Peter DeFazio

Mr. DeFAZIO

Mr. DeFAZIO. Well, we just do need to expand on that point a little bit; as my colleagues know, the fact that these companies are chasing the lowest labor around the world and the least enforcement. As my colleagues know, actually I saw, not to be humorous about a serious subject, but I saw a cartoon once, and it was one a guy asked another, ``Why do you think it is we are spending all this money on NASA, National Aeronautics and Space Administration?'' And the other guy said; well, he says no because we know somewhere out there in the universe there are people who work for less than a dollar a day. As my colleague knows, I mean it is kind of a sad commentary, but unfortunately there is some truth in it. Under this guise of free trade American corporations are chasing around the world, and multinational corporations, after the cheapest labor from the most desperate people or from children, as we have seen in many countries where children are exploited in horrible conditions as young as age 7 and 8 in some countries, basically indentured into their jobs, deprived of an education or any opportunity to get ahead, to make products that are marketed in the United States and other developed countries. And trade law does not allow us to prohibit those goods from coming into our country.

Mr. DeFAZIO. Well, I understand it is not the policy of this Congress or this administration to interfere in those workings of the market, but as an individual Member of Congress and someone who is concerned about humanity worldwide, I kind of would like to see us take a stand there. I mean slave labor, prison labor, child labor; it seems to me these are sort of basic things that should be allowed and should be part of your trade policy. Project your values, and, yes, this is even more radical to talk about maybe looking toward the people at home and protecting their jobs. Now say, oh, well, you are talking about protectionism. I say no, I am just talking about leveling the playing field. Let us not have unfair competition. Let us not let American firms go south of the border and dump their pollutants out the back-door into the rivers in Mexico. Let us have them follow the same environmental laws there. Let us allow the Mexican people to organize and strike and not be bullied or even killed sometimes by their own government because they are trying to organize and help their wages. If we get level playing field, then workers all around the world will benefit, and I think these companies will ultimately do well too. They forget something: In America, in our country, we have kind of a compact. As the middle class grew, the companies did better because they could consume the goods. They seem to have forgotten that now because with families desperate more and more to make ends meet, they are becoming less and less capable.

Mr. DeFAZIO. Mr. Speaker, I have talked to a lot of people in Oregon and different places and I just remember one young man, I pulled into the gas station late one night after I flew back across the country, as I do almost every week, and he was kind of almost apologetic about it; he recognized me, and he said, I got to tell you, Congressman, I am not doing too good, I am not making it. And Oregon has the highest minimum wage in the United States, and guess what, our economy is booming, all the companies have not fled the State as we heard they would with the highest minimum wage in the country. But he said I have two jobs, my wife has a job, and he said, we are really not making it. We want to have a kid. We are not really sure we can afford to have a kid, because, he said, I have two minimum wage jobs at the Oregon minimum wage, the highest minimum wage in the United States; my wife has a minimum wage job, but after we pay the rent and the car payment and the other stuff, he said, there is not much left over. That is the unfortunate reality for many Americans. There have been a lot of jobs created, but compare the salaries and wages and benefits of those jobs. The largest employer in the United States of America now is not General Motors, it is not even Microsoft; it is something called Manpower, Inc., which is a temporary employment firm, with no benefits and, obviously, very little security and not the greatest wages in the world for most of the people they place. That is the largest employer in America. There is something wrong with that picture. It goes to trade policy, it goes to tax policy; it goes back to who funds the elections in this country. I mean there are a whole host of things contributing to this. It is very complex. It also goes to the Federal Reserve Board, who are a bunch of bankers who meet downtown at the largest, heaviest, most expensive marble and exotic hardwood table in the world, in secret, by the way, to determine monetary policy for the United States of America. And now, they are obsessed. They are obsessed. It is now, will a one-rate increase satisfy the Fed? What are they worried about? Another cartoon, I saw it. There are all these old guys, pretty much older guys, bankers and stuff, standing around behind Frankenstein, who is tied town, and Frankenstein's label is inflation, and one of them says, his eye lid twitched, his little toe moved, I think he is starting to breath. They are worried about inflation that does not exist; the lowest real rate of inflation in the last 50 years in the United States. Highest real interest rates, though, if we borrow money, and guess what? If there was a little bit more inflation, debtors, which is most of the people in America, the ones certainly I care the most about; everybody has a credit card, a mortgage, a home loan, a car loan, if inflation ticked up a half percent or 1 percent, guess what, you come out a little bit ahead, but your banker, your banker loses a little bit on the margin. So the obsession is we have to worry that wages might go up. The Fed is petrified, petrified that wages might go up. We have a law that says we are supposed to work to our full employment and keep down inflation. They do not look at the full employment side, and they particularly look negatively upon the idea of a real increase in wages. They do not want that to happen. And they are willing to drive up interest rates, which raises the credit card of virtually every American who has credit card debt, makes car loans more expensive, makes housing loans more expensive, because they are worried that the profits of the banks, that some of them who actually sit there and make policy in secret work for, might go down a little bit. There is a very strange system we are running here. What happened to the policymakers? What happened to the Congress? What happened to the President? Why can we not make monetary policy to drive up wages in this country, to create full employment? Why are those things anathema. Something is very wrong. Why can they make policy in secret? How can they do this?

