Thomas Coburn

Mr. COBURN

Mr. COBURN. Let me just summarize, if I can. The whole purpose of talking to the American public about this is it is called daylight. Knowledge is powerful. The more Americans know that we are actually taking Social Security money and spending it on something other than Social Security, the more reaction that we are going to get to say, ``Don't do it.'' Because we know not to do it, but the tendency in Washington is to spend money, not conserve your money. The tendency is to think in the short term, not the long term. I want us thinking about our grandchildren, and I want us to ensure that we live up to every commitment that we have made to seniors. We can only do that if we are honest about the problem that faces us. To be dishonest will compound the problem for another generation past this one. Any fix that is going to happen on Social Security cannot be a short- term fix. It has to be a long-term fix. And it has to recognize the reality which is the government cannot continue to take 22 percent of the gross domestic product without holding down growth, holding down opportunity, holding down job creation and holding down capital investment.

Mr. COBURN. I think the other point that the Education at a Crossroads made to me is not all our problems in education are going to be solved by money. I have a daughter who is not teaching now, she is fortunate enough to be able to be home raising her children. But what she told me was two things about education. One is, is I got to spend about a third of my time filling out paperwork for the bureaucracy. The second thing is I do not have the tools to control the discipline in my classroom. So it does not matter how much money we spend, if we do not fix those two problems where teachers can teach, then we are not going to solve the problem. It is easy to get a vote from a constituent saying I am spending a lot of money on education. It is very difficult to talk about what the real problem is, because it requires us to change. It requires all of us to participate and do something. I just wanted to make one other thing. I am into my sixth decade. I proudly have joined an organization called AARP. I did that not because they necessarily represent all my viewpoints but I wanted to be able to have input as we say this, I am interested in getting my Social Security. I am a baby boomer. I have an investment in my retirement. Since I am not going to have a retirement from Congress, I am going to want my Social Security money. So to me it is important that we create the truthful paradigm that we are trying to make sure the American public knows today about where the Social Security money is, where it is going and how big the problem is for the future.

Mr. COBURN. And that means we have to be honest about what the numbers are. We cannot use this as a political tool to win a political race. We have to be honest. This should be above politics. This should be above, about keeping our commitment to our seniors, and making sure we ensure a future for the working people today, and making sure we ensure the opportunity for our children and grandchildren for tomorrow. I believe we can do that, but it is going to take political courage. It is going to take the courage of statesmen, not politicians, to come up here and do that. The American public is going to have to measure whether or not we did that or not.

Mr. COBURN. Let us say that in a little plainer words. If you put X amount of dollars into Social Security and you were born in 1970, what that says is you would have to live to be 110 years old until you got that money back. That is not in real dollars, that is in dollars from 1970, which means you would probably have to live to 130 or 140 to get it back in real dollars, not counting earning any interest on the money that you had invested.

Mr. COBURN. Absolutely.

Mr. COBURN. We are about to run out of time. I just want to leave the American public with something that Martin Luther King said in his last speech at the National Cathedral. He said that cowardice asks the question, is it expedient? And we have seen a lot of expediency in this body through the years. And he said vanity asks the question, is it popular? And we have seen a lot of things done because they are popular but not necessarily good for the Social Security system or not good for the future of our children. But he said conscience asks the question, is it the right thing to do? The debate this year about the budget and about Social Security cannot be based on expediency, cannot be based on popularity. It has to be based on what is right and best for all three generations concerned. I want to thank the gentlemen for sharing this time with me, and I hope we can do it again.

