Pete Hoekstra

Mr. HOEKSTRA

Mr. HOEKSTRA. Mr. Speaker, the gentlewoman actually believes school reform can happen at the local and the State level better than at the Federal level.

Mr. HOEKSTRA. I think what many of us have seen as we have met with school administrators and around in our districts, we constantly hear that these buildings and these people here in Washington, all with good intentions but who control about 7 percent of the flow of the dollars to our local classrooms, generate 50 percent of the paperwork. For every dollar that we give them, they keep somewhere in the neighborhood of 30 to 40 cents and they send 60 to 70 cents to our kids. What we are saying is we agree with the President. We ought to take a look at where the dollars are going, and before we pour another dollar into this building and only get 60 cents out, we ought to see exactly the bang that we are getting. If we can get that up to 90 cents, we do not have to increase taxes, the tax burden; we will just be helping our kids. I know that my colleague from Kentucky would like to participate, and I yield to the gentlewoman from Kentucky [Mrs. Northup].

Mr. HOEKSTRA. Mr. Speaker, the gentleman has taken kind of a revolutionary approach. He is focusing getting dollars to the classroom, getting them to the kids, getting them to the teachers, to the local administration where they can actually make an impact. The other visual that we use frequently here, this is a picture of Washington, DC. I know my colleague is a freshman but I know that he is very well aware that when we walk across this street over here and we walk to the Capitol to vote, we call it Independence Avenue. That is what the street is called. But along this road are what, all of the bureaucracies that now are controlling so much of what goes on in our local neighborhoods. We think we ought to rename the street Dependence Avenue until we change that culture. What would the gentleman's legislation, what kind of impact would it have on the people that work here on Dependence Avenue?

Mr. HOEKSTRA. Mr. Speaker, that is improvement. It may be improvement, but it is still not very good.

Mr. HOEKSTRA. Mr. Speaker, it is my understanding that the Education Department very recently highlighted this as a significant accomplishment, getting it down to 21 weeks and 216 steps. I think until the Vice President became involved in this process, it took 26 weeks and over 400 steps. But this is what the Education Department calls significant progress and moving towards education excellence by shortening the process of finding out whether a school district is actually going to have a grant accepted after they go through 216 steps and after 21 weeks.

Mr. HOEKSTRA

Mr. HOEKSTRA. Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague for yielding. I am encouraged by the work my colleague has done and that he has completed on working toward, not a balanced budget but actually working toward a surplus budget as soon as possible, and actually developing a plan to pay off the national debt so that our children can look to a much brighter future. I would like to just refer my colleagues to an article that was in USA Today on Monday, April 7. It talked about what we in the Committee on the Budget have discussed as a vision, where a one-income family is where we want to get to, where a one-income family can derive enough income to support a family and support government, and where a two- income family becomes an option. It is kind of interesting. In USA Today yesterday they cited that the number of two-parent working families in 1995 has increased to 64 percent of the population. They then took a look at what we get with 64 percent of our families having two incomes. The second wage earner basically ends up working, as our majority leader would say, we have one person working for the government and one person working to support the family.

Mr. HOEKSTRA. We are operating at least 760 programs through 39 different agencies. They are not all in the Department of Education. They are in 39 different, distinct agencies, and they spend $120 billion per year.

Mr. HOEKSTRA. Mr. Speaker, if the gentleman will just yield for a second, I have to take leave. I appreciate the gentleman for sharing his time and the gentleman from Minnesota for sharing his time. I am sure we will be back at this, and I am confident we will present a budget that we can be proud of.

Mr. HOEKSTRA. Teaching them about sex education, giving them national tests, doing after-school programs, maybe even midnight basketball and a couple of other things. Other than that, it is your local school. Now, the President has moved away from this. He has now proposed a whole new set of programs spending $55 billion more. What we are doing in our committees, we are urging this Congress to say before we spend another dollar, because we think when we spend a dollar in education today, only 65 cents gets to the classroom, gets to your children in Wisconsin, gets to my kids in Michigan. Thirty-five cents gets eaten up by the bureaucracy. Mr. Speaker, before we spend more on education and ask the American taxpayers to send more to Washington, we ought to be taking a look at what we are doing with that dollar. Instead of saying, let us spend $1.10, we ought to be saying instead of 65 cents getting to the classroom, let us see if we cannot get it up to 85, 90, 95 cents of every dollar, because for bureaucrats to take 10, 15, 35 cents of every dollar before it gets to our kids, that might be another moral issue.

Mr. HOEKSTRA. Mr. Speaker, we are going to have to go through that process. I think that is an exciting debate and discussion to have. I know that one of the things that we are spending a tremendous amount of time on is an oversight subcommittee that I chair and we absolutely agree with the President. The President in March 1996 said, ``We cannot ask the American people to spend more on education until we do a better job with the money we've got now.'' What was he referring to? He was referring to the bureaucracy of education that we currently have, which is 760 programs in 39 different agencies spending $120 billion per year.