Mr. DeFAZIO. Mr. Speaker, there are some policy issues at stake here. We talked about trade and we will not go back to that, but we could have a trade policy that helped in those areas. But the other issue is tax policy. The majority party here in the House very much wants to give a tax break to the American people, and the question becomes first off, are they going to give that tax break out of the Social Security surplus; that is a question and a problem; or, are they going to give a tax break by cutting programs like Pell grants and other things the gentleman talked about. But maybe it can be justified, but we can only justify it if we look and see where those tax benefits are going to flow. There are ways that we can provide substantial tax relief to the majority of the American people, but I fear, as in the last several tax bills since I have been here, the wealth and what they are talking about, the people at the top are going to do very well, and those average people are not. They want to reduce the capital gains tax again. Now, this is not quite clear to me, but let me see if I totally understand this. If I invest for a living, my effective tax rate is just slightly more than half of a retail check-out, unionized check-out clerk or a teacher, is that correct? A teacher is paying at 28 percent on the margin and if I do capital gains, I do not have them, so I do not know, but I think it is 18 or 19 percent, as I recall. So what are we saying to the American people? Is this like the Leona Helmsley theory of taxation, only the little people pay taxes? I mean they are talking about a world in which they would do away with the inheritance tax, and let us say we were lucky enough to be Bill Gates' kids. But he says he is going to give most of the money away and not to his kids. So maybe he only gives his kid $1 billion. So his kid only gets $1 billion. The rest, the other $89 billion goes to charity. That would be nice. But then the kid goes to college and vests that $1 billion and becomes an investor for a living. Does not work for wages. Guess what? That person would not pay any inheritance taxes under the brave new world of tax reform they are talking about, and would pay no income taxes, because they would exempt capital gains from income taxes. So the guy selling the burgers down on the corner, well, they are paying FICA tax, Social Security, they are paying income tax; they are subject to all of these taxes, but the person who inherited and invests for a living does not. What is wrong with this picture? If they want to talk about leveling the playing field, why should it be that people who invest for a living pay a lower rate of taxes than people who earn through blood, sweat and tears and time away from their home and their families, wages? Let us equalize the two. Why would we not do that? What is wrong with that idea? Would that not help most people?

Mr. DeFAZIO. Mr. Speaker, it is pretty simple. They are talking about destroying the system to save it; moving toward a privatized, sink-or- swim, on-your-own system, but there is one simple fact. If we just lifted the cap and said every American will pay the same amount of Social Security tax on all of their wages, that sounds pretty fair to me. It is not progressive, even. It is not. We are not saying low income people will pay less, we are saying everybody would pay the same amount on every dollar, and that would provide more than enough money to make Social Security solvent beyond the 75-year window. But I went a step further in my bill. I said okay, I like that, that is pretty good. We do not have to cut benefits, raise the retirement age or do things that hurt working people, and we do not have to roll the dice on some sort of individualized accounts, which have not worked out real well in Great Britain and in Chili, but what we could do also is exempt the first $4,000 of income. I would like to give a little tax relief. So the plan I have would lift the cap and use some of that money to provide tax relief by exempting the first $4,000 of income for self- employed and for wage-earning Americans who pay FICA taxes. Now, guess what that means? That means 95 percent of the people in the United States of America who work for wages would get a tax cut, and they would still collect their full Social Security. But 5 percent, those who earn over $76,600 a year, would pay the same amount as the other people who earn less than them. Now, would that not be a fairer way to fix Social Security?

