K. Conaway

Mr. CONAWAY

Mr. CONAWAY. Mr. Chairman, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. CONAWAY

Mr. CONAWAY. Mr. Speaker, I appreciate that. I, too, want to add my thanks to the gentleman from Georgia for hosting this hour tonight and for going to the lengths that he has gone to gather us together to talk about this very important issue. Had I realized that we could use grandchildren as props as the gentleman from South Carolina (Mr. Wilson) did, I would have brought pictures of mine, because I want to make reference to my six wonderful grandchildren in a few minutes. So the gentleman from South Carolina, as always, has set a very high standard for discussion in this Chamber. Over the last several weeks at least, I have on occasion caught glimpses of a television commercial that I have found very troubling as we try to discuss and talk about this very important issue of Social Security reform. There is an organization out there that has a commercial running that talks about a clogged drain, a household drain, and they use that as a comparison to the problems and challenges that we face with Social Security. On its face, it is ludicrous to compare a normal, everyday occurrence of a clogged drain, one that you fix out of your normal operating budget and one that just happens all the time, to the very difficult- to-solve problems that we face with Social Security. We cannot fix those out of our normal operating budget, the normal budgetary process, the problems that we have where in 2017 we will begin to run a cash flow deficit. That means that the payroll taxes that we collect each year will be less than the benefits that we pay out. So at that point in time, we will begin to have to use the surpluses that have accumulated in Social Security. That means that we have to borrow the money in the open market to redeem those IOUs, or we have to cut spending, Federal spending in other areas to make up for that cash flow. So a very significant problem is coming in 2017. Then, in 2041, we will have paid back, paid out in benefits all of the accumulated surpluses that are in the Social Security trust; and, at that point in time, current law, as it currently exists, says that the beneficiaries in that date, in 2041, will experience an immediate 27 percent haircut in their benefits. So a clogged drain and a cash flow deficit in 2017, a system that is bankrupt in 2041, a 27 percent haircut in benefits, that is a misplaced analogy if I have ever heard one. Then this commercial goes on to say that the solutions are like tearing down the house, and they have a bulldozer that runs through this house and destroys it totally. Well, as I look at the reforms that are being talked about, every time any of us talk about it, whether it is the President in his crossing this country back and forth, trying to convince the American people that Social Security reform is something that we ought to be about today, the first thing out of his mouth, the first thing out of yours I suspect at our town hall meetings, the first out of mine, is that current beneficiaries, my mom and dad, this is not about you. We have made you promises. You are getting your Social Security benefits. You will continue to get your benefits no matter what happens. No matter what we do, we have made those promises and we are going to keep those. Near-term beneficiaries, folks in the 55 and up bracket, if that is where we decide to draw the line, it is not about you either. Your benefits will not be affected. And reforms that affect our grandchildren, my six and the grandchildren of the gentleman from South Carolina (Mr. Wilson), to say, look, if we think Social Security is good for my mom and dad, it is good for me, then we believe it is good for you as well. So we are going to put reforms in place for our grandchildren. So those are the reforms that this organization equates with tearing down the house and, in effect, destroying Social Security. Again, a misplaced analogy. I do not think it is helpful to the discussion. I do not think it is helpful or adds to the effort that the gentleman from Georgia (Mr. Price) talked about. The gentleman is right. This is not a partisan issue. The solutions that fit Social Security do not wear jerseys. They do not wear a Democrat jersey. They do not wear a Republican jersey. So to simply fill up the airwaves with conversations and discussions that are not productive, that are not about fixing the system; I am from west Texas. We leave off the ``G'' on the word ``fixing'' often. So, to the stenographer, there is no ``G'' in the word ``fixin','' is counterproductive to this entire process. So I want to add my voice to trying to bring this organization to the table. Part of our frustration is that we cannot get folks who are opposing Social Security reform to actually begin to sit down and have conversations with us in our inside voices to talk about what these solutions ought to be. So I am going to send a letter out tomorrow to the leadership of AARP, the American Association of Retired Persons, and it reads like this: ``Dear leadership: I write today not only as a Member of Congress, but also as a member of your organization and a grandfather. We all know that the debate over Social Security has become very political. However, I strongly believe that this program deserves to be considered above the fray of partisan politics. I am calling on you today to help craft a solution to the problem we are facing. ``I am a CPA with experience in banking, health care, and the oil and gas industry. I was a small business owner and have lived in west Texas nearly all my life. Since arriving in Washington, I have been disappointed by the political partisanship that has inhibited a substantive and honest debate on Social Security reform. ``It is time to set aside partisan differences and come to the table to seriously address Social Security reform. We must have an open debate that is free of political rhetoric and emotion and, with your cooperation, we can at least begin that discussion. ``The best way to address this problem is first to agree about the facts: ``Social Security is safe for today's seniors, but is in serious danger for our children and grandchildren. ``Social Security is a pay-as-you-go system with today's workers paying to support today's retirees. In just over a decade, the government will begin to pay out more in Social Security benefits than it collects in payroll taxes, and shortfalls then grow larger with each passing year. ``Without changes, Social Security will be able to pay 100 percent of its current benefits until 2041 when Social Security will be forced to cut benefits by at least 27 percent. ``This is an issue of generational fairness and the preservation of a promise made in 1935 to future generations of retirees. This vital program shouldn't just be safe for those who are over the age of 55, it should be an equitable and viable program for our children and our grandchildren. ``After reviewing the facts, it is clear that the current system cannot be sustained. When looking towards a solution, we all agree on two major points: benefits for individuals ages 55 and older should not change, and that Social Security needs to remain solvent for all future generations. Let's use this as a starting point for discussion that moves us closer to crafting a common sense solution that fixes the problem and does not simply place another Band-Aid over it. ``The Federal Government has collected hard-earned tax dollars from American workers and used them in a system that is on the path to bankruptcy and yields little return. We cannot idly stand by and allow such a looming financial problem to become a crisis. Every year that we wait and do nothing, it will cost the American taxpayer approximately $600 billion. ``I have six wonderful grandchildren. What kind of a grandfather would I be if I asked them to mortgage their future retirement security on a system that cannot sustain itself? I think the millions of grandparents who make up the membership of AARP would agree with me on this. We must act now. ``Social Security is a contract with ourselves. And that is a contract that we cannot and will not breach. Please, let us not make a partisan issue out of retirement security for our seniors and future generations of retirees. ``I would like to extend an invitation to the four of you that are addressed to discuss all of our options, including permanent solvency and some form of personal retirement accounts in dealing with the future of Social Security. I call on you today to set up a meeting with several of my colleagues to begin discussing these issues. I look forward to working with you.'' I would say to my colleague from Georgia (Mr. Price), this letter will go out tomorrow to the leadership of AARP. I suspect there are other letters similar to this that have gone to this very influential organization that has millions of members, most of whom we look straight in the eye when we talk about Social Security reform and we tell them in as clear and convincing a voice as we can, fixing Social Security is not about your benefits. Those promises have been made. We are collectively going to keep those promises. The solutions that we are talking about are about my grandchildren and your grandchildren and making sure that Social Security is in place, that lifetime benefit, that lifetime annuity that protects all of us in our retirement years. So I thank the gentleman for his leadership tonight and bringing this issue to the table.

