Steve Chabot

Mr. CHABOT

Mr. CHABOT. Mr. Speaker, the President, who in 1993 gave the American people the largest single tax increase in peacetime history, told us last week that he made a mistake by raising taxes too much. The next day he said that he did not really mean what he had said the day before. Actually, he said, it was late in the day and he was a little bit sleepy. My goodness. It is not exactly news that Mr. Clinton has occasionally tailored his remarks to suit whatever group he happens to be talking to at the moment, but this one is a real doozy. Mr. Speaker, we are going to give the President another opportunity to make amends for his mistake in 1993. We are going to present him with a tax bill that will reduce the taxes on those same middle class Americans to whom he promised a tax cut in 1992, then raised their taxes instead, soon after becoming President. Mr. Speaker, 75 percent of our tax cuts go to people who make less than $75,000. Let us hope that when the tax cut bill comes before him this year, he will be in the right frame of mind and he will sign our middle-class tax cut.

Mr. CHABOT

Mr. CHABOT. Mr. Speaker, the Republican majority is working hard to do what is right for all Americans--save Medicare from bankruptcy. And let us get one issue straight right from the start--accusations by Democrats here in Congress that we are cutting Medicare are absolute nonsense--baloney--we are increasing spending per senior; from $4,800 to $6,700. Republicans have come up with a plan to ensure Medicare's solvency through the next generation not just through the next election. Our plan will increase benefits offer more choice to seniors and attack the waste and fraud in the system. Our plan offers real solutions to the real problems facing Medicare today. I urge my Democrat colleagues to stop the scare tactics, stop listening to the special interest groups, stop playing politics and do what you know is the responsible thing to do: Save Medicare now.

Mr. CHABOT

Mr. CHABOT. Mr. Speaker, the Democrats in Congress would like everyone to believe that Republicans are cutting Medicare, allegedly to give tax cuts to the rich. That is garbage and they know it. First of all, we are not cutting Medicare. Our plan will slow the growth, give seniors more options, all in order to save, protect, and preserve Medicare, to keep it from going bankrupt. Second, our tax cuts in the Contract With America are paid for. They were paid for last April, when we passed our bill on the floor. Who will benefit from these tax cuts? Every family in America. Our $500 tax credit for children is the main part of our tax relief package. Do Democrats think any family with a child is rich? Apparently they do. They seem to think that anybody who has a job in America is a rich person. I do not think that is true. Mr. Speaker, together we should be working to save Medicare, not just trying to scare our senior citizens, which apparently is what the Democrats are stooping to doing.

Mr. CHABOT

Mr. CHABOT. Madam Speaker, Republicans in the House this week celebrated the 1-year anniversary of the Contract With America. That contract was and is a promise to the American people to reform the way things are done around here and we delivered. Now we are making a promise to preserve and strengthen Medicare. We intend to deliver again. The shameless demagoguery that our liberal Democrat colleagues are engaging in will not stop us. The false TV ads put out by special interest groups will not stop us. The deliberate deception of the American people by a liberal minority with no solutions of its own will not stop us. We will deliver. [[Page H 9674]] Mr. Speaker, for too long our Nation was plagued by a liberal majority party that was satisfied with sacrificing the future of our children to sustain its power. Our new majority has already begun to change the priorities of Congress. The Republicans will not let this generation or our future generations down. We promise to save Medicare. We will deliver.

Mr. CHABOT

Mr. CHABOT. Mr. Speaker, if I could just mention one thing in follow up on that, even though they still need one more vote over in the Senate to actually pass a balanced budget amendment to put it into the Constitution, nonetheless, we in this House passed the first balanced budget resolution in about 30 years. So the budget that we are acting on right now, the spending up here in Washington that goes all over the country and is spent for services here in Washington, this is a balanced budget resolution, and it will put us in balance over the next 7 years. Some of us voted to do that even quicker. I voted to do it in 5 years. The President has come around to some degree. He is now talking at least about 10 years. So we are heading in the right direction, but even though the balanced budget amendment did not pass, unfortunately, we are still pushing to balance this budget and we are dedicated to doing that. I would like at this time to yield to the gentleman from the State of Washington [Mr. Tate].

