scores are rising across the country at a national average rate of about one percentile point per year, a pace outstripping that of the previous two decades and suggesting that public education reforms are taking hold. Progress is far from uniform, however. One group of states--led by North Carolina and Texas and including Michigan, Indiana and Maryland--boasts gains about twice as great as the national average. Another group--including Wyoming, Georgia, Delaware, and Utah--shows minuscule gains or none at all. Most states fall in between. Even more dramatic contrasts emerge in the study's pathbreaking, cross-state comparison of achievement by students from similar families. Texas heads the class in this ranking with California dead last. Wisconsin, Montana, Iowa, Maine, North Dakota, Indiana and New Jersey cluster closely behind Texas. Louisiana, Mississippi, West Virginia, Alabama and Rhode Island perform almost as dismally as California. Although the two states are close demographic cousins, Texas students, on average, scored 11 percentile points higher on NAEP math and reading tests that their California counterparts. In fact, the Texans performed well with respect to most states. On the 4th-grade NAEP math tests in 1996, Texas non-Hispanic white students and black students ranked first compared to their counterparts in other states, while Hispanic students ranked fifth. On the same test, California non-Hispanic white students ranked third from the bottom, black students last, and Hispanic students fourth from the bottom among states. Differences in state scores for students with similar families can be explained, in part, by per pupil expenditures and how these funds are allocated. States at the top of the heap generally have lower pupil-teacher ratios in lower grades, higher participation in public prekindergarten programs and a higher percentage of teachers who are satisfied with the resources they are provided for teaching. These three factors account for about two-thirds of the Texas-California differential. Teacher turnover also has a statistically significant effect on achievement. (California is now implementing class-size reduction and other reforms but these steps began after the 1996 NAEP tests.) Having a higher percentage of teachers with masters degrees and extensive teaching experience appears to have comparatively little effect on student achievement across states. Higher salaries also showed little effect, possibly reflecting the inefficiency of the current compensation system in which pay raises reward both high- and low-quality teachers. However, the report points out that salary differences may have more important achievements effects within states than between states. Also, they may have greater impact during periods when teachers are in shorter supply than during the 1990-1996 measurement period. To raise achievement scores, the most efficient and effective use of education dollars is to target states with higher proportions of minority and disadvantaged students with funding for lower pupil-teacher ratios, more widespread prekindergarten efforts, and more adequate teaching resources. As for teacher salaries and education, the report adds, ``efforts to increase the quality of teachers in the long run are important, but . . . significant productivity gains can be obtained with the current teaching force if their working conditions are improved.'' The most plausible explanation for the remarkable rate of math gains by North Carolina and Texas is the integrated sets of policies involving standards, assessment and accountability that both states implemented in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The RAND study, led by David Grissmer, is based on NAEP tests given in 1990, 1992, 1994 and 1996 to representative samples of 2,500 students from the 44 voluntarily participating states. Five tests were given in mathematics and two in reading at either the 4th- or 8th-grade level. Not all of the states took all of the tests. And there were too few reading tests to permit a separate analysis of those results. Taken together, however, the tests provided the first set of data permitting statistically valid achievement comparisons across states. The researchers used data from the census and from the National Educational Longitudinal Survey to establish the student samples' family characteristics. The 1998 NAEP reading and math scores became available too late to be incorporated in this analysis. ``We're examining those data now, however, and we find that the state rankings change little and our findings about which policies make the most difference aren't affected at all,'' Grissmer declares. ``Our results certainly challenge the traditional view of public education as `unreformable','' he concludes. ``But the achievement of disadvantaged students is still substantially affected by inadequate resources. Stronger federal compensatory programs are required to address this inequity.'' Grissmer's coauthors include Ann Flanagan, Jennifer Kawata and Stephanie Williamson. Improving Student Achievement: What NAEP Test Scores Tell Us was supported by the ExxonMobil Foundation, the Danforth Foundation, the NAEP Secondary Analysis Program, the Center for Research on Education Diversity and Excellence and by RAND.

Mr. BENNETT. I have probably exhausted my indignation on that subject, I say to the Senator from Kentucky. I will be available again if someone comes along to try to misinterpret and misquote these studies.

