Pete Hoekstra

Mr. HOEKSTRA

Mr. HOEKSTRA. Mr. Chairman, I thank the gentleman and apologize for being a little late. I had the opportunity to listen to some of the gentleman's discussion on education. I think he was talking about land use earlier. I thought it would be helpful for me to come and participate only so that I can in some ways learn from the gentleman from Colorado (Mr. Schaffer) and the gentleman from California (Mr. Cunningham), my colleague that we miss on the Committee on Education and the Workforce but who is now on the Committee on Appropriations. We actually have a great partnership in making sure that the dollars that we spend here in Washington actually get down to the local level. The gentleman from Colorado (Mr. Schaffer) and myself have had the opportunity to go around the country, and we have been in 16 different States, we have been in the district of the gentleman from Colorado (Mr. Schaffer), we have been in my district, where we have built a record of the good things that are happening in education. There are a lot of good things that are happening in education. As we have been in Colorado, as we have been in Michigan, as we have been in California, Ohio, Illinois, Milwaukee, New York, we have been in Kentucky, the thing that we have seen consistently is that education excels when people at the local level are given the freedom and the latitude to take the money that we give them, and they all come back and they say ``your dollars are critical, and they help us do some things that we might otherwise not be able to do,'' but they say, ``get the dollars down here, but then let us have the flexibility.'' As the gentleman said, all these programs do not go to K through 12, the 760 programs. Some of them have nothing to do with K through 12 or higher ed. But we think that there is well over 500 programs that do go to K through 12 or higher ed. Each one of these are the funding stream. We call it a funnel or a silo. Each silo comes with a whole series of rules and regulations and applications. Once one gets the money, one has got to report back. Then one is audited. That is why, like the gentleman indicated, we believe that, when the American people send a dollar to Washington for education, somewhere between 60 cents or 70 cents, maybe as low as 50 cents, only 50 cents gets into a local classroom and an immediate impact to a child. Fifty cents, 60 cents gets lost in the bureaucracy. It gets lost in the red tape. We just appointed the conference committee today on Ed-Flex, which is intended to eliminate some of the bureaucracy, some of the red tape, and allow local school districts to make the decisions for the kids in their classrooms. I think it is a real step forward and a real opportunity and one that I hope we can build on through this Congress. Ed-Flex is only the beginning of a process of not eliminating Federal involvement, but really recognizing where the power and this partnership is. The power and the partnership is at the local level.

Mr. HOEKSTRA

Mr. HOEKSTRA. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for yielding time to me. I rise to speak in opposition to the motion to instruct the conferees. If we take a look at simply what the Lott amendment does, it allows local schools and local administrators to make a very basic decision. It provides local school districts with a choice. It says, if you want to focus on reducing class size, you can use the money to reduce class size. But perhaps if you have already done that and your class sizes are small and you have a pressing need in special education, you can make that choice. So it is a very simple process of saying, we are committed to providing additional resources, additional funding for education, but we believe that the decision needs to be made at the local level. That is what Ed-Flex is about. Ed-Flex is about moving decision-making to the local level, and it is about reducing red tape and bureaucracy so that we can actually move more dollars from the Washington bureaucracy into the classroom, and as we do that, we can address class size, we can address special ed, we can address teacher training, we can address technology, and a whole other range of problems and opportunities that local school districts face today. Let us keep moving in the direction of enabling local administrators and local parents and local teachers to do what they believe is best for education in their school districts. Let us not hamper and hinder an education bill that is moving in the right direction by coming right back with the same old Washington model, which is more rules and regulations and directions.

