Pete Hoekstra

Mr. HOEKSTRA

Mr. HOEKSTRA. I yield to the gentleman from Colorado (Mr. Schaffer).

Mr. HOEKSTRA

Mr. HOEKSTRA. Mr. Chairman, over the last number of years, we have had the opportunity to travel around the country, taking a look at schools and local programs and identifying what works and what does not work. It is called Education at a Crossroad. This bill is built on the principles that we outlined as a result of that effort. The Teacher Empowerment Act follows five important principles, and I think these principles could apply to all Federal education programs because we do recognize how important education is to secure the future of this country. What are those five principles? We need to empower parents and not bureaucracies. We need to use education methods that work, not fads and gimmicks. We need to spend the money where we have the most impact. That means that we spend the money on the kids; we spend it in the classroom; we do not spend it in Washington; and we do not spend it on red tape. We need a terrific teacher in every classroom. Then we have to have accountability for results. Because not how much we put it in is what matters. What matters is how much learning takes place. That is why I oppose the Martinez amendment. Because what it does, it moves us away from these principles. It moves us away from empowering parents. It empowers bureaucracies. It moves the decision making back to Washington. It means that we will end up spending and approving local spending decisions here in Washington, not at the local level. If we are going to have waivers to a Federal education program, those decisions need to be made at a State and a local level. As we found out in welfare reform, what sense does it make to move decisions from the State level to Washington? Let us keep moving decision making and improving education and make it a local responsibility.

Mr. HOEKSTRA

Mr. HOEKSTRA. Mr. Speaker, I would like to take this opportunity to officially recognize the 100th anniversary of the Henika District Library, located in Wayland, Michigan, part of the Second Congressional District, which I represent. The Henika Library was established in 1899 as a legacy of Mrs. Julia Henika, who upon her death left $2,000 to the Wayland Ladies Library Association for the construction of a library. Aided by contributions from Mrs. Henika's husband, George, and her mother, Mary Forbes, this picturesque library formally opened in 1900. Initially, the library was run by the independent Library Association for many years before turning it over to the village of Wayland. At that time, the facility's first paid librarian, Miss Fannie Hoyt, was hired. She served in her position until the 1940s, when she was succeeded by Dorothy Peterson, who served as librarian until 1975. Barbara Crofoot then became the library's third head librarian and served for 10 years until she was succeeded by the current librarian, Lynn Mandaville. Henika Library has served the Wayland area as a source of information and entertainment from the Gilded Age to the Information Age. The original building was first expanded in 1968 with an addition in the rear with a full basement, effectively tripling the size of the facility. A reading room was created the next year by enclosing the front porch. In the early 1990s, the building received a complete makeover, inside and out, with financial assistance from the Wayland Downtown Development Authority, an outstate equity grant and contributions from the city of Wayland and Wayland Township. This remodeling made the library ready for the 21st century by providing public access computers, an online card catalog and public access to the Internet. In addition, a local company, Ampro Industries, donated several thousand dollars to remodel the basement children's library. Today, Henika District Library continues to serve the community in the same manner Julia Henika envisioned a century ago. I am proud to honor her memory and the hard work and dedication of so many people to make that vision a reality.