Mr. BENNETT

Mr. BENNETT. Mr. President, I listened with interest to my colleague from Massachusetts. I am always interested as he holds forth on these issues about which he feels passionately, and I congratulate him on his passion. I have a similar commitment to education but a rather different view of things. Let me review again, as I have in this Chamber before, my own experience with respect to education that causes me to come to a different opinion and a different position than that of the senior Senator from Massachusetts. As I have related to the Senate before, I was happy in a business career when I received a phone call that asked me to serve as chairman of the Strategic Planning Commission of the Utah State Board of Education. That got me into educational issues and actually started me down the road out of corporate life and into public life, ultimately leading me here to the Senate. Apropos of the things that the Senator from Massachusetts has said, I share an experience I had that resonated with the comment that Governor Bush made the other night. The Senator from Massachusetts has already referred to the debate between the two Presidential candidates, so I think it is appropriate I should go there, as well. We started, in my education about what happens in education by talking about the money. That is always a good place to start. Start with the numbers, start with the dollars. The dollars pretty much drive everything else. I looked at the various things that were being done in the State of Utah, some of which struck me, as a businessman, as being maybe a lesser priority than some other areas. I asked the question: Who sets the priorities? Who determines that we spend more money on topic A than topic C? I was told, that is the Federal Government. The Federal Government puts up matching funds and requires that the States come up with their match, and the Federal Government determines that topic A will be topic A, topic B will be topic B, and so on. I looked at some of the programs. I said, we would be better off in Utah if we spent that money on something else. Our needs in Utah are different than the needs in other States. Maybe it is nice to have the Federal dollars, but why don't we tell the Feds, sorry, we won't take your dollars for topic A, because for us topic C or topic D should be topic A, so we will forego the Federal dollars, and we will take the money that we have been forced to put up as matching dollars and spend it on our priorities. The fellow who was briefing me on this kind of smiled at how naive I was, how foolish a notion that was. He said: You can't do that. The Federal Government will sue you and will win. They have already sued States that tried to do that and won. So if the Federal Government says this is what you have to spend your money on, then you have no choice but to do that, even if it is not in the best interests of the schoolchildren in your State. That was a disappointing thing for me to realize, but I thought: OK, we are dealing with 50-cent dollars here, at least. We are putting up matching funds. So the Feds put up 50 cents and we put up 50 cents, so it is not hurting us quite as badly to be spending 50-cent dollars on a project we would not have chosen. Once again, smiles of indulgence on the part of the fellow who was briefing me. He said: No, no, you don't understand, Bob. The State doesn't put up 50 cents. The State puts up 80 cents, the State puts up 90 cents. When we say matching dollars, we don't mean matching dollar for dollar; we mean the Feds put up 5 percent or 10 percent or, if they are feeling really generous, 15 percent or 20 percent. But the States are required to put up the rest of it. I thought: That is really not fair. That is not a good deal. That is controlling the direction of education everywhere with a small amount of money. I thought: There is something wrong with that. I looked into it. I found that the only program where the Federal Government puts up half or more of the money in so-called matching funds is school lunch-- which is not an educational program; it is a welfare program. I have nothing against school lunch. Indeed, I recognize that there is a great need for school lunch. I am a supporter of school lunch. But let us not stand here and say that, because the Feds put up more money for school lunch percentagewise than anything else, they are making a major contribution to education. When Governor Bush was speaking about this the other night, he made this point that went by many people but that I would like to focus on here. He said the Federal Government puts up about 6 percent of the money but they control--if my memory is correct from what the Governor said--60 percent of the strings. I don't know whether that 60 percent is exactly right, but it is in the ball park, and I will use that figure because that is what my memory says. Six percent of the money, but they control 60 percent of the strings that are attached to that money. So the people in Utah, Colorado, or Arizona or, yes, Massachusetts, have to jump through the Federal hoops with the 96 cents that they put into every dollar spent on education, jumping through at the dictate of the people who put up the 6 cents. Here is the fundamental difference we need to confront when we have this debate on education, the fundamental difference between the Republicans and the Democrats, between those who are demanding we put more money into the present system, as does the Senator from Massachusetts, and those who are saying let's experiment a little bit. The fundamental difference is, Who should be allowed to call the shots? The people closest to the problem, the people facing the children day by day, the people administering the schools on a regular basis in their home communities? Or the people in Washington, DC? Who should make the ultimate decisions about education? Let me make it clear, I am not calling for the abolition of the Department of Education. The senior Senator from Massachusetts would seem to be very upset that somebody suggested we abolish the Department of Education. I have never made that suggestion, so I am on his side on that one. I agree there should be a voice at the Cabinet level talking about education. But I do not think the voice at the Cabinet level that is talking to the President about education should be the voice at the school board level, talking to the principal of the school where my grandchildren go about education. I have to talk about my grandchildren now because all of my children have graduated. All of them are out of school, out of college, raising families, pursuing careers. But there was a time with six children-- seven, actually, because we had a foster child in our home for 4 years--when I spent a lot of time at school board meetings. I went to school board meetings and listened to them discuss the budgets. I recognized that there were differences within the school district, between schools. I heard them debate about how they were going to take care of problems in this middle school that were different from problems in that middle school. I recognize that is where the rubber meets the road. That is where the decisions have to be made. That is where the problems really arise. I do not think there is anybody in Washington who can differentiate between the problems in this middle school in the Las Virgenes School District in California, where my children went, and that middle school in Las Virgenes School District in California where my children went. I don't think there are very many people in Washington who have ever heard of the Las Virgenes School District in California where my children went. That is the issue. That is what we are talking about. The Senator from Massachusetts says the Republicans don't care about Massachusetts because all they do is block all of our efforts to go forward with a massive Federal program in education. Yes, we do try to block some of those efforts. Not because we are saying the Federal Government should have no role in education, but we are saying the Federal Government should begin to trust people at the local level to