Thomas Coburn

Mr. COBURN

Mr. COBURN. The Senator from Alabama is correct. You can see from this chart that 29 States currently have a minimum wage higher than the Federal minimum wage, and you can also see from the next chart that 14 other States are in their legislature right now considering increasing their own minimum wage. One of the things our Founders thought and planned and hoped we would stick with is having the States be laboratories of experimentation with respect to our democracy. So if you have 14 plus 29, you have 43 States out of 50 and the District of Columbia that have already answered this question. We are going to go through and answer it for them again. There are a lot of problems associated with this. I want to put up another slide that shows what has happened since 1998 as far as the number of people on the minimum wage. It is a precipitous decline from over 4 million to less than 1.9 million workers presently. You need to break that down. When you break that down, when we say we want to help single moms with kids or four-person families, those working at the minimum wage, what happens is, when you run the numbers, in many instances we are going to hurt people who are making the minimum wage. Let me prove my point. In Oklahoma today, if you are earning the minimum wage, you have access to the following benefits: A State tax credit--I am talking about families with children on the minimum wage, and there are 40,000 of those in Oklahoma--a school lunch program, which is federally sponsored; temporary assistance to needy families; childcare subsidies; Medicaid, which is called SoonerCare in our State; the earned income tax credit, which is over $4,400 per year; food stamps; housing vouchers; plus what they earn on the minimum wage. What happens is, if you are a family of four in Oklahoma today earning the minimum wage, your aftertax net benefits, taking advantage of what we are supplying supporting people making the minimum wage, is $36,438 per year. The median household income is only $38,000 and that is pretax. So the average person receiving the benefits we have offered for people who have less means in Oklahoma today actually has more benefit than the average Oklahoma family. What is going to happen when we pass this minimum wage for that person in Oklahoma? What is going to happen is, on the childcare, they are going to go from $22 a month copay to $95 a month. That is what is going to happen to families in Oklahoma. TANF, they are going to go from $3,500 a year to $2,600 a year, based on this minimum wage bill. On food stamps, they are going to go from $3,588 a year to $2,808 a year. Under this very bill, that is what is going to happen to families earning the minimum wage in Oklahoma. Their housing subsidy is going to go from $4,140 a year to $3,096, a 25-percent reduction. Their Medicaid, if they are a family of four, they are not going to qualify for the whole family anymore; only their children will be qualified. So, in essence, what they are going to lose is $4,600 a year in aftertax benefits. Net net, when you think about the median household income in Oklahoma being $38,000 and they are paying a State income tax of less than 6 percent, and an average Federal income tax of about 18 percent, what you are going to see is they are going to lose. In the name of helping them, they are going to lose. The vast majority of the people we want to help, which is not the vast majority of the people on minimum wage anywhere in this country--the people who we really want to help the most, not the teenagers or the kids living in a family who have a minimum wage job as a first job, but those in Oklahoma and in 19 other States--you are going to actually decrease their income with this bill. It is not going to have any effect. Put Massachusetts up there on the chart. The Senator from Massachusetts wants Oklahoma to have his minimum wage bill. The median household income in Massachusetts is $52,354 a year. The total income for somebody making the Massachusetts minimum wage, they are making $45,416 if they take advantage of the benefits available to them in Massachusetts. So his State won't be impacted because he is already above the minimum wage which is being proposed in the minimum wage bill. How smart is it for us to decide that we want to take away from the families of 19 States--those people who we say we really want to help but, in essence, we are going to cut their aftertax income by about $1,000, a net/net loss for them? Is that what we intend to do? That is the unexpected consequence of what we are going to do. Nobody is considering the fact that the 19 States that have lower minimum wages which will be impacted by this bill--their needy families, single moms with kids, are going to lose under this bill in the name of them winning. It is because we didn't think it out. The reason we didn't think it out is because this isn't about minimum wage; this is about wage compression. This is about raising the wages of those people above minimum wage. It is not about minimum wage. We come down here and say it is, but it is not. It is designed to raise the wages of anybody under $15 an hour. That is what it is going to do. We know wage compression. If you have 100 people working and the highest is making $12 and the lowest is now making $6, and you say they are going to have to make $7.25 or $7.50, what is going to happen to the other wages? They are going to have to be bumped up. The minimum wage is no longer designed to protect people as far as their income. You can see it from this chart and you can see it in California--and I have it for every State--where the vast majority of the benefits don't come from what we earn in terms of a salaried job; they come from the other benefits the country put in as a social safety net. So in the States in which we would raise the minimum wage that have not done it, in 19 States what is going to happen is we are going to hurt the very people we say we want to help. How is it we can do that? Why is it we will do that? We will do it because there is a very powerful interest group that is behind this called the labor unions in this country. For every dollar increase in labor rates paid through the labor unions, what happens to the union's fees? More money. So is it about helping those people who need our help or is there another agenda here? I have great respect for Senator Kennedy. He is very eloquent on the floor. But when you see his charts, there are false questions asked. He showed the increase in the level of income in this country since we raised the minimum wage. It doesn't consider all of the other things that have happened over the last 20 years that, through productivity increases, have raised wages. Mandating a minimum wage in any market by any economist will not increase the market. That is not the reason. It looks good on a chart. But you don't consider all of the other benefits and factors that might have considered that. You just say this must have been it because it looks like it. I can show that on anything that we do in the Senate. Here is a chart for New York. The State of New York is another example. The wage per-job average is $51,165. A single mom earning minimum wage under New York's level, which is at $7.15 right now, and taking advantage of all of the benefits there, aftertax income is $49,000 a year in benefits. I am not saying cut the benefits; I am saying don't do something that will cut the benefits to those people you say you are going to help. It is interesting when you look at this number, knowing that taxes-- if you look at New York City's tax, you pay a city income tax, a State income tax, and a Federal income tax. Those people making minimum wage have more aftertax income in terms of benefits and salary than the average household in New York City. We have to ask the question, do we want to help people? The Senator from Alabama talked about making sure that the earned income tax credit comes as a part of your wage every month instead of at the end of the year. It is a great idea and ought to be something we want to do. I want to show again what is going to happen to families earning the minimum wage in Oklahoma. There is a net loss of $232, but that doesn't include the taxes. So the net loss for Oklahoma families who are on minimum wage under the new minimum wage, in essence, will be about $1,200. Is that what we want to do to Oklahoma and 18 other States? I don't think so. We have to take the lid off of this pressure cooker. For us to pass a minimum wage that undermines the very people we are saying we want to help does not, in the long run, do anything except help organized labor, 1; No. 2, it makes certain jobs go away; we know it will, No. 3, send more jobs out of this country. I believe and I hope the Senator from Massachusetts will look at our data. I hope he will try to amend his bill in such a way so that we have either a safe harbor or some other mechanism so the people in these 19 States don't lose the very benefits we say we want to give to them. In fact, that is what will happen if this bill passes. With that, I yield the floor.

