Pete Hoekstra

Mr. HOEKSTRA

Mr. HOEKSTRA. There will not be any money for education if we do not, and I do not consider these tough decisions, I consider these reasonable decisions to reform and slow the growth of Federal spending. Remember, in 1995 we spent, what, the numbers are big, $1.5 trillion. The year 2002, we are not going to be spending $1.4 trillion, it is not going down. We are going to be spending $1.85 trillion. We are going to add $350 billion more per year to spend. What we are trying to do is allocate those dollars toward the priorities that we think are important for this country. So we are not cutting spending. We are trying to more effectively target the programs. The chairman has done an excellent job of identifying reforms in a number of programs so that these dollars will go back to the States, will go back to the kids in more effective ways. We had the vote today on the President's budget which does not get us to zero. I applaud the vote that we had today; 412 Members of this Congress, of this House, stood up and said, a $75 billion deficit in year 7 is not good enough. We need to do better than that. We need to do better than that for our kids, for the next generation. We are going to have, and I think the House is going to have, to take the lead. We have worked hard all year. We have developed a lot of innovative new programs, a lot of reforms. The House has led the way. I think we are going to have to lead, we are going to have to lead the President now because this is an historic debate. Are we finally going to take the lead in actually having a realistic plan to balance the budget? Or what a lot of my constituents are afraid of, they are afraid that there was a plan to balance the budget in the mid-1980s, there was one to balance it in the late 1980s. There was a Bush plan in 1990. There was President Clinton's plan in 1993, all of which have two things in common. They all promised to balance the budget, and they have all failed miserably. We still have a $160 billion deficit. We are going to make sure that this Congress comes down and that we do not join that pattern. We are not the fifth in a series of failures. This Congress is actually going to go though the process and say, we are going to have a real plan. We are going to come back next year. We are going to monitor the programs and the changes and the reforms that we have made. We are going to fix them where they do not work, and we are going to build on them where they do. But we are also going to come back and make sure that we hit year 1 of the 7-year plan. Then I think we will do it the Republican way. We are not going to meet the targets of year 2. We are going to exceed, not exceed in spending, we are going to beat the deficit targets, and we are going to improve on these plans, because I still think there is room for improvement. We just have to get better at monitoring, reforming and transferring power out.

Mr. HOEKSTRA. Block grants are a positive thing because they will get rid of rules and regulations, they will be broad objectives, and it will return the primary focus back to the kids and getting them educated, and the administrators will spend more time worrying about what is happening in the classroom and less time about what is, or less time worrying about what is going to happen when the people in Washington review our documents. It is a constructive change, it is a positive change, it is moving control back to where it should be.

Mr. HOEKSTRA. Mr. Speaker, sloppy program management, what does that mean when we have sloppy program management on $3.5 billion? Sloppy program management, private sector, my boss came to me and said, you have got sloppy program management. We were not talking anywhere on these kinds of numbers, but it means dollars going down the drain that are not being used for the goals and the objectives that we have set. It is maybe time to step back and take a look and not throw more money at it but say, let us take a look at the money that is going there, that $3.5 billion. Let us tighten up our program assessment, our criteria so that we can get more effectiveness out of $3.4 billion or $3.5 billion rather than just throwing another $2- or $300 billion at it, because that $2- or $300 billion is going to be administered how? Sloppy program management means a portion of it is gone before we ever educate one more child.

Mr. HOEKSTRA. Well, the gentleman may be disappointed he yielded. We have had our discussions and our debates about revenue sharing, but I think we are pretty close together. As long as the money--it is kind of interesting. Revenue sharing is kind of like the impression is we are sharing with the rest of the country. It is kind of like they are sharing with us. The money comes from there in the first place, but, as long as the money is coming from the local communities and it is coming to Washington, then we are sending it back to them, I think it is important that we send it back with some broader goals, and some criteria and some measurements so they can drive toward successful programs. I think what my colleague from California was pointing out so correctly, we are not taking away the criteria, and the goals and the objective measurements, but what we are doing with block granting is we are putting in place a lot more flexibility for the people in Holland, MI; Muskegan, MI; or Ludington, communities in my district, versus communities in your district, versus communities in California, to take these dollars, take a look at the broad objectives and goals that we think they should be striving for and put the programs together to go after meeting those objectives. What we want to eliminate, and you know we had the hearings a couple of weeks ago talking about values, schools, and parents, and Bill Bennett came and testified, and he seemed to imply, and I think we going to do some followup work on this with our staff and research with the people in the Education Department that the 6 percent of dollars, the education dollars that are coming from Washington at the elementary-secondary level, that when those dollars go back to the community, the belief is that maybe they go back with too many strings attached, too many rules and regulations, so that what happens at the local level is administrators and teachers are looking to Washington for their direction in what they should be doing when really, as Mr. Bennett said, great schools, effective schools, are those that are forming a partnership with the parents in the community in talking together with about here collectively our goals and our objectives for your kids, and we are going to work together on reaching those, and what you have here is when the dollars start coming from Washington with rules and regulations, all of a sudden the administrators are looking somewhere else about what they should be doing, and what rules and regulations they should be following, and we are detracting away from their primary focus. Their primary focus should not be filling out paperwork for bureaucrats in Washington. Their primary focus should be dealing with parents in the community, in dealing with the kids in the classroom and meeting their needs, and not trying to meet the needs of detailed rules and regulations from people that cannot even find our districts on a map.

