Daniel Moynihan

Mr. MOYNIHAN

Mr. MOYNIHAN. I thank the distinguished chairman of the Finance Committee for his helpful remarks. I would also emphasize that, in the Finance Committee, members on both sides of the aisle strongly agreed that these child health grants should not supplant current State spending, and instead would supplement and enhance current State child health insurance programs. The conference report included such maintenance of effort provisions. To ensure a cost-effective grant program, Federal funds should not replace existing State spending.

Mr. MOYNIHAN. Another clarification. Is it intended that children, including those with special needs, receive quality care?

Mr. MOYNIHAN. Mr. President, the Senator from Virginia would like 5 minutes.

Mr. MOYNIHAN. Mr. President, I would like to enter into a colloquy with Chairman Roth to clarify the conference agreement as it relates to the children's health initiative. First, the issue of what benefits must be provided to children has been very important to us in this Chamber, on both sides of the aisle. Under the conference report, a State covering children under the new title XXI must offer at least the coverage listed under the options specified in section 2103(a). Do these options establish floors or ceilings?

Mr. MOYNIHAN

Mr. MOYNIHAN. Mr. President, I ask for the yeas and nays.

Mr. MOYNIHAN. Mr. President, I don't want to introduce any partisan wrangling, but this side of the aisle has done much better in using up time than that side. Perhaps we could think of yielding back some time.

Mr. MOYNIHAN. Mr. President, the Senator most surely can. I wish he would.

Mr. MOYNIHAN. Mr. President, if there are additions from our side, I know the Senator wishes them to be added also.