Mr. HOEKSTRA. Auctioneer. The other thing we look at in business is the value you get for your dollar, and the problems we were trying to solve for our customers in the business world. We have to take a look as we go through this process and take a look at some of the things that taxpayers are sending money to Washington for and asking, is that really the best place to solve these problems. Every day when we cross the street, we come over a street that is called Independence Avenue. Me and my staff, we have talked about it, we kind of think that maybe we could rename the street into Dependence Avenue because that street is littered with bureaucracies that we have moved responsibilities from families, from local and State government, from churches and nonprofit institutions and said we really do not think that you are the most effective place to handle these issues and we are going to have bureaucrats in Washington address these problems. I think my colleague will remember the discussion that we had last year during welfare reform where we said, just send the money to Wisconsin and let the people in Wisconsin decide how best to help those on welfare in Wisconsin and how to escape the welfare trap because there are probably people in Washington here who, I think, were we not talking about that my colleague had a bunch of waivers from Wisconsin that he could not get approved?

Mr. HOEKSTRA. We know that in the K through 12, which is a portion of that $120 billion, that is what we are seeing. In some of those other programs, it may be better, it may be worse, but it is not a pretty picture. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentlemen for allowing me to participate.

Mr. HOEKSTRA. We estimate that for the dollar that goes for K through 12, about 65 cents gets to the children, gets to the classroom. Thirty- five cents gets eaten up in the bureaucracy and the paperwork. Those are not impressive numbers. We can do significantly better than that.

Mr. HOEKSTRA. When this President gets done, if he gets this approved, he will be building our schools, he will be teaching our teachers, certifying our teachers, putting in the technology, feeding them lunch, feeding them breakfast.

Mr. HOEKSTRA. Mr. Speaker, I think the gentleman is absolutely right, it is a moral issue. Saddling our kids with $100 billion, $200 billion of additional debt each and every year is the wrong thing to do. The other thing, I came out of the business world, as I know my colleague from Wisconsin did, and I am not sure, you were in the legislature and before that maybe had a real job.

Mr. HOEKSTRA. That is right and provides them with either the opportunity to take the income to improve the quality of life for their family or to take that time away from working and invest it in the family. I would yield to my colleague from Minnesota.

Mr. HOEKSTRA

Mr. HOEKSTRA. Mr. Speaker, before I begin with my comments, which are a series and talk about where we are going in education, I want to yield a few minutes to my colleague from California to talk about a project that I have some interest in and I may learn something tonight about, a patent bill that he has proposed and a number of my constituents have called me about. So I want to yield some time to my colleague from California.