Mr. CHABOT. Moving along with the items in the Contract With America that we passed in the House this year, another item that I think was very important was we rewrote the so-called crime bill that was passed in this House last year. I think we would all agree that crime in this country is far too high, the fact that people, oftentimes many of our senior citizens, are prisoners in their own homes, cannot take a walk on the street because they are worried about being mugged or being raped or something just awful happening; I mean, it is a crime itself that that level of crime has been able to go on all of these days, and much of it is linked to the drug problems that we have, much of it is linked to the fact that kids do not have appropriate parental supervision at home. They hang out on the street corners. They get involved in crack dealing and shoot each other, and it is just a mess. So, unfortunately, the crime bill that was passed last time I do not think did much good. There were a lot of social programs in there. There was midnight basketball and many of us, in talking with the people in our districts last time when we were running, heard over and over again, ``We want a real crime bill. We want something that is really going to battle crime in this Nation and not just have some feel-good legislation that makes people think something happened.'' So we passed, I think, a very, very good, comprehensive crime bill earlier this year. It gave flexibility to the States to determine what really worked in those particular communities. If midnight basketball works in a community, that is something they can have an option to do. Other communities may choose to do something entirely different. It required truth-in-sentencing where, if you have a violent criminal, they are going to be locked up because when they are behind bars, they are not out on the streets preying on the public. It toughened the death penalty in this country. I firmly believe in the death penalty. Most of the people in this country believe in the death penalty. There are some people that have just a moral feeling about it. They do not agree. That is fine. It is a free country. We can have both sides of the [[Page H 9583]] issue. We do have a death penalty in most States. The problem with the death penalty, and some people argue it is not a deterrent, the poor deterrence is the fact of the way we handle the death penalty in this country. We let people sit in death row for 15 years, 16 years. We need a short appeals process, and then the death penalty, I believe, should be carried out. Then I think it would be a deterrent. That is one of the things this crime bill did. It shortened the death penalty appeals process. I think we need to go even further in that area. It was certainly a step in the right direction. The levels of crime has gotten far too high in this country. We are actually doing something about that finally in this House.

Mr. CHABOT. Mr. Speaker, relative to term limits, a couple of things I would like to point out, as the gentleman mentioned, in reforming Congress itself. On the very first day of Congress, we passed term limits for committee chairmen, and the reason that is important, one of the main problems up here in Washington and in the Congress is we have some of these old bulls, these committee chairmen that have been in power for decades, sometimes, and their power was sometimes corrupting, and oftentimes just not healthy for the system. So we passed term limits for committee chairmen of 6 years, and after 6 years they can no longer be chairman of that committee. Relative to term limits for all of Congress, the reason that it did not pass in the House is because it was a constitutional amendment, and therefore, we needed two-thirds, not just 50 percent of this body to vote for it, but two-thirds of this House to vote for term limits. Now, we got 85 percent of the Republican Members of Congress to vote for term limits, 85 percent of us did. Unfortunately, 82 percent of our democratic colleagues in Congress voted against term limits, and that is why that failed in the House. The Speaker, Newt Gingrich, has indicated the very first bill that will be introduced in the House, assuming we have a Republican majority next time and therefore we have a Republican speaker, will be term limits, once again, and if we have more folks that support term limits, hopefully we will be able to pass it next time.

Mr. CHABOT. Mr. Speaker, if the gentleman would yield, I think that is an excellent point. Another thing we did, and I am sure that the gentlemen remember this very well. I remember I had my little son, who is 6 years old now, he was 5 years old at the time, sitting in a chair right over there, the day we got sworn in, and that was around noon, and we were here until 1 or 2 o'clock in the morning, because we had promised that we would take action on all of these items the very first day. To give credit where it is due, many of our colleagues, many of the Democrats on the other side of the aisle, joined us in these reforms the very first day. One of the most important reforms we made the first day, I think, is the fact that we made it tougher than ever for Congress again to raise taxes on the American public, because as the gentleman from Washington mentioned, when he was going around his district, he kept hearing people saying the same thing: balance the budget and cut taxes. It has been too easy to raise taxes on people, so from now on, rather than a simple majority, 50 percent plus one to raise taxes, we have to have 60 percent of this body to ever raise taxes again. That will make it tougher to raise taxes, and that is the way it ought to be.

Mr. CHABOT. Mr. Speaker, I think the gentleman from Washington makes some excellent points, and relative to balancing the budget and taxes, there were many of our critics whom we remember when we were running last year, and I kept saying, I want to balance the budget, I do not want to raise taxes. I had some of the folks in the press, and my opponent, over and over again, and many of our critics said, you cannot possibly balance the budget without raising taxes. Well, we proved them wrong. We absolutely have to balance this budget. It is immoral to continue to spend and spend and spend the people of America's money up here in Washington and turn that debt over to our children. It is immoral to continue to do that. So we are going to balance the budget, but we are not going to balance the budget by raising taxes. We are going to balance this budget by cutting spending. That was our commitment, that is what we are going to do.