make their own decisions. It is a fundamental difference. We saw it in the debates the other night. We are saying it on the floor now. Whom do you trust? Do you trust the Federal Government and the Federal bureaucracy and the Federal Department of Education as the ultimate authority as to what should be done or do you trust the people who are closest to the problem to decide what should be done? It should be a partnership, not a dictatorship. It seems to me someone who puts up 6 percent of the money, who then controls 60 percent of the decisions, is getting close to dictatorship and not partnership. At the State level, I found myself resenting it. Now that I have come to the Federal level, I bring that bias with me. I continue to resent it. I continue to think we would be better off if we said those who are putting up 6 percent of the money have an opinion, have a role to play, they have a function they can perform that no one else can perform, but when it comes to the nitty-gritty of the daily decisions, those who are putting up 6 percent of the money should yield to the decisionmaking power of those who are putting up 94 percent of the money and doing virtually 100 percent of the work. Let's look at this Congress. The Senator from Massachusetts attacked the record of this Congress on education and said we have not done anything. We have. For example, we passed the education savings accounts which would have put more power in the hands of individuals and parents. Once again, the fundamental difference: Whom do you trust? The education savings account bill, which was cosponsored by the chairman of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, the Senator from New Jersey, Mr. Torricelli, would have put more power in the hands of individuals, and the President vetoed it. The President vetoed an education bill on the grounds that it would have taken power away from the Washington establishment and put power in the hands of the parents. It is not fair to stand here on this floor and say, regardless of the decibel level at which you say it, that this Congress has done nothing about education, because we have passed education bills that the President has vetoed and he has vetoed it on this basic issue. Straight A's: This is a bill, we call it the Academic Achievements for All Act--Straight A's Act. It was supported by the Senator from Georgia who used to occupy this place on the Senate floor, Mr. Coverdell. The Democrats blocked it. The Democrats said the President will veto it. The Democrats said: No, we cannot allow this kind of flexibility at the local level. We must continue to dictate to the local people what will happen with respect to education. Once again, those who put up 6 percent of the money control 60 percent of the strings, and they are using their 6 percent of the money to dictate to the people at the local level how things should be. I remember the debate on the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. We have had that debate. I regret that it did not result in the passing of the act, but one of the reasons it did not result in the passing of the act was because of blocking efforts on the part of the Democrats to a Republican proposal that would have given States, on an experimental basis, the opportunity to try something new. There was no dictating in the position of the Senator from Washington, Mr. Gorton, that said States have to try this. His amendment said if a State thinks the present system is wonderful, the State can continue to receive money with the present system. They can continue to accept those 60 percent of the strings. They can continue to do exactly what they are doing. What if a State does not want to do it quite that way? What if a State wants to experiment in a very tentative fashion with something new? Let's give them the opportunity to try it. The senior Senator from Massachusetts was one of the first to take the floor and roar that we must not allow that kind of experimentation. We must not allow anyone to try anything different. Look at the States that are making progress. And, yes, look at the State of Texas. Look at the progress that has been made among Hispanic students, the progress that has been made among black students--the progress that has been made among minorities generally in the State of Texas. It leads the national average. It is a record of extremely beneficial accomplishment, and it is taking place in the early grades where it needs to take place because if you wait until the time they get to the SAT scores, it is too late. If you want to look at SAT scores, you are looking at high school students, and the high school students in Texas were cheated by the administrations in Texas that were there prior to the time Governor Bush took over. It is in the lower grades where they are seeing the fruits of the activities in Texas where they are trusting people, trusting the locals, giving the opportunities that need to be given to those who need education the most. The white middle-class suburban kids do pretty well in this country in almost every State in which they live. The real educational crisis is among the minorities. The real educational crisis is among those people who live in the inner cities and do not have the opportunities that come to the white middle-class suburban kids. Let's be honest and straightforward about that. It is very interesting. Who has led the fight, which seems to upset the senior Senator from Massachusetts more than any other, for experimentation with vouchers? It has been Polly Williams, an inner- city representative of a minority, a black member of the State legislature. She comes from Milwaukee, and she has led the fight not for the rich, not for the upper 1 percent, not for the other groups that have been demonized in this political campaign. She has led the fight for poor inner-city kids. She has won the fight, and the fight in Milwaukee is over. If you run for an educational position in Milwaukee now, you better be for vouchers because the public has seen it and has embraced it, and it is now the strong majority position. It comes down to this fundamental question when we talk about money: Do you want to fund the individual or do you want to fund the system? We say let's fund the individual and let the individual take the money wherever he wants to go. They say: Oh, no; that's terrible. He might take it to a--dare we say it?--religious school. He might take the money in such a way that violates the separation of church and State. We can't have that. In what is considered the most successful social program since the Second World War, we did exactly that. We gave the money to individuals, and we said to them: We don't care what you do with it; just use it to get an education. I am talking, of course, about the GI bill. When we said to the GIs who came home from World War II, ``We are going to give you money to go to school,'' we did not say, ``We are going to pick the institutions that will receive this money and then you go petition for it.'' We just said if they served in the Armed Forces, they have the money under the GI bill of rights. And if they wanted to go to Notre Dame and study to be a Catholic priest, they could do that and nobody was going to claim that was somehow a violation of the separation of church and State. We said if they want to take the money and go to Oral Roberts University, they could do that. It may well be Oral Roberts University did not exist under the GI bill--I am not sure--but the principle still holds. If they wanted to go to Harvard, if they wanted to go to Wellesley, if they wanted to go to Ohio State University, or if they wanted to go to Baylor or Southern Methodist--they pick the school and the money follows the individual, giving the individual power, and America is the better for it. That is what we are talking about here. The money should go where it will do the individual the most good and not be controlled out of Washington that puts up 6 cents out of every educational dollar and then wants to make 60 percent of every educational decision. Mr. President, I suggest the absence of a quorum.

