Peter DeFazio

Mr. DeFAZIO

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

Mr. DeFAZIO. Mr. Speaker, this is a straightforward motion within the parliamentary constraints of the House. Some might say, because we would ask the bill to be sent back promptly, that we are dooming it to death. We have been waiting 11 months for a highway bill, 11 months since the last one expired. Give us 2 hours, and we will give them a lot more investment and a lot more jobs. We can deliver this bill back within 2 hours. The House could pass a bill at the Senate levels this evening. All across America that would make a big difference. Across the entire country, that would mean that we would have, if we adopted that level ultimately for 6 years, an increase of $37 billion in spending. That is 1.7 million jobs; 1.7 million jobs could be created. We could begin to deal with the 161,000 bridges in this country that are structurally deficient, one in four. My own little State has a $4.7 billion bridge problem. We are trying to do our own part, as the chairman asked. We have raised registration and other fees. But we need a little bit of help because this is Interstate 5, the federal highway that goes between Canada, Mexico and includes Oregon, Washington, and California. There is some federal obligation, I believe, to help maintain that highway. This has been a maddening process for those of us who care about transportation, who care about our failing bridges and the potholes and our congestion and the lack of new starts and mass transit, all those things. If we had our way, we would have significantly more investment, according to a unanimous vote of the committee on which I serve, bipartisan. We voted for the number which has been outlined by the President's own Department of Transportation, $375 billion over 6 years. And even that would not take care of all the problems, but it would sure be a lot more to address them. But the President has taken a hard line at $259 billion, far below the number passed by the House, way below the number passed by the Senate, and about one-third below the number recommended by his own experts. This is inexplicable. This is investment. This is paid for out of gas taxes, which each and every American pays every time they tank up their car. We owe them an obligation to make this investment, not to stick with the levels of that are now 6 years out of date under the old legislation but to look at something that will spend more, begin to deal more with the backlog, put more people to work. We could help the President deliver on his own promise. This would create 1.7 million jobs. The President could sign a bill which we could have back and have ready for consideration by five o'clock tonight. He could sign it tomorrow in the Rose Garden, and he could refute the claims of his opponent that he had lost 1.7 million jobs because he would just have signed a bill to create 1.7 million jobs. For the life of me, I do not understand the reluctance at the White House to invest the people's tax dollars paid for every time they tank up their car in investment in the people's infrastructure, the infrastructure that will benefit not only individuals but businesses all across America who depend upon just-in-time delivery. Just-in-time delivery is pretty hard when they have got to detour a truck over the Cascade Mountains in Oregon, down the far side and then back down again to I-5 because of failed bridges. And that is unique. That kind of thing takes place all across America. Trucks are detouring hundreds of miles out of their way, wasting fuel, wasting time, making us less efficient because the Federal Government says we do not have the money to catch up with this backlog on bridges. Well, we do have the money. We are taxing the people. We should adopt a more robust level. We should deal with some of the problems and the disparities among the States, the whole issue that States give a whole bunch more in than they get back. But we cannot do that unless we have higher levels of funding. It is impossible. And that is what this amendment does, very simply. It would bring the bill back later this evening, spending at the levels of the Senate bill, which would put over 6 years, if finally adopted, 1.7 million people to work, 20,000 people in my State, and begin to defray that backlog. I would hope that we will pass this motion unanimously and make the investment that we need. And I think the President will sign it. I doubt very much he will see fit to veto the bill. Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. DeFAZIO. I am, Mr. Speaker, in its present form.

Mr. DeFAZIO. Mr. Speaker, I offer motion to recommit.