Mr. CHABOT. The problem and the reason that previous Congresses and the folks in control of this House for the past 40 years were unable to balance the budget is they really had it all wrong. The way they looked at things is not that the government overspent. They thought that the people of this country were just undertaxed. We think just the opposite. The problem is not that people pay too few taxes. It is just that they overspend up here in Washington. When we talk about the tax burden, I think it is important that we look at the trend that has happened in this country. I was born in 1953. Right around that time, in the early 1950's, the average American family sent about 5 percent of what they earn up here to Washington in the form of taxes. That has increased over the past 40 years to about 25 percent, from 5 percent to 25 percent of what the average American family earns comes up here to Washington in the form of taxes. If you add into that city taxes and county taxes and State taxes and Social Security taxes and real estate taxes and property taxes, and God knows what all the taxes we all pay every day, the average American family now pays 40 to 50 percent of what they earn in one form of taxes or another. The folks on the other side of the aisle, the liberals in this institution, keep attacking us on a daily basis, saying, oh, well, we are just trying to give tax cuts to the rich. That could not be further from the truth. Seventy-five percent of the tax cuts that we passed this year go to people who earn under $75,000. Things like a $500 tax credit per child for families. Those are the types of taxes that we really need to encourage. Capital gains taxes, so that businesses can create more jobs, so rather than people being on welfare, people are working. Those are the types of positive changes that this Republican majority who now controls the House has been trying to enact.

Mr. CHABOT. That is, I think, an excellent point. What we have seen across the country is, for example, when you have had a family who has owned a farm, and wants to pass that farm on to the next generation, either their sons or their daughters, to run that farm, they have oftentimes been unable to do so because of the exorbitant inheritance taxes. In essence they have had to sell the farm in order to pay their taxes. That is not fair to that family and it is certainly not healthy to our agricultural communities across this country. We have had the same problem with small business owners, somebody owns a business and they want to pass that business on to the next generation. Sometimes the businesses get sold down the river to pay the taxes. What happens to those people that worked there, the employees? Many, many people get hurt besides just the business owner and his family. I agree very much with the proposal of the gentleman from California [Mr. Cox] to try to reform the inheritance tax system in this country because it has been very, very unfortunate what it has done in many instances.

Mr. CHABOT. That is one of the scary things, that it goes bankrupt in 7 years, but it starts losing money next year, and this has not happened before. This is the first time in history it goes completely bankrupt in the next 7 years. I would argue very strongly that it would be immoral for us to let that happen. My mom and dad, you know, are on Medicare. They receive the benefits. Many of our relatives do. People in my district do, thousands and thousands of people. It is something that they paid into. It is something that was sacred, that the Government basically made a contract with them just like we made a contract with America this year. I think it is our responsibility, as Members of Congress, to not let Medicare go bankrupt. We have to save it. We have to preserve it. We have to protect it for the seniors now, for this generation and for future generations. That is absolutely critical.

Mr. CHABOT. We have a better baseball team.

Mr. CHABOT. I believe the gentleman makes some very important points about our defense. Another item that you mentioned was welfare reform. This was one of the things that I saw up front and very close in my community in the city of Cincinnati. I was on the Cincinnati City Council for 5 years and I was a Hamilton County commissioner in Cincinnati for 5 years. One of the greatest problems, one of the most frustrating things that I saw was how destructive the welfare system was in Cincinnati. I am sure that was repeated all over this country. We passed, I believe, a very positive welfare reform package in the House earlier this year. I think, and I have heard again some of the folks on the other side attacked us as being mean-spirited, not caring about the poor, because we were trying to change welfare. But I would argue that there was nothing more mean-spirited, nothing more corrupting, nothing more damaging to children in this country than the present welfare system, which basically for many years has encouraged families to break up, has encouraged fathers not to live in the home but to go away from the home, not to support their own kids. Kids all over this country grow up in homes where they never see an adult go to work. They then fall into that same pattern of behavior. Our plan emphasizes work. It gives job training, it gives job opportunities and basically assists people into getting into work in the private sector, not some government make-work-type jobs but jobs in the private sector. We have got to get people working, supporting themselves and supporting their own families. I would argue it is really not fair to require other families that oftentimes both the mother and the father have to work, sometimes work two jobs to support their own kids, and then they get their money taken and sent here to Washington and sent to folks on welfare who for the most part ought to be supporting themselves and supporting their own children. I am all for helping the truly needy, but too often welfare in this country has become a permanent way of life, generation after generation after generation on welfare. I think our plan was a step in the right direction, requiring people to work, and support their own children, and emphasizing families staying together. That is direction we should be heading.

