John Kerry

Mr. KERRY

Mr. KERRY. The Senate shortly will be taking a very momentous step. We will be acting on a budget resolution designed to eliminate the federal budget deficit by 2002. This has been an objective many of us have fervently sought for many years. It has been my objective since I came to the Senate in 1985. The Federal Government has run a deficit continuously for more than 30 years, but it soared to what were then almost inconceivable heights in the 1980s during the Reagan and Bush Administrations. As a result of those stratospheric deficits, the national debt has multiplied several times, exacting a toll from our economy, increasing interest rates, and making debt service one of the largest expenditures in the Federal budget. I would like nothing more than to vote for a solid budget resolution that would achieve balance while allocating resources in a way most likely to meet our most pressing national needs. Because of the strength of my desire to achieve balance and eliminate the deficit, I am tempted to vote for the resolution that the Senate is considering today. It does, of course, project balance in 2002. Mr. President, I know how difficult it is to achieve a budget compromise, which entails bridging the great differences among elected officials--the President and his Administration and both Democrats and Republicans in the Congress. President Clinton and his senior advisers, the Senate and House Republican leadership, and the chairmen and ranking members of the House and Senate Budget Committees have labored mightily for many weeks to try to devise the plan on which we will be voting today. Given those differences they had to bridge, I think they are to be commended for what they accomplished. But above all the applause for the deal they struck, and the bipartisan congratulatory cheers simply for laying aside the usual bickering and sticking with the plan they have prepared, I hear my conscience saying it is wrong to ignore my core set of values and what I believe should be the priorities for our Nation. This budget deal, Mr. President, may be historic. I strongly support the fact that it achieves balance in 5 years, and if that balance actually is achieved, it surely will be historic. But that is far from the only measure that should be applied to a budget. Deficit elimination is a vital objective, but it is neither an economic policy nor a statement of priorities for our Nation or its Government. Said another way, it matters, and matters greatly, how we achieve balance, not just that we achieve it. Mr. President, despite the fact it achieves balance, and despite the fact that one can imagine many budgets that would be worse for our Nation--indeed, one need look no further than the draconian budget the congressional Republicans tried to force down our throats as recently as 2 years ago--this budget does not meet America's needs as I believe they can and must be met while achieving budget balance. It fails this test in two ways--one of those consists of vital activities it fails to include, and the other consists of the detrimental effects of its contents. The foremost deficiency of this budget is that it has no vision for America's children. To partially address this deficiency, I offered an amendment to enable the Senate to consider legislation later this year to meet the critical early developmental needs of children from birth to age 6. I applaud the managers for accepting this amendment. But earlier, the Senate rejected a bipartisan amendment that would have provided the budgetary room needed to enact a program providing health insurance to the millions of children who do not now have it. We were presented with a deal that gives lip service to some of our critical domestic needs by providing limited room for so-called Presidential initiatives. These include $16 billion over 5 years to provide health insurance to children who do not now have it; an increase in Pell grants; and increased funding for bilingual and immigrant education, child literacy initiatives, Head Start, and Environmental Protection Agency and National Park Service operations. But the allocations for these categories fall far short of the additional investments that are needed in these and other critical areas. The share of our gross domestic product invested in education, training, infrastructure, and civilian research and development will continue to decline for the next 5 years under this budget blueprint. Many Senators--on both sides of the aisle--pointed this out during the debate and each one in turn was rebuffed. Look at the amendment by my great friend and colleague, the senior Senator from Massachusetts, Senator Kennedy, and the chairman of the Judiciary Committee, Senator Hatch. The amendment they offered would enable an expansion of health coverage to all uninsured American children. But their amendment was defeated--shot down for the sake of the deal. Look at the amendment by my able friend, the senior Senator from Illinois. Senator Moseley-Braun attempted to set aside $5 billion for school construction. Of the schools in Massachusetts, 92 percent are in disrepair, and this money would have been a downpayment on our obligation to allow these