Mr. HOEKSTRA. It is not every senior citizen, it is every one of us is worried about.

Mr. HOEKSTRA

Mr. HOEKSTRA. Mr. Speaker, I think today is a great day. We have reached an agreement with the President that we will work together to balance the budget in 7 years. We will use conservative scoring, so that we can be assured that we will reach that objective, by using the Congressional Budget Office. Today, we will be voting on one plan to get there: The Balanced Budget Act of 1995, which does get us to a balanced budget by the year 2002. We may have some differences with the President, but at this point in time, we are not sure exactly what they may be. We need a plan for the President so that we can compare our differences about how we achieve a balanced budget. Mr. Speaker, the other thing that we need is we need a pledge from all the candidates for President that they will work with Congress over the next 7 years to make sure that this becomes a true promise and a true commitment that we will actually all be committed to working toward getting to that balanced budget over the next 7 years. Mr. Speaker, as we take a look at what our plan does, we can see that this really gets to be a discussion not about cutting spending but actually a discussion about how much money we will spend over the next 7 years. From 1989 to 1995, the last 7 years, we spend $9.5 trillion in Washington. This Balanced Budget Act says that over the next 7 years we will spend $12 Trillion, which is a little bit less than what some people had hoped we would spend, which is about $13.3 trillion. Mr. Speaker, in 1995, we spent $1.5 trillion. That is going to grow to $1.8 trillion by the year 2002. We are spending plenty of money in Washington over the next 7 years. We are actually growing Federal spending by about 27 percent over the next 7 years. That is a lot of money. There is a lot of benefits to balancing the budget. It is estimated that if we balance the budget, the American people will realize a 2-percent reduction in interest rates. That is a significant cost over what a car loan may cost, over what student loans may cost, over what the mortgage that one will pay, the mortgage payments that one will make on interest over the next 7 years. So the benefits to balancing the budget far outweigh the costs. We need to manage growth in spending to about 2.7 percent over each of the next 7 years to get a balanced budget. That is not a sacrifice; that is just good, sound management. If we manage a 2.7-percent growth, there will be a shared benefit by all the American people and a better standard of living because Washington will finally have gotten their costs under control for the benefit of all the American people.

Mr. HOEKSTRA

Mr. HOEKSTRA. Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague for yielding time to me. Mr. Speaker, we have a vision. We want to restore the trust of the American people and the integrity of the legislative process. For the last 11 months we have been pursuing this. We have reformed welfare, Medicare, regulatory reform. We have a whole series of reforms on opening today. Today we are going to finish a couple of more pieces of business. The Waldholtz bill is reasonable reform guidelines. We have listened to the American people. They said, ``Reform these legislative businesses and items, but also restore the process where you are personally enriched.'' The Waldholtz bill is a reasonable process. It does not ban participation in charities, it does not ban participation in charity events, it just says that when you participate in charities, just like all the other people that are participating in these events, you are expected to be charitable and carry your own weight at these events. All the Burton bill does is it protects access to Members of Congress through privilege and special interest. It needs to stop. Vote ``no'' on Burton.

