Jim McDermott

Mr. McDERMOTT

Mr. McDERMOTT. Mr. Speaker, well, here we are, one more time, rubber- stamping whatever the President says he wants. They come out here with a 43-page bill and 302 pages of explanations, and there is not a soul in here who knows what is in it. Let me tell Members what is here. You are spending a trillion dollars, which is almost exactly what is estimated as the shortfall in Social Security and Medicare. You are going to come back after this break, and you are going to privatize Medicare. We know what you are going to do. What is nice for the American people about this rubber-stamp Congress out of White House, the junta gets its orders, they bring it to the Committee on Ways and Means or Committee on Rules, and zoom, out it comes. The American people are getting a clear, unadulterated picture of what the Republicans are all about. Every single Member comes from a State where they are cutting their State budget. They are cutting the living daylights out of their budget. If you are from Texas, it is 275,000 kids who will not have health care. In my State, they threw 60,000 people off of health care programs. Every State in the Union is doing that. The estimated cost of that, $100 billion. That is what States are cutting out of their budget. No, you cannot give that money to them. You give them $20 billion, and I know you are going to stand up and say $20 billion is better than nothing. Yes, it is better than nothing, but it is not going to fix the problem. When some kid is sick in the State of Washington, and they now have waiting lists in Medicaid, and you are a mother with your kid in the waiting room, maybe you will get into the hospital and maybe you will not, then you have to ask yourself, is this the country that you and I believe in? Is this the common good? I say it is not. You really ought to be ashamed of what you are doing because what you are doing is sticking it to the kids of this country. The President says Leave No Child Behind. My God, not only in education are you leaving them behind, you are leaving them behind in the hospitals and the environment and everywhere else in this society. Vote ``no.''

Mr. McDERMOTT

Mr. McDERMOTT. Mr. Speaker, I received my symbol for this Congress just the other day. It is an official stamp from the White House, and they are passing them out. You will all get one in the mail I am pretty sure, and it says: ``Official rubber stamp. I approve of everything George Bush does. Member of Congress.'' All you have to do is sign your name on there. That is what this Congress is about, rubber stamping the President's proposals. Bring it out here. No debate. Do not let us offer amendments. Do not take any time. Just get out the rubber stamp and put it down there and just roll it on in. You have now joined the rubber stamp Congress. This party is running a one-party government. They want no input from the Democrats whatsoever. They are a rubber stamp for the President. They are willing to give away all their prerogatives on the war. They said to the President, whenever you think it is time to go to war, go ahead. So they have rubber-stamped whatever he wanted to do. On the tax cut, just give it to him. It will work. On unemployment benefits, well, they stalled and stalled; and he said, look, we are getting bad numbers on those polls. We better do something about employment. So in about an hour we are going to come out here and rubber-stamp again his unemployment bill that the Democrats have been pushing for 4 months. But when the President says it, everybody on the other side jumps up and says, Where is my rubber stamp? God, I got to get over to the floor and cast my vote for whatever he wants. Whether he wants to repeal all of the environmental issues related to the military, give the military an open season on doing anything they want. They are killing whales and porpoises in Washington, they are doing all the rest, but over here on the other side, we do not want to have any debate on that. We are rubber-stamping whatever the President wants. I welcome everybody to the rubber stamp club. I hope you got yours. Do not forget to bring them to the floor when you vote.