children and all American children to have at a minimum a proper setting in which to learn. But Senator Moseley- Braun's amendment was rejected. And, why? Because it purportedly would have busted the deal. The Senator from Minnesota, Senator Wellstone, sought to increase funding for Head Start, school lunches, and school construction. Republicans cynically demolished that amendment by passing a substitute amendment calling for a school voucher program. At the head of the list of the harmful features of the bill can be placed the effects of its tax cuts. I support and believe the Nation can benefit greatly from the President's initiatives to provide assistance through the Tax Code to American families and individuals to help them meet the costs of higher and continuing education. But this budget resolution includes tax cuts that are sufficiently large that the result inescapably will be to increase the deficit--yes, I said increase the deficit--for at least the next 2 years. Considerably more potentially destructive, despite a fuzzy commitment by the deal cutters that the tax cuts will not be backloaded--that is, they will not result in mushrooming revenue loss in the future, the revenue losses will significantly increase in the outyears. The net revenue loss over 5 years will be $85 billion; the net loss over 10 years is projected to be $250 billion. Mr. President, while President Clinton did win some less-than- ironclad assurances that the Republican-controlled Finance and Ways and Means Committees will include some of his tax cut priorities regarding education tax deductions and credits and a child tax credit, the Republicans insist on including sweeping, broad-based, across-the-board capital gains and estate tax reductions among a host of tax cuts. These cuts will have a dramatically skewed distribution, providing the greatest portion of their benefits to taxpayers with annual incomes placing them among the top 5 percent of the Nation. It is instructive to look at two proposals. Reducing capital gains taxation from 28 percent to 19.6 percent will yield 85 percent of the benefit to the top 5 percent of taxpayers, all with incomes exceeding $100,000. Reducing the estate tax by increasing the exemption from $600,000 to $1 million will benefit only the wealthiest 1 percent of households. Under current law, 98 percent of Americans who die leave estates wholly exempt from estate taxes. Such proposals can only be viewed as Republican ``welfare-for-the-rich'' at its worst. Mr. President, while non-defense discretionary accounts are squeezed harder as we approach the magical balance to occur in 2002, and while most Americans have worked hard and sacrificed for the past 5 years to keep our economy booming and slash the deficit more than $200 billion and will be required to tighten their belts further by this resolution, the richest Americans and American corporations are absolved from contributing to the final push to 2002. The deal virtually ignores corporate welfare--both that which exists among discretionary spending programs and the far larger amount which exists in the Internal Revenue Code. At a time when beneficiaries of spending programs--especially lower- income beneficiaries--have been subjected to significant reductions in those benefits they have received, corporate beneficiaries are asked to bear virtually none of the cost of achieving budget balance, much less paying for the investments in people and infrastructure that are so badly needed. As my distinguished friend, the eternally junior Senator from South Carolina, Senator Hollings, said on the floor on Tuesday evening, there is a scarcity of discipline in this budget and even less willingness to take less-than-pleasant budget medicine now in order to experience economic and budgetary order in later years. Instead, even that limited budgetary reckoning the deal entails is largely postponed until the final 2 years of the deal. Because of this, the national debt will increase significantly in the next several years, resulting in ever- higher debt service costs which must be borne by the budget until that debt is reduced. I reiterate that I staunchly support balancing the Federal budget. But I do not believe in balancing the budget in just any way. One roadmap for achieving balance is not the same as every other roadmap for achieving balance. There unquestionably is a difference. Indeed, I have worked on and voted for balanced budget plans over the years with colleagues on both sides of the aisle. But, I cannot vote for this one. It is a Wizard of Oz budget deal--no home, no heart, no brain, and no courage. If this budget passes and becomes the operative structure for fiscal decision making by the Congress, as I expect it may, I will work diligently to do everything possible to meet the needs of America's children, and other pressing needs, within its constraints, and to alter those constraints where it is possible to do so. But, with no joy, I will vote no on final passage, greatly disappointed and saddened that the Senate has not taken the steps and provided the opportunities that are so badly needed to fairly confront and meet our Nation's most critical needs while achieving a balanced budget.