Mr. DeFAZIO. Mr. Speaker, I would like to thank the gentleman from Illinois (Mr. Lipinski) for his tireless work because this will be his last action on this legislation. I would like to thank my colleagues on the committee and the chairman of the committee for their work. If we ran things, we would have already completed a much more robust investment in our roads, bridges, highways and mass transit here in the United States, putting millions of people to work and beginning to deal with the backlog of projects. Unfortunately, we not only have to deal with the House, the other body, the Senate and the White House; in this case the White House has been the big problem. What we are doing here today will mean no increase. This will be the second year in a row with no increase in transportation infrastructure spending, even with the accelerating rate of deterioration of our bridges, even with growing congestion, no new starts. This does not get anywhere near what we would consider a good push toward dealing with those problems and putting people back to work. But the White House has chosen this extraordinarily low number, $256 billion. They would essentially underspend the highway trust fund. They collect gas tax from Americans and they would divert some of that money to other purposes by borrowing from it instead of fully investing it in roads, bridges, highways and mass transit. That means we are walking away from a lot of jobs. For every $1 billion we invest in transportation, the estimates are that we create 47,500 jobs, not just direct construction jobs which are good jobs which cannot be outsourced out of the United States, but also spill over into communities, small businesses, equipment providers, suppliers; all those people would benefit dramatically. If we were to adopt the numbers proposed by the Senate at $318 billion, we would create nearly another 2 million jobs. We could use those jobs. It would also help the President, who is dragging his feet on this, to deliver on his promise of creating 2 million jobs, which he has not done yet and is unlikely to be able to accomplish before November except with the stroke of a pen and signing a bill and showing that he will create them in the future. But he is refusing to do that. Unfortunately, there is hesitation with going forward with a more robust level and challenging the President. Someone spoke earlier about how the system works, and we have to deal with the Senate and White House, but we have the power to send something to the White House, allow him to veto it, and then override. The first vote I cast in the United States Congress was to override a much more popular President's veto of a highway bill, Ronald Reagan. This is not only good for the transportation infrastructure, the economy, just-in-time delivery, small businesses, construction workers, it would be of tremendous benefit to the entire economy. In closing, I want to thank the gentleman from Illinois (Mr. Lipinski). He has been a great mentor and friend to me. I will miss him. I am sure that we will take care of him when we do the highway bill next year. Although we do not know how much money we will have, but if we have lots of money, he will still do well, I am sure, and his State will do well.

Mr. DeFAZIO. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for the time. October 1, 2003: What is important about that date? That is the date that the last highway bill expired. Here we are, almost a year later, legislation that sets the course of all spending on roads, bridges, highways, mass transit in the United States of America has been in suspended animation working under a 7-year-old law for the last 11 months. I guess if the Republicans controlled things, things would not be like that; that is the kind of thing we hear around here all the time. They control the White House, the Department of Transportation, the House and the Senate. The White House is low-balling the number and underinvesting in America. They only want to spend $259 billion. They want to take our gas tax money and spend it on other things instead of transportation. The House did a little better, $283 billion, not enough, but they did better. But they do not want to confront the President in an election year. We could roll them easily. It would be embarrassing, though, just before the election for him to be against jobs and investment in America and spending gas taxes on the purposes for which it was collected. The Senate did a lot better yet, $318 billion. Then, of course, there was the unanimous bipartisan vote of the Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure, on which I serve, where we voted unanimously for $379 billion, $120 billion more than the President is willing to spend, because that is what the President's Department of Transportation said is necessary to take care of the problems in New York and other States. We need another $120 billion over what the President's asking for to deal with those problems. It is disingenuous to get up here and say, oh, if we follow these lower numbers, nothing is being hurt. We are foregoing new starts. We are foregoing new investments. We are foregoing additional investments that the President's own Department of Transportation says is necessary. Why? Why are we doing that? We collect gas taxes from each and every American every time they fill up their car, a bunch of them, and that money is supposed to be spent on roads, bridges and highways. We have seen the potholes. I have got failing bridges in my district. We could put hundreds of thousands of people to work tomorrow if we had more investment and more spending. I cannot understand why they will not spend our gas tax money to put people to work and meet needed investment in our infrastructure. So I stand here saying we should be doing more than just this continuing resolution, obviously. We should have sometime in the last 11 months. The Republicans should have been able to get their act together and agree on a highway bill. That has not happened. Well, if we cannot do that, at least let us put a little more money in there, put a few more people back to work, begin to address some of these problems that are out there, begin to take care of some of the new starts that New York has asked for that cannot go forward under this legislation. My colleagues cannot say, oh, the transportation experts in New York say this is going to take care of all the problems. It is not. It is not even beginning to address the backlog of problems of failing roads and bridges. Another interesting statistic from the President's own Department of Transportation is that, for every $1 billion we spend on roads, bridges, highways, mass transit, we create 47,500 jobs; not just construction jobs, but those are good jobs and good wage jobs. And guess what? They cannot be outsourced to another country. That is a really good thing about those jobs, but what it also does is it spills over into communities and small businesses. The suppliers, the contractors, the equipment operators, they are all local. They are locally based. It helps our local communities who need more jobs and investment. It helps small businesses, 47,500 jobs. So, that means by walking away from the higher numbers proposed by the Senate, that is $318 billion, that we are foregoing $34 billion of investment that is needed to repair our failing bridges, roads, highways and our mass transit inadequacies, new starts in New York and other States. I cannot do the math quite here, but 34 times 47 sounds like a heck of a lot of jobs to me, somewhere around 1.5 million jobs. This country could use another 1.5 million jobs. In fact, if the President would sign a bill at that higher number, then he could say he delivered on his promise of creating 2 million jobs during his presidency. Right now, he is kind of short on that. This is at best an absolutely minimal stopgap that is not meeting the real needs of Americans, that is not putting people back to work, that is not spending their gas tax money in the manner in which it was intended when it was collected and extracted from them, when they bought gas at the pump. I would say we have apparently no alternative but to support this inadequate level of funding, but the American people should be aware it is inadequate. It does mean no new starts. It does mean that we are not going to address a whole bunch of problems all around the country, and we can do better.

