Jim McDermott

Mr. McDERMOTT

Mr. McDERMOTT. Mr. Speaker, next week is going to be a very interesting week. Probably the major issue that faces this Congress, that is, what do we do about prescription drugs for senior citizens, will be dealt with. The Republicans have put a bill out here which is absolutely inadequate. Everybody knows it. The newspapers have reported that. It is clear to anybody who has looked at the data. Yet when the Democrats put something forward, they say that ours costs too much. Now, some of us, many of us, said back in March when we passed $1.7 trillion worth of tax cuts that the day is going to come when we are not going to have the money to do this right. So now we have a bill which is going to come out here. It will pass, no one here has any doubt about that, because we know we have to have the press release: House Republicans Deal With Drug Problems for Seniors, or something like that. But the fact is that the bill will not do what is necessary. It is a real shame that Members would rather cut taxes than take care of their mothers and fathers.

Mr. McDERMOTT

Mr. McDERMOTT. Mr. Speaker, various Members who have spoken on this bill have talked about the fact that there are things that we agree with. I think all Members of Congress like the idea that we can put another thousand dollars in our IRA. Some of us who are over 50 can add an extra $500, if we did not do it before. Those benefits that benefit us, we certainly like them, and they are in the bill, and we like them. Nobody should want to hide that. But what is peculiar about this issue, and I think that somebody has to sometime explain to me the equity questions here, if 77 percent of the benefits go to people in the top 20 percent in this country, and 42 percent go to the top 5 percent in this country, where is the equity when we bring the bill to make it permanent and leave out the one piece that was there for the small savers? Now, for the life of me, why for PR purposes would we want to give more to people at the top, and the little bit that we were giving to people that expires in 2006, it does not even make it to 2010, but they took it away. They took it away. They said, we do not need those folks. Now, last year's bill, let me be specific, included a nonrefundable tax credit for low- and middle-income workers who elect to contribute to either an employer-sponsored program, like a 401(k) at the Enron company, or an IRA. The maximum credit of $1,000 was available to taxpayers filing a joint return with an income up to $30,000, we are not talking about rich people here, $30,000 is below the average income in this country, that is all they have, or single filers up to $15,000. Now, these would seem to me to be the people that the other side of the aisle would want to save. We would want to give them an incentive. We do not need to encourage people who have a lot of money to save money. They have got it already; but they save some more, that is nice, and get it tax free. But the people on the bottom, a husband and a wife making $15,000 apiece, that is a little over $1,000 a month, which means about $250, $300 a week. So they are not cleaning up. But the other side of the aisle has that provision, and it goes out to 2006, and then it is dropped. They are now going to make things permanent, and they now say, well, we have evaluated the impact of this, and we do not think the small savers are doing much anyway, so let us take away their tax benefit, but let us make sure that the taxpayers in the upper 5 percent get theirs. Now, I think when we think about this country, the questions of equity and the division between the rich and the poor in this country is getting wider and wider, and we are creating more and more tension. My question to the other side of the aisle is: Why was that taken out? I would love to hear the explanation. We could actually have a debate, and I can see the other side is eager to respond. Finally, we are going to get them the other side of the aisle to discuss why they took out the small saver.

Mr. McDERMOTT. Mr. Speaker, I think the gentleman is misstating what the point of the bill is. The point of the bill is to give people at the top more ways to save more money.

Mr. McDERMOTT. Mr. Speaker, there have probably been enough explanations of what is in this bill. The question really remains: Why should we deal with the gentleman from Massachusetts' proposal for some corporate governance changes? I was reading the Bible recently, and I read in the second chapter of Luke about the fact that in the days of Caesar Augustus, everybody went to their home village to be taxed. That is how come Jesus' mother was riding on a donkey up the road 100 miles. The Roman Empire got unfair. It became unfair, and they had to tax everybody out in the bushes. Nobody was paying anything in Rome. Well, we say, what does that have to do with us? Santayana said that if we do not learn from history, we are going to repeat it. We had the 1890s in this country, where the economy got way out of sight and we had a collapse. In the 1920s, we had the Roaring Twenties, and what did we get? We came right to the edge of going with the Soviet Union in communism. There was a lot of fear in this country. That is why when Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who was no great liberal, came into the Presidency, he said, hey, look, we have to make this place fair. What we have done in the 1990s is go back to what we did in the 1890s and in the 1920s, and we are spreading out this country so that the people on the top have got all of it, or are getting more of it, I should say, and the people on the bottom are scraping to make it. When somebody from the other side stands out here and says the fact that we dropped a little provision for people making $30,000 out of here is no big deal, they are talking about 50 percent of the people in this country. How can Members not want to be fair? What is going on in Enron is not fair. If I cannot sell my stock because I work there, and the boss can sell his, that is not fair. That is why we are here. Members ought to vote for this proposal.

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

Mr. McDERMOTT. Mr. Speaker, I am glad to hear that they have an answer, although it seems inadequate to me that we ought to have more hearings on the poor folks, but we do not need any more hearings on the people on the top. No, that is perfect. The gentleman questions my number. The Institute for Taxation and Economic Policy says 66.9 percent goes to the top 20 percent, 42 percent goes to the top 5 percent. That comes out in the Joint Tax Committee the same. The Joint Tax Committee has talked about income distribution over and over again. They are saying that 75 or more percent goes to the top of the scale.