Mr. KERRY

Mr. KERRY. I call up amendment No. 309.

Mr. KERRY. I thank the Chair. I yield 4 minutes to the Senator from Minnesota.

Mr. KERRY. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that my amendment be temporarily set aside and that the time remain as it is on both sides.

Mr. KERRY. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

Mr. KERRY. Mr. President, I am particularly grateful to the Senator from West Virginia. His work as the head of the National Commission on Children was absolutely extraordinary. It was way ahead of its time. I am very honored to have him working as part of this effort. I just say to him that the example about Japan that he raised, that in 1965, when Pat Moynihan first talked about 27 percent then known as illegitimacy in America, the rate of illegitimacy in Japan was 1 percent. It is now 33 percent overall in America; that is up from 27 percent. He was referencing only African-Americans. It is now 69 percent among African-Americans in America; 49 percent among the Hispanics; and 27 percent among the whites. It is still 1 percent in Japan--1 percent. What is interesting is the Japanese have an adage that the Senator is obviously familiar with. They say that the soul of a 3-year-old will be with you for 100 years. They have been way ahead of us; they have understood that. I am particularly grateful to Senator Rockefeller for his participation and effort in this.

Mr. KERRY. Mr. President, I am particularly grateful to the Senator from Wisconsin for his support because as a supporter of the budget-- and he has long been an advocate of balancing the budget and reducing the deficit--he has taken some tough votes in the Senate in an effort to do that, sometimes separating himself from colleagues on this side of the fence, but he is supportive of this amendment. My hope is that colleagues on the other side of the aisle will not see this amendment as a threat but, rather, see it as an opportunity for us to simply reserve the possibility that as we go into the process of reconciliation we may find that revenue expectations are better or that we are in a better position to take money from some other program that people have thought differently about and invest some of it in early childhood development and education. I have been working to try to develop a way to do that with Senator Coats from Indiana, Senator McCain, Senator Bond, and Senator DeWine. We have not yet resolved exactly the methodology by which we would want to do it, but I think it would be a mistake were the Senate to preclude the opportunity, to have potential points of order and all kinds of parliamentary gobbledygook restrain us from coming back to this if Senators on both sides of the aisle can find a good means of coming together on this. I think there are enough people on both sides of the aisle who recognize why this is important and why we ought to do it, but my principal objection to this current budget that is in front of us is the absence of a sufficient commitment to our children. We hear an enormous amount of talk in and out of the Senate, all around the country, properly so, about the implosion of family, about the absence of family values, the absence of community in many cases in our life. If you look at the statistics with respect to the increase of juvenile violence and you look at the statistics with respect to the condition of some of our education system and schools, if you look at the absence of after-school programs, the absence of sufficient drug treatment and other problems, it is clear that in many ways what we are doing is running a national farm system for the trouble spots. We are running a national farm system for young people to move up the ladder of difficulty, ultimately to become $50,000- or $80,000-a-year wards of the State. Now, that is not an exaggeration. That is a reality that is documented by facts, implacable facts that none of us can deny. The truth is that since 1969, the gross domestic product of the United States has doubled, but in that same span of time child poverty has increased in the United States of America by 50 percent. As I stand here today in this Chamber, all of us know that there is a huge problem in America with births out of wedlock. Some people may say all right, what does that have to do with this budget and where we are heading? We are living in an age where 33 percent of all the children in America are born out of wedlock. One-third of America's children are born into a single parenting situation. And in a world where 60 percent of the mothers of children from 6 on down are at work in the workplace, we have got to stop and think about what is the availability of surrogate parenting, of care for those children when they are away. What you know is that if 33 percent of your children are being born out of wedlock without even measuring the difficulty that many two-parent families have, you know that the vast majority of that one-third are born into a state of crisis, a very difficult structure for parents to adequately be able to teach and adequately be able to instill those children with the values we talk about. Now, some people may say, well, that is going to happen automatically. The fact is it does not happen automatically. I just share with you the results of that. In our country, while the stock market