Mr. MOYNIHAN. Mr. President, I have the honor now to respond to my revered chairman, who brought this extraordinary legislation to the floor and in a very few hours from now will see it sent to the President to become law. By day's end, the U.S. Senate will have voted overwhelmingly to reduce Federal taxes by a net total of $95 billion over 5 years and $275 billion over 10 years. Whatever one's view of this legislation as a matter of tax policy, there can be absolutely no doubt that without the dominant influence of the chairman of the Committee on Finance, we would not be here today. Absent Senator Roth, we would not be here today. This conference agreement is a singular achievement for him, and we congratulate him. Among other provisions in the legislation, the Roth IRA will soon be as well-known as the Pell grant. It is a fitting tribute to Senator Roth's long, persistent, indomitable commitment to encourage savings by Americans. For those interested, this is in section 302, Individual Retirement Accounts, section 408(a), Roth IRAs. It is there in what I think others across the park in the Supreme Court call black letter law. There, sir, it is. There is another aspect of this legislation which has not been commented on and, I hope, might be. Without perhaps entirely intending it, and not quite in the mode of how others have done it, after a half century of discussion, we are, in fact, establishing a children's allowance in our social policies. I have had occasion to write about this over the years. We are the only industrial democracy in the world that does not have a children's allowance--just a routine thing, a feature of social policy that goes back to the beginnings of the century. It had various motivations in Sweden. There was a time when the Swedes thought they were dying out as a race and needed to encourage more children. So they gave family allowances. Sometimes called a family allowance. The French much the same. In places like Canada, just a good social policy. During World War II, the late Senator Neuberger was working on the Alaska-Canada highway--ALCAN highway, as we knew it in those days--and interested in what the Canadians were doing, came upon the family allowance, the children's allowance, and introduced legislation when he became Senator after the war. And John F. Kennedy was much interested in this and cosponsored the legislation. And I can say from the days of the early Kennedy administration there was an active interest in this possibility--the elemental proposition that if you have children, it is going to cost money, and a family raising children needs a little support. We are giving it. Instead of a direct grant, we are providing a direct tax credit. The end result will be the same, and a rather extraordinary bit of social policy is before us which has never been debated as such, but as I get on in years I begin to think the more you debate social policy, the less social policy you get, and so we could perhaps count our blessings in this regard. But now my friend from Delaware has heard his ranking member say on many occasions that if it were up to this Senator, we would have no tax cuts at this time, given the extraordinary condition of our economy just now, a condition for which many believe the deficit reduction law enacted in 1993, OBRA 1993, is largely responsible. I continue to be concerned about whether cutting taxes might undo the astonishing progress we have made over the last 4 years, because OBRA 93 took hold when we did it. It was, indeed, the largest tax increase in history, and it has produced extraordinary increases in wealth in our Nation because it sent a signal to the economy that this Government was going to get hold of its financing, pay its bills in sound dollars, not monetize the debt, as the phrase is among economists, inflate the currency and get rid of your debt in that mode. Those are profoundly important signals to the markets, and we have seen, I believe, the result. The deficit for fiscal year 1992 was $290 billion and growing. It was strangling us. We had no prospect whatever of getting out of it. What earlier on, President Reagan's Director of OMB, David Stockman, had said, $100 billion deficits as far as the eye can see, had become $300 billion deficits as far as the eye could see. And we turned it around. We stopped it. As a result of this aggressive deficit reduction program put in place by a Democratic Congress in 1993, the deficit for the current fiscal year could be less than $30 billion, which is about one-third of 1 percent of gross domestic product, a matter of no consequence in the large sphere of things. The Federal budget is on the verge of balance at this very moment and for the first time in three decades, and it would get there without any changes in law. I would estimate that we might have a balanced budget in the fourth quarter of the next fiscal year, a year from now. We would have it without change in law. Now we are putting the date off until the year 2002. I hope that does not become a fateful mistake. I am not here to alarm anyone, but I think it needs to be said for the record if the time comes when we have to make changes. Given the previous success of our action 4 years ago, we may come to regret what we have done today, but there is not a majority for that view. There is a very small minority for that view. The congressional leadership and the President have agreed that there will be tax cuts this year, and so, given that reality, I joined with the other Democratic members of the Finance Committee in working with Chairman Roth in a bipartisan mode. He has been generous enough to point out, as did earlier in the day the majority leader, that the Finance Committee was unanimous in reporting out the measure that we voted on just an hour ago on spending, and there was an 18 to 2 vote in our Committee on the bill before us now. Yesterday, Senator Domenici, the distinguished chairman of the Budget Committee, said it was the bipartisan solidarity of the Finance Committee which gave the real impetus to getting the budget agreement put in place, and I think that is so and nothing, no further tribute is possible to Senator Roth for having presided over that event. It is a phenomenon which I hope, and I know he hopes, we might see in the future. We found that we could do things on a bipartisan basis that could amaze you. We could raise taxes on tobacco. We could provide the largest incremental initiative in health care since Medicare and Medicaid were enacted in 1965--just like that, just in 2 days. Again, perhaps because it was not debated for a year, we were able to get it done in an afternoon. I would like to explore that possibility sometime. Is there an inverse ratio between the amount of debate and the legislation that emerges? I think you have seen some of that in the past many years. I would take the time of the Senate to point to several measures in the bill which are surely praiseworthy and equally important. One that has not been commented on anywhere that I have seen in the press is that the bill before us removes the present $150 million cap on the issuance of tax-exempt bonds by universities, colleges and nonhospital health facilities. It sounds like an esoteric matter. What could this mean? Well, it goes to something that is as important to American life as anything I know, and it is as characteristic of American democracy as anything I know. We are the only democratic nation in the world that has a private sector in its higher education--not just a few Jesuit colleges here or every so often a special arrangement in the north of Sweden or the south of France, and so forth. No, our system of higher education began as private denominational matters, and we continue to have just about an equal balance between the great private institutions and the great public institutions. You could go out to California, in the San Francisco Bay area, and you would see it is exemplary of Stanford University, named for a great railroad magnate who gave his money in the name of his son who died prematurely, and Berkeley, the University of California at Berkeley, a great State institution. Now, we have earlier on enabled the private universities, colleges, and nonmedical health facilities to borrow money on a tax-exempt basis, which puts them partially on an equal footing with the State institutions which obtain money directly from the taxpayers, from tax revenue, and can issue tax-exempt bonds because they are public institutions. We capped that amount, and more and more of our institutions have reached it. And having done that, they are no longer in a position to build what you could call the capital-intensive science facilities and suchlike facilities that you need in the area of research on the edges of knowledge in this country today. And we are the center of such research. You could hypothesize, if you like, a future where if we did not do what we are doing, there would come a time when the finest law school on the west coast would be at Stanford--law schools are not expensive; you have to add 50 books a year in the library--but all the physics would be done at Berkeley. Physics is expensive. All the chemistry, all the great research in astronomy, the outer edges of the universe to the very core of the Earth itself, all that would be in public institutions. And the competitive urges and the range of variety of the private institutions--the University of Chicago, Rice University, go right down the list of them--that would be lost. The University of Pennsylvania, New York University, Columbia and, as I say, across the Nation, those institutions are precious. There is no reason why Americans should know that the universities and colleges in the United Kingdom are all public institutions, but it is important to know that we are singular in this regard, and this legislation responds to that need. It may just be that no one is interested enough to care, to take note, but I can assure you the universities involved are very attentive and are very pleased. We also extend for 3 years the provision for exclusion from income of employer-provided educational assistance, which is section 127 of the Internal Revenue Code. This is a wonderfully unintrusive piece of social policy. It is probably the single-most successful tax incentive for education we have. In a world of continuing education, of continuing developments in science and technology, we have arrangements whereby an employer can send an employee to school to learn something special being taught--at night or weekends, whatever--get a degree, bring the skills back into the workplace. They will be paid more money, and they will get more income. We will get more revenue. Everyone wins all around. We in the Finance Committee made this absolutely easy, workable, a successful program. We made it permanent. For reasons I cannot understand, and I don't think the chairman could possibly understand either, the Finance Committee language, which made it permanent and applied it to graduate school, was