Jim McDermott

Mr. McDERMOTT

Mr. McDERMOTT. Mr. Chairman, I rise in support of the Doggett-Meehan amendment because our Government should do everything it can to prevent the use of tobacco products--regardless if that use occurs in the United States or abroad. The amendment before us is simple--it merely prohibits the use of taxpayer dollars to help tobacco companies market their products overseas. Overseas communities clearly represent the future market for America's tobacco products. Since 1990, the sale of Philip Morris tobacco products have increased in this country by about 5 percent. However, during the same time period, Philip Morris' overseas sales skyrocketed by 80 percent. Worse still, the new smokers who are attracted to these U.S. tobacco products are children. For example just 2 years after American cigarettes were introduced to Taiwan, smoking rates among Taiwanese teenagers jumped from 22 to 32 percent. In Korea, the number of male teens who smoked almost doubled to 30 percent just 1 year after United States tobacco products entered the market. Mr. Speaker, in my view, each of us should do everything we can to reduce smoking worldwide--not just in the United States. This is especially true when you consider that it's the kids of the world who are most susceptible to the marketing of this lethal product. I urge my colleagues to take this small, but worthy step to reduce the world's addiction to tobacco by limiting our country's ability to push tobacco use abroad. I urge you to support the Doggett amendment-- let's not spend anymore taxpayer dollars to boost these lethal tobacco products overseas.

Mr. McDERMOTT

Mr. McDERMOTT. Mr. Chairman, most things that need to be said about this issue have probably now been said, but I want to say a couple of things specifically about the State of Washington. The Legal Services Foundation in the State of Washington turns away four out of every five people who come seeking legal counsel. Now, if liberty and justice is for all, then it ought to be for all five. Four people out of five go away because there are no funds. If that does not state the case, in 1980, the Legal Services Corporation in Washington State had 140 Legal Services attorneys dealing with roughly half a million poor or low-income folks in our State. That is 1 attorney for every 4,000 people. In 1996, the ratio had fallen to 1 attorney for every 15,000. That is 78 attorneys dealing with 1.2 million people. There are several facts in that. That means more people, in a State like ours that is doing very well economically, more and more people qualify for legal aid, and yet we have half the lawyers that we did in 1980. I strongly support the Mollohan amendment, and urge my colleagues to do the same, if you believe that there should be justice and liberty for all.

Mr. McDERMOTT

Mr. McDERMOTT. Mr. Chairman, I want to associate myself with the remarks of the gentleman from Florida [Mr. Foley] and the gentlewoman from Connecticut [Mrs. Johnson] because it really makes it very clear this is not a partisan issue. This is a public health issue. My colleague from Washington made the best case for a national health insurance program that I have ever heard. But we are not talking about that today. We are talking about prevention of a disease. It is a program that works. And people at the local level in my State, in Tacoma, came up with local money to do this because they know what the costs are if we do not prevent. Benjamin Franklin said, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. We spend millions, hundreds of millions of dollars on the cost of triple therapy, on homes for people living with AIDS, and all other kinds of things, but we will not spend money on a program that works at the local level to reduce the incidence of AIDS infection. Members can argue out here and make this into somehow we are promoting drugs. That is the argument that has been made all over the country on this issue. But the fact is that if people are using clean needles, they are not going to be spreading the drugs, and we know that is a major route of infection, not only in the United States but worldwide. This epidemic is not getting smaller. It is getting larger. It is spreading through all kinds of methods, but this is one of the main ones. In my view, to take the step of taking away from the Secretary a route to deal with this issue nationally is simply to say we are willing to come back in here and put another $100 million or $500 million or whatever into triple therapy. As long as the pharmaceutical industry can find ways to keep people alive longer, the costs are going to grow. If we want to be just fiscally sound, this is a fiscally sound program. Every conservative in the House ought to be for it because it saves money as well as deals with the problem in a humane way.

Mr. McDERMOTT

Mr. McDERMOTT. Mr. Speaker, I object to the vote on the ground that a quorum is not present and make the point of order that a quorum is not present.

Mr. McDERMOTT. Mr. Speaker, in order that the House have time to work on campaign finance reform, I move that the House do now adjourn.