Mr. McDERMOTT

Mr. McDERMOTT. A few minutes ago, Mr. Speaker, I came out and talked about this being a rubber stamp Congress. We now have a perfect example. We brought up in the Committee on Ways and Means at least three or four times, the gentleman from Maryland (Mr. Cardin) did, the issue of unemployment. The chairman said, whoa, we cannot do anything about that. We cannot do anything about that. The person who sponsors the bill today voted no against it in the committee again and again and again. Then we come out here on the floor and they say, oh, no, we cannot vote for unemployment. Then they must have done a poll and the poll must have come back real bad, because we have a bill here that we are going to vote on what about 90 percent of the people in this House will have never even seen. They will not know what it says here. It was filed on May 21. Would that be yesterday? This has not had any hearings, no testimony from anybody to come in and talk about this issue, and we run it out here and we put it under martial law and we run it through the House. If that is not a rubber stamp for the White House, I do not know what is. They have Mr. Rove down there. He gins up all kinds of destruction in Colorado and Texas. He also runs what happens on this floor. The junta up in the leadership office, that junta says, Mr. Thomas, you cannot handle this. We will send it straight to Rules. You are not smart enough to get a bill out or handle any kind of discussion about what is going on. It is an absolute destruction of the process. They ought to allow us to have amendments to fix this. We heard from the gentleman from Michigan (Mr. Levin) that there are problems. There are one million people who are not covered by this. Even Mr. Greenspan says that probably people who are not getting jobs now are not doing it because they like being on unemployment. They cannot find work. Why would we leave $20 billion in the unemployment fund put there by these very people? Why would we not give it to them during this period? It is because the rubber stamp at the White House has come out, boom, this is what we are doing. And our leadership on the other side, they get all in line and say, folks, this is what we are doing. Here, the gentlewoman from Washington (Ms. Dunn), put this bill in. They put it in last night. They have a Committee on Rules meeting at 11 o'clock after they have a $22 million fundraiser. They all troop back in and say, great, now let us get things ready for tomorrow. This is what we get. Maybe we will be here tomorrow doing more rubber stamp stuff. We are going to do unemployment and this tax bill so they can go home and say they have handled unemployment. I come from a State with the highest unemployment in the country. When that happened before, we had people who were defeated who voted against it, so they remembered. Now we must come with this bill, so rubber stamp it. ``Get ready, guys. Bring your rubber stamps from the office when you come over.''