dropped in conference. We had legislation in the Senate to do just this, Senator Roth and I, with 50 cosponsors. What is the matter with people who can't see what elemental good sense this makes? The firm that wants to send a chemist to do postgraduate work in a new field that is just opening up so he can come back and do it in the private sector of the economy is just so elemental. That it was not done is disturbing. Perhaps we will get back to it. I can't imagine why it was not accepted, but we had no success. The conferees included another salutary measure by extending for 1 year the deductibility, at fair market value, of charitable gifts of appreciated stock to private foundations. Absent this, we would have seen a needless dropoff in charitable giving. And, again, we are trying to encourage the private sector, that private sector of education we try to support, the private sector of employer-provided educational assistance, into giving to private charities. Now, to another matter of concern--of large concern--just beginning to be noted. I observed in the Washington Post this morning a comment on it, and also in the New York Times. The Senate-passed bill included a measure written by our chairman and supported by this Senator and others to provide $2.3 billion in critically needed funding for Amtrak, the National Railroad Passenger Corporation, the last hope of rail passenger service in America. The distinguished CEO of the corporation, Mr. Tom Downs, said to me, as he would say to anyone who called and asked, that if he did not get this $2.3 billion, the corporation would be bankrupt in February or March. I say to you, Mr. President, that's what this period will be remembered for, that we did not do this. We had it in the bill. The Senate voted 80 to 18 for the provision that the chairman provided. And it was dropped. It was dropped owing to a dispute over other matters altogether--job protections and outside contracting by Amtrak. It is provided in this bill that $2.3 billion is there, but it is not available to Amtrak until some very controversial legislation is adopted making job protection and such like matters subject to collective bargaining. I will be blunt. This could mean the end of Amtrak, the National Railroad Passenger Corporation. Bankruptcy for Amtrak is an outcome we should surely do everything in our power to prevent. It would be a national calamity. I wish to be emphatic in saying that the possibility is now real, and I hope the administration will join in the effort to bring about a resolution. I was surprised, in the often intense debates of this last week on this matter, that nowhere did we hear from the Secretary of Labor. Nowhere did we hear from the Secretary of Transportation. What do we have Cabinet officers for? I don't mean to be critical of any individual. It occurs to me that they were not invited in. I'll tell you, I was once an assistant to Secretary Arthur J. Goldberg when he was Secretary of Labor during the Kennedy administration. We had rail strikes and soon thereafter, in the Johnson administration, disputes in the steel industry. Arthur J. Goldberg would have been right in the middle of it, seeing that workers were protected and that the public was protected. This remains to be done. I hope I have sounded an alarm. If I sound alarmist, Mr. President, may I put it in the Record that I am and I intend to be alarmist. Another matter on which we have made an error, in my view, was the hurtful provision revoking the tax-exempt status of the Teachers Insurance and Annuity Association and the College Retirement Equities Fund, known as the TIAA-CREF, a 2-million-member retirement system that serves 6,100 American colleges, universities, teaching hospitals, museums, libraries and other nonprofit educational and research institutions. TIAA was founded by Andrew Carnegie in 1918. It has been tax exempt ever since. It is a nonprofit charity, and properly not taxed. In 1937 it was incorporated under the laws of the State of New York to ``forward the cause of education and promote the welfare of the teaching profession''--``forward the cause of education and promote the welfare of the teaching profession.'' The law further states that the purpose of TIAA--this is the New York statute--is ``to aid and strengthen non-proprietary and non-profit-making colleges, universities and other institutions engaged primarily in education or research.'' And it has done just that. It has long been recognized as a model of such programs. As a somewhat unanticipated result, it brought to American higher education portability of pensions. You did not have to start out in one institution and after a certain point stay the rest of your life because you had to have some retirement benefit. It has a great value to our educational system for the simple reason that it enables a young person at, say, a 2-year college or a local college, who shows great promise, does good work, to end up at Chicago or Stanford or Duke, because they can move. This is part of the agility of American higher education. There is no reason to tax this, and the Finance Committee said don't tax it. We never have. The Senate said don't tax it. But somehow or other we have decided to do so. Revoking TIAA-CREF's 79-year-old tax exemption will cost the average retiree who receives $12,000 a year about $600 in income. You know, librarians are not highly paid. Perhaps that is not widely known. A $12,000 pension would be quite normal. A $600 reduction would be 5 percent right away. Future retirees currently accumulating benefits are likely to face reductions of 10 to 15 percent. Why make the lives of librarians and assistant professors and teachers in community colleges harder? Why do we do this? Why wasn't this something that people said no to? The Finance Committee said no to it. But we were not successful. Two closing points. In an era in which the most recent Presidential campaign was captivated--at least sectors of it--by the idea of a flat tax, it deserves pointing out that this 820-page piece of legislation will add hugely to the stupefying complexity and mass of the Internal Revenue Code and its accompanying regulations. Mr. President, this is not an exercise here in physical therapy. For as long as I can, I would like to hold it up to show it to you. I dare not hold it up any longer. If I should drop it, there would go my right ankle. Did that thump on the desk make itself heard? In 1986, in the Tax Reform Act of that year, we moved toward the idea of simplicity in the Tax Code by a broader base and lower rates. Just an anecdote, the late beloved Erwin Griswold, sometime dean of the Harvard Law School, sometime Solicitor General of the United States, was a friend. He used to write me each April describing how long it took him to complete his tax returns, which he persisted in preparing himself. Now, mind you, Dean Griswold was perhaps the Nation's foremost authority on the subject of tax law. He almost began the subject. He wrote the first text. He describes himself as being a young attorney, graduate of Harvard Law in the 1920s, in the Solicitor General's office, and some matters concerning taxation came to him. He, as he put it in a wonderful address to the bar association tax section, said, ``I thought of going to the Solicitor General to tell him I didn't know anything about tax law, but I decided to go to the library instead.'' And he wrote the text. In his last letter to me, dated April 12, 1994, 7 months before he died, he wrote that his 1993 tax return took him almost 100 hours to complete--100 hours for Erwin Griswold to prepare his not very complicated financial affairs. He was a teacher and a lawyer, Government employee, and he knew all these matters--yet it took him 100 hours. It would be 110 were he alive into the next tax season. Let me say, just as an example, a family with three children, two in college and one under age 17, could be required to calculate the new child tax credit, a Hope scholarship tax credit for one college student, and a separate lifelong learning credit for the older child. Each of these different provisions will have different eligibility rules and complicated income phaseouts that will have to be calculated on different worksheets and reported to the Internal Revenue Service on a variety of forms. It is no exaggeration, sir--I don't believe it is an exaggeration--to say that anybody who could fill out the forms necessary to qualify for these tax benefits would already be an accountant of advanced experience and achievement and would have no need for the benefits. I do want to point out that in the statement of the managers accompanying this conference report, it says, ``The conferees anticipate that the Secretary of the Treasury will determine whether a simplified method of calculating the child credit, consistent with the formula described above, can be achieved.'' So there is hope. But I wouldn't hope too much. President Ronald Reagan, our much-loved President Ronald Reagan, liked to say the Republicans are the party of the Fourth of July and Democrats are the party of April 15th. With the passage of this legislation, I think Democrats can no longer take all the credit for April 15th. A second and final point. This will be the first-ever tax bill subject to the line-item veto, which gives the President, ``limited authority to cancel specific dollar amounts of discretionary budget authority, certain new direct spending, and limited tax benefits.'' Limited tax benefits are those that provide, a Federal tax deduction, credit, exclusion, or preference to 100 or fewer beneficiaries. In January of this year, I joined Senators Byrd, Levin and former Senator Hatfield in a legal challenge to the line-item veto on grounds that it violates the presentment clause in article I, section 7, of the Constitution. The U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia agreed and promptly declared the statute unconstitutional. But later, on June 26, the Justice Department took the matter to the Supreme Court itself, and the Court held that we, as legislators, had no standing to challenge the law, clearing the way for the President to exercise his new authority. Now, just 2 days ago, on July 29, the Joint Committee on Taxation met to consider the list of limited tax benefits in this bill, a list prepared by the committee staff, that would be subject to the line-item veto. It was the first time we had done this under the new law, and I am pleased to report, upon being presented with the 6-page list totaling 79 separate provisions in this bill subject to the line-item veto, some members of the joint committee began to display a visible lessening of enthusiasm for the concept itself. I have a list here, Mr. President, and take the liberty of asking unanimous consent that it be printed in the Record, so the administration will have an opportunity to look up the items, veto them and then the injured parties can arrive across the park at the Supreme Court with standing and the Constitution will be preserved.