Mr. COBURN. It will be a benefit but not to the extent a direct tax credit to them would be. Right now the average American, if you are in the upper income scale, gets $2,700 worth of tax benefit from our income tax code. And if you are on the lower scale, you get $103 worth of tax benefit.

Mr. COBURN. I am happy to yield.

Mr. COBURN. Under the President's proposal, that would be narrowed. I believe it ought to be the same for every American. Every American ought to get the same tax benefit. I also believe every American ought to be covered. There ought to be access for anybody with disease. There are ways to do that, and I will be introducing a global health care bill within the next month that attacks every aspect of health care and what we need to do about it.

Mr. COBURN

Mr. COBURN. Madam President, I had asked for this time to spend a few minutes talking about what has happened in the last few weeks. One of the things that is going on in our country is that we have a little bit of a crisis of confidence in our legislative bodies. Some of it is well deserved. We have had a bill on the floor under the guise of ethics reform. The bill is a statute. It is not a rule. It is going to become law. But I think the American people should be on guard. I was one of two people who voted against this bill and for some very good reasons. What the American people would like to see is transparency. They would like to see clarity. They would like to see sunshine. Some of the amendments to this bill made it much better; there is no question about that. But some of the things that happened along the way did not allow the American people to really know what is going on in terms of what needs to change. A lot of the amendments tonight were accepted only on the basis that they would preclude debate. Now it is Thursday night. The Senate is not in session tomorrow. And the question people have to ask is, why didn't we debate those amendments? Why didn't we want to debate those amendments? The reason we didn't want to debate those amendments is because they are going to be discarded as soon as we get to conference. Let me talk about one of them because I believe it is important. We have had hundreds of stories over the last 2 years of Members of Congress who have used the earmark process to enhance the well-being of either members of their office staff's families, personal family members, and even in the House a couple of occasions where they helped themselves. I am thinking particularly about a $1.2 million road that was built for properties owned by the Member of Congress. That fact is, that should have been debated. The American people need to know what the problems are, and there needs to be sunshine. There needs to be transparency about what we do. The question the American people ought to ask is: What is going to happen when this bill goes to conference and what is going to come out? And is all the rhetoric we heard on the floor truly going to be reflected in an ethics bill that will change behavior? A lot of effort has been concentrated on lobbyists. Lobbyists aren't the problem. Members of Congress are the problem. And transparency solves that problem. So we are not going to have transparency anymore. We are going to say you can't take a meal from somebody, but you certainly can deliver on a couple-million-dollar earmark. And we are going to create a situation where we say we are going to expose it, but you shouldn't count on that happening until the final bill comes. My faith and my hope is that we put everything we have done away and don't do any of the things that have been accepted by the Senate tonight because of fear of political consequences, but that we do what the American people want, and that is to be transparent in both our actions and our deeds. The way to clean up ethical problems in Congress is for the Members to be transparent about what they do. So if this bill were to come back and we pass it just as it is, we are going to go through all these hoops that will have been created, and we are going to make sure people don't come to the Senate to serve. We are going to have a ``gotcha'' system. That is what we just passed. Good, honorable people of integrity are going to make an innocent mistake, and they are going to be gotten. I am not talking about the things that were intentionally done that we have seen over the past 4 to 6 years from both parties. I am talking about good, honest people making an innocent mistake, and it is going to ruin them. Consequently, people are not going to come here. Only those who are shielded and armored, who are careerists and have enough money that no matter what happens, they can defend themselves with the trial lawyers they are going to need to defend themselves after we pass all these rules that are going to come. I know this sounds a bit negative now that we have passed supposedly an ethics reform bill. But my warning to the American people and to this body is, we should measure that when we see the final product. And we should measure the final product against Senator DeMint's amendment for true transparency on earmarks, my amendment on true lack of ethical bias in terms of monetary gain for staff members' families or Members' families in terms of earmarks. My faith will be renewed if, in fact, we come out with a great ethics bill. I wait and remain to be convinced that that will be the case. The final point I want to make is process. Why did we not want to debate in front of the American people the idea that it is unethical for somebody to gain monetarily, directly or indirectly, staff member or staff member's family, Member's family or Member, from an earmark? Why did we not want to debate that? That is a question the press ought to be asking. That is a question we all ought to be asking, as the conference comes back. The way we solve the problems with ethics in the Senate is through complete and total transparency about what we do. And if we are not ashamed of what we are doing, we should not be ashamed of putting up what we are doing and how we are doing it. I yield the floor and suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. COBURN

Mr. COBURN. I ask unanimous consent to ask the Senator from Arizona a question.

