Tom Harkin

Mr. HARKIN

Mr. HARKIN. Mr. President, today we will be introducing the Public School Repair and Renovation Act. This legislation will authorize $1.3 billion in grants and no interest loans to enable school districts to make urgent repairs at our nation's public schools. I am pleased to be joined by Senators Robb, Bingaman, Feinstein, Kennedy, Wellstone, and Dodd in cosponsoring this legislation in the Senate. The facts about the condition of our nation's schools are well known. The average age of the schools in this country is 42 years. 14 million children attend classes in buildings that are unsafe or inadequate. The General Accounting Office reports we need $112 billion to just bring our schools up to overall good condition. How can kids prepare for the 21st century in schools that didn't even make the grade in the 20th century? It is a national disgrace that the nicest thing our kids see are shopping malls, sports arenas, and movie theaters, and the most rundown place they see is their school. What signal are we sending them about the value we place on them, their education and future? I was disturbed by the comments of Tunisia, a Washington, D.C. 5th grader in Jonathan Kozol's book, ``Savage Inequalities.'' This is what she said. It's like this. The school is dirty. There isn't any playground. There's a hole in the wall behind the principal's desk. What we need to do is first rebuild the school. Build a playground. Plant a lot of flowers. Paint the classrooms. Fix the hole in the principal's office. Buy doors for the toilet stalls in the girl's bathroom. Make it a beautiful clean building. Make it pretty. Way it is, I feel ashamed. The legislation we are introducing would make it possible to fix the holes in the walls of Tunisia's school, put doors on the bathroom stalls and paint the classrooms. These repairs would make Tunisia feel a little less ashamed of herself and of her school. This legislation is part of a comprehensive two-prong strategy to modernize our nation's schools. This bill complements our continuing effort to provide tax credits for new construction and modernization projects. We have advocated school modernization tax credits that would finance $25 billion in new construction or major renovations. The Public School Repair and Renovation Act will complement that effort and I urge my colleagues to support it.

Mr. HARKIN

Mr. HARKIN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that Sally Phillips of my staff be granted the privilege of the floor for the duration of the statements of Senator Specter and myself on the Medical Errors Reduction Act, S. 2038.

Mr. HARKIN

Mr. HARKIN. Mr. President, I am pleased to join my colleague, Senator Specter, in the introduction of the Medical Errors Reduction Act of 2000. Senator Specter just outlined the major provisions of the bill. I will not go back over that; only suffice to say our bill addresses a critical problem facing America's health care system, a problem that places millions of Americans at risk of serious injury or death every time they seek medical attention. Again, I thank my distinguished chairman, Senator Specter, for putting this bill together in such a timely fashion. This is something we have to address, and we have to focus on this immediately. Many of my colleagues are aware of the recently released Institute of Medicine report which describes a health care industry plagued with systems errors and provider mistakes. If you are familiar with the report, then you have discovered something I do not think a lot of people are aware of and of which I was not aware, and that is, we are more likely to die from a medical mistake than diabetes, breast cancer, or a traffic accident. The report found that deaths due to medical errors are the fifth leading cause of death in this country. This chart is from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, National Center for Health Statistics. It shows medical errors as the fifth leading cause of death. Some say it is the eighth leading cause of death. More people die from medical errors than pneumonia, diabetes, accidents, or kidney disease. Whether it is the fifth or eighth, we have been given a wake-up call. The cost to our health care system and national economy from medical errors is enormous. The total cost, we are told by the Institute of Medicine, of injuries due to medical errors is $17 billion to $29 billion annually. This estimate cannot accurately reflect the true personal cost to patients and their families when a diagnostic test is misread, a drug that is known to cause an allergic reaction is prescribed, or a surgery goes awry. One does not have to look too far for stories. I know some personally in my own family. Another came from one of my staff members who told me about the disastrous outcome of a conventional gall bladder procedure performed on her father in 1991. It seems he went in for a laparoscopy and came out with a severed bile duct. The gall bladder was removed surgically, and the patient was sent home to recuperate. Within days, he experienced great abdominal pain, could not eat, and began to lose weight. His wife is a nutritionist and could tell something was very wrong. They kept going back to the doctors who performed the surgery only to be told they could not find anything wrong and that his problems were probably psychological. Finally, in great frustration, the man and his wife turned to a neighbor, an old-fashioned country doctor who sent them to a surgeon friend of his. Sure enough, this doctor discovered the problem and it was corrected, but only after several months of pain and frustration. Deaths from medication errors total more than 7,000 annually. These errors erode the trust Americans have in their health care system. Let me be clear, most medical errors that occur in our health care system are not the fault of any one individual or institution. We have the best trained, most sophisticated health care workforce in the world. Thousands of highly skilled and conscientious doctors, nurses, pharmacists, and other medical professionals operate under tremendous pressure and time constraints. It is a complex problem which must be addressed with comprehensive solutions and rigorous changes that will help providers better perform their jobs and prevent medical errors from happening in the future. It is a problem that is systemic, not personal. Again, we must work together, in a bipartisan way, because all Americans enjoy the right to be free from accidental injury, accidental death, and medication-related errors when they need care. Again, I thank my distinguished chairman for his leadership on this issue, for putting this bill together. I am proud to be his chief cosponsor. In closing, this Congress now has an opportunity to join together to address a problem that has the potential to impact the life of every citizen who seeks health care. I hope all of my colleagues on both sides of the aisle will join Senator Specter and me in supporting this important legislation. I yield the floor to my distinguished chairman.