Mr. HOEKSTRA

Mr. HOEKSTRA. Mr. Chairman, I rise today to speak in favor of the Coast Guard Reauthorization Act. The Act provides the United States Coast Guard with authorization for the funding they need to accomplish the important missions that the Congress and the Nation have asked them to accomplish. As a member with more than 120 miles of Lake Michigan coastline in my district, I fully understand the Coast Guard's mission and appreciate the fine level of search-and-rescue services that the Coast Guard provides to the boating and beach-going public in West Michigan. I rise especially today to discuss the way that this authorization bill impacts the operation of the Coast Guard Muskegon Air Facility. The Coast Guard has operated this air facility on a seasonal basis from April 1 to October 1 each summer since 1997. Prior to 1997, the Coast Guard had operated an air facility or air station to cover southern Lake Michigan out of the Chicago area since 1959. The bill before us today addresses the concerns of the Michigan and Illinois delegations regarding Coast Guard search and rescue air coverage on Lake Michigan. The bill provides that the Coast Guard shall continue to operate the Muskegon Air Facility and shall establish a Chicago area facility for operation through the end of FY 2001. In addition, the bill provides for a study of total search-and-rescue response on Lake Michigan and the establishment of a plan for the coordination of search-and-rescue response in the Chicago area. I hope that the Coast Guard will aggressively move to take the actions necessary to operate both the Muskegon and Chicago air facilities in FY 2000. I also hope that the Coast Guard will, in the interim, provide a high level of search-and-rescue air coverage for southern Lake Michigan by operating the Muskegon Air Facility on a seven-day, 24-hour-per-day basis during the summer of 1999. Finally, I want to thank Transportation and Infrastructure Committee Chairman Shuster and the other subcommittee chairmen for their assistance in resolving the Lake Michigan Air Facility issue. I would also like to thank the gentleman from Michigan, Mr. Ehlers, for his assistance on this issue and for helping to maintain the high level of boating safety enjoyed by those boating on Lake Michigan.

Mr. HOEKSTRA

Mr. HOEKSTRA. What the top chart enables us to do, if we stick to the spending caps and we pass our budget, is to really focus on what our colleague here has been working on, which is to seriously take a look at Social Security reform. Because we have to be honest here, we do not save Social Security. What we do is we position ourselves to save Social Security for our kids and for our grandkids. But that is the next step, again. We get to a surplus, then we get to a point where we have sufficient surpluses to save Social Security but we still have to do a Social Security reform proposal.

Mr. HOEKSTRA. If the gentleman will continue to yield, we can take a look at those two charts, and the chart on the top is what happens if we wall off the Social Security dollars. If we protect the Social Security dollars, it says that by 2001 we will be able to sustain some type of change in economic conditions. The further out we get, if we have an economic downturn or if we have some emergency spending requirements, that we have some room in there that we could still have a real surplus, even with some difficulties in the budget. The bottom one says that under the best of circumstances, by 2004 we will have a small surplus.

Mr. HOEKSTRA. Mr. Speaker, if the gentleman will yield, all the stuff below the line on the President's proposal is new debt for our children.

Mr. HOEKSTRA. Mr. Speaker, if the gentleman will yield for just a second, because I think it is going to be a bill that I think I am going to introduce tomorrow. What I do encourage each and every person to do is to take a look at their W-2, to take a look at their FICA number, which is their Social Security tax, and remember that that number, whatever it is, is matched by what their employer paid to the Federal Government. That could have been used for salaries or whatever, but that is money that is coming to the Federal Government. So it is not 6.2. It is 12.4. Tomorrow I believe we are going to introduce a bill. It say that is the employer, I know we do not like mandates, but that the employer on their W-2, on an employee's W-2 has to put in the employer's share of the tax that they have paid to the Federal Government so that the employee sees that, when they are working, their employer not only pays their salary and their taxes, but there is a hidden 6.2 percent tax that is going to the Federal Government based on the salary that they are making. It is full disclosure. It is truth in budgeting.

Mr. HOEKSTRA. Mr. Speaker, what does the gentleman mean ``obviously?'' It is all the money that they have made. It is all the money that is excluded that is taken out of their check by taxes. Would not it all be covered?

Mr. HOEKSTRA. Mr. Speaker, if the gentleman will yield, maybe the gentleman from Minnesota (Mr. Gutknecht) can help us out here. But when we take a look at the FICA taxes or the Social Security taxes when an employee at the end of the year gets their W-2 which shows how much income they have made, and it shows how much they have paid in tax, is the full Social Security tax displayed on their W-2 form?