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

Mr. BENNETT

Mr. BENNETT. Mr. President, this morning there was a meeting of the Joint Economic Committee on which I sit. The subject had to do with oil prices. I would like to report to my fellow Senators and any who may be watching on television some of the things we found out. The first thing that became clear was that the oil crisis that we are dealing with now did not occur in the last 60 days. It has been building for months. Indeed, the conditions have been building for years. One of the things that I found distressing was a comment made by one member of the committee whose suggestion was that anyone who disagreed with what the President and the Vice President are currently proposing should be challenged with this question: What is your solution? And if the answer was you don't have an easy solution, then stop complaining about our solution. I think that is an irresponsible reaction. I quoted to the members of the committee a column that was written in the New York Times yesterday by Thomas L. Friedman. He is the foreign affairs commentator for the New York Times, not normally known--either Mr. Friedman or his newspaper--for their support of Republicans or for their disapproval of Democrats. I found it a rather interesting column. I quoted some of this to my fellow committee members. I would like to quote from it here on the floor. I ask unanimous consent that at the conclusion of my remarks, the entire column be printed in the Record.

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

Mr. BENNETT. Mr. President, Mr. Friedman is writing this column from Tokyo. It has a Tokyo byline on it. He starts out by saying: It's interesting watching the American oil crisis/debate from here in Tokyo. The Japanese are cool as cucumbers today--no oil protests, no gas lines, no politicians making crazy promises. That's because Japan has been preparing for this day since the 1973 oil crisis by steadily introducing natural gas, nuclear power, high-speed mass transit and conservation, and thereby steadily reducing its dependence on foreign oil. That is one of the key paragraphs in this entire piece, that for nearly 30 years now the Japanese have been steadily reducing their dependence on foreign oil. In the same period in the United States, we have been steadily increasing our dependence on foreign oil. Look at the power sources Mr. Friedman refers to: Natural gas, nuclear power, high-speed transit, on the conservation side. I have been a supporter of high-speed transit ever since I came to the Senate. There are some people who have said: Senator, you come from the West. Why do you care about Amtrak? Why do you care about high-speed ground transportation in the Northeast corridor? I have said I care about it because it is part of the long-term solutions in the United States. Even as a Senator from Utah, I have sided with the Senators from New Jersey, the Senators from New York, and the Senators from Delaware in supporting Amtrak and high-speed ground transportation, in hoping to keep that form of transportation alive so we are not always on the highways. Natural gas: There is an enormous amount of natural gas in the United States. Nuclear power: We have not built a nuclear powerplant in this country since the oil crisis of 1973. There are those who say nuclear power cannot be built. I am a strong supporter of nuclear power. Just because we have large supplies of natural gas, including large supplies of natural gas on Federal lands, public lands, doesn't mean we can use the natural gas to heat our homes. Why? Because natural gas on Federal lands is of no value. It must be explored for, it must be brought out of the ground, and then it must be transported, which means building pipelines, usually across Federal lands. Once we realize, particularly in this administration, what the attitude has been, we begin to understand why Mr. Friedman can write this somewhat sarcastic column in Tokyo. This administration, for 8 years, has done everything it can to prevent the building of additional pipelines across Federal lands. They say, no, we don't want to do that; somehow it will despoil the Federal land if there is a pipeline under it. I stress ``under it'' because once a pipeline is in place, people who are out on that Federal land who love the wide open spaces will not be aware of the fact that the pipeline is there. The pipelines get buried, particularly natural gas pipelines, and the scenery is unaffected. It comes back quickly, in the age of the wide open spaces of the West, a few years, to recover from where a pipeline has been buried. It is nothing more than the blink of an eye in nature's time. This administration is opposed to pipelines. Friedman goes on to tell us that America has failed to do the kind of exploration and conservation that the Japanese have done. He makes this comment: Imagine if America had that sort of steely focus. Imagine, in fact, if at this time of soaring oil prices and endangered environments, America had a presidential candidate who could offer a realistic plan for how to preserve our earth in the balance. Then Thomas Friedman goes on to make this comment, writing in the New York Times: Wait a minute--that was supposed to be Al Gore, but in the heat of the campaign, Mr. Gore has shamelessly offered us instead a fly-by-night plan for putting America out of balance. The new Gore energy theory is to demonize the oil companies, tap into the Nation's strategic oil reserve-- which only a few months ago he declared shouldn't be touched to manipulate prices --and talk about developing new magic energy-saving technologies that will create jobs in the swing states where Mr. Gore needs to get elected and will allow Americans to keep driving gas-guzzling big cars and indulging their same energy-consuming habits without pain. I felt a little sense of satisfaction when I read that particular paragraph because I have just traded in my gas-guzzling car for one that will get 70 miles to the gallon on the highway. I am sorry to say that it is Japanese in its origin, but it is a lovely little car and I will be happy to give any Member of this body a ride in it at any point. Back to the Friedman article, referring, again, to the Gore policy with respect to energy: How nice! How easy! And how far from what's really required to free us from the grip of OPEC. He goes on and describes what needs to be done and then makes this comment: Mr. Gore knows this, but instead of laying it on the line he opted for an Olympic-quality, full-bodied pander--offering a quick-fix to garner votes and pain-free solutions for the future. Prime the pumps, pumps the polls and pay later. Don't get me wrong, tapping the strategic reserve makes some sense to ease the current distribution crisis--but doing it without also offering a real program for consuming less oil and finding more makes no sense at all. I go back to the accusation made in this morning's committee hearing: you who are complaining about what the President is doing, have no solution yourselves, so stop complaining. What Mr. Friedman is talking about illustrates what I and other Members of this body have been proposing as a solution for 8 years. For 8 years, we have been trying to increase the domestic supply of power. For 8 years, we have been on this floor asking this administration to allow us to drill more, to find more, to produce more so that we will have the supply when the demand comes. For 8 years, we have been sounding the alarm on the energy issue and we have been ignored by the President of the United States, or on those occasions where we have actually passed legislation, it has been vetoed by the President of the United States on the recommendation of the Vice President: No, we do not need to go after that vast pool of oil that is there in Alaska; It will despoil the environment. The Senator from Alaska has pointed out if we compared this room to the Alaska Natural Wildlife Reserve or ANWR, say this room is the size of ANWR, the footprint of the drilling would be about the size of one of those decorative stars in the middle of the carpet. One could cover it entirely with a single piece of paper 8\1/2\ by 11. That would be the total amount of impact on the entire room in the bill that this Congress has passed and that the President has vetoed--not once but twice. Yet now when we say wait a minute, it is the action of this administration that has prevented America from having the oil supplies we need to deal with this crisis, we are told: you have no solution. We have had a solution and we have had it for years and it is the President and the Vice President who have stymied us. I don't want to overdramatize this, but I will try to be a student of history. I feel a little like Winston Churchill who for years and years and years warned of the coming threat, and then when it happened, he had to say to his people: I have nothing to offer you but blood, toil, tears, and sweat. That is overdramatic, and I do not want to overplay it. The point is, there is one thing to be complaining about this over and over and then there is another thing to come along and say: We are in a mess and you guys don't have any solution. My senior colleague from Utah is here. I understand he has reserved the last 10 minutes before the vote so I shall terminate my comments. I want to make it clear, the solution to the problem of high oil prices does not lie in short-term fixes. It does not lie in the kind of neat conclusions that Thomas Friedman talks about. It lies in long-term plans and long-term policies. That being the case, we are not going to get out of this anytime soon. I leave you with this one conclusion that came out of the witnesses. They said this: If everything goes the very best that it can, if everything works according to our plans, home heating oil prices in New England this year will be substantially higher than they were last year. That is the best-case scenario. I think those who should have seen the handwriting on the wall last year bear the responsibility for that situation and should not be let off the hook by just saying to us: Well, what's your solution? We were not in charge. Those who were should bear the responsibility. I yield the floor. Exhibit 1 [From the New York Times, Sept. 26, 2000] Candidate in the Balance (By Thomas L. Friedman) It's interesting watching the American oil crisis/debate from here in Tokyo. The Japanese are cool as cucumbers today--no oil protests, no oil protests, no gas lines, no politicians making crazy promises. That's because Japan has been preparing for this day since the 1973 oil crisis by steadily introducing natural gas, nuclear power, high-speed mass transit and conservation, and thereby steadily reducing its dependence on foreign oil. And unlike the U.S., the Japanese never wavered from that goal by falling off the wagon and becoming addicted to S.U.V.'s--those they just make for the Americans. Imagine if America had that sort of steely focus. Imagine, in fact, if at this time of soaring oil prices and endangered environments, America had a presidential candidate who could offer a realistic plan for how to preserve our earth in the balance. Wait a minute--that was supposed to be Al Gore, but in the heat of the campaign Mr. Gore has shamelessly offered us instead a fly-by-night plan for putting America out of balance. The new Gore energy theory is to demonize the oil companies, tap into the nation's strategic oil reserve--which only a few months ago he declared shouldn't be touched to manipulate prices--and talk about developing new magic energy-saving technologies that will create jobs in the swing states where Mr. Gore needs to get elected and will allow Americans to keep driving gas-guzzling big cars and indulging their same energy-consuming habits without pain. How nice! How easy! And how far from what's really required to free us from the grip of OPEC. Here is how we got into this pickle, which you won't hear from Mr. Gore: OPEC came along in the 1970's and pushed the crude oil price up too far too fast, and it created a global economic slowdown, triggered both energy conservation and widespread new exploration outside of OPEC. The result was an oversupply of oil from 1981 to 1998--culminating in 1998 with oil falling to $10 a barrel, when the glut coincided with Asia's economic crisis. This cheap oil lulled us into retreating from conservation, and was like a huge tax cut. And because it coincided with the technology revolution, it added to the booming U.S. economy, which helped fuel a world economic recovery. But this boom eventually stretched OPEC's capacity for quality oil, used up most of the world's oil tankers and once again pushed up prices. As such, today we either have to start to consume less oil--by shrinking our S.U.V.'s, raising gasoline taxes and again taking conservation seriously--or find more non-OPEC oil, which means figuring out how to tap more of Alaska's huge natural gas reserves without spoiling Alaska's pristine environment. Or else we pay the price. Mr. Gore knows this, but instead of laying it on the line he opted for an Olympic-quality, full-body pander--offering a quick fix to garner votes, and pain-free solutions for the future. Prime the pumps, pump the polls and pay later. Don't get me wrong, tapping the strategic reserve makes some sense to ease the current distribution crisis--but doing it without also offering a real program for consuming less oil and finding more makes no sense at all. It's also dangerous. Another name for the Gore strategy would be ``The Saddam Hussein Rehabilitation Act of 2000.'' Because tapping into the strategic reserve, without conservation or exploration, only guarantees OPEC's dominance. And when the oil market remains tight, it means that Saddam is in an ideal position to hold America hostage. Any time he threatens to take any of his oil off the market, he can make the price soar. Mr. Gore's oil pander also reminds many Democrats of what it is that bothers them about the vice president. Many Democrats really are not wild about him, yet they know they have to vote for him over Mr. Bush. They would at least like to feel good about that vote. But when you hear Mr. Gore bleating that ``I will work for the day when we are free forever of the dominance of big oil and foreign oil''--without leveling with Americans that the only way to do that is by us consuming less and drilling more--you just want to cover your ears. Surely Mr. Gore is better than that. Surely Gore supporters are entitled to expect more from him. I guess all they can hope for now is that he will show more spine and intellectual honesty as a president than he has as a candidate. You really start to wonder, though.