Mr. HARKIN

Mr. HARKIN. Mr. President, I am pleased to join my colleague, Senator Specter, in the introduction of the Medical Errors Reduction Act of 2000. Senator Specter just outlined the major provisions of the bill. I will not go back over that; only suffice to say our bill addresses a critical problem facing America's health care system, a problem that places millions of Americans at risk of serious injury or death every time they seek medical attention. Again, I thank my distinguished chairman, Senator Specter, for putting this bill together in such a timely fashion. This is something we have to address, and we have to focus on this immediately. Many of my colleagues are aware of the recently released Institute of Medicine report which describes a health care industry plagued with systems errors and provider mistakes. If you are familiar with the report, then you have discovered something I do not think a lot of people are aware of and of which I was not aware, and that is, we are more likely to die from a medical mistake than diabetes, breast cancer, or a traffic accident. The report found that deaths due to medical errors are the fifth leading cause of death in this country. This chart is from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, National Center for Health Statistics. It shows medical errors as the fifth leading cause of death. Some say it is the eighth leading cause of death. More people die from medical errors than pneumonia, diabetes, accidents, or kidney disease. Whether it is the fifth or eighth, we have been given a wake-up call. The cost to our health care system and national economy from medical errors is enormous. The total cost, we are told by the Institute of Medicine, of injuries due to medical errors is $17 billion to $29 billion annually. This estimate cannot accurately reflect the true personal cost to patients and their families when a diagnostic test is misread, a drug that is known to cause an allergic reaction is prescribed, or a surgery goes awry. One does not have to look too far for stories. I know some personally in my own family. Another came from one of my staff members who told me about the disastrous outcome of a conventional gall bladder procedure performed on her father in 1991. It seems he went in for a laparoscopy and came out with a severed bile duct. The gall bladder was removed surgically, and the patient was sent home to recuperate. Within days, he experienced great abdominal pain, could not eat, and began to lose weight. His wife is a nutritionist and could tell something was very wrong. They kept going back to the doctors who performed the surgery only to be told they could not find anything wrong and that his problems were probably psychological. Finally, in great frustration, the man and his wife turned to a neighbor, an old-fashioned country doctor who sent them to a surgeon friend of his. Sure enough, this doctor discovered the problem and it was corrected, but only after several months of pain and frustration. Deaths from medication errors total more than 7,000 annually. These errors erode the trust Americans have in their health care system. Let me be clear, most medical errors that occur in our health care system are not the fault of any one individual or institution. We have the best trained, most sophisticated health care workforce in the world. Thousands of highly skilled and conscientious doctors, nurses, pharmacists, and other medical professionals operate under tremendous pressure and time constraints. It is a complex problem which must be addressed with comprehensive solutions and rigorous changes that will help providers better perform their jobs and prevent medical errors from happening in the future. It is a problem that is systemic, not personal. Again, we must work together, in a bipartisan way, because all Americans enjoy the right to be free from accidental injury, accidental death, and medication-related errors when they need care. Again, I thank my distinguished chairman for his leadership on this issue, for putting this bill together. I am proud to be his chief cosponsor. In closing, this Congress now has an opportunity to join together to address a problem that has the potential to impact the life of every citizen who seeks health care. I hope all of my colleagues on both sides of the aisle will join Senator Specter and me in supporting this important legislation. I yield the floor to my distinguished chairman.

Mr. HARKIN

Mr. HARKIN. Mr. President, I am pleased to join my colleagues, Senator Specter, as primary cosponsor of a sense of the Senate resolution, introduced yesterday, that puts the Senate on record that funding for NIH should be increased by $2.7 billion in Fiscal Year 2001. NIH is the premier medical research institution in the world-- research funded by NIH is key to maintaining the quality of our health care and key to finding preventive measures, cures and the most cost effective treatments for the major illnesses and conditions that strike Americans. Two years ago, our Appropriations Subcommittee provided NIH with a $2 billion increase to set us on a five-year course to double NIH funding over five years. Last year, our Subcommittee was able to secure a $2.3 billion increase for NIH--continuing on the course to double NIH funding over five years. A $2.7 billion increase for NIH in Fiscal Year 2001 would keep us on track to double NIH in the five years. I was disappointed that the President's budget which we received today only requested a $1 billion increase for NIH. Funding biomedical research is especially important now when research on stem cells and progress made on the Human Genome project offer such promise. I hope to work closely with Senator Specter this year to build on last year's increase for NIH as we move to doubling funding for NIH by 2003.

Mr. HARKIN

Mr. HARKIN. It is exactly what we are talking about. I point out that in the administration's proposal for their farm support this year, they will use a 5-year average of gross income--gross income. Look, what about the increased price of fuel, machinery, fertilizer, seed, and, thanks to the Federal Reserve System, increased interest rates? I said before and I say to my friend again that the farmer has a $100,000 gross income averaged over 5 years. But if his costs are $92,000, what does that mean? It doesn't mean anything.