Mr. HOEKSTRA

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

Mr. HOEKSTRA

Mr. HOEKSTRA. Mr. Speaker, tonight I would like to take the opportunity to talk about a number of the items on the Republican agenda, the agenda that I believe provides us with the opportunity to really build on the prosperity that this country has experienced over the last 7 to 8 years, the opportunity to take that prosperity and to reform the programs that we have in here in Washington, to reform our budget priorities and to address some of the systematic problems that we are experiencing. Let me give my colleagues one example. In the budget resolution that we passed earlier this year this Congress took a historic step. We stated that for the budget horizon, the next 10 years, that we would lock away every dollar of Social Security surplus, that we would lock it away and allow those funds to be only used to reform and save Social Security and Medicare. When we take a look at the commitment that we have made of locking away 1.8 trillion dollars, we see that that is a historic change. It provides the framework for shoring up Social Security and Medicare and at the same time ensures that those dollars will not be spent to grow other segments of government. That is exactly what has happened over the last 30 years. Every American today, they get their paycheck at the end of the week, and they recognize how much they have grossed, and between their gross and their net is this thing called FICA. That is the amount that your employer, actually that you, pay to Washington for Social Security. It is 6.2 percent of your income. The interesting thing is that your employer also matches that with another 6.2 percent. It means that you are paying or based on the hours and the salary that you have earned, 12.4 percent of your income is going to Washington, and it was going and it is supposed to be coming to Washington to deal with Social Security and to be set aside so that when you reach retirement income those dollars will be there and they will be there for you. But what has happened over the last 30 years is those dollars have come into Washington. They have been set aside. They have been set aside with IOUs. Government then went in, and took that money, and put in the IOU and spent it on other federal programs. So what we now have in the Social Security Trust Fund is not all of the 30 years of surplus in Social Security, but what we have is a stack of IOUs, and on this hand we have got a bunch of federal programs that we have grown and expanded. We want to set aside the total Social Security surplus for the next 10 years, $1.8 trillion. That is a hundred billion dollars more than what the President plans to set aside for Social Security. As a matter of fact, when you take a look at a shorter window rather than 10 years out, you take a look at what this President and this administration is proposing for the next 5 years, they are going to spend $146 billion of the Social Security surplus. They are not saving every dime of Social Security over the next 5 years and setting it aside to save and reform Social Security and Medicare; they are actually going out and continuing the practices of the past, and they are going out, and they are going to spend it one more time. What happens when we set aside $1.8 trillion? What it means is that we can go out and we can reduce the public debt. We will reduce the public debt by $1.8 trillion over the next 10 years. That is $450 billion more of debt reduction than what the President's budget proposes. Under our budget it means that the debt held by the public declines from $3.6 trillion to $1.9 trillion by the year 2009. The other thing that we have in our budget plan is that we maintain the spending discipline of the 1997 balanced budget agreement. As the Chair will remember, in 1997 we passed a historic budget agreement. It laid out a 5-year plan for spending, it laid out a 5-year plan for revenues, and it said by the year 2002 we will be out of surplus budget. Some positive things have happened. The economy and Federal tax revenues have been stronger than what we anticipated. What it means is that we move closer and we have actually moved to a surplus budget, as it is defined in Washington, this year. There are those now that would say, well, now that we are at surplus, let us forget about the spending restraints that we agreed to in 1997, let us open up the vault, and let us start spending the surplus. There are many here in the House who believe that that is the wrong thing to do. We believe that this is an opportunity where we can really continue the fiscal discipline and commit to meeting the spending targets that were outlined in 1997 which then enables us to save every dime for Social Security and then also provides us with the opportunity to another step which we think is very positive, which is to provide tax relief to the American people. When you take a look at taxes and why we need tax relief, think about the two-parent working family today. The second working adult usually earns about 40 percent of the combined income. It is interesting enough to note that the average American today pays 40 percent of their income in one form of tax or another, a State tax, a local tax or a Federal tax. What that means is that in a two-parent or two-working-parent family, the second person is not working to support the family. The second person is working to support Washington, their State government or their local government. They are paying 40 percent of their income. We have an opportunity to relieve the stress that that places on American families and that places on American workers. Think about it. You go out, and you earn a dollar; you lose 40 cents of it before you ever go home and use it to buy food, to pay for a vacation, to invest in your child's education. The first 40 cents always comes to government. We think that there is an opportunity to reduce taxes in three different areas. In one way we will propose in our tax relief package something that provides an immediate benefit to the American people. What does that mean? It means that your take-home pay is larger, means that your check at the end of the week for what you have worked that week, means that you get to keep more of it and Washington gets to take less of it. We want to provide tax relief in a way that says you can prepare for your long-term future. Because a tax code is being restructured, you can be better prepared to plan your financial future so that you will be more secure and you will have the freedom to get financial security. How do we do that? For those of you that save, for those of you that invest, we can reduce the capital gains tax. We can encourage you through the Tax Code to invest in individual retirement accounts so that you can prepare for your retirement, or perhaps that you can set aside dollars so that if you want to go out and purchase your first home, you can use those dollars for that, or if you are really talking about long-term security, would it not be great if you can take more of your income and set it aside so that you can prepare to help your child get a better education? That is what we mean when we talk about enabling you to have more freedom to plan for your future and to get your financial independence. There is another area that we think we can reduce taxes in, and that is we think you have got the opportunity, and we have got the opportunity, to let Washington know who is in charge. Do you ever have these fees or services that you just think where did they come from? And why are they doing this? Let me give you two examples: A few years ago we passed a telecommunications reform bill. As part of that we said that we were going to encourage the expansion of the Internet into the schools, a very good goal. We have got a bureaucracy that said: Wow, that gives us the latitude to impose a fee on every American's phone bill. It is called the Gore tax. It is the Vice President's idea. It was not passed by Congress; it was an interpretation by a bureaucracy and a group of bureaucrats as a way to get money from the American people. This is a wonderful opportunity to say, no. The American people are in charge. We are going to repeal that bureaucratic abuse of power and we are going to eliminate that ``fee.'' It is not a fee. It was a tax that was initiated by bureaucrats who had no right and no authority to do it. There is another one that is currently going through, and I think it is maybe going to affect only a small number of Americans today, but again, it is an abuse of power, and it is an abuse of power by the Postal Service. For those of us that have a box, a mailbox, but it is not at the Post Office and it is now at a private business, there is a whole new set of rules and regulations that the Postal Service has put on the small businesses and has put this cost on Americans who say, I would really like a Post Office box or a place of business that can receive my mail, because it can do things that the Postal Service cannot do, meaning that this business will sign and accept a delivery by an overnight delivery company. The