Mr. DeFAZIO

Mr. DeFAZIO. Mr. Speaker, the administration says time and time again, as if that would make it so, that Americans are safer today. After all, they are spending $10 billion to deploy a defective Star Wars system that has not been tested and could not hit missiles that will not be launched against us, and that makes us safer. Yet our ports are wide open. Three percent of the containers coming into America will be inspected this year. That is the most likely route of a weapon of mass destruction to the United States, and we are only inspecting 3 percent of them, and 2 percent of the trucks coming across the Mexican border? No one is going to shoot a missile at us, but they darn well might smuggle it in a truck or container and bring it in and detonate it in a city in the United States. And they are doing nothing about it. They are doing nothing about plastic explosives being carried on to airplanes, even after the incidents in Russia. We have been warning them for 2 years that they are likely to take planes down. They are still doing nothing to detect plastic explosives at passenger checkpoints or keep people who clean the planes from secreting bombs on to the plane. America is safer today? Maybe it is safer in an undisclosed location where Dick Cheney is hiding out, but if is not safer for average Americans.

Mr. DeFAZIO

Mr. DeFAZIO. Mr. Speaker, I rise today to recognize and to congratulate Martha ``Marti'' Young of Roseburg, Oregon. The Oregon Commission for Women selected Ms. Young as one of the 2004 Women of Achievement. She will be honored on Saturday, October 2nd, at the 20th Annual Women of Achievement Awards Dinner for her determined advocacy, intelligent leadership, and inspired vision on behalf of low income Oregonians. Marti Young has an impressive record of public service, with over thirty years of active participation. Wherever there has been innovation, progress, and development in human services in Oregon, she has been in the front ranks. She has been an unstoppable advocate, mobilizing resources and providing services to alleviate poverty and enhance the quality of life for the poor, the elderly, and people with disabilities. Marti Young gets things done--and done well. She has worked with the low income community and community partners to establish Head Start programs, a child care center for low income families, a school lunch program, and an emergency food bank, an energy assistance program, transportation services, shelter programs, and other resources and opportunities vital to the health and well-being of Douglas County. The world is full of heroes like Marti Young, working every day to make the world a better place. I am pleased to offer her the heartfelt congratulations and warm thanks she so richly merits.

Mr. DeFAZIO

Mr. DeFAZIO. I support accountability if that is what we will get out of it.