Mr. HOEKSTRA. Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague for sharing with us and look forward to learning more about this issue over the coming weeks. It is a critical issue. I have had a number of my constituents calling me and saying get with the Congressman from California, sounds like he has a good thing going and it is something we have to watch out for. So I thank the gentleman for taking that time. Mr. Speaker, I want to continue a series now that I have been doing for my colleagues that outlines a project which we call lessons in education. This is the fifth in a series. This is the fifth lesson, and it is about new spending and what the impact of new spending is. The impact is that new spending equals a new tax burden. It is something that sometimes is lost on us here in Washington. It is lost on my colleagues, that as we come up with an idea for more new programs, more good programs, solving more problems from Washington, that the increased spending, the impact of that is that someone has to pay for it. So lesson 5 is, let us not forget that new spending equals a new tax burden on America's families. These lessons in education, they are coming out of a process which we call Education at a Crossroads. Me and my colleagues, especially Buck McKeon and Frank Riggs, who share subcommittees with me on the Committee on Education and the Workforce, are currently working on this project, Education at a Crossroads, what works and what is wasted. The purpose of our efforts is to do a survey around the country of education, what the results are. There is enough education out there today or there are enough issues out there today that we can say that at least in parts of our country today education is in a crisis. You go to Washington, DC, right outside of this building, we are spending $9,000 per student. We get some of the lowest test scores in the country. We have had hearings in California where key people from universities come in and they say, you know what we need to do and what you need to do in Washington is you need to make sure that you continue funding our remedial education programs, and you kind of lean forward and say, these are kids entering higher education in California, what kind of remedial education do they need? And the answer is, well, they cannot read or write at an eighth grade level, so give us more money, and the answer is no, you do not need more money. As experts in education, you have got to get into the high schools, the middle schools and the grade schools and figure out why kids are not learning. You go around the country and you compare our scores with international scores and we are not getting the kind of results we would like to get. So we know that there are some problems and some opportunities in education. We also then want to take a look at whether Federal programs are helping drive the creativity, the energy, the innovation that we need in education today, or whether Federal programs are a stifling wet blanket of rules and regulations on State and local efforts to move education into the 21st century. Today I want to just make this additional report. The first lessons that we had is parents care the most about their children's education. That was lesson one. The exciting thing about going to New York, going to California, going to Phoenix, going to Chicago, going to Milwaukee, going around my district, going to Detroit, some of the toughest neighborhoods in the country, and talking about education is that there are lots of places where education is working. And the amazing thing is where education is working is where parents and teachers and local administrators have gone in and taken their school back, and they have taken their school back at the expense of district administrators, State bureaucrats or Washington bureaucrats. They have said, this is our school, these are our kids, we know their names, you do not, we are going to run this school the way that we want to run it, the way it needs to be run, because we know what our kids need, we know what our communities like, and we know how to bring the community, parents and teachers, together to service our kids, and we do not want to be locked in by State or Federal bureaucrats. It is amazing the amount of innovation that takes place when parents and teachers and local administrators are given the freedom to move forward. So that was lesson one, recognizing the fact that people at the local level, parents and teachers, care more about our children and their future than what bureaucrats in Washington do. Lesson No. 2. Good intentions do not equal good policy. Washington is full of good intentions. We have tried to do so many good things for our children that we have lost focus, that we are here to serve the kids and not smother them. Over 20 to 25 years, we have developed 760 programs going through 39 different agencies and spending about $120 billion per year. Lots of intentions, lots of good intentions, poor execution, and actually now, when you take a look at it, poor results at the local level. Lesson No. 3. More does not always equal better. It is kind of like when you have got a system and the system is not working. Only in Washington do you say, to fix the system, what we need to do is add a few more programs just like the ones that we have had and to fix the system, just put a little bit more money in it. When you put a little bit more money and a few more programs, you know, we think that is going to fix it. No, what it is time to do is to step back, to take a look at this and to say, more does not always equal better, and more does not equal better when what we are doing today is not working. Lesson No. 4. Education is not about government or bureaucrats. It is about kids. It is not about tax credits, it is not about Federal mandates. Education is first, last and always; education is always about children. And we have lost sight of that with too many Federal programs. I will go through it a little bit later when we take a look at where education in America has gotten to, at least at the Federal level. This is done by a cottage industry, a cottage industry that grew up because it recognized that education in Washington had moved away from being for kids; it had moved into becoming a bureaucracy. And what are these binders? Cottage industry, an independent organization that said, hey, there is an opportunity out there, nobody knows how to get the Federal money, let us develop a guide to Federal funding for education telling where the dollars are, who to call, how to write your grants, not to write your grants about what is going on in your local school district or the problems that you have but how to write a grant so that the people who give the money out will give you money. This is a license to steal from the American taxpayer, a license to come to Washington, mining for grants. This is about bureaucracy. This is where Washington has come. Washington has moved to becoming bureaucracy and has moved away from what it really should be, and that is a focus on our kids. Today's lesson. Today we focus our attention that when we decide to increase spending, that when we increase spending, somebody has to pay for it, so that when we increase spending, we create additional family tax burdens. Remember that what the President is taking a look at doing over the next 5 years, again good intentions but, remember, good intentions do not necessarily equal good results. More does not equal better. He wants to spend $50 billion more on education and develop a whole new series of programs. And, remember, if we spend $50 billion over 5 years, that is $10 billion a year for education. In the President's eyes, that is a positive move, but remember when the President adds new spending, the end result of adding $10 billion of new spending is that there are 5 million families that have to send an extra $2,000 to Washington each year for the next 5 years. What we are doing is we are moving families away from where we want to be, which is a government that can be supported by a one-wage-earner family and where a two-wage- earner family is an option. We are moving with this kind of reckless spending to a situation where a two-wage-earner family is going to be a requirement because one person is going to work to support the family, the other person has to work to support government. That is wrong. The lesson is, new spending equals new family tax burden. Either we are going to pay for it because we are going to have to raise our taxes, but more likely we will do it the way Congress has done it for the last 29 years and the way this President is proposing that we do it, let us increase spending, let us not increase taxes, let us increase spending and let us pass along this new family tax burden on to our kids. It is the wrong thing to do. Take a look at this scenario in one of the programs the President is taking a look at. The President says, we need 1 million new tutors because, why? America's children cannot read. Well, if we are going to have 1 million tutors to help our children learn to read, take a look at what the cycle here is. Kids cannot read. We have not taken a look at why kids cannot read, but kids cannot read. The solution is, let us pair a student up with a volunteer. You could say why do we not pair a student up with a parent but, no, let us pair them up with a government-sponsored volunteer which through AmeriCorps may cost about $27,000, but let us pair them up with a volunteer. Well, if we are going to have 1 million new volunteers, we are going to have to have a way to manage this. Well, how do you manage 1 million people? Well, what we need is we need a bureaucracy to administer a program to finance and manage our new tutors. So we have got the kids, we have got the tutors, we need