Mr. McDERMOTT. Mr. Speaker, will the gentleman yield?

Mr. McDERMOTT

Mr. McDERMOTT. Mr. Speaker, I am going to make a prophecy. Next week we will pass a bill that will not give senior citizens economic security in the area of prescription drugs. Why? Very simply, because it is based on the theory that we will throw the old folks into the arms of the insurance companies who will then arm wrestle the drug companies down in their prices. If my colleagues believe that, they must have been unaware of what went on last night. The reason this bill is going to pass is last night the bill was paid; $30 million came in from the insurance companies and the drug companies through the Republican Party fundraiser. I am sure they must have sung at least one chorus of an old song we used to sing in the camp meetings in Illinois when I was a young kid called, ``Bringing in the sheaves, bringing in the sheaves, we shall come rejoicing bringing in the sheaves.'' But the people will not benefit from this bill. It is a bill that is designed to privatize Medicare with a little sweetening wrapped around it called a drug benefit. The old folks will be watching and they are going to want us to vote ``no'' on that bill.

Mr. McDERMOTT

Mr. McDERMOTT. Mr. Speaker, I am glad to see my amendment from 1995 suddenly appeared out here. When Newt Gingrich took over this place, there was a Contract on America. This was in it then, 1995. I proposed it in the Committee on Ways and Means, and every single Republican voted against it. Now we have a new day, and now we have all this money, or we did have all this money. We thought we had all this money. We set up a straw man. Last year we passed a bill that said, people are going to get this benefit, but then we get this and it is not permanent, so they voted last year for it; and now they come out here and they say, oh, oh, it is not permanent. Let us make it permanent, in the midst of fiscal chaos. Republicans ought to be ashamed of themselves. All the times I heard people standing out here telling me about those liberals just spend and spend and spend, well, I am watching the Republicans just spend and spend and spend, but not on things people care about. The drug benefit is gone. There is not going to be any drug benefit worth anything at all. On Medicare, people in my district cannot get a doctor to accept a Medicare patient. But no, no, we have to add this marriage tax penalty out here. That is what is going to save America. This election is going to be a test of whether Americans can be fooled all the time by the folks that say, we are cutting your taxes and it will not hurt, and you are not going to notice it. They may get a couple of bucks back, but if one's mother has to pay for her drugs and she is living on a Social Security benefit like mine is, 92 years old, $8,000 a year, who do Members think pays for her drugs? Do Members think she can pay for it? Of course she cannot, so her sons and her daughter are going to pay for it. They have, of course, this tax benefit, now that they are married. Let us see, there are two of us that are married and two are not. Two are paying the penalty and two are not. We are going to use our penalty that we get back, and we are going to go down and pay for my mother's drugs. The old people in this country would rather have the security of knowing they had a pharmaceutical benefit under Social Security. They would also like to know, and the children would like to know, that there is going to be a Social Security out there in 20 years. But they gave it all away. They gave it all away. Last week it was estate tax, and this week they have a new one: this is the marriage tax day. Next week, it will be retirement benefits. Do Members want me to predict every week? Because we are about to go home. In about 3 hours we will all be on planes, and everybody has to get their press release out before they get back to the district. So they send out, today I voted for removing the tax penalty on marriage. They then go home and bask in the warmth of that kind of baloney. When are they going to be honest with people that they have to pay for stuff? When are they going to be honest with them? Vote ``no.''

Mr. McDERMOTT

Mr. McDERMOTT. Mr. Speaker, the chairman asked how did we get here. Well, actually, we got here by people in this country who led it who said this is the proper policy that we have, to have an estate tax. Thomas Jefferson outlawed primogenitor and he did it in saying we are taking an axe to the foot of America's pseudoaristocracy. The decision was made in the very beginning that we did not want to have an aristocracy in this country. Now, Theodore Roosevelt, who signed this into law, and I remind everyone here he was a Republican, said, ``The man of great wealth owes a particular obligation to the State because he derives special advantages from the mere existence of government.'' In this debate, in my State, Mr. Gates, Sr. spoke to the law school on this issue and he said this: ``One day a child was about to be born, and it was brought to God. And God said to the child, you are either going to be born in Zimbabwe or in the United States. You can choose. But when you die, I have many works and I need money. So if you go to the United States, you have to give half of it back when you die.'' Now what do you think the child would choose? We live in the best country in the world, with the most opportunity, with the most freedom. And we have that because we give people a continuing chance. We do not allow the accumulation of aristocracy and wealth that we have had in Europe and other parts of the world. It was a decision at the very beginning. We did not want a king, we did not want lords and nobles and earls and so forth that could keep their lands forever. That is why most of us are in this country, because we came from countries where we were serfs. Mine were Irish and they were German. Some were Polish, some were Italian, some were Japanese. All of them came here because of the opportunity. And when we start having an aristocracy that controls it all, we do real damage to America as we know it. Now, even more important is what will happen to the giving, the charitable giving in this country. Seattle University had a consultant look at this issue and he said that more than half of the giving to the Seattle University will dry up if we get rid of the inheritance tax. Now, everybody said, of course, these people are going to pile it all up and they will give more. Come on. Why would my colleagues be pushing to get hold of it all if you were going to give more? You can give more now and actually deal within your taxes, but they are not. This is a way of saying to everybody in this country we all have an opportunity. We all can do very well here. But when you die, you give back to the society that made it possible. Vote ``no'' on this bill.