Mr. CONAWAY

Mr. CONAWAY. Mr. Speaker, I rise in support of this bill tonight with a heavy heart, as is everybody in this Chamber. I would, though, like to address an important issue that we have not talked much about, and that is the conflict of interest that I believe her husband has with respect to his decisions that are supposedly in her best interest. I have spent a professional career as a CPA working under a code of conduct that requires me to function without conflicts of interest. I have to disqualify myself as an auditor if I have got a conflict of interest that is in appearance or in fact. This body has heard much about the importance of conflicts of interest, whether in the Sarbanes-Oxley bill that talks about the relationship of auditors and their clients, or campaign finance laws where it talks about the impact that money has on these conflicts of interest. Terri's husband has, in my mind, a significant and apparent conflict of interest in this matter. Her husband is her guardian, and he is duty bound, in my mind, to make decisions that are in Terri's best interest. Even the most casual observer would conclude that he is conflicted. He lives with another woman. He has fathered two children with this other woman. This is a conflict of interest between what is in his personal best interest and his wife and children's best interests and those of Terri's. We have heard much about Terri's condition tonight, but what we have not heard, though, is much evidence of her current condition, evidence such as tests and MRIs and brain scans and swallowing tests that we could objectively evaluate her condition through these tests. Her husband has categorically prevented this from happening throughout the last 7 years. I do not believe the issue of Terri's husband's conflict of interest and its impact on her condition have been given a proper review. I have heard her brother tell us this evening about the lack of care that has been insisted upon by her husband throughout the last 7 years, simple tests, trips outside into the sunshine. I support this bill that would allow a review of Terri's case, including the role of her husband's decision and his conflicts of interest.

Mr. CONAWAY

Mr. CONAWAY. I thank the gentleman for yielding time. Mr. Chairman, he did mention I am the newest member, but I am also the only CPA on the committee. I brought that burden to the activities of the committee. It seems that every business that I have ever consulted with, every client that I have ever had, every family that I am aware of has to live within their means. All of us can at one point or another spend more money than we are bringing in, whether it is family or a business; but you cannot do it very long. The only organization that can do it over an extended amount of time is this body, is the Federal Government here in Washington, DC. Just because it can should not mean that it should. And we should not be doing that. We are leaving debt to our children that they will have to pay off or that they will have to look their children in the eye and say, We're going to pass it on to you. Our grandparents passed it on to us, and we're going to keep passing this thing on. The issue of living within our means means that you have to make some tough choices and you do have to set some priorities. The Budget Committee hearing on members' day, we sat there all day long and listened to a long litany of amendments just like this one, couched in the phrases that we have already heard, that these are not family values when you, quote-unquote, cut spending; these are not love for the military when you cut spending for veterans and veterans affairs. You can make these arguments that if you vote against mom, apple pie and the girl you left behind, you are a horrible person; but the truth of the matter is all across this Nation, all of us have to make tough decisions on where we spend our money. I stand in opposition to this amendment. The budget that is going to be proposed later on today does in fact make some of those tough choices, begins to start that process of trying to force this government to live within its means. Tax revenues are going up because the economy that we live in is improving. That is the way that we ought to do it. But we have to hold down spending. Reducing the rate of growth overall in mandatory spending by one-tenth percent from 6.4 percent growth to 6.3 percent growth, I am hard pressed as an accountant and a CPA to understand why that is a cut. It is just a slowdown in the growth of increases. The other side presents every one of these very good programs as if they are the best they can be, that they are totally efficient, that they are not spending money where they should not. I do not think that is the case. I stand in opposition to this gentleman's amendment.