the bureaucracy to manage the tutors, to find them, but now you say, how are we going to pay for these tutors, how are we going to pay for the bureaucracy that manages the tutors? Well, we are going to probably have to increase taxes either today or on future generations, on our kids, to pay for the Washington bureaucracy the President needs to administer the program to finance the new tutors. The tutors, the bureaucracy, the new tax burden. What then happens? We have got a new tax burden. What we are trying to do tonight is we are trying to inform America's families that, hey, you are being informed that you must pay more taxes to pay for the Washington bureaucracy the President needs to administer the program to finance the new tutors. So the family now needs and they are saying, wow, we have to pay more in taxes or we are going to be spending more money. So what does this now do to the families? They are saying, wow, a tax burden for our kids, or for us. We need more money. Families are forced to send a second wage earner into the work force to take a job, often a low-paying job, just to pay the taxes to pay for the Washington bureaucracy the President needs to administer the program to finance the new tutors. Now, what is the next step? You have more two-wage-earner families, because more families are forced to send a second wage earner into the work force to take a low-paying job just to pay the taxes to pay to the Washington bureaucracy the President needs to administer the program to finance the new tutors. More parents have less time to spend with their kids to teach them how to read. Well, we have almost come full circle. Because more families are forced to send more taxes to Washington by creating a second wage earner into the work force to take a low-paying job just to pay the taxes to pay for the Washington bureaucracy President Clinton needs to administer the program to finance the new tutors, more parents have less time to spend with their kids and to teach them how to read. As we have gone around the country and as experts will tell you, the most effective way to teach a child how to read is to reinforce the learning at school with a parent at home or person in the family at home reading to the child. It does not make any sense. We are going to go out and we are going to ask, in this case, to pay for the tutors. It is about $200 million a year. An average family if they have to pay more taxes, $2,000; that is either $2,000 that comes to Washington or it is $2,000 that stays with the family. One hundred thousand families are going to have to have a second wage earner paying $2,000 in taxes to fund the tutors. It does not make any sense to have this kind of scenario in place, to have families having more two-wage-earner families, not by choice but by a requirement because Washington wants to do more for your kids and the only way Washington can do more for our kids is by putting more parents to work so that they spend less time with their kids, which makes it harder for them to learn how to read. Does this make any sense? No, absolutely not. The time has come to tell the President no new spending. The American people must speak up and be heard on this. More new spending equals new family tax burden. It is time for the American people to stand up and to tell the President, no new spending. There are 760 programs through 39 different agencies spending $120 billion per year. If we need more education for different priorities, the money is there, and we need to tell the President that. No, actually we do not need to tell the President that. The President knows that. The President has said that. What we need to do is we need to remind the President of what he told the American people not all that long ago. A few months ago he was not talking about, the President was not talking about more spending for education. What did the President say on March 27, 1996? He did not say, give me $50 billion more; let's put 5 million more American families with two wage earners to pay for new taxes or new spending, the new tax burden by this education. He said exactly what we are trying to do with education at a crossroads. So this is not going back and telling the President he does not know. This means going back to the President and saying: ``We agree with you. At least we agree with what you said on March 27, 1996,'' where he said we cannot ask the American people to spend more on education until we do a better job with the money we have got now. This was a speech to the National Governors Association, their education summit back in March 1996. The President knows we have got plenty of money in education. The time is now to say, no more spending; we agree with you, Mr. President. We're not going to ask the American people to send more money to Washington on education until we take a very good look at what we're doing with the money that they are already sending here on education. Washington spending and taxes are linked. By asking for $50 billion and more spending, you are asking for $50 billion in more and new taxes, it's the wrong thing to do. There is plenty of money here in Washington. It's time to stop it, it's time to take a look and do an honest appraisal, an honest assessment of all of these Federal education programs. It's time to take a look at if we've got a bureaucracy like this or a bureaucracy that requires this kind of information to be published to go to the American people to tell them what's available in education funding, we've become too bureaucracy focused and not enough child focused. Mr. Speaker, I just want to go on for a few more minutes. This is not about who cares about our kids. We all care about our kids. We all care about education. But there is a fundamental difference between President Clinton's approach of spending more money on more bureaucracy and increasing the tax burden on the American people to pay it in our approach. Education at a crossroads says we are going to reassess and clearly identify what is working and what is wasted in these 760 programs, over 39 different agencies, and we are going to focus on getting the money into the classroom. The disappointing thing that we have today is we walk across the street when we come here to work. We walk across a street called Independence Avenue. In today's world and today's Washington spending, that is now Dependence Avenue. What is done in these buildings has a significant impact on American citizens around the country, whether it is Health and Human Services or whether it is Housing and Urban Development. These people in these buildings have way too much influence on what goes on in America. We talk about $50 billion of more money going into this city and into these buildings just for education. What does that mean? It means more decisions, more control in Washington, a bigger Dependence Avenue and less independence and freedom at the local level. Every dollar of taxes that goes to this city comes from an American family and increases the family tax burden. The first stop of these tax dollars; where is the first? The first stop is when you actually go to work and you earn it, but you do not keep it for very long. As a matter of fact, you do not keep--some of the money you never get. It was a wonderful invention called withholding. Mr. Speaker, I have got nephews and nieces that just began their first jobs, and they are excited. They have got a job for $5 - $5.50 an hour. They work for 20 hours that first week. Pay day is the following Tuesday or the following Wednesday, and they are excited because they worked for 20 hours at $5 an hour, and they are going to get a check for a hundred dollars. Twenty times five is one hundred. This is a good deal. It would be if they got $100. They get their first check, and they say: ``Well, where did this money go? You know, I've got $76, and it goes to all these strange acronyms that they have no understanding what they mean.'' But what we have got is we indoctrinate our children, when they get that first job, it is not really your money. You never see it, it never reaches your checkbook, it never reaches your wallet. It goes somewhere else. And then what happens? That check leaves their pocket and goes to this wonderful institution in Washington which is called the IRS, and what happens when it gets to the IRS? The tale of two visions. What happens in Washington when we get your money? One of the best examples is IRS wastes $4 billion, unsure if it can fix a computer problem. Think about this, $4 billion. This is 2 million American families sending $2,000 to Washington for 1 year, 2 million American families sending $2,000 to Washington, and they are unsure if they can fix a computer problem. Well, I will tell you there are 2 million American families who could have spent a lot more time with their kids if they had not had to work and send $2,000 to Washington for this computer glitch. After investing $4 billion in taxpayer dollars to try and remedy its inefficient and unreachable computer systems, the IRS has come to one conclusion. It is, unsure, if it can fix the problem. The agency expressed doubt that it was capable of developing modern computer systems, saying it lacked the intellectual capital for the job. It may be lacking the intellectual capital for the job, but the American taxpayers, because the IRS did not realize it could not do the job, 2 million American families had to send $2,000 to Washington. They had to provide the financial capital, and it all went down the drain. Mr. Speaker, think about what happens when the money comes here to Washington. Another program; again this one is out of the education programs. Only in Washington a report is completed. The report says drug programs do not work. OK. Thank you. Thank you for that analysis. Now, based on