Mr. McDERMOTT

Mr. McDERMOTT. Mr. Speaker, I was unable to be in Washington, DC today because I was attending a memorial service for Marc Lindenberg. Mr. Lindenberg was the dean at the University of Washington's Daniel Evans School of Public Affairs. Throughout his life, he was a passionate and potent leader in international relief work. Those that knew him, or were touched by his work, will truly miss Mr. Lindenberg, but we find solace knowing that the legacy he leaves behind will endure. Mr. Speaker, I missed six votes. Had I been able to vote, I would have voted in support of: H.R. 4800, H.R. 4823, H.R. 4466, H.R. 3983, H.R. 4073, and H.R. 2941.

Mr. McDERMOTT

Mr. McDERMOTT. Mr. Chairman, I move to strike the last word. I would remind the gentleman that he voted against supporting the troops when they went to Kosovo. Today this House is sort of engaged in watching a great allegory, only I think the Republican leadership has forgotten one of their famous phrases, ``Remember the Alamo.'' Why do I say that? You ask yourself, why would somebody stand in the Alamo and wait and get killed when they knew they were going to die? Or why did the Jews jump off the rock in Masada? Or why did the troopers get surrounded at Little Big Horn and why did they fight till they died? The people on the other side, the leadership, are not paying attention to what is going on here, because there is a truth in what is going on in this process, and it is this: You have the power. We can talk and talk and talk and we know that we are going to lose. There is no question about that. We have no illusions that we are going to win. But why do people do what they did in the Alamo? Or why do people fly planes into buildings in New York? Or why do people wrap bombs around themselves? Or why do they go into the general post office in Dublin on Easter Sunday in 1916? You can pick a thousand places in history where people have done what makes no sense to people, where if you look at it you would say, ``They had no chance.'' We know we have no chance here tonight, but we are frustrated, we are powerless, because you have taken all the power. Wonderful allegory. You come out here, you smash us, you will beat us on every single amendment, and we will not be able to save Social Security, we will not be able to save Medicare. We cannot stop you from spending like you had no tomorrow. We have no ability to do that. We can tell the American people we stand against that kind of stuff and we will be beaten tonight. But the problem with that is, we are coming to the last act in the allegory. I got this little thing that came from the GOP to their members: ``Please note that it is mandatory that all Members stay in town and be available for votes tonight and the early morning hours as we plan to finish the supplemental in the early morning hours. It's possible for your boss to catch a late-morning flight home on Friday.'' We know martial law is coming. They knew it in the Warsaw ghetto. They knew it everywhere. Did people give up? No. But this really is not the Alamo. It is not really the end. This is more like Dunkirk. The Nazis pushed the Brits all the way up against the beach and they thought, boy, we are going to be in England in about a month. And at Dunkirk they took off 338,000 people who came back to fight another day. When they surrounded the American troops at Bastogne in the Battle of the Bulge, they sent in an offer of unconditional surrender to General McAuliffe. He sent back one word written on a piece of paper: Nuts. What you do not understand is there is an election coming and the American people are going to watch what you have done to Social Security and what you have done with the surplus that started out at $5.6 trillion and you have taken it down below the line and we are down in the depths again, a trillion dollars below. The single biggest reversal in economics in the history of the world. And you guys are still spending. You are still spending. ``Let's raise the debt limit. Let's keep spending.'' It is like if you take your credit card and you give one to your son or daughter and they go to college. They say, ``Dad, I've reached the limit. What should I do?'' You say, stop spending or get a part-time job or something. But no, not with you guys. You call up the company and say, ``Raise our debt limit. We got to have more credit to spend.'' We cannot stop you. You are free to do it. But you are also free to pay the price. And do not think this is the last night. I mean, you will win. In about two hours and 40 minutes, you will close this joint down and create a new day and you will come out here and slam bam, thank you, ma'am, and it will be over. We understand that. But do not think it is all over.

Mr. McDERMOTT

Mr. McDERMOTT. Mr. Speaker, I think that this is a very important day for people to be paying attention. Tomorrow, we are going to come out here, and we are going to take one more step toward undermining Social Security. Now, the majority has said for a long time they wanted to privatize it; and certainly if we do not fund it, there is not going to be anything left except people doing it privately. But tomorrow is the day we start. We have not dealt with any of the issues that are before this Congress of any import. We have not dealt with the pharmaceutical benefit for seniors. We have not dealt with a whole bunch of other things. But what are they doing tomorrow? They are passing more money out the door to fund the tax cuts for the rich. That is the reason they are borrowing tomorrow, is because the bill is coming due. In fact, today we are going to actually make another move to raise the debt some more. Why do we not face the fact that we ought to think about the poor and the elderly and what their benefits are going to be in the future?