Post Office will not do that. But if one now wants to do that, this company that has provided someone with this service is going to have to go through and provide a whole series of documents on that box to the Post Office. The bottom line: rules, regulations. They do not come free. It is a huge new cost and another way, again for, in this case, not for the government to collect more money, but for someone who is providing a service that may be in direct competition to a government monopoly, to penalize this service and make it more expensive for the American people to use an alternative delivery service or a Post Office box that provides additional services. This is a wonderful opportunity for us to go back and say, no. We are not going to let the government do that. We are going to repeal that. We are going to pass a bill here that says, you cannot put these kinds of costs on the American people. You cannot put these kinds of costs on small businesses who, because the Postal Service could not deliver the service, found a niche, identified a need, and in the great spirit of the American entrepreneurs, created a business, only now to be penalized by the Postal Service. We need to change that, and this will provide us an opportunity to do that. Mr. Speaker, underlying our direction on taxes where we want to increase take-home pay, we want to let Americans understand that they are going to have more freedom for planning their financial security in the future and for sending a message back to Washington that says, we are in charge and you are not, we want to overlay two broad themes. It is time to simplify the Tax Code, and it is time to make it fairer. Perhaps the most unfair component of our Tax Code today, although there are probably a number of different items competing for that title, but perhaps the most unfair is that our Tax Code continues to penalize married couples. Think about it. We have a Tax Code in America that penalizes people for being married. That is not fair. Not only that, it is the wrong thing to do. So as we move forward through our agenda this year, as we continue building on the balancing of the budget, as we plan for solidifying Social Security, solidifying Medicare, we are doing the right things, and we are using the prosperity to get our house in order. I want to spend a little time now moving on to another priority that over the last number of years I have spent a lot of time on, and that is education. I am glad that I came to the House Floor tonight to be able to respond to my colleague's comments about what those Republicans did this week with our Straight As program, where we are going to move more flexibility back to the local level and we are going to move the dollars down there so that people at the local and at the State level can have the flexibility to deal with the issues and the problems at their local level and not worry about whether their problems match the problems that we here in Washington have identified as national issues. I have a great quote. My colleague earlier was asking the question, do we really trust people at the local level and at the State level to do what is right for our kids? Do we really trust those people who know the names of the kids in their class and in their school to do the right thing for those kids? And the answer, obviously, from my colleague was, of course we do not. There is a Federal role here because Washington knows best. As my colleague in the chair remembers, back in 1995 when we began the welfare debate, we began the welfare debate very much on the same tone and tenor, and we really accelerated the debate on welfare reform when I came down to the floor with a number of my colleagues from Wisconsin. And the reason we came to the floor was that Wisconsin had proposed a reform of welfare. It had passed the State legislature in a bipartisan way. The governor had signed it. They sent their application here to Washington, because somebody in Washington in Health and Human Services had to approve what the State of Wisconsin wanted to do to help their people in their State get off of welfare, to go to work, to get training, and to become more productive. I believe that it was something like 287 days later that we came to the floor, 287 days or something like that after Wisconsin had sent their application to a bureaucracy in Washington, a bureaucracy that probably had some people from Wisconsin working in it, but the reform proposal maybe was not read by anybody that had ever been to Wisconsin. But 280-some days later, Health and Human Services had not acted. Now, get this. It is the State of Wisconsin, the governor, the State legislature saying, we think we have a better idea. We think we have a model that we would like to try that is better for our people and it is better for the people on welfare than what the national Washington one- size-fits-all model is. And after roughly two-thirds of a year, the people in Washington had not thought it was important enough to go through this, to study the issue, and to answer the people in the State of Wisconsin as to whether this was or was not something that they were going to let them do. And that is the same attitude that our colleagues are expressing when it comes to education. What finally happened in welfare reform? We pushed for flexibility, we pushed for local accountability, and now that welfare reform has passed the House, that it has been implemented at the State level where we have given this authority to the governors and to the State legislatures and said, you have a great degree of flexibility, you have a huge opportunity here to take the Washington resources, to break the rules, to break the mold, and use the money to solve the problems in your own State. A couple of years ago we heard the same types of claims: they will not do the right thing. They will move the money into the wrong places. They do not really care about the people that are on welfare. They are not going to help. They are going to take the money and move it to different places. What we found in welfare reform is exactly the opposite. It is a wonderful success story. The States have taken the freedom, they have taken the flexibility to reach out and help those that were on welfare get work, to come off of the welfare rolls, and the wonderful thing is that I am not sure what they are doing in Wisconsin. Wisconsin has a model that works for them. Michigan has a model that has worked for us. Michigan is probably learning from Wisconsin and Wisconsin is learning from Michigan, and both programs are moving forward. What they are doing in Hawaii is probably a little bit different or very different from what they are doing in New York, but as we go around the country, it is one success story after another. And, we have 50 models of welfare reform, all working, all learning from each other, and all moving forward. And what a wonderful difference it makes to have 50 States learning from each other and all competing to have the best welfare program, or the best welfare reform program; to have the best statistics about saying we have moved this percentage of people off of welfare into being more productive members of society. What a wonderful way to compete versus where we were before. Because what has happened now is States are forced to focus on results, not process. Under the old model, Wisconsin had to focus on process. They had to fill out all of the Washington forms. They had to fill out all of the forms and make sure that they dotted the I's and crossed the T's correctly, and they would send it to Washington and Washington would make sure that they had dotted the I's and crossed the T's and if they had filled out something slightly wrong, they would send it back to Wisconsin to fix it or they would send it back to Michigan to fix it and the paper would flow back and forth eating up dollars. But as soon as we reformed welfare, we moved away from a paper work shuffle, we moved away from a bureaucratic red-tape system to a system that is doing exactly what it is supposed to. It is focusing on people. It is focusing on how, with key help, people get off of welfare. Why am I talking about welfare reform? Because I think it is a beautiful model for what we are proposing to do with education. And we know that the same broken bureaucratic model that we suffered under in welfare reform is also found in education. That model is Washington Knows Best. We are going to take the 7 percent of the dollars that any school district gets from Washington and we are going to use that 7 percent to, on a significant scale, impact what goes on in the school because we know best and the people at the local level do not. That is the broken model. How do we know that that is the model that people at the local level believe exists today? We know because we went to over 15 States, had something like 18, 19 different hearings, and learned about what is going on in education. But the thing that we found over and over and over again, really two things. Number one, we saw great schools, we saw great kids, we saw great teachers, great administrators, parents, administrators, and