Mr. HOEKSTRA

Mr. HOEKSTRA. Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague on the other side of the aisle for yielding me time, and I also want to compliment the distinguished gentleman, the chairman of the Committee on Rules, for structuring a fair rule, and also for being a partner during the last 3 weeks as we have tried to put together this reform to the gift policy in the House. It has been a fun time, it has been a learning time, but, most importantly, I think tonight, as we complete this process, we can demonstrate that we have gone through a process of listening to the American people, we have spent a tremendous amount of time listening to Members, Members of both sides of the aisle, and recognize that they have all approached this issue with a lot of emotion, a lot of good will, and a lot of genuine interest in doing the right thing. Mr. Speaker, I think tonight we will have the opportunity to do the right thing. We will have an opportunity to set a clear, new standard on the gifts that House Members can accept. This does not preclude us from interacting in an effective and efficient way with our constituents, with those that are here to educate us on the issues, this just moves a whole set of concerns, issues that have been associated with how constituents and other individuals may interact with Congress. We are going to set a new standard. I applaud the Speaker for bringing this idea and this concept to the floor, and I think we have a real opportunity to say the new standard is we will accept no gifts. Our interaction with our constituents, our interaction with those that are here to educate us on the issues will deal purely with the substance of the various issues. Mr. Speaker, I think this is a good opportunity to set a standard, to set a standard which perhaps the other body will also follow.

Mr. HOEKSTRA

Mr. HOEKSTRA. We can go back to how we started this special order. We went through a process in designing this new Medicare program of listening to seniors; listening to providers; listening to doctors; taking a look; listening; learning. We are now in a process, we are still listening and learning as we roll out this program, but we are helping people understand what we are doing and we are leading which is our responsibility. We have gone through the steps. Listen, learn, help, lead.

Mr. HOEKSTRA. Mr. Speaker, I think we told the staff that has been so gracious in staying that we are going to let them out early. We will do this in the Republican way. We will not take the full hour; we will take 59\1/2\ minutes.

Mr. HOEKSTRA. If the gentleman will yield, I think if we go back and say, ``Why can we do this?'' When we are taking a look at Medicare, we are taking a look at a program that started in the 1960's; that basically for 30 years has remained unchanged. I entered the work force in 1977. From 1977 to 1992, before I came into Congress, in the private sector we saw an explosion of, sure, health care costs, but also an explosion of health care options. Changes, innovations in terms of the choices I had to make, the services that the company that I worked for provided. The options that they provided me and my family for health care coverage, all kinds of innovations going on in the health care field, none of which made their way into Medicare. So now, finally, in 1995, we are bringing and we are catching up to 1960's program, fee-for-service, traditional fee-for-service. The most expensive, inefficient way to provide health care to individuals. We are updating that. For those that like that program, I had that at my own employer. I said, ``If you want to keep a traditional program, you can do that, but here are some other options which may be more exciting and more advantageous to you. Take a look at them.'' Mr. Speaker, and that is the same thing we are doing. If you like the traditional fee-for-service Medicare Program, can you keep it. Your premiums stay the same. Your copays do not change. It is the same program.

Mr. HOEKSTRA. It is a northeastern term.

Mr. HOEKSTRA. What is that?

Mr. HOEKSTRA. We fought through the issues. I do not know if we compromised, but we listened to each other, we learned from each other. At the end, the gentleman from Ohio, John Kasich, he led. He said, ``I have listened to all of you, I have taken your input. You know, some of you are going to win, some are going to lose, but we have to get off the dime. Here is where we are going.'' We sat down at the end of the day and said, ``I do not agree with all the decisions that were made, but you know what, this package is something that we can all get behind and we are going there.'' If the President says ``I am going to balance the budget in 7 years,'' he can put his plan and we will get in the room again and we will start doing the same give and take, and if we are all agreed on that vision, it would free us all up to have a wonderful dialog and a wonderful debate about how we are going to get to a very positive future.

Mr. HOEKSTRA. Well, I mean the process that we could use with the President is very similar to what we did in the Committee on the Budget. I mean we spent what, 3, 4 months, the first 4 months of this year, going through it saying, ``OK, we've agreed as what, 18-20 Members, that we are going to balance the budget. We brought in experts from all the different departments. We brought in our own knowledge, our own staff, our own biases.'' We said, ``OK. We have to get to here, we have to get to there.'' You had some ideas, I had some ideas, and we all shared our ideas.

Mr. HOEKSTRA. Well, we are asking the President to sit down, understand our vision for where we want America to be, where we want America to be in 7 years, understand the vision, understand what we want America to look like, understand what we perceive the benefits of moving in this direction, and understand what we believe to be a very rational way of getting there, by just slowing the growth of the Federal spending.