Mr. MOYNIHAN. I thank the President, and particularly thank him for affording that the Constitution be preserved. Finally, as I have said, I would have preferred the Senate-passed bill, in many respects, but committees of conference work by compromise, and we have a compromise before us which I will support, again with great thanks to the chairman, to Lindy Paull and to Frank Polk, and to Mark Patterson and Nick Giordano. I yield the floor. Several Senators addressed the Chair.

Mr. MOYNIHAN. Mr. President, if the Senator from New Mexico wishes to speak, I will yield the floor, of course, but the Senator from Arkansas would be the next?

Mr. MOYNIHAN. Of course, Mr. President.

Mr. MOYNIHAN. Mr. President, I believe the chairman would like to make a comment in response.

Mr. MOYNIHAN. Mr. President I believe the distinguished Senator from Louisiana would like to speak at this point. She can have as much time as she would like from our time.

Mr. MOYNIHAN. Mr. President, can I just say thanks once again to the chairman, and add that there is every reason to think that Amtrak is on the verge of financial stability, with a new rail system, fast rail system, and just when we are about to succeed, we can thwart the whole enterprise. I hope we will not do that. Mr. President, I yield the floor. I find my friend has been waiting so very patiently. The floor is now his.

Mr. MOYNIHAN. Might I simply join my friend and old colleague on the Finance Committee in his remarks commending the Senator from Louisiana. Typically, he did not mention his own work, his own role in this--it was indispensable--to have a unanimous Finance Committee in these matters and to make a point. It had been assumed there would be a storm of disapproval for what we did. There was none. There was none. The usual interest groups wrote the usual letters and the usual people took them too seriously. But a day will come when we have learned from this experience because it was an event. I thank the Senator.