Mr. COBURN. I want to put in the Record this idea of Federal entity, non-Federal entity. Let me give my colleagues examples of Army Corps of Engineers' earmarks in report language: Six hundred thousand dollars to study fish passage, Mud Mountain, WA; Two hundred and seventy-five thousand dollars to remove the sunken vessel State of Pennsylvania from a river in Delaware; Five hundred thousand dollars for the collection of technical and environmental data to be used to evaluate potential rehabilitation of the St. Mary Storage Unit facilities, Milk River Project, MT; Five million dollars for rural Idaho environmental infrastructure. Nowhere will you find in that bill what that is for. The American people ought to know what that is for. We ought to know what that is for. One million and seventy-five thousand dollars for a reformulation study of Fire Island Inlet to Montauk Point, NY; One hundred and fifty thousand dollars for the Teddy Roosevelt Environmental Education Center; One million two hundred and fifty thousand dollars for the Sacred Falls demonstration project in Hawaii; Two million dollars for the Desert Research Institute in Nevada. None of those are authorized. Nobody will hold anybody accountable for those earmarks. Nobody will know it happened unless we bring it up on the floor, and then we would not have the power to vote because the coercive power of appropriations in this Congress is, if you don't vote for it, you won't get the next earmark you want; you will be excluded from helping your State on a legitimate earmark. The American people better pay attention to the vote on tabling this amendment because anybody who votes to table this amendment wants to continue the status quo in Washington as far as earmarks.

Mr. COBURN. Will the Senator yield?

Mr. COBURN. The question I have is, The distinguished Senator from West Virginia asked the question: How long and at what price? But that is a false choice. Because if we leave Iraq and we walk away, we are going to be fighting this battle again. So it is not about how long and at what price; it is, when are we going to have this battle again? I believe that is up for debate. What the American people lack is the understanding that if we walk out now, we are going to put young men and women again at risk, at far greater numbers and at far greater cost in the future, as we empower the terrorists. I wonder if the Senator from Arizona may comment.

Mr. COBURN. Mr. President, I don't think you can have a discussion on earmarks until you set the predicate for what is really going on. It is not dishonorable to want to help your home State. The vast majority of those things that are considered earmarks are not bad projects. They are not dark. They have a common good that most people would say would be adequate. The question about earmarks is, What has evolved through the years and what have they become? I believe earmarks have been the gateway drug to the lack of control of the Federal budget. The proof of that is, look at who votes against appropriations bills. I will promise you, there won't be Senators in this body who have an earmark in a bill that will vote against the appropriations bill. What does that say? Does that mean everything in that bill was good; they agree with the bill? What it means is, they have an earmark in the bill. And if they vote against it, the next time they want an earmark, they won't get it. So you have the coercion of using earmarks to control votes. Our oath is to do what is in the best long-term interest of our country. No matter what our political philosophy, we are all Americans. We can all agree about that. And whether we are liberal or conservative, we don't want any money wasted. But as we spend money on things that are earmarks that are not bad but definitely should not be a priority when we are fighting a war and have a gulf catastrophe and a budget deficit of $300 billion we are passing on to our children, we get the priorities all out of whack. Priorities are what the American people said they wanted us back on, and they wanted us back on it together. The bill that is on the floor, as the Senator from South Carolina said, addresses only 5 percent of that problem--5 percent of the earmarks. The Congressional Research Service looked at that--12,318, of which 534 would fall under the bill that is on the floor--correction, 12,852 is the total and there are 12,318 that this bill would not apply to at all. It would have no application to it at all. The other problem with earmarks is there has to be sunshine. Fixing the problem to make everybody think we fixed it versus really fixing it is what this bill does. It is a charade, as far as earmarks are concerned. There is nothing wrong with wanting an earmark or for me wanting to bring something to Oklahoma. I have chosen not to do that because I cannot see how Oklahoma can be helped with an earmark when we are borrowing $300 billion from our kids and grandkids. I cannot see how that priority can be greater when it undermines the future standard of living of our children and grandchildren. But to put this bill up without the House version--and even it doesn't go far enough because it doesn't list who the sponsor is until after it is passed. In other words, you don't know who the sponsor is until after the bills come through. We need to be honest with the American people. The only way we are ever going to get our house in order fiscally is to have complete transparency on what we are doing, so they can see it. Today the President of the Senate and I passed a bill that will, after the fact, create transparency so that everybody will know where all the money went. But it does nothing before the fact. We need the discipline to control the spending and to not use this tool of earmarks as a coercive tool with which we get votes on appropriations bills that are spending more money than we have. This last year, a subcommittee I chaired in the last Congress had 46 oversight hearings where we identified over $200 billion in discretionary waste, fraud, or duplication. We ought to be taking up those things. We ought to be eliminating that. We can do tremendous work. The other thing that is important in the earmark discussion is that you don't have an earmark if it is authorized. When it is authorized, that means a committee of the Senate--a group of our peers--looked at it and said this is a priority and something that should be done; therefore, it is no longer an appropriations earmark because it has been approved by the committee of jurisdiction. The best way to eliminate earmarks is to bring them into the sunlight, get them authorized, and allow Appropriations to fund them. That way, we have 100-percent sunshine and the American people know what we are doing, and we defend that in the public, open arena of committee hearings. We should not be afraid to do what is right, what is open, what is honest, and what is transparent for the American public. They deserve no less than that. The earmark provision that is in the bill in the Senate that we are debating right now is cleaning the outside of the cup while the inside stays dirty. We should not let that happen. There is no doubt in my mind that Senator DeMint's amendment is going to lose. So the question has to come to the American public, are you going to hold the Senate accountable for acting as though they are fixing something when they are not? Anybody who votes for this bill, with the language in it the way it is today, is winking and nodding to the American people and saying we fixed it. But we didn't. Everybody here knows it won't be fixed with the language as it sits today. So it is going to require the American people to have great oversight over us to see who votes for this bill. If you are voting for this bill, you don't want to change the way business is done here; you want to leave it exactly the way it is and leave everything alone. So you want to tell everybody you fixed it when you didn't. That smacks of a lack of integrity in this body that belies its history. I yield back my time.