Mr. DeFAZIO. Let me ask a very simple question on that. Since every person that consumes electricity in my State is paying about 40 percent more today for the same electrons from the same plant because of the manipulation of the markets by Ken Lay and the fact that the Bush administration with Pat Wood and the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission would not do anything about it, does that mean that Ken Lay would finally go to jail?

Mr. DeFAZIO. We do not want to leave accountability because there is a heck of a lot of that missing around here.

Mr. DeFAZIO. I think it is a fair principle to say that the companies that are responsible for the pollution, the companies that made a profit when they created those hazardous waste and those Superfund sites should bear a substantial portion of the burden for cleaning them up. There is a new sort of vision on the other side of the aisle here, the Republicans saying, well, if you want to clean it up, clean it up yourself. Hey, somebody made money creating that mess. That is what this is all about. They made money. So tough luck. The same thing has happened in my State. We have a major Superfund problem. We have been told, well, sorry, there is no more money to deal with those sites. Maybe you people would like to clean up. We have got to live with it, and someone else created it. I have not noticed exactly that the oil and gas industries are hurting. Somehow I think I saw the last quarter when they were gouging the heck out of the American consumers with $2 and $2.20 a gallon of gas that they made record profits. So if they made record profits, how is it that they cannot afford a minimal continuation of the Superfund tax which would lower their profits a tiny bit, but not very much.

Mr. DeFAZIO. Let me just on that, I support the pledge as it is. I learned it that way. I think it is fine. The courts have in fact ruled many times that the use of God on our currency or our coinage or, in this case, under God in the pledge is diminimus. It is not a violation, and there is in fact no current threat. The one case that was pending against those words in the pledge was thrown out by the courts. There is no threat from the so-called activist judiciary at this point in time because the one that had been filed was thrown out. But instead of addressing real issues for which they have no answer, here is something where there is a non-existent threat, but there is a real threat to the kids who cannot go to college. There is a real threat to the seniors that are cutting their pills in half because they cannot afford them. There is a real threat to the woman I talked about who will be thrown out of her subsidized housing in Albany having worked her whole life because she cannot afford it any more. There are incredible threats to our troops in Iraq because of a reckless foreign policy, but they have no answer for those things. So they want to distract people with things that most of us agree on. We like the Pledge the way it is. There are a lot of things we love about our country, but they want to divide us on those issues and not deal with the real problems.

Mr. DeFAZIO. If we took instead and said, hey, let us go back to a program that we developed in the 1950s, National Direct Student Loans, National Defense Student Loans they were originally called, and said the Government is going to make the loans to its young people, guess what? The Government always knows where to find you. So the Government could do it without having the banks in the middle and for the difference in what the gentleman is talking about between 9.5 percent and say if the government charged 3.5 or 4 percent, the current Treasury bond rate to the students, we can give one million more Pell grants or a couple of million more loans to students. But instead, we are going to give money to the banks, the poor suffering, long suffering banks. They need the help, the subsidies. On the other side of the aisle we hear about free market economies and socialism and all that stuff. What is this? Why is the Government subsidizing banks? The second point is made about No Child Left Behind. I have a State that we have got some real problems funding primary and secondary education. I have not seen the number as big as Ohio's, but our number in the tens of millions of dollars that No Child Left Behind is underfunded. It is an unfunded mandate. Again, early on when the Republicans said no more unfunded mandates, I was with them. I was sincere. I said I do not think we should send down these mandates to local governments, down to schools and other communities. The Federal Government wants to send down new rules, they should pay for them. The President's signature bill. No Child Left Behind, $15 billion underfund, $15 billion being extracted from the States and local school jurisdictions that cannot afford to pay for the President's signature bill, much of which is repetitive. National testing. We have State testing. We did not need national testing. I voted against the Clinton mandate for national testing. I thought my Republican colleagues were sincere when they joined me in that. Bush becomes President, proposes an identical national testing mandate to President Clinton's, guess what a majority of the Republicans voted for? I voted against it. I voted against a Democrat and a Republican President. It was a stupid idea. It is very expensive. They are teaching to the test. It is a new mandate, and we are not paying for it; Washington, D.C. is not paying for it. These are the kinds of policies, the hypocrisy that we are getting out of that side of the aisle is unbelievable. The American people need to start paying a little bit of attention to what these people are really doing to them.