Mr. COBURN. Mr. Speaker, I found the previous hour very enlightening. Many of the things that I heard I absolutely agree with. But the subject I came to talk about today is something that oftentimes is overlooked by the American public, and that is the fact that one hears in the press and one hears on this floor all the time that we have a surplus, that there is a surplus of money in the Federal Government today. I am here to tell my colleagues that that is not true. There is not a surplus in the Federal Government today. In fact, the monies that are shown in surplus actually belong to the Social Security system, the retirement system. What I have before me is a graph that shows my colleagues actually what is happening right now and what is projected to happen with Social Security monies. This chart, my colleagues will see, is from the Social Security Trustee's report, and it was issued this last year. If my colleagues will notice, what they see is somewhere around $70 billion to $75 billion per year actual more money coming in to the Social Security system than we are paying out. That is, everybody that is working in this country is paying a FICA tax, and everybody that they work for is paying a portion of that FICA tax that comes to the Federal Government. This last year, it was about $480 billion that everyone who worked in this country paid in. When you look at this graph, what actually happened is we paid out somewhat less than that to the seniors who are presently on Social Security. What we have before us in Washington today is a shell game. How do we confuse people about what is going on with Social Security? When I talk to seniors in my district, as a matter of fact, when I talk to seniors anywhere, I have not found anybody that wants that money spent for anything except Social Security. We continue to play a shell game by not being truthful with the American public. What one will see is, when we get to the year 2013, this surplus of money that is paid in versus the money that is paid out on Social Security starts running a deficit. As we can see, with the baby boomers, of which I am one, by the year 2030, the Federal Government is going to have to come up with some $750 billion a year to fund the Social Security program. All right. So we have a problem that is coming to us. The first thing I was taught by my father as a young boy is that a half truth is a whole lie. The half truth is that there is a surplus. Yeah, there is more money in Washington than what we are spending out. But it does not belong to the Congress to spend any way it wants to. It belongs to the Social Security system. What is going to happen if we continue with this half truth-whole lie is that the children that are going to be 30 years of age, that are going to be born this next year, are going to have a FICA tax rate of 28 percent instead of 12 percent. That means that if we made $100,000, $28,000, not income tax but payroll tax, will have to go just to keep even to fund the Social Security system in this country. So before we can ever begin to hope to solve the Social Security problem, we have to be honest about what it really is. What it really is is the surpluses that were seen last year and the surplus that we are going to see this year is made up entirely of Social Security money. The next diagram shows you what actually happens to Social Security money. Right now, the Federal Government uses excess Social Security to pay for more spending or to pay off the debt. Last year, we did retire some external debt. We borrowed Social Security money. We gave them a note that bears interest. We used that money to pay off people outside of our government, outside of our Nation, who have loaned us money to run at a deficit. We are paying that off. So we are putting in IOUs, credited to the Trust Fund. It is important to note that, last year, we took $26 billion of the Social Security Trust Fund and spent it on nonSocial Security programs, which stole $26 billion of the seniors' Social Security money and spent it on other programs. That is why it is so interesting to hear that we have to spend all this additional money on education where, in fact, if the Congress would live up to its obligations that it made in 1973 on IDEA that we would fund 40 percent of the cost of the special ed in this country, we would free up billions of dollars in local monies to be spent on education, and we would not have to have a Federal program to build schools, because the schools would have the money to build it, because we have not kept up our end of the bargain. So what is going to happen in 2013, we are going to spend more money than what comes in. We are going to have to either go borrow money, or we are going to raise taxes. It is real simple. Actually, we are going to do one of three things, and let me show my colleagues what that is. So how do we solve the Social Security program? How do we solve this problem so that the money that goes into Social Security is used for Social Security? How do we solve it so that the people who are working today can have a retirement benefit that is supposed to be guaranteed to them? As they poll young people under 35 and they ask them, ``Do you believe that you will get Social Security money, or do you believe that there are UFOs out there,'' more people believe there are UFOs flying around than believe they will see their Social Security money. That is a condemnation on Congress that we have let down the American people. So what are our options? Save the hundred percent of the Social Security surplus and transition it into some instrument that earns more money, one. What we can do is repay the money taken by the fund by raising taxes, and that is exactly what I outlined, that we are going to have a 28 percent effective FICA tax by the year 2015 to pay to meet the obligations that we have committed to under Social Security. Or, finally, we can do all sorts of things to Social Security. We can back up on our agreement to Social Security. We can raise the age at which it is available. Nobody wants that. Or we can lessen the benefits. Our seniors now can hardly get by on the Social Security money that they are receiving. So option three is not any good. Option two, all it does is transfer our lack of physical control, our lack of ability to do what we were sent up here to do, and sends it to our grandchildren. As I talked to seniors, three things come to their mind. They do not want the Social Security money spent on anything but Social Security. Number two, they want the debt paid down. Number three, they do not want to saddle their grandchildren with the excesses of our inability to do what we were sent up here to do. So let me draw you a comparison.

Mr. COBURN. I am happy to yield to the gentleman from South Carolina (Mr. Sanford).

Mr. COBURN. Mr. Speaker, that is right.

Mr. COBURN. Mr. Speaker, reclaiming my time, let me interject something, because the American public does not know this. The actual rate of return, real dollar rate of return on one's money that one puts into Social Security over the last 30 years has been less than 1 percent per year. It has been six-tenths of 1 percent. Well, one could loan the money to one's grandkids at 2 percent and do three times better than what the Federal Government has done with one's Social Security money.