Mr. CONAWAY

Mr. CONAWAY. Mr. Speaker, one other point. Not only the liability for the promises that have been made but also the promises we intend to make to our grandchildren, a lifetime benefit for each and every one of those, a benefit that they cannot outlive. It was good public policy in 1935. It is good public policy in 2005. It ought to be good public policy in 2035 when my sons and daughters begin to retire. I want to misquote Ronald Reagan in one of his inaugural speeches talking about the problems this country faces that in terms of solution, if not us, who? And if not now, when? I thank the gentleman for allowing me to share his time this afternoon.

Mr. CONAWAY. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for those kind remarks. And I actually chose the office that you vacated, so that, as my initial start in this chamber, I would have the good vibrations that you left behind on your good start in this body. I want to make a few points, some of which play off of the ones that you have already made. Unfortunately, we got off on what I think is the wrong foot when we began to call this situation a crisis. We in America have a relatively short attention span, and crisis means something is going to happen in the next 15 minutes or certainly by tomorrow. So that was probably an ill word to use, and we spent an inordinate amount of time arguing over that word. I am a CPA by background, 30-plus years of business experience. And as I look at what I believe to be the very compelling arguments and facts that you present, then that leads me to believe that we do have something we ought to deal with, and that we ought to deal with that today and not continue to put that off. Now, is the time to fix this problem. You have already mentioned that, each year that we delay in this fix, it adds an additional $600 billion of unfunded benefits and liabilities to our problem. So, in your family, my family, my business, the clients that I have, if we had circumstances where we had cash flow deficits and I went to the Chairman and the CEO and I said, you know you are going to bring in less money than you are spending this year, do not worry about it, it will be okay, let us just do not fix it, wait 3 or 4 years from now. Well, that is nonsense. Nobody does that in the real world, and we should not be about doing that here in Congress. So I think the facts compel us to see the problem, see the issue that needs to be done and also compel us to say, we should be the ones who fix it. If you agree with the facts that we have a system that is no longer sustainable, there is a great adage that I picked up in one of the briefings that we had early in November that said, things that cannot be sustained will not be sustained. It is a pretty straightforward statement. That is exactly what we have here. We have something that will not sustain itself. When it originally came into being in 1935, it could clearly sustain itself. The more callous of some would look at that system and say, that is nothing more than a pyramid scheme where you collect from all these people and give it out to a few. In this instance, it is a legitimized pyramid scheme, but as every pyramid scheme in history it runs out of gas. The facts compel us to say that this system that we have got is running out of gas. We hear the phrase PAYGO bandied about this body and in committees a great deal with some passion and disdain. This was an original PAYGO system, pay as you go. The monies you bring in are paid out to beneficiaries. I do not think it applies to Social Security and here is why. PAYGO means in this circumstances you pay, and if I am retired, I go. PAYGO ought to mean the folks incurring the bills ought to pay the bills. So I do not think the term PAYGO really applies to Social Security. The next thing is once you have this issue in front of us, let us take a step back and put ourselves back 75 years ago when it was conceived and the leadership at that point in time, the wonderful leadership it was, clearly thought a lifetime benefit, a Social Security stream of cash flow that you cannot outlive, was an important public policy arrangement. I do not hear anybody on either side of the aisle hinting that this is not still really a good public policy for our country to have. I have counseled many clients who as they approach retirement age one of the first questions they ask is, am I going to outlive my money? I have got all this put away that I have saved and scrimped and foregone purchases and have put this money away. Am I going to outlive that? Well, the wonderful thing about Social Security is you have got the security of knowing you simply cannot outlive this lifetime benefit. So if we are compelled to fix it, and I think we are compelled to keep it, if it is good public policy for my mom and dad and for me, then I would argue that it ought to be good public policy for my grandchildren and my children, just like the gentleman has talked about his children as well. So I think we are coming to some things we can all agree on as we begin to move toward how do we come about this conclusion of fixing whatever is in front of us. I have six wonderful grandchildren. God has blessed me immensely with four wonderful children and two daughters-in-law and a son-in-law and six magnificently wonderful grandchildren. It would never ever occur to me to gather those six little critters up, take them down to my local bank and say, Mr. Banker, I want to borrow a lot of money. And I want to spend that money over the rest of my life time, and I want my six grandkids to sign that note. And when they grow up they will pay off what granddad spent. If you individualize what we are really doing every single day in this country, there is not a grandparent on Earth I do not believe who would do that, who would obligate their individual grandchildren for some individual debts that they might incur. So if it is not good public policy on an individual grandparent-to-grandchild basis, then it really should not be good public policy on a corporate basis to do this very exact same thing. We are a Nation at war, and we have these wonderful stories coming back from men and women and the sacrifices they are making on behalf of liberty, on behalf of freedom, spreading freedom around this world. They are answering a call to duty, a call to country, a call to honor that is magnificent on every level. But there are a select few, there are a lot of them, but in comparison to Americans there are a select few. We ought to look at that example and say, given the sacrifices they are making, given their role that they are playing, is there some similar role that we can play? Is there some similar duty, some similar responsibility to country that we ought to be obligated, we ought to be taking on or shouldering; and in my mind this is clearly it. I cannot think of a better place to start on the financial problems that face this country than solving this problem. Now, once you get the groundwork laid for the problem, once you get the groundwork laid that it is a process and a public policy we ought to keep in place, once you get in place that we ought to be the ones that fix it, then you begin to start what I think is a very thoughtful, logical, step-by-step process of coming about how to do that. The President has laid out personal savings accounts as a piece of the solution. All of us collectively are going throughout our districts, looking at our men and women, the voters of the United States: if you have some ideas that will work on fixing Social Security, let us get those on the table. Let us get that into the mix as we try to coalesce around a solution that collectively, both sides of this aisle, a vast majority of both sides of this aisle, can gather around. Because the big public policy moves in this country happen when we collectively agree. If we have to vote 232 to 203 on this deal, we do not have the right answer. We want an answer that is broad-based support throughout both sides of this aisle. And I appeal to my colleagues on the other side of the aisle that whatever this solution looks like, I assure you it is not wearing a jersey that has an elephant on it or a donkey on it. This solution just has the jersey of what is best for America, what is best to continue the promises made to my mom and dad. We will work to put the security back in Social Security for my grandchildren as well. A couple of other points and then I will turn back to the gentleman. The black area that the gentleman is talking about, when I am out and about in my town hall meetings, one of the misconceptions that permeates them is that there is something wrong with having used the Social Security surpluses the way we have done it. Lyndon Johnson started it with a unified budget in 1969, I think, so we have had this for quite a while, both parties in charge of the White House and both parties in charge of the Congress. So we have been at this a long, long time. We also have a push-back in what is called the transition costs. How do we pay for this transition? How do we pay for this fix? One of the things I would like to put forward, and I think it would resonate with many, is let us start today and capture that surplus. Now, it is an accounting gimmick, and I use that phrase cautiously because what that will require us to do is rather than us borrow the money for the general fund from the Social Security trust fund and spend it, if we capture that money as a quote/unquote down payment on the transition costs, a down payment on the fix, then we will be required if we continue to spend the same levels of monies that we are going to spend the next years to 2018, we will have to go into that market and borrow that money from the public and borrow that money from the Chinese or the Japanese or other investors to fund the operations. While it may be more form than substance, it may be a cornerstone of an idea that the folks can say, okay, that I understand. We are no longer spending the Social Security surplus. We are capturing that for a down payment of the transition costs. And maybe that is an idea that can be folded into the overall fix that will help the Americans rally around whatever this fix may be. Let me speak finally about that red section. That red section there for the most part is unfunded liabilities, unfunded promises that this country has made. We owe that money to somebody. So if we collectively said, we are going to stop Social Security, we are only going to pay off the benefits that we accrued, we will still have this staggering deficit of unfunded promises that we have made. As I campaigned and talked in town hall meetings, I heard the comment that Social Security is a contract with ourselves, and we are not going to breach that contract. Breaching that contract will be reneging on those promises and affecting benefits for the current beneficiaries who are counting on the cash flow for a lifetime, the lifetime benefits. If you are on benefits right now that will not change. If you are within a certain number of years that we can collectively agree on retirement this is not about you. This fix is not about you. This fix is about our grandchildren and our children as they begin to approach that. So when we talk about borrowing money, we have already borrowed that red money. It is just not on our balance sheet. The Federal Government's financial statements are rather poor, speaking as an accountant, a CPA. If somebody had to sign the Federal Government's financial statements with the same liabilities that major publicly traded companies' CFOs sign, we would put them in jail. That liability is ours. We have made those promises. They are out there. They are on the quote/unquote U.S. Government balance sheet, or ought to be; but they are there. It is not a matter of borrowing new money. It is figuring out how do we fund an obligation that we will keep, we have obligated ourselves to. The bill just has not come due yet.