Mr. HOEKSTRA. Mr. Speaker, if the gentleman will yield, I mean that is the one thing, the point that I missed on these two charts. The gentleman from Oklahoma brings it out at exactly the right time. When the deficit is increasing, and we have got that liability coming up on Social Security. The Federal Government going out and borrowing huge sums of money means potentially increased taxes for our kids and our grandkids. It means that the government is going out and borrowing probably billions, hundreds of billions of dollars per year. As we went through the Committee on the Budget, Alan Greenspan came in and said, ``If you get to a surplus budget or close to a surplus budget, I expect interest rates to drop by 2 percent.'' Do my colleagues know what? He was absolutely right in 1995. That is not a cost. That is a direct benefit to the American people. The biggest tax cut that we have given American families is to get close to surplus, because that has kept interest rates down on mortgages, on cars, on student loans and all kinds of things.

Mr. HOEKSTRA. Mr. Speaker, we still have this issue to deal with over the next couple of years.

Mr. HOEKSTRA. The false deficit. Mr. Speaker, that is right. But we still are facing this crisis. So we, with the plan now to wall off the Social Security dollars, say, number one, we are getting a handle on it. But it does not take care of these deficits yet. We are going to have to come up with a plan to reform Social Security. I think that leads into your options.

Mr. HOEKSTRA. Mr. Speaker, if the gentleman will yield, I was going to say, I think that if you take a look at two charts, we will outline how critical it was that we made the types of decisions that we made in 1995. When you combine the chart of deficit outlooks, which the gentleman from Minnesota (Mr. Gutknecht) showed us earlier, here is the dynamics that were going on in 1995 when he came here. The deficit was going down. By 2009, the deficit was going to be $600 billion per year. All right. So that is one. Think of it. We are going to spend $600 billion more than what we are going to collect in revenues. Look at the trend line. The trend line is that this number is going down. So by 2013, we are probably going to be at $700 billion with the accelerating rate. If we combine that with what was going to happen in Social Security, because right here, 2013, this was going to become a negative. So we have got the deficit on the general fund being a huge number. Then we are going to compound it with this flow from Social Security. There were people saying that is good enough. We take a look at it and say there is no way we can survive. Now we have taken care of the one chart, which is just the deficit numbers. We have got that under control.

Mr. HOEKSTRA. There is only one cut, and that is when the number goes down. What we have done is we have slowed the growth. The government is still growing, it is still getting bigger. We are spending more money on a number of different issues which this Congress and the President have identified as priorities. In no given year, however, can we go through and say that government is smaller in 1996 than it was in 1995. This is why I think it is so upsetting when so often we go out and hear about all of those cuts in Congress, that Congress has made on government spending, and we sit there and say, no, we are spending more than what we did last year. The only thing is we have slowed the growth and tried to demonstrate some restraint, because of the issues we were dealing with. We were looking at $300 billion deficits. It is a great thing that somebody finally came here and exercised some restraint so we can get to a surplus, or that we will get to a surplus, and all we did was slow the growth. We did not cut. Sure, we eliminated some programs, but we are spending more than what we did.

Mr. HOEKSTRA. Mr. Speaker, if the gentleman will yield, just like there is only a surplus or not, not a genuine and a phony, there is either a real surplus or not a real surplus, the other thing is there is either a real cut or not a real cut. I think we have to be very clear that when we talk about cuts in Federal spending, that I do not believe in any year since the gentleman has been here, since 1995, that our spending in any year, say for 1996, even though we cut spending, we are not spending less than what we spent in 1995.

Mr. HOEKSTRA. If the gentleman will yield, Mr. Speaker, I think what we really want to reinforce tonight is that we are going through various stages of addressing these issues because of the magnitude of the problems we are facing. In 1993, when I came here, getting to a surplus was a critical issue. In 1995, when these two gentlemen joined us here, we were actually able to move to a surplus. We talked a lot about getting to a surplus. That was only a step in a series of steps that we needed to take. We reached that last year where we got a surplus, but we used the social security surplus to help us get there. Now we are talking about taking the next step, which is, all right, now let us strive for a genuine surplus, or what some of us would describe as a more genuine surplus by taking social security off-budget and walling that money off.