Mr. McDERMOTT

Mr. McDERMOTT. Mr. Speaker, it seems like not one week goes by without another outrage from this administration with respect to the environment of this country. I rise today to submit an article from a recent newspaper in my city which I think everyone ought to read before they vote on this change in environmental regulations for the military. The column details a recent sonar test that was conducted by the navy near my hometown and the effects of the marine mammals that were observed by a University of Washington class who happened to be studying the area. There is a lot of worry in my area about the orcas and about the porpoises, and there are a number of people who are involved in this kind of study, and they were up there watching, observing the sonar, what was going on and with cameras what was going on with these animals, and along comes a ship and sets off a sonic boom. They say they have to test it there. There is no reason why they could not call the University of Washington and say where are the animals, we have some concern, we do not want to kill porpoises, we do not want to kill whales, but no, they set off the boom, and soon, porpoises were floating to the surface, dead, and whales were beginning to act very strangely, and this is unnecessary. The military should be held to the same account that everybody else is. A few weeks ago, they were out there shooting shells into the water with depleted uranium on the end of them. Everybody knows there are questions about the effects of depleted uranium and what it does to the human body. The salmon fishery off the Washington coast is right where they are shooting the shells. They could not even figure out how to get out far enough or something to get out of the fishing grounds. To make it even worse, this issue of depleted uranium is a big issue in Iraq. We dumped 300 tons of depleted uranium over southern Iraq in 1991, and we have had recorded, at least by the Iraqi medical people, a 1- to 300-percent increase in cancer and deformities at birth in children. In the last 6 months, we dumped 600 tons, twice as much, and the military continues to put out the word that there is no problem. The British Government, the Royal Society of Medicine in England said, there is a problem and we are going to clean up the area around Basra which is where the British are responsible, but the United States, in Baghdad, in Mosul and Kirkuk and all these places, we say no problem. The military is unwilling to confront the environmental damage they bring about, and when called to account for it, they say, well, it is a national security matter. Look, we can test sonar devices 300 miles out in the ocean. We do not have to do it 50 yards, through a pod of whales. There is no reason for that, and they know they are there. It is not as though it is some mystery. The science is very good. They simply did not think they had to worry about the environment. They are the military, and this bill that is going through here with an exemption for military from the environmental regulations is simply an absolute atrocity. In all the places in the world where they have nuclear weapons, where they have all kinds of chemicals, in Anniston, Alabama, they put in a facility to burn the waste gases they have created from making the weapons of mass destruction in the United States, and they burn it right in Anniston, Alabama, 10 blocks from a school with no protection for that school. This kind of thing is unacceptable in the United States, and the United States Congress should not endorse it and make it okay. It is wrong. I will enter into the Record an article from the Seattle Post- Intelligencer dated May 19, 2003, at this point. [From the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, May 19, 2003] In the Northwest: Sonar Tests' Effects on Wildlife Should Set Off Alarms (By Joel Connelly) Lovers of Washington's inland waters, including this part- time Whidbey resident, enjoy a living tip sheet in www.orcanetwork.org, a Web site filled with recent sightings and locations of killer whales, gray whales and other great marine mammals. Last week, however, the customary lighthearted dispatches yielded to a gripping account of the extreme distress of marine creatures during a Navy sonar test earlier this month. The episode, on May 5, raises major new questions about whether Congress should roll over for a Pentagon campaign designed to exempt the military from complying with landmark federal environmental laws. Without these laws, the natural systems and marine life of our Puget Sound-Strait of Georgia region would possess no defense against the Department of Defense. Orcanetwork's dispatch came from David Bain, a University of Washington faculty member. With students, he witnessed what happened when the Everett-based guided missile destroyer Shoup conducted a midfrequency sonar training exercise off San Juan Island. ``The passage of naval vessel 86 (Shoup) was observed by me and the marine mammal class at Friday harbor laboratories,'' Bain wrote. ``Collectively, we observed effects on three species.' These were: Porpoises: Bain and students watched Dall's porpoises in a bay north of Lime Kiln Lighthouse, an island landmark. ``After the (Navy) ship passed, they were observed traveling away from the ship at high speeds,'' Bain wrote. ``This is similar to the behavior of Dall's porpoises in the presence of other loud sounds, such as air-gun blasts.'' Since the sonar tests, bodies of seven porpoises have been found--three beached in the Strait of June de Fuca near Haro Strait, and three more in the San Juan Islands. A number of porpoise deaths have occurred in recent months, Bain noted, some predating the Shoup's passage through Haro Strait. ``Midfrequency sonars were heard in April as well, although they seemed to be coming from Juan de Fuca Strait or points south,'' he wrote. ``Thus, these earlier strandings were potentially related to sonar activity.'' Minke whales; During the test, a minke whale was spotted porpoising (coming out of the water) as it swam north of the Shoup. Other sightings of similar behavior were recorded at two other locations off San Juan Island. ``It has been about 20 years since I've seen a minke porpoising,'' wrote Bain. He speculates that all sightings were of one whale, racing to get away from the naval vessel and its sonar tests. Killer whales: As he and students watched the widely known J pod of orcas, wrote Bain, ``Killer whales were observed behaving normally until the sonar became audible in the air.'' At that point, however, the J pod moved inshore and grouped tightly. ``As we moved inshore with them, the naval vessel disappeared over the horizon, although the sonar was still audible,'' wrote Bain. The J pod then moved quietly northward, staying near shore and later bunching up again. Given the recent sharp decline in our resident killer-whale populations, did it make sense for the Shoup to be causing apparent distress? Did the Navy bother to think about this, or to consult beforehand with biologists expert in marine mammal life of the northern Sound? We are a military-intensive region. The shores of Puget Sound likely would sink were another Navy base, shipyard or testing facility located in our waters. Aside from pacifists protesting the Trident base--most memorably Archbishop Raymond Hunthausen paddling a kayak-- local officials and politicians have embraced bases and jobs. Once upon a time, too, there were security grounds for so doing. The buildup of the Soviet Pacific fleet was endlessly cited by the late Sen. Henry Jackson. An Everett Navy base, Scoop argued, would be a day's sailing time closer to the Soviet Far East than berthings in California. As Bain notes, however--with cool understatement--``the threats arrayed against the United States at this time are minor compared to what we faced when the environmental laws proposed to be overturned were first passed.'' As well, it should be recalled that Jackson--the Pentagon's most devoted friend--was the chief architect of the National Environmental Policy Act and the Clean Water Act. Washington's congressional delegation ought to take heed of the distress caused by the Shoup's recent sonar tests. In recent years, lawmakers have constructively pushed the Navy. Environmentally sensitive construction of the Trident base was one result. Another was forcing the Navy to abandon an untested, risky plan to deposit toxic dredge spoils beneath a berm in Everett's Port Gardner Bay. What is to be done? First, there should be no exemption from federal environmental laws. If the military ignores regulations, citizens should have recourse in the courts. Second, the Navy must be made to consult with civilian agencies in case of sensitive or potentially harmful activities. A firm suggestion on this front might come from Rep. Norm Dicks, senior Democrat on the House Defense Appropriations subcommittee. Third, as noted by Bain, the Department of Defense is reviewing proposals on what it can do to prevent such conflicts as those caused by the Shoup's sonar tests. ``The Navy (should) proceed with caution until such programs are completed and the Navy can accurately predict where it can operate dangerous equipment without causing undue environmental damage,'' Bain wrote. Amen. Marine mammals are a big part of what makes the waters of Puget Sound and Strait of Georgia worth defending.

