Pete Hoekstra

Mr. HOEKSTRA

Mr. HOEKSTRA. Mr. Speaker, if the gentleman will yield, it is not the winning argument, it is the right thing to do.

Mr. HOEKSTRA. Mr. Speaker, if the gentleman will yield, a couple of points. Number one, all of those years from 1969 where our colleagues on the other side, and I hope they join us on slowing the growth so that we can get some tax cuts; but from 1969 when we reported, or the Democratic Congresses reported $200 billion deficits, that $200 billion did not identify Social Security, did it? If we would have taken the Social Security surplus out of there, we would have been at $250 billion or $300 billion deficits annually.

Mr. HOEKSTRA. With Social Security. So taking Social Security out, it would have been close to $400 billion annually. So we get almost a real surplus, and next year we probably will. We are able to do all of those tax cuts that the gentleman outlined, the $400 per child, the Roth IRA, the Hope scholarships, the scholarships for students. We go through all of that, which is a real benefit to American families each and every day. We are then on the verge of next year, with continued economic growth, of getting to a real surplus, taking Social Security out, which then enables us to do even more good things, which is more tax cuts and paying down the debt and putting the dollars back into Social Security. Also, by doing and getting to where we are financially today, the Members now will have the courage to go through and do the right thing on budget process. Because a few years ago, they said we cannot change the budget process because then people will really know that the deficit, instead of being $200 billion is really $298 billion. It has really been liberating and has changed the dynamics and changed the debate here in Washington for us to do a lot of good things and move us in the right direction.

Mr. HOEKSTRA. What happens through this process is what you outline. We get to a surplus in 1998, or we get to a balance or close to a balance without taking into account Social Security, which is a very, very positive step. When I first came here in 1993, we were looking at increasing taxes, and we were looking at increasing spending, and we were looking at deficits of $300 billion as far as the eye could see.

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

Mr. HOEKSTRA. It smells like government waste. So we have got to stop.

Mr. HOEKSTRA. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for yielding. I think it is important for us to come back and say, what was the trigger, what was the trigger that enabled all of these positive things to happen? I really come back to exactly that. That chart; the chart that said, we believe Washington is big enough and has enough; as a matter of fact, we think Washington has too much of your money and we have set our growth rates too high, and all we want to do is scale back the rate of growth. And when we did that, it enabled us to get to a surplus budget. Remember, a year ago we were debating, because people were saying, get to a surplus budget by 2002? Never make it, never happen. But by controlling the growth of spending and when revenues came in higher, we were able to get to that. We are going to get to that surplus, and we were able to do all kinds of other positive things. When we in Washington say, enough is enough, we have had enough and we have to learn to live within our means; as a matter of fact, again, I keep saying cut, but it is not. All we need to do is to learn to grow a little bit smaller.

Mr. HOEKSTRA. Mr. Speaker, if the gentleman will yield, Members on the other side of the aisle who are blasting us now for perhaps even considering some of these things, from at least 1969 on, were burying these Social Security surpluses into more spending and understating the deficit each and every year as those numbers continued to go up. Mr. Speaker, if we go to the budget, I saw the budget proposal for redoing the budget process today, and I do not know if the gentleman has seen that or not, but if the gentleman goes back to his chart that he had up there, the wall that he drew in, if we are going to talk about honest budgeting, I am thinking this is going to be a bipartisan effort because of the work that the gentleman has done in helping to communicate this very issue. But under budget process reform, we are going to take the tax dollars collected for Social Security that go into the Social Security Trust Fund, we are going to take that wall there and we are going to pull those two circles and that green arrow, if the gentleman would point them out, we are going to pull them out of this equation. In the future, when we are talking about this, we are going to be talking about a Social Security chart, and we are going to be talking about a general fund chart, and we are going to start doing this more like the way we should than the way we have been. So that we can talk about Social Security, we can talk about how much the debt is, and then we can talk about the general fund. The other thing that we are going to put in there, because this is such a convoluted budget process, but nowhere in our budgeting process today do we account for the other accrued liabilities that the Federal Government has. Nowhere do we identify the pensions that are payable to Federal employees. So the new budget process number 1, is going to do exactly what the gentleman has proposed on that chart, and what the gentleman has proposed in his legislation which is to say, we are going to take Social Security and Social Security revenue and expenditures, and we are going to take it out of the general fund, and we are going to have really 2 accounts. If we want a unified budget, we can go and add those 2 charts together, but we are going to be working off of 2 separate accounts here. That is a huge step forward, and the gentleman has spent a lot of time educating the rest of this House about why that needs to happen. I think we have a real opportunity to make that happen and begin that process yet before we go home.