Mr. COBURN. Let me add one other thing. The Social Security System, as designed, was a good system. We had a lot of people working to pay for very few people getting benefits. We have two Members here that are term-limited that are talking about this issue. We are citizen legislators. We are both in our last term. We have been here 4 years. These are our last 2 years. One of the things that has happened is this body, because of politics rather than because of American spirit, has promised things for votes without asking the taxpayers to pay for it. So we have seen a lot of expansions in Social Security, which are not bad, but they did not have the political courage to say, if we spend more, we have to pay for it. So, therefore, the system's expenditures went up without a concomitant increase in the revenues to pay for it. So now we have two problems: We have, one, the population shift with the baby boomers; but we also have the lack of true integrity by the Congress to pay for the things that they pass on as a benefit. So the way to get reelected is to send the pork back home, tell people that we are doing something for them, but their grandchildren and their great grandchildren are going to be hassled, and their standard of living is going to be markedly decreased because we did not have the courage to say, if we are going to do something, we have to pay for it. This gets me to the next slide: why we have to control spending. This is the Federal budget, excluding Social Security. These are the real numbers. This is no hokeypokey. There is nothing other than CBO numbers here and OMB numbers. President Clinton's budget and the actual CBO projections. What we see here is if we do not restrain spending, then we are going to continue to spend more and more and more of the Social Security money on programs that are not related to Social Security. Now, I happen to believe that this year or early next year we will run what is called a true surplus. That is, we will have more money coming into the government than we spend, excluding Social Security. The CBO budget projects that somewhere between 2000 and 2001. That is this green line. But if we follow what President Clinton wants to do, he wants to spend 38 percent, and, actually, it is more than that, it is about 45 percent in the next 5 years, of the Social Security surplus on new programs. Now, I come from a district that is a Democrat district. I am a Republican, but my district is 75 percent registered Democrats. My Democrats, my constituents, do not want that money spent. And what will we see as we do this? What happens to the national debt? The national debt goes up. What is it that our children are going to have to pay back? They are going to have to pay back the national debt. Under President Clinton's program he is going to raise the national debt hundreds of billions of dollars. The total debt. Now, sure, he is going to shift some of it, but at the end of this last year, when we went through, and even though we spent Social Security money and we paid off some external debt, our national debt actually increased $22 billion. Now, what is the reason for that? We passed spending proposals that were off budget. Emergency supplementals. Whenever we hear those words, ``emergency supplemental'', what that means is our grandchildren are getting ready to get it. Because it is not going to be paid for, except in rare instances. This Congress, since 1994, has offset two of those, but the vast majority have not been offset, so they will end up paying for that. And the next year, that money that was spent comes in to raise the baseline of spending for that year. So the reason the national debt went up $22 billion, even though we retired external debt, is because we borrowed more than what we showed on the books. There was another $22 billion that was spent that we were not honest with the American public about who was going to pay for it. And it is our grandchildren. I have two little grandchildren, a 3-year-old and a 1-year-old, and the last thing I want to do is leave them a legacy where they have an income tax rate of 30 percent and a working tax rate, a FICA tax rate, of 25 percent, and that their standard of living is going to be markedly lower than ours. What is the answer to that? Let me just finish this point. The answer is the Federal Government is not efficient. I have asked about that around this country and nobody says, yes, the Federal Government is efficient. Well, if it is not efficient, why do we not cut spending within the Federal Government to make it efficient so that we will not spend Social Security money? The education dollars that the gentleman from North Carolina (Mr. Etheridge) wants to spend, and which we need to invest in education, I do not think we will find anybody that disagrees with that, we can find that money through the inefficiencies of the Federal Government. One last example. If this country were to go to war tomorrow, we would all, as a Nation, hunker down and say, we have an emergency, we can do things better, we can do things more efficiently, we can do things in a way that costs less. We have an emergency right now equal to any world war we would go to, and that emergency is we are taking away the opportunity, we are taking away the future of our grandchildren by not having the courage to stand up and cut the spending where it does not need to be spent and spend the money where it does need to be spent.

Mr. COBURN. I think what is important for everyone to understand is all of this red in the President's budget comes from social security taxes. Every bit of it. And what he has said is that we are only going to spend 38 percent of social security taxes on something else, rather than we are going to take Social Security and put that money in Social Security and have the fiscal discipline to control the spending in the Federal Government.