is at the rate of 7,290 or so points, while chief executives of our corporations are earning a record 200-plus times the average worker, while we have a record level of employment and a record level of control of inflation at least for some 30 years, we find that an American child drops out of school every 8 seconds; an American child is reported neglected or abused every 10 seconds, is arrested every 15 seconds, is born with a low birthweight every 2 minutes, born into poverty every 34 seconds, is killed by gunfire--an American child is killed by gunfire every hour and a half and commits suicide every 4 hours. The costs to our society of these children who are being raised without adequate supervision, without adequate input, are simply enormous. Business Week estimated, in a study that it released recently, that we are spending $425 billion a year annually on crime in the United States. The total annual economic cost to society of drug abuse is $67 billion. So we are just losing $67 billion out the door as the cost of people who wind up being part of the drug culture, largely as a consequence of their lack of capacity to make a better choice. We have learned a lot in the last years. I used to be a prosecutor and I spent a lot of time, and I still spend a lot of time, talking to young kids, 14 and 15 years old, or 16 years old, who are in trouble. Almost every kid I have ever talked to, once they finally get into some kind of mentoring program, once they finally have some kind of adult supervision in their lives, has said to me: Senator, this is the first time in my life that somebody has provided a structure for me. This is the first time in my life that somebody has told me I am valuable. This is the first time in my life somebody said I can be somebody, I can do something. It is the first time in my life I had to get up in the morning and do chores and be responsible for myself. Inevitably, anybody of good sense is going to stand back from that and say, wait a minute, why are we waiting until they are 15 or 16 years old for kids to be able to say this is the first time these experiences, which hopefully most normal kids get all through their lives, are experienced? I have sat with my friends on the other side of the aisle and we talk about this. We talk about, what do you do if 33 percent of your kids are born into a situation where it is almost predictable that they are going to have trouble? I respectfully suggest it is not enough to simply say, oh, it's individual responsibility. Oh, it's up to the parents. Because, obviously, these are situations where the parents have already failed and where there is no individual capacity to make a difference. The question for all of us here is, who is going to make a difference? Or, are we going to be so blind, and even sometimes so stupid, that all we are going to do is wait until they come down that track, get into trouble, and we are finally going to make great speeches and say, throw the book at them, send them away. We have learned a lot in the last years about the science of brain development and of children. It is not altogether new to all of us, because the fact is that pediatricians and people of good sense, child psychologists and others, have been telling us a lot of this for a long period of time. But what we now know scientifically is that the brain of a baby develops almost fully in the first 3 years--almost fully. The brain of a child, when it is born, has about 100 billion neurons in it and those neurons are rushing around, making the connections that empower that brain to be able ultimately to create the capacity to relate to people, to do certain tasks, to learn. Mr. President, this is a CAT scan of two brains. These brains were originally shown to doctors and the doctors were asked, ``What do you see there?'' The doctors said, ``Well, those are the two brains; one is an adult's brain fully developed, and the other is the brain of an adult with Alzheimer's disease.'' They were wrong. These are both the CAT scans of 3-year-old brains, both of them. One is the 3-year-old brain fully developed, with the area of red, yellow and green which represents the full development of that brain. Here in the dark areas of this brain there is nothing. It is blank. The scientists now tell us that the brain of a 3-year-old, properly stimulated so those neurons properly make connections, will be 25- to 30-percent larger than the brain of a child that does not receive that kind of stimulation. I want to read to you what that is all about. This is from ``Nightline.'' Ted Koppel did an interview with the doctors who were involved in this. I want to share with you what Dr. Stanley Greenspan at George Washington University says. He said: Well, what we've learned is that a lot of commonsense makes common sense, but we've added a few little twists onto common sense. For example, we've identified the six kinds of experiences in the early years that will help promote not just our intelligence, but our morality and our sense of self. It starts with a baby learning to pay attention. We figured out that babies attend differently. Some babies like high pitched sounds, some low pitched sounds, some bright lights, some dull lights. So now we can cater the experiences to the baby's senses. We've also learned that babies fall in love, the second