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

Mr. HOEKSTRA. Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague, the gentleman from Wisconsin, for yielding. Mr. Speaker, I realize the passion with which the gentleman is dealing with this issue and has dealt with this issue over the last couple of years, and really appreciate that because I think it is one of the things that has really enabled us to in 15 days or 14 days end the fiscal year the way Washington counts, with our first surplus since 1969, recognizing that perhaps all or most of that surplus will be attributable to the surplus that we have in Social Security revenues. I really want to build off on this. I was watching in my office the gentleman's dialogue with his counterpart, the gentleman from Wisconsin, and in that dialogue I really felt that there was one point that was missing, and the gentleman was just talking about it. I think that the gentleman and I agree that as we end up 1998 and as we prepare for 1999, the last thing this Congress ought to be doing is a $90 billion spending plan. It is being talked about as an $18 billion, $19 billion spending plan, emergency spending, but what the gentleman and I both know, being on the Committee on the Budget, as soon as we put that $18 billion in there for 1999, it becomes part of the baseline for 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004. It is not emergency spending that goes out here somewhere and says, that is a 1-year emergency. All of a sudden it is a built-in emergency as part of that budget each and every year so we are on the verge, or the rumors are because we have not seen anything yet and I think some of our other colleagues are saying if we are going to spend this $18 billion this year we ought to find offsets, but the worst case scenario would be that in the next 3 or 4 weeks we do an $80 billion to $90 billion spending increase, a spending bill. That is the wrong way to go. The gentleman was talking with his colleague from Wisconsin, and the gentleman was talking about that increasing spending was the wrong thing to do. I think the gentleman got agreement, but I am not sure it is what he and I agree with, that the tax burden is too high, that when the American people between the local, State and Federal government taxes are working Monday and Tuesday for the government, 40 percent of their income they are paying to taxes, the gentleman and I want that lowered. The gentleman and I agree on that. I am sure they did. The thing that I was hoping that the gentleman would get agreement on is that they would join the gentleman and I in identifying wasteful, ineffective, inefficient spending of taxpayer dollars here in Washington. We are spending $1.6 trillion to find, what? To find a $16 billion, a $20 billion tax, we have to find what? How much is that, less than 1 percent?

Mr. HOEKSTRA. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for leading this discussion. I think the real focus here is on controlling spending. Even the gentleman was using the term reducing spending. We are not reducing spending. The best we can hope for is to slow the growth of spending. If we can slow the growth of spending, we save Social Security, we pay down the debt, we can reform the budget process, and we can provide tax relief. It really opens up and changes the debate in wonderful ways here in Washington.

Mr. HOEKSTRA. Mr. Speaker, if the gentleman will yield, I asked the gentleman the specific question about the anglers in Ireland only because I chair an oversight subcommittee on the Committee on Education and the Workforce, and we asked a very simple question of the Executive Branch about a year and a half ago as we began a project called Education and Our Crossroads. We said, this is the Executive Branch. We kind of surveyed their documents and tried to answer the question. How many education programs are there? The answer came back, and a lot of study, and it is 740, 760. We finally said, if you take it all, and this is not all K through 12, it is all kinds of different education programs, and this one might be in there, and if it is, I am sorry we did not catch it and identify it before the gentleman did, but it is like 760 programs. We thought hallelujah. Now we know why there is an education department, to coordinate 760 programs. We then took a look at it and said wrong; 760 programs, 39 different agencies. We found things like, we, the people in the gentleman's district, the people in my district pay for closed captioning, think about this, closed captioning of Bay Watch, of the Ricki Lake Show. American taxpayers are paying for closed captioning of Bay Watch. It is kind of like take a look at where we are spending our dollars. This is why, when we go to our town meetings and say, do you think we should grow at a rate faster than inflation, they said no, kind of like maybe we should decrease spending, which we have not done.

