Thomas Coburn

Mr. COBURN

Mr. COBURN. Mr. Chairman, I yield myself 30 seconds to respond to that. All that is is Washington double-talk. What that is saying is we cannot deliver services more efficiently. What we are hearing is hearing an appropriator say we do not want to cut spending. The Federal Government is not efficient. Nobody knows that better than the people here. The refusal to demand efficiency and accountability out of the agencies of the Federal Government is why we have this problem. Thirteen billion dollars will pay for Social Security benefits, bringing them back up for every one of the notch babies.

Mr. COBURN. Mr. Chairman, I yield 2\1/2\ minutes to the gentleman from Pennsylvania (Mr. Toomey).

Mr. COBURN

Mr. COBURN. Mr. Speaker, each year the Veterans of Foreign Wars of the United States and its Ladies Auxiliary conduct the Voice of Democracy script-writing contest. This year more than 80,000 secondary school students across the nation competed for fifty-six national scholarships by writing about the theme ``My Service to America.'' It is with great pleasure that I announce that the winner from the State of Oklahoma is Ms. Kinya Efurd, a Junior at Eufaula High School in Eufaula, Oklahoma. Kinya, the daughter of Jerry and Vicki Efurd, is active in the Honor Society, Student Council, Band, and Future Farmers of America. Kinya's description of how her uncle, a veteran of World War II and the Normandy Invasion, served our country and her vision of personal service to America is both a reminder of those who have sacrificed so much and a call to all Americans to strive to continually serve our great nation. I am submitting Ms. Efurd's essay for the Record, so that my colleagues may have the opportunity to review and reflect upon her inspirational comments. ``My Service to America'' Like many other Saturday nights, I was on my way to the theater and decided to see the new hit movie ``Saving Private Ryan.'' My parents stopped me before I went in and warned me that what I was about to see was extremely graphic and violent. Evidently, they were visibly shaken by what they had just viewed. My parents were unsure if they wanted me to see what some say is the most accurate portrayal of war ever filmed. I told them I would be fine because I had seen those other bloody movies before, so in fact, I thought I had seen it all. From the very beginning this became more than just a movie to me. I immediately remembered the story of my great-uncle being part of the Normandy Invasion. I have been told that he was awarded the bronze star, for an act of bravery, during that battle. No one knows what he did to gain that district honor. He has never told anyone about the horror that he experienced. After seeing this movie I feel I have a stronger appreciation of not only what my uncle did, but also the thousands of others who have served America. Perhaps, I may never serve my country in headed battle. However, I know other ways to serve with honor and dignity. I strongly believe that as an American citizen I can and must serve my country in my own way to benefit future generations. As a teenager what can I do now to serve my country? The answer to this question is as simple as getting an education. This means going, participating, and believing that this is not a right, but a privilege. Attending school and filling my head with knowledge that will prepare me for the real world is critical. Undoubtedly, school and education will give me the values and knowledge I need to reach my goals. Also, education has given me the power to believe that I can become whatever my heart leads me to be. I may want to be a doctor, a teacher, or even a social worker. I might even become the best stay-at-home mom there is. My parents have always told me that education is the key to success. How can I serve America? Exercising my right to vote is a responsibility of being an American citizen. When electing politicians, people should expect that their voice will be represented with honor and dignity. My one vote is just one step in the stairway to better America. How else can I serve America? Personally, I would love to become a politician. A great honor for me would be standing up and speaking out for what I believe in. I might become the first woman President of the United States of America or maybe just the president of the PTA. No matter what I become, I know that I will carry with me the same honor, loyalty, and respect portrayed by my forefathers for their country. I may never understand how my uncle felt that dreadful day and I probably never will. I do know that sitting through a movie that portrays war that real has changed the way I feel for him, and the many other veterans. The respect I feel for my flag has also been enhanced. It was increased when I attended an FFA camp. I had the honor of being selected as a speaker for the flag lowering ceremony. The small part I said made me realize what our flag really means. It stands for the freedom, the happiness, and the sadness for which our country stands. I realized that putting my hand over my heart and saying the Pledge of Allegiance is not a chore, but an honor. Our flag is a precious symbol for America, and it is my duty always to be proud of it. I hope one day I can stand up and speak to thousands of people all over the world. I know that I cannot help everyone, but if I can help at least one person my dream will be fulfilled. I would also love to speak with teenagers and let them know that our nation does care for them and believe in them. People may think that this is a big dream for such a young women, but I say dreams are limitless. I also believe with the Lord's power and his will behind me, and the encouragement of my church and family members, the sky is the limit. I may never stand on the field of honor as my uncle did and receive a bronze star, but if my service to America or my community can make a difference in one persons' life, then my responsibility for serving my country will have begun.