Mr. MOYNIHAN

Mr. MOYNIHAN. Mr. President, I rise with a distinguished group of my colleagues to introduce the Magnetic Levitation Transportation Technology Deployment Act of 1997. Maglev is the first new transportation technology envisioned since the development of aviation in the early 1900's, and its adoption represents an opportunity for dramatic national gains in transportation efficiency and economic growth. This legislation proposes to demonstrate the feasibility of Maglev by authorizing limited Federal participation in financing one or more Maglev projects in the United States. Maglev is an advanced technology in which magnetic forces lift, propel, and guide a vehicle over a guideway. Utilizing state-of-the-art electric power and control systems, this configuration eliminates the need for wheels and many other mechanical parts, thereby minimizing friction and permitting cruising speeds of 300 miles per hour or more-- three times the speed of conventional American train technology. Because of its high speeds and relatively modest right-of-way requirements, Maglev offers significant advantages over auto, rail, and aviation modes in 40- to 600-mile travel markets. Maglev is also a very safe technology since properly designed Maglev is virtually impossible to derail. While Maglev was invented by a young American nuclear engineer in the 1960's, the Germans have developed the technology and have already built a demonstration Maglev test facility. They are now proceeding with a public/private project to construct a 181-mile Maglev system to connect Berlin to Hamburg. The German system, which is expected to be operational by 2005, will provide 1-hour service between the two cities. Not far behind Germany, Japan has its own Maglev system under test. Meanwhile, our Federal Government has done relatively little to develop this extraordinary technology. In the last few years, however, the Federal Rail Administration has identified the feasibility of deployment of Maglev systems in several major U.S. transportation corridors. Also, several public/private partnerships in the United States have begun to develop Maglev projects in a number of States, including California, Florida, Maryland, and Nevada. However, as with our European and Asian competitors, developing these Maglev projects will require Federal support to supplement the private and other public funding sources. Our bill would establish a competition for Federal funds, based on economic and financial criteria, among the various public/private Maglev project partnerships. Because Maglev is a proven technology that offers significant benefits for both passengers and freight, it is in the National interest to demonstrate these benefits by proceeding to construct and put into service, at an early date, a project in the United States. This legislation will encourage such a project at minimum public cost. I ask unanimous consent that the section-by-section analysis and the text of the Magnetic Levitation (Maglev) Transportation Technology Deployment Act of 1997 be printed in the Record.

Mr. MOYNIHAN. Mr. President, I rise today to introduce the Acid Deposition Control Act of 1997, a bill to combat acid rain and help restore health to the Nation's sensitive ecosystems--such as the Adirondack Park in my home State of New York. My friend and colleague, Senator D'Amato is cosponsor of this measure. Mr. President, in the 1960's, fishermen in the Adirondacks began to complain about more than the big ones that got away. Fish, once abundant, were not simply becoming harder to catch. They had disappeared. Initially, pollution seemed an unlikely cause. The lakes lie in a park protected by the New York State Constitution from most disturbances by human activities. Most of the lakes are virtually inaccessible, except to fishermen--and the winds that blow in from industrial pockets across the Midwest. Before long, pioneering scientists such as Cornell University's Eugene Likens and Carl Schofield and Syracuse University's Charles Driscoll established a link between increased deposition of acidic compounds in rainfall and the absence or deformity of fish in lakes with clear water and low pH. This was precisely the phenomenon first documented by Robert Angus Smith in Manchester, England, in 1852. More recently, acid rain had been of concern in Scandinavia. Acids lofted into the atmosphere from tall smokestacks in the industrial basin of the Ruhr River, falling on watersheds that were, in many places, little more than bare rock. Closer to the source, acid rain was blamed for Waldsterben, the death of Germany's prized Black Forest. We have learned a great deal since then. In June 1980, Congress passed the Energy Security Act, Public Law 96-264. Title VII consisted of a bill I introduced in 1979, the Acid Precipitation Act of 1980. It established the National Acid Precipitation Assessment Program [NAPAP]--an interagency research program to foster the development of science-based Federal policy regarding acid rain. This program resulted in the establishment of long-term acid deposition monitoring programs, a network of permanent forest plots and lake sampling regimes, over 1,500 peer reviewed publications, and perhaps more important the issuance of 71 doctoral degrees in acid deposition research during the 1980's compared to only 2 in the decade before. By the end of this massive study, scientists worldwide gathered in South Carolina to discuss what they had learned. They learned that at least 800 lakes and 2,200 streams in the eastern United States had been made acidic by acid rain; they predicted that an additional 10 percent would become acidic over the next decade without additional legislation. And they confirmed--as had been expected--that sulfur dioxide emissions were found to be a significant factor in acidifying ecosystems. Sulfur dioxide had contributed to forest decline in high elevation areas, corrosion of stone and metal structures, and reduced visibility. In 1990, Congress enacted acid rain controls to reduce sulfur dioxide emissions by 10 million tons below 1985 levels, utilizing a unique, market-based approach to ensure the most cost-effective pollution reduction possible. At the time, the measure was expected to have some noticeable--but not overwhelming--beneficial effects. We were right. Visibility has increased. Acidification of lake waters and deterioration of materials has been reduced. The incidence of respiratory disease has decreased. The market-based emissions trading approach has proved a tremendous success, fostering reductions nearly 40 percent beyond that which the act required, at costs amounting to a mere fraction of industry and government predictions. Equally important, our knowledge increased. In recent years, scientists have identified another important precursor of acid rain: nitrogen oxides. Studies on the combined effect of sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxide strongly suggest that the Clean Air Act will not be adequate to prevent long-term deterioration of national treasures such as the Adirondack Mountains and the Chesapeake Bay. According to a 1995 Environmental Protection Agency [EPA] study, even with the reductions required by the Clean Air Act, up to 45 percent of the lakes in the Adirondacks will become too acidic to support most aquatic life by the year 2040. Lakes too acidic to support life. Now there is a powerful image. The bill I introduce today requires an additional 50-percent reduction of sulfur dioxide and a 75-percent reduction in the level of nitrogen oxides emitted from electric utilities. This legislation blends the best judgment of top scientists with the successful, market- based approach of the existing program. The legislation calls for a nitrogen oxide cap and trade program similar to the sulfur dioxide program presently administered by EPA's Acid Rain Division. Under the program, EPA officials would divide a fixed--capped--number of nitrogen oxide emission allowances among the 48 contiguous States each year, basing each State's share of allowances on the State's share of the power generated within the 48 States. Each State, in turn, would divide the allowances among the utilities within the State, in whatever manner the State sees fit. Each allowance represents a limited right to emit 1 ton of NOX pollution. Each utility must conduct an accounting procedure to ensure that they hold enough allowances to cover their emissions tonnage. A utility with more allowances than emissions may sell their additional allowances or save them for use in a future year. Likewise, a utility with fewer allowances than emissions would purchase excess allowances from another source. If for any reason a State does not wish to administer the allocation of allowances to its utilities, the EPA Administrator will distribute the allowances automatically, giving each utility a share of the State's allowances equal to that utility's share of the State's power generation. In addition to contributing to acid deposition, NOX pollution contributes to ozone pollution, a respiratory and pulmonary irritant which can cause significant adverse health effects. Because heat and sunlight are necessary components in the creation of ozone pollution, ozone is most prevalent in warm summer months. Therefore, in an effort to reduce ozone pollution, the legislation would take additional measures to reduce summertime NOX emissions. During the months of May, June, July, August, and September, an electric utility would be forced to surrender two allowances per ton of NOX emitted. The NOX trading program would commence operation on January 1, 2000, beginning with an annual cap of 5.4 million allowances and cutting back to 3.0 million allowances beginning in 2003. EPA modeling suggests that, due to the two-for-one ozone season emissions provision, the actual emissions will likely drop to approximately 2.3 million tons per year after 2003--a reduction of approximately 70 percent from 1995 levels. Mr. President, there were days when dark plumes of smoke coming out of factory smokestacks were signs of prosperity. There was nothing Jim Farley liked to do better than put up a new Post Office and hire an artist to paint on its walls prosperity returning. Black columns of smoke reaching up to the sky--strong colors for what we hoped would be a strong economy. Lord Kelvin used to point out that one can't solve a problem that one cannot measure. We have spent decades measuring, and now it is time to update our policy response in order to solve the problem. It is time to adjust to the consequences of what we have learned. Mr. President, I urge my colleagues to support the Acid Deposition Control Act of 1997. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the text of the bill be printed in the Record.