Mr. COBURN. Will the Senator yield for a moment?

Mr. COBURN. Mr. President, I will make a point. There is nobody down here defending the other side.

Mr. COBURN. Mr. President, will the Senator yield?

Mr. COBURN. I would like to finish. The point being, let's not send a false message to the American public. This provision that is in this bill is a sham in terms of cleaning up earmarks, and if you are going to defend it, then you are going to have to defend it to the American public. It will not eliminate 95 percent of the earmarks, it will not make them transparent, and they will never know until after the fact who did it, why, when, and what lobbyist got paid for it.

Mr. COBURN. Mr. President, first, that is not an earmark program. It is not an earmark. Everybody knows it is not an earmark. It is the 95 percent that is in the report language that nobody knows about and on which we are not going to report. The American people deserve transparency. The Senator is good. Senator Durbin is very good, and I understand debating with him is difficult, but he is not to the point. The point is, that is not an earmark. It is a great move to the side. That is not an earmark. Items authorized are not earmarks. That is the point I made before the Senator from Illinois came to the floor. All we have to do to get rid of the earmark program is to authorize them in an authorizing committee. Let a group of our peers say they are good. But we don't want to do that. We want to continue to hide this 95 percent that is hidden in the report language that the American public isn't going to know about until an outside group or some Senator raises it to say: Look at this atrocious thing.

Mr. COBURN. I would love to have a debate on the basis of why the amendment that is in this substitute should not cover the other 95 percent of the earmarks. I ask the Senator from Illinois, what is the basis for only covering 5 percent of the earmarks in the bill.

Mr. COBURN. I make the point, if you got better reporting on 5 percent and no reporting on 95 percent, you have nothing. That is the whole point. Before the Senator from Illinois came down, I said it is not dishonorable to ask for an earmark. Most of them are good projects. I made that point. But to not have 95 percent of the earmarks reported, whether strong or weak, and say we are going to report 5 percent of the earmarks and report them strongly is not cleaning anything up.

Mr. COBURN

Mr. COBURN. Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that S. Res. 19 be held at the desk.

Mr. COBURN. I yield the floor.