Mr. McDERMOTT

Mr. McDERMOTT. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for yielding time to me. Mr. Speaker, I rise in joining to celebrate this event. It is a wonderful event to see people determine what they want to be and have the opportunity to become independent. But there is a cautionary tale here. There are not very many of us in this House who were here when the Indonesians marched in and took East Timor. And we did not do anything then. We let that happen because we felt that our relationship with Mr. Sukharno or whomever was such an important thing that we were not going to tell them that we did not approve of what they were doing to the East Timorese. Only because of human rights activists in this country has that issue been alive at all. They are to be commended. Sometimes they think that they are not heard, they think no one is paying attention, but in fact we have come to the point where in fact Congress actually supported the East Timorese in becoming independent. It happened because grassroots people had a desire to make this wrongness right, or right this wrong, and they did it by talking to their Members of Congress. We as Americans have to think carefully about what kinds of decisions we make in order to keep a certain leader in place in a certain place, when we have other concerns at the same time about the people who are experiencing that leadership. It is a very difficult task that the United States has, but we cannot overlook what is happening at something like East Timor. We did for almost 20 years, until it got out of control. Then, the Australians took the lead, and we are grateful for that, and we followed. I think that it is a happy day for everybody who lives in East Timor, but it is not over. They still have a long way to go in developing their economy.

Mr. McDERMOTT

Mr. McDERMOTT. Mr. Speaker, I was glad to come out here and join in the preparing the press-release-of-the-week event. The Republicans say, well, every week we have got to have something to put out in the press to confuse the public, so let us go vote another tax cut. It reminds me of that old saying, ``Tonight we drink, tomorrow we'll fix the truck.'' What are you drinking from? You are drinking from the tax cut cup. You are putting another billion dollars in the hole. And for anybody to get up at that other side of the well and say that that does not come out of Social Security means he has paid no attention to the fact that we are going to end this year $300 billion in debt. Why add one more? Well, we have to have the press release, right? Even more, though, let me tell you what is going on here. The reason this is out here on the suspension calendar, with no hearings in the committee, just out on the suspension calendar, is because they did not want to bring it to the committee. They did not want to give the gentleman from Massachusetts (Mr. Neal) the opportunity to raise the question of the runaway companies and paying for this particular option. There is no payment in here. This is just taken out of the Social Security. So the leadership on the Committee on Ways and Means said, I know how we can get around this uncomfortable situation that the gentleman from Massachusetts is going to put us in, forcing us to vote about whether we want people running away, creating paper companies and taking tremendous profits because they are no longer an American company. Why, one of them even in Connecticut, just recently, makes hand tools. They decided they would go to Bermuda, create a paper company. As luck would have it, there might be a member on the Committee on Ways and Means who would be embarrassed by having to vote on that issue. So the chairman said, ``Don't worry, we'll never let it come up in the committee. We will send this directly to the floor.'' At some point, somebody has got to talk seriously out here. You cannot blame the fact that a tool company goes to Bermuda on 9/11 or on the war on terrorism. Why would they be moving from Connecticut to Bermuda? Is it to get away from the terror in this country? They went there for tax purposes and everybody knows it. I could give you a list as long as my arm of companies doing it all the time to avoid paying taxes in this country. They want the protection of the United States, they want the military, they want us patrolling the oceans so that they can send their exports everywhere, but they do not want to pay for it. I wish that I would hear the President of the United States say, ``We all have to make a sacrifice, we all have to pay taxes,'' and that he would say it to his friends in Bermuda, ``Come on home. Pay your share.'' This is a terrible bill.