Mr. HARKIN. Mr. President, I want to talk on the issue of agriculture and rural America, and the administration's proposal announced by Secretary Glickman yesterday for improving the farm safety net. At the outset, I am pleased that the administration has recognized that the Freedom to Farm bill has failed. The proposal the administration came up with is an impetus for change, and I think it will do a good deal to remedy the shortcomings of the Freedom to Farm bill. I think the administration proposals of yesterday are a good step forward. I will go through a number of those. However, I want to forewarn my colleagues, while I think there is a lot in the administration's proposal that is good and positive and moves us ahead, I believe there are some shortcomings in it also. First, on the conservation end, I believe the administration's proposal is a good step forward. It has some very positive features. The administration is proposing, for example, that we extend the conservation reserve program by 3.6 million acres up to 40 million acres. I believe that is a good proposal. That will do a lot to help conserve land and water and take some land out of production. It will help our wildlife. I think this is a good step. There is a proposal for $600 million for the conservation security program. This is a program that is designed after a bill I authored to set up a conservation security program whereby farmers and ranchers could, on a voluntary basis, carry out certain conservation measures on their land, and then they would receive payments for doing so. This program would be administered by the Natural Resources Conservation Service. Again, this is fully voluntary, but it is another means whereby farmers could, by engaging in certain conservation practices, shore up their income. The wetland reserve program has a cap right now of 975,000 acres. The administration would enroll an additional 210,000 acres in 2001 and another 250,000 acres in each subsequent year--again, a very positive step forward, to enroll land in the wetland reserve program. There are several other conservation proposals: new funding for the farmland protection program, the wildlife habitat incentives program, and the environmental quality incentives program. All of these are extremely good measures that will both help conservation but also improve farm income. The risk management provisions are positive. The administration is proposing about $640 million for a premium discount program for farmers and ranchers who take buy-up levels of crop insurance. That would help them reduce the cost and get better coverage. The administration also is proposing $100 million annually to develop a policy that covers multiyear losses. In places such as North Dakota, South Dakota, some parts of Minnesota, and others, we have had areas where they have had 3, 4, 5 years of drought, floods, crop disease or other damaging conditions. We need a risk management program that covers those multiyear losses. I am glad to see the administration taking a step to address this problem in the budget. The administration is also proposing to establish a pilot program for insuring livestock. Currently there is no such insurance program. I hear a lot from livestock producers in Iowa that there should be some form of a risk management program, an insurance program for livestock production. Half of all our farm receipts come from livestock or livestock products. The administration is proposing a pilot program of $100 million annually to provide livestock producers with some form of price protection. I believe that is another good provision in the administration's proposal. There is another area I am very pleased to see the administration addressing. That is using $130 million in the next couple of years to establish new cooperative development programs to provide equity capital for new livestock and other processing cooperatives. This proposal would address concerns about market concentration by encouraging new entrants into the livestock processing market. It would also provide an additional source of income for farmers through the ownership of value-added processing. This is key. We have to help farmers to form more cooperatives, both for the marketing of their grains and livestock and also to develop value-added processing plants and enterprises that would help farmers obtain more of the value added to the livestock and crops they produce. Again, this is a good proposal. The administration is proposing to develop a new bioenergy program to encourage greater use of farm products for production of biofuels. Again, by supporting ethanol and other bioenergy feedstocks, we can use some of our land, perhaps even some of our conservation land, to produce energy sources such as switch grass, which can then be used to generate energy. We have a project ongoing in Iowa right now that will do that so we can use land set aside in the conservation reserve program. We can grow products such as switch grass. We can cut that switch grass and burn it for energy. So we get conservation, plus the farmer will get some additional income, plus it will cut down on our need for imported energy into this country. I am delighted the administration is moving ahead on that. Lastly, the area I am concerned about with the administration's proposal is sort of the heart and soul of it, which is farm income support. Again, the administration recognizes that we need some kind of countercyclical type of support. That is true. That is what we need. That is what Freedom to Farm does not provide. It does not provide an adequate safety net. It does not provide for countercyclical help. Nevertheless, the administration proposal misses the mark. They are proposing that under this program they are going to have supplemental government payments, in addition to the AMTA payments under Freedom to Farm, to eligible producers if projected gross income for the crop falls below 92 percent of the preceding 5-year average. Gross income would include gross market revenues for the crop plus government payments, including AMTA payments, marketing loans, and loan deficiency payments. That is where I have a problem with the administration's proposal. First of all, they are going to use a 5-year average. That is fine. But what are they using? They are using gross income over 5 years. They are throwing into the gross income all of the government payments, loan deficiency payments, marketing loan gains, everything. Farm income should not be looked upon as government payments. Farm income ought to come from the marketplace. That is where the farmer ought to get a better share of the marketing dollar. If you are going to use gross income for 5 years, what about the farmer's costs? Seed goes up in price; fertilizers go up; fuel costs are sky-rocketing; machinery and equipment continue to go up. And, thanks to the Federal Reserve System, interest rates are going up. So if you are just going to take gross income over the last 5 years and not take into account the cost to the farmer, you are already downgrading the net income farmers get. A farmer can tell you--I don't care how much gross income they get-- they have to know what their bottom line is. You might say a farmer has a gross income of $100,000. That sounds great. But you add up all the costs of feed, seed, fertilizer, machinery, fuel, equipment, interest rates and the like; if his costs are $92,000, the farmer has made $8,000. That is what we are seeing happening out there. To use gross income over 5 years, I think, is inadequate, ineffective, illogical, and not in the best interest of trying to get net income up to farmers. That is what I am interested in--net income. I don't care about gross income. I want to know what the net income of farmers is. What are they going to have left afterward to put away for a rainy day, to help their bottom line, to help put their kids through school, to keep a roof overhead, to help buy some better machinery in the future, to help provide for their retirement, to pay off their land costs? This is what we ought to be thinking about. I am disappointed that the administration would use gross income over 5 years and average it out that way. Again, that is better than the Freedom to Farm bill, which is fixed and declining payments based upon acreages and yields from 20 years ago. That is totally illogical. So is this better than Freedom to Farm? Yes, a little bit, but it still shortchanges farmers. Quite frankly, I think we are going to have to modify that. I am disappointed, I must say, in the administration for using gross income figures over 5 years. That is not the right way to base the income support. Again, they have tried to target the payments to family-size farms. I am all for that principle, and, quite frankly, the way they have figured it, most of the income support would go to the bulk of the farmers who need the help. I won't get into the mechanics of that, but it basically looks that way at this point. The idea of sending the bulk of the support to family farms who need the help is good, but they are basing it over income of 5 years--gross income--and farmers would be getting shortchanged. Secondly, the administration, in establishing and sort of outlining and coming up with this program, said in their release: Rising crop surpluses, continued low prices and declining incomes will contribute to increasing farm financial stress in 2000, indicating a need for further Federal assistance. However, added assistance should not be made in the form of emergency legislation with the bulk of the payments in the form of Agricultural Market Transition Act payments. That approach, taken the past two years, is not in the best interests of farmers and taxpayers, as the assistance is ad hoc and ineffectively targeted. Well, that is partially true--certainly about the AMTA payments. Listen to this again: Rising crop surpluses, continued low prices, and declining incomes will contribute to increasing farm financial stress in 2000, indicating a need for further Federal assistance. There is nothing in their program--the administration's proposal-- that will tend to reduce crop surpluses. A little bit of the land taken out for the CRP, or WRP, that is fine. That is mostly marginal land anyway. But there is nothing in here that will tend to get our surpluses down and thus, increase the market price, or the price farmers get when they sell their crops. That is the problem. It seems to me that the administration has sort of bought into the idea that we are going to plant fence row to fence row, we are going to continue to produce everything we can produce--the sky is the limit-- and we are going to come in with some kind of targeted Federal assistance. On the one hand, I believe we do need some Federal assistance. On the other hand, we need to get out of the mindset we are in; we need to have a different mindset, one which says we can shape programs that will help get the surpluses down and thus increase the price at the farm gate. I would hope that we can put some money into a shorter-term reserve program, something that would be 2 years, or maybe a 3-year program, to facilitate taking some land out of production and putting it into conservation use for a while. I am talking about land we will not get into the 10-year CRP. Farmers will not tie up relatively productive land by agreeing to take it out for 10 years. You can't pay them enough to do it. But I believe they will take some land out in this period of very low commodity prices for maybe 2 years. That should help alleviate the surpluses and improve market prices. I would think we would have a target of saying we want to enroll a certain number of acres in a short-term program, which would tend to get some of our surpluses down. So I hope we can come up with the funding to attract land into a shorter-term reserve or paid set-aside program. Lastly, there is nothing in the administration's proposal that will provide farmers the assistance they need to store grain so they can market their grain in a more orderly fashion. The Farmer Owned Reserve was taken away by the Freedom to Farm bill. It was one of the best programs we ever had. Right now, farmers harvest grain and they can put it under loan for a time, but there are no storage payments. And then they have to sell their crops even if the price is very low. Well, we need a program for on-farm storage, where they can store it at the farm or in an elevator, but the payments ought to go to the farmers. There is nothing in the administration's proposal that would do that. Now, there is a provision--and I haven't looked at it that closely-- which says: Using existing authorities to implement a new on-farm storage loan program to facilitate farmers' marketing opportunities. Well, I don't know exactly what that is, a loan program. I am talking about storage payments to farmers, which we had before, and not some kind of a loan program just for the facilities. So I think while there are some good things in their proposal in terms of the conservation programs that are in there, the new amount of money for cooperatives, to encourage cooperatives for marketing--I ask unanimous consent for another 3 minutes.