Mr. COBURN

Mr. COBURN. And the other answer to that is, when are we going to start? And we have to start now. Now is the opportunity. The American public is awake and knows that there is a problem with Social Security. It is time to be totally honest about that regardless of what the political costs are. We were sent here to solve problems, not to protect ourselves politically.

Mr. COBURN. This is a nonpartisan group. This does not have anything to do with Republicans or Democrats. This has to do with our international relations and our assessment of human rights status, and we do this on every country that we deal with, it is required by law, and here is the assessment for those two countries. It blows the mind to think that we have the same evaluation by the U.S. State Department, and one country we are trying to befriend and economically aid, and the other country we are bombing today. The Budget

Mr. COBURN. Let us spend a little time and tell why it is important that we start being honest with the American public. Even with the latest numbers that most people in America have read with social security's outflow-inflow changing by 1 year to the year 2014, what we can see is the bars in black represent more money coming into social security than we are paying out. We can see until the year 2014 we are going to be doing okay. We are going to have more money coming into social security than we are actually going to pay out, so there is cash there that the Federal Government has. It is smart to borrow that and pay off external debt. I do not deny that that is a smart thing to do. But it does not lower the total debt that our children and grandchildren are going to have to pay back. It is an untruthful statement to say that it lowers our debt. It does not. It just lowers that portion of the debt that the public holds, that Japan holds, that Switzerland holds, that Germany holds. It just lowers that percentage and shifts more IOUs to the social security system. What is important about fixing social security, and fixing it on the basis that we are going to start being truthful about the surplus, we are going to be truthful about the surplus in the social security account, which is totally different than the surplus for the Federal Government, is that look what happens after the year 2014. If we take all money that comes from social security, starting in 2014, plus all this, what we will find is we are going to have to go to the taxpayer or to our general revenue. We are going to start having to cut a whole lot of other spending to keep a balanced budget, if in fact we are going to be able to pay what we owe for my generation, the baby- boomers. I was born in 1948. I am the proverbial baby-boomer. There are going to be a whole lot fewer people working when I get ready to draw social security than were working when I started paying into it. Consequently, we can see out here at the year 2035, $850 billion a year is going to be required in additional revenues for us to just meet the payments of the baby-boomers, just to meet the needs. We have a couple of ways that we can deal with that.

Mr. COBURN. The spin on programs other than social security.