Mr. McDERMOTT

Mr. McDERMOTT. Mr. Chairman, I move to strike the requisite number of words. Mr. Chairman, I want to, first, associate myself with the remarks of the gentleman from Nebraska. In 1991 I went to India for the first time to look at the AIDS epidemic and what was happening there and talked with then-Ambassador Thomas Pickering about the changes that were coming about in India; the Rau government had come in and made a number of changes; and he said, ``Go back to the Congress and start talking about the changes in India, they are real.'' Now I have been back to India six times since 1961, the last time in December, leading a delegation, a trade delegation from my own city, to go to India. I have been in 12 of the States of India, including Kashmir and Punjab. I talked to Punjabi farmers on the ground. I have talked to public officials, human rights people, all through the country. Now the amendment offered by the distinguished gentleman from Indiana, who has never been in India, in my opinion, reflects one of the problems of making foreign policy by sitting in the United States and trying to decide what somebody else ought to be doing. We are essentially having the half full, half empty glass of water argument here. Do they have problems? Yes. Have they moved? Absolutely. If we take the rupee note from India, on it they have 13 official languages. This is a country where we argue about whether English is the official language. They have six major religions. There are more Muslims there than in any country, except Indonesia. And this is a country that has separated church and state in the same way we struggled with in this country. The division of church and state and keeping a secular government has been an enormous problem. India was born in violence. The splitting off of Pakistan into what is now Bangladesh at the beginning was a problem they had to deal with from the very start, and they have struggled with this for 50 years. They have not solved all the problems. No Indian official will say that, no Indian journalist. India has the same basis of common law that we do, the English system. They have a free press that, in fact, in some ways is more free than our own. Read the Indian press and understand that politicians do not get away with anything there without it being in the newspapers. So there is no question that they have problems, but they are struggling with them, but the real question here is what kind of relationship do we want to have with India? Is it our idea that we want to alienate them in their year of celebration? I remember that I think it was Jesus Christ was once cautioning people about how they ought to view things when he said, ``Now you ought to look at the plank in your own eye before you point out the speck in your neighbor's eye.'' When my distinguished colleague brings a picture out here and puts it up on the floor and says that is the reason we ought to cut off aid, look at this horrible picture. If some Member of this House put up a tripod here and put up a Rodney King beating picture and then suggested to the House: Well, we ought to cut off small business loans to California because they have human rights problems in California done by officials, we would laugh them off the floor. We would say that is crazy; how could anybody make such a suggestion? Yet take one example or two or three. Remember India has 900 million people, four times the number in the United States in an area from the Mississippi to the East Coast. One-third of our land mass, they have four times the people. They struggle hard, and I believe that our development assistance is a statement to them that we encourage them. They have never had a military coup. They have had one democratic election after another. Not only democratic elections, they have a well-established democratic institutional system in the country that does not always function perfectly, but they do not need from us a blackened eye, a slug in the face at their independence celebration by the U.S. Congress. Mr. Chairman, that is not the message we should send, and for that reason I argue very strongly against the Burton amendment.

Mr. McDERMOTT

Mr. McDERMOTT. Mr. Speaker, this House has ignored a problem that the Speaker and the President shook hands on over 2 years ago, saying we were going to deal with the whole question of campaign finance. The amount of money that was spent in the last campaign was absolutely atrocious. It is a scandal how much money is raised and spent in campaigns. It will soon be possible only for those who are very rich or those who accept so much money that they cannot have independent judgment to come into the House of Representatives. I sit on the Committee on Ways and Means. We passed a tax reform bill in this House giving the tobacco industry a $50 billion tax break, at a time when they are seeking a settlement in many States in this Union for health-related problems that have been caused by the tobacco industry. Mr. Speaker, the only way we can justify or we can explain a $50 billion tax break is on the basis of the contributions made to campaigns in this House of Representatives. It is wrong and it must be addressed.

Mr. McDERMOTT

Mr. McDERMOTT. Mr. Speaker, when I think of the unexplained delay in considering campaign finance reform, I am forced to ask myself the same question over and over again: Why is it taking so long to do what we promised the American people in 1996? It is obvious that the American people want campaign finance reform. The President and the Speaker shook hands over 2 years ago committing themselves to reforming the system and, according to the rhetoric in Congress, many of my colleagues want the same thing. Yet, no campaign finance reform legislation is on the agenda, and many news reports indicate that after the consideration of the remaining appropriation acts, as early as October 11, the House will adjourn for the year. Roll Call says it will be the fastest session since 1965. I think we still have time to consider this important issue. What we need is the commitment of the Republican leadership of the House. We can no longer tolerate the rhetoric without action on this issue. The Speaker has left us no choice: We have declared September Ban Soft Money Month, and we will do everything in our power to raise this issue on the floor. We must do it before the 1998 election.

Mr. McDERMOTT

Mr. McDERMOTT. That is what Mr. Greenspan says.