Mr. McDERMOTT

Mr. McDERMOTT. Mr. Speaker, people often have the opportunity to do things which bring attention to themselves that they did not really expect, and one such person is a woman named Barbara Kingsolver, one of the most eminent authors in this country. During the days after 9/11, she wrote a number of essays about what was happening in the United States and was, in some instances, very poorly received by people, and I think that, having met her and listened to her at the Physicians for Social Responsibility 2 weeks ago, I thought it would be good for the House to have an opportunity to think about Ms. Kingsolver's words. The speech she gave there was entitled ``Saying Grace,'' and it goes this way. ``I never knew what 'grand' really was until I saw the canyon. It's a perspective that pulls the busy human engine of desires to a quiet halt. Taking the long view across that vermillion abyss attenuates humanity to quiet internal rhythms, the spirit of ice ages, and we look, we gasp, and it seems there is a chance we might be small enough not to matter. That the things we want are not the end of the world. I have needed this view lately. ``I've come to the Grand Canyon several times in my life, most lately without really understanding the necessity. As the holidays approached I couldn't name the reason for my uneasiness. We thought about the cross-country trip we had usually taken to join our extended families' Thanksgiving celebration, but we did not make the airplane reservations. Barely a month before, terrorists attacks had distorted commercial air travel to a horrifying new agenda, one that left everybody jittery. We understood, rationally, that it was as safe to fly as ever, and so it wasn't precisely nervousness that made us think twice about flying across the country for a long weekend. Rather, we were moved by a sense that this was wartime, and the prospect of such personal luxury felt somehow false. ``I called my mother with our regrets and began making plans for a more modest family trip. On the days our daughters were out of school we would wander north from Tucson to visit some of the haunts I have come to love in my 20 years as a desert dweller, transplanted from the verdant Southeast. We would kick through the leaves in Oak Creek Canyon, bask like lizards in the last late-afternoon sun on Sedona's red rocks, puzzle out the secrets of the labyrinthine ruins at Wupatki, and finally stand on the rim of the remarkable canyon. ``I felt a little sorry for myself at first, missing the reassuring tradition of sitting down to face a huge upside-down bird and counting my blessings in the grand joyful circle of my kin. And then I felt shame enough to ask myself, how greedy can one person be to want more than the Grand Canyon? How much more could one earth offer me than to lay herself bare, presenting me with the whole of her bedrock history in one miraculous view? What feast could satisfy a mother more deeply than to walk along a creek through a particolored carpet of leaves, watching my children pick up the fine-toothed gifts of this scarlet maple, that yellow aspen, piecing together the picture puzzle of a biological homeplace? We could listen for several days to the songs of living birds instead of making short work of one big dead one, and we would feel lighter afterward too. ``These are relevant questions to ask in this moment when our country demands that we dedicate ourselves and our resources, again and again, to what we call the defense of our way of life: How greedy can one person be? How much do we need to feel blessed, sated and permanently safe? What is safety in this world, and on what broad stones is that house built? ``Imagine that you came from a large family in which one brother ended up with a whole lot more than the rest of you. Sometimes it happens that way, the luck falling to one guy who didn't do that much to deserve it. Imagine his gorgeous house on a huge tract of forest, rolling hills and fertile fields. Your other relatives have decent places with smaller yards, but yours is mostly dust. Your lucky brother eats well, he has meat every day--in fact, let's face it, he is corpulent, and so are his kids. At your house, meanwhile, things are bad. Your kids cry themselves to sleep on empty stomachs. Your brother must not be able to hear them from the veranda where he dines, because he throws away all the food he can't finish. He will do you this favor: He'll make a TV program of himself eating. If you want, you can watch it from your house. But you can't have his food, his house, or the car he drives around in to view his unspoiled forests and majestic purple mountains. The rest of the family has noticed that all his driving is kicking up dust, wrecking not only the edges of his property, but also their less pristine backyards and even yours, which was dust to begin with. He has dammed the rivers to irrigate his fields, so that only a trickle reaches your place, and it's nasty. You are beginning to see that these problems are deep and deadly, and you will be the first to starve and the others will follow. The family takes a vote and agrees to do a handful of obvious things that will keep down the dust and clear the water. All except Fat Brother. He walks away from the table. He says God gave him good land and the right to be greedy. ``The ancient Greeks adored tragic plays about families like this, and their special world for the fat brother was `hubris.' In the town where I grew up, we called it `getting all high and mighty,' and the sentence that came next usually included the words `getting knocked down to size.' For most of my life, I have felt embarrassed by a facet of our national character that I would have to call prideful wastefulness. What other name can there be for our noisy, celebratory appetite for unnecessary things, and our vast carelessness regarding their manufacture and disposal? In the autumn of 2001 we faced the crisis of taking a very hard knock from the outside, and in its aftermath, as our Nation grieved, every time I saw that wastefulness rear its head I felt even more ashamed. Some retailers rushed to convince us in ads printed across waving flags that it was our duty, even in wartime, especially in wartime, to go out and buy those cars and shoes. We were asked not to think very much about the other side of the world, where, night after night, we were waging a costly war in a land whose people could not dream of owning cars or in some cases even shoes. For some, `wartime' becomes a matter of waving our pride above the waste, with slogans that didn't make sense to me: `Buy for your country' struck me as an exhortation to `erase from your mind what has just happened.' And the real meaning of this I can't even guess at: `Our enemies hate us because we are free.' ``I'm sorry, but I have eyes from which to see, and friends in many places. In Canada, for instance, I know people who are wicked cold in winter but otherwise in every way as free as you and me. And nobody hates Canada. ``Hubris isn't just about luck or wealth, it's about throwing away food while hungry people watch. Canadians were born lucky, too, in a global sense, but they seem more modest about it and more deeply appreciative of their land; it's impossible to imagine Canada blighting its precious wilderness areas with `mock third-world villages' for bombing practice, as our Air Force has done in Arizona's Cabeza Prieta Range. I know how countries bereft of any wild lands at all view our planks for drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, the world's last immense and untouched wilderness, as we stake out our right to its plunder as we deem necessary. We must surely appear to the world as exactly what we are: A nation that organizes its economy around consuming twice as much oil as it produces and around the profligate wastefulness of the wars and campaigns required to defend such consumption. In recent years we have defined our national interests largely in terms of the oil fields and pipelines we need to procure fuel. ``In our country, we seldom question our right to burn this fuel in heavy passenger vehicles and to lead all nations in the race to pollute our planet beyond habitability; some of us in fact become