Mr. MOYNIHAN

Mr. MOYNIHAN. I move to lay that motion on the table. The motion to lay on the table was agreed to.

Mr. MOYNIHAN

Mr. MOYNIHAN. Might I thank him on behalf of Senator Roth, who is not present at the moment, for his very generous remarks about the Finance Committee, of which he is a member--not hardly the least of us. It is true that the overwhelming portion of both these measures fell to the Finance Committee, and we voted nearly, in one case, a unanimous measure, on one bill we are about to vote on, 18 to 2, the bill we are going to take up. I think that has contributed considerably to the momentum that has surrounded us and brought us to this moment. I thank the distinguished majority leader for his generous remarks.

Mr. MOYNIHAN

Mr. MOYNIHAN. Mr. President, on July 22, 1997, the Washington Post contained a moving tribute to the Forward, a New York City journalistic tradition currently celebrating its centennial year. The Members of the Senate are probably aware of the Forward's magnificent history; this daily Yiddish newspaper once enjoyed a daily circulation of over 250,000. It did its job of helping new arrivals assimilate and become Americans so very well, that its original readers' descendants can now enjoy the newspaper's superb English language edition, while a wave of new immigrants are being introduced to the nuances of American life by the newspaper's Russian edition. The Forward's legacy lives on, not only in its three current editions, but with the tens of thousands of families whose ancestors learned about this country in the pages of Abraham Cahan's remarkable publication. On May 22, New York Mayor Guiliani hosted a reception at Gracie Mansion to mark the one- hundredth anniversary of the Daily Vorwaert's first issue. I sent a message to this reception which was reprinted in the Forward's Yiddish, English and Russian editions: I have long believed that the Forward renders an invaluable contribution to American society. Your dynamic newspaper should be appreciated by all who cherish our national heritage of respect for intellectual creativity and journalistic integrity. Even those of us who couldn't enjoy A Bintel Brief in the original were long ago aware of the Forward's power to captivate, educate and inspire. Your vigorous English edition is a worthy companion to the historic Yiddish Forward. Please accept my great congratulations on this magnificent milestone. With my best wishes to the ``gold standard'' of ethnic journalism. The Forward has played a significant cultural and educational role in its first century and I trust that the members of the Senate join me in wishing similar success to the three editions that so ably carry on the historic Forward tradition. Mr. President, I ask that the text of the Washington Post article on the Forward's centennial be printed in the Record. The material follows: [From the Washington Post, July 22, 1997] New Voices for a New Century--Newspaper of an Exodus Speaks a Language Its Children No Longer Hear, but Reaches Out in Others (By John M. Goshko) New York.--Some of this city's most prominent editorialists, academics and intellectuals lately have been waxing nostalgic about a New York institution now personified by a half-dozen elderly men hunched over rickety, ancient typewriters in a charmless office. These men--not all in the best of health and able to put in a full day's work--are what remains of the Yiddish staff of the Forward, or Der Vorwaerts, once celebrated as the most influential foreign-language newspaper in the United States. Now marking its 100th anniversary amid growing uncertainty about its future, the Forward is known as the paper that did its job so successfully that it has come to the brink of putting itself out of business. To survive into a second century, the Forward has had to start thinking about ways to reinvent itself. It actively is experimenting with moves away from Yiddish, seeking to attract new audiences with editions in English and Russian. The English edition, in particular, has aroused considerable interest because of its aggressive, no-sacred- cows coverage of Jewish affairs under editor Seth Lipsky, a graduate of the Wall Street Journal's editorial page, and his staff of young reporters. The English version doesn't always sit well with many old-line readers who find Lipsky's combative conservatism jarringly at odds with the Forward's foundations in socialism and trade unionism. They say that while the name on the masthead of the English edition may be the same, the newspaper itself is not. To them, he Forward's identity cannot be separated from the language and culture that the great waves of turn-of-the-century immigration brought to this country from East European Jewish communities destined to perish in the Holocaust. More than 2.5 million Yiddish-speaking Jewish immigrants poured into New York between 1880 and 1925, and many learned how to Americans from the Forward. At the height of the newspaper's influence, its daily circulation of more than 250,000 stretched from New York into the sizable immigrant communities of Boston, Philadelphia, Chicago and Los Angeles. And it used this influence to become a key player in shaping the modern American labor movement and leading the exodus of Jewish immigrants from European-inherited socialist politics to the New Deal. ``For people like me, the Forward is part of a culture; something that's in my genes,'' said Hyman J. Bookbinder, long the American Jewish Committee's representative in Washington. ``I was brought up in a Forward home, where my parents, who came from Poland as teenagers, looked to the Forward for what amounted to their high school and college education.'' In 1947, the Forward's 50th anniversary celebration packed Madison Square Garden. Today, the editor of the Yiddish Forward, Mordechia Shtrigler, worries that the paper, which became a weekly in 1983, might have to cut back further and go biweekly or even monthly. The grandchildren and great grandchildren of the original faithful have moved on. For the Yiddish edition, there remain only a geriatric generation whose imminent passing effectively will mark the dying out of Yiddish as a language with any currency in the United States. ``It's not just that the young people don't read or speak Yiddish,'' said Shtrigler. ``We are almost out of people who can write commandingly and persuasively in Yiddish about politics and literature and culture. Many weeks I have to write more than half the newspaper myself. I fear what the future will be.'' His anxiety is, in many ways, a testament to the certain vision of Abraham Cahan, an autocratic but brilliant editor who ran the paper for more than 50 years. Cahan arrived in New York from Lithuania in 1882 and quickly acquired a gift for writing in English that enabled him to become a star reporter for English-language newspapers. He gained even wider notice by writing two novels about Lower East Side ghetto life: ``Yekl,'' which in the 1970s became the basis for the film ``Hester Street,'' and the ``Rose of David Levinsky,'' acclaimed at the time as a minor masterpiece of genre realism. Both books dealt with the theme of assimilation as necessary and inevitable for survival in the new world, even when it meant a melancholy loss of one's youthful ideals. That was the message that Cahan carried over into the pages of the Forward. Cahan built a devoted readership from sweatshop laborers and pushcart peddlers with detailed, colorful coverage of New York's politics and its nascent labor movement. And he added a high-toned side, publishing the work of the best Yiddish poets and novelists. One, Isaac Bashevis Singer, published almost all of his stories in the Forward before their book publication. But the Forward's basic message was underscored by Cahan's lead editorial on his first day as editor: ``Send Your Children to College if You Can, but Don't Let Them Become Disloyal to Their Parents.'' It set the tone for future Forward articles that would attempt to act as a bridge between America and the shetl. They covered every conceivable subject including one, ``Fundamentals of Baseball Explained to Non-Sports,'' which came complete with a diagram of the Polo Grounds. By far the most popular and famous feature was the ``Bintel Brief'' (``Bundle of Letters''), where readers wrote in to seek advice about their most personal concerns and aspirations. The letters included such pre-``Dear Abby'' trivia as one from ``The Unhappy Fool,'' who confessed that he considered the girl be loved flawed because she had a dimple. The Forward's tart reply: ``The trouble is not that the girl has a dimple in her chin but that some people have a screw loose in their head.'' But others were what has been called ``a cry from the depths of immigrant life'': the new arrival's anguish at leaving his aged parents in Europe, the plight of the young mother deserted by her husband, the despair of a tenement janitor condemned to eke out his days in `` a place where the sun is ashamed to shine.'' If the people who wrote to the ``Bintel Brief'' have a present-day counterpart, it is the immigrants from the now defunct Soviet Union, whose population in the New York area has swelled to almost 400,000 in recent years. An estimated 95 percent of them are Jewish, and in December 1995, the Forward began a weekly Russian edition to cater to their needs, with a circulation now of 10,000. It carries a heavy dose of news about the Russian immigrant community, particularly its problems of adjustment. It even carries a Hebrew lesson in each issue. As to the descendants of those earlier immigrants who were the Forward's original audience, they are largely successful business and professional people who have graduated to the suburbs and Manhattan's tonier neighborhoods. The English edition, a weekly established in 1990, is hoping it can lay the foundations for a new kind of paper by establishing with the new generation the same bonds of passion for Jewish issues that existed between their forebears and the Yiddish Forward. It has a ways to go. Its circulation is only about 25,000, and it hemorrhages red ink at the rate of about $1 million a year. Still, Lipsky optimistically insists that it is not unrealistic to harbor hopes of someday becoming a daily. In pursuit of that dream, he has hired a constantly revolving team of your talent. Although they work just down the hall from the Yiddish staff, there is a respectful but clear separation between the two. The English edition does not use any material from its older sibling. And the younger staff members, their accents and sensibilities betraying the stamp of places like Berkeley, Cambridge and New Haven, have only the foggiest notions of the Talmudic arguments about assimilation and schisms in the socialist movement that preoccupied earlier generations of Forward editors and reporters. Collectively, they turn out a newspaper distinguished by sophisticated arts coverage and a more probing, sometime sensationalist approach to Jewish issues than most other American Jewish publications, whose ties and funding sources generally cause them to tread cautiously around Jewish charities and organizations. The Forward also is unlike its competitors in that it frequently is willing to take some critical looks at Israel. This attitude has earned the English edition a substantial number of enemies among Jewish organizations and individuals who feel the paper has treated them unfairly. Inevitably the biggest share of brickbats has been aimed at Lipsky's editorial positions which reader nostalgic for the old Forward consider an unpalatable mix of Reaganomics and Cold War rhetoric. Rabbi Arthur Hertzberg, a professor of humanities at New York University, accused Lipsky of trying to turn ``a newspaper of socialists and social democrats [into] an echo of the Wall Street Journal.'' Jack Sheinkman, former president of the Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Union, expressed outrage at Lipsky's unapologetic defense of American involvement in the Vietnam War, and the literary critic, Alfred Kazin, protested that a Forward proposal to bomb North Korea's nuclear weapons facilities had no place in ``a paper founded a century ago on the blood and toil of peaceful laboring people who believed in harmony with people like themselves. Lipsky takes the criticism in stride: ``A lot of people tiptoe around our ideological battles as through its something to be embarrassed about. Actually, I find it a matter of great zest.'' He even wrote an article in a recent issue of Commentary magazine arguing that ``Abraham Cahan would have perfectly well understood the contours of the struggle we are in today and have responded in the spirit in which we carry on.''