Mr. McDERMOTT. Mr. Speaker, the political vote today is yes, but I intend to vote no because of the issue of fairness. This country was founded on a battle about taxation without representation with the British Government. We have had rebellions in this country, Shay's Rebellion, the Whiskey Rebellion, when people felt the taxation was unfair. We rely in this country on taxpayers, voluntarily collecting from people. We have a basis in this country of fairness. This bill is unfair. It is unfair to give somebody making $30,000 with two kids and trying to deal with all that is involved in raising a family $1,000 for their kid credit, while somebody making $109,000 gets an average of a $16,000 tax break on their capital gains. The lowering of the capital gains rate benefits the wealthy in this country, and it is clear that what will happen when we get the rate down to 18 percent, which is almost the lowest tax rate on regular income, that this will have thrown gasoline on the whole class warfare issue. If I am making $500,000 or $600,000 or $800,000 and I can get my pay given to me in stock options, I will pay 18 percent. That is exactly what people making $30,000 in this country are paying. We have brought the tax rate for the richest in this country all the way down to 18 percent. I do not see how anybody can call that fair. When I look at it, I hear it being made worse by the gentleman from New York [Mr. Solomon] and the Speaker, who are publicly saying they are going to reduce the tax rate on capital gains to zero in the next Congress. That means if you are out there working as an aerospace mechanic for the Boeing Co. and you make $35,000 or $40,000, you will be paying somewhere between 15 or 20 percent of your income in taxes. But if you are making all your money in capital gains, you will pay nothing. That is unfair, and this bill ought to be defeated. Announcement by the Speaker Pro Tempore

Mr. McDERMOTT. There is no question, Mr. Speaker, that ultimately the deficit will go back up again because of these tax breaks. If we had let the situation alone, the situation that was created in 1993 by the tax bill which we passed, and incidentally, people stand out here and say we are making all these great tax cuts. They have not changed in this bill one single provision from 1993. The bill that set us on the path that has gotten us in the good situation we are in today so we can talk about tax breaks, not a single provision of that has been repealed.

Mr. McDERMOTT. Mr. Speaker, we are today dealing with a tax bill that I think if people are watching this they would have trouble figuring out where everybody is coming from. Some people, the majority, believe that this is the best tax bill since sliced bread. Some of the Democrats say, well, we took a bad tax bill and made it a little bit better. But there are some of us who think that this bill is so bad that it ought to go down because it is not fair, it is not fair enough. Mr. Speaker, I would like to associate myself with the remarks of both the gentleman from Missouri [Mr. Gephardt], the minority leader, and the gentleman from Wisconsin [Mr. Obey], but I will give my colleagues a couple specifics. Let us take a woman who has two kids who makes $35,000 and teaches school. Now she pays 15 percent of her income in FICA taxes and then is taxed at the 15 percent rate beyond that. Somewhere around $7,500 to $10,000 of her income goes in taxes out of a $35,000 income. Now let us take and contrast somebody who makes $200,000 in unearned income; that is, they invest in the stock market and they make $200,000. Under this bill they will be taxed at a 20 percent rate; the schoolteacher at a 30 percent rate; the unearned income at a 20-percent rate because the person earning their income in capital gains pays no FICA tax, no FICA tax. Now in my view that is unfair. The person making $200,000, taxed at a 20-percent rate under this bill will pay $40,000 in taxes. Now let us get to the tax breaks. Here is the woman. She has paid $10,000 in taxes. She gets $1,000 back, $500 for each one of her kids. The person making $200,000 and paying 20 percent has two kids, so he gets $1,000 back. Is that fair to a woman raising two kids, making $35,000, paying 30 percent of her income in taxes and getting $1,000 back and somebody who makes $200,000 worth of unearned income, and they get $1,000? That is not fair. Mr. Speaker, the unfairness of this I think is only one of the problems. As I listen to people speak here, I continually believe that the Contract With America's idea of term limits is buried under all of this. An awful lot of people who are voting for this today are voting politically correct when they vote yes, but they are not thinking long term. They do not expect to be here in 2005 or 2006 when the real impact of this bill comes to rest on the American people. Today's New York Times on the editorial page, page 21, says ``The deal's long-term effect has economists uneasy.'' When these capital gains cuts and these estate tax and all the other cuts come to full pressure on the economy, we will be facing the baby boomers going into their senior years with no capacity, because we have dug a hole in the revenue side. We will not be able to deal with their problems.

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

Mr. McDERMOTT. Mr. Speaker, the gentleman is absolutely correct.

Mr. McDERMOTT. There is no question, their credit card debt is going to go up.