Mr. McDERMOTT

Mr. McDERMOTT. Mr. Speaker, sometimes when I come to the floor, I think I have come back into the French Theater of the Absurd. Here we have a bill that we are going to allow employers to provide financial advice to their employees but does not require sufficient safeguards to ensure that the advisers do not have a conflict of interest. The country has gotten a better idea about the Republican idea of fiscal management recently, and I am sure that that would be the kind of people they would want their employees to get their information from. Despite running a budget of $400 billion in debt this year, they continue to spend money for their affluent supporters in trying to keep them from cutting taxes. They have really turned a modest government surplus into a prescription drug problem for the next 25 years. We are drunk on giving tax relief. If we look at Mr. Bush's economic report on page 58, he says: ``A conservative rule of thumb is that interest rates rise about three basis points for every additional $200 billion in government debt.'' Now he tells us that things are going to go up. He tells us, and yet he continues to drive us into the hole. Now, I was thinking about the kind of advisers that the company might recommend. They might recommend Bear Stearns or Credit Suisse or Deutsch Bank or Goldman Sachs, or any one of a dozen companies here that the Attorney General of New York has just fined $1.4 billion for misleading their investors. If you are an employer, and you want them to buy the stock in your company so you have some dough, and you send them to your credit bank that floats your bonds, it would not be very surprising if they recommend that people buy your company, even if it was like Ken Lay and Enron and it was going in the tank within a week. But there is nothing in this bill that says you cannot do that. Any way you can manipulate your workers is fair game. Now, there is a legitimate role for government, and that is to protect the American people. And not only to protect them from terrorists and al Qaeda or whatever is going on in the rest of the world, but from the financial rapacious people in New York City.

Mr. McDERMOTT

Mr. McDERMOTT. Mr. Speaker, today we passed a bill out of here in an hour that spent $550 billion worth of taxes. The fact that the House of Representatives, which is the body charged by the Constitution with the responsibility of originating all tax policy in this country, that we can deal with a bill of that size with 1 hour's debate is an absolute travesty. The Founders of this country never considered that a bill of that magnitude with those kinds of long-range effects would be considered on the back of galloping horses as we run to the airport to catch planes all over the country. The theory of this bill is that if we give back taxes, somehow we will give it to people who will then invest it, creating jobs that will lead to employment in this country. We will hear over and over and over again we are going to create a million jobs, and all this kind of stuff. But the fact is that the Department of Commerce says that today our industries in this country are operating at 75 percent capacity. That means that they can make 25 percent more of whatever it is they make whether it is shirts or tables or furniture or automobiles. They have already the capacity to produce more goods. What is not happening is that there are people there who have money to purchase those things. So the concept that we are going to give more to the people running the factory and that some factory owner is so stupid that he has already put out all of whatever he can make and thinks he can sell that he would now make more, he would get more machinery and open up a new building and make more automobiles or more whatever, it simply does not pass the commonsense test. If someone runs a bakery and they make 10 loaves of bread and their ovens will allow them to make 20 loaves of bread, but they only sell seven loaves of bread, why would they make 20 loaves of bread? Why would they hire another baker, buy more flour and more yeast and make more bread? So this theory that suddenly if we give more money to the people at the top will magically create jobs is absolutely nonsense. What is needed, obviously, is for the people at the bottom who buy things to have more money. The bill we just passed out of here in an hour gave 80 percent of the benefit to people making more than $75,000 a year. Now, $75,000 a year is a pretty good income. One can do quite a bit with $75,000 a year. But do all the people above it need more? Do they need to take 80 percent of the benefit and 20 percent goes to the people below? If one is a millionaire under that bill, they will get $105,000 tax refund, $105,000. What will these people on the bottom get? $325. Most people buy what they can afford, and if they have a small income, they sometimes cannot afford things so they do not buy them. When they have got a big income, they can do whatever they want. But this bill says these people over here with all the money, we are going to give them more, and these people over here, we are going to give them $325. There are many ways we could have written this bill. I had a proposal to give a payroll tax holiday. There were other proposals that were out here. But the point is that we needed a bill that was fair, that gave the money to the people at the bottom. I was prepared to give a $1,400 amount to everybody in the whole society because everybody pays the payroll tax. Everybody pays Social Security. Everybody pays Medicare, and if we gave that back to people on the first $20,000 of their income, the people on the bottom would get about $1,500 in refund. They could spend it to buy an extra shirt, to take their family to dinner, to do many of the things that would keep the small businesses open that are now closing because nobody can come and buy dinner for their family. They have to stay at home and live within a tight budget. But the leadership of this House for some reason did not want us to deal with that. They would not let us deal with unemployment. None of the people at the bottom got anything. That is a sad day for this House.