Mr. HARKIN. There is a good proposal in there on the bioenergy. But when you get to the heart of it, and what we are going to do to get away from this mindset of the Government supplying the income to the farmers--that is the heart of what the problem is--and get to the mindset of how do we get the prices up at the farm gate, this is where the administration's proposal falls short. I am hopeful as we move ahead we can convince the administration to get off of that mindset, to provide for perhaps some increased loan rates for farmers, to provide for storage payments to farmers, and to provide for a shorter-term paid set-aside program. Again, as the administration said in their proposal: Rising crop surpluses, continued low prices, and declining incomes will contribute to increasing farm financial stress in 2000, indicating a need for further Federal assistance. We have to get off of that mindset. We have rising surpluses. Well, let's get them down and provide for the kind of programs that will get the surpluses down. Continued low prices--get those low prices back up at the farm gate--that is the mindset we have to get on, and I hope we can take the good things in the proposal, but get to the heart and soul of it, which is getting farm income up--not from Government payments, but from the prices farmers receive for their products. That is what we have to do. I see my friend from Minnesota is here to speak on this. Again, we have talked about this, and we share the same strong feelings that this is not adequate, this needs some additional work in the Congress. I hope we can get the administration to help us on that. I yield the floor.

Mr. HARKIN. The Senator is absolutely correct. I look forward to working with him and others to set forth proposals that will move us in the right direction.

Mr. HARKIN. Will the Senator yield on that?

Mr. HARKIN. We have to get away from thinking that agriculture is some sort of a minor entity out there, some kind of a sidebar issue. Agriculture is still, if I am not mistaken, something like 20 percent of our gross national product. I think we are up from 20 percent, if I am not mistaken. People still have to eat. Food is one thing we can't do without. Yet we sort of treat agriculture as sort of--well, it is sort of a sidebar, sort of a side item. We have to think of agriculture as a central, integral part of our entire economic structure in America.

Mr. HARKIN

Mr. HARKIN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

Mr. HARKIN

Mr. HARKIN. I understand, Mr. President, we are in morning business.

Mr. HARKIN. Mr. President, are there time limits on how long we may talk in morning business?

Mr. HARKIN. Ten minutes. Mr. President, I see my colleague from Minnesota has arrived on the floor. I want to take this time today to talk a little bit about----

Mr. HARKIN. I am delighted to yield.

Mr. HARKIN. I am sorry.

Mr. HARKIN. I may ask unanimous consent to extend my morning business remarks.

Mr. HARKIN

Mr. HARKIN. Mr. President, how much time do I have remaining?