that analysis and recognizing that drug programs do not work, what are you going to do about it? What is the Education Department going to do with the billions of dollars that they get every year for drug programs? Only in Washington, when you have a program that does not work, do you say please give me some more money. Only in Washington. The program does not work, and what happens? We are going to spend more money on the failed programs. Only in Washington does that make sense. Only in Washington does it make sense when something does not work to pour more money into it and ask more families to have a second wage earner to fund Washington government that does not work. One final example out of our tale of two visions document. This is a monthly newsletter that we published. The State Department charging people with passport questions. IRS cannot run a computer system; the Education Department cannot run a drug program; the State Department has taken an entrepreneurial approach. They are going to develop customer service. Think about this. This is your Federal Government that you are paying taxes for. They are going to develop an approach, and they are going to become customer focused. You are paying for this agency with your tax dollars. They are going to become customer centered. Hallelujah. But wait a minute. What does it mean when we say the State Department is going to be customer focused? The State Department has created a customer service, not 800 number, to provide you easy access service, but a 900 number for all inquiries regarding passports. This 900 number will cost the public a dollar five per minute to answer questions such as: How many forms of ID do I need to bring? How long does it take to get a passport? The State Department, at least they are consistent. They are also saying we want congressional offices to use the 900 number if they have questions for their constituents. I think that, you know, at least they are being entrepreneurial, but they are forgetting who paid for this in the first place. The ironic thing would be, can you imagine if this spreads to the IRS, the agency that cannot understand its own regulations and cannot develop a computer system? And when you call it three times and ask three different people the same question, you get three different answers, and you are liable for it. Just would it not be wonderful if they develop a 900 number so that, when you ask the same question three times and get three different answers, you can pay three different times $1.05 per minute to get the wrong answer. We also go through and not only highlight what we think is waste in government, but we also highlight real life tales of the opportunity vision, which is people in their communities going out and making a real difference. There is a school in New York, Our Lady Queen of the Angels, spends $1,585. Think about it, $1,585 a year, about one-fourth of what city, State, and Federal governments spend on educating the child. Even by spending a quarter they have shown dramatic improvements in test scores each year, and they are well superior to other schools in their area. This is not about money getting good results. It is putting in place the right kind of systems to drive the right kind of behavior that makes things successful. Mr. Speaker, we have talked a lot about government spending. This is what happens to your taxpayer dollars. This is a problem. Let us move on to what happens when those dollars move into the education system. There is a question about how many Federal programs there are. This exhibit is called the catalog of Federal domestic assistance. If you do not think we help and have a lot of programs in place, in very small type this lists all of the different Federal programs of assistance that we have, and it primarily lists just the names. And when we go to page FI-9 and go through FI-17, we find the section that is called education, 8 pages, and if you add all the programs up here just under this category you will find 660 different programs. We then went to another organization, Government organization, CRS, and we said, you know, what do you think of this list? Is this an accurate list of government's involvement in education? And they said it is accurate, but as we take a look at it, we identify at least 116 other programs, and we know of no better source then the catalog of Federal assistance, so, you know, we are really not sure, but you are going to the right sources. You have asked us; we have identified at least 116 others, and this identifies 660, so yeah, you are somewhere in the neighborhood of 7 to 800 different education programs. We talked about earlier this is the cottage industry that has grown up, and what is in one of these binders? What is in these binders are a description of the different programs, how to apply, program purposes, what is the flow of funds, who is eligible, who do you contact, what is the range of awards. The funding opportunity index, which is the sheet at the back of every binder, is this blue sheet. This is a blue sheet, it is kind of a crib sheet. It tells you as you are going through all of these different types of programs, and it gives you a rating system, it tells you how easy or how difficult it is to get money. It not only tells you how to get the money, but it tells you whether it is going to be an easy program. Like if it has one star, approximately one out of eight applications is funded, or fewer. Two stars, approximately one out of five to seven. One out of four, one out of three, one out of two. So this has become a bureaucratic exercise. remember, this is not one binder, this is two binders. We get the two binders because it is 39 agencies, it is $120 billion of spending, and it is over 760 programs. This is a problem. This is $120 billion of spending where we are not sure we are getting the kind of results. One-half of all adult Americans are functionally illiterate. Fifty-six percent of all college freshman require remedial education. Sixty-four percent of our 12th graders do not read at a proficient level. You would think as we increase the amount of spending that SAT scores would have gone up over the last three decades, right? $123 billion of spending. Wrong. They have gone down 60 points in the last three decades. Last week we looked at two ways to approach education. There was the Washington-centered approach, which is this, when we have these kinds of binders sitting on your desk at the local level. What it means is that local administrators are sitting at their desks and they are gaming out how to get Federal money. The other thing that is happening, when they get these programs, you can imagine the binders and the rules and the regulations that come back and fill up the rest of the shelf. When you get money from Washington, you do not get the money without strings attached. That is why, as we have gone around the country, people have said the problem with Washington money, and they will take the money because there is still a cost-benefit, that the cost of getting the money and administrating the programs is less than what they receive back, but it is not that big of a deal. What they tell us is, all over the place they tell us, we get 10 percent of our money from Washington, we get 50 percent of our rules and regulations from Washington. We know that the system, a Washington dollar from a taxpaying family, through the IRS, through the Education Department, back to the local school district, we are estimating that somewhere in the neighborhood of 60 cents to 70 cents gets back to the child. That means somewhere in the neighborhood of 30 plus is taken up by bureaucrats. That means that the process here in Washington is bureaucratically focused, it is not focused on the children. This is why I agree with what the President said in 1996. The issue here is not about spending more money. This is what the President said. We cannot ask the American people to spend more on education until we do a better job with the money we have now. Think about it. Instead of increasing spending on education by increasing that dollar or that $120 billion to $130 or $135 billion per year, we can get that money if we just take a look at how we spend it today and we do a better job. Instead of only letting 70 cents get back to the classroom, let us set a real aggressive objective. Let us get 75 cents back to the classroom. That would get us an extra $5 billion into the classroom, closer to the children. I do not think that is enough. One of my colleagues is going to be proposing legislation that says maybe we ought to move to 95 cents; that for every dollar that comes to Washington, the entire process of applying for it, administrating it, and getting it back to the child and reporting back to Washington, that that entire process can only take 5 cents of the dollar. We need to design a system where the bureaucracy and the bureaucrats only take 5 cents and the kids and the teachers and the parents and the local classroom get 95 cents. That is the difference between a child- centered approach and a Washington-centered approach. A Washington-centered approach says, let us celebrate bureaucracy, let us give 30 cents to 40 cents of every dollar to the bureaucracy. A child-centered approach says the kid is the most important, let us get 95 cents to the child, and let us make sure that the bureaucracy does not consume a lot of the money. As we go through this process, it is important to shrink down that bureaucracy, because we know bureaucrats will be paid and we know the bureaucracy will be funded. But we know, at least in the current system, and this is why the President is right, the current system is not working the way that it should. It is robbing from our kids each and every day. We need to be working with the