Mr. McDERMOTT

Mr. McDERMOTT. Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent to take the Special Order time of the gentleman from Washington (Mr. Inslee).

Mr. McDERMOTT

Mr. McDERMOTT. Mr. Speaker, the Chair, in a rare moment of clarity last night in the Committee on Rules, told us this is like a poker game. The money on the table at the end of the game is just the same as when you started, just different people have the money than they did at the beginning. And he is absolutely right. The rich get the money in this bill and the middle class gets stiffed. We cannot trust the middle class to make decent decisions. Eighty percent of this money, of the $500 billion goes to people above $75,000; $105,000 for millionaires; $325 for people making $40,000. Now, Mr. Speaker, this is not a poker game. This is a crap game we are in, and we have got loaded dice. It is crooked and we have got to shut this game down in 2004 or the middle class is going to be slaughtered. This Congress is only one thing, and I brought what everybody ought to get. I got one of these. It says here, I approve of everything George Bush does, Member of Congress. This is the rubber stamp, crooked crap game Congress.

Mr. McDERMOTT

Mr. McDERMOTT. Mr. Speaker, I do not think the American people understand, and the gentleman is down in Chapel Hill and he knows the pressure that is on the hospitals; it is the same in Chicago or Richmond or Seattle or New York or anywhere. What we are saying to those counties, to those cities, to those States, we are not going to help you. You are on your own. The President made no provision.

Mr. McDERMOTT. Mr. Speaker, I think the long-term effects of not dealing with the social problems in this society are more costly in the end than if you put the money up front. If you do not feed people and take care of them and give them preventive health care, you pay much more at the far end when they are seriously ill and then you spend thousands and thousands of dollars that would not have been necessary if you had dealt with it in the early stages. It is so cost ineffective. We talk about history. I do not know where the people went who were here on the other side when I came here. They used to talk about deficits being terrible and bad, and they have all disappeared. I mean I sat on the Committee on Ways and Means and the Treasury Secretary, Mr. Snow, came before us and said, deficits are not bad. I could not believe what is going on. We are going to spend so much money financing that debt. And the gentleman and I, we will not do it. It will be our kids. That is not fair.

Mr. McDERMOTT. No, not a single dime.

Mr. McDERMOTT. They basically were stiffed.