Mr. DeFAZIO. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman. In fact, I went before the Committee on Ways and Means. They would only accept bills that the actuaries had certified as meeting the 75-year requirement, so they only had testimony I believe on five pieces of legislation before the Committee on Ways and Means, and mine was one of the five certified by the trustees of Social Security. The chairman of that committee, who is also I believe for a flat tax, he did not just like latch on to it. I said, well, Mr. Chairman, this is going to be right down your alley; this is a flat tax. People are going to pay the same if they earn $1 million, if they earn $75,000 a year. Would that not be fair? And, we fix the system and we do not have to go through this whole disassembly and reassembly and rolling the dice and taking chances on whether something else would work, and whether the ``something else'' that they might put in place of Social Security, the system that is responsible for lifting millions of Americans, older Americans out of poverty, disabled Americans out of poverty, survivors of workers who died at a young age; we would lose or risk all that in the newly fractioned, independent sort of account kind of system. Yes, a few people would do better, but most would not. Here is an option that would provide tax relief and save the system, but it just somehow did not capture the chairman's attention right off. I do not intend to drop the idea. I have final legislation and I am ready to introduce it soon. I am hoping to begin a debate about a better way to fix social security.

Mr. DeFAZIO. Mr. Speaker, just to expand on the point of my colleague. I think it is a statistic the American people need to pay attention to. It is one-quarter of one percent. One-quarter of one percent of the people in America gave more than $200 to a political campaign last year and yet constituted 80 percent of the contributions. So who do we think are in the Republican leader's office when the decisions are being made on tax relief or reforming Social Security or on whether or not we are going to have HMO reform that gives patients rights? Guess what, the insurance company executives are in the office, not the patients, not the people who desperately need access to health care and cannot get it because their HMO is more interested in profits than in their health care. Guess who is in those offices when we are talking about tax reform? Now, we could do some tax reform around here that would benefit the majority of the working people in America. In fact, I have introduced some legislation to reform Social Security that would vouchsafe Social Security for 75 years, certified by the board of trustees, and it would give tax relief to 95 percent of the wage earning Americans in this country. It is simple. Right now we pay Social Security tax on the first $72,600 of income. After that, we do not pay Social Security tax. If we earn a million dollars a year, our tax rate under Social Security is less than one percent. If we earn $15,000 a year, our tax rate on Social Security, which is part of the FICA, is six percent. We make six times more out of a meager income on which we cannot make ends meet. So if we just lifted the cap and said, fair is fair, all these people want to talk about a flat tax, well, let us make Social Security a flat tax on all income, not a regressive, super-regressive flat tax which is only on the first $72,600 of income. That would vouchsafe Social Security into the indefinite future. But you can also use some of that money to give a $4,000 exemption from FICA tax. Forty percent or 45 percent of Americans pay more in taxes to Social Security than they pay in income taxes. Ninety-five percent of Americans would benefit under that system. Everybody who earned less than $76,000 a year would get a tax break. But guess what? The same people are sitting in the leaders of the office of the Committee on Ways and Means and the Republican leader's office when I talk about a progressive Social Security reform, something to make this vital program safe, and saying, ``You better worry about your campaign contributions here if you raise my taxes.'' They want to tax the little people, and they want tax relief at the top. It is time to change this system. But it is not going to change, as the gentleman from Vermont pointed out, until more people who have more on the line choose to vote, and that is the majority of the American people, who are losing under the current system. Often I give speeches like this on the floor and I have had colleagues and friends from the Republican side of the aisle say, ``You're talking about class warfare. We don't want class warfare around here.'' That is what they say. That is not the truth. What they want is they want to continue the current class warfare, which is winning warfare against middle-income and working families and the poor in America to the advantage of that one-half of 1 percent at the top. That is what they want to perpetuate. They do not want to talk about it. They do not want the truth out there. It goes to so many issues. It goes to Social Security reform. It could be progressive. It goes to trade. I hope the gentleman does not mind if I switch to trade for a moment.