teachers who knew the child's name and had a passion for making sure that that child would have the best opportunities to learn that they could provide. Now what do we see? Here is what somebody basically found out and what they said about Washington. I think there is an arrogance on the part of the school bureaucracy, that is Washington, that assumes that they know what is best for everybody's children. I assume the opposite. I do not think that anybody can make a better decision for their children than the parent. The focus of directing a child's education does not need to be here in a bureaucracy in Washington, it needs to be at the local level, starting with a parent or an adult guardian, moving to a teacher, moving to an administrator, and the last person in the food chain is a bureaucrat in Washington. We need to improve education. Let me just talk about why we believe it is important to reform education and why the current model does not work. We published a report called ``America's Education System at a Crossroads,'' ``Education at a crossroads.'' It is the result of a whole series of hearings around the country, a series of hearings here in Washington meeting with the education experts here in Washington, and other research and analysis that we completed here. We know that America's education system needs to be reformed. Why? What are some of the statistics? Forty forty percent of fourth-graders do not read at even a basic level. Half of the students from urban school districts fail to graduate on time, if at all. The average NAPE scores among 17-year-olds are lower than they were in 1984. That is a year after a Nation at Risk was released. We are not necessarily making progress. U.S. 12th graders only outperformed two of 21 nations in mathematics. What does that mean? Here are the statistics. In the Third Annual International Math and Science Study, called TIMS, 12th grade U.S. lags behind in math and sciences. Here are the nations with average scores significantly higher than the U.S.: the Netherlands, Sweden, Denmark, Switzerland, Iceland, Norway, France, New Zealand, Australia, Canada, Austria, Slovenia, Germany, and Hungary. Nations with average scores not significantly different from the U.S.: Italy, the Russian federation, Lithuania, the Czech Republic, and the U.S. are in this category. The two nations that did score below us, Cyprus and South Africa; not a very impressive showing. Another startling statistic: American students fall further behind students from other countries the longer they are in school. One of our first hearings a couple of years ago was in California. We had one on K through 12 and then we had one on higher ed. The first year, the hearing with people from the colleges, they said, make sure you do not cut our remedial education budgets. You kind of do a double-take and say, excuse me? These are kids who have gotten into college. What are we remediating? They are remediating basic skills. Public institutions of higher education annually spend $1 billion on remedial education. It is a huge problem. The other thing that I can tell the Members, even though those are the national statistics, as we went around the country we saw success story after success story of people at the local level achieving some wonderful things. That is where the reform is taking place. It is where parents and people at the local level have control over their local schools. What other stuff did we find out as we took a look at Washington's answer to education, one of which says we are going to take the 7 percent of the Washington dollars and we are going to come up with a solution for almost every problem? We wonder, how does 7 percent really drive so much of a local curriculum? Think about it. In Washington we have a program that will pay and contribute for a child's breakfast and a child's lunch. I am not saying these programs are not needed, but they come along with bureaucracy and red tape. There are people in Washington who want to build the schools, they want to pay for putting in technology, they want to buy the technology, they want to pay for the technology classes. We already pay for drug education. We pay for sex education. We pay for arts in the schools. They want to hire our teachers. They want to test our kids. They want to develop curriculum. They want to develop after-school programs. So when we take a look at it, they want to feed our kids breakfast, build our schools, pay for the technology, teach them about sex, teach them about drugs, teach them art, get involved with curriculum. They want to test our kids, hire our teachers, feed them lunch, do after- school programs, maybe midnight basketball. But other than that, it is our local school. That is how 7 percent of Washington's Federal education dollars drive into a local school district to drive administrators from, rather than focusing on the child, rather than focusing on the education, to recognize that they have become just like welfare. They have become process-driven. I want administrators, I want teachers focused on helping our children learn, not pushing paper. How do we know that they push paper? We surveyed the Federal government, and these are not all K through 12, but when we asked the question, how many Federal education programs are there, there are 760. Like I said, they are not all K through 12, but there are lots of programs. We say, wow, that is why we have a Department of Education, to take these programs and centralize them in one department? Wrong. These 760 programs are spread over 39 different agencies that spend over $100 billion a year. It has gotten to be so complex that there is a cottage industry, again, the wonderful entrepreneurial spirit in America. There is a company called the Education Funding Research Council. What do they do? They will sell a book for $400. What is it? It is the guide to Federal Funding for Education. We have a business out here that has decided that they can make a living by telling the rest of America where the dollars are in education, and help them go through the process of getting Federal education dollars. There is another one that says, they talk about 500 education programs. There is another one that is called ``The Aid for Education Report.'' Here is what they say: ``Huge sums are available. In the Federal government alone there are nearly 800 different education programs that receive authorization totalling almost $100 billion a year.'' What do 760, 800 programs, what do they lead to? Even accounting for recent reductions, the U.S. Department of Education still requires over 48.6 million hours of paperwork per year, 48.6 million hours. This is for the paperwork. This is the focus on process rather than on results. The President talks about hiring maybe 100,000 teachers. We do know that when you require 48.6 million hours of paperwork, that is about the equivalent of 25,000 people working full-time, 25,000 people working to meet the paperwork requirements of the Department of education and other Federal agencies. The Department of Education talks about, well, there are only 4,637. We are one of the smallest agencies in Washington. They have been smart. They have moved the paperwork and the requirements down to the State level. At the State level there are another 13,400 full-time employees funded with Federal dollars to administer these programs. The end result is that when we send a dollar to Washington, there is a good chance that only 65 to 70 cents actually reaches the classroom. If we are really concerned about educating our children, let us take a look at the welfare model, the welfare reform model that has been so successful, and let us focus on results rather than paperwork and process. Let us focus on educating our children, rather than administering 760 programs with mountains of paperwork that are run by a shadow education department that consume 30 to 40 cents of every dollar before it gets back to the child. How does this work? Vice President Gore's National Performance Review discovered that the Department of Education's discretionary grant process, now think about this, in a world today where a new product in a high-tech business can be developed in India and can be in the room next door in a matter of seconds, if we want to get money from the Department of Education to help educate a child, the process is 26 weeks long and goes for 487 steps. I have good news, the Department of Education has streamlined the process. They are now in the Information Age. But they define their Information Age and their streamlining as resulting in a process that now only takes 20 weeks and only has to go through 216 steps of review. Think about this. This is the model that we have for 7 percent of our education funding: 760 programs, mountains of paperwork, three employees in the States for every Federal employee here in Washington chewing up every dollar in education so there is only about 65 to 70 cents left for the classroom, a process that goes through 216 steps and takes 20 weeks. Where does this money go? It is kind of like, well, at least we have 65 to 70 cents of