Mr. HARKIN. I would like to let my fellow Senators know I don't intend to take that much time. Mr. President, I noted with some interest that the chairman of the committee, Senator Gramm from Texas, when he started speaking a few moments ago said this debate we were having--and he mentioned the Senator from North Dakota, he mentioned this Senator--indicated the fundamental difference between the parties. I waited to see just exactly what he meant by that. I never heard an explanation. But maybe this debate does show some fundamental differences. For example, we are for openness. We believe the Federal Reserve ought to meet in the open, that it shouldn't meet in private. We believe transcripts ought to be made available to the public sooner than they are. Of course, we believe in lower interest rates. We want open meetings and lower interest rates, and the other side wants private meetings and higher interest rates. Perhaps that is really the fundamental difference we are talking about. I say it only tongue in cheek. But it does, I think, really say what this is all about. That is whether or not we are going to have some more accountability and openness in the Federal Reserve rather than what we have had in the past. Its decisions affect every American's life. It affects all of us. This recent interest rate increase today, as the Senator from North Dakota said, is a tax on all Americans. We are all going to pay for it. Some of us can afford to pay it a lot more easily than others. If you are a creditor, if you are part of the creditor class in America where your income exceeds your outgo, where you are able to save, where you have a lot of assets, and you are into investing and lending, higher interest rates may not be such a bad idea. However, if you are in the lower income sector of our economy, you need to buy a new car to get to work and the old one has run out, you do not have enough money, you have to put some money down, pay for it on time, or roll your interest on your credit cards month to month, maybe you need to make your house payment, maybe your kids are in college, you need to make some college payments, and you are an individual making less than $30,000 a year as a family, this is a real tax. It is going to cost you more money. Yet we don't know what the debate was. We don't know the details of why they did this. We will not know for years. I believe there is an important difference. The Open Market Committee just announced another quarter-point interest rate from 5.5 to 5.75 and an increase in the discount rate as well. This makes four times in 1 year that we have had interest rate increases--four times, three times last year, and then once this month. These increases hurt prospective homeowners. It is going to hurt the housing market. I want to say at the outset, we all want Americans to save more money. For modest-income Americans, the best savings program they have is owning their own homes. For modest-income Americans, when they are through with their working lives and they retire and they are on Social Security, the biggest asset they have, and in many cases the only asset they have, is the equity they have in their homes. So we want Americans to become homeowners. This interest rate increase will hurt Americans hoping to own their own homes. It will decrease the number of Americans who can own their own homes and have that as their savings vehicle. It will hurt small businesses and manufacturing. My farmers, who are already hurting enough and who have to borrow every year to get their crops in, they are going to get hit again. Everyone will be hurt one way or another. Some will feel it more profoundly than others. The prime rate is moving up today from 8.5 percent to 8.75 percent. That means the real interest rate, not the nominal but the real interest rate, adjusted to inflation, is close to 6.55 percent. Again, it is the real interest rate that you feel, not the nominal. For example, if interest rates were at, say, 10 percent, and inflation were at 8 percent, the real rate of interest would be 2 percent. If, however, interest rates are 8.75 percent, and inflation is only 2.2 percent, your real rate of interest is 6.55 percent. That hurts you more. When our economy was flourishing in the 1960s with the highest growth rates we ever had, our real prime rates ran around 2 percent to 3 percent. In other words, the real interest rates were 2 to 3 percent. Today it is about 6.55 percent. Think about that. Hopefully, the Fed will not be continuing this process because this hurts people, and there is no reason for it. That is really the essence of my remarks today. Mr. Greenspan and the Federal Reserve Board seemed to think they needed to make a preemptive strike on inflation before we see clear signs of inflation out there. This view, if aggressively acted upon, would place an absolute cap on our economy's ability to grow. It would destroy much of our potential for growth. That is a tragedy. Back in 1996, I opposed the renomination of Mr. Greenspan along with a number of my colleagues--a small number. I said at the time, and I say again today, I have no personal animus toward Mr. Greenspan. I agree with those who said he has had a distinguished career in public service. I think he is a bright individual. Like I say, I have only met him, as I can remember, once in my entire lifetime, so I have no personal animosity toward him. I think he is an honorable individual, exceptionally smart--bright. I did have one thing someone brought to my attention at one time. They said back in his youth he was a follower of Ayn Rand, and was with some little group with Ayn Rand in New York City. I said: Don't hold that against him. I said: If you can't test way-out theories, far-out kinds of philosophies when you are young, when are you ever going to test them? I assume Mr. Greenspan has moved on from his youthful days of following that way-out philosophy of Ayn Rand's and is now more mainstream and more centrist than that. But like I say, that is fine. I don't mind what people do in their youth. That is the time to test theories and philosophies, when you are young. As the Senator from North Dakota said, I have no personal animosity toward Mr. Greenspan. I just have a problem with what I believe the philosophy is at the Fed. I don't think it just applies to Mr. Greenspan, It applies to a lot of people at the Federal Reserve Board. In 1996, I opposed the renomination because I feared that he, along with others, had a history of jumping to raise interest rates and to choke off economic growth too soon, blocking the economy from growing at its potential and keeping millions of modest-income, middle-income Americans from benefiting from their hard work. A former Chairman of the Fed, William McChesney Martin, once said it was the Fed's job to remove the punch bowl at the party. At some point that should be done. But doing it too early kills our chance for growth, for jobs. It effectively kills any chance for the maximum number of Americans to climb the ladder of opportunity. Prior to 1996, Mr. Greenspan showed very little concern in that regard. He was focused on the possibility of accelerating inflation. He had, in the past, I believe--and again I say he and the others on the Fed--had damaged the economy by moving too quickly to raise rates and choking off our growth potential. For some time, a lot of economists, not all but a lot of economists took the view that NAIRU, the nonaccelerating inflation rate of unemployment, was 5\1/2\ or 6 percent; in other words, that if unemployment went below 5\1/2\ or 6 percent for a period of time, then inflation would take off. Once it started to accelerate, it would be very hard to stop. So that view was once unemployment got down to that level for a period of time, one had to raise interest rates and stop unemployment from being too low. At the same time, the orthodox view among a lot of economists about how fast could the economy grow over the long term was about 2.3 percent; somewhere between 2 and 2.5 percent. I must again be very frank. That was the administration's estimate of the economy's potential for sustainable growth. That was in President Clinton's budget's economic assumptions for FY 97 and I opposed that. I said to the President and his economic advisers at the time: That is nonsense. You are following some of these economists who do not understand the new economy that is out there. They do not understand the new rate of productivity growth and what is causing it. They are still looking back. They are back in the eighties and not in the 1990s. So it was not just the Fed at that time, it was also the administration of President Clinton and the CBO. They saw it as a simple calculation. You take the increased expected productivity of the economy, estimated at 1.2 percent--again, very low--add the increase to the labor pool--about 1.1 percent--and you get a 2.3-percent rate of growth. Again, they said if economic growth exceeded 2.3 percent over time, or if unemployment fell below 6 percent, the alarm bells would have to go off. It was prudent to raise interest rates or we would be on the perilous path of accelerating inflation. So in 1996, viewing that, I feared we would never get a chance to see what our economy was really capable of doing. That is why I opposed the renomination of Mr. Greenspan in 1996. I suggested in 1996, that the supporters of NAIRU were wrong, that it was an outdated concept. I said at the time we could have unemployment at 4.5 percent or less, and I said it was possible because of increased