Mr. DeFAZIO

Mr. DeFAZIO. Mr. Speaker, after the high school shooting in my district last year, in my hometown of Springfield, Oregon, I talked to hundreds of residents. We had an incredible community dialogue about the causes and the possible solutions for youth violence. Everyone agreed it was complex. They had a long list of things they would like to see done. They would like to see something done about violence in the media. After 66 amendments and dozens of hours of staying in session until 2 o'clock in the morning, this House has done nothing about violence in the media. After a day and a half on the very sensitive issue of gun control, this House has done nothing to extend instant check and background checks to people who purchase guns at gun shows. After 66 amendments and dozens of hours and late into the night, we have done nothing to add to the services to serve at-risk youth and their families and prevent them from getting into violence. Nothing. Zero. Mr. Speaker, I hope my constituents and I hope my colleagues' constituents were watching. What we did here does not even meet the common-sense laugh test. It was a disgrace for this House of Representatives.

Mr. DeFAZIO

Mr. DeFAZIO. Mr. Speaker, I requested a leave of absence for June 22 and 23, 1999. As ranking member on the House Coast Guard Subcommittee, I have been invited to participate in a global shipping conference in the Netherlands to discuss shipping safety issues.

Mr. DeFAZIO

Mr. DeFAZIO. Mr. Chairman, I thank the gentleman for the generous grant of time. Mr. Chairman, what some would have us believe is that what we have before us today is a radical proposal; that is, that we should take a tax which is collected for one purpose from the American people for the aviation system and we should dedicate it to that purpose. We will hear from members of the Committee on the Budget and members of the Committee on Appropriations saying that is unconscionable that we should take it from one purpose and actually spend it on that. They do not like that. They are going to raise false allegations that this somehow will impact social security or other things. None of that is true. This is the way it should be and should have been. Our system is going to be overcapacity in the near future. We need to invest. We are collecting this tax from the American people to invest in this system. This bill will move us into the next century with greater capacity, greater comfort, and greater safety. It has some other provisions that go directly to safety, to the competition for small airports, so they can attract new airlines and help the underserved airports. All in all, this is an excellent piece of work, the first step in what should be a two-part process, the next dedicated to safety and passenger rights and to more competition.

Mr. DeFAZIO. Mr. Chairman, I thank the gentleman for yielding me this extremely generous period of time. It is an interesting debate we have before us. We have heard that if we spend the Aviation Trust Fund, funds which are collected for the safety and capacity of the aviation system, we might not be able to give generous tax cuts. Well, let me put a situation to my colleagues. I fly a lot, sit next to people and talk a lot about safety. If you have just been caught in a microburst, and your plane is heading toward the ground, and you are crossing yourself and saying your goodbyes, you are not going to feel really good about that $78 tax cut burning a hole in your pocket, and that is because you did not have the public funds for the Doppler radar to make the system safe for all Americans. There are only some things you can do with public dollars and with trust funds and tax dollars, and some things individuals can do for themselves. Individuals are not going to get together frequent fliers and collect money for Doppler radar for the local airport. They are going to spend the money on something else. We need that safety investment. It is also ironic that we are hearing that somehow this is an attack on Social Security. Many of the people are standing up who just voted for the Social Security lockbox because it is a trust fund. Guess what? This is a trust fund. The money is collected for capacity and safety from flying Americans; it should be spent on those purposes. Now, the chairman of the committee said, it is not spent on anything else; it is true, he is right. We only underspend the money, there is $9 billion in the trust fund, replace it with IOUs, and then we spend it on something else. We are not really spending it on something else because we have replaced it with IOUs. We do not make the critical investments in capacity, we do not make the critical investments in safety, we jeopardize the flying public and the future of aviation in this country all with very shortsighted budget logic. Vote against this amendment.