every dollar going to help educate our children in the basics. Wrong. Let me just give one good example: The Department of Education's Office of Special Education and Rehabilitative Services. The objective of this program is supposedly to promote the general welfare of the deaf and hard of hearing, a very appropriate goal. How is that mandate and objective interpreted in Washington? It means that in Washington our taxpayer dollars, when we have this kind of performance that I mentioned earlier in education, what we are doing is in Washington educational meaningful programs include paying for the closed captioning of Baywatch, Ricki Lake, the Montel Williams Show, and Jerry Springer. And they have a special program dedicated to closed captioning for major sports programs. That is defined as a high priority program in Washington. Other education programs, and remember, this is in context with where we were earlier for how our kids are performing internationally. Our education department believes that, here, they print a cartoon book. The title is ``The Ninjas, the X-men, and the Ladies, Playing with Power and Identity in the Urban Primary School.'' They have got one for the bakery industry. Lesson plans prepared for grocery employees. The lessons focused on topics from the workplace in the following areas: bakery, cake orders, courtesy clerk, and sushi bard. It is 96 pages long. Fifth grade pipe fitters. Building workplace vocabulary for pipe fitters, 27 pages. I am not sure that those are the right priorities. My colleague said that is why we need more money in Washington and we need more focus in Washington, because we cannot trust people at the local level. There is a better way to address education. What do we want to do? Let me talk a little bit about the values that are the foundation for our Academic Achievement For All Act, Straight A's, because there is a different approach. It builds on the welfare approach. What it says simply is, we are going to take these Federal programs, and we are going to provide States with the opportunity, this is not a mandated program, this is a choice for the States, we are going to provide them with the opportunity to go through the categorical programs, the model that my colleague thinks is the most appropriate; and my colleague should be pleased to know that that program is going to stay in place. But we also then provide the States with the opportunity of coming to Washington and presenting a plan and saying, we have got some special need and some special focus and some special priorities that we have in Wisconsin or that we have in Michigan that we really think we need to focus on. So they reach an agreement with the Department of Education on a charter. So they get a 5-year waiver from the rules and the regulations. And, yes, they do get flexibility. They get flexibility to move their dollars around to their areas of focus and their areas of need. In exchange for that increase to flexibility and in exchange for eliminating the paperwork, they reach an accountability agreement that says, for that flexibility for the dollars and that freedom from the red tape, we are going to focus on results, and we are going to agree on these accountability standards for all of our students, to make sure that we deal with all of our students and do not forget about any of our students. The State then gets that flexibility. If, after 5 years, the States have not met their accountability guidelines, the Federal Government can come back and say they did not do what they said they were going to do. They did not get the results that they were going to get. They have got to go back into the categorical programs. Flexibility, elimination of red tape, and a freedom to focus on results. It is the welfare model. What do we believe that this will lead to, and what are the values that drive this kind of a strategy? We believe that education needs to be student centered. Successful schools are not forced to rely and focus on Federal paperwork. They have the opportunity and the freedom to focus on each and every child. They are results oriented, not process oriented. We believe in equality. Each and every child in America must be given the opportunity to succeed in his or her school. Another value we have is that parental involvement and local control. Schools thrive, and we have seen this wherever we went, schools thrive when parents are integrated into the learning process, when parents and adults are viewed as equal partners in decision making and direction setting, and when decisions are made at the local level by individuals who know the names and understand the needs of each child in their school. Freedom. We believe that families and students deserve the opportunity to choose the school that they will attend. Safety. Successful schools are free from violence. Children and parents need schools which can provide a secure learning environment. Basic academics. It is another core value much the schools and the successful schools that we have seen focus on basic academics. Reading, writing, and math are taught as the foundation of lifelong learning and a sound future. The methods used to teach these subjects and others should be based on sound science and reliable and reputable research. Discipline. Successful schools maintain disciplined environments where all are respected. Flexibility. Schools need the ability to shape programs and policies that fit their particular needs. One size does not fit all. It did not work in welfare. It does not work in education. No two school districts or States are the same, and a one-size-fits-all Federal education system just will not work. One size fits all cannot replace the knowledge or the concern. To imply that people at the local level and that parents and teachers and administrators do not care about their children at the local level sells them short. It does not sell them short, it is just a total lack of understanding of what is going on in local America today. Results. Successful schools implement accountability mechanisms which measure whether or not a child is learning. Finally, another value is we believe that dollars need to be spent in the classroom and not on bureaucracy. Successful schools spend less time and resources on paperwork and more time on classroom resources. We all want a better education system. We want common sense principles that drive our education strategy. For us, that means parental involvement. It means basic academic. It means flexibility. It means dollars to the classroom, and it means eliminating red tape. For the other side, it means creating a Federal school board and running one's local school in a much more direct way from Washington than at the local level. That is just not going to work. It is not the right way to go. We have a wonderful opportunity in today's prosperity to reform and to rethink the education model. We did part of it earlier this year when we did the Education Flexibility Act, providing a certain degree of latitude and flexibility in States to deal with the paperwork that has been imposed upon them. We can build off that now by giving States and local schools the flexibility in how they spend their dollars and focusing on meeting the needs of their children's learning. We can provide parents with the opportunity and the flexibility to secure their child's education by providing tax relief in the form of education savings accounts. We can get more resources focused into the classroom by saying, when it comes to Federal education spending, Washington comes last. It does not mean we cut our Washington spending. It says that, for every dollar we spend in Washington, instead of getting 60 or 65 to 70 cents back to a local classroom, which is where the leverage point is, which is where we can have an impact on learning, we are saying we are going to get 95 cents of every Federal dollar back. So without even expending more money in Washington, we can increase the amount of Federal dollars that get to the classroom, the local classroom, by 50 percent. That is an effective way to improve education. We have made a lot of progress. We are going to continue working on this issue. As I wrap up, I take a look at what we have accomplished and what we want to accomplish this year. We are going to have a balanced budget. We are going to begin the process of setting aside $1.8 trillion for Social Security and Medicare. We are going to provide tax relief to the American people. We are going to strengthen our national security so that we can be secure at home and abroad. We are going to focus on education. We are going to allow parents and local schools to focus on meeting the needs of their children. We are going to provide States the flexibility. We are going to take the model that worked in welfare, and we are going to take that same kind of criteria, which is a trust in the local level, a trust in the State level, and saying the top-down structure does not work. We have got a model that works. We have seen it work. People have experienced it. People are benefiting from it. We need to take that same model and apply it to education.