Mr. HOEKSTRA. Yes. That brings us to 1999. If we would have treated social security honestly, and we are going to be talking about that later tonight, that number would have been $350 billions of deficit, and for spending of about $1.7 trillion we would have had a deficit of $350 billion. In the year 2000, we would have been approaching $400 billion. If we would have put in the social security numbers, roughly 20 to 25 percent of our spending would have been deficit-financed, would have been new debt that we would have stacked onto our children, which would have jeopardized the future of social security, either in terms of benefits or eligibility or increasing taxes. In 1995 the President said that that was good enough. He said, that is where I am going to lead the country. That is when people like the gentlemen here came in and said, wait a minute, that is maybe good enough for this administration, but it is not good enough for the American people, and financing our spending with 20 to 25 percent of debt is just plain wrong. In 1995 we changed the course of this town.

Mr. HOEKSTRA. Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague for clarifying that. In 1998 the Congressional Budget Office projected a deficit of somewhere in the neighborhood of $225 billion, the President's plan. In 1999, that number would have been about $250 billion. In the year 2000, it would be about $290 billion. This is a year. We would be in debt $290 billion more.

Mr. HOEKSTRA. Mr. Speaker, if the gentleman from Oklahoma (Mr. Coburn) will yield, just to put this in reference, because we are talking about 1998, we are going to be talking about performance of 1999 and performance of 2000.

Mr. HOEKSTRA. Mr. Speaker, if the gentleman from Oklahoma will yield, if we are talking about history, the one thing I appreciate is taking a reference point of 1995, which is when the two of you joined us here in Washington. As my colleagues may remember, I came in 1993, and if my colleagues think the picture was ugly in 1995, they should have been here in 1993, because in 1993 when we came and when I came here with 110 new freshmen and we had a new President, the mentality of Washington was, let us increase spending. Remember, that is when some of my colleagues were maybe motivated to run for Congress, because the message was the economy may be going into a downturn or whatever, when actually the economy was recovering because of what President Bush had done early in the 1990s. But it was like government spending is going to stimulate the economy. We did not, or the powers that be at that time did not care about the deficits. The deficits were $200 billion per year, as far as the eye could see, and growing. The belief was that to attack some of these issues, it was not to return money back to the American people, but was to take more of their money and to increase taxes. So in 1993, we had deficits as far as the eye could see, growing deficits as far as the eye could see; $200 billion deficits, increasing taxes, increasing spending, saying, that is the new model for this new presidency. The good thing about it was that that agenda I think spurred many of my colleagues to say, wait a minute, that is the wrong model, so my colleagues came and got elected in 1994, and in 1995 really set a very, very different tone. So my colleagues recognize what we have done since 1995. I go back two years previous to that and say, boy, if my colleagues had not come here in 1995, we would have continued that trend of 1993 of more spending and higher taxes. I think my colleagues are going to lay out how ugly the picture was in 1995, but it was much worse in 1993, and a very different solution to the problem in what my colleagues helped introduce and helped pass in 1995.

Mr. HOEKSTRA. I thank the gentleman for taking the time to do this and look forward to continuing this dialogue.

Mr. HOEKSTRA. The gentleman just brought up education. As he well knows over the last 2 years we have had the opportunity to go to 17 different States and take a look at the Department of Education, 760 education programs, 39 different agencies. For every dollar we spend on education, 30 to 35 cents of it stays in Washington, never gets to a child, never gets to a classroom, never gets to the local level where a parent, a school board, a teacher can say, ``Let's spend this money in this way to help our kids achieve academic excellence, to get them to be able to do reading and writing and math.'' The problem is not that we do not have enough money here in Washington for education. The problem is that we are keeping too much of that money here in Washington. We debated a bill today that just said we are going to give some level of flexibility to local school boards, to State governments, to take this money to get rid of red tape, to get rid of the abuse and to make this system more efficient so that rather than throwing more dollars into an inefficient system, let us make the system efficient so we can get 95 cents of every dollar into the classroom rather than the current 65 to 70 cents.