productivity due to the new technologies, because of the greater integration of the world economy, the new marketing techniques that are taking place in America and that NAIRU was wrong and ought to be thrown out the window. I suggested in 1996 that we ought to give our economy a chance to do better or we would limit our economic growth and limit the ability of average Americans to see their incomes rise. Mr. Greenspan indicated that he would not raise rates simply because of the NAIRU. That was a good statement, but again we had a history of these preemptive strikes, and I feared we would not let the economy reach its potential. I believed Mr. Greenspan would be quick to see the specter of inflation behind some little statistic. I am here to say fortunately I was wrong about that. Mr. Greenspan and the Fed have allowed the economy to grow. Part of the reason was particular situations, such as the crash of the Asian economies, but I believe there was a willingness to let the economy grow and a new attitude that there were some new things happening in the economy. I read a speech Mr. Greenspan gave in which he mused about the increase in productivity and how it did not seem to have any end, the use of computers and how they helped to control inventories. Quite frankly, there seemed to be a shift then at the Fed at that time. The results have been very impressive. Gross domestic product has been increasing at an average rate of about 4.3 percent since Greenspan was last confirmed. Unemployment has gone down by over a percentage point. The portion of our population over 16 in the workforce is at or near a record high. Unemployment for minorities, teenagers, traditionally hard-to-employ groups are at record lows. Incomes for those at the middle are rising--not as much as I would like--and, to some extent, those at the bottom are rising. What has happened is unemployment fell below 6 percent and inflation did not take off; economic growth was near 3 percent and inflation did not take off. And then unemployment came down to 5.5 percent and nothing happened. Then unemployment went below 4.5 percent. It has been under 4.5 percent for almost 2 years now. No inflation. We are seeing our GDP increase at over 4 percent on average per year, almost twice what people were saying a feasible sustainable rate of growth of 2.3 percent and there is no inflation and productivity continues to increase. That was in the initial years. Then starting last year Mr. Greenspan seems to have shifted his view. The concern was not NAIRU. It was irrational exuberance in the stock market. Therefore, we had to put interest rates back up. Last year, there were three ticks up. Today there was another tick up; bringing us to a 1-percent increase in 1 year. It almost seems as Fed are looking for something out there. If it is not NAIRU, which has been discarded, then it is something else out there as to why we have to raise interest rates. There is something else out there lurking that is going to cause inflation to happen. Is it irrational exuberance in the stock market. What this is going to mean is that, quite frankly, we are going to have more ticks up in the interest rate, enough till we see the rate of unemployment start to rise again. I believe that would be a tragic mistake. People need to be employed. We still have people out there who need job training and skill upgrading. Can unemployment stay this low without causing accelerating inflation? Absolutely. The common wisdom is that we have a pool of low- skill workers still to be tapped. All they need is job training and skill upgrading, but they are there. Robert Lerman, in an October 26, 1998, Washington Post article said: Differences between the groups entering and leaving the workforce explains the surprisingly high qualifications of newly employed adults. Older workers without a high school degree are retiring, replaced by younger, better educated workers. In the past 6 years, the population of college graduates aged 25 and over increased by about 20 percent, well above the 7 percent growth in total adult population. Meanwhile, the population of high school dropouts declined by nearly 3 million. We are getting that higher skilled workforce, and they are more productive. The economy is also attracting people who were not considering work to come back into the work force. The job market has been tight in most places. In Iowa, we have a low rate of unemployment, about 2.2 percent, and that is good. Are wages skyrocketing in Iowa because we have low unemployment? No. Are they rising modestly? Yes, and they should. With this booming economy and 4- percent growth in our GDP, wages ought to be going up. As an aside, I find it more than passing strange that here we are in the second week back this year and we could move through the Banking Committee at almost light speed the renomination of a central banker, Mr. Greenspan, to be head of the Fed, but we cannot do it to raise the minimum wage. We cannot do anything to help low-income people get a better share of the economic growth of this country. Gosh, we could sure move fast to help the banking system out, but not to help modest- income Americans. Many economists now come to conclude that NAIRU should not be used to predict a new wave of inflation. Quite frankly, I am happy it is dead. We had this irrational exuberance in the stock market. Now we have a new concept. As I said, if it is not NAIRU, then it is this irrational exuberance. The new concern is the wealth effect. Mr. President, have you heard about the wealth effect? Mr. Greenspan is talking about the wealth effect as a reason we should fear inflation and that we should have some preemptive strike. You have to have something, there has to be something out there. Chairman Volcker had the money supply. Now we have the wealth effect. In a speech at the Economic Club in New York earlier this month, Chairman Greenspan noted the possible negative impacts of the wealth effect. He said that estimates of the wealth effect on the GDP has hovered around 1 percent of the GDP since late 1996. He then said, in part: . . . the impetus to spending by the wealth effect by its very nature clearly cannot persist indefinitely. In part, it adds to the demand for goods and services before the corresponding increase in output fully materializes. It is, in effect, increased purchasing from future income, financed currently by greater borrowing or reduced accumulation of assets. There are always limits, aren't there? Economists were right not to clamp down on the economy until we see real signs of inflation. The Fed should stick with that view. Today's increase makes me believe the Fed will endanger the economy by not waiting for real signs of inflation, and now the wealth effect has become the latest reason, despite the fact inflation is nowhere in sight, except for the runup in oil prices caused, in large part, by OPEC's setting of limits on oil production. The Fed raising interest rates will have no effect on that. I think everyone agrees with that. This wealth effect is estimated by some to add about 4 cents in extra spending per dollar of increased wealth. A prominent study by senior vice president Charles Steindel and economist Sydney Ludvigson, both with the New York Fed, concluded the wealth effect was likely to be between 3 and 4 cents per dollar in annual consumption. They also said it is impossible to predict how quickly the wealth effect will kick in. It can take years for consumer spending to reach a permanently higher level. They said: Forecasts of future consumption growth are not typically improved by taking changes in existing wealth into account. So I guess what I am saying is the wealth effect--just like NAIRU, should not be the reason for raising interest rates, simply because of the fear that it will cause an inevitable cascade of economic effects leading to accelerating inflation. As the Senator from North Dakota said earlier, I believe if the Fed wants a more targeted instrument to more carefully check some of the excesses in the stock market, they should look at margin requirements for buying stock on credit. But raising the interest rates is not going to do it without great harm to the economy as a whole. So quite frankly, again, we see no signs of higher inflation. We have had inflation down from 3.3 percent in 1996 to 1.7 percent in 1997, and 1.6 percent in 1998, and in 1999 it jumped to 2.7 percent. Is that a problem? It sounds like a problem until we take out food and energy. Without food and energy, the core inflation rate continues to improve on a December-to-December basis. In 1996 it was 2.6 percent, in 1997 it was 2.2 percent, in 1998 it was 2.4 percent, and in 1999 it dropped to 1.9 percent--when you take out food and energy. So inflation is going down. Inflation is dropping. And the Fed is raising interest rates. Please, will some economist tell us what is going on here? Again, inflation took a jump in December two-tenths of a percent. But, again, without food and energy. And energy--that was the culprit, not food--energy prices shot up 1.4 percent that month. Raising the interest rate is not going to cure that. I do not know of anyone who says it will. Petroleum prices move with the OPEC cartel's production, not by the effects of interest rate increases. I will repeat that. We all understand petroleum prices move with the OPEC cartel's production and not by the effects of interest rate increases. So again, I repeat, last year inflation actually went down on a December-to-December basis. Yet we had three increases in interest