Mr. McDERMOTT. Mr. Speaker, I was coming downstairs from the Committee on Rules where I was up there making a presentation as they prepare for our consideration of this bill tomorrow. It was never so clear to me as it was sitting there that we are in a one-party government here, where the President and the House and the Senate are all from one party, and they are going to have a discussion down here tomorrow on their proposal. But what I really am fearful of is that the proposal the gentleman is putting out here tonight will not be allowed into the discussion tomorrow, except in a very abbreviated form. I think that is unfortunate, because I think the American people ought to have a chance to choose between alternatives. That is what this government is about. Will Rogers one time said people would rather have fair taxes than lower taxes. The fact is we do not have fair taxes. The proposal that is coming down here tomorrow is one that 80 percent of the benefit goes to people above $90,000 a year in income. Now, I do not think they need a tax break. The effect of this bill tomorrow would be to give a $105,000 tax break to people making $1 million, while people who are making $40,000 will get $325. Now, that is not a fair tax structure, and it basically says the only people who know what to do with their money are people who are rich. If you give it to the people down there making $40,000, they will not know what to do with it. They will squander it away on something, I do not know what; but if we give it to the rich people, suddenly things will be stimulated. The problem with that theory is that the Commerce Department, Mr. Bush's Commerce Department, has come out and said that industry in this country is operating at 75 percent of capacity. There is plenty of capacity right now. There is no need for further investment in capacity. What you need is people with money in their hands to buy things. Now, the bill that I proposed, the amendment I proposed upstairs, is a proposal that would give a tax holiday on the first $20,000 of your payroll taxes. Everybody pays payroll taxes. Not everybody pays income tax, because if you are down low enough, you do not. But if you are down low or high up, you pay payroll taxes for Social Security and for Medicare. If you gave a tax holiday on $20,000 of income, everybody in this country, every working person in this country, would get somewhere between $1,400 or $1,500 in rebates. That means that 94 percent of the money would go to people below $75,000 in income, and it goes all the way to the bottom. Everybody gets it. In my view, that is a fair tax cut, if you are going to have one. I really think the idea of a tax cut in the first place is a bad one. Sitting on the Committee on Ways and Means, I have watched these tax cuts go whistling through there one after another, and we go deeper in debt. I was looking at what is going on in the States. California is $34 billion in the hole; New York is $12 billion; Texas is $10 billion; Washington State, my State, is $2.4 billion. The National Conference of State Legislatures reports that 41 States have accumulated almost $84 billion worth of deficit in this year, and what we are doing at the national level is looking out on those States and all the mess that is out there and saying, tough luck, you are on your own. Now, that is a major philosophical debate that goes on in this House, what responsibility does the Federal Government have and what responsibility does the State have, and this administration has been pushing off on to the States all the responsibility for education, health care, the environment, whatever; and the States are being destroyed. The Missouri Governor, the new Governor, is going around turning off every third light bulb. He put out a memo for the State of Missouri. Connecticut is laying off prosecutors in the court system. In Kentucky they are laying off prison guards. Nebraska just put 25,000 women and children off the Medicaid program. In Michigan they are considering a proposal to put advertising on the sides of police cars so they can make money, making them rolling billboards. That is where these States are. Ohio has taken 50,000 off of health coverage and Colorado is cutting out the senior citizen benefits on property taxes for 120,000 seniors in Colorado. Now, I could go on with that list, and it does not make any difference what State you are talking about. And we at this level are saying what we are going to do with the money we have is we are going to give it to those people at the top. They are the only ones who know what to do. They are going to save us. And we are not giving money out to the States and the counties, with all the problems at the State level or dealing with the problems in our own system, or preparing for all the people who are going to come on to Medicare and Social Security in 2008 or 2009 or 2010. We are not preparing for that at all. Today, we are giving it all away. And then we are saying, gee, Social Security does not work anymore, Medicare does not work anymore. We have to put that responsibility on people. Next Friday, a week from today, we will be dismantling the Medicare system in the same way. That is the system that this party has put in order and they are going to keep doing it one week at a time, and we are seeing it, and we will not have any money to respond to that because we have given it all away. Now, we have a choice tomorrow. We could say no to the President's way and the Committee on Ways and Means chairman's way. The chairman said upstairs that the Congress is kind of like a poker game where everybody sits down at the table and at the end of the night the same amount of money is there, but different people have it. And what I am saying, my answer to that is yes, that is true, and I think that ordinary working people ought to get it and the Democratic proposal is an attempt to do that. But the leadership of this House is going to bring in a bill tomorrow that will make it increasingly unfair in this country. I congratulate my colleagues from North Carolina and Virginia and Connecticut for coming down here and letting the people know that the Democrats do have a proposal, because they will control the rule tomorrow in such a way it will look like we did not even have any ideas. We do have ideas, but they are not consistent with giving it all to the people on the top. Mr. Speaker, the American people are sitting there, after dinner, at the dinner table and you think to yourself, does somebody who makes $1 million really need a $105,000 tax break? I mean just ask yourself. And then you think about the people in your neighborhood who are scraping to pay their drug benefits and do the things that they have to do for themselves. My mother just bought a hearing aid. She is 93. Hearing aids cost $800 if you can get a cheap one. They are not covered by Medicare. So if you do not have kids who can help you, you do not get a hearing aid. I mean, do we really need to give all of this money to the people on the top? Where is the fairness in that? I think the gentleman from North Carolina (Mr. Price) should be congratulated for his effort tonight to give the people an understanding of what is going on. It is unfair.

Mr. McDERMOTT

Mr. McDERMOTT. Mr. Chairman, I thank the gentleman from Massachusetts for yielding me this time. The other day I saw something in The New York Times that gave me hope. The White House had put in solar panels on one of the sheds out there. And I thought, well, my goodness, they must have some enlightenment down there at the oil ministry. But when I offered an amendment in the Committee on Ways and Means that would have allowed us to have energy companies give tax-free bonds for the purpose of raising money for interest-free loans to homeowners to purchase solar equipment, every Republican in the committee voted ``no.'' I guess they did not get the message from the White House. Mr. Chairman, it usually costs about $11,000 to put a solar panel on a home. It is not pie in the sky. Solar production has grown 600 percent since 1996. So this is something that everywhere else in the world they are doing, but not here, and certainly not in the Committee on Ways and Means, in a committee controlled by the oil industry. We had a chance, if we had passed that amendment, to follow California. They always lead what is happening in this country. Watch and see. San Francisco puts panels on their buildings, Los Angeles, and Sacramento. They will be doing it, and all the rest of the country will be sitting around tied to these oil companies and saying to themselves, why is this? Now, we gave an opportunity for the House to begin a program that would have had 2 million families with secure, clean energy. We could have gone a long way down the road toward meeting the Kyoto Accords. The President walked away from that and said, We cannot clean up the environment; no, sir, we cannot. We cannot do anything, we are just hopeless, we Americans. Well, if we put an area of 70 miles by 100 miles of solar panels in Nevada, we could provide all of the energy this country needs in one place. It can be done, and we have got to start it someday, but I guess this administration is going to keep drilling and drilling and drilling. It will not work, Mr. President.