Mr. HOEKSTRA. So that we have a realistic chance then of getting to that, changing the law of the land. It will enable us perhaps to do budget reform so that we can identify capital spending versus expense spending so we can do some budget reform. We maybe actually can even run the budget like the private sector does so that when accountants came in and took a look at our books, they would say, ``Yeah, that makes sense.'' How does Washington run today? The biggest budget in the country; how do we run it? We run it on a cash basis. No company in the country would pass any financial test by any auditing firm if they ran on a cash basis. The do accrual accounting. We have got liabilities out there for Federal employees who are earning pensions. If we are in the private sector, we would have to be setting money aside to make sure that that money is there to pay their pensions. We do not do that for Federal employees because we run on a cash basis. I mean it is unbelievable, but, if we get to a balanced budget, maybe we can make that reform. Like the gentleman said, if we get to a balanced budget, maybe Congress can grab back this entitlement monster, not to change the programs, but to assume the responsibility each and every year, which is ours, that says, yes, we are going to spend this much money to provide these services rather than it being automatic. Entitlement spending is one of I do not know how it ever got here, but when Congress gave that authority away and said we are automatically going to spend that money without reviewing it each and every year, we gave up our responsibility in loss--well, we did not lose accountability, but we put in place a monster that has gotten out of control. If we actually get, as we move to a balanced budget, these are the kinds of reforms that we can get back in, and we can say we are actually going to run this country under the types of financial rules and regulations that insure long-term financial soundness. I yield to the gentleman.

Mr. HOEKSTRA. In downsizing government, I came from a company that downsized. Actually, when we downsized in the private sector, when we got done the number of employees and our costs were actually less. Remember when we are downsizing in Washington, we are downsizing a $1.5 trillion budget. And in 7 years it will be $1.8 trillion budget. So downsizing in the private sector is a little different than downsizing in Washington.

Mr. HOEKSTRA. Mr. Speaker, I think my colleague from Connecticut probably will want to jump in, our research shows that there have been nine Government shutdowns since 1981. And in that same period of time, there have been 57 continuing resolutions. Congress has not always gotten its work done in the first part of September. Mr. SHAYS Mr. Speaker, I think we can be very candid. I would love it if we had had this budget done by October 1. I am not going to say because it happened in the past we should have done it, because we would like to think that we are different. I think the challenge has been that for the first time we are trying to balance the budget and get our financial house in order. We have taken on every special interest group you can imagine. By special interest group, I do not even mean that in a derogatory way. We have just taken every group and said that they need to share in this wonderful, and I say wonderful, opportunity to get this financial house in order. Because ultimately the benefits will be extraordinary. But it has not been ready by October 1. But the one point I make is that by Friday we will have the job done. We will give the President a balanced budget. It will get us on a glidepath to a balance in 7 years. It will still allow spending to increase, and it would be easier if our colleagues on the other side of the aisle were contributing to helping. Someone said, why have you not downsized Government, and we said we are, and we are in the process. But when a private company downsizes, the corporate people get together in a room. They decide the policy and they speak with unanimity. In this case, you have a government. We are trying to downsize the Government. And you have part of the board of directors on the other side saying, no, we should not downsize government and we should [[Page H 12345]] not control the growth in spending. But we are going to get the job done.

Mr. HOEKSTRA. We have seen that. This is not your 7-year budget. It is not mine. If you developed one, it probably would have been different than mine. But we have put aside our differences and agreed on one that we can get that kind of unanimity on. I just want to say, we are also making some key structural changes in programs that are going to reform programs and that are going to make these programs better for the long term. I think the other thing that we have to recognize is, maybe one of my colleagues would like to share on this, the dynamics, after the year 2000, especially on entitlement programs do not get any better. If we blink in 1995, what happens in 2005 with the baby boomers, the dynamics are working against us. All the entitlement spending on Medicare, Social Security, and all of these programs is going to skyrocket as the baby boomers get there. And so if we do not solve or start addressing this problem in 1995, it is not going to go away. It is only going to get worse. That is why today, yesterday and the next 7 to 10 days are so, so critical to get this under control. I yield to the gentleman from Maine [Mr. Longley].