Mr. MOYNIHAN

Mr. MOYNIHAN. Mr. President, today the New York Times reports an important advance in United States diplomacy. Secretary of State Albright has agreed to appoint a special coordinator to oversee American policy toward Tibet. This brings to fruition the vision of our beloved former chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, Senator Pell, who introduced a bill (S. 2554) at the end of the 103d Congress to establish a position in the Department of State to coordinate United States policy on Tibet. Since 1959, the Tibetans have suffered the liberation of their country by the Communist Chinese. Tibet is a remote land. Tibetans at that time had no interest in relations with other countries. No interest in joining the newly formed United Nations. Perhaps if Tibet had, we would have paid more attention when it was invaded. Now it's time to pay attention. Most importantly, we must focus on efforts to bring the Tibetans and the Chinese to the negotiating table to resolve their differences. The situation requires far more attention within the administration and a special coordinator can provide appropriate attention. While the Dalai Lama has stated repeatedly his willingness to begin negotiations, the Chinese continue to issue denials. As my daughter Maura wrote in a Washington Post article in April: Most policy makers do not realize that the Dalai Lama is not seeking territorial sovereignty for his captive nation; nor is he asking to be reinstated as the head of the theocratic government that ruled Tibet prior to the Chinese invasion. In an address to the European Parliament in 1988 in Strasbourg, France, the Dalai Lama offered the Chinese control of Tibet's military and diplomatic affairs if they would allow the Tibetan people a measure of self-governance and non-interference in religion and culture. That is certainly a magnanimous offer. The response from the Chinese? Silence. In creating this new position, we make clear that we have heard this reasonable offer and intend to pursue it. As Lodi Gyari, the able diplomat who represents the Dalai Lama in Washington, is quoted in the New York Times today: If the United States is consistent and sincere and vigorous in trying to persuade the Chinese Government to come to a settlement, I strongly believe it will happen. The new post will also allow closer scrutiny of human rights abuses in Tibet, which continue at an appalling level. I would note, as the author of the provision which resulted in a separate Tibet report in the State Department's annual Country Reports on Human Rights Practices, that the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor, led by Assistant Secretary Shattuck, has done a superb job in documenting the situation in Tibet. The excellent information the Bureau collects will be more readily acted upon by an officer focused solely on Tibet. For too long, Tibet has fallen between the cracks of United States foreign policy. Such neglect has led Abe Rosenthal to wonder if Tibetans are not ``Endangered Species,'' as he asked in the New York Times on May 21, 1994: Is anybody protecting, please, another of God's endangered species, which happens to be human, the Tibetans? Not yet. Neither the Republic nor the Empire nor any other nation, great or small, does anything about the Tibetans, except India, which gives them refuge when they can escape their cage. Would it help to say that just as there are laws against slaughtering hawksbill turtles, there are international laws against genocide--the elimination of nations and cultures? Probably not. This is a rather somber note on which to end, yet the situation in Tibet is grave. I am pleased that the Secretary has decided to appoint a new special coordinator for Tibet and both Congress and the Administration can devote more attention to this ``Endangered Species.'' Mr. President, I ask that the article on the position be printed in the Record. The article follows: [From the New York Times, July 30, 1997] Albright to Name Special Aide On U.S. Policy Toward Tibet (By Steven Lee Myers) Washington, July 29.--Secretary of State Madelene K. Albright told Congressional leaders today that she would appoint a new ``special coordinator'' to oversee American policy toward Tibet. The announcement, which came in response to Democratic and Republican pressure in Congress, could create new diplomatic strains with China. The United States has never had diplomatic relations with Tibet, which it regards as part of China, but the creation of the new position would significantly raise the profile of Tibetan affairs within the Government, according to Administration and Congressional officials familiar with the plan. ``We are prepared to have someone working in the State Department to see that the religious freedom of Tibetans is promoted and that their ethnicity is respected,'' a senior Administration official said, speaking on condition of anonymity. The new coordinator, however, would not have the rank of ambassador, with the diplomatic credentials to act on behalf of the United States, nor would the appointment bestow any diplomatic recognition on Tibet. In that sense the idea would fall short of recent proposals in both the House and the Senate, which the Administration has opposed. But the appointment is likely to rankle China, which has repeatedly accused other nations of interfering with internal matters by raising concerns over Tibet. President Clinton met in April with the Dalai Lama, Tibet's exiled spiritual leader, and promised to raise Tibet as a prominent issue when he meets President Jiang Zemin of China in the fall. The meeting with the Dalai Lama, a so-called drop by during the Tibetan's session with Vice President Al Gore that stopped short of an official visit, prompted protests from Beijing. ``I see this as a step in the right direction,'' said Lodi Gyari, president of the International Campaign for Tibet and a former aide to the Dalai Lama. ``I hope this is the beginning of a trend. If the United States is consistent and sincere and vigorous in trying to persuade the Chinese Government to come to a settlement, I strongly believe it will happen.'' Ms. Albright, visiting Singapore today, discussed the appointment in a telephone call with leaders of the Senate's Committee on Foreign Relations and the House's Committee on International Relations, which are considering new legislation to force the appointment of an envoy with ambassadorial rank, a move the Administration opposes. The details of the position--including the scope of the duties and resources--were not disclosed. After the meeting, an aide to a Senate Republican said, ``We want to make sure this is not one guy sitting in the bowels of the State Department with no influence over policy in Tibet.'' The special coordinator would have a broad mandate to orchestrate the Administration's policies internally and also to meet with Tibetan officials, including the exiled leaders based in India, officials said. The officials said the coordinator would also act as a mediator between Chinese and Tibetan officials, trying to restart contacts. China seized Tibet in 1950.

Mr. MOYNIHAN

Mr. MOYNIHAN. Mr. President, might I thank with great gratitude the senior Senator from New Jersey and my friend from the day I entered this Chamber, the chairman of the committee. They speak to what I think is an important fact. But, of course, the person who made it possible was Senator Roth, the chairman of the committee. I was with him in this regard and proud to have been. I thank Senators.