step, differently. Some babies need to be wooed. We need to pull them in. We need to smile a lot. Other babies reach right out and charm us. The third step in the building of our intelligence and our morality and sense of self, learning to be logical. By eight months, babies are capable of give and take games with smiles and smirks and head nods and back and forth, but some babies we need to woo into these interactions. He goes on to say that, later on, at toddler stage, babies learn to be problem solvers and that one can develop the intelligence much further by encouraging that child in that problem solving, and so forth. Unfortunately, when so many of our children are born into this state of crisis, when so many of our children are even the sons and daughters of children, of 15- and 16- and 17-year-olds, they do not have a clue about these interactions. They don't understand what parenting is at that stage. And if we are not going to inherit a significant number of those children as children with learning disabilities, children with health problems, children with sociopathic problems, with the inability to adjust, the inability to relate--then somehow, if we are going to come back from this precipice, I respectfully suggest to my colleagues we need intervention in the place of that incapacitated parent. In the absence of the parent, who is going to provide the structure for that child to have the values that all of us want that child to have? I am not here to suggest it should be the Government. I don't want the Government to do it. We've learned a lot about the downside of that. I am not here to suggest that it ought to be another big Federal program. We've learned a lot about that. I am here to suggest that we have to create a new model, a new way to think about this. I think Senator Coats and Congressman Kasich and some others have thought about that a lot. But I do not happen to agree with their methodology of how they get the resources for it. I do agree with the notion that there are thousands of efforts out there in this country, Boys Clubs, Girls Clubs, YWCA, YMCA, the Youth Build, the ABC mentor programs, Success by Six, Smart Start--North Carolina, by Governor Hunt--a host of efforts that are proving their capacity to provide grassroots, local, home-grown efforts that make a difference in the lives of these children. But every single one of them is drowning in the demand, and there isn't a sufficient supply. I was in an early infant toddler care center in Boston the other day, the Castle Square Child Development Center. There are about 67 children in there, early infant toddlers, getting this kind of input. But for the 67 that are in there, there are 400 on the waiting list. And those 400 will never cross the threshold of that place because they will be 6 years old before there is room for them. What I am respectfully suggesting is that there is an ability for us to reduce these costs that we are spending on drug abuse, on imprisonment, on the violence in our streets, on the back end, and rescue a whole generation from this problem of lack of sufficient input at the early stage, if we would think about how to empower those local entities directly; not with big Federal bureaucracy, but directly. Mr. President, in the last 10 years, we have taken our prison population in America from about 450,000 to 1.5 million. So we are filling up our prisons, and we are building more prisons. There has been, I think it is, a 248-percent increase in prison spending in the last few years. I want to show you the spending on children, because it is absolutely inverse. This blue line represents the line of brain development. It goes up, obviously, dramatically in the first 3 years. It grows a little bit as you go on from there, and when you reach about 14 years old, it flattens out, regrettably, and then for all of us who are getting older, at the back end, it starts to tail down. Mr. President, a 15-year-old's brain versus the brain of a child, a baby, the brain of the baby is growing 1,000 times faster than the 15- year-old. The brain of a baby is growing 10,000 times faster than the brain of a 50-year-old. Here is the line of expenditure of the United States. We are spending exactly inversely to the most important years of brain development. We spend the most money at the very tail end; we spend the least amount of money up front. I want to underscore what we are trying to do here. This is not coming to the floor with a specific program. It is not coming to the floor saying money will go to early Head Start or money will go to the charitable institutions I talked about, although I would like to see that happen. We are merely trying to reserve the capacity to be able to agree in the course of the next months that we will do something to address this vital issue. I am confident that we will be able to find a bipartisan place to begin in order to be able to focus on what really works. I would like to see us at least have some pilot projects that invest in the capacity to put some leverage directly into those charitable institutions so we can see the grassroots do a better job at the local level of being able to reach out and intervene. It is my hope that colleagues will recognize the wisdom of at least reserving a place in line so that we can argue about this at a later time.