Mr. COBURN

Mr. COBURN. Madam President, I want to spend a few minutes today to kind of summarize some of the events of the past year and kind of also to put the Senate on notice that what this election was about is us being good stewards with the taxpayers' money. I appreciate the distinguished Senator from Louisiana. I happen to be the Senator who held that bill up in the wee hours of the morning. There were some real good reasons why I did that. It is a great example of the habits that we have to change. There is no question that levee system needs to be authorized, and it will be authorized this year. There is no question. But there was a drudging component that was added to that bill. Nobody knew what it was going to cost, at least $100 million. That portion had not cleared the committee, and it was important that we not have habits such as that, to authorize programs that we do not have any idea what they cost. We have heard a lot of talk about bipartisanship. We can all be partisan for America. If you go to the Federal Government's Web site and go to the Comptroller General, David Walker, and you read what is there--I would encourage every American and every Senator to go read it--what you will find is we are on an absolute unsustainable course. And the problems are bad now. Madam President, we have a $260 billion deficit this year with ``Enron'' accounting statistics, about a $360 billion accounting deficit by real accounting statistics. That is what we are adding to the Nation's debt. That is what our kids get to pay back through a decreased standard of living. But I would encourage you to go read it. We cannot continue to do what Congresses over the last 5 years have done; that is, we cannot spend new money because there is no new money. So that means if we are going to authorize a new program, we need to make sure a couple things happen. One is we need to make sure it does not duplicate something that is already there. And if it does, we need to eliminate what it duplicates if, in fact, it is better because there is an opportunity cost of funding two programs that do the same thing. One of them does it better, so every dollar you spend on the one that does it less well costs us money in terms of the value for our children. Let me give you a couple other examples, things where our rules kind of mess us up. Because of the budgetary rules, Federal buildings in this country are no longer owned by the Federal Government--new ones. Why is that? For any other business, any individual would, if they are going to lease a building, try to lease purchase it. Because of our accounting rules, we lease them. Because if we lease purchase, then the agency has to show the entire cost of the building in their budget that year. Well, it does not make accounting sense. I happen to have a degree in accounting. It is crazy accounting. But what it does is force us to make bad financial choices on fixed assets for the Federal Government. We cannot get rid of the buildings that we don't want now. We spend $6 billion--that is billion with a ``b''--a year maintaining buildings the Federal Government does not want. That is $6 billion. The Pentagon spends $3 billion. That is a total of $9 billion. So if we had the $9 billion, if we could get rid of the buildings we wanted to by streamlining that process, we could save $9 billion a year. Madam President, $9 billion would do a whole lot for the people of Louisiana as far as this levee system repair. We know we can save about $30 billion every 5 years by having the buildings we acquire or lease become lease purchase because then the taxpayer gains from the real estate rise in value associated with those buildings. We have a lot to change in what we do. I am not a partisan Republican, but I am very partisan about the future of this country and what has to change to do that. Some other examples I would want the American public to know that we could do something about tomorrow: We have an earned-income tax credit that has a 40-percent error rate on it. That means billions of dollars every year get paid to people who do not qualify for their earned- income tax credit, but we do not fix it. We have not fixed it. Shame on us. We have $350 billion a year that is owed in taxes to the Federal Government--that is what the tax gap is this year--that will not be collected. As a matter of fact, last year, the IRS, through incompetency, was putting on board a new program. They threw away their old program. But the new program was not ready, so they do not have a way to go back and track the problem tax payments. That is going to cost us $50 billion, $60 billion in lost revenues--one stupid error after another. We have a program to help people with food called food stamps, except we have an error rate there, where we give out $1.6 billion to people who are absolutely not eligible for that program every year. In this very short conversation of what we have talked about, we have talked about over $400 billion that we would have. We would not be running a deficit now if we did some things efficiently. In the last 2 years, the subcommittee I chaired, along with Tom Carper, the Senator from Delaware, had 46 hearings oversighting Federal financial management. We came up with, either from waste, fraud or duplication--not counting the tax gap, not counting any of these other things I have talked about--$200 billion of fraudulent, wasteful or duplicative programs associated with the Federal Government. What the American people ought to be asking us is, rather than creating new programs, fix the ones we have. Make them efficient. Eliminate the duplications. I am planning, when I come back, to send a letter to my colleagues outlining what my procedures plan to be in terms of blocking new bills to the floor. I thought I would read it into the Record tonight so that if anybody has any disagreement with it, they would come speak with me. First is for me to agree to a unanimous consent on legislation in the 110th Congress, the bill has to conform to the vision of the limited Federal Government set forth by the Constitution and our Founding Fathers. In other words, it has to be constitutional. Second, if it creates or authorizes a new Federal program or activity, it must not duplicate an existing program or activity. Third, if a bill authorizes new spending, it must be offset by reductions in real spending elsewhere. If a program or activity currently receives funding from sources including, but not limited to, the Federal Government, the bill shall not increase the Federal Government's share of that spending. Finally, if a bill establishes a new foundation, museum, cultural or historic site, or other entity that is not an agency or a department, the Federal funding should be limited to the initial start-up cost plus an endowment that can be added to through private funding. The way we get out of the problems facing our country starting in 2012 is to endow the future rather than expand it. If we start endowing things--one of the former Presiding Officers, the Senator from Arkansas, had a plan to honor Bill Clinton's birthplace home. I am not against that at all. But the average cost to the American taxpayer for every President's birthplace home--and there are only 22 of them--is a million dollars a year. Divide that out for a minute. That is $3,000 a day to take care of a birthplace home. Most Americans would kind of like to have that to care for their home. The answer to that is to create an endowment with a million dollars, set it up as a fund for the Bill Clinton birthplace home endowment. It can never be touched. People can give money to that, and they can care for that. The earnings off of that will be about $60,000 a year. That is about $200 a day, or about $5,800 a month. Most people in America-- as a matter of fact, the vast majority of people in America don't come close to spending that on maintaining their home in a year. So we can generously endow what needs to happen for the future and use the power of compound interest to help secure the future for our kids. My hope is that this spirit of bipartisanship we are starting off with will lead us to do the things the American people want us to do, and that is to get control of this behemoth we call the Federal Government. We can do it if we work together and if we are partisan for our children, partisan for the future of our country, and if we will do the oversight. If our oversight is going to point at what President Bush did wrong rather than what we can do right to fix programs, eliminate inefficiencies and fraud and waste, we will do much more for the country. I hope the words we have heard today will be acted on the entire 2 years of the 110th Congress. If they are and we follow these guidelines, we will see a surplus much sooner than 2012. We can do that but not without the hard work and dedication that says future generations are worth it, worth us doing what we need to do to make the difference. We could take care of every need of the people in Louisiana because we have tons of waste where we are spending in the wrong way, whether it is bridges to Alaska or railroads across Mississippi or financing defense contractors when insurance is going to pay their bill anyway; we could do it. We have to stop playing the game and start thinking about the long term. My hand is out to work with anybody, whether on this side of the aisle or the other side, who wants to solve the fiscal problems facing this country. Then we can get about solving health care and retirement programs associated with Social Security and Medicare.