President on examining and clarifying and improving the current system before we put an overlay of new programs that duplicate the system and do not improve on it. I do not believe that the President has gone through this process. The President has not proposed sweeping reforms of our education programs, sweeping reforms of how we bring these dollars to the local district. He has not done that yet. He has not completed this work. So before we give him more money on education spending, we have to complete this work, because if we complete this work, I think that there is a high probability that we will be able to fund many of the initiatives that the President believes are essential, that is if we agree in concept that we should be doing that, we will be able to fund many of those programs out of the existing base and not out of new spending, not out of new spending which increases our family tax burden. This process says, before we do new spending, we have to take a look at the 760 programs. Before we create the million new tutors that we talked about on Americorps, the President is right, we ought to take a look at why the current system is not working. Why do we need new spending on literacy when we already have 14 literacy programs? Why do we need to spend new money here on tutors and put it through an agency? Think about what we are doing here. We are putting money into an agency, a new agency called the Corporation for National Service, started in the 1993-94 time frame, which when we audited or we tried to audit the books in 1996, we found the books were not auditable. Now, think of what that means. We are putting new spending, we are increasing the spending of an organization that spends $600 million per year by 25 percent, and they cannot keep their own books. Think about this. $600 million of your money and they cannot tell us where the money is going. The reward in Washington is when we have an agency that does not know where its money is going, it does not know what kind of results it is getting at a local level, what happens? Good job. As a matter of fact, you are doing such a great job, we are going to give you another $200 million per year. Only in Washington. We could make a joke about it and say, I am glad our tutors are going to be teaching our kids how to read, because they could not teach them how to do math because the agency back home obviously cannot, or back in Washington obviously cannot do math. Now, that would be a sad enough state in and of itself, but there are some reasons why the corporation says it cannot audit its books. Some of the organizations that became part of the corporation in 1993 were old agencies that did not have the right accounting records and they had to upgrade those systems, so it was not a corporation starting from scratch. Three or four years later you would think, boy, you would think they would have gotten those problems ironed out. But it gets worse. The Corporation for National Service in 1993 and 1994 was new spending, which means we had to go to the American families and increase their tax burdens. Remember in 1993 we had the biggest tax increase in American history. We put it into organizations that cannot keep their own books, and part of the Corporation for National Service is AmeriCorps. Part of AmeriCorps matches up kids who go out and do volunteer service, quote unquote volunteer service, we pay them about $27,000 on average, and part of that cost is a stipend that enables them to get a college tuition grant for about $4,000 or $5,000. Now, you would think that in a new organization that is requiring kids to do service and saying if you do the work, you get a stipend, you get the scholarship, that we would set up a system that would match the kids to the dollars for their college tuition. The auditors come in, and this system started from scratch, no history, it started from scratch, and the auditors come in and they say, guess what? Same old tune. These books are not auditable. So when we start paying out the scholarships, we will not be able to verify, or at least the auditors are telling us that the systems that the Corporation has in place, that should verify whether the individual has put in the required time, required hours to get the scholarship, we will not know whether that has actually occurred. The system does not have any integrity. When the system does not have integrity, it opens itself up for fraud and abuse. This is what happens. In 1993, the President asked for significant new spending, significantly increasing the family tax burden, and we put it into agencies that are wasting your money and are making more of America's families have two wage earners rather than one. We are moving toward a government that is making a two-wage-earner family a requirement rather than an option. That is, I think, why parents and families in America are frustrated. More and more of them are spending less time with their kids, and they are doing it because they need to send more money to Washington, and we come up with these convoluted schemes that say, yes, you are spending less time with your kids, so let us start a new program that gets tutors into your house or with your kids. But we are going to need $200 million more for that, which means that we are going to have to have more of you work, and so there is going to be more of you that are going to need tutors. It is a vicious cycle. The problem is, it is a vicious cycle in the wrong direction, and if we went in the other direction and lowered taxes and lowered the tax burden and lowered spending, we could have more families where two wage earners was an option rather than a requirement. The bottom line on all of this is why do we want a one-wage-earner family rather than a two-wage-earner family? Because it recognizes the fundamental thing in American society: That the most effective way to make a difference in an education, the most effective way to train and educate our children, is to have it at the local level. This chart, where we equate new spending equals new tax burden, says Government programs with more new spending, more new spending in education, increases the family tax burden, so by having parents work longer, working harder, and sending more money to Washington, only in Washington do we believe that that will increase and improve education in America. I think the bottom line out of tonight's discussion on education, Mr. Speaker, we have to go back and we have to hold the President accountable for what he said in 1996. Mr. President, please, do not come to Washington, please, do not come to Congress and ask for more money to pump into a system that only gets 70 cents to the classroom. Do not come to Congress with spending that will require 5 million families to pay $2,000 more in taxes so that you can do your education programs. Let us work together, let us work together in a bipartisan way to take a look at what we are doing today. This is what you said: ``We cannot ask the American people to spend more.'' You were right, but then why did you ask us and why are you asking us to spend $55 billion more? You said yourself, ``we cannot ask the American people to spend more on education.'' You are absolutely right, Mr. President, until we do a better job with the money we have now. You hit the nail on the head, we are not very good custodians of the $120 billion we are already spending on education. We can do a much better job. We need to find out what is working in education. We need to find out what is wasted in education. We need to identify the models that are working. We need to get rid of what is wasted and build on what is working, and when we do that, it is not an issue of more spending, it is an issue of being more effective. When we do that, we will get to a surplus budget earlier, we will get to a point where we are not going to ask more American families to put another person to work, or for a person in an American family to work longer hours, to work overtime, so they can fund Washington bureaucracy. There is a better way to do this. You were right in March of 1996. If you would say this and repeat it in March 1997, you have a Congress that is willing and already working on this process, and willing to share the results with you. This can be done. Our vision for our budget, our vision is to have a one-wage-earner family being able to support and fund this Government. We do not want any more spending. We want to get to a surplus budget as soon as we can, and we want to continue having a surplus so we can continue paying down the $5 trillion debt that we have built up for our kids. It is simple: A one wage-earner family, a two- wage-earner family is an option. The budget for 1998 is a matter of choices. It is a choice between lessening the family tax burden or increasing Washington spending. It is about making those choices. It is about restraining spending. It is about saying no to new spending, and it is about doing a better job with the money we have now. This President is asking for over $265 billion in new spending authority for the next 5 years. I really think that when we take a look at the $8 trillion we are going to spend over the next 5 years, that the Congress and the President can find savings of that $265 billion to fund some of those new priorities, those that we agree with. We can find $265 billion. We have just highlighted plenty of examples of where there is waste and abuse. We do not need 760 programs. We do not need education coordinated through 39 different agencies. We do not need to be spending $130 billion instead of $120 billion. We do not need to be creating entrepreneurial opportunities and cottage industries. I love entrepreneurs in America, but this is not productive work, telling them how to get more money out of Washington.