Mr. COBURN. Absolutely. There is another thing which is important to note. And this is not a method to try to beat up on the President's budget. That is not my point. My point is to draw a contrast. Even within this, there is $50 billion worth of tax increases, in fees and licensing fees and tax changes. So that if, in fact, the $50 billion in tax increases were not added, we would be stealing $75 billion or $80 billion from the Social Security based on the spending. The Congress agreed with the President in 1997 that we would have 5- year budget caps that were locked into law. It was an agreement. Last year the omnibus reconciliation package broke that agreement. The President signed it, this House signed it. Neither of these two gentlemen that are talking today agreed with that. We did not vote for that bill. The point being, as we start the 2000 budget, with the administration's budget, they break the spending caps by $30 billion. So we have to get back to this idea that we have to restrain spending. The fact is there are lots of programs within the Federal Government that are ineffective, that have not been looked at, that do not accomplish what they were set out to do, that have not had an oversight hearing to make sure they do that. The Congress has failed to do its job for the last 20 years in terms of oversight. There have been very few programs that have been started that have ended, number one; and there have been even many more of those that have been started that we have never looked at to see if they were accomplishing the very goal we set out to accomplish. So if, in fact, we can constrain spending, by the year 2001 we will have a real surplus, and then we can decide what we do with that real surplus. Do we pay down the debt, as most of the seniors in my district want us to do? Do we give some money back to people who are working poor and working? Because they are having trouble making it now. Do we give some of this money back to them? Do we expand selectively some of the government programs? Our goal should be to let us not spend anything until we are in this stage. We are spending money we do not have now and we are stealing from the Social Security System. I see the gentleman from Michigan (Mr. Hoekstra) is here. Would he like to jump in on this?

Mr. COBURN. Show me the money.

Mr. COBURN. I think again, just to reemphasize the point, first, if we do not put all the Social Security money into Social Security, one, if we do not address the problems with Social Security, we are going to see at least $800 billion per year in increased taxes on working Americans just to pay for Social Security. That does not have factored into it any inflationary spirals that might be higher than what we think they are going to be. So to get $800 billion in 2030, $780 billion in 2029, what do we do? What that means is the constituents in my district, my grandchildren, they are not going to get to do anything except barely eat, barely sleep and have a roof over their head if they want to pay for my generation's Social Security. So the hard work has to start now. The hard work has to be associated with restraining spending, not necessarily new spending on new programs but paying for it by cutting spending somewhere else that is not effective, rather than spending more of our grandchildren's money.

Mr. COBURN. Let me ask the gentleman a question. If all the money coming into the Federal Government, real surplus plus Social Security, was saved, we still will not have enough money to take care of Social Security, will we?

Mr. COBURN. That is an important point that the President has never mentioned. No matter what the surpluses are in the future, no matter how great they are, saving all Social Security money for Social Security plus all the rest of it will never save enough money to be able to meet the obligations for the babies born from 1942 on. We will never get out of the hole. So something has to happen. I think that is the gentleman's point.

Mr. COBURN

Mr. COBURN. Mr. Chairman, let me reclaim my time and give a couple of examples. Under OSHA now, every medical office, every container that might contain anything that would be contaminated, has to be labeled. So even if one has a container behind closed doors under a sink, one still has to have a nice orange label there that totally ruins the decor that somebody might get there. If a child pulls that label off and I fail to report that, that it was not present until I could get another label there, and if I were to be inspected, or caught, that is subject to a fine under OSHA. If the laboratory in my office, under its approval and certification procedures, makes an error on a testing, but yet we fail somehow, not to fill out the paperwork but if I as the medical director of that laboratory fail to sign that piece of paper, and when we are inspected, if I missed one of them, missed signing one of them, then I lose my CLEA license for failure to comply with a piece of paper that has nothing to do with the quality of care that we give our patients, has nothing to do with the certification and accreditation of that laboratory, but is simply based on a paperwork error that was never intended. It was just a mistake, a misstep, an oversight. Not because it was intended to violate the law, but because there are so many requirements that have so little benefit that are carried to such great extent by the bureaucracy that the penalty of it becomes, the penalty is not the fine, the penalty is that I do not get to practice medicine, I get to spend my time filling out paperwork for the Federal Government. So with that, let us consider the examples that are very real that we all encounter if we are in any small business, on how the tremendous paperwork burden is affecting and cutting our productivity, eliminating our ability to enhance the wealth of those around us, offer jobs and opportunity to those that do not have it today. I yield to the gentleman from Indiana (Mr. McIntosh).

Mr. COBURN. Mr. Chairman, I move to strike the requisite number of words. Mr. Chairman, I just wanted to say something. One of the things that bothers me in this debate is the assumption that small business people have an intention to do something dishonest. That is like saying that school teachers have the intention not to teach; that doctors have the intention to commit malpractice. If we continue in this country with the assumption that small businesses' goal is to do everything opposite of what the Federal Government would want them to do, we will not be long in terms of being an economic power. To say that a gun dealer will blatantly disregard the Brady law if this bill is passed is absurd. There are significant penalties for doing that which will not be abated by this law.

Mr. COBURN. I yield to the gentleman from Indiana.

Mr. COBURN

Mr. COBURN. I yield to the gentleman from Florida.

Mr. COBURN. Mr. Speaker, reclaiming my time, I thank the gentleman for that assurance.

Mr. COBURN. Mr. Speaker, every day when I am not here I practice medicine, and 70 percent of my patients are women. There are wonderful things in this bill. However, this bill comes up short, especially in addressing cervical cancer in our country. Mr. Speaker, 43 percent of the young women in this country today are carrying human papilloma virus. That is important. The reason that it is important is because that causes 94 percent of the cancer of the cervix to women in this country. We also have in the bill a complete section on diethylstilbestrol, which has not been used in almost 30 years in this country. The last time it was used in any frequency was in the mid-1960s. The consequence of cancer associated with that drug shows itself before the woman is 30 years of age. So, in fact what we are doing is authorizing a program that is no longer needed with this bill. My concerns, regardless of all the positive things in this bill, are that we should make sure we reach beyond where we have been in the past. And there is no question, breast cancer affects a vast majority. My sister, my sister-in-law both had breast cancer as well as many patients that I diagnose that disease in, and this bill is great in that regard. This bill is great in cardiovascular health risks for women. But it comes up very short in addressing a problem that is going to burgeon and balloon on us. Cervical cancer is going to grow at the rate of 10 or 15 percent per year each year in the future. We have not instructed the CDC to do the proper job with this bill. The CDC should have a program that mandates human papilloma virus, the agent that causes cervical cancer, as a reportable disease. They have refused to do that. Mr. Speaker, 40 percent of the women in this country now have herpes. It is also associated with anomalies and carcinomas of the reproductive tract of women. We have done nothing to address that in this bill. Mr. Speaker, I am going to support this bill, and I want us to move forward with this. But I would like to have a colloquy with the gentleman from Florida (Mr. Bilirakis), chairman of the committee, to in fact see if we cannot address these issues and send out a supplemental authorization in the next Congress so that we can impact cervical cancer the way we are attempting to impact breast cancer in this bill. It is my hope that we will have a hearing so that what I have just stated can be put in the Record by not me as a practicing physician, but the scientists who know these issues well, and that that will become a part of what we do in the future.

Mr. COBURN

Mr. COBURN. I would just make one other assumption. We have tried to slow the growth of spending. We have tried to send money back to the people that are sending the money here. We have done that at the same time while we want to protect what money is coming into Social Security today. We always hear we cannot do it. We cannot do it. That is based on the assumption that the government is this wonderfully efficient operating machine, 110,000 IRS employees. How efficient are we that we need 110,000 IRS employees? How efficient are we at all these different Cabinet levels? How efficient are we at the Department of Education with our 6,000 employees that are mandating on the people that I represent what they will and will not do while at the same time for years the commitment to IDEA, education for those with disabilities, was promised by this government to be 40 percent of the cost. It has never come close. So what we have is school boards having to maintain a federally mandated budget program to meet the requirements of IDEA while we do not send them any money. It is called an unfunded mandate. If we would just pay our share, what we promised to send to the local school districts for IDEA, every school district in the country would average about a $500,000 to a $1 million increase in their budget this next year.

Mr. COBURN. I would just add one other thing. Somebody may think that I am one of those extreme conservative radicals. A father, a grandfather, I deliver babies on the weekend still. I love children. But I also know if they do not have guidance and if they do not have discipline, they are going to be in trouble, and they desire that guidance. Do not ever kid yourself. They want to be disciplined in a way that will give them a future. It is natural that they would desire it.