belligerent towards anyone who dares to raise the issue. We are disinclined as a nation to assign any moral value at all to our habits of consumption. But the circle of our family is large, larger than just one nation, and as we arrive at the ends of our frontiers, we can't possibly be surprised that the rest of the family would have us live within our means. Safety resides, I think, on the far side of endless hunger. Imagine how it would feel to fly a flag with a leaf on it, or a bird, something living. How remarkably generous we could have appeared to the world by being the first to limit fossil fuel emissions by ratifying the Kyoto Agreements, rather than walking away from the table, as we did last summer in Bonn, leaving 178 other signatory nations to do their best for the world without any help from the world's biggest contributor to global warming. I find it simply appalling that we could have done this. I know for a fact that many, many Americans were stunned, like me, by the selfishness of that act, and can hardly bear their own complicity in it. Given our societal devotion to taking in more energy than we put out, it is ironic that our culture is so cruelly intolerant of overweight individuals. As a nation we're not just overweight, a predicament that deserves sympathy; I fear we are also, as we live and breathe, possessed of the Fat Brother's mindset. ``I would like to have a chance to live with reordered expectations. I would rather that my country be seen as a rich, beloved brother than the rich and piggish one. If there is a heart beating in the United States that really disagrees, I have yet to meet it. We are by nature a generous people. Just about every American I know who has traveled abroad and taken the time to have genuine conversations with citizens of other countries has encountered the question, as I have, `Why isn't your country as nice as you are?' I wish I knew. Maybe we're distracted by our attachment to convenience. ``Maybe we believe the ads that tell us the material things are the key to happiness, or maybe we are too frightened to question those who routinely define our national interests for us in terms of corporate profits. Then too, millions of Americans are so strapped by the task of keeping their kids fed and a roof over their heads that it is impossible for them to consider much of anything beyond that. But ultimately, the answer must be that as a Nation, we just have not yet demanded generosity of ourselves. ``But we could, and we know it. Our country possesses the resources to bring solar technology, energy independence, and sustainable living to our planet. Even in the simple realm of humanitarian assistance, the United Nations estimates that $13 billion above current levels of aid would provide everyone in the world, including the hungry within our own borders, with basic health and nutrition. Collectively, Americans and Europeans spend $17 billion a year on pet food. We could do much more than just feed the family of mankind, as well as our cats and dogs. We could assist that family in acquiring the basic skills and tools it needs to feed itself, while maintaining the natural resources on which all life depends. Real generosity involves not only making a gift, but also giving up something, and on both scores, we are well situated to be the most generous Nation on earth. ``We like to say we already are, and it's true that American people give of their own minute proportion of the country's wealth to help victims of disasters far and wide. Our children collect pennies to buy rain forests one cubic inch at a time, but this is a widow's might, not a national tithe. Our government's spending on foreign aid has plummeted over the last 20 years to levels that are, to put it bluntly, the stingiest among all of the developed nations. In the year 2000, according to the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development, the United States allocated just .1 percent of its Gross National Product to foreign aid, or about one dime for every $100 in its Treasury, whereas Canada, Japan, Australia, Austria, and Germany each contributed 2 to 3 times that much. Other countries gave even more, some as much as 10 times the amount we do; they view this as a contribution to the world's stability and their own peace. But our country takes a different approach to generosity. Our tradition is to forgive debt in exchange for a strategic military base, an indentured economy, or mineral rights. We offer the hungry our magic seeds, genetically altered so the recipients must also buy our pesticides, while their sturdy native seed banks die out. At Fat Brother's house the domestic help might now and then slip out the back door with a plate of food for a neighbor, but for the record the household gives virtually nothing away. Even now, in what may be the most critical moment of our history, I fear that we may seem to be telling the world we are not merciful as much as we are mighty. ``In our darkest hours we may find comfort in the age-old slogan from the resistance movement, declaring that we shall not be moved. But we need to finish that sentence. Moved from where? Are we anchoring to the best of what we've believed in throughout our history, or merely to an angry new mode of self preservation? The American moral high ground cannot possibly be an isolated mountaintop from which we refuse to learn anything at all to protect ourselves from monstrous losses. It is critical to distinguish here between innocence and naivete: The innocent do not deserve to be violated, but only the naive refuse to think about the origins of violence. A nation that seems to believe so powerfully in retaliation cannot flatly refuse to look at the world in terms of cause and effect. The rage and fury of this world have not notably lashed out at Canada, the Nation that takes best care of its citizens, or Finland, the most literate, or Brazil, or Costa Rica, among the most biodiverse. Neither have they tried to strike down our redwood forests or our fields of waving grain. Striving to cut us most deeply, they felled the towers that seemed to claim we buy and sell the world. ``We do not own the world, as it turns out. Flight attendants and bankers, mothers and sons were ripped from us as proof, and thousands of families must now spend whole lifetimes reassembling themselves after shattering loss. The rest of us have lowered our flags in grief on their behalf. I believe we could do the same for the 35,600 of the world's children who also died on September 11 from conditions of starvation and extend their hearts to the mothers and fathers who lost them. ``This seems a reasonable time to search our souls for some corner where humility resides. Our Nation believes in some ways that bring joy to the world, and in others that make people angry. Not all of those people are heartless enough to kill us for it or fanatical enough to die in the effort, but some inevitably will be, more and more, as desperation spreads. Wars of endless retaliation kill not only people, but also the systems that grow food, deliver clean water, and heal the sick. They destroy the beauty, they extinguish the species, they increase desperation. ``I wish our National Anthem were not the one about bombs bursting in air, but the one about the purple mountain majesties and amber waves of grain. It's easier to sing and closer to the heart of what we really have to sing about. A land as broad and as green as ours demands of us thanksgiving and a certain breadth of spirit. It invites us to invest our hearts most deeply in invulnerable majesties that can never be brought down in a stroke of anger. If we can agree on anything in difficult times, it must be that we have the resources to behave more generously than we do, and that we are brave enough to rise from the ashes of loss as better citizens of the world than we have ever been. We've inherited the grace of the Grand Canyon, the mystery of the Everglades, the fertility of an Iowa plain; we could crown this good with brotherhood. What a vast inheritance for our children that would be, if we were to become a nation humble before our rich birthright, whose graciousness makes us beloved.'' Mr. Speaker, I hope all Members take the time to read this.