Mr. CHABOT. That is exactly right. It is interesting that that $5 trillion is almost the same amount as our national debt right now, of which 14 cents of every dollar that comes up here to Washington just goes to pay the interest on that debt. We have spent a tremendous amount of money on welfare. Most of that money I would argue has been counterproductive and just has not worked. Most of that money, the explosion in the spending started back in the 1960's during Lyndon Johnson's Great Society. I think the intentions were good but the results have been tragic for this country.

Mr. CHABOT. The gentleman mentioned I am on the Committee on the Judiciary. A couple of the other things in the contract, many of the items passed through the Committee on the Judiciary, so we had our hands full in that earlier 100 days. Tort reform, for example, was something passed through the Committee on the Judiciary. We had a lottery system in this country where trial lawyers oftentimes benefited, made tremendous amounts of money. It is arguable whether the people that got hurt got very much at all. We wanted to change the lottery system. There was a case in New York City, for example, that gives you an example of what was wrong with the system. There was a case where a homeless person decided to commit suicide, threw himself in front of a subway train. He was unsuccessful. He did not die, but he was injured seriously. He turned around and sued the city of New York, and he won, and that just shows one of the ridiculous types of cases that, under the existing laws, happened. Another case a lot of people have heard about is the lady who spilled coffee on herself at McDonald's Restaurant, turns around and sues McDonald's and gets a multimillion-dollar verdict. It was reduced somewhat to the hundreds of thousands, but we all pay for higher insurance premiums, and we need to have a system that, rather than just lawyers making out, we need for people who have really been injured and people who need justice to be able to get fair and equal justice under the system, and that is what our bill attempted to do.

Mr. CHABOT. Why do we not drop down to the third item and maybe come up to the second item last?

Mr. CHABOT. The bill that we have sponsored up here is called the Back to Basics Education Act, and we have 111 cosponsors, meaning that 111 Members of this body have indicated they support this legislation. Again, what it does is it takes the power away from the bureaucrats up here in Washington and gives it back to the folks at the local level, parents, teachers, and local school boards. Education is a very, very important issue with me. I am a former schoolteacher. I taught in an urban school in downtown Cincinnati and taught the seventh and eighth grades. In fact, my daughter is in the eighth grade this year, so I can identify very much with her and the kids we taught and why this particular bill is so important to the education of children all over this country. It saves money, too, which is important to the taxpayers.

Mr. CHABOT. What we have done thus far this evening is we have kind of talked about what we did during the first 100 days, and the time after that, the Contract With America, what we passed, what we still have to do. We are in September now. We have got a few more months left in this year, and at this time we are setting the budget for next year and we are in very significant times for the future of this Congress and the future of this country, and I think what might be helpful at this time is to show what are the most important issues right now that we have facing us and perhaps discuss those. I have here a chart which shows four of the issues, and perhaps one of my colleagues might like to indicate what we see here and what the significance of these issues is.

Mr. CHABOT. The gentleman has got me stumped. I cannot guarantee that there is not somebody in there.

Mr. CHABOT. Those are very good issues, points, and things that we certainly made progress in. One of those things which is near and dear to my heart is the area of education. The gentleman from Florida [Mr. Scarborough] and I are cochairmen of a group that has been trying to get rid of the Federal Department of Education up here in Washington, so that instead of bureaucrats making the decision about how our kids are going to be educated, we let parents and teachers and local school boards determine how the money ought to be sent and how the education ought to be carried out and what books they ought to have instead of some nameless, faceless bureaucrat up here in Washington, and we would save billions of dollars in the process.

Mr. CHABOT. You have mentioned the Washington Post. I have a couple of articles here. This is exact wording from the Washington Post here, and I would just like to refer to a couple of these things, what the Post has to say about the Democrats' mediscare campaign. This is an exact quote from the Washington Post: They have no plan. Mr. Gephardt says they can't offer one because the Republicans would simply pocket the money to finance their tax cut. It's the perfect defense. The Democrats can't do the right thing because the Republicans would then do the wrong one. But that has nothing to do with Medicare. The Democrats have fabricated the Medicare tax cut connection because it is useful politically. It allows them to attack and to duck responsibility, both at the same time. We think it is wrong. This is the Washington Post.