Mr. KERRY. Mr. President, I thank the Senator from Minnesota not just for his support for this but especially for his long-term commitment to it and his enormous understanding as a former teacher of how important these ingredients are. Mr. President, I yield 5 minutes to the Senator from Wisconsin.

Mr. KERRY. Mr. President, I will be happy to agree with the Senator from New Mexico.

Mr. KERRY. I will agree to request that this be set aside.

Mr. KERRY. I will be delighted to set this aside for whatever period of time the manager would like. I do want to engage in a dialog on it.

Mr. KERRY. Mr. President, I cannot tell the Senator precisely, but I can absolutely tell you I am going to yield back time. I think it will be somewhere in the vicinity of a half-hour.

Mr. KERRY. Mr. President, I now yield to the Senator from Minnesota 4 minutes. Mr. President, before I yield let me just take 1 minute to explain. This is an amendment to hold out a possibility--I yield myself such time as I may use--to hold out the possibility that when we come back in the appropriating process, we may be able to find some money to deal with the issue of early child development. We do not spend money now. We do not trade money. We do not have an offset. We do not spend. We simply want to be able to reserve the capacity to come back at a later time to deal with this issue. I will explain why I feel that is so important, as do the other Senators joining me. This is an amendment that is cosponsored by Senators Kohl, Moseley-Braun, Wellstone, Rockefeller, Mikulski, Murray, and Bingaman. I now yield 4 minutes to the Senator from Minnesota.

Mr. KERRY. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Senator from North Dakota be permitted to proceed for 10 minutes, and subsequently, when he completes, that I be recognized for the purposes of calling up my amendment.

Mr. KERRY. Mr. President, before I use any of that time, just as a matter of courtesy and parliamentary process, my distinguished colleague is also standing for recognition. If I could ask the Chair what the Senator's intent might be, we might be able to work out an arrangement.

Mr. KERRY. Mr. President, it is my understanding that I was to be able to call up an amendment at this time.

Mr. KERRY. Mr. President, it is my understanding that we have under normal regular order an amount of time at this point.

Mr. KERRY

Mr. KERRY. I thank the Senator.

Mr. KERRY. Madam President, could I inquire of the manager, is that immediate? Is there any intervening time, or is that immediate?

Mr. KERRY. Reserving the right to object.

Mr. KERRY. I ask the amendment be set aside per the unanimous consent request.

Mr. KERRY. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that reading of the amendment be dispensed with.

Mr. KERRY. Mr. President, I send an amendment to the desk, and I ask that it be temporarily set aside per the unanimous consent request.

Mr. KERRY. Reserving the right to object.