rates last year and another increase just today. Why? What is happening out there? This is hitting our farmers. It is hitting our working families. It may not be hitting Senators and Congressmen making 130-some thousand dollars a year. It is not hitting people making money in the stock market. We have our share of megamillionaires in this body. It is not hurting us, not hurting them. But you go out and talk to that husband and wife who are both working jobs, and they have a couple of kids at home, and they are making $40,000 a year, and they are trying to pay a mortgage on a house, trying to keep a car--maybe two cars; they need two for both of them with their jobs--and keeping their kids in clothes. This is a tax on them. We have no signs of accelerating inflation. I believe we are going down the wrong path in raising interest rates. I basically believe we ought to have the lowest possible reasonable interest rates at all times, and only when we see clear signs of inflation should we then begin the process of ratcheting up interest rates. We have had a period of quality growth and we should be doing all that we can to sustain it. Again, I have a lot more I could say about this and what we ought to be doing. What we should be doing is keeping interest rates low. We ought to be taking the surpluses we have, not using them for a tax cut, which, again, would be the wrong thing to do at this time. That would do more to stimulate inflation than anything, having some tax cut that is going to stimulate and fuel even more demand out there. What we ought to be doing is using the surplus we have now to buy down the national debt. This is where I do agree with Mr. Greenspan: Buy down the national debt. He is right in that regard. I do agree with him on that. But we also need to use some of the surplus to invest in our children's education so they can partake of the new economies as they grow older. Every child in grade school today ought to have access to computers and to the Internet. Every teacher who teaches in grade school today ought to be fully trained in teaching the new kinds of skills using the new technologies. We need to reeducate those already in our workforce with job training. We need to upgrade our infrastructure. There are $100 billion in needed repairs in our schools in America. I understand the President's budget was going to have $1.3 billion for that. We need to improve our infrastructure. We need to improve our transportation infrastructure in this country. These are the things we ought to be doing. This would help to keep our GDP high, keep our workforce employed, keep unemployment low, and keep inflation down. It would not be a tax on working Americans like raising the interest rates that the Fed is doing right now. Productivity is good. Productivity is increasing. We hope it will get back to where it was in the 1960s. Long term high productivity. A lot of people think we are more productive today than in the 1960s. From 1960 to 1970, our productivity increased by 31.8 percent. From 1990 to the year 2000, it increased 21 percent, although we are doing a lot better in the last half of the 90s. So we have a ways to go before we are as productive as in the 1960s. But I believe that will happen in the next decade if we have reasonable policies. In the next decade, I believe our productivity will continue at a high level and further increase and will closely approximate what we had in the 1960s. I was chastised back in 1996 when I opposed the Greenspan nomination. I was on a couple talk shows, and people asked: What do you think the growth rate could be, the sustained growth rate? I said: At least 3.5 percent, 3 to 3.5 percent without any problem. I got hit by a few economists who said: Oh, Harkin is way out on that one. Since 1996 we have had--what?--4 percent and no inflation. So even I--as optimistic as I am about the American economy and the ability of our workforce--was a little underestimating the real rate of growth we could have. I am just saying, in the next 10 years we can still maintain a 3- to 4-percent growth rate. I believe we can maintain an honest average of over a 3-percent growth in the next decade. It is not going to happen if this Federal Reserve continues to raise these interest rates. They are going to choke it off. And they are going to choke it off for no good reason whatsoever. We can improve the quality of the lives of Americans, and we can invest in our future, and we can buy down the national debt. We can do all those wonderful things. But if the Fed persists in raising interest rates, it is going to choke off our rate of growth. All of the good we do here--in terms of keeping a surplus, in getting rid of the national debt, of investing in young people and in education--all that will be for naught because our rate of growth will be choked off. When that rate of growth is choked off, unemployment is going to go up. The Fed talks about a soft landing. If you are flying well and the airplane is working and you have a lot of fuel and the sky is clear, why are you worried about a landing? Why are they talking about a landing? This economy, I believe, can grow at a 3-percent plus rate for the next decade. We will have a landing all right. If they keep raising interest rates, we will have a landing. Let me close by saying I think there is a reverse side to the wealth effect. I coin the term the ``poor effect.'' Some economists believe that shrinking wealth has an even bigger effect on spending than growing wealth. If we push the economy into a dive, we will experience the poor effect again. Economist Mark Zandi suggests that declining wealth reduces spending by about 7 cents per dollar of wealth lost. So if the wealth effect is 3 to 4 cents a dollar, declining wealth reduces spending by 7 cents per dollar, almost twice as much. So any danger that is out there of accelerating inflation must be weighed against the possible result of slowing the economy and what I call the poor effect, not the wealth effect but the poor effect. Rural Iowa, my State, experienced the poor effect in a deep agricultural recession in the mid-1980s. The value of land fell by more than 50 percent as our rural economy crumbled. I saw grown friends of mine cry in public, farmers lose their lands, and some of them took their own lives. Families fell apart; couples divorced. The economy of rural Iowa shrunk. Let's not jump too quickly to use the club of higher interest rates. The Federal Reserve has two mandates in law. The Federal Reserve is not a creature of the Constitution of the United States. You won't find it in the Constitution anywhere. It is a creature of Congress. We legislatively created it. We gave it two mandates: to balance concerns about inflation on the one hand and to stimulate full employment on the other. Those goals were placed in the law in 1978. Prior to 1978, there was no specific mention of inflation at all in the law. It was not in any of the laws about the Fed going all the way back to its founding in 1913. By the Full Employment and Balanced Growth Act of 1978, the Congress, in the exercise of its constitutional power, said to the Fed: You have two functions now: check inflation and stimulate full employment. That law we passed in 1978 set a goal of 4- percent unemployment for those 16 and older, 3 percent for those over 19. We are near 4 percent now. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, conservative economists laughed at those goals. They said they were ridiculous targets set by politicians. That is the law of the land, and it sure doesn't look so silly now. I worry that the Fed has a hard time maintaining a balance between inflation and full employment concerns. They are only focused on the specter of inflation, and there is no inflation out there. As I said, new advances in our technology, in our computers, designing products at high speed, the rapid replacement of parts, tight controls on inventories at lower cost, reduces the inventory buildup, one of the classic causes of past recessions. Communications costs are dropping like a rock. Every day I get something in the mail that I can make long-distance calls cheaper than I did the day before. Now you can get computers individually tailored for retail customers under $1,000 from Gateway Computer. Amazing, a world economy, capital flowing around the world. I know others want to speak. I see my good friend from Minnesota, who has been a great leader on this in the past, on the floor. I know he wants to speak. I took this time because, as I said, I don't want anyone to mistake that I have some personal animosity toward Mr. Greenspan. That is not so. I do have very deep-seated questions about the direction of the Fed, the fact they are raising interest rates without any inflation, and they are going to choke off this great growth we are having in this country with a series of interest rate increases. They are going to push up unemployment. I will yield the floor with the final statement that we need to open up the Federal Reserve System's meetings. I don't want to make them political. It should not be political. We need to know why they are making the decisions they make. The decision they make on raising interest rates taxes every working American. How would they feel if we debated tax policy behind closed doors? I don't want to make it political, but I think it ought to be open. Secondly, I believe the Fed should pay more attention to unemployment and to growth and not just get so fixated on some specter of inflation that is not even out there. I yield the floor.