Mr. CONAWAY. Let me make a comment. The gentleman talked about when the collective surplus is paid off to beneficiaries, and it is estimated that it is somewhere in the 2042 range, beneficiaries on that date under today's law with us doing nothing else will suffer a 25 percent haircut immediately in their benefits. That is out there. That is in current law. That ought to be on the minds of all the folks who think about benefits. Today's beneficiaries, it is not likely that many of them will live to 2042; but we will keep those promises. But 2042-ish there are immediate cuts. I would like to get that fact on the table.

Mr. CONAWAY

Mr. CONAWAY. Mr. Speaker, the newsprint, the television media, and I notice even in this House, as in a couple of speakers ago, we are constantly bombarded with stories of the youth in our communities, in our cities, in our towns that are doing bad things, young men and women who are making some bad choices, and some of them very grievous and extremely bad choices. They get an awful lot of the air time on television and in newsprint. I am standing before you today, Mr. Speaker, to point out a group of young men and women in Fredericksburg, Texas, who are, I think, at the absolute other end of the spectrum from those who we typically see in our newspapers. I want to talk briefly this afternoon about the Fredericksburg High School Aerospace Program. This is a voluntary program, an elective program that students in Fredericksburg High School can participate in. Their mission each year is pretty straightforward. The first day of class the teacher writes the problem on the board, and then they have to solve it. They will spend the entire year solving that problem. The problem that Mr. Williams, the founding father of this program, gives his class, their mission, is to put a 35-pound scientific experiment 100,000 feet into the air. And that is it. This group of young men and women then begin to break up into teams, teams that will help do the design. There will be young men and women who may be good at physics and other math skills; there will be teams that are good at marketing and they will be out trying to scrounge and acquire the necessary information and materials to solve the problem each step of the way. There is no text book. These young men and women are solving this particular problem from scratch. Mr. Williams is there to keep them between the white lines, but he is also there to let them make mistakes. As they go down paths that do not solve the problem, they learn from those mistakes and then go back to the drawing board, so to speak, to accomplish their mission. SAT scores at Fredericksburg High School have risen 200 points as a result, in their minds, as a result of this cross-disciplinary process that goes on within this particular classroom. Also, these young men and women, 80 percent of them go on to engineering degrees in colleges. I am not sure of the exact statistics, but China is producing a staggering number of engineers greater than we are in this country, and that ought to give us all pause for concern. If America wants to remain competitive in whatever arena, look at the advantages all these engineers being trained in China will give them over us, as we produce fewer engineers, should give each of us pause on a variety of levels. These young men and women go on to school to further their careers. They work in teams. They learn to use skills and techniques and processes that serve them well in the real world by working in groups, small groups and large groups, to accomplish this program. They design this vehicle from nose cone to nozzle, including the propulsion systems. Now, once they have the design done, they then build the rocket. They build the 35-pound test module that they are going to send 100,000 feet into the air. They build it from scratch. They do all the electrical work; they do all of the construction work that they can. They then begin to look for contributions from companies that might be in this business or in allied businesses, looking for the nozzle parts, looking for the parts of the nose cone, the fuel systems, and those kinds of things, because they do not have money that goes with this. This is all part of the program of living in the real world, looking at problems and trying to figure out how to solve them. Some of the accomplishments of the Fredericksburg High School and this team is the first high school to break the sound barrier with their rocket. They are also the high school that has launched the largest, fastest vehicle to the highest altitude at a Federal missile range, White Sands Missile Range outside Alamogordo. That is a top accomplishment for a group of high school students. This program, in its seventh or eighth year, is being developed in a manner that will allow it to be replicated in other high schools across the Nation, providing an opportunity to incent and interest our young men and women in positive programs doing things and doing those things well. Mr. Speaker, I rise today to point this out to my colleagues here in the House. I hope that the good citizens throughout the 11th Congressional District of Texas and throughout the United States will recognize these accomplishments, will look for their own communities to say: We have some kids that are as bright and as smart as the kids in Fredericksburg, Texas; I wonder why we cannot beat their record, why we cannot put a 35-pound payload 100,000 feet into the air and recover it intact. It is a great accomplishment that is going on in Fredericksburg, Texas. This is a great opportunity to recognize the wonderful things being done by these students, in contrast to all the bad things that we hear in the press.