Mr. KERRY. Mr. President, I thank the Senator from New Jersey. I am proud to rise to join Senator Hatch and Senator Kennedy as a cosponsor of this, and to thank them for their leadership on it. Let me say first of all, that it is absolutely disingenuous to suggest to the U.S. Senate that this amendment ought to be voted against or is subject to criticism because it reduces the tax cut by $30 billion. Every U.S. Senator knows, by virtue of our experience here and the practice on the budget, that we are not allowed to specify the specific source of revenue. But every Senator also knows what the source of revenue would be if we decided to pass this legislation. There is no question about it. There is no other place that the Finance Committee would go as a consequence of an overwhelming vote of the Senate to say that we should provide this care with the understanding of the sponsors and of all of those proposing that there is one source that we are directing our attention to for the revenue. So that is an entire smokescreen. No Senator can hide their vote behind that kind of smokescreen today. Second, it is absolutely false to suggest that the $16 billion in the agreement is going to provide health care to even the 5 million children that it claims to, let alone the 10 million children we know do not have coverage today. The math is ascertainable. And the math will tell you that you are only going to cover about 3.7 million children with the amount of money allocated. The fact is, that last year when Senator Kennedy and I and Senator Rockefeller and others introduced legislation to provide health care for children, we thought we had an approach. And Senator Hatch and others could not find agreement with it. And there have been some changes since then. But let me tell you, Mr. President, what else has happened since then. There are 750,000 additional children who have lost their private health insurance in this country in that year that we have not seen fit to do what Senator Kennedy and Senator Hatch are asking us to do today--750,000 additional kids. One kid every 35 seconds has lost their health insurance in this country. And the fact is, that most of those 10 million kids are the sons and daughters of parents who are working. Ninety percent of them are working. And the vast majority, about 68 or 69 percent, both parents are working and are working full time. So why is this necessary, Mr. President? Let me just share with you a real-life story from Massachusetts. Jim and Sylvia Pierce were married in 1980. They lived in Everett, MA. Jim was a plumber. They had three children: Leonard, Brianna, and Alyssa. In October 1993, Sylvia was pregnant with her fourth child when Jim was murdered on his way home from the store. In that one horrible moment, her life changed forever. She not only lost her husband, but, pregnant and alone, she lost her health insurance as well. Her survivor's benefits made her income too high to be able to qualify for long-term Medicaid but it was too low to be able to pay the $400 a month premium that would have extended her husband's health plan so that it would have covered her children. Result--she lost her health insurance, pregnant, and with three children. And she said, ``I've always taken good care of my children. I feed them well; I take them to the doctors immediately when they need it. All of a sudden I couldn't do that anymore.'' That is what this debate is about, Mr. President. It is about families like that that are trying to provide for their children. It is about teachers who will tell us again and again that children in a school who are disruptive in a class are often the children who have not even been diagnosed for an earache or for an eye problem. We are the only industrial country on this planet that does not provide health care to our children. That is unacceptable in 1997. It is unacceptable when we are looking at 134 billion dollars' worth of gross tax cuts. Mr. President, every person involved with children will tell us the value of providing health care to those kids so that you can provide the long- term preventive care and diagnosis necessary to provide them with full participation in our society. The Journal of the American Medical Association found that children with coverage gaps are more likely to lack a continuing and regular source of health care, so that if you just have a gap in your coverage, the greater likelihood is you are not going to be able to make it up and have any kind of long-term preventative care; and that even when factors, such as family income, chronic illness, and family mobility are factored out, numerous studies by university researchers and by Government agencies show that the uninsured are less likely to receive preventative care, such as immunizations, more likely to go to emergency rooms for their care, more likely to be hospitalized for conditions that could have been avoided with proper preventive care, and more likely to have longer hospital stays than individuals with health insurance. So, in other words, the fact that we nickel and dime this and we refuse to give them coverage actually winds up costing us a lot more in the long run. Mr. President, when you really consider the savings in this, this ought to be a no-brainer for Members of the Senate. And the fact is, the reason we are turning to cigarettes is because cigarettes are the greatest saver of all. You can leave aside the fact that the Wall Street Journal did a poll that suggested that 72 percent of Americans favor this 43-cent tax, but just think about it on the merits. The fact is, the public supports this bill because they want children to have health insurance and they also understand the rationale for increasing the cigarette tax. The cigarette tax is a user fee. For three-quarters of Americans they are not going to pay anything additional. But for the one-quarter of Americans who do smoke, they wind up costing Americans an additional $50 billion in direct costs, health care costs as a consequence of that smoking. Mr. President, the tobacco taxes in the United States today are the lowest in the industrial world. And even if we passed this 43-cent tax in order to fund health care for children, we would still be far below the tax charged in most of those other countries today. There is a rationale for doing this, a rationale that is overwhelming. In the next 24 hours, 3,000 children are going to start smoking. Every 30 seconds a child in the United States starts smoking. And the problem is getting worse because smoking among students in grades 9 to 12 increased by more than 26 percent from 1991 to 1995. And although 419,000 smokers die each year of smoker-related diseases, the fact is that 89 percent of those who start to smoke by the age of 18 are going to be replaced today or the fact is those 419,000 are going to be replaced by about 1 million new smokers, which means that you are going to have about 89 percent of those who are 18 will have started smoking before that. Mr. President, the tobacco tax is known to weed out that early smoking. The tobacco tax, according to the American Cancer Institute, suggests that 835,000 children's lives would be saved. So that is really the choice we face in this vote today. We know that if you raise the taxes on cigarettes, the people with the least amount of disposable income, which are kids, are less accessible to cigarettes. The fact is, if 835,000 lives could be saved and we refuse to take the step today to do that, then ask yourself what the complicity is in those additional 835,000 smokers and deaths that would occur as a consequence. Mr. President, this makes sense. This is important in terms of our rising to the standards of the rest of the countries in the world, industrial countries. It makes sense to save countless tax dollars that are spent for those people who die, the 419,000 each year, as a result of smoking-related disease. It makes sense because it provides children with the opportunity to have the diagnosis of preventive care that provides them with a full opportunity to participate in our society. I think Senator Hatch and Senator Kennedy are absolutely correct when they say this is one of the most important votes we will cast. This does not blow apart any agreement. Do not let any smokescreen to that effect cloud a vote here. This agreement can hold together because this amendment provides for revenue and it provides for making up the difference of what is taken away. In the end, this agreement could go forward, and America's children would benefit as a consequence of that. I reserve the balance of my time.