Mr. HARKIN. Will the Senator yield for a question?

Mr. HARKIN. That is true.

Mr. HARKIN. I thank the Senator for his statement on the floor, pointing out that what this interest rate increase is is a tax on hard- working Americans, a very insidious kind of tax, too. It is going to have other repercussions. The question I have to ask of the Senator is this: The Senator talked about the Federal Reserve Board meeting in secret and not knowing what is going on. I don't want to make it political either. No one wants to make it political. But I think we do have a right to know why they make the decisions they make. It is my understanding that the transcripts of the meetings of the Fed are kept secret for 5 years, if I am not mistaken. It may be a shorter period. I stand to be corrected. We don't know for years why they made the decisions they made. What is so secretive about this? Even if they do meet in secret, it seems to me that within 1 month or 3 months or 6 months we ought to at least have the transcript so we would know what was the discussion that went into why the Board raised interest rates a quarter of a point today; what the discussions were last year that caused them to raise interest rates three times. Keep in mind, the Fed has raised interest rates four times in a 1 year period. A little nick here, a little nick there, pretty soon you are bleeding pretty badly. Four times in a 1 year period. What were the reasons for it? We don't know because they meet in secret. Again, it is my understanding--I stand to be corrected--that the transcripts are kept secret for 5 years. Again, the Senator from North Dakota has pointed this out many times, the Federal Reserve was not created by the Constitution of the United States. The Federal Reserve was created by legislation. It is a creature of Congress created by legislation. It seems to me we have a right and a responsibility to have a better understanding not only of how the Fed operates but why they make the decisions they do. I ask the Senator that question, about opening up the transcripts so we know why they make those decisions.

Mr. HARKIN

Mr. HARKIN. Mr. President, I thank the Chair. I thank my colleague and friend from Wisconsin for yielding time to me but, more importantly, for his strong and continued leadership on this issue of East Timor. As we all know, East Timor is a small, new nation in a faraway place. A lot of times we tend to forget about it and push it off to the side. But we can't. We can't forget about what happened in East Timor. I think it is incumbent upon us, as the leader of the world's democracies and as the nation that holds out to oppressed peoples all over the world the ideals of self-determination and democratic institutions, because we are in that position, that we have to take a leadership position among world communities, focusing and keeping our attention focused on East Timor. These brave people for almost 25 years have continued their struggle--peacefully, I might add--for their own right to self- determination. When the Portuguese left in 1975, of course, Indonesia annexed East Timor. The East Timorese people had no say in that whatsoever. Yet they continued a worldwide campaign for their right to self-determination. What didn't they do? What didn't the East Timorese people do? They didn't plant any bombs. They didn't sabotage anything. They didn't blow up airliners. They didn't commit acts of terrorism against the Indonesia Government or the Indonesia people, but forcefully, day after day and year after year, they went to the world community and pricked our conscience. They went to the U.N. They came here. They went to Europe. There was no accident that Bishop Belo and Jose Ramos- Horta both won the Nobel Peace Prize for their activities because they pursued their right to self-determination as Gandhi or Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., would have done, in a peaceful, nonterrorist way. When they finally had this vote late last summer, they voted overwhelmingly for separation, to have their own nation. Senator Reed and I, along with Congressman McGovern from Massachusetts, were there right before the vote about a week before. We traveled extensively around the country. You could already see the militias and what they were trying to do and the intimidation. It was after that trip that the three of us had conversations with our Secretary of State, with Kofi Annan, the Secretary General of the United Nations, Secretary Cohen, our Secretary of Defense, and people at the White House. We talked to everyone, saying: Look. We need to have things in place there. There is going to be a blood bath. We hope there isn't. But our sense is that everything we had ever seen before in our lives, in our history--you could almost smell it. You could almost sense what was going to happen in East Timor. A powder keg was ready to go. We met with General Anwar. We went back to Indonesia, and we told President Habibie at the time: If your orders are right, there should be a peaceful transition and a peaceful election. This General Anwar is not carrying out your orders. He is either not carrying out your orders or you are not giving the right orders. But something is not adding up here. The same with General Wiranto, the head of the armed services. I ask unanimous consent that an article and an editorial from the Washington Post be printed in the Record.

Mr. HARKIN

Mr. HARKIN. Mr. President, I rise to pay tribute to the two Iowans who led the St. Louis Rams to victory in Sunday's Super Bowl. Quarterback Kurt Warner, a native of Cedar Rapids, Iowa and Offensive Lineman Adam Timmerman, a native of Cherokee, Iowa. It is a bittersweet irony that a third Iowa native, injured Quarterback Trent Green, couldn't play this season and so Kurt Warner stepped in to the position. Nobody--I mean nobody--could have predicted that Kurt Warner would be holding the Super Bowl trophy under the Georgia Dome last Sunday. Not Kurt Warner who was stocking the shelves of the Hy-Vee Market in Cedar Falls, Iowa a few years ago. Not Kurt Warner who was bypassed by the NFL draft out of college and went straight to the Iowa Barnstormers and then the Amsterdam Admirals. And certainly not the Kurt Warner who warmed the bench at the University of Northern Iowa. This is a true American success story. An Iowa boy comes from the bench to Super Bowl 2000 where he sets a Super Bowl record for passing yards--414 yards in all, topping Joe Montana's 1989 Super Bowl record of 357 yards. It doesn't get much better than that! And Kurt Warner had help from another Iowa boy, Adam Timmerman, the Rams offensive lineman, a native of Cherokee, Iowa. Timmerman and the Rams offensive line held the Titans to one sack in the entire game, allowing Warner time to complete the passes that won him his Super Bowl record. You know, I am sure many of you have heard me talk about the ladder of opportunity, about leaving the ladder down so others can climb up. Well, Kurt Warner built his own ladder of opportunity, sticking with it at every turn, persevering against odds that would sink a weaker man. It is great to see him at the top. Iowa is proud of its native sons and daughters. For the past several months, Iowa has been in the public eye because of the caucuses. And now that the Iowa caucuses are behind us, Iowans are proud to share the spotlight with homegrown heroes Kurt Warner and Adam Timmerman. I know we all wish Kurt and Adam good luck in this Sunday's Pro Bowl in Honolulu.