Mr. CONAWAY

Mr. CONAWAY. Mr. Chairman, I demand a recorded vote.

Mr. CONAWAY. Mr. Chairman, I yield myself such time as I may consume. With all due respect to my colleague on the other side, that is not what this is about. This is about reducing a regulatory burden on an industry without demonstrated evidence that this, in fact, does what we all want, and that is safe drivers on our highways. This issue of driver fatigue, a bit tongue-in-cheek, but there may be those who say this body in session at 2 a.m. in the morning is a greater public safety risk than the truck drivers in the oil and gas business. We are talking about mom and pop organizations who are these service companies that are burdened with this regulation. We are also talking about the very largest oil field service companies that are burdened by it. To a person, they are interested in safety. They do not want to run their trucks in an unsafe manner. They have immense liabilities if that happens. They have as great or greater interest in safe, alert truck drivers than we certainly do in Congress. This industry is burdened by regulation that is not proven to increase safety with respect to oil and gas operations. It is simply an added layer of regulation that I believe is unnecessary. This amendment would unburden that very important industry in our country. Mr. Chairman, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. CONAWAY. Mr. Chairman, I yield myself such time as I may consume. This amendment would reduce the regulatory burden on the good men and women of this country who are exploring for oil and natural gas. The hours-of-service rules that this would impact really have to do with long-haul truckers, men and women who feed their families by driving trucks from one side of the country to the other. Oil and gas operators are getting caught up with this rule, and it is an unnecessary regulatory burden on them that does not add to the safety of our highways. In general what happens, these truck drivers will leave the yards in the morning, go to a location where an oil and gas well is being drilled or completion is being done on oil and gas wells, or workover units are being worked. While driving commercial vehicles, they are typically tractors pulling either specialized trailers that perform some special function on the well, or they are driving a self-contained unit that has some special function once it gets to location. These locations are generally within a short driving distance where these men and women are typically spending the night in their own home and getting up the next morning and going to work. The rules, as they apply to oil and gas truck drivers, are causing some undue burdens in that if they get caught on location, as operations typically happen, it is not as efficient as they need to be; they are there longer than normal circumstances. Because of these rules, they cannot drive back home that night. The operator or the service company has got to hire transportation to drive out to location and pick them up and bring them home. Or even worse, they are required to spend the night overnight on location in a circumstance where they were not necessarily expecting that because of this regulation. So with this amendment, we have the opportunity to lessen the regulatory burden on an industry that is vital to our national security. As crude oil prices reach $55 a barrel, natural gas prices are high, we obviously do not want to burden this industry any more than is necessary. I spent 7 years in Texas writing regulations for the accounting industry. Regulations ought to control what is going on and protect what needs to be protected, but they ought to be done in a way that is cost efficient and effective for those who have to comply with the regulations. This amendment would allow oil and gas operations exclusively to conduct their safety programs under the rule in place before the hours- of-service rules came in effect in January of 2004. Mr. Chairman, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. CONAWAY. Mr. Chairman, I offer an amendment.