Mr. CHABOT. Mr. Speaker, I have another Washington Post, and obviously these are blowups here, but what the Post has to say about the Republicans' Medicare plan--this is the Washington Post: Congressional Republicans have confounded the skeptics. It's incredible. It's gutsy. It addresses a genuine problem that is only going to get worse. This is the Washington Post talking about the Republicans' Medicare plan, and I brought a couple of articles here from two of my hometown newspapers, the Cincinnati Post and the Cincinnati Enquirer. I am not going to read the entire articles, but I would just like to read a couple of quotes. This is from my district in Cincinnati. This is the Cincinnati Post talking about the Republican Medicare plan. It says: Will the Republican plan actually cut anything? No. It just slows the rate of growth. But it is extraordinary, in an age when political truth- telling and courage are often thought in meager supply, that the Contract-With-America crowd is following through on its pledge to balance the budget and is going about it the only way possible, by reforming an entitlement program hugely popular with middle-class voters. And the plan is, in fact, meritorious, not only because it would save billions upon billions of dollars if enacted, but chiefly because it would introduce market principles into the program, enabling the elderly to shop around for what suits them best. Democrats, carrying on as if the Republicans were caught building concentration camps, have been trying to scare the elderly into paroxysms of protest, so far to no avail. Perhaps the elderly have noticed that per capita spending under the Republican plan would rise from $4,816 this year to $8,734 in 2002. That's just a few hundred dollars less than without the proposed changes. Still, action, above all, is what's needed. Now, that is why the House Republicans' plan is such a valuable start to badly needed Medicare reform. That is the Cincinnati Post. Let me read briefly from the Cincinnati Enquirer. The quacks who have been playing doctor with Medicare for decades always prescribe the same treatment: Bleed taxpayers to keep the cash transfusions coming, but don't close the wounds--that would be painful. Finally, Republicans have dared to propose some surgery to get Medicare healthy again. And the response from the Clinton administration has been the same old faith-healing. And then they quote Donna Shalala's response to our plan. They quote Donna Shalala as saying: We will not go back to the days when older Americans brought bags of apples to pay for their doctor visits,'' was the panic-inducing response from Health and Human Services Secretary Donna Shalala. And what the Enquirer says to her response, ``That's snake oil.'' ``Considering the critical condition of Medicare, the Republican therapy is fairly painless.'' And then it goes into some of the details about our plan, and it says: Unless something is done, Medicare could go broke and double the federal deficit by 2005, soaking taxpayers and the elderly with increases measured like a runaway fever chart. It's long past time for a healthy cure before Medicare has a massive stroke. The Republican remedy is a good place to start. That is a Cincinnati Enquirer.

Mr. CHABOT. The four items that we have up here are the important issues we still have facing us this year, the ones we really want to accomplish, the ones we will not back down on, we will not blink on, we will not flinch on in dealing with the President, things that absolutely have to be done for the future of this country. The next item that we want to talk about now, for the balance of the time that we have left this evening, is the fact that we have to save Medicare from bankruptcy, and that is the issue that I think is so important that we are going to spend the rest of the time that we have here this evening discussing how we are going to save Medicare and why it is so critically important. I think the way we want to start out here is that, first of all, I think most people around the country realize now that Medicare is in serious trouble, and Medicare's own trustees, including the Clinton administration Cabinet secretaries, Donna Shalala, Robert Rubin, and Robert Reich, have indicated that Medicare starts losing money next year and goes bankrupt in the year 2002. So that is what this next chart here indicates. This is the conclusion of the Medicare trustees. This was in April of 1995. Again, I want to emphasize that three of these trustees, these are not Republican Members of Congress, they are not our staff people. These are President Clinton's top Cabinet officials, Donna Shalala, Robert Rubin, and Robert Reich, and what it says here, ``The fund is projected to be exhausted in 2001.'' By funds, they are talking about Medicare funds. The funds will be exhausted in the year 2001. Here are their signatures. Here are their names right down here.

Mr. CHABOT. Mr. Speaker, I think one thing that we absolutely should make clear is that although some of the folks who want to scare senior citizens across this country are talking about us cutting Medicare, that could not be further from the truth. What we are talking about doing is increasing the spending on Medicare, but at a slower rate. Right now in the private sector medical care has been increasing at about 5 percent, 6 percent, thereabouts, a year. Medicare has been going up 10 percent, 11 percent a year, so just about double what it has been in the private sector. So what we have to do is we have to slow the growth of Medicare so it is more consistent with what is going on in the private sector so that we can save Medicare, and in fact the dollars in our plan go up, and I will give you the dollar amounts. Right now for every senior in this country on average, Mr. Speaker, we spend $4,800. The U.S. Government spends $4,800 on Medicare per senior citizen this year. Under our plan over that 7 years' period of time it will go from $4,800 up to $6,700, and that is more than the rate of inflation every year. So we are talking about increasing spending from $4,800 to $6,700. Now, Mr. Speaker, I say to my colleagues, that ain't a cut, and even up here in Washington when oftentimes folks on the other side of the aisle are trying to scare seniors and trying to mislead, that is not a cut, it is an increase, and that's the way we have to save Medicare.