Mr. BENNETT

Mr. BENNETT. It is my understanding further, Mr. President, and I inform the Chair, that with Senator Thomas' permission, I am here to claim that time. Is there objection to my doing that?

Mr. BENNETT. Mr. President, I say to my friend from Florida, I want to respond briefly to the comments of the Senator from Massachusetts and then perhaps respond to the Senator from Florida. The Senator from Massachusetts has touched a number of issues in this debate. I am not sure I can keep up with him in terms of the volume of subjects he has brought before us, but I will try to respond to some that I think need response. I will start with the H-1B issue, which is the issue with which he started. He told us at great length how much he supports the H-1B program and described the high-tech activity in Massachusetts, his home State, which is dependent on our doing something about the H-1B problem. He did not tell us that he was one of two Senators--and there were only two--in the committee who voted against reporting out the H- 1B visa bill about which we are talking. So it is clear his support is conditional on a number of things. He outlined those on the floor. And he is certainly entitled to his conditions and to his attitude with respect to them. But I will point out a few things with respect to H-1B which those Senators who are primarily responsible to the AFL-CIO, in their political lives, do not seem to talk about. We talk about jobs. The Senator from Massachusetts said: Many of the jobs for H-1B visas are filled by people who do not require very high academic standards, so those can be filled by Americans. We should only have the H-1B visas for people with master's degrees and doctorates. He talked about a screening program that would be set up by the Federal Government to determine, on the basis of academic credentials, who could get in and who could not get in on the H-1B system. I spent a good portion of my life in the private sector. I found that experience to be tremendously valuable to me when I came to the Senate. At one point in my young life, I fantasized about the possibility of coming here as a very young Senator, taking a seat maybe in my thirties or even forties. Now I am very glad that I did not do that because that would have meant I would have spent all of that time in the governmental orbit and not learning some very fundamental lessons in the private community. The first lesson I learned in the private community--and learned it again and again and again whenever the situation came up--was that the marketplace rules. I have said here before that if I could control what we carve in marble around here, along with the Latin phrases, which are inspiring and wonderful and historic, I would carve another slightly more practical phrase in marble, to keep it before us so we never forget it, and it would be: ``You cannot repeal the law of supply and demand.'' We try that every once in a while. We try to repeal the law of supply and demand with congressional mandates. This is what, frankly, the Senator from Massachusetts would be up to if he had his way on the H-1B visa issue. Why is there an H-1B visa issue? Because there is a gap between supply and demand. It is as simple as that. There is an enormous demand for certain kinds of jobs in this country. Currently it is running somewhere between 350,000 and 400,000. That is the demand. For whatever reason, the American educational system cannot supply the workers to fill that demand. There is a pool of skilled workers who can fill that demand worldwide, and that pool of supply will meet that level of demand. The only question is: Where? We held a high-tech summit in the Joint Economic Committee, of which the senior Senator from Massachusetts is a member. He came to that summit and heard the executives of the high-tech companies speak to us. I am not sure whether he was there when one particular statement was made, but it made a strong impression on my memory, and I would remind the Senator from Massachusetts, and others, of what one particular man said. He said: ``Senators, understand, this work''--he was referring to the demand--``will be done by these people''--referring to the supply. ``The only question is, whether they will do it living in the United States or living abroad.'' In today's high-tech world, in today's world of the Internet, the job can be sent electronically to the worker living in India, or Pakistan, or some other country; and the results of the work can be sent electronically back to the corporate headquarters in Silicon Valley, or Route 128 in Massachusetts, or Utah Valley, or Salt Lake Valley, or the Dulles Corridor, or any other high-tech center you might want to identify. I cannot understand why it is not recognized in this Chamber almost universally that it would be better for the United States to have highly skilled, highly motivated, immediately qualified individuals living in the United States, paying taxes in the United States, adding to the economic activity of the United States, while they do this work, instead of having them live abroad and paying their taxes and making their contributions to the economy of other countries. Yet the restrictions that would be put on H-1B visas, primarily at the behest of the AFL-CIO, would have the effect of saying, you can't do this work in the United States. And to have the Government screen those who can get H-1B visas on the basis of the Government's criteria of what constitutes the appropriate educational level, is to deny clearly the impact of the market. No one is going to hire someone on the basis of anything other than that person's ability to do the work. I do not want to say to Hewlett- Packard or Intel or Novell, or any other high-tech company you can name: You can't hire this worker because we in the Government have decided that he does not have the appropriate educational credentials. I want Hewlett-Packard to make that decision. They might not make it right. But it is the shareholders of Hewlett-Packard who pay the price if they make a mistake. That is the way the entire American economy has been built from the very beginning, and that is the way it will flourish in the future. But no, we have from the Senator from Massachusetts an outline of the restrictions that the Government should put on the hiring practices of American companies. And we have from the Senator the statement that the Government should decide who is qualified to come in under an H-1B visa to fill one of these high-tech jobs. Whenever the Government gets involved in trying to change the law of supply and demand, you get one of two things--I said this yesterday when we were in the debate on the minimum wage; I repeat it today-- whenever the Government interferes with the law of supply and demand, you either get a shortage or you get a surplus. Let me expand on that a little. As I reread my remarks from yesterday, I was not as clear as I usually like to be. Right now, we have an example of the Government dictating how many foreign nationals can come in to work in the high-tech industry. They set the amount below that for which there is demand. What is the result? A shortage. Interfering with the law of supply and demand, the Government says, we will only allow this many, when, in fact, the requirement is for that many; and the result is we have a shortage of these workers. A flip side of this, where surpluses are created, is where the Government sets a price higher than the market would. If I can go back historically to a time that is impressive to the Western U.S., the Government said: We will buy silver at a set price for our coinage. They set the price of silver higher than the market price. What happened? Everybody went out to find any kind of silver in their mountains, or any sort of mining operation, and the Government acquired a huge surplus of silver. The price was set higher than the market would set and it created a surplus. In the case of skilled workers, the quantity is set lower than market demands, and we get a shortage. So once again, engraved in marble on the walls: ``You cannot repeal the law of supply and demand''--and recognize that every time you try, all you do is create either an artificial surplus or an artificial shortage. As I said, with respect to H-1B visas, the work will get done either in the United States or abroad; and it will get done by the same people either in the United States or abroad. The only question we have to ask ourselves is, Do we want the people who are doing this work, getting paid by American corporations, drawing salaries with which they support their families, to be living in the United States and spending those salaries in the United States, contributing to the tax base of the United States, adding to the economic benefits of the United States, or do we want them living abroad? Obviously, the American companies that seek to hire these individuals want them here because it is more efficient for them to be here. It would mean higher costs for them if they had to do the work abroad, but they will absorb those higher costs because they have to do the work. If they don't, America will lose its technological lead. America will lose its edge over the rest of the world, and we will see the technology world begin to disappear. We have recaptured it. There was a period of time when people said the future lies in Japan, that America's great day of technological advance is behind us, that the Japanese have taken over. I remember those debates. I remember those speeches. It is not true. There is no country in the world that is close to the United States in our technological edge. But to maintain that technological edge, not rest on our oars and coast into the future, we have to have a skilled workforce that can keep things moving forward. It is not available in this country. We have to let those companies hire on a worldwide basis so that the edge can be maintained here. People say, well, they are taking jobs from Americans. Again, Mr. President, the statistics are clear. There are 350,000 to 400,000 high- tech jobs going begging right now because there are not people qualified to fill them. Companies are paying bounties to their employees who bring in a potential employee. In many companies in Silicon Valley, an existing employee will be paid thousands of dollars if he can introduce another prospective employee to his company who gets hired. Bounties are being paid to find people with these skills so that the companies can maintain their technological skills. It is not a matter of saying, well, there are Americans who will be shut out if the H-1B visa program passes. It is not a matter of saying there