Mr. CONAWAY

Mr. CONAWAY. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentlewoman from North Carolina for yielding. I appreciate the esteemed remark. I am not sure what that means, but I will take it as a compliment. Thank you very much. You cannot talk about eliminating waste, fraud and abuse in Federal spending without kind of putting it in some context. During the 1950s, the Federal income tax amounted to about 2 percent of the family budget. At that point in time, Americans had continued to experience a growing standard of living as it has continued to grow. In the 1990s, however, the Federal income tax consumes about 25 percent of that same family of four's income. And I think most of us have run on platforms that have said that Americans are overtaxed. Tax levels at all levels when you begin to add Federal income taxes, State income taxes, local taxes, the sales taxes, the variety of taxes that we all pay from cradle to grave, they consume about 50 percent of a family's income. We will celebrate, sometime in April, May, June, the day keeps getting longer each year, a tax holiday in a sense that most average Americans will have worked through that part of the year in order just to pay their taxes. We will spend in this government on the order of $2.5 trillion in fiscal 2005 and 2006. You have already put that in context, $69,000 per second that is spent across the board, for the most part, most of it on programs that we all agree on; but some of it I think gets spent on things and in ways that we believe would be inappropriate. The House Budget Committee has recently released a report that shows that there are billions, literally billions of dollars that are going to waste. These moneys are being paid to people who do not deserve them, people being paid by accident, being paid in many instances through fraud schemes, where folks are frauding the very systems that we put in place to help and nurture those in our society, those in our communities who can least afford to live. Those programs get preyed upon by some of the worst in our society. You know, I suspect that speaker after speaker has stood at these microphones, on both sides of the aisle, to condemn wasteful spending, money that is getting spent that should not get spent. I suspect that if we took a vote in this House it would be a 435-to-0 vote against wasteful spending. It is very difficult to find a politician who would stand up and defend wasteful spending. It is hard to find a constituent group that would stand and defend wasteful spending. The President has proposed a budget recently, and in that budget he has proposed about 150 programs that would be either cut, or spending reduced. In Washington, since that budget came out on the February 7, we have been the recipients of special interest groups across the board who want to defend those very programs. We cannot find a single special interest group who would be willing to defend waste, fraud and abuse in our Federal spending. Let me give you some examples that will help put this in context for our fellow Members here in the House this afternoon, kind of what we are talking about. Twenty-one of the 26 major departments and agencies currently receive the lowest possible rating for their financial management. Let me put this overall thing in context. I am a CPA. I have been in business as a practicing accountant for some approximately 36 years. And hearing things like this are obviously troubling to me on a professional level as well as on a taxpayer level, that we would have things like this going on. The single most troubling one, as a former auditor, someone who has examined other peoples' books and rendered opinions as to the reasonableness of those books, the U.S. General Accounting Office will not certify the Federal Government's own accounting books because the bookkeeping is so bad. Unfortunately we have got agencies, big and small, who cannot keep up with the tax dollars that Congress allocates to them to spend. We are 2\1/2\-plus years now into living under the Sarbanes-Oxley bill, a bill that came into existence as a result of financial accounting abuses by certain of my brethren in the accounting profession and certain leadership in various corporations. We now have in place rules and regulations that require publicly traded companies to certify their books, that the chief financial officer certifies that book, that the CEO certifies that the books are correct under the penalties of going to jail for Federal felonies if those are incorrect. There is no one in the Federal Government who signs a financial statement under that same penalty. So the fact that we cannot keep our own books ought to be troubling on a variety of levels. Talking about some specific dollars, the Federal Government made $20 billion in overpayments in overall payments. Medicare payments by themselves totaled $12 billion overpayments in 2001. Mr. Speaker, I think we can do a lot with $12 billion. There is an awful lot of those programs listed in the President's 150 that could be covered by that $12 billion. I think the total savings that the President projects out of that 150 is about $20 billion. Now, those of us who have a checkbook and write checks, you know, never write a billion-dollar check. We do not have a clue realistically how much money a billion dollars is in trying to stack it up. But to put it in context of overall savings of $20 billion, if we have got overpayments, either through by accident, charges that should not have been, double billings, physicians and health care providers who are scamming the system, that 12 billion is a big number. Social Security income program has made overpayments of about $2 billion in 2002. And the Federal Management Service at the U.S. Treasury Department could not produce details on outstanding checks. In one case it caused a $3.1 billion overstatement of cash. Now, I used to be a small businessperson and worked with companies as their auditor. One of the things you do when you write a check is you have a source document as to why you wrote that check. You got an invoice from a vendor in most instances, and you attach it; someone approves that invoice and someone sends it over to the check-writing department and they write that check. Then you file that invoice, and then at the end of the year the auditor comes in or the owner comes in and said, I need to kind of figure out where we spent our money. You see this list of checks. You want to know why this check was issued. Then you go look in the file cabinet, or, in today's world, the way electronic data is kept, you go look for that source document: Why did we write that check? Well, in an organization as large and as expansive as the Federal Government, you would expect a few invoices to be missing. I mean, that is just the nature of the beast. We do not all keep all of the records that we are supposed to. That is not to condone it, but it is the real world. $3.1 billion in checks written that we do not know why they were written, or we cannot prove why they are written, seems to be an area that we could make some improvements in. If I may give one example, a personal example. My mom and dad are of an age that they are on Medicare. And my dad has got diabetes and needs a certain supply of things to handle and take care of his diabetes. The suppliers continue to overship that stuff to my mom and dad. Well, my mother is just very diligent and Rambo about not accepting it and shipping it back, because, you know, she just keeps the regular 30-day supply of the supplies that my dad needs to take care of his diabetes. Well, what is happening here is that these companies are gaming the system. Because when they ship it, then they get to bill Medicare for those products. That is just simply not fair. So I will brag on my mom. She is out there in the hinterlands lands of west Texas, out in Odessa, Texas, trying to save and do her part to save taxpayer dollars so that legitimate Medicare expenses that ought to be paid get paid. And that as we try to work with the very daunting task of cutting spending in Federal Government this next year, starting with the budget process right now, and working through the appropriations process and the authorizing process, that we are looking at dollars that ought to go to programs. We are not looking at dollars that are being funneled into areas or into scams or overpayments. As I mentioned, as a CPA and one who has signed the firm's name on audit papers before and audit reports, we can do better. I do not pretend that we cannot. It is a tough job. Obviously the Federal Government is the single largest financial entity, I suspect, on Earth, the U.S. Federal Government. And so keeping track of all of those dollars ought to be hard. It is hard, but that is no excuse for why it should not be done, why it should not be done to the same standards that we require the largest multinational corporations in our country to maintain their books, to be able to report to their shareholders what is going on, so that each year in October when we get the financial statements from the Federal Government we have got some confidence in those numbers, that we can then take that information and use the information to make public policy decisions that ought to be made. Included in all of this effort of keeping the books correctly ought to be an ongoing vigilance to watch out for waste, fraud and abuse. Wasteful spending hurts, fraudulent spending is a crime, abusive spending is a crime. Those folks should go to jail. I know we have got some instances where that is happening. But the cost of not doing this means that legitimate recipients for all of those programs have the risk of not being able to get the money, because it has gone in a wasteful manner, or in a fraudulent manner or in an abusive manner, so that the taxpayers of this good country are overburdened to the extent that we do have waste, fraud and abuse within our system. So I want to thank the gentlewoman for bringing this topic to the table today to let us have a chance to rant and rave about it, to talk to our fellow Members here in the House to try to help them with seeing how important it is as we go about this work to do that. So I thank the gentlewoman for her bringing this topic up today and allowing me to speak.