Mr. HOEKSTRA

Mr. HOEKSTRA. Mr. Speaker, it is time to review a little history. Just last year Republicans put forward a commonsense proposal to save 90 percent of the budget surplus for Social Security. Simply, it was called the 90-10 Plan, 90 percent for Social Security, 10 percent for tax cuts. That proposal was vilified every day for months by Democrats as a raid on the Social Security Trust Fund. Let me repeat that. Democrats repeated day in and day out that because only 90 percent of the surplus was designated to go to Social Security, that proposal was a raid on the Social Security Trust Fund. Now this year the President has proposed to set aside 68 percent of the surplus for Social Security, which last time I checked was less than the 90 percent which the Republican proposal set, and yet the President claims that his proposal saved Social Security while ours was a raid on the Social Security Trust Fund. Now, there is some reasoning that I just do not trust.

Mr. HOEKSTRA

Mr. HOEKSTRA. Mr. Chairman, I move to strike the requisite number of words. Mr. Chairman, I am here today to voice my support for the efforts to adhere to a freeze, to not increase spending this year. I empathize with the comments that my colleague has made and the difficulty that we are having in working some of these issues out through our own leadership. But I think that, as we have taken a look and heard the rhetoric in Washington this year, the President talking about saving 62 or 68 percent of Social Security, Republicans talking about 100 percent of Social Security, and I think we really believe that this is the year and this is the opportunity where we can move forward and have a surplus not only on the back of Social Security, but taking Social Security out of the equation and have a balance in our general fund, that that is the appropriate and the best way for us to go. It really then lays the foundation for us to move forward effectively and aggressively into the future, to start addressing some of our real priorities that we need to be looking at as we move into the new millennium. We need to be taking a look at paying down a portion of our debt. We need to be taking a look at reducing the tax burden on American families. The only way that we are going to be able to address those issues is if we hold the line on spending. And the only place that we can hold the line on spending is through the appropriations process, and that is why we are here and that is why this debate, as well as the 12 other appropriations bills, that is why the debate on each of those issues is so critical, because it sets the foundation for saving Social Security, for reforming Social Security, for saving and reforming Medicare, and then to move forward towards paying down the debt and reducing the tax burden on the American people. I want to talk a little bit on this issue for just a second. I came out of the furniture business. I worked in the office furniture industry. I worked for the second largest manufacturer of office furniture in America. I have three of the largest office furniture companies either in my district or very close to my district, and I have got a lot of smaller office furniture manufacturers, many of them who use wood products. I am not sure that they need or want the government to direct or fund this research. As a matter of fact, we were just up in the Committee on Rules, and I told my colleagues what they really want is, they would rather not have us fund this research; what they really want to have is, they want to have the ability to compete. The amendment that we brought up in the Committee on Rules goes to an industry like this and says they cannot compete for business with the Federal Government. It is kind of interesting that we are saying we are going to give them $5 to $6 million to be more competitive, but at the same time, whatever they--earn--learn, they cannot compete for business with the Federal Government. Why is that? Because their largest competitor in the Federal Government for Federal Government business is Federal prison industries. Federal prison industries make $200 to $300 million worth of office furniture each and every year. So I am sure that the office furniture business would say, let us not worry about the subsidies, let us move back to free market enterprise; and that they will take care of their own research, they will take care of new developments, new technologies, breakthrough technologies, they will fund that. Just give us the opportunity to compete for Federal Government business. We will more than earn our return in terms of profit and at the same time give the Federal Government a better quality product on a better delivery schedule and at a lower price. So I think that gets to be a very interesting kind of a trade-off. And I think it just shows us one of the ways that we can actually hold the line on Federal spending here in Washington where everybody can win and nobody really gets cut. So those are the priorities that I have.

Mr. HOEKSTRA. I yield to the gentleman from Oklahoma.