Mr. DeFAZIO. Mr. Speaker, the point the gentleman made is little understood, and I have a whole bunch of those guaranteed student loans to get through, and what you said just really merits revisiting. The Federal Government is going to guarantee banks 9.5 percent rate of return for extending loans to students to go to college to get a higher education. Now, it is a great thing that we can help kids get a higher education. That is good. But the point is those loans are guaranteed by the Federal Government. The bank has no risk. Zero risk. I always thought interest had something to do with risk. So if the bank has no risk, how is it that they are going to get guaranteed?

Mr. DeFAZIO. Mr. Speaker, we will move on to the second point the gentleman made about Medicare, and I think that that is an extraordinary point the gentleman made, the largest one-year premium increase in history, far exceeding any senior's Social Security cost- of-living adjustment. A funny thing, when they calculate cost of living, they do not include health care costs, pharmaceutical costs, it seems. They tell seniors, oh, well, your cost of living is going up 2.4, 2.6 percent. So to a senior, except perhaps wealthy seniors who own their own home; I mean there are very few people who can say, gee, my cost of living is only going up 2.4 percent a year. The point is that with the Medicare bill that we passed, the White House hid how much it costs. I mean, there is now a former employee who has now become a very highly paid lobbyist, very common with this administration; highly paid lobbyists, go work in the administration and then become highly paid lobbyists again. This guy was head of the Health Care Financing Administration. He told a career employee who was asked by Congress, how much will this bill cost, an actuary, and he figured it out. And he was told, the career employee was told by the political appointee, who is now a million-dollar-a-year lobbyist rewarded by the pharmaceutical and insurance industry, if you tell Congress how much this will really cost, I will fire you. Well, here is a guy who works for a living, has a family, career civil servant, and he was a little bit scared for his job, so he did not tell Congress how much it would really cost. He wrote it down, transmitted it to his boss, but he did not go to the press. He did not want to lose his job. Well, now, the Bush appointee has moved on to his million-dollar lobbying job, a little reward that he got from the pharmaceutical industry for having lied to Congress, and we find out that it is going to cost more like half a trillion dollars, maybe six-tenths of a trillion dollars, and most seniors are going to get more cost than benefit. Some seniors will actually pay more, those who have less than $1,000 a year in drug costs will actually pay more under this plan. And seniors in the doughnut hole, well, they get the doughnut hole; we know what that is. And then, some people who have over $4,000, $5,000 a year drug costs, they will get some benefit. But that is their vision. And they prohibited Americans from reimporting less expensive, FDA-approved drugs from Canada, and they outlawed Medicare bargaining for less expensive drug costs for all Medicare recipients. We could have had a program for nothing, not one taxpayer cent, just like we do with the VA. Everybody in Medicare has a card. Medicare goes out and bargains lower prescription drug costs. Just like I get in Blue Cross Blue Shield as a Federal employee, they negotiate discounts of 60, 70 percent. We could have provided a more meaningful benefit for no money, but guess what? It would not have made the pharmaceutical and insurance industries a huge pile of money. And they were against it and the White House nixed it, and that is now the policy of the United States of America. And there is only one way we can change that, and that is to change the presidency and to change the direction of this Congress, the House and the Senate. And then we can roll it back, and we can give a meaningful benefit at much less cost.

Mr. DeFAZIO. That is an insult, referring to drunken sailors.