Mr. CONAWAY

Mr. CONAWAY. Mr. Speaker, I move that the House do now adjourn.

Mr. CONAWAY

Mr. CONAWAY. Well, that is right. The earned income tax credit was an attempt by this Congress to credit folks at the lower end of the earning scale for taxes that they would have otherwise owed to the Federal Government. It is a credit that is targeted directly to those who make the least amount of money in our system, or in our economy, and phases out as folks' income goes up.

Mr. CONAWAY. Mr. Speaker, as I said earlier, the Congress should approach Federal budgeting in a more businesslike manner. I, too, do not understand how underperforming Federal agencies or programs can continue to receive funding year after year without being held to account. In the real world, a business owner who manages his or her own business this way would soon find themselves out of business. Instead, Washington seems to reward that behavior. Mr. Speaker, our President has proposed a budget that will serve as a good starting point for Members of this Congress as we begin to craft a budget that respects and honors the wishes of the hard-working American taxpayer. I urge my colleagues on both sides of the aisle to join us in crafting solutions, and not just blind opposition, to wasteful programs that hamper our Federal Government.

Mr. CONAWAY. Mr. Speaker, while we are there, let me mention one other area of cost that waste, fraud, and abuse causes. Every single time we have an incident of waste or fraud, the regulatory agencies in charge put on layer upon layer of additional regulatory burdens to try to prevent it. I am not criticizing them for that, but that is just the way the system works. They try to figure out, how did this person cheat us, how can we put some additional regulations in place so that we do not let that happen again. Every time that happens, legitimate providers of services for Medicare, as an example, or health care have to continue to comply with this increasing burden of regulations that we have put in place. This costs them money. In a business, when you have to comply with a regulation of some sort, you either have to hire somebody to help you with that, a direct cost, or you have to allocate some resource within your organization who was previously working to help you make money and help you provide services to clients to comply with that. So either one of those costs those providers within the system money, and it is a direct result of cheaters in our system. Now, I am not advocating that we do not go find the cheaters; let us go find them and point them out. But let us also help all of us understand that as people cheat, that increases government regulation; and all of us, particularly on this side of the aisle, campaign often on reducing government regulations, so there is a second cost that the cheaters put into the system.

Mr. CONAWAY. Mr. Speaker, no, I think I said there was a 32 percent.

Mr. CONAWAY. Either by intention or by accident.

Mr. CONAWAY. Well, the good news is, we found a third of them, and there should be processes in place within the Internal Revenue Service to get that money back so that it does, in fact, go either to pay off the debt or to fund other government services.