Mr. COBURN. What I really want to talk about today is the budget, the money. The U.S. Congress for the last 45 to 50 years has been dishonest with the American public about the budget. I am in my third and final term as a Member of the House from Oklahoma. I am a practicing physician. I have continued to practice medicine since I have been in the House. I delivered 97 babies last year as a Member of Congress. It is the thing I do that I think keeps my perspective the same as those people that I represent. I heard in the State of the Union, and I also would tell the Members that I am not partisan; my district is mainly Democrats, and I am reelected as a Republican because I am seen as nonpartisan. But I want to share some of the things that the President said in his State of the Union, and then I want to show the Members that the government is complicit in being less than honest with the American public about where our financial situation is, what the risk of that is to us for the future, what the risk is for our children and grandchildren, and that we tend to minimize, and we talk out of two sets of books. The first principle that I want to make sure that we understand is the only time the Federal Government really has a surplus is when the debt goes down for our children. We currently have almost $6 trillion of debt that my grandchildren, and I have two of them, they are going to help repay that debt. That is because we have used a double accounting standard. We do not speak as a body truthfully to the American public about our accounting system or our deficits and our surplus, and neither does the executive branch. I want to use a couple of points to bring that out, and then I really want to try to make sure that the American public knows where we are in the social security trust fund, how we solve that problem, and what a surplus is and what a surplus is not. Because we continually hear today that we are in a surplus. We are not in a surplus. We do not have a budget surplus associated with this government. At the State of the Union speech, I want to give the Members some quotes that I heard. I hope that Members will be patient to understand why this is important. This is not about Democrats and Republicans, it is about returning the people's House to the people by truthfully speaking about what our situation is, so they can in fact have confidence that we are going to deal properly with it, rather than telling a little white lie about what the situation is, and the public knowing that we cannot be trusted to deal properly with it. President Clinton said this in the State of the Union speech this year: For the first time in three decade, the budget is balanced. From a deficit of $290 billion in 1992, we had a surplus of $70 billion last year. That is not true. We actually, and I want to show that, if we had a surplus last year in 1998, how come the debt went up $200 billion? How come our children owe $200 billion more this year than they did last year, if in fact we had a surplus? We did not. We borrowed $200 billion, almost, in terms to fund and run the Federal Government above what we actually took in. It is true, some of that we borrowed from the social security trust fund, but any time we put an IOU to the social security trust fund, we are recognizing a liability that our children are going to have to pay back. We also are going to have to pay interest, so it is like borrowing from our retirement account to pay off the debt, and then saying we do not have a debt anymore, because we have a debt. If we allowed public companies to raid their retirement programs, we would put the people who made that decision in jail, because we have said that they cannot touch retirement funds. They are projected and protected for the purpose that they will be there in the future. If we look at this chart, the politicians in 1997 said we had about a $20 billion deficit. But the debt rose from $5,200,000,000,000 to $5,325,000,000,000. In 1998, voila, we have a surplus, the first time since 1969, but look what happened to the debt. The debt rose. How can we have a surplus? This is a politician's surplus. This is the difference between what we took in in social security and what we paid out and we did not spend, of that difference. If we took in $10 and we spent $6, then we had a $4 difference and we are calling that a surplus, where we still owe the social security system $10. So it is important for the American public to understand what a surplus is. Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from South Carolina (Mr. Sanford).

Mr. COBURN. If I can interrupt the gentleman, the difference between what we borrowed and what the deficit was is what we stole from social security.

Mr. COBURN. What the gentleman is saying is, if we had had a 12 percent rate of return rather than 6/10ths of 1 percent of real rate of return, we would not have a problem with Social Security.

Mr. COBURN. Mr. Speaker, I want to close this out. One of my heroes is Martin Luther King. And I have said this many times on this floor, but I do not think it could be said often enough, his last major speech that he made was at the National Cathedral here in Washington; and in that speech he said, ``Cowardice asks the question, is it expedient? And vanity asks the question, is it popular? But conscience asks the question, is it right?'' It is popular to not talk about the problems we have with Social Security. It is politically very expedient not to be honest about the budget. But it is not right. And until this body, all sides of the body, until the executive branch starts becoming honest and accurate with the words they use about our budget and our situation with Social Security, we are not going to solve the problems. We have to ask the right questions. And the first question we have to ask is, ``is it right?''