Mr. DeFAZIO. Mr. Speaker, let us just sort of go back to those two points, because they are very important to a large number of my constituents, Social Security and Medicare. This year, Social Security will over-tax individuals who work for wages and salary and the self-employed earning less than $89,000 a year. They will pay more in taxes than necessary to support the system, under the theory that that $160 billion we are going to extract only from wage- and salary-earning people who earn less than $90,000 a year, those who are not the big beneficiaries of the tax cuts, to put into a trust fund to pay for their retirement. That would be great. Unfortunately, this Congress is going to borrow every penny of that money, every penny, and replace it with IOUs. Some good part of it will go to pay for tax cuts, borrowing money to pay for tax cuts for people who do not pay Social Security taxes and do not ever care if they collect a cent because they are so wealthy; they may not even be eligible, because they may have never worked for salary and wages, who have been just investors their entire lives with their inheritance. Now, remember, we voted seven times; it was before this gentleman arrived, but I believe the gentleman from New Jersey was here. Seven times we voted on a lockbox for Social Security. The Republicans were berserk about that; Lockbox, lockbox, do not spend that Social Security money. Well, I voted for it every time. Guess what? George Bush became President, the lockbox is gone, broke open the door, grabbed the money and ran. And there is no more talk of the lockbox. So all of that money is being extracted only from people who work for wages and salary and is going to be borrowed and spent. Now, that is extraordinary. And how are we going to honor the IOUs with deficits as far as the eye can see proposed by this President and this majority? How are we going to repay those IOUs?

Mr. DeFAZIO. If the gentleman will yield further, this is an excellent point. I do want to get back to the positive agenda, but we are talking about things that people need to think about. The control that we are giving to the Chinese and the Japanese over our economy, basically 40 percent of the $600 billion trade deficit we are going to run this year, we are borrowing from China and Japan. They are going to get unbelievable leverage over the future of the dollar and the future of the U.S. economy. And not only that. Of course, they are stealing our technology, and many American companies are aiding and abetting them in that theft of technology, because they want to access the cheap labor and the lack of environmental constraints and other things to move their companies and operate in China. The Republicans wanted to make a big deal about this satellite launch during the Clinton administration. Boy, that is like quaint history at this point, given the technology transfers and the theft going on today. You know, the Bush administration has filed one trade complaint. They told us, oh, we will give China, the bloody butchers of Beijing, Castro, he is bad, we cannot even sell him medicine, but the bloody butchers of Beijing that ran over the kids with the tanks and the democracy demonstrators and all that, we are going to give to these people permanent most-favored-nation status. We are going to pretend they are not a Communist country. We are going to do away with the laws of the United States that say, you do not extend that to Communist countries, Communist dictatorships. But they did with the rationale, oh, put them in the WTO, the World Trade Organization, then they will have to follow the rules. Well, the Bush administration, despite the document theft I have talked about time and time again, I have a couple of companies in my district that have been cloned in China, a small entrepreneur, a small business that the other side of the aisle cares so much about, except when it comes to, well, if the Chinese are stealing your stuff, tough luck. But they have filed one trade complaint against China, and it was with the pricing of drugs for the Pfizer Corporation. That is the only trade complaint filed against China. China, who is stealing the entire product of a small company, a beautiful American dream company in my district called Videx. A furniture manufacturing company in my district that refused to sell out to the Chinese, they cloned his entire line. Both these people have gotten calls from all over the United States saying, that happened to us too. These are the people that care about small business? They do not care about small business. They pretend to care about small business. They care about the mega-corporations that want to relocate to China and access the cheap labor, and they are playing right into the hands of the Chinese, who are an ongoing threat to the United States of America and will be the major threat in this century. But we are getting a little off track. This is pretty depressing. When I go to my chambers of commerce and I go around my district and I talk about this, people get a little depressed. I think if we talk a little more about the positive agenda, then we will get back to some of the problems.

Mr. DeFAZIO. If the gentleman will yield further, this is something a lot people do not realize. It is one thing to have a debate about whether we should cut taxes, pay down the debt or maybe spend more on education for our kids and other programs when we had a surplus. But this President has taken us from record surplus to record deficit in 4 short years. So we are borrowing the money to finance tax cuts. We are borrowing every penny of the Social Security surplus this year. $160 billion more will be paid in out of taxes that fall only on wage- and salary-earning Americans who earn less than $90,000 a year. We are giving the money they paid in for their retirement, this Congress is going to borrow it and give it substantially to those people you are talking about in much greater amounts. It will flow to the people who earn over $1 million a year. And guess what? They do not even pay the tax. If they are a investor, they do not pay a penny into Social Security. It is only people who work for wages and salary. So we are going to borrow all that money, and we are going to borrow another $440 billion. We are going to indebt our kids and grandkids for the next 30 years to borrow $600 billion to run the government this year. Every program of the government except for the Defense Department, and almost half of that, is being run on borrowed money. We are borrowing from our future. So we are borrowing that money to invest in trickle-down tax cuts.