are American graduates from American universities who will be denied jobs if we let these other people in. No. It is a matter of jobs going begging, jobs that have to be performed if this country is to maintain its technological edge, people who are capable of filling those jobs being allowed to come into this country and perform them. Now there is one other aspect to this that I will highlight and discuss. That is the importance of maintaining America's edge. I have referred to it already, but I want to expand on it a little bit. It used to be that in the industrial age, when a company was established and momentum was created in the marketplace, you could expect the momentum of that company to carry it forward not only for years but probably for decades. In today's world, a technology company can disappear virtually overnight if somebody else gets the edge on them and produces something better quickly. The most important factor in today's economy is speed, the speed with which you get your product to market, the speed with which you move ahead of your competitor. That means, once again, qualified people. That means, once again, being able to fill those particular assignments. Now the Senator from Massachusetts says, well, what we really need to do is spend money increasing training. We look at the bills that are before the Appropriations Committee, and there is an enormous amount of money being spent to increase training in the United States to try to close this educational gap. I would be more than thrilled if we could say that there were already 400,000 American graduates from American universities ready to fill these jobs, that we don't need any visas for high-tech people abroad. One of the ironies of that, however, that applies to the H-1B visa issue, is this: a large percentage--indeed, in some universities it is close to 50 percent--of the high-tech graduates of these universities are foreign born. They hold foreign passports. We give them visas to come to this country to gain the best education that is available anywhere in the world in these high-tech skills. Then when they graduate, we say to them: Thank you very much; you cannot stay because we can't give you an H-1B visa. The American taxpayers--in the State of Utah, it is my State taxpayers--are subsidizing those universities. Why? Because we want the product that comes out of them in the form of qualified graduates. So we have ourselves in the interesting and ironic situation of saying, because we believe in education, we will appropriate money for higher education on both a Federal and State level; because we believe in education, we will do everything to make the American university system the very best in the world, which it is; and because we believe in opportunity, we will allow students from all over the world to come to these schools. But when they have been here and partaken of that tax subsidy and have obtained that education, we say to them: Now you can't work here. You have lived here for 4 years, 5 years, 6 years, with a graduate degree, maybe you have been here 7 or 8 years. You have become assimilated into American culture. You have become comfortable with hamburgers and pizza (which is more of an American food than it is Italian food, I have discovered). You feel comfortable in all of this. You are ready to find a job. You can't find a job in the hotbed of technological advancement, which is the United States of America. You have to go home. We won't give you an H-1B visa after we have subsidized your education at taxpayer expense. I have a hard time understanding how that makes any sense, that these students from our best universities, who have received the taxpayer subsidy giving them the best degrees, then have to leave because of the artificial barriers created by the attempt, once again, of Government to try to repeal the law of supply and demand. When we talk about Americans filling these jobs, talk about graduates of American universities filling these jobs, let us understand that many of those graduates are themselves the very people who will benefit from the H-1B visa program that is included in this bill. Now a few other comments, and then I will yield the floor. I was interested to hear the Senator from Massachusetts talk about the fact that there are jobs going begging in this good economy and how difficult it is for employers to fill jobs. He was speaking at this time not about the H-1B visa and the high-tech kind of jobs, he was speaking about very ordinary jobs. He was speaking on behalf, he said, of immigrants who he wanted to come in to fill these jobs. He said these jobs are going begging and we need to pass his particular bill in order to make it possible for these immigrants to take these jobs. I am not a member of the appropriate committee, so I cannot comment in detail on the bill he was pressing, but I would like to go back to our debate of yesterday when the senior Senator from Massachusetts was demanding that we raise the minimum wage. We have raised the minimum wage. We do that periodically. But he is demanding that we raise the minimum wage again. To me, there is an interesting gap between the rhetoric of yesterday that says these people cannot support themselves on their wage and the Government must interfere, once again, with market forces that set their wages, to push those wages up, and then the rhetoric of today that says there are a bunch of low-level jobs going unfilled. If the jobs are going unfilled, why is it? It is, once again, because there are not people qualified to take them. I told the Senate yesterday about the experience I have in my home State. When I talk to employers, they say their biggest problem is finding workers. They can't get anybody to fill the jobs. I ask them: Do you offer more than the minimum wage? The answer is always: Yes, we are offering more than the minimum wage. The problem is not that the Government hasn't mandated a high enough wage in order for these people who are just subsisting at minimum wage to get by; the problem is they do not have the skills that will allow them to return enough value to the employer so they can command the jobs that are open in this economy. The Senator from Massachusetts answered his rhetoric of yesterday with his rhetoric of today. I hope he can connect the two so that we can realize that the challenge for people who are living at poverty's edge, the working poor who are getting by on just the minimum wage, is not Government intervention to artificially demand that they be paid more and, thereby, in some cases, run the risk of being priced out of the market for the skills they have. The challenge is to see that their skills are improved. That is where training money should go. That is where many American corporations are spending their training money, and that is where the educational challenge becomes most obvious. American corporations are spending billions of dollars to teach employees how to read and write. That is correct--billions of dollars to teach basic skills that should have been learned in public schools and were not. Now we get to the next issue that the Senator from Massachusetts talked about in his presentation, which is education. I was lured back into public life by the issue of education. I was very happy being the CEO of a comfortable and profitable company. I got a phone call one day saying: Would you be willing to serve as a member of the strategic planning commission for the Utah State Board of Education and address our education issue? I said: Yes, that sounds like a proper kind of citizen thing to do. Then I got a phone call a few days later and they said: By the way, we want you to be the chairman of that commission. Thus, I found myself dragged in a little further and a little deeper than I had originally planned. I immersed myself in education issues and came out of that experience absolutely convinced of several things: No. 1, education is our No. 1 survival issue. Now that the Soviet Union is no more, nothing threatens the future of America, long term, so much as the educational challenge that we face. I am sure that the Senator from Massachusetts would agree with me on that. No. 2, nothing is more high bound and determined not to change than the educational institution in this country. And we have seen that in the debate on this floor. We have seen that in the educational initiatives that have been offered on this floor. The Republicans have brought forth proposal after proposal after proposal that would bring fresh air, new opportunities, new experimentation into the educational establishment. Some of them passed, some of them were filibustered. Those that were passed were vetoed. And always we were told the solution to education is to put more money into the present system. Now, there is a cliche that we have in the business world that says, ``If you want to keep getting the result you are getting, keep doing what you are doing.'' If we want to continue the educational crisis and challenge that we have in this country, then we should keep funding education as we are funding it. But when the Senator from Washington proposes allowing 10 States to experiment--if they want to--with a greater degree of local control over Federal dollars, we are told: No, that threatens public education as we know it. We can't do that. That is risky, that is dangerous. We keep reminding our friends on the other side that if the State doesn't want to do that, they don't have to. We are not mandating this kind of change. We are just making it an opportunity. No, they filibuster against that. They say the President will veto that. They say we can't consider that. I am not one of those who thinks that a voucher program constitutes a silver bullet that is going to solve every educational problem. I know some on my side of the aisle do believe that. I don't; I think there are serious problems with vouchers. But I am willing to experiment with them to find out whether or not in certain circumstances vouchers can help. I am willing to try and get a little data. The data we have with respect to vouchers is quite encouraging--sufficiently encouraging that Robert Reich, a former Secretary of Labor in the Clinton administration, a man not known for his right-wing proclivities, wrote a piece in the Wall Street Journal that said that the data is in and vouchers work. I was stunned when I read that. I thought, gee, the experiment is over and we know that it works. He had a most interesting, most creative kind of further proposal to test the implication of vouchers. But, once again, we heard again and again: No, no, we can't experiment with that. It will threaten public education as