Mr. McDERMOTT

Mr. McDERMOTT. Mr. Speaker, the last speaker and I probably are bookends for this Congress. Yesterday and today, 44 million people without health insurance in this country; maybe we gave health insurance to 2 million children. The other 42 million, we could not seem to address that issue, while we can give a $95 billion tax break this afternoon. Now, in my view, this is payday for people who pay for campaigns. There are a few bones for people who have kids and a little bit for education, but the long-term effects of this bill are for those people who contribute to campaigns. The New York Times says the deal's long-term effects has economists uneasy because they look at what happens in the long run. I believe that we have to deal with the issue of soft money in campaigns when we come back in September. The Members of this House have to be prepared to sit and deal with that issue if we are going to change the way this country's economics go.

Mr. McDERMOTT

Mr. McDERMOTT. Mr. Speaker, I yield 1 minute to the gentleman from Chicago, IL [Mr. Gutierrez].

Mr. McDERMOTT. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself as much time as I may consume. The gentleman from South Carolina has said that the budget deficit has been reducing, begun by the Democrats in 1993, and it would be balanced within a year or so without this whole exercise. So make no mistake, what we are doing here is making cuts in this bill in entitlements in order to give tax breaks tomorrow. Today, if today did not happen, tomorrow would not and could not happen. Now as I see it, this issue of Medicare is the reason I will vote against the bill because it is a sugar-coated poison pill, it will taste good going down, everybody will say, well, we are saving Medicare, but there is no question in my mind that the social insurance principles on which Medicare was created are being eroded in this bill. Rather than strengthen the program, which everyone says they are doing here today, the bill creates a multitiered Medicare Program, one for the super rich, one for the rich, and one for the rest of the folks. Now in Germany when they did that in their health care program, if someone wants to opt out of the system, as this bill will now allow seniors to do, they can never come back. But our wisdom in this body did not say we will not let people back. We will let them go out, take advantage of the system, game it in every way possible, and then when the problem comes they can jump back into our system. It creates incentives for for-profit health care plans to siphon off America's healthy and wealthy seniors and leave the rest of the problem for the Federal Government. In my view, that is in the long term not good for the country. Now also in the area of health care is the reduction in the DISH payments. For those listening who do not understand, DISH means disproportionate share. It is those hospitals that take care of a disproportionate share of people who do not have health care insurance. We have 44 million Americans. Not one single one of them is better off because of this bill, because they are not getting insurance in it. We are taking away the money that the hospitals use to cover those people when they show up at the emergency room in a crisis. And my view is that the city hospitals and the rural hospitals of this country within 2 years will all be in serious problems because of the reductions we have made in the disproportionate share payments. For that reason I think we should not be passing this bill, we do not need to make tax breaks tomorrow, the American public is not clamoring for tax breaks, especially tax breaks where 50 percent of them go to people making $109,000 or more, and yet we rush forward here today to make these cuts in Medicare and the service that we provide through the disproportionate share payments.