Mr. HOEKSTRA. I think that is exactly right. That is the problem that we are facing. We have had the debate within our own conference, where we talk about debt reduction and getting our fiscal house in order, and people say, well, that does not sell. In reality, I think when you lay out some of the charts that we laid out earlier that talk about the burden that we are facing, that we are placing on our children, I think when you go back to the chart that the gentleman from Oklahoma (Mr. Coburn) has up there and you start saying, wait a minute, we had $138 billion within our grasp, and in one year we took it away from Social Security and we pile it back on to new debt for our kids, I think the American people would embrace saying, ``Wait a minute, let's restrain the spending. We see this bubble coming up on Social Security. Now is the time to act.'' They understand these kinds of issues. They understand the crisis that we can face with the baby boomers. I think they look very positively at starting to set some of this money aside and getting our fiscal house in order. Again, this is $57 billion of new spending. This is not to get to $138 billion, you are going to cut spending by $57 billion. This is $57 billion of growth beyond what we already are planning on growing the Federal Government. This is brand new growth, brand new growth, brand new spending.

Mr. HOEKSTRA

Mr. HOEKSTRA. Mr. Chairman, I rise to oppose this amendment. Let me explain why. Over the last few years, as we have taken a look at education around the country, we have visited a lot of different types of school districts, but one constant remains, that people at the local level are focused at meeting the needs of the kids in their schools. They want more flexibility. Washington has stood in the way too often of schools helping kids in their community. What Ed-Flex does is it steps back and it says, we recognize that at the local level the teachers, the parents, and the school districts are best-equipped to make the decisions to improve the lives and the education of their students. If we take a look at the facts, Ed-Flex, in the 12 States where it has been operating, has been helping and not hurting Title I students. It just reinforces the direction here that says, let local people make local decisions. We have had lots of cases where school-wide programs have been more effective at improving student performance than traditional targeted programs. In both Texas and Maryland, Ed-Flex States, Ed-Flex has enabled school districts in each State to improve the test scores of their poorest children. In return for greater flexibility, both States have produced solid academic outcomes. An example, in Kent County, Maryland, a 60 percent poverty school that utilizes Ed-Flex, it now has the third highest test scores in the State. In Texas, through the use of Ed-Flex waiver authority for school-wide projects under Title I, test scores of poor and educationally disadvantaged students have increased significantly. I think these are just a couple of examples of when we empower people at the local level, they take that flexibility and they make the decisions that are right for that school district and for the kids in their schools. We saw that over and over again. Whether we were in New York, whether we were in Cleveland, whether we were in Milwaukee, when we give the flexibility, people at the local level embrace it and put together some truly exceptional programs. They do focus on results, and they do focus on the most needy students within their school districts. We do not need Washington to dictate. We ought to place some confidence in people at the local district. I think what we have seen and the examples that we have out of Texas and Maryland show that that is exactly what happens. Some would argue that Ed-Flex shortchanges high poverty schools. Again, that is not true. Since 1994, the year that both Ed-Flex and schoolwide projects under Title I became law, the percentage of high poverty schools receiving Title I funds rose from 79 percent in 1993, 1994 to close to 95 percent in 1997, 1998. Poor students are continuing to benefit under Title I. The question that we have is, when Governors, school administrators, teachers, State boards of education, local boards of education, and chambers of commerce, all experts at improving education, they all support more flexibility for the States, why is it that we continually see amendments here in Washington that are trying to dictate to them what they should do? We know flexibility works. Local school principals, local teachers, local administrators like having the schoolwide option. The national assessment of Title I shows that, by 1997, 1998, 82 percent of eligible schools were using the schoolwide option, and an additional 12 percent were considering implementing schoolwide programs. We know that this type of an approach works. We know that the flexibility works. We know that, when we enhance the capability of people at the local level within a set of parameters to improve education, they make the right kinds of decisions. Let us leave this decision making at the local level within those parameters and oppose this amendment.

Mr. HOEKSTRA

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