Mr. McDERMOTT. Mr. Chairman, I thank the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Hall) for yielding me the time. I am in opposition to this bill because today I believe we are preparing to pass the oil industry's dream plan. It was drawn up in the secrecy of the vice president of the oil dynasty's office, Mr. Cheney. He has fought every attempt to tell us who was even in the meeting, much less what they talked about. The bill was brought up to the Congress and the Committee on Ways and Means, and we could not get any amendments adopted, nothing. It has been put out by the White House, and that is good enough for the boys up in the Committee on Ways and Means. Now, Rumsfeld and Bechtel were involved in this whole business with Iraq back in 1983. In December of 1983, Mr. Rumsfeld was there negotiating for a $2 billion pipeline from the southern Iraq fields to Aqaba, the Gulf of Aqaba, across Jordan. Saddam negotiated with them a while, and then he said no. Ever since then, there has been all this interest in why can we not go in and have a regime change, because he would not roll over for what was going on. Now, this is at the time, when Rumsfeld was negotiating with Saddam Hussein is exactly the time when he was bombing the Iranians with chemical weapons. We are over there making an oil deal, and this guy is doing this stuff out there. People act like we have such clean hands in this. This administration is going to get out of here with a bunch of money for oil. I offered an amendment in the Committee on Ways and Means to put money up for buying solar panels. They did it in San Francisco; they passed a bond issue to put solar panels on every building in San Francisco. They are doing it all over California. Eight times the amount of energy they need in California falls out of the sky every day. For this bill the chairman of the Committee on Ways and Means would not even consider that amendment. This is an oil company bill. It is oil, oil, oil. It has a greasy feeling to it.

Mr. McDERMOTT

Mr. McDERMOTT. I yield to the gentleman from Wisconsin.

Mr. McDERMOTT. Mr. Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from California (Mr. Sherman).

Mr. McDERMOTT. Mr. Speaker, I take back my time. I appreciate the gentleman's point. The last tax we had last year, the one they have been running their elections on, the Urban Institute says that if your income is between $30,000 and $40,000, that is the average income in this country, the tax cut was $339. Households with over $1 million get an average tax cut of $90,000. Sixty-eight percent of households in this country get a tax cut of less than $500. If you are a typical elderly family with an income between $20,000 and $30,000, you get 89 bucks. That is an unfair tax structure. They made it worse. If they have their way with this $700 billion nonsense that they are trying to push in this session, they will make it even worse, because they will saddle our kids with debt and give all the money to people on the top. Now, I agree, this is a great thing. I wish we could get somebody, when we send this sense of the Congress, it would actually get to somebody who could actually do something, maybe the Speaker's office, maybe the majority leader's office. Mr. Armey used to talk about it, but he never brought a bill here. Maybe the new majority leader would bring us out something we could vote on. It would be real nice to have a debate on an actual piece of legislation, so we could understand what it was really going to do. Mr. Speaker, I urge all my Members to vote for this, because we all want a more fair tax structure. Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. McDERMOTT. Mr. Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the gentlewoman from Cleveland, Ohio (Mrs. Jones).

Mr. McDERMOTT. Mr. Speaker, reclaiming my time, I know, you fired the lady that wrote this. You got rid of her. So I know that that is probably why you got rid of her. Mr. Speaker, I yield such time as he may consume to the gentleman from Massachusetts (Mr. Neal).

Mr. McDERMOTT. Mr. Speaker, reclaiming my time, no, I would not admit that at all. This is the letter they put out, and they are standing by this.

Mr. McDERMOTT. I yield to the gentleman from Georgia.

Mr. McDERMOTT. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume. Mr. Speaker, before I yield to my colleague from Massachusetts, I would point out that the gentleman from Georgia has introduced a bill called the Fair Tax Act. We submitted it to the Joint Committee on Taxation, that is a joint House and Senate committee, everybody agrees that it is balanced, Democrats and Republicans and all that sort of thing, and they came up with the fact that this flat tax that we are talking about here, the rate would have to be at 59.5 percent. That means if you buy a Coke, suddenly the Coke is $1.60. If you buy a hamburger and it is $2, you are going to have to pay $3.20 for that hamburger. This goes onto health care, this goes onto pharmaceuticals, it goes onto everything, not just things you just choose; that is, everything you buy, you have to pay 60 percent taxes.