Mr. HOEKSTRA

Mr. HOEKSTRA. Mr. Speaker, I think the other thing that is important when the gentleman is talking about explaining this, the numbers, when one takes a look at one's check stub and it says the FICA and the Social Security and one sees the 6.25 percent, recognize that one's employer matches that dollar for dollar. One of the bills that I have introduced says that at the end of the year when one gets one's W-2, that the W-2 ought to state clearly what one has paid in FICA taxes and what one's employer has paid in matching FICA taxes, because really it is all one's income. That is paid specifically on how much one makes. If the employer did not have to be paying that in taxes to the Federal Government, that could be a part of one's wage. It is a hidden tax on each and every American. Again it is one of these ways, secret ways that a time back they went to Washington and they said how can we get some more money without letting the American people know how much we are really taxing them? They said, well, there is the employee's share. Let us create a matching employer's share. It never gets reported anywhere. It never gets reported anywhere, but it clearly is income. It is revenue that an employer receives that, if they did not have to pay it in taxes to the Federal Government, they could pay it to the employee. Then when an individual gets a .004 return on that, he or she is not only getting a .004 return on the money that the employee had set aside; it is the same return that the money that is being set aside by the employer is earning. And that is not right.

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

Mr. HOEKSTRA. Mr. Speaker, we are talking about the money that Washington believes we ought to spend, instead of the American people spending, on a variety of programs and services.

Mr. HOEKSTRA. I think the other interesting question is not only to ask is this more important than Social Security, it is if we are risking young men and young women's lives in Kosovo, is there no place else in the budget that we could find $6 billion? Is the only thing to say it is an emergency, not say everything else is as equal of a priority? I think as we have taken a look at all of this, we spend $1.7 trillion per year. We all know that there is lots of bureaucracy, there is lots of red tape. There are other places where, if we really went after it, we could find the dollars to fund this without raiding Social Security and be able to do Kosovo and just say for those Members that believe it, this mission in Kosovo is so important we are willing to reduce spending in some other areas because this is a new priority.

Mr. HOEKSTRA. If the gentleman will yield, I think the reason that we are now in the Social Security debate is because of the progress that we have made in the last 3 or 4 years, where, relatively speaking, we are near or at a surplus. This year we may have an actual surplus, disregarding the inflow into the Social Security Trust Fund. Now is the time to have that debate. And as we said in our budget, the first thing we want to do is to set aside all of the Social Security dollars so that we can have a meaningful debate on Social Security reform, we can have a meaningful debate on Medicare reform. I mean, we see it every day. There are all kinds of suggestions out there about how we should take this ``surplus'' and how we should spend it. And as my colleague from South Carolina has said, what that means is, if we got a surplus, there are all kinds of ideas how people are now suggesting that this surplus stays here in Washington and we spend it rather than securing our future for the next generation or paying down the debt or reducing the taxes. It seems like there are a lot of people who believe Washington should be first in line and we ought to accelerate now that growth in spending, and that is the wrong thing to do.

Mr. HOEKSTRA. Mr. Speaker, if the gentleman will yield for a minute, when we are talking about a Washington pay raise, we are not talking about what they pay Members of Congress versus what people back home are getting.

Mr. HOEKSTRA. Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague, the gentleman from Oklahoma, for yielding to me. The options that the gentleman lays out are probably the range of options that we have, although under option one, we probably have a number of different alternatives for how we would reform and strengthen the foundation for social security. I hope that that is the option that this Congress pursues and pursues aggressively, because if we begin in 1999 to take a look, a serious look at reform, and if we implement reform in this Congress, that gives us, then, you know, we have a time window then of 14 or 15 years to get ready before we hit that wall in 2014. That is a much better option than the number two, which is raising taxes. Or we end up cutting a bunch of services in the other area of the government, but I do not think that will ever happen, or to change the fundamental structure of social security by delaying the retirement age or cutting benefits and those types of things. So the opportunity, and really, the thing that we have to take a look at in this Congress is reforming social security along the lines that our colleague is developing a plan on, but that is the mandate that is in front of us.

Mr. HOEKSTRA. Mr. Speaker, if the gentleman will yield, I think this is a point that I do not think we can drive home often enough. There are those back in our districts who talk about cutting spending. We have not cut spending.

Mr. HOEKSTRA. Mr. Speaker, what we have done is we have slowed the growth of Federal Government. So my colleagues know spending has not been cut. What we have done over the last 3 or 4 years, and what we did in the balanced budget agreement of 1997, which we continue in this budget agreement that we just passed a couple of weeks ago, is we agreed to live within the caps that restrain the growth of new spending that we would incorporate here in Washington. So we said, government, we are going to allow it to get bigger, we are just not going to grow it quite as fast. By just slowing the growth of government and sticking to that plan, we achieve real surpluses, and we achieve a significant surplus over the years beyond 2000 and allow some room for some of that money to go back to the American people.

Mr. HOEKSTRA

Mr. HOEKSTRA. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for yielding time to me. Mr. Speaker, I think that this is a very good budget proposal. What this budget enables us to do is to build on the success that we have created over the last number of years. What does this budget do? Number one, it locks away the entire social security trust fund surpluses. That is almost $1.8 trillion over the next 10 years to save, strengthen, and preserve social security, and as necessary, to do the same things for Medicare. It locks away the entire social security trust fund. This budget saves social security receipts in excess of benefit payments so that we can strengthen and save both social security and Medicare. Secondly, it forces us to maintain the spending discipline of the 1997 Balanced Budget Act by holding to the discretionary spending caps that we agreed to with the President in 1997. It pays down about $1.8 trillion in debt that is held by the public. In regard to what the President's budget does, this budget pays down over $450 billion more than what the President pays down in public debt. It ensures that we properly fund our need for defense by spending $290 billion in fiscal year 2000. In addition, we provide for $66 billion for education, training, employment, and social services. This is $3 billion more than what was in the House resolution, so we continue our commitment to education. What we are going to do in the area of education is reform the program so not only do we spend more money on education, but we ensure that more money is spent at the local level under local control, where decisions are made by parents, local teachers, and local administrators to make sure that we get maximum flexibility and impact for those dollars. This is a good budget. I encourage my colleagues to support it.