Mr. McDERMOTT. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume. I include for the Record an editorial from the Washington Post yesterday entitled ``Budget Week,'' as follows: Budget Week As a country, we seem about to enter a week of self- congratulatory rhetoric in which the president and congressional Republicans will celebrate the balanced-budget agreement they appear to have reached and that Congress may finally pass as it leaves town for its summer vacation. The president will say, not without cause, that he was successful in taking some of the rougher edges off the initial Republican proposal. He will argue that the final product balances the budget without doing violence to the values of the Democratic Party, finishes the job of deficit eradication that he began in drawing up in his first budget in 1993, provides a steady platform from which to head into the future and proves that, when there's a willingness to compromise, the political system can work. The Republicans, for their part, will say that while they've had some tough times lately, and while they lost some battles to the president, they basically won the war. Glossing over the history of the 1980s, they will claim it is they who have always wanted a balanced budget. With greater cause, they will say it is they who have been the party of tax cuts and smaller government. If those are now both parties' goals, they win, even if the president, in coming their way on the issues, has partly shouldered them off center stage. But in our view those are the wrong standards by which to judge this deal. They are mostly short-term and political, as is the deal itself. It will be no surprise to readers of this page that we apply a different lens. (1) The balanced budget, assuming one is achieved, will owe as much to the continuing strength of the economy as to any policy changes Congress will vote this week. You could argue--we would--that the strong economy derives in part from some of the policy changes for which the president successfully fought in 1993. The fact is that this budget would actually undo some of the most important of those changes. In terms of fiscal discipline, it is less the advance its sponsors claim that a retreat from high ground that the president himself once occupied over Republican objections. (2) The distinctive element in the deal remains the tax cut, for which the rest is mostly cover and a gloss. The long-term effect of the tax cut will be to add, regressively, to a deficit that the deal will at best only temporarily erase. The president played a double role in this, first agreeing to the cut, then working to make it a little more palatable around the edges. But the basic structure is still wrong. The children's credit, which will be the costliest provision in the early years, is mostly a political sop for which neither party has been able to think up a convincing economic justification. In the later years this will be overtaken by large, late-blooming tax cuts mainly for the highest-income households in the country. They will begin to drain the Treasury in earnest about the time the baby boomers retire. There is no economic or social justification for most of them either. (3) Meanwhile, even though these are the most propitious of economic times and possibly political times as well in that the next president election is three years off, the plan, by mutual agreement, does next to nothing about the real fiscal problem--the one that will come with the boomers' retirement--that everyone acknowledges but wants to defer. Let the next folks do it. The tax cuts would compound this problem. The Senate proposed some first steps to cut longer- term Medicare costs, like asking higher-income beneficiaries to pay a slightly higher share of program costs. They dropped it from the final bill. This is a bill that, in the name of solving the nation's fiscal problem, systematically avoids and in some respects worsens that problem. The wrapping is great; the gift is dross. The bill has some good features. Medicare will be a tidier program as a result of its passage. The number of children in the country lacking health insurance could be reduced (though that could end up an empty initiative, also). But most of the things that are good about the bill are good only in that the alternatives were worse. The legislation reverses some of the worst features of last year's welfare bill and of the original budget bill that the Republicans put forward this year. But the welfare bill should never have been signed, and likewise the first draft of this year's budget bill is a pretty poor standard on the strength of which to measure victories. We assume that Congress will pass this package; the president and the Republican leadership are both invested in it. By now a lot of other people have larger or small investments in it as well. But this is a lost opportunity that, on balance and in the long run, will likely do a fairly large amount of harm--the tax cuts--for relatively little good. Mr. Speaker, we hear people here talking about this whole issue as though it was a long-term fix, but in fact if my colleagues read this editorial, it says the strong economy derives in part from the policy changes which were made in 1993 by the Democrats, by the Budget Deficit Reduction Act that we passed. But more important this editorial has a warning in it. It says the distinctive element in this deal remains the tax cut, for which the rest is mostly cover and a gloss. The long-term effect of the tax cut will be to add regressively to a deficit that the deal will at best only temporarily erase. The late-blooming tax cuts, mainly for the highest income households in the country, will begin to drain the Treasury in earnest about the time the baby boomers retire. There are no economic or social justifications for most of these cuts. My concern is we are going to touch down with a balanced budget in 2002 like a 747 doing a touch-and-go landing in learning to fly the plane. The budget deficits will take off at precisely the time the budget will have to face the problems of baby boomers. People will be caught between their kids going to college and their parents in nursing homes, and there will be no money in the Treasury to deal with their problems because we are taking away the essence of the social safety net in this country. That is why people ought to vote against this. It is making a long- term problem for ourselves for short-term political gains.

Mr. McDERMOTT. Mr. Speaker, I yield 4 minutes to the gentleman from Wisconsin [Mr. Obey].

Mr. McDERMOTT. Mr. Speaker, I yield 3 minutes to the gentleman from California [Mr. Stark]. (Mr. STARK asked and was given permission to revise and extend his remarks.)

Mr. McDERMOTT. Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. McDERMOTT. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume. Mr. Speaker, with this bill we can embark on a new and responsible course by balancing our Nation's budget by restoring hope, confidence and opportunity. This balanced budget agreement is the first in a generation. It represents GOP ideals, and it shows that a Republican majority at the helm in Congress can and will deliver on its promises. Mr. Speaker, I yield 1 minute to the gentleman from Texas [Mr. Bentsen]. (Mr. BENTSEN asked and was given permission to revise and extend his remarks.)

Mr. McDERMOTT. Mr. Speaker, I yield 15 seconds to myself to point out to the last gentleman that every time we raise taxes the deficit does not go up. In 1993 we raised taxes and the deficit came down. Mr. Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from California, [Mr. Waxman].

Mr. McDERMOTT

Mr. McDERMOTT. Mr. Speaker, like the previous gentleman, due to weather problems here in D.C. I missed all four votes. On rollcall vote 332, I would have voted ``yes,'' on rollcall vote 333, I would have voted ``no,'' on rollcall vote 334, I would have voted ``yes,'' and on rollcall vote 335, I would have voted ``no.''