Mr. CONAWAY. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentlewoman from Tennessee and also want to compliment the two previous speakers on the excellent job they did in setting out some of the things that we all want to talk about. In the interest of fair disclosure, though, I do need to correct one thing. I went to Texas A&M at Commerce, Texas, which is actually the second largest institution in the A&M system. We were the Lions, not the Aggies. In fair disclosure, I need to set the record straight on that. Mr. Speaker, I stand tonight in support of our efforts to aggressively eliminate waste, fraud, and abuse in our Federal spending. I am a CPA by profession. I have over 30 years of practice in helping clients and others deal with this issue in the world outside of government, and it is incredibly important in that arena, as it is in Federal Government. I once spent 5 years working with President George W. Bush as his business partner in Midland, Texas, the chief financial officer of the oil and gas exploration company that we co-owned, and it was an exercise in meeting payrolls and providing jobs for people of west Texas, but doing so in a cost-effective and efficient manner. We were getting other people's money to spend in the oil business to drill with, and it was incumbent upon us to spend those dollars as if we were spending our own money, wisely and with an understanding of how scarce they were, because folks trusted us with that money. We in Congress have much the same role in that regard. We take money away from people at the point of a gun, for the most part; but that should not relieve us of our obligations to spend that money as wisely as we possibly can. I believe that is important that we in Congress aggressively approach the issue of balancing the Federal budget from a business perspective. President Bush and this Republican Congress, of which I am very proud to be a part, are committed to spending the American taxpayers' hard- earned money as wisely as we can. We seem to hear a lot about opposition in Congress these days, not only opposition in Congress to cutting waste out of our budgets and out of our organizations, but we also see debates on Social Security reform, abusive lawsuit reform, funding our troops and much, much more. The opposition we face in these critical issues has become almost par for the course, and I find it quite personally disappointing that we are unable to reach any kind of common ground as we search for solutions to the issues and problems that face our Nation. Now to the issue of eliminating waste, fraud, and abuse. Surely this is one area that both sides of the aisle can find common ground on, an area we can agree that every single tax dollar that we, as I mention, take away from the citizens of this country, the working citizens of this country, should be spent in a manner and on programs that we in Congress authorize and provide for. We should all agree on the importance of cutting waste, fraud, and abuse from Federal spending. But, Mr. Speaker, it is imperative that every Member of Congress take this issue seriously. We are a little better than 2\1/2\ years past the passage of the Sarbanes-Oxley bill, which looked at fraud in the public arena, publicly traded companies. There are men and women today who are on trial for committing fraud within that arena, and they are going to go to jail. They are going to do felony time for that. Those were serious issues, where they defrauded the investing public. We ought to be just as serious about that happening in Federal spending programs as we are in the public arena. Here are some examples of waste, fraud, and abuse that hopefully everyone who listens would find offensive. Fraudulent tax returns. As I mentioned, I am a CPA and I have spent 30 years practicing, preparing tax returns for folks, helping them comply with the income Tax Code. According to some recent data, more than a quarter of the tax returns claiming the earned income tax credit were prepared erroneously, accounting for up to 32 percent of the total claims for over a decade. The estimated errors and erroneous payments, should they have been eliminated, would have freed up $8.1 billion of tax dollars that we took away from the taxpayers of this country. Another area is in the General Services Administration. Improper payments and duplicate payments for GSA credit cards occur primarily because cards are typically used without preauthorization for purchases, and controls to reconcile these purchases are inadequate. We have got a recent example of a GSA employee who spent over $32,000 during a 15-month period on her government credit card for personal expenses. We just simply cannot abide by that kind of conduct. We have also got waste in the tax collection system. There is an overall problem with the way we collect taxes to fund the Federal Government. The problem lies in the complex Tax Code that we have built over some approaching 90 years, a little better than 90 years, I guess. With a simpler and fairer Tax Code, we could take the tax industry that is kept in business by the need to comply with the Tax Code; we could take that industry on that is kept in business because of the needs of complying with this complex Tax Code. The costs of complying with the Federal tax laws and regulations is roughly $250 billion a year. I would argue while much of this money goes to my CPA brethren and me to help our clients, it does not help businesses do a better job, whatever business they are in. It does not help them provide better surfaces. Drilling contractors in my districts do not drill for energy better because of this. This is simply a burden that they have to pay, year after year, to allow us to collect taxes. We ought to be able to come up with a tax collection scheme that is simple and straightforward and fair and eliminates much of these compliance costs, which not only is a compliance cost, but generates a great deal of tax fraud in its compliance. Waste, fraud, and abuse not only costs taxpayers unnecessarily; but there are two hidden costs I would like to speak of. The first cost is to legitimate participants in programs who may not get the services that they need because resources that would have otherwise gone to provide those services have been stolen or diverted by cheaters within the system. As an example, in my hometown we have recently convicted a physician of fraudulently collecting fees from Medicare and Medicaid. This money, money that this person stole from the taxpayers of this country, should have gone to the providers in our area for treating patients, not for cheating.

Mr. CONAWAY

Mr. CONAWAY. Mr. Speaker, I rise in support of the amendment today out of a bit of a sense of confusion as to why we really need to revisit this issue one more time. It is odd that in a Nation at war that institutions of higher learning would take steps to limit the Army and the Navy, the Marine Corps, Coast Guard and other services' access to their students. I wonder what they are afraid of as to why they would take this particular position. They pride themselves on having the brightest in America at their universities, particularly the ones in question. As an aside, I was at a university in January, excuse me, in November, at freshman orientation and saw a couple of co-eds walking across campus that obviously have impaired reading skills because they were both smoking. Nevertheless, I wonder what they are afraid of. Why are they afraid of the message of serving one's country, of doing one's duty. We can argue that the Federal Government should or should not be in a lot of different areas, but clearly national defense and raising an army is a mission of our Founding Fathers that none of us would argue with. I guess the point I would like to make is that if these colleges and universities feel so strongly that their students should not participate in our military, then let us do it with honor and voluntarily turn back the Federal funding that supports many of the programs that they support through their universities. I would call on them and if they are really serious about limiting this, they are afraid of what our recruiters might say, that our recruiters might ask their young men and women to serve their country, to place their lives on the line, as many of the men and women who today serve our country in those Armed Forces are doing every day in Iraq and Afghanistan and other places around the world that we do not necessarily know about, but nevertheless they are serving, why they are afraid of this message? Why they do not think their students should have access to that? I rise in support of this resolution and would ask those universities that feel strongly about this to voluntarily send back all the Federal funding that they are currently getting and allow us to use those dollars in universities that are a little more in line with the issues that we are talking about today.

Mr. CONAWAY

Mr. CONAWAY. Mr. Speaker, several members have mentioned the inconvenience that many voters may have experienced on voting day by having to stand in line to wait their turn to vote. I want us to put that inconvenience into a proper perspective. It goes without saying we should eliminate any barrier to voting that we reasonably can eliminate. That said, one day last year the Afghan people got up early one morning, put on their best clothes and set out to vote for the first time. They left the safety of their homes to vote at the express threat to their safety and very lives. They were threatened with being shot and killed or maimed by bombs. In addition, many stood in line all day to vote. I believe we should look to the Afghan people for an example of how to fulfill our responsibility to vote.