Mr. COBURN. There is an interesting case law on this. There was a company, I will not mention their name, that had several thousand employees in the State of Colorado who decided to do that on their paycheck stubs, and the IRS and the Social Security System took them to court and made them stop and they won. So the idea that there is some secrecy about this is true. If the American public actually recognizes the amount of money withdrawn from their paycheck, and paid also additionally by their employer, and that that money is really theirs that they cannot have because Washington is consuming it, the participation rate and the recognition of the value of what they are getting would rise in terms of their acknowledgment of it, and we would see much more activity on the part of the regular citizen to help us try to change the mindset of spending more of their money. One final point I would make is that all through this we have shown this graph that depicts the rise in spending. And the question that I continue to be asked, and the question that I ask to people in my district, is how many people believe that the Federal Government is efficient? They kind of snicker. That is not to say we do not have some great Federal employees, but bureaucratic run programs typically are not very efficient. There are exceptions to that. But the fact is that we have allowed growth while we are sitting here scraping our fingernails against the chalkboard trying to hold down growth in the Federal Government. We have still allowed a $300 billion increase over the last 5 years in terms of budgets. This counts the fact that we have not really squeezed any efficiency into this government yet. We have just trimmed some of the programs. But there are many gains that can be made in efficiency. There is over 100,000 IRS employees. How many people in this country are spending tons of money having their taxes prepared? How many of them understand how to fill out their taxes? There are productive jobs for everybody that works at the IRS somewhere else in the economy today. And if we take and drop 90,000 or 95,000 people out of the Internal Revenue Service and put them into productive jobs elsewhere, and we have simplified the Tax Code where we know what we will pay and we do not have to have 90,000 additional people to collect the money, we get benefits both ways. We save money paying our taxes and the government spends less money collecting. So there are just hundreds and hundreds of things we can do, but we do not have the political power to do it yet and it is because America is not awake. They were awake a little bit in 1994, and they fell back asleep because they were disappointed because they felt all politicians were the same. I am here to tell them that we are not. There are those who want to change things. We want Americans to send people here, I certainly want them to send people here who are willing to make the sacrifices and the political sacrifice to do some of the changes. I think the gentleman from South Carolina (Mr. Sanford) had a very interesting chart, and this has to do, and I will let him introduce it, but I want to give it a little preview. Had the politicians done what they said they were going to do starting in 1938 with Social Security, what we would find out is the amazing principle the gentleman is about to talk about.

Mr. COBURN. Absolutely. And it needs to be raised and continue to be talked about so that Washington hears. I know what that answer is in the American public. It is the same everywhere. ``Get your hands off my Social Security money. Make the hard choices somewhere else.''

Mr. COBURN. Correct.

Mr. COBURN. One cannot tell which is which from these excerpts from the Human Rights Report.

Mr. COBURN. This is from the United States Department of State Report on Human Rights Practices for 1998. This is our government's own evaluation of these two countries.

Mr. COBURN. The point we are saying is we do not truly have a surplus until we quit borrowing money external to the United States. Until our debt stops rising we have not achieved a surplus, and it is not proper to tell the American people that our books are balanced until we quit adding to the debt for our children and grandchildren. We have three options when we get to the year 2014 at that time. We can, one, save 100 percent of the social security surplus, transition to a system with a portion of that in individual accounts, so that what we invest in social security we get a decent return on. Right now the average over the past 30 years has been about 1.2 percent on our investment. We could have had it in a passbook savings and done three times better. Number two, we can repay the money taken from the trust fund by raising everybody's income taxes, and it is important to understand what that does. That lowers the standard of living for our children and our grandchildren, because the politicians in Washington have not had the courage to be honest and not spend money that belongs to the social security system. Or we can delay the benefit structure. We can say we are going to wait until we are a certain age, or we can cut the benefits. There are only three things that we can do to fix social security. There are not more than three things to do. We have to do one of those three things. We can deny, the politicians can deny this as a problem, because they are really more interested in getting reelected; or they can say, we have a problem with social security and it is okay to talk about that, because I do not have one senior citizen in my counties, and that is 18 of them in Oklahoma, who want their grandchildren to lose an opportunity because the politicians in Washington have not done the right thing. They would much rather sacrifice dollars for their grandchildren. We have an obligation before us. We are at a turning point. The first turning point is being honest with the American people about the budget, not letting the politicians' lingo, because it sounds better, it is easier, and we will not be subject to criticism if we are a little bit untruthful. It is the old question about, a half truth is a full lie. My daddy taught me that from the time I was 2 years old. And a surplus is a half truth. It is a surplus in social security. We have to do one of these three things. I notice that the gentleman from Michigan (Mr. Hoekstra) has joined us. I wanted to welcome him and thank him for being here to discuss this issue with us. Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from Michigan (Mr. Hoekstra).