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

Mr. MOYNIHAN. Mr. President, this conference report comes before the Senate in an atmosphere of near euphoria. While I have signed the conference report--I was a Democratic conferee from the Finance Committee on these matters--and while I will vote for each of the bills, I cannot share the elation. I say this with the greatest respect for the Senators who managed this through the Budget Committee and, of course, for our own revered chairman of the Finance Committee--Senator Roth--and others who have worked so very hard on the legislation. Surely, there is much to applaud in both bills. But the agreement does little to address, in a serious way, either short run or long-run budget problems. In the short-run, the Federal budget is already on the verge of balance. This is due to a strong 7-year economic expansion. The expansion is attributable, in part--very probably in large part--to the budget decisions made by the President and this side of the aisle in the Senate in 1993. Indeed, my respected colleague, Bob Kerrey, suggests that the Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1993 be renamed the Balanced Budget Act of 1993. The deficit reduction brought about by OBRA 93, as our usage has it, is expected to reduce the deficit by a cumulative $924 billion through 1998. That is almost a trillion dollars. I stood on the floor at this desk, with my great and good friend, Senator Sasser, as the chairman of the Budget Committee at that desk. I was chairman of the Finance Committee. In the end, we enacted that measure by one vote, which has brought us to where we are today. I don't know that the Nation, having heard so much for so long about deficits, had been properly concerned about them so much and for so long. It is not easy to grasp the possibility that the deficit for this fiscal year, which will end September 30, will come in under $30 billion. That is about one-third of 1 percent of gross domestic product--an insignificant number. If the present trends continue, we could well be in a surplus in a year's time--the first such surplus, if I rightly recall, since 1969. And then having reached the point where we have free resources, we would be in a very proper position to turn to questions of, do we want to cut taxes, which clearly we might do? I would much prefer to see tax rates reduced--and I will talk about that tomorrow--or to provide new benefit programs of the kind that we are providing, but not before we have done what we said we would do first, which was to balance the budget. Over the long run, too, this legislation does less than many of us on the Finance Committee would have liked. Indeed, I can say, sir, that all of us on the Finance Committee would have liked, as the measure I am referring to, passed unanimously in the Finance Committee, 20 to 0, on June 18. In particular, we chose to confront the long-run issues in Medicare. We are told that our two major retirement programs--Social Security and Medicare-- are in grave difficulties. That is not so clear in the case of Social Security. Four rather simple steps would bring us into actuarial balance for a full 75 years--the usual way solvency is measured for the Social Security program. It could be done by four simple measures. Construct an accurate cost of living index--rather than a consumer price index--in the manner that has been proposed by the chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, the previous director of the Office of Management and Budget, Dr. Rivlin, and the Boskin Commission established by the Finance Committee when Senator Packwood was chairman--he and I jointly did that. Tax Social Security retirement benefits in the way that all other pensions are now taxed. Include all workers in the Social Security system. To this day, in a kind of exasperating holdover from the 1930's, there are several million State and local government employees who are not in the Social Security system as government employees, but who acquire the benefits, in any event, through part-time work outside. Increase the computation period from 35 to 38 years. Just take those four measures, and a few other odd things, and we put Social Security in fine fiscal condition into the second half of the next century. This is not the case with Medicare. Medicare is a health program, and it provides health care to a population that grows older and does so in the setting where medical science grows ever more successful in the treatment of the diseases associated with aging. But those treatments are, of necessity, ever more expensive. There is a true problem in Medicare. We have made many changes in the present program, so as to provide another 10 years of trust fund solvency. But in fact, sir, since 1992, the revenues from the Medicare payroll taxes have not equaled the outlays. And we have used general revenues to fund the shortfall, and since the Federal budget has been in a deficit situation, we have had to borrow money to do it. We can say, if you like, that we have 10 years of solvency. There is not now and there won't be until we do very important things. We began that effort in the Finance Committee on June 18. We took the decision to increase the age of eligibility for Medicare from 65 years to 67, in very gradual steps over the next quarter century, and bringing it into line with the increased age of eligibility for Social Security benefits, provisions adopted in 1983 in the aftermath of a commission, headed by Dr. Greenspan, on which Senator Dole and I served, among others. That measure just responds to the age profile, the demographic profile of the American people. We are living longer. And I would say, Mr. President, also, while we are living longer, we are retiring earlier. The majority of Americans now retire at age 62, when a reduced benefit on Social Security is available, and some 70 percent have retired by age 65. It is not entirely clear why. Some have sufficient resources and they simply want to stop working, and others have not gotten work, or others find the work no longer possible for them. But the fact is that most people now are retired before age 65, and on actuarially reduced benefits, so the trust funds are left unaffected. We proposed to do that with Medicare. If there is a problem of interim insurance from the time you leave employment to the time you are retired, well, we can resolve that problem. We could be thinking about it right now, in terms of those who retire early on Social Security. The problem of health care insurance does not deter, so far as we can tell, persons from doing that. It is not an admirable fact; it is a distressful fact that the last time the Social Security Administration did a survey asking persons the reasons why they retired early was about 15 years ago. The Social Security Administration is very slow in providing the kind of information we would like to have to make these decisions. We also, in the Finance Committee, unanimously agreed to increase the part B premiums for upper-income beneficiaries. That is to say, to reduce the part of the Medicare Program paid for by general revenues. When the program was begun--and I was involved if not peripherally, but with some measure of consequence as an Assistant Secretary of Labor for Policy Planning and Research in the Johnson administration--we provided that this program, Part B, should be paid for half by premiums paid by beneficiaries and half by general revenues. Over the years, as a technical result of having constrained the increase in premiums to the same percentage increase in Social Security benefits, while the cost of medical care increased faster than the consumer price index--which itself was an inadequate measure of the cost of living--that 50/50 share dropped to 25 percent for beneficiaries and 75 percent for the Government. We would simply provide that persons with higher incomes would pay more than the simple 25 percent that the great majority of persons would pay. We are talking about a very small number of people--about 6 percent of all beneficiaries--but the principle is that if you have the income, you don't need the subsidy. Indeed, the overall subsidy would still be much greater than it was originally envisaged in 1965--with the Federal Government financing 72 percent of program costs out of general revenues. The time has come to do that. Equally, the time has come to provide some measure of copayment for home health care, which has been growing at extraordinary rates, and which is evidently subject to serious abuse. This was widely reported in the press just this week. These items have come to be known as the big three Medicare changes. They were adopted on June 25 here on the Senate floor by a vote of 73 to 27. However, they are not included in the conference agreement. The House was not willing to do this, and I can only regret that we have not done so. I stand here and say, however, that the Senate has led the way and has shown you can do it. The response in public opinion has been quite moderate. The comment in the press has been almost unvaryingly supportive. These are necessary, sensible things to do. And it is time we set about doing them. There is an opportunity that we will not miss, particularly if the Finance Committee--under the leadership of Chairman Roth--continues to work in a bipartisan manner. About 80 percent of the savings in mandatory programs in this bill before us, this extraordinary large bill--I would hate to see it dropped on anyone's foot--about 80 percent of those savings came from actions by the Finance Committee. The 5-year savings for Medicare are $115 billion. That is a decrease in the increase, in a manner we have come to be familiar with, and, as I have said, the trust fund will be in technical balance for about 10 years. This does buy us time for an important provision in the bill, the provision for the creation of a national bipartisan commission on the future of Medicare--time for such commission to do its work. The statute provides that it issue its report by March 1, 1999, a year and a half from now. The commission is required, in the first instance, to review and analyze the long-term financial condition of the Medicare Program, which is not an easy matter because we are talking about the long-term progress of medicine in an age of discovery that has proved extraordinarily creative and fruitful but equally and not unsurprisingly costly, and to identify the problems that threaten the financial integrity of Medicare, including the extent to which Medicare update indexes do not accurately reflect inflation. If I could say parenthetically, Mr. President, we have had a great deal of talk about the accuracy, or inaccuracy, or sufficiency, or insufficiency of the