Mr. HOEKSTRA

Mr. HOEKSTRA. Mr. Chairman, I thank the gentleman for yielding me this time. This is really a great budget. Let us take a look at what this budget does. It allows the American people the opportunity to secure their future as we enter a new millennium. It locks away the entire Social Security Trust Fund, the surplus that we are going to be gaining over the next 10 years, $1.8 trillion. We save it so that we can strengthen and preserve Social Security and, as necessary, Medicare. We set aside $100 billion more than the President for Social Security and Medicare. We create a safe deposit box. What this means is that we prevent Congress from going and raiding those surpluses and using it for other spending. We pay down $450 billion of debt held by the public; $450 billion more than the President. We maintain the spending discipline of the balanced budget agreement of 1997. We allow the American people to secure their future by providing more for defense, by providing more for education, and providing the opportunity to enact historic tax relief. This is the kind of plan that enables us to build on the success of the last few years and to prepare for the future. It is a wonderful budget to move forward.

Mr. HOEKSTRA

Mr. HOEKSTRA. If the gentleman would continue to yield, would it not be great if we did education reform and we started reading headlines that said, test scores improve by 25 percent, math and science scores up by 25 percent?

Mr. HOEKSTRA. I think we need to take the same kind of fresh approach on education that we took on welfare. In the welfare debate, if my colleagues will remember, the governors came to us and said we have plans and ideas to help those people who are on welfare, but we have to go to Health and Human Services and we have to ask for waivers. We have plans that are approved by our State legislature, a lot of times in a bipartisan way. The executive in the State has agreed to it, and we come here to Washington and we have a bureaucrat who says, no, we cannot do that. Now, I have to say, wait a minute, who do we think is going to take better care of the people in our States, those who are elected and serving in that State legislature or in the Governor's mansion or some bureaucrat here in Washington? We really need to do the same kind of thing on education, where there are governors that are coming here and they are saying we get 7 to 10 percent of our money from Washington and we get 50 percent of our paperwork, all of our rules and regulations, from Washington. We have some States that are experimenting with one form of charter schools, others are experimenting with scholarships to students or tax credits for extra instructional assistance, and they say we have great ideas that are having an impact, but the Federal Government is holding us back from what we really think will help our kids. So we need to bring the same kind of fresh thinking to reforming education or the education monster here in Washington so that we can actually go out and effectively help children at the local level. I think we are on our way to begin that process, but we do definitely have a significant way to go.

Mr. HOEKSTRA. I want to play off the welfare thing, because as we are doing welfare correctly and improving the system, I really want the gentleman from California (Mr. Cunningham) to reinforce the point that he made earlier that says, as we are reducing the amount of money that we are spending in welfare, maybe we are freeing up some of that money so that it can be used on education.

Mr. HOEKSTRA. If the gentleman will yield only so that we can explain what Davis-Bacon is. Davis-Bacon means that there are bureaucrats here in the Labor Department who send out forms all around the country and say that in Detroit the prevailing wage for an asphalt layer is X amount of dollars, and in Holland, Michigan, where I am from, it is X amount of dollars. And then if the school builds a project using even $1 dollar of Federal money, they have to pay these ``prevailing wages''. They are inflated wages. I believe that the average age of one of these surveys is 7 years old. I mean it is not even up-to-date data.

Mr. HOEKSTRA. The highest in over 30 years. And all they did in the Senate was, on the teacher funding, we know there is a tremendous burden on the local school for special ed, so we will give them the flexibility of either hiring teachers, because maybe they have already taken care of the class size issue, or they are struggling with a couple of different priorities. But rather than Washington coming in and saying they can only use the money for teachers, they wanted to say they can use the money for teachers or they can use the money for their special ed program. And we had a fairly spirited debate here on the floor of the House with one group saying hiring teachers is exactly what they should do with that money and they should not be able to use it for anything else. Luckily, we prevailed today in saying they have the flexibility of using it for teachers or using it for special ed so that the local school district can make that decision. I would think that local administrators, a local school board with parental involvement, is better equipped to make that very basic decision: Are we going to take this money and use it for addressing some of the needs in our special ed program or are we going to use it to reduce class size? Let the people at the local level decide. We won a skirmish in that process of moving the money and the decision-making back to the local level, but there are many here who believe that we know best what needs to go on in the local school districts. I have this litany that says we have a group of people here in Washington who believe that Washington ought to build our schools, hire our teachers, develop the curriculum, test our kids, buy technology, teach them about the arts, teach them about sex, teach them about drugs, feed them lunch, feed them breakfast, provide them with an after-school snack and have midnight basketball. But other than that, it is their local school.

Mr. HOEKSTRA. If the gentleman will further yield, we are shifting the barge, but there are powerful currents that are trying to put us back on the track that we have been in for the last 15 years. Take a look at the debate we had on the floor of the House here today. In the Senate, on Ed-Flex, they added a very simple amendment. They said for those school districts, or for the school districts that are getting money for reducing class size, for hiring additional teachers, there is another mandate out there from the Federal Government, which is funding for children with special needs. We promised local school districts in the State, we did not, I do not think any of us were here when that mandate went through, but Washington said we will cover 40 percent of that cost for these children with special needs. That is a priority for us in Washington. We are going to mandate that the States do it and we will pick up 40 percent of the cost. Last year, we had a record percentage that we cover the cost. We were all the way up to, what, 11, maybe 12 percent? Somewhere between 11 and 12 percent.