Mr. COBURN. That is right.

Mr. COBURN. Mr. Speaker, let me make a little correction. We hope to achieve real surpluses if the tendency of Washington is restrained to throw money at everything, and so that is our job. We are going to be talking here in a little bit about how what the President has put us into in terms of Kosovo is going to affect all these numbers. It is important that we have a discussion about that and how it is going to impact us. The gentleman from South Carolina (Mr. Sanford) actually has a chart that shows what has happened.

Mr. COBURN. Mr. Speaker, I am going to have several Members of Congress join me today, and we are going to talk about several issues, but I wanted to start out on this one, and I want to apologize to the people who are seeing this over C-SPAN in that they cannot read it. But I think it shows a tremendous disparity in our foreign policy that most of us do not understand, and I think we are not very well educated on it as a Nation. So I want to take some information that is provided by our State Department. This is the latest year's report on two separate countries that we have dealings with presently. This is the report straight from the U.S. State Department's 1998 Human Rights Practices Report. Country A: The government's human rights record worsened significantly during the last year. There were problems in many areas, including extrajudicial killings, disappearances, torture, brutal beatings, arbitrary arrests and arbitrary detentions. Country B: This government's human rights record deteriorated sharply beginning in the final months of 1998 with a crackdown against organized political dissent. Abuses included instances of extrajudicial killings, torture, and mistreatment of prisoners, forced confessions, arbitrary arrests and detention, lengthy incommunicado detention, and denial of due process. Country A: The government infringes on the citizen's right to privacy. Country B: The government infringes on the citizen's right to privacy. Country A: The government severely restricts freedom of speech and of the press. Country B: The government continued restrictions on freedom of speech and of the press. Country A: Discrimination and violence against women remained a serious problem. Discrimination against religious and ethnic minorities worsened during the year. Country B: Discrimination against women, minorities and the disabled, violence against women, including coercive family planning practices, which included forced abortion and forced sterilization, prostitution, trafficking in women and children and abuse of children are all problems. Country A: The government infringed on freedom of worship by minority religions and restricted freedom of movement. Country B: Serious human rights abuses persisted in minority areas where restrictions on religion and other fundamental freedoms intensified. Country A: Police committed numerous serious and systematic human rights abuses. Country B: Security police and personnel were responsible for numerous human rights abuses. Country A is a constitutional republic; country B is an authoritarian state. Let me describe these two countries. This is Yugoslavia. We are presently bombing it as we speak. This is China. We presently give them Most Favored Nation's status. The President just spent a week in association with trying to establish World Trade Organization status. There is something wrong with our foreign policy when we take two countries who have equal human rights abuses, one we are trying to make a friend and do things for economically; the other we are bombing. Very, very difficult for us to understand. As we bring about this discussion of the bombing and the war, the only reason I want to bring it up is because of how it is going to impact what the major topic is that I want to talk about, and that is honesty in government and the preservation of the Social Security system and the utilization of Social Security funds for Social Security and not something else. I would like to yield to my friend from Minnesota (Mr. Gutknecht).

Mr. COBURN. Mr. Speaker, let me go into one area so that we are completely honest with the American public. The President has sent the House and the Senate a supplemental bill. There is great debate on what the deficit is in terms of the need of our military, especially now when we are now exposed on one front and potentially exposed on another front. There is no question that we have underfunded the requirements to have a readiness capable military. There is some debate about the money. But the American public needs to make known to this body and to the Senate that if in fact they do not want Social Security money used to pay for that, they better let their representatives know it, because that is exactly what is going to happen. The group of gentlemen that are with me have routinely fought to pay for everything that we do up here by cutting some program somewhere else. I do not believe that is going to happen this time, and it is not ever going to happen until we continue to contrast that when we spend money, that we are not willing to have the courage to cut spending somewhere else. Where are we getting the money? We are stealing it from Social Security. We should not run from that issue. We should talk about that issue. And as we talk about it, I believe the public will demand on the body politic in this country to do the sharpening and cut the fat and promote the efficiency that we need.