Mr. HOEKSTRA

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

Mr. HOEKSTRA

Mr. HOEKSTRA. Going back to the Tale of Two Visions, we all know how complex our Tax Code is. It is so complex that the IRS has spent in the neighborhood of $8 billion trying to design and automate and computerize the system. They now acknowledge that $4 billion of this will never be able to be used. When you talk about a two-wage- earner family, that is 2 million families where the second wage earner paid $2,000 to the Federal Government and did not get one dime of value. Two million families where the second wage earner paid $2,000 in taxes and the Government threw it away, because our Tax Code is too complex. That is why 2 million men or women went to work for a year and got absolutely no value. That is waste, that is wrong, and that is what is killing America's families today.

Mr. HOEKSTRA. I am glad the gentleman brought that up. We have a sheet on that. Our choice is between new or expanded government programs or new or expanded nonprofit faith-based organizations. It is not a dream, what the gentleman was talking about: Corporations and individuals and churches and nonprofits being involved. It is happening every day. Last night I had the opportunity to speak to a group in a church that has reached out, and 1 hour every week a number of the members from this congregation go into their local school and they tutor the children in that school, one-on-one, 1 hour every week, and they form a lasting and an important relationship with that child. Some of them have been involved for 3 years. That is how we make the difference. The question is, are we going to suck the money out of the local community, creating more two-wage- earner families, and create these programs that are run out of these buildings here in Washington; or are we going to leave some of the money in the local community, and a parent or an adult saying, ``I have some free time, I am going to go to that school and I am going to help. I will go out and reach out and form a personal relationship with a child in that school.'' It is a wonderful way to improve the community. We help the child but we also personally get a great benefit out of that kind of an activity. So it is a choice between more new government programs versus some more free time that enables our nonprofits and our faith-based and our individuals to step up in the community. I see we have been joined. The gentleman from Pennsylvania may want to yield to our colleague from Georgia.