Mr. HOEKSTRA. I would like to make a couple of points, building off of what my colleague from Connecticut talked about. I think they really do talk about how we want to work as a majority, the kind of vision that we have for how we want to whole House to work. It is that we want to focus on a positive message. Mr. Speaker, we have a positive message. We have, I think, all a positive vision for where this country needs to go and what we want to do. So we can talk about where we want it to be in the future. We can talk about it in a very, very positive way. In a way, that reaches across to the other side of the aisle, and reaches out to the President and says, ``We have a vision and a very positive vision. And we really would like you to work with us.'' I think again on the Committee on the Budget, we are willing to work with Members who share this vision of financial stability and financial soundness. In the meetings that we had where we kicked off the year in the Committee on the Budget, we were joined by one our colleagues from the other side of the aisle who said, ``I share your vision for restoring this country to financial soundness,'' and that gentleman participated in all of our meetings because he recognized that where we wanted to go was where he wanted to go. We recognized that it was going to be hard work. Getting to a balanced budget, I think we have found out, has not been easy. We have many differences from the Northeast to the West, to the South, to the Midwest. We all have our different priorities. But when we have come together as 234 Members and said, ``We share this vision of getting to a balanced budget,'' and we keep our focus on that end goal, we have all been able to put aside some of our personal desires and our personal priorities and say, ``It is more important for us to reach that goal together, because that is the only way that we are going to get there.'' We are willing to put aside part of our personal interests because we share that objective of getting to a balanced budget. It is going to be hard work. I hope that the President, that he comes out and says, I will do it with you. I will balance it, because we will get a better solution because we will have 435 Members and the President taking a look and scrubbing our proposals. It will get better if we hang onto that balancing the budget within 7 years.

Mr. HOEKSTRA. That is correct. They would pay an effective tax rate of around 82 percent over their lifetime if we did nothing, so we have listened to the American people, we have learned, and we have understood the problems. We are helping people understand the problems, and hopefully engaging them in the process to develop appropriate solutions, because the next thing is if we have listened, we have learned, and we have helped, the responsibility now comes, and this is what we are doing this week, we are leading. Earlier this year we led with the Contract With America. We told people what we were going to do, then we went out and did it. All year we have been doing what we said we were going to do in 1994. We said we were going to get on a path to a balanced budget. We are leading. That is our vision, to get to a balanced budget, but more importantly, the benefits--and we talked about shared sacrifice for getting to a balanced budget. Last week we had a policy committee hearing where we had outside experts come in and talk to us about the benefits of balancing the budget. They said, ``We do not know where you are talking about shared sacrifice. Number one, Federal spending is still going up. It is going to go up from $1.5 trillion in 1995 to $1.8 trillion, a 27-percent increase in Federal spending. There is plenty of money to address the needs that this country is facing.'' They said, ``You should not be talking about shared sacrifice. You ought to be talking about shared benefits of balancing the budget.'' The vision is the shared benefits of lower interest rates, of an economy that is stronger because we are going to be more able to compete internationally, we are going to be better equipped to create new jobs, better-paying jobs. This impacts the kids that are going out and getting a student loan, they are going to pay less in interest rates. It affects the homeowners because they are going to be paying lower interest rates. Greenspan came, and my colleague, the gentleman from Connecticut, and I are both on the Committee on the Budget. Alan Greenspan has come in and said we will face lower interest [[Page H 12343]] rates if we demonstrate to the financial markets that we are serious about balancing the budget. That is what it is about this week. We have this vision where we are going. We would like to do it with our colleagues on the other side of the aisle. We would like to do it with the President, but they have to share our vision of getting to a balanced budget and getting there within 7 years. We have our strategies for doing that. We are going to not cut spending, we are going to slow the growth of Federal spending. We are going to allow the American people to share with us in some of the benefits of decreasing the rate of spending increases. The projects we now face, I mean everything is coming together at one point in time. We do need to finish the appropriations projects. Later on this week we are going to have the Balanced Budget Act of 1995, which changes entitlement spending to put it in line with the balanced budget. We are going to have to increase the debt limit. I know my colleague from Connecticut and I are not real excited about doing that, but we recognize that we cannot get to a balanced budget in 1 year or 2 years. I think that 7 years might be too long, but I think it is a reasonable time for us to change our behavior in Washington, to move to where we are today from deficit spending to a balanced budget. Mr. Speaker, I yield to my colleague.