Mr. DeFAZIO

Mr. DeFAZIO. Mr. Chairman, the Skelton amendment would allow a legitimate and proportionate role in peacekeeping, 7,000 troops. Earlier the gentleman from Indiana questioned whether that would stretch our forces too thin, whether they were overextended. I do not believe the short-term commitment of 7,000 peacekeepers is an overextension. But the thoughtless, nonstrategic, nontactical permanent garrison of 100,000 troops in Europe is expensive and does overtax our military resources. Ask a military strategist, why a permanent garrison of 100,000 troops in Europe? They say, well, to show commitment to Europe. I think we have shown commitment. Commitment to what, I might ask? To subsidizing and offsetting the legitimate defense obligations of our allies in Europe? For years we were poised to repel an attack through the Fulda Gap. The only invasion going on in Eastern Europe into the former Soviet bloc involving the Gap is an invasion by a U.S.-based clothing store into that area. There is no threat from the Soviet bloc any longer. We no longer need to permanently garrison 100,000 troops in Europe. Support the later vote on the Shays-Frank amendment to phase down our obligation to 25,000 troops, and help our military to husband its resources so they can serve their core obligations to defend our Nation against real threats. That would be a vote here. If Members are really concerned about the military being stretched too thin, vote to stop that permanent, thoughtless, anachronistic deployment of 100,000 troops.

Mr. DeFAZIO

Mr. DeFAZIO. If the gentleman would further yield, Mr. Chairman, I was the county commissioner. We had tough times. We had to cut our match, which lost our Federal predator control agents. All of my sheep ranchers were in and said, my God, you will not believe what is going to happen, Commissioner, if we do that. Do Members know what happened? Nothing. In fact, the predation went down over a 5-year period. That is really interesting, that when we stop spending the money, and we heard that they did kill some predators still, but they did it in a very discriminate form on their farms without a subsidy. I have a real life example in my district, which gets these funds, where we do better without them. I thank the gentleman.

Mr. DeFAZIO. Mr. Chairman, I would like to offer a compromise here. The gentleman raised a number of issues in which I am vitally concerned: Airports, bird strikes, those things on which a pitiful amount of money was spent last year, inadequate. So if the gentleman would accept the first part of the amendment, which is a limitation only for lethal predator control for livestock, and not delete the amount of money and then support that, I would be happy to actually leave the funds in if we direct the service to not waste the money on the lethal predator control. Would the gentleman accept that?

Mr. DeFAZIO. Mr. Chairman, will the gentleman yield?

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

Mr. DeFAZIO. Mr. Chairman, this is an issue which the House is revisiting for the second year in a row. Last year there was a lot of confusion around this vote. I tried to make it much more explicit and simple this year. This amendment cuts funds only for lethal predator control to protect private livestock on private or leased land in the western United States. That is what this does. Now, we are going to hear that actually this amendment will cause brown tree snakes to invade Hawaii, it will cause tuberculosis to spread in the northern Midwest, it will cause plague in the Southwest, it will cause planes at National Airport to crash. No. In fact, all of those other activities would be enhanced, more money would be spent on those activities, if animal damage control, wildlife services, dropped their obsession with this failing environmentally and biologically unsound wasteful subsidy of spending $10 million, and this does not even cut every penny they are spending on lethal predator control in the western United States, if they just dropped their obsession and the subsidy. I also offer that the ranchers would come out ahead. Nothing in this amendment would prohibit a rancher from controlling predators that are problems on their own property, owned or leased. They could go out and do it themselves. They could hire someone to do it. In some cases States would still unwisely provide subsidies to these private ranchers. But the question is, should Federal taxpayers pay for predator control services on private ranches for profit in the western United States? If you have, as my mother did, a raccoon down the chimney, you cannot call a Federal Wildlife Services employee and ask them to remove the raccoon. If you have termites in your house, no one from the Federal Government is going to show up. They will laugh at you and tell you to call a pest control company. So why, why is it that ranchers, private ranchers in the West, can call up a Federal agency and get a Federal employee out there pronto, who will not only kill problem predators, which the ranchers could do on their own or hire someone on their own to do, but will indiscriminately kill other wildlife, and in some cases, as happened on the northern edge of my districts, kill domestic pets and poison humans with these indiscriminate M-44 devices which cause a horrible lingering death? Now, why is the Federal government paying to subsidize this activity? That is the question before us. It is very simple. In fact, if Wildlife Services stops its obsession and all the amount of energy they put into this program, they will do a better control, a better job in other States protecting against bird strikes, protecting human health and safety. So this is a fiscally responsible amendment, an amendment that goes to cutting out an obsolete subsidy that goes to private ranchers in the West, and will also benefit environmentally in the western United States, will stop the indiscriminate destruction of nontarget wildlife. There are more coyotes now than when they started this program 68 years ago, and they are more dispersed across the country, because they are not even looking at the biology, they are ignoring previous orders of Congress to look at more effective and nonlethal predator control methods. They are not targeting the problem, they are just breaking up and dispersing the packs. Now you have coyotes in places where they have not seen them in 100 years, like Manhattan, elevators in Seattle. It actually happened. This has not been seen for a long time in this country. It is time for this archaic and barbaric program and this subsidy to end. We have a very definitive opportunity to vote on it today. This is a very targeted amendment. Do not believe any of this other hooey about all the other problems that will be caused.