Mr. HOEKSTRA. Mr. Speaker, if the gentleman will yield. Just a simple question. What department was this angler training program in for Irish fishermen?

Mr. HOEKSTRA. Mr. Speaker, I do not know all the specifics on it. The gentleman highlights it. We are glad that the gentleman goes through the budget and he finds that. I do not remember the exact amount of money, but the gentleman looked at it and said, is this really what we need the federal government doing is paying for someone to study the cow gas.

Mr. HOEKSTRA. Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague from Wisconsin for yielding. Mr. Speaker, I think as we take a look at this, number one, what we have to recognize is the significant amount of progress that we have made. Again, listening to some of the comments earlier about what happened in the eighties, the tax cuts and spending, the problem in the eighties was spending, and when we go back to the gentleman's earlier chart, I mean spending just went up, up, up, up. In 1995, when my colleague joined us here in Washington, we started to cut the growth. Again, we did not cut spending; we just cut the growth, projected growth of spending. Where we are this year, and I do not know if my colleague has his latest estimate, but the gentleman has been about our most accurate forecaster in Washington, but we are very close to actually being able to have a surplus in the general fund. I am not sure we are going to quite get there, so I will yield to the gentleman.

Mr. HOEKSTRA. The gentleman is absolutely right. When I go to my town hall meetings and talk to my constituents and say, would you like the growth rate to be a little bit more than inflation, because we are really doing good things with your money out here in Washington, it is kind of like they look at you and say no, because we just have way too much evidence of you doing the wrong thing in Washington with our money. We do not have a high degree of confidence that you need all of this. As a matter of fact, most of my constituents, I would believe, think that we have too much of their money and ask them for too much of their money each and every week when they look at their little pay stub; and they say, wow, this is some money that I probably could spend better than what Washington could spend it. The gentleman has identified we have got the silly little spending out there, the cow, the methane gas study that is going on.

Mr. HOEKSTRA. Mr. Speaker, we do know that in many cases we can have the best of both worlds. We proved it in 1997, and we can prove it again that we can reduce spending. Excuse me, we can just slow the rate of growth. We as Republicans have done nothing to cut the size of government. All we have done is slow the growth of government. If we go back and we just take a look at the wasteful spending, I have taken a look at the Education Department, I have taken a look at the Labor Department. There are billions to be found. It does not mean that spending on education is not important, but the way that we are spending on education, where a dollar comes in to Washington and only 60 to 65 cents gets back to a classroom, I believe that means that we are wasting 30 to 35 cents. We were in Milwaukee. We have been around the country listening to people at the local level about education. They are saying, we like your money but the rules and the regulations just dampen our enthusiasm and they stop us from doing what we would like to do.

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

Mr. HOEKSTRA

Mr. HOEKSTRA. Mr. Speaker, I want to take a few minutes tonight to offer my perspective on the importance of principled leadership in America today. It is always helpful to reflect on lessons learned from the rich history of our country. We have thrived as Americans because of the principles upon which our Nation was founded: truth and justice, freedom and responsibility. These principles are sacred. They are inspired and they represent eternal significance. Truth has always been the cornerstone of a civilized Nation. Justice and the rule of law are essential for those who want to live together in peace. And freedom, of course, depends upon personal responsibility. If we really think about it, this is what America is all about and we are nothing without it. If we do not stand for truth, then by our silence we condone lies. If we do not stand for justice, then by our silence we condone injustice. The struggle to preserve these American ideals has taken place on battlefields around the world and it is a struggle that takes place each and every day in America in our homes, in our workplaces, and in our courts. Parents do their best to teach their children to be honest and trustworthy. Moral behavior is important to parents across America. This does not mean that we are perfect. It does mean we want our children to grow up with a sense of how important the truth is and how damaging immoral behavior can be, how damaging it can be to our children and to others. Truth and justice are also very important in the American workplace. Relationships between men and women in the workplace have become more and more complicated. Sexual relations between employees, particularly between supervisors and employees, which in times past might have remained secret, today have become more public. Why? Because there are times when these relationships impact justice and fairness in the workplace. If a workplace sexual relationship results in a promotion or a demotion, or involves using peers or subordinates to facilitate, conceal, or lie about a relationship, it is no longer a private matter. It involves basic justice and fairness in the workplace. Which leads me to one of the key battlefields for truth and justice in America: That is the courts. Lying under oath is a serious crime, so serious that it is a felony under Federal law. Since Bill Clinton became President in 1993, 323 Americans have been sentenced to prison in United States District Court for committing perjury. These 323 Americans have been sentenced to an average of 2\1/2\ years in Federal prison. Why is lying treated so severely under Federal law? Because justice is at stake. We want our citizens to respect the law and not trivialize it. Honesty is so important, it simply cannot be brushed aside. Without honesty and trust, the whole system begins to break down. Mr. Speaker, in the past several weeks I have heard over and over again from some people that we should simply forgive bad behavior and get on with the business of the country. The truth is, when some people say we should forgive bad behavior, they are really asking us to tolerate bad behavior. There is a world of difference between the two. Forgive? Yes. Tolerate? No. There are those who are hoping that the things we are going through today will make us stronger. But to claim that somehow this is good for America is just plain wrong. Can we learn from this situation? Yes. But the cause of the damage cannot be relied upon to lead us through the healing process. The time has come for President Clinton to resign. If he is unwilling to do so, there is a constitutional process to address the matter at hand. I have every confidence that my colleagues and I can and will work to ensure that respect for truth and justice will ultimately prevail.