Mr. McDERMOTT

Mr. McDERMOTT. Mr. Speaker, the gentleman from California (Chairman Thomas) has said we are asking for way too much money. I saw in today's paper that the head of the Congressional Budget Office, Mr. Crippen, has decided not to go on for 4 years. I know why, because they want to get rid of him because it was his memo on February 2, 2002, that says this bill is going to cost between 8 and $11 billion in unfunded liability. We did not make that number up. That came from the Congressional Budget Office. The director is selected by the majority, and they put him in. Here he is. Now he gives them information they do not want. The chairman is ignoring 280,000 kids in California who are not served.

Mr. McDERMOTT. Mr. Speaker, this whole issue of how much money, I do not know how the American people follow it, but the fact is that the bill makes mandatory $1 billion for child care. Any additional money is subject to appropriation. That second billion dollars is not guaranteed, and we have a terrible budget mess. Those of us sitting on the Budget Committee know that, and the fact is that even that $2 billion is not going to cover the $11 billion in child care that is needed to hold the line. In the State of Washington, my distinguished colleague from the State of Washington, when she votes for this, is putting a $280 million unfunded mandate on our State, in a State where they are already $1 billion in the hole. The gentlewoman from Illinois, she stands up here and blithely puts $322 million on the Illinois State legislature; they must fund this because they have to have a program for people for more than 30 hours. That means make-work programs. Never mind what happens to kids and whether they get taken care of or not. We are going to be back to CETA jobs. I do not think there is anybody left in here except a few of us who remember CETA jobs in the 1960s. My colleagues are going to be putting States and counties and cities to making work programs, and my colleagues can stand up here and say that they have all of this in here and all this flexibility. If this was such a flexible bill, I would like to understand why it is they took away vocational training. What possible reason could they take vocational training out as one of the work activities? Do my colleagues not think people ought to train to get a better job or do they want them all to work as maids in hotels or something at a $7-an-hour job with no child care and no health care benefits? That is what my colleagues call lifting them out of poverty.

Mr. McDERMOTT

Mr. McDERMOTT. Mr. Speaker, I feel a little like Yogi Berra when he said, ``This is deja vu all over again.'' I was in the State of Washington in 1980 when we had exactly this, they were going to put all this in Hanford. We had a governor who said, bring it all in. Bring it all in. Dixie Lee Ray. And we got an initiative. We have collected the signatures and 75 percent of the people in the State voted no, we do not want to accept all the waste from the country. And she was defeated. I knocked her out in the primary of that election. Now, what you are looking at is this old business about NIMBY. It is not in my back yard. Throw it over the fence. Well, you cannot throw nuclear waste over the fence. And if you try, you will be putting it in trucks and railroads all over this country. And if you did not see what happened in Baltimore just a couple weeks ago where they had a train wreck in that tunnel and two Amtrak train wrecks in the last month, think about what happens in your neighborhoods if that happens. Now, all Members who are voting yes are thinking thank God it is not going to be in my neighborhood. But the fact is it is going to be in your neighborhood. It is going to be on the roads. It is going to be on the trains. It is going to be going past schools and hospitals. And when that issue comes to you, as it did in the State of Washington, suddenly all of the county sheriffs are saying, we do not know what we are going to do with all these trucks coming by and we do not know if there is a fire. We will need more money. You will wind up giving yourself one headache because this is being rushed through for one reason: The President has got the September 11 flag and he is waving it around and wrapping himself in it and saying, We got to have nuclear power, and if we do not get rid of the nuclear waste, we cannot have nuclear power. So he sees his chance. He wants to ram this through in spite of the fact that the GAO says there are 293 problems. How can you go home and defend to your people that you just ignored those problems? Vote no.