we know it. And here are their key words, which test very well in a poll, and they work very well in a focus group: If you try the Republican experiment in education, you will drain money away from the public schools. There is an answer to Robert Reich in the Wall Street Journal recently, where Governor Hunt says: No, no, no; you can't do this because what you are doing is taking money away from the public schools. Well, Mr. President, as I say, I spent most of my life in the private sector. I think I understand money and the movement of money. This is the way I understand it. Let me walk through it and see if someone can help me realize how it takes money away from public schools to run one of these experiments. Let's say that a school district is spending $7,000 per year on a child. There are many public school districts in this country that spend more than that. We happen to spend less than that in Utah for a variety of reasons. We spend considerably more than that here in the District of Columbia. Let's take that as a number, for the sake of this illustration. The school district is spending $7,000 per child. Along comes a Republican opportunity to try something with that child, and we follow the Robert Reich formula that says this is only with low- income children. We will not subsidize a Member of Congress who wants to send his children to private schools, as many Members of Congress have done--as the Vice President has done. No, we won't subsidize them. We will say that only low-income people who otherwise could not even conceive of going anyplace else will be eligible for this program. That is Robert Reich's proposal. OK. Let's take $5,000 and say to this child: You can take $5,000 and go someplace else. As I say, in the private world where I have spent most of my time, $5,000 subtracted from $7,000 leaves $2,000. It seems to me that if you do that, you are saying to that school district you have an extra $2,000 per child for every child to whom you give a voucher, and you can use that $2,000 per child to spend on the children who stay. You can increase spending per child in the public school system if you adopt a voucher program such as the one Robert Reich has endorsed. I do not ever hear that when we hear the rhetoric about education. You are taking money away from the public school system. In the aggregate, yes; you probably are. But we don't teach in the aggregate. We fund and we teach per child. If you are going to make your calculation on the basis of the amount of money available per child, you want as many children on vouchers as you can possibly get because you are going to make an extra $2,000 for every two grand on every one of them. That extra $2,000 is available for the kids who stay in the public system. I would be very interested to have anyone on either side of the aisle explain to me why that math doesn't work. Explain to me why the reality of those numbers doesn't add up because they always add up every time I do the calculation. Every time I run through the examples, it always ends up being more money per student less in public education if you try one of these experiments. I repeat again that I do not believe that vouchers represent a silver bullet. I have spent enough time examining them that I think there are some serious problems with them. I think it needs to be checked and rechecked. We need to be very careful before we endorse any kind of massive movement towards vouchers as some of my fellow Republicans have done. But I ask those who do not even want to experiment: What are you afraid of finding? Are you afraid of finding that it might work? I am not afraid of finding that it fails. I am willing to admit that it was wrong, once we have some actual data. As I say, Robert Reich decided the data demonstrates that it works. The city of Milwaukee has been doing it longer than anyone else. They endorsed it and say it is working there. The driving force behind it was an inner-city black single mother named Polly Williams who serves as a liberal member of the Democratic State legislature. She says: The private system is failing my child. It is failing our children. Interestingly, when you do the polls, support for this kind of experimentation is perhaps highest in the minority community--not the white, middle-class soccer moms in the school districts where the schools do a pretty good job, but in the inner-city minority schools where the children are being left behind, Ultimately, this is the solution to the H-1B visa problem. It is fixing American education so that we have enough Americans to fill those 400,000 high-tech jobs. But it will not be done in the way that the Senator from Massachusetts wants to do it. I repeat: If you want to keep getting the results you are getting, keep doing what you are doing. That is basically what he has offered us--keep putting more and more money into the present system, and don't even think about experimenting with it. When the Republicans say, let's try giving more control to the local school board, we are told, No. That would threaten the present system. When the Republicans say, let's experiment in the District of Columbia with some vouchers and see what happens, we are told, No. That would threaten the present system. I believe we are trying to act responsibly with respect to the education situation. I am afraid there are some others who are trying to act politically and respond to the teachers union and other parts of the educational establishment for whom the only thing better than things the way they are is things the way they were. They don't want to try anything different. They don't want to experiment in the way the late Senator from Georgia tried--it was vetoed; the way the Senator from Washington tried, it was vetoed; the way Robert Reich suggested we try, and it was filibustered. I think we should say to the Senator from Massachusetts: What are you afraid of? What are you afraid of in terms of experimentation? Don't filibuster; don't tell the President to veto. Let us have some of this experience, and then we will see if we can't move in the direction which will give us the graduates from American universities who will fill the 400,000 high-tech jobs. One final comment: The Senator from Massachusetts talked at great length about problems with the INS and the problems with aliens here on an undocumented status who would like citizenship--that we must pass a law in order to solve their problems. Again, I am not a member of the committee, and I don't know the details of the law. I might very well end up in favor of it. But I would say this to the Senator from Massachusetts: If he makes a phone call to the White House, the chances are it will be returned more rapidly than if I do. I will share with him my experience as a Senator, which I think is not atypical. We spend more time in our offices in Utah dealing with INS problems than any other single issue. More people come in with heartrending stories about their difficulty in dealing with the INS. I have ridden along with the Salt Lake Police Department. They told me their No. 1 problem has to do with the INS and the way the INS handles undocumented aliens. In the city of Salt Lake, 80 percent of our drug arrests and 50 percent of our murders are committed by undocumented aliens. They come across the border, go past the border States, and come into Utah where they think they are free from INS supervision because INS is located most heavily in the border States. And they have set up the drug turf wars. They control the drug traffic. They fight to protect their turf. The police tell me that 50 percent of the murders come from that. Interestingly, once the cocaine is gone--they bring it with them-- they will go back for more, and then come back again with another stash. Interestingly, the chief of police told me that for some reason there was a shortage of cocaine south of the border and that month all they had in Salt Lake was heroin. They brought a different drug with them, and they stayed until that shipment was gone. Then they went back and another group came--80 percent of the drug crimes; 50 percent of the murders. Naturally, I spend time with the INS trying to get their assistance to deal with this. My point is this: If the Senator from Massachusetts is concerned about INS problems, he is not alone. But the problems, it appears to me, lie with the administration of the INS in this administration rather than with the underlying legislation that deals with it. I was stunned to discover that there are people in my State who have been waiting for a green card so long that their 5-year visa opportunity will expire before they get it. And the answer as to why they are waiting so long has nothing to do with their qualifications but with the backlog that has been built up in the way the INS processes applications for green cards. We are not going to solve that problem by passing a visa piece of legislation that the Senator from Massachusetts wants. But I think if he made a phone call to the President, if he made a phone call to the Attorney General, and he started with the same fervor and volume and excitement that he demonstrates from time to time on the Senate floor to berate them about the way the INS is administered and managed, those who need intelligent handling by the INS in my State would start to get some relief. I don't think they will get relief with the passage of this legislation. But I think they can get relief if we can get the attention of the INS, and the managers, the bureaucrats, the political appointees--call them what you will--in the Clinton administration who have been handling this for the last 8 years. I am one who would vote for increased appropriations for the INS if I were confident the management of that agency were capable of handling it because I recognize the seriousness of the problem. I see day to day, from the people who come into my office, how wrenching it is in terms of their relationship with their families, but this is something the executive branch should get together first and foremost before they come to the legislative branch for the passing of a piece of legislation that makes everybody feel good. That is the best I can do on this short notice to respond to the issues the Senator from Massachusetts has raised. I enjoy the exchanges that seem to come about now as the Senator from Massachusetts, the Senator from Minnesota, the Senator from Illinois, and others repeatedly come to the floor to raise these issues. I and other Senators on this side will repeatedly come to the floor to respond. I am grateful to the Senator from Massachusetts for giving me the opportunity. I yield the floor.