Mr. HOEKSTRA. The gentleman is a pretty good lead. We are developing two other segments in what we call our tale of two visions, because one of the things that we talk about when we talk about more government spending, whether it is increasing spending or reducing taxes, the choice is pretty clear. The choice is between government spending versus family savings. A very clear choice. We take a friend with us almost wherever we go just to talk about this, and the choice is sending money to a Washington bureaucrat or leaving it with a family. It is a decision between Washington bureaucracy versus our children. What we are going to do in each of the next few weeks is build on this tale of two visions and discuss each one of those: Washington bureaucracy versus our children; government spending versus family savings; a one-wage option versus a two-wage requirement; deficit spending versus surplus savings; and new government programs versus new nonprofits. Those are things that are important. That is what a budget sets. A budget tells us who we are, what is important to us. We are more than about a surplus budget. We are about strengthening families; restoring and strengthening our families and designing a system. I think in a few minutes we are going to talk about education. I have had the opportunity to go around the country, in my oversight capabilities, to schools in New York and California and Arizona and Delaware, and talk about education. Somebody said, ``Well, Mr. Hoekstra, maybe you should come to my classroom and you can see what is really going on in the classroom.'' I said I do not know if I will ever be an expert in the classroom, but what we in Washington and what people in the State bureaucracy are supposed to be good at doing is designing systems that empower teachers and parents to help their children at a classroom level, at the local level. Soon we will talk about the kind of systems that we currently have in place. We are about empowering people at the local level to make a difference because systems at the local level, most often, are the ones that have the greatest impact.

Mr. HOEKSTRA. If the gentleman will yield, I encourage my colleague from Pennsylvania to listen to this very closely, because there are some bureaucrats in HUD who thought that this was a very important regulation, and you can see the wisdom of some of the people in our bureaucracies and the kind of issues that they are dealing with.

Mr. HOEKSTRA. The rest of it is in applying for the funds, finding out about the funds, promoting the programs, the bureaucracy, administration, all of those kinds of things, and you know as we are talking about some of these new programs that the President wants to do, the debate here on some of these programs is not going to be about whether these are things that we should be doing. We need to be in certain cases helping improve education. The debate will be if we are only getting 65 cents of the dollar to the child, are we going to increase spending to $1.20 to get up to 70 cents or 75 cents to the child, or are we going to take a look at that 30 to 35 cents and say that is too much going to bureaucrats and bureaucracy? Let us see if we cannot cut the overhead like we did in welfare, if we cannot cut the overhead in the bureaucracy and get the money to the child and get it to the classroom without having to increase taxes or increase deficit spending.

Mr. HOEKSTRA. For my colleagues, this newsletter is delivered on a monthly basis, and they can get it from 1122 Longworth House Office Building. [From the Atlanta Journal, Oct. 14, 1996] Wasteful AmeriCorps Survives Another Year AmeriCorps, President Clinton's much-vaunted ``volunteer'' program, has survived another year. Too bad. It's past time to kill this costly program before it becomes a permanent government fixture. It is fast-growing and expensive, it eats away at the very definition of volunteerism, and it's costing taxpayers a huge amount per participant without any measurable gains. In announcing AmeriCorps in 1993, the president spoke of a largely privately funded program that would engage the nation's young people in volunteerism and community service: ``While the federal government will provide the seed money for national service,'' the president wrote in a New York Times op-ed article, ``we are determined that the participants--the individuals who serve and the groups that sponsor their service--will guide the process. Spending tens of millions of tax dollars to build a massive bureaucracy would be self-defeating.'' But it has been the federal government ``guiding the process'' with tax dollars. The program cost $217.3 million in 1994, but $427.3 million in 1995. Congress put the brakes on the president's effort to pump even more into the program this year. Undaunted, Clinton is now seeking $1 billion over the next five years. The notion of private funding for AmeriCorps was also an illusion: Just 7 percent of the program is funded privately. National and state governments pick up the rest of the tab. The General Accounting Office has discovered the program costs taxpayers $26,700 per participant for 10 months of volunteer work. And the type of ``work'' is not always what taxpayers would have paid for. In San Francisco last year, AmeriCorps volunteers organized 40 groups to fight the federal crime bill's ``three strikes and you're out'' provision. In Denver, ``volunteers'' who were supposed to be helping neighborhoods instead were passing out fliers attacking a city councilperson. In Orange county, Calif., AmeriCorps volunteers were paid to knit a memorial quilt for victims of the Oklahoma City bombing--a chore they never even finished. And AmeriCorps destroys the healthy notion of volunteerism by paying participants to ``volunteer.'' Participants receive a stipend of $650 per month--about $7.50 per hour--and $4,725 a year for college costs. This even though more than half of Americans over 18 volunteer in the real sense--for free. Neither are the benefits of AmeriCorps limited to the poor in need of financial aid for college. America's wealthiest are just as eligible--and far more likely to participate. While the program is supposed to give young people a chance to go to college, the cost of a single AmeriCorps participant would send 18 students to college with Pell Grants. The president needs to look back at his original statement and ask if the program is indeed ``self-defeating.'' It is, and it's an incredible waste of taxpayer dollars.