Mr. HOEKSTRA

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

Mr. HOEKSTRA. Mr. Speaker, the Democratic National Committee worked, and we have kind of split the responsibilities on this, one of the things that we are going at now is this is what was alleged. We know that at certain times the Democratic National Committee went out looking for donors to make these contributions. It is unclear at this point in time whether they found them, but we do know that there were other groups that participated in this scheme very similar to what is alleged to have happened here with the Democratic National Committee where money actually did flow out. We know with the Teamsters it did flow out, it did flow back to the Democratic National Committee. We are just now trying to figure out exactly what the quid pro quo was. Did money actually then make its way from the Democratic National Committee back into the Carey campaign? Did they find wealthy donors who, instead of writing a check to the Democratic National Committee, maybe supported the Ron Carey campaign? We do not know. We looked at that early. We focused on what was going on within the Teamsters itself. The gentleman's committee was looking at some of that. We are going to, I believe, have a hearing on that later this month to try to get to the bottom of it. It is very, very difficult. What we do know is that the scheme was planned, it was agreed to. We do not know, at least with the Democratic National Committee, how far it was actually completed.

Mr. HOEKSTRA. The one we paid for, the one where the regime, members of the group that were part of the ticket that won the election are still running the Teamsters. Think about it. They were part of the fraudulently elected leadership. They are still running the Teamsters. I have met with my rank and file Teamsters at the local level. They cannot believe it. They want the same thing we want. They want a fairly elected leadership representing them, because they know what happened under the last leadership. As good as they got at laundering money, they did get caught. The other thing that they have even gotten better at is making sure that we do not get all of the information that we need. There were documents that were at one law firm and we requested them, and they are at another law firm. It is kind of like one of these things, you have to ask the question exactly right, because if you have anything a little bit out of order, you are never going to find it and you are never going to get it. They are masters at hiding information, at slowing down the process and trying to turn the tables. Whether it is what is going on in the executive branch, whether it is what is going on at the Democratic National Committee, or whether it is still going on at the Teamsters, they have made it very difficult for almost anybody to get at this quickly and effectively.

Mr. HOEKSTRA. Mr. Speaker, as the gentleman is well aware, the Justice Department, Miss Reno, has now opened a 90-day investigation into testimony of certain members of the President's staff regarding their testimony to the Senate committee, in regards to specific testimony on their involvement in perhaps supporting Teamster efforts through actions in the executive branch, which is frightening. It is one thing to run this through a political organization. It is another now to perhaps bring in executive branch agencies as part of this quid pro quo, if you give us money perhaps we can help you over here. The Attorney General has begun a 90-day investigation into those questions, and we are pursuing those as well. As good as they got at laundering money, because they were good, because almost all of this stuff was not found out until after the Teamsters election, which means we had to throw out the whole election.

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

Mr. HOEKSTRA. Yes. We invited the gentleman to participate at our hearing and he indicated that if he came to the committee, he would invoke his rights under the Fifth Amendment and he would refuse to reply; going to your chart, he would refuse to reply on the grounds that it might incriminate him.