Mr. COBURN. I want to discuss just one more little learning model that we can learn from the past. One of the ways Social Security got in trouble is called political expediency. If I want seniors to vote for me, I give them more benefits. But I do not ever tell them that the cost for that benefit is, number one, we cannot afford it; and, number two, if we are really going to pay for it, it will cost their grandchildren and their children a whole lot of money. And what has happened over the past 40 years, as things have been added in terms of Social Security, as benefits have changed and have been raised, the politicians did not have the courage to say, wait a minute, from an extrapolation and a demographics standpoint, this does not work. Well, we will ignore that; that can be somebody else's problem down the road. Well, we are at that point. We are down the road. We have not in the past done the responsible thing to make sure Social Security was viable. The only thing we can take from that is learn from it and not make the same mistakes. So the integrity of being honest about the problems in Social Security, the commitment to making sure that those that are dependent on it today and in the future will have, that are the two principles that we have to follow as we try to solve this problem. And the number one portion of that is to try to keep the Social Security money out of the hands of spending in the U.S. Congress.

Mr. COBURN. I am happy to yield to the gentleman from Michigan.

Mr. COBURN. So even with the hard work we have done in trying to restrain spending since the three of us came to Congress, the gentleman from Minnesota (Mr. Gutknecht), the gentleman from South Carolina (Mr. Sanford), and myself, Federal Government spending has still, including this budget that we just passed, risen 20 percent. Over $300 billion a year, us fighting with all our energy to try to limit spending, it has still gone up by that. So it is very important that this concept of restraining spending be helped. I want to get back to Social Security just for a minute, if we can, because the other thing that is important, and we talked about what is going to happen, is Social Security taxes. If we just let the tax rate rise on one's working wages, remember, this hurts middle income and lower income more than it hurts anybody because there is a maximum limit at which one pays Social Security taxes on. So what happens is the rate is going to go from this 12.5 percent to a rate of almost 20 percent as we get out into the next millennium, the next century. So if we take the fact that right now we are paying 12.5 percent, and we are going to take and almost double that rate of taxes on our children so that we double the amount of money that is coming out of their paycheck every month, we can see very easily what we are going to do is lower their standard of living. So it is a real problem. It is a problem we have to address. One other thing that I think is important is, if we look at the demographics of the Social Security system, and if one happens to be 65 right now, one will have a life expectancy of about 82.5 years. If one earned the average wage in 1998, one will have to live 5.1 years past one's life expectancy ever to get the money that one puts into Social Security back, let alone get any earnings off of it. If one is 54 right now, one's average life expectancy is 82.9. One will have to live to 99.1 years to just get even with one's money. The third age group, 44, one's life expectancy is 83.3 years. One is going to have to have to live to 102 to ever get one's money back that one put in, let alone any benefit off that money. If one happens to be 34 years of age, one is going to have to live an extra 16.7 years past one's life expectancy ever to get one's money back. There is something fundamentally unfair about making our grandchildren drop their living standard to pay for their retirement when we can do it another way and still provide every benefit that has ever been promised to anybody that is on Social Security or who is going to be on Social Security. So it is not an impossible problem, but it is a problem that the politicians use to drive wedges between candidates when our real job up here ought to be solving the problems for the American public, not trying to make political hype. So I think this is one of the most revealing things. It is unfair to our children and our grandchildren to ask them to pay into something that they know they are never going to get the return back. The polling data, which I hate polling data but I like this one, more young people believe in UFOs than believe that they are going to get their money back out of Social Security. And they are right, because they are not going to get their money out of Social Security the way the system is set up today.

Mr. COBURN. Mr. Speaker, reclaiming my time, it is important that we explain what that means because a lot of people at home may not. That means if one had $100, one would get 40 cents for it if one were a male. If one had $100 invested and one were a female, one would get 70 cents for it. If one puts it in a CD or even a passbook savings, one gets $3.50 on it. So one gets four to five to six to even almost nine times, if one is a man, more money investing the same amount of money into a passbook savings account that is guaranteed by the Federal Government to $100,000, than one would by paying one's Social Security money.