Mr. DeFAZIO. Mr. Speaker, because he raised a couple of provocative issues, I did a series of Medicare prescription drug forums in my district, and I will get to the point of what the gentleman mentioned, but what was most interesting is I saw well over a thousand seniors in my district. A total of six had purchased the so-called prescription drug discount card. Two had not gotten them yet, even though they purchased them in June, and this was August. Two got them and said they were worthless. One said, well, it gave him about a 10 percent discount. And then one other guy said he was doing really great. But a bunch of the other people in the audience sort of shouted at him and said, no, he was a partisan guy. Whatever. Out of 1,000 people, that is it. But the point is, at one of those Medicare town halls an older woman came, worked until she was 70 years old, but all she has got, widowed, is her Social Security, and she is living in subsidized housing. They just raised, as the gentleman referenced about housing, they raised her share to the point where she came, and it was kind of sad, she came in a cab, which was pretty unusual, this town does not have a big cab service, it is a small city, Albany, Oregon. That was a little unusual. So I saw her and greeted her. I kind of helped her in. She said, ``This is only the second time I have been out in 3 months. I am really sick, and I am taking a lot of prescription drugs, and it is a big burden on me. Medicare does not cover them. I looked at prescription drug cards; it is not going to help.'' She had just gotten notice that her share, she was going to have to pay about $70 more a month for her apartment. She said, ``You know, I cannot afford that. I do not have the money now.'' She said, ``I am basically eating into my savings and I don't have much savings left.'' It was just incredibly sad to see that. So she is getting hit on both sides. She is getting hit by a phony prescription drug benefit, which is costing more than half a trillion dollars to the taxpayers in the United States that totally subsidizes the pharmaceutical and insurance industries, but delivers scant benefits to a person like her. Yes, there are some people who benefit from it, people who are, incredibly, even poorer than she is and have very large drug costs. But very few people will get a net benefit out of it. And then to sock her, this is where we have got to raise money so we can give trickle-down tax cuts to the wealthy, is from women like her, who worked her entire life?

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

Mr. DeFAZIO. Factually based.

Mr. DeFAZIO. Like a Dave Barry routine. Right?

Mr. DeFAZIO. Mr. Speaker, I want to at this point, since the gentleman is proposing a positive agenda for America, just to sort of put this discussion in context. If people are happy with the status quo, if they think the country is going in the right direction, if they believe that what has happened to our economy in terms of the job loss over the last 4 years, the outsourcing of American jobs, if they think that a pharmaceutical benefit based in subsidies to the pharmaceutical and insurance industries is the way to help seniors and other Americans afford prescription drugs, if they think that borrowing 600, $700 billion a year, 10 percent of our accumulated national debt in 1 year, breaking the debt limit of the United States for the third time in one Presidency, if they look at those things and think that that is a good, sane direction for this country, then they might not be interested in this alternative. But the alternative that we are offering as Democrats today is something that, instead of benefiting that one tenth of 1 percent or maybe, to be generous, one half of 1 percent of the populace who are doing so well with these policies, then we are offering a different direction. We do not think the United States of America is on the right path with its fiscal policy, its trade policy, its tax policy, tax fairness, with its Medicare policy and health care policy, and a whole host of education policies, things that are important to Americans. So I want the gentleman to continue to describe a positive alternative because maybe a little later in the hour I will wax a little more eloquent about how bad things really are, from my perspective, the perspective of my district in Southwest Oregon, and I think many other districts around the country. But I just kind of wanted to put the context on this discussion.