Mr. BENNETT. Mr. President, it is my understanding there is an hour reserved under the control of Senator Thomas.

Mr. BENNETT

Mr. BENNETT. Mr. President, I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. BENNETT. I thank the Chair.

Mr. BENNETT. I ask unanimous consent that that time be reserved for my control as manager of the bill.

Mr. BENNETT. It is my understanding that on the Republican side there are still 45 minutes remaining under the control of Senator McCain.

Mr. BENNETT. If the Senator would withhold, I would like to make an inquiry about time.

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

Mr. BENNETT. Mr. President, we are about through with this debate, as demonstrated by the fact that Senators on neither side are coming to the floor. We would be able to vote more rapidly than anticipated except that some Senators have made appointments based on the assumption we would not be voting until 3:30 or 4. However, we have cleared on both sides that we can vote on the adoption of the pending conference report at 3:15 and that paragraph 4 of rule XII be waived. I ask unanimous consent that the Senate agree to the adoption of that time and the waiving of that rule.

Mr. BENNETT. I suggest the absence of a quorum and ask unanimous consent that the time be charged equally on both sides.

Mr. BENNETT. Mr. President, I am here in my capacity as manager of the conference report. We have had very little conversation about the conference report or any of the items contained in the bill, but through this debate, we have had a great deal of conversation about a number of other issues. I suppose in the spirit of that debate, I can be excused if I respond to the comments made by the senior Senator from Massachusetts. The senior Senator from Massachusetts as well as the Senator from Illinois have given us a great number of statistics about the minimum wage, a great deal of information from various studies that have been done about the minimum wage. I remind them of the last time we had a definitive study on the minimum wage that was given to us with great fanfare from the Department of Labor; that further analysis of that study by objective academics indicated that the methodology of the study was false; that the conclusion of the study, which was that the minimum wage did not in fact destroy jobs, was false, and that the minimum wage does in fact have an impact. I don't want to debate studies and arguments and academics. I want to take us, for just a moment, into the real world of employment. We hear over and over that we are in the most prosperous economy that anybody can remember. That is true. That creates a real world situation which has not been addressed in any of the rhetoric we have just heard. The real world situation is this: When the economy is very strong, there is a very strong demand for labor. As a consequence, unemployment goes down. Unemployment is at historic lows at this time of a good economy. And in the real world, where people really seek jobs and employers really seek workers, there is a shortage of workers. I talk to employers in my State and I say: What is your biggest problem? They say: Our biggest problem is finding workers. We post jobs. We do everything we can to try to get people to come in and take these jobs. They come in off the street and if, during the presentation of what the job is like, we say something that they don't particularly like, they turn and walk out. Why? Because they can walk into another employer down the street and have exactly the same kind of presentation. They are in a position where they can pick and choose. I know this doesn't sound like macroeconomics, but this is the reality of the marketplace in which we operate. If I can talk about macroeconomics for a moment, let me quote Alan Greenspan, who appears regularly before the Senate Banking Committee and the Joint Economic Committee, on both of which I have the opportunity to serve. He says to us the one thing he watches with greatest concern in terms of the possibility of this economy overheating and spiraling off into inflation is the shortage of labor. He says the reason he has not raised interest rates more is because our labor is becoming so much more productive that we can have this kind of tremendous demand in the economy, even though the labor force is not expanding as rapidly as one would think it would have to in historic terms. The labor force is expanding in productivity so that it can keep up with the demand for labor in the economy without becoming inflationary. So there are microeconomic considerations and individual considerations, but it always comes down to the same fact in the real world: There is no shortage of jobs. There is no shortage of good- paying jobs. There is no shortage of jobs above the poverty level. The problem is with people who, for whatever reason, cannot take the jobs that are available. The reason is usually training. The reason is usually experience. If I may get personal for a moment, Mr. President, I don't know how many other Members of this body have worked for a minimum wage, but I have. I did it when I was 14. The job, frankly, was something of a gift because I don't think I added very much value to the corporation that I worked for at age 14 at 50 cents an hour. For me, it was a tremendous experience. I look back on the time that I worked at ages 14, 15, 16, and so on, in the summertime, after school, and on weekends, as one of the most important formative experiences of my life. But I think if the Federal Government had come in and said, no, you can't pay Bob Bennett 50 cents an hour and we are going to order you to pay him 75 cents, my employer, in all probability, would have said: What he does for us is, frankly, not worth 75 cents an hour, and being true to our shareholders and our other employees whose jobs we do not want to jeopardize, we will just let him go. But the minimum wage was low enough that I could work for 50 cents an hour, I could have that kind of experience and, frankly, I could get the kinds of job skills that made it possible for me, a few years later, to command salaries at substantially higher than the minimum wage. When I hear about the minimum wage from people in my State, it is always from employers who are employing--and this is a very pejorative term, but it is true--marginal workers. And they say: Senator, if you raise the minimum wage, I am going to have to let them go. The contribution that they make to my company, or farm, or ranch, whatever it might be, is marginal. I can afford to pay them the minimum wage now and say that I get some return from their labor. If you raise it, I am going to have to say, no, it isn't worth it; I can't afford this. These people then end up unemployed. The problem with these workers is not to have the Government step in and attempt to repeal the law of supply and demand; the problem is to find innovative, new ways to give them the training and skills they require in order to command a higher wage on the basis of their work. We are about to move, I hope, on to a debate on H-1B visas. People will say: What does that have to do with the minimum wage? It is a manifestation of the same basic principle I am talking about here; that is, we cannot, no matter how powerful we think we are as Senators, repeal the law of supply and demand. H-1B visas are used primarily by high-tech employees from other countries who come into this country to take high-tech jobs. What is the demand for those high-tech jobs? Right now, there are between 350,000 and 400,000 high-tech jobs, paying in the high five figures and into the low six figures, going begging in this country, and the companies that have those jobs are saying: If we can't find Americans, we want people from outside America to come in and fill these jobs. Will you please allow us to give visas to these people? We cannot legislate that those kinds of salaries be paid to someone who is not capable of doing the job. The focus here, in terms of those who are at the lowest ends of our economic ladder, should be finding ways to train them, equip them, and prepare them to command, on the basis of their own skills, the wages they want instead of having the Government just automatically decree that they be paid a wage that may, in fact, be higher than the amount of value that they can add to their employer. The Senator from Illinois displayed a chart that showed the minimum wage going up and employment going up, and then he suggested that one causes the other. I suggest that there is no relationship whatsoever between those two trend lines. There is another trend line that I think has a relationship. What is the area of greatest unemployment in this country? If you break it down with the demographics and the metropolitan areas, you find that the area of greatest unemployment in this country is among young, black teenagers in the inner city, particularly male. That is, statistically, the area of highest unemployment. The unemployment rate among young, teenage, black males in the inner city in the United States is not only in double digits; it is in high double digits. I don't have the figures with me now. I didn't understand that we were going to debate minimum wage on the legislative branch bill. But they are in the 50 percent, 60 percent, 70 percent area. Those young, black men would benefit enormously by having a job experience. I know that, as I say, from my own experience, when I was paid the minimum wage at age 14. But it was less to add value to the company than to add skills and understanding to myself. If we had the law of supply and demand operating unimpeded by Government instruction, I can imagine--and I think I could find jobs for those young, black teenagers to do in the inner city. They would not be $6-an-hour jobs, but they would be jobs where there could be some value added to the employer and tremendous experience and training value added to the employee. And the Government, over time, would get tremendous benefits out of that because if those young men could be trained in marketable skills and then go out and command jobs at $10 and $12 and $15 an hour based on their skills rather than the Government demanding that they be paid that whether they produce value for it or not, the economy would be better, society would be better, and America as a whole would be better. So as I listen to these debates on the minimum wage, the emotion, the shouting, and the great indignation that is sent forward here, I ask the Senators to step away from the academic studies. Go out among the employers of their own States and ask this direct question: What will happen in your business to the people you hire if the Federal Government intervenes in this situation and starts to dictate the wages that you pay? A comment came out of the oil crisis of the 1970s when President Carter was telling us that the energy crisis was a crisis that was the moral equivalent of war and that we must somehow marshal the entire energies of the Nation to deal with it. Interestingly enough, as the Senator from Alaska points out, ever since we declared that kind of war, American dependence on foreign oil has gone up, not down. That is one of the main reasons we are looking at $2-a-gallon gasoline in the Midwest, as we are seeing the results of 8 years of an administration that has opposed any kind of energy development in the United States. In that period, an economist made this point that I have never forgotten. He said: When the Federal Government interferes with the setting of prices by the forces of supply and demand, you get one of two results. If the Federal Government sets the price higher than the market would set it, you get a shortage. When the Federal Government sets the price lower than the market would set it, you get a surplus. In other words, when the Federal Government says you must pay a wage higher than these people can return value for, you get a shortage of jobs that these people can fill. If the Government should arbitrarily say we will set a price lower than these people can produce, then you get a surplus of people. We don't need shortages and we don't need surpluses. We need jobs. We don't need shortages. We don't need surpluses of energy. To put it back in the same context, we need the energy. The law of supply and demand gives you a price. It is always the right price as supply meets demand. As soon as someone steps in to try to manipulate that law--be that someone a monopolist, or be that someone a Federal legislator--and you get a diversion between the price that the demand would call for and that the supply would provide, you get either a shortage or a surplus. It has been that way since time immemorial, and it will be that way forevermore into the future. We need to learn that lesson and be a little humble towards that process in the Senate as we stand on the floor of the Senate and raise our voices in indignation to say we must do something for these people in the name of fairness, and realize that in the long run we are in all probability hurting far more than we are helping. With that, I suggest the absence of a quorum.