Mr. DeFAZIO. Mr. Chairman, I thank the gentleman for yielding. Just on the photo, that was provided by the Federal government. It was actually taken at a test facility where the coyotes were starved and then put into an enclosure with sheep. It is a graphic photo, but it is not exactly representative.

Mr. DeFAZIO. If the gentleman would further yield, and I appreciate the gentleman yielding, although we are on opposite sides of this issue, also on the total wildlife damage in agriculture in Oregon, it was $158 million. The gentleman is exactly correct. However, the damage to livestock from predators was about $1 million, and more was spent by the State and the Feds to control that than if we had actually reimbursed people. The major damage was damage to crops, $148.6 million. That damage, interestingly enough, took place from things on which coyotes predate, such as field mice, ground squirrels, prairie dogs, et cetera, et cetera. All of their prey is causing a big problem. Now we have to start another new program to go out and control the things that the predators used to prey on because they are eating the grain and other crops. We need to get a better vision. I think the gentleman and I could construct something that would work better. I thank the gentleman for his time.

Mr. DeFAZIO. Not at all. If the gentleman will further yield, we will talk about coyote biology.

Mr. DeFAZIO. Mr. Chairman, will the gentleman yield?

Mr. DeFAZIO. Mr. Chairman, I demand a recorded vote, and pending that, I make the point of order that a quorum is not present.

Mr. DeFAZIO

Mr. DeFAZIO. Madam Speaker, I was at the so-called classified briefing which was conducted by people who are consultants for defense contractors, and actually, subsequently it has turned out the test was not entirely successful, despite their protestations at that time.

Mr. DeFAZIO. Madam Speaker, I thank the gentleman for yielding me this time. It is particularly ironic that we are having the debate this week with the release of the latest Star Wars movie. We might title this ``Star Wars, the Phantom Solution,'' because that is what this is. This is a phantom solution. Hitting a bullet with a bullet in outer space to intercept a North Korean missile. Now, let us think about it a minute. North Korea has not yet built the missile, it has not been successfully tested, but they might build one or two and put warheads on them. Well, one thing that works in our arsenal of the antiballistic missile defense is the radar. We can track the warheads. Guess what? The second they shoot something at us, we will know. Guess what? We have thousands of nuclear warheads with which to retaliate if they have shot at us. Will they do that? No. This is not a real threat to the United States of America, single missiles launched that could be tracked back to their source. Any nut who is going to attack the United States with weapons of mass destruction is going to do it in an undetectable manner, and yet we are doing nothing to deal with bioterrorism, chemical terrorism, smuggled nuclear weapons, while we spend billions over here to make the defense contractors happy who have yet to conduct a successful defense test after spending nearly $50 billion. So what is the solution? Hurry up and deploy it. Deploy what? The phantom system against the phantom menace. This is real life; it is not a movie. We have to make tough choices. Are we going to defend America against real threats? Are we going to fund pay raises for the young men and women in the military? Or are we going to throw more billions after billions in a failed dream, a dream of Ronald Reagan which was put forward back in the 1980s, an impenetrable shield above the United States? We all know that even if this thing works, we can bring in a submarine and launch under it, or terrorists certainly can smuggle in a nuclear weapon. This does not defend the United States against real threats. I say to my colleagues, do not, do not do this. Do not destabilize the ABM Treaty. Do not waste our precious resources, and do not give people a false sense of security while we are letting real threats go unchallenged. Vote ``no.''

Mr. DeFAZIO. Madam Speaker, will the gentleman yield?