Mr. McDERMOTT. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume. This is, as I said, the second act in the Republican tax follies. This is the one that is the longest-playing act in this town. They have been talking about tax simplification since they took over. Since 1997 to today, they have added 293 Tax Code provisions that required 515 rule changes, that everybody has to understand they have added 2 hours to filling out their tax form every year. By 2010 there are going to be 35 million people who are going to have to figure their tax twice because of the alternative minimum tax. So these are the people who say we want tax simplification, and they come out here every year and add more complexity to this whole business. I read this resolution. It says one out of four taxpayers are not in compliance with the tax laws. The facts are that wage earners, the ordinary citizens of this country, 98 percent of their income is reported and 85 percent are in complete compliance with the law. The former IRS Commissioner, Mr. Rossotti, said in his departure speech, the most serious noncompliance areas are promoters of tax schemes of all varieties, the misuse of devices such as trusts and offshore accounts to hide or improperly reduce income. The average guy working in an automobile plant is not setting up a trust, does not have any money invested offshore. He is not using abusive corporate tax structures. He is not underreporting, as high- income people do, and the accumulation of failure to file and pay a large amount of employment taxes, these are the people who are not in compliance with the law. The average taxpayer has been waiting for that taxpayers' bill of rights they have been promising them. And of course the Republicans fell to fight among themselves upon that issue; so they could not even bring that out here. They have been promising it for weeks and weeks and weeks, and it ought to come out. April 15 is almost here. But, no, they are going to bring this foolishness out here. This reminds me of that story of the Methodist minister who was sick and they had a board of deacons meeting come together and they had a long discussion about what they should do about the minister's illness. Finally, by a vote of four to three with 25 abstentions, they voted to write a letter to the minister urging him to get well. This is a get- well letter to the tax structure from the people who make it complicated. Why do you not stop putting this nonsense out here? We have had Speaker and Committee on Ways and Means chairman after Speaker and Committee on Ways and Means chairman talk about the fact that we are going to have a simpler tax structure. I remember Mr. Armey, we are going to pull it up by the roots. You have never put a single bill out here. Eight years of talking and sending these letters urging the tax structure to get well. Come on, guys. Let us stop this nonsense. Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. McDERMOTT

Mr. McDERMOTT. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from Maryland (Mr. Cardin) for yielding me this time. It is really an honor to have a part in another example of the Republican tax follies. This bill could have been passed weeks and weeks and weeks ago. As we celebrate and are grateful for the fact that the war seems to be winding down in Iraq, the people who have been over there, we have been trying to do this for them for about, I do not know, 3 or 4 or 5 months. First the bill got over in the committee, and we had to add on fishing tackle and a whole bunch of other stuff, and that did not work out here. So it had to go back and come back on a rule, and now it has gone over to the Senate. They have more generous provisions. There is just no question about it. And they also added this provision that would make it a little bit more difficult for people who want to avoid taxes to leave this country, to give up their citizenship. At a time when this country ought to be thinking about sacrifice because we have asked men and women to sacrifice their lives for us, we have people leaving this country saying I do not like this country. I have made a whole bunch of money here, but I do not want to pay any taxes; so I am leaving. And we let them get out of paying taxes for that. What kind of statement is that to our troops overseas that this Congress will not close the loophole that lets somebody drop their citizenship in order to avoid their taxes? If that is not folly at a time when our deficit is $400 billion this year and going up and we expect the young men and women who are over in Iraq to sacrifice for us but we will sacrifice in terms of taxation even on people who are giving up their citizenship, there is something really weird about this bill. And I certainly know that everybody is going to vote for it. What is also strange is they say we are going to give the tax benefit to the soldiers and those people, the Marines and whatnot, give it to the State Department; but when we offered an amendment in the House committee for people in the Peace Corps who are out there risking themselves for the United States, they say no. No, not them. Let us talk about people who are doing a service to this country, which is what this is all about; and yet finally we come out here and of course it is almost the day we pay our taxes. So every year for the last 8 years we have always had the April 15 tax follies, and this is act one and will be followed by act two, which we will get to in a few minutes. But this is a bill that we should have accepted the other body's construction. It is more generous, and it closes an egregious tax loophole.