Mr. COBURN

Mr. COBURN. Mr. President, I was asked to allow this bill to come up at this late hour in the Congress. This bill is going to pass. The goals of this bill are very worthy. As a practicing physician, and knowing the families whom I take care of and the family members they have, I know the burden that is placed on multitudes of people. When they do the better thing of keeping their loved ones in their own homes, in terms of quality of life, I have no argument with the intent and background of what is trying to be accomplished. But I want to make three points. One is how this place operates. What we do at the end of the session is we try to run hundreds of bills through that very few people have thoroughly looked at, that drives all sorts of new spending, that does not get the privilege of the debate that the American people deserve on the priorities of how we spend their money. That needs to change. It is a terrible way to govern. It is inappropriate in the way we do it. It has more to do with the rules that we operate the Senate under than anything else. That ought to be changed. There is no question I am known for my desire to try to get our fiscal house in order. For example, this bill is great, but what the American people are never going to ask out of the almost $350 million that this bill authorizes, where is the money going to come from to pay for it? What priority is going to be decreased so that priority can be increased? We have in the Social Security account a surplus this year. We have a $344 billion deficit. A lot of my friends would say that reflects the fact that we need to have pay-go and increase taxes. But during the last 2 years, I have held 49 hearings in the Federal Financial Subcommittee of the Committee on Governmental Affairs, where we have identified a pure $100 billion worth of waste, fraud or duplication in this Government, and no one wants to change that. It is easy for us to come out here and spend $300 million on a new program. But it is very hard for us to get together and do the hard work of eliminating the fraud, waste, and duplication. There are two other programs that have money in them available for this, not the correct way, and not done as good as this bill does it. We haven't done anything in this bill to change those programs to redirect any of that money through. So now we are going to have three programs that have an impact in this area. Representative Ferguson has done a great job of bringing this up. But unless we change the culture of how we operate, we are going to enhance what we call the birth tax. When you are born today in this country, counting the unfunded liabilities for Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security, you are born having liabilities of $435,000 on you the day you are born. We are adding a little bit to that. We are adding a little bit more and a little bit more. Until we get together and say we are going to review this Government and get rid of the waste, fraud, and abuse, we are going to care as much about the person who is born today as we care about those who need some respite care, legitimate rest from the care of parents of those people they love, we will do a great disservice. We are doing a great disservice in this country. Two weekends ago, I delivered a 9 pound 4 ounce baby to a woman whom I had delivered a baby to before. I had very well controlled her gestational diabetes. She had delivered a 9-pound baby before that. I thought about the 2\1/2\ minutes it took me, from the time I decided I couldn't deliver a baby in a normal way for her. It took me 2\1/2\ minutes from the time of that crunch when there was no way to get a baby out, with a heartbeat of 50 beats per minute--which is about 40 percent of what it should be--we have a baby in trouble; it took me about 2\1/2\ minutes to go around and get that baby out of that momma. We saved that baby's life. Now, the corollary is, I had warning signals. I had indications that said things aren't going right. And this body, this Congress, this Government is not paying attention to the warning signals. The baby is going to die. Our country is going to drown in debt. The processes by which we operate include not paying attention to the waste, fraud, and abuse and not making the hard choices on priorities, not offsetting, not deauthorizing something else that is not working where there are billions of things that are not working, and adding another problem. We are adding to that. As a Senate, we are not ill-intentioned; we just are not paying attention to the warning signs. We are not paying attention to the fetal monitor of our country and the future for the next generations. It is just as laudable to care as much about the next two or three generations that come down the road as we care for those who need our help today, except this bill doesn't do that. This bill is going to go by voice vote--and I have allowed it; I will not even vote against it--but I wanted this time to make this statement. What will follow this bill today is a tragedy. We are going to spend another $17.5 billion on the tax-extender package that is getting ready to come through this place. We are going to pick up the bills mining companies owe and we are going to charge that to the rest of the people in this country. We are going to overspend on lots of things. We are not going to cut doctor's fees--and I am a doctor--but we are not going to pay for it. We are going to pay for it through gimmicks, and we are going to tell everybody that we are doing great things. In fact, we are being dishonest. There are two cultural problems that have to change: We have to quit authorizing new programs unless we deauthorize other programs, and we have to reach across the aisle and say that we need to review everything we have, and whatever is duplicative, let's get rid of it and save these costs. If one does not work as well, put the money in the other and save the money. Let's get rid of the fraud. We are paying out $38 billion a year to things we should not be paying for right now, and that is an underestimate because we have only looked at 60 percent of the Government in terms of improper payments. We still have a law that is not being followed by 40 percent of the agencies. They are not reporting their improper payments. We had a Pentagon that paid $6 billion in the last 5 years for contractors for performance bonuses, and they did not come close to reaching the performance basis for the bonus. That is our fault. That is us. We are charged with the responsibility of doing what is necessary. The final point I wish to make is that if we keep nibbling around the edges on health care, we are going to find ourself in the biggest jam in the world. We have two choices: We are going to either have government-run health care or we are going to control the costs by basically allocating it at end of life and telling people what they cannot have. That is how most other countries do it. Or we will fix health care. We spend 16.3 percent of our GDP on health care, and $2.2 trillion is what we will have spent at the end of this year. That is 16 percent of our GDP. The closest country in the world spends 11 percent of GDP on their health care, and they don't have a government-run health care program. Fully $1 out of every $3 we spend on health care today does not go to help somebody get well or keep them healthy. Our prevention programs, which is the key to our success in solving our health care problems, are abysmal. They are wasteful. They are not effective. We talk about diabetes, we talk about obesity, but we are inept in any type of consensus as to where we can make a difference in prevention. We have to address that issue, and I believe this is a fix around the edge. We need a comprehensive fix and a look at health care in America. We need to do it knowing the motivation. Most people are surprised to learn that out of that $2.2 billion we spend on health care every year, $152 million is spent on things that nobody needs except providers to protect themselves from lawsuits. Now, we need a good trial bar. We need to be held accountable. But it has gotten so far out of hand that we are adding to the birth tax. I beg my colleagues and the American people who are listening to this, let's get our act together. Let's start not just authorizing, let's deauthorize before we authorize. Let's fix health care. Let's do oversight in a way that saves money for the future. If we have eliminated the waste, we have eliminated the fraud, we have eliminated the duplication in this Government, we have to go to the American people and say: Shouldn't we pay a little more taxes now rather than ask for this birth tax? Remember, the birth tax is over $400,000 per baby right now. Every baby I deliver, the first thing I see is a beautiful young child, and then in the back of my mind I wonder, how are you ever going to get out of this mess we have left you? I appreciate the concern and the intent of those supporting this bill. This bill has come to the Senate in the wrong way. This bill should have had its authorization offset. This bill does address a very real need, but there are a lot of very real needs out there that we need to do that we cannot do and we cannot fund because we are not doing our job. Our country is at a crossroad. The fetal monitoring alarm is on. The baby's heartbeat is low. It is time to do what is necessary. The debt burden cannot be swallowed, the unfunded liabilities cannot be handled. It is up to us to change that. Let's lower that birth tax. Let's get rid of that. Let's work together to do the things we can do to lessen that impact on the generations to come. I reserve the remainder of my time.