Mr. HOEKSTRA. I thank my colleague, the gentleman from Connecticut, for yielding to me. Mr. Speaker, my colleague and I have been working with many of our friends in the House in developing a new process on how we work on the Republican side of the aisle, a process of participative involvement. It is one of the reasons that we as a group have really been able to get behind a unified vision. The first step in our process as colleagues, as we work together, is to listen. We have developed a process for listening to each other, but more importantly, we have developed a process for listening to the American people. We did it a year and a half ago, as we went through the campaign process in 1994. We spend a lot of time listening to the American people, having them tell us what was important. They said, ``We want an agenda in Washington that will reform Washington, that changes the way Washington does business.'' We continued to hear people, in 1994, very anxious and concerned about where we were going with the deficit, with the budget, very concerned about the debt we were piling on our children. So I think we spent a lot of time listening to each other, but more importantly, listening to the American people and trying to understand their problems. After we won the elections in 1994, we spent a lot of time trying to learn and understand the problem. We recognized, I think as you just pointed out, that to get to a balanced budget, we did not have to cut spending. We could grow spending, we just could not grow it as fast as what maybe Congress would like to have grown it; that if all we did was grow spending but grow it a little slower than what we had anticipated, we would get to a balanced budget. We also learned that as we looked out into the year 2010 and a little beyond that, if we did not reform entitlement spending in, what is it, the year 2013, 100 percent of the revenues that the Government would collect would be used to pay for entitlement spending and interest on the debt, and there would not be any money left for anything else. As we looked even closer, we looked out and we learned that 7 years out, the Medicare part A trust fund would be broke, so we learned a lot of things about the budget. For the last number of months, we have been trying to help, help people understand, help our colleagues here in Washington understand what the implications were of the information that we have gathered, help the American people understand that if we continue down this irresponsible and reckless path of increased spending, increased spending beyond our limits, we are going to be facing some serious problems: children born today, in 1995, and over their lifetime, paying $182,000 in taxes, not for anything that is going to benefit them, but for things that are benefiting us today. That $182,000 is only going to cover the interest on the debt, their share of the interest on the debt, and that is for kids born today.

Mr. HOEKSTRA

Mr. HOEKSTRA. Mr. Chairman, I thank the chairman for yielding me this time. Mr. Chairman, the only thing that we will wreck if we do not pass this reconciliation bill is the American family. Let us talk about exactly what is going to happen to spending over the next 7 years. If we do nothing, Federal spending will rise by 37 percent. If we pass reconciliation, which we will do later on today, Federal spending, we are really going to tighten our belts for the next 7 years. We are only going to allow Federal spending to increase by 27 percent. I came out of the private sector, and I would have loved any budget that over 7 years would have allowed me to increase spending by 27 percent. We are asking the Federal Government to get spending under control and have a gentle slope toward balancing the budget. Spending goes up in every category. Total spending goes up. Welfare reform, welfare spending goes up. Medicare spending goes up. Per beneficiary on Medicare goes from $4,800 to $6,700. We are trying to manage health care growth to 5 percent per year. Medicaid spending goes up. Spending on student loans. Student loan spending goes by 37 percent over the next 7 years. School lunches. We heard that those were gone. Spending on school lunches goes up by 4.5 percent per year. This is a reasonable budget; this is a commonsense reconciliation. Common people, on the street every day would love to have a budget at their house that would go up by 3 percent per year and be asked to manage to that. This makes sense. This is reform that we can manage too.

Mr. HOEKSTRA

Mr. HOEKSTRA. Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the opportunity to address the House this evening. Earlier today the Education and Economic Opportunity Committee did something that the General Accounting Office suggested we do in 1979: We began the process for eliminating the Davis-Bacon Act. Davis-Bacon is not right for America in the 1990's. It might have served a role in 1931 when it was originally formatted, but today, it is an outdated law. It has to be changed. What Davis-Bacon requires is that workers on Federal construction projects be paid a wage at or above the level determined by the Department of Labor to be the prevailing wage in the area. Since 1937, the prevailing wage provision has been extended by many statutes to involve construction, financed in whole or in part by the Federal Government. In 1979, the General Accounting Office recommended the repeal of the Davis-Bacon Act. They stated that it appeared to be impractical to administer. Davis-Bacon is impractical to administer due to the magnitude of the task of producing an estimated 12,400 accurately and timely generated prevailing wage determinations. Mr. Speaker, what we have here is the Department of Labor trying to determine prevailing wages in specific job categories around the county for every country. It does not make any sense in 1995. Prevailing wages can be determined very effectively through the competitive bidding process. I would like to yield to my colleague from Michigan [Mr. Smith] to just give us an example of what happens when the Department of Labor tries to determine prevailing wages throughout the country.