Mr. McDERMOTT

Mr. McDERMOTT. Mr. Speaker, I was sitting over in my office looking at today's calendar and could not help but get up and come over here. In 460 B.C. the father of medicine, Hippocrates, wrote: ``Healing is a matter of time but it is also sometimes a matter of opportunity.'' Now, for 2,500 years we have been talking about this opportunity or in modern times access to good health care coverage in our country. For decades now we have been talking about improving access to health care coverage, yet the problem continues to grow. We argue about how best to provide the coverage; but no matter what you say, uncovered people are one of the biggest economic and human problems in our society. Many people are locked into jobs. They would like to change jobs, but they cannot because they cannot give up their coverage. They are there because they have to have coverage for some chronic illness. But we are on the brink of things getting exponentially worse and they can. If we have any kind of downturn in the economy we will have a worse situation. Now, I started in 1972 as a physician advocating for a health care system that was universally available, never could be taken away, and every American would be in it no matter what their circumstances in the society. I introduced bills in the Washington State legislature and started the Washington Basic Health Plan. When I came to Congress, I introduced the American Health Security Act in 1992. This act is the gold standard that provides universal coverage for all Americans, and it does it through a single-payer mechanism. Now the American Health Security Act offers a fair and fiscally responsible way to deliver high-quality and cost-effective health care to all Americans. It provides for a highly decentralized system that is federally financed from Washington, but state-designed; and it delivers the health care through the private health care system. It guarantees universal coverage, comprehensive benefits, costs containment, the freedom to choose your own employers, and accountability. Every citizen should be entitled to that kind of coverage in this society. The reason I came over to talk about this is that today we are being treated to one of those events that begins the campaign season when people start putting out press releases in the form of resolutions. This one is H. Con. Res. 271, expressing the sense of the Congress that public awareness and education about the importance of health care coverage is of the utmost priority, utmost priority, and that the national importance of Health Care Coverage Month should be established to promote these goals. So we will have a whole month for people to get up here and tell you how everybody ought to have health insurance. But the question you have to ask yourself is, Where is the proposal that would provide health care coverage for everybody? Where is it? We can put out these press releases. This thing reminded me of the reason I came over here and I was sitting there reading this and I thought about the joke of the Methodist minister. He had gotten very ill and so the head of the board of deacons called all the deacons together one night and he called a meeting and they all got together to decide what to do about the illness of the minister. They had a long discussion. Many things were argued back and forth. And finally by a vote of six to five with 20 abstentions, they decided to write a letter to the minister urging him to get well. Now, that is what this is. This is saying to the American people, why do you people not go out and get health insurance? What is the matter with you? Do you not know how important that is? As though the American people were stupid or that they would not be doing it if they could. The resolution is an indictment of itself. It says, ``Whereas over 17.3 million of the uninsured are employed, but are not offered health coverage through their employers.'' Now, if you are an individual in this country and you work full time and you are not offered it through your job, you are supposed to go out by yourself and find a policy. Anybody who knows anything about that kind of experience knows how ridiculous it is to say to people, you should be aware. When are we going to take up the issue in real substance and get away from these letters to the American people to get well?

Mr. McDERMOTT

Mr. McDERMOTT. Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent to have my name removed as a cosponsor of H.R. 448.

Mr. McDERMOTT

Mr. McDERMOTT. Mr. Speaker, I have a parliamentary inquiry.

Mr. McDERMOTT. Mr. Speaker, the Committee on Ways and Means, the Subcommittee on Human Resources, is meeting at this time rewriting the welfare bill, the TANF bill. Is there any rule under which it is possible for us to suspend here on the floor so that we can go back to the committee and work on that? Members of the Committee on Ways and Means are presently supposed to be in two places at once. I am asking whether there is provision under the rules.

Mr. McDERMOTT

Mr. McDERMOTT. Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent to revise and extend my remarks on the bill which is before us.

Mr. McDERMOTT

Mr. McDERMOTT. Mr. Speaker, here comes the train again. Last month, my Republican colleagues passed a fiscally irresponsible budget that called for spending hundreds of billions of dollars from the Social Security Trust Fund on tax cuts for the wealthy. Mr. Speaker, we gambled with tax cuts last year, we gambled again last month, and here we are today, rolling the dice one more time. In 1999, 2000, and 2001, Republicans in this chamber voted seven times to fully protect the Social Security Trust Fund. George W. Bush echoed the theme on the campaign trail and during the Presidential debates--he wanted to put those reserves in a ``lock-box'' to prevent it from being used to pay for tax cuts or additional spending. Even the beloved Speaker of the House stated, ``We are going to wall off the Social Security Trust Funds . . . We are not going to dip into that at all.'' Remember when you said that, Mr. Speaker? Now it appears that the government will raid the Social Security surplus for as far as the eye can see. And extending the tax cuts permanently would only worsen the deteriorating fiscal outlook. Mr. Speaker, this bill amounts to an intergenerational mugging. Our children will pay for the debt we incur today. The 75-year cost of making the tax cuts permanent would be more than twice as great as the entire shortfall projected in the Social Security Trust Fund. Furthermore, this bill, and you won't hear the Republicans mention this during the debate, will also cost the U.S. Treasury $4 trillion during the decade after 2012--just when the Baby Boomers are retiring in earnest and both the Social Security and Medicare systems are coming under mounting financial strain. If the congressional Republicans continue to sacrifice the safety of Social Security and Medicare, for the sake of tax cuts for the wealthy, America will be a country where the rich stay healthy and the sick stay poor. If we simply look at the budget forecast, it is clear that permanent tax cuts mean permanent deficits. Mr. Speaker, these tax cuts are so heavily skewed to benefit the wealthy that the richest one-percent of taxpayers would receive tax breaks that equal one and one half times the entire budget of the Department of Education. If we completely repeal the estate tax, in particular, we'll be essentially creating intergenerational gated communities. Our capitalist friend, Adam Smith, said, ``A power to dispose of estates for ever is manifestly absurd. The earth and the fullness of it belongs to every generation, and the preceding one can have no right to bind it up from posterity. Mr. Speaker, this chamber sometimes seems like the House of Lords, because it attempts to do everything in its power to protect the pseudo-aristocracy. Mr. Speaker, we need this bill about as much as we need a runaway train. I urge my colleagues to oppose this campaign sop, disguised in the form of H.R. 586.