Mr. COBURN. I yield back the remainder of my time.

Mr. COBURN

Mr. COBURN. Mr. President, as a physician and a two-time cancer survivor, I believe that eliminating cancer should be among our Nation's highest priorities. During my two decades practicing medicine, I have treated countless patients of all ages and backgrounds who were diagnosed with various forms of cancers. Many were successfully treated and are alive and healthy today. Others were not as fortunate. Sadly, most of these cases could have been treated if detected earlier. Nearly all could have been prevented. As a physician, I know firsthand that both patients and health care providers are not properly informed about many symptoms and causes of cancer. I have long been disappointed that the U.S. Surgeon General and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, CDC, have failed to take an effective leadership role to educate the American people with lifesaving information about the various forms of cancer and how to protect themselves. As a result, the American Cancer Society estimates that 1,399,790 men and women--720,280 men and 679,510 women--will be diagnosed with and 564,830 men and women will die of cancer of all sites in 2006. Countless others will require invasive treatment that will forever affect their lives. Each of these individual lives represents a failure to protect the health of one of our sisters, daughters, brothers, sons, parents, neighbors, and friends. One recent patient of mine, an 18-year-old girl, is an example. She was diagnosed with human papillomavirus, HPV, infection. HPV is the cause of over 99 percent of all cervical cancers and is a sexually transmitted disease. To prevent the onset of invasive cervical cancer, a large portion of this young girl's cervix had to be removed. As a result she is less likely to be able to become pregnant in the future and more likely to have a premature infant if she does become pregnant. And despite already undergoing invasive treatment, she remains at risk for future complications and additional surgeries. This girl and the others that I am caring for in my medical practice are the real faces of those affected by HPV and cervical cancer. What we are confronting is not an isolated epidemic. About 24 million Americans are currently infected with HPV according to the National Cancer Institute and an estimated 5.5 million Americans become infected with HPV every year. With 4.6 million of these HPV infections acquired by those aged 15 to 24, HPV accounts for over half of all new sexually transmitted diseases among young Americans. On March 8, 2004, researchers from the Colorado Health Sciences Center reported that more than 30 percent of women in a recent study were found to be infected with a strain of HPV linked to cervical and anal cancer. In comparison, 18.7 percent of men carried HPV-16, one of 10 high-risk strains of the virus. Over 1,350,000 women will have invasive procedures each year just to assess the status of their abnormal pap smears secondary to HPV. According to the American Cancer Society, every year over 12,000 new cases of invasive cervical cancer are diagnosed and more than 4,000 women die of the disease. And noninvasive cervical cancer is estimated to be four times as widespread as the invasive type. HPV is also associated with other forms of cancer and more than 1 million precancerous lesions that affect both women and men. Few of my patients with HPV had ever heard of the virus and were unaware of its health risks including its link to cancer. Many of my fellow physicians were not even aware of HPV and its symptoms. In 2000, I authored legislation directing the CDC and the Food and Drug Administration--FDA--to take actions to educate the public with ``medically accurate information'' about HPV and cervical cancer. I was disappointed when groups that claimed to advocate for women's health, such as the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists--ACOG-- opposed my proposal and fought to keep the public in the dark about HPV. The HPV law was approved by Congress as a component of the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2001 and became Public Law 106-554 with the signature of President Bill Clinton on December 21, 2000. In a Statement of Administration policy, President Clinton stated: The Administration supports the goal of better informing the public about HPV and the fact that the use of condoms may not fully prevent HPV transmission. The law directed CDC to develop a report outlining the ``best strategies to prevent future infections, based on the available science.'' After the repeated urging of Congress, CDC finally issued a report in 2004 that concluded: Because genital HPV infection is most common in men and women who have had multiple sex partners, abstaining from sexual activity (i.e. refraining from any genital contact with another individual) is the surest way to prevent infection. For those who choose to be sexually active, a monogamous relationship with an uninfected partner is the strategy most likely to prevent future genital HPV infections. For those who choose to be sexually active but who are not in a monogamous relationship, reducing the number of sexual partners and choosing a partner less likely to be infected may reduce the risk of genital HPV infection. . . . The available scientific evidence is not sufficient to recommend condoms as a primary prevention strategy for the prevention of genital HPV infection. . . . Regarding other possible prevention approaches, no data indicate that treatment of clinical lesions or use of microbicides will prevent transmission of infection, although HPV vaccines are likely to become available in the next few years and may become an effective prevention tool. The CDC's conclusions reflected what has become the scientific consensus. In a February 1999 letter to the U.S. House Commerce Committee, Dr. Richard D. Klausner, then-Director of the National Cancer Institute, stated: Condoms are ineffective against HPV because the virus is prevalent not only in the mucosal tissue (genitalia) but also on dry skin of the surrounding abdomen and groin, and it can migrate from those areas into the vagina and the cervix. Additional research efforts by NCI on the effectiveness of condoms in preventing HPV transmission are not warranted. In 2001, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases along with FDA, CDC and the U.S. Agency for International Development issued a consensus report regarding condom effectiveness that concluded ``there was no epidemiologic evidence that condom use reduced the risk of HPV infection.'' In November 2002, a meta-analysis of ``the best available data describing the relationship between condoms and HPV-related conditions'' from the previous two decades was published in the journal Sexually Transmitted Diseases. The meta-analysis concluded: ``There was no consistent evidence of a protective effect of condom use on HPV DNA detection, and in some studies, condom use was associated with a slightly increased risk for these lesions.'' Based upon these findings, the law directs CDC to ``prepare and distribute educational materials for health care providers and the public that include information on HPV. Such materials shall address modes of transmission, consequences of infection, including the link between HPV and cervical cancer, the available scientific evidence on the effectiveness or lack of effectiveness of condoms in preventing infection with HPV, and the importance of regular Pap smears, and other diagnostics for early intervention and prevention of cervical cancer.'' The CDC has not complied with this requirement. The law further requires that ``all other relevant educational and prevention materials prepared and printed from this date forward for the public and health care providers by the Secretary--including materials prepared through the Food and Drug Administration, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the Health Resources and Services Administration--or by contractors, grantees, or subgrantees thereof, that are specifically designed to address STDs including HPV shall contain medically accurate information regarding the effectiveness or lack of effectiveness of condoms in preventing the STD the materials are designed to address.'' Again, Federal agencies have not complied with this provision of law. The law directed the FDA ``to determine whether the labels are medically accurate regarding the overall effectiveness or lack of effectiveness of condoms in preventing sexually transmitted diseases, including HPV.'' Six years after this law was signed, the FDA is still in the beginning stages of crafting a new medically accurate informational label for condom packages. By way of comparison, it took 410 days to build the Empire State Building and 2 years, 2 months and 5 days to construct the Eiffle Tower. Congress approved the HPV law precisely because Federal health agencies had failed to educate the American public about the health risks of HPV and how it can be prevented and these same agencies are continuing their cover-up of the HPV epidemic, now in violation of federal law. In 1999, when this law was first offered in Congress, a study published by the American Journal of Preventive Medicine in June 1999, found that ``only 37 percent of respondents had ever heard of HPV,'' meaning knowledge of HPV has not increased in almost a decade. The 1999 study concluded ``implementing HPV education programs and measuring their effectiveness should be a priority.'' According to a 2005 Health Information National Trends Survey, only 40 percent of women have ever heard about HPV. Of those that have heard of HPV, less than 20 percent knew that HPV could sometimes lead to cervical cancer, meaning that only about 8 percent of American women are aware that HPV can cause cervical cancer. The only factors associated with having accurate knowledge--knowing that it could lead to cervical cancer--was an abnormal Pap test or testing positive on an HPV test. This suggests that most women are finding out about HPV only after experiencing a negative consequence. As these numbers show, the failure of CDC and FDA to enact the HPV/ cervical cancer education and prevention law has had real consequences--a hidden epidemic that claims thousands of lives every year and affects tens of millions of others. It is unacceptable that federal health agencies have abdicated their responsibility and missions and intentionally ignored the law and, in so doing, placed the health and lives of millions in jeopardy. Today the Senate has passed another bill, the Gynecologic Cancer Education and Awareness Act, or ``Johanna's Law,'' which will again direct CDC and FDA to educate the public about cervical cancer as well as other forms of gynecological cancer. I would like to recognize Senator Arlen Specter, Congressman Darrell Issa, cancer survivor Fran Drescher, and the countless other activists who are cancer survivors themselves or have a loved one who has been diagnosed with gynecological cancer who have championed this bill through Congress. It is an unfortunate statement that this bill is even necessary. It is a recognition that federal health agencies have failed to effectively carry out their missions. It was my concern that the same agencies entrusted with enacting this bill would ignore it in the same manner that the law Congress passed in 2000 has been ignored. That would mean that the dedication and hard work of the activists and survivors who supported this bill was for nothing. When I voiced these concerns, Senator Specter agreed to amend the bill language to include a date certain that the cancer education activities that both this bill and the current law require. This assures that the law and the epidemic of gynecological and cervical cancer can no longer be ignored by federal agencies. If the CDC and the FDA do not enact the provisions of this bill and the existing law--317P of the Public Health Service Act--by March 1, 2008, the Department of Health and Human Services is required to submit to Congress a ``a detailed description of all actions taken'' to bring the Department into compliance every three months until the law has been fully enacted. I fully expect that these requirements will compel CDC and FDA to enact these important laws and the Department will not deliver ``the dog ate my homework'' excuses. Laws, after all, are not optional for citizens, for members of Congress or even for government agencies and bureaucrats. Again, I am pleased that the Senate is directing federal health agencies to do their part to help educate and prevent gynecological and cervical cancer and that this time we will hold them accountable to ensure that not another one of our sisters, daughters, mothers, or friends falls victim to this silent epidemic.

Mr. COBURN

Mr. COBURN. I rise for the purpose of engaging Senator McCain, who is managing H.R. 4766, in a colloquy over a certain aspect of the bill. Senator McCain, as the chairman of the Committee on Indian Affairs, to which this bill has been referred, and as the bill's manager in the Senate, I would like to know if it is the intent of this legislation that the Administration for native Americans, in administering the provisions of this bill, require that grants for Native language survival schools requite parental permission for the student to participate in the program and also that the students participating in the program demonstrate adequate progress in English proficiency according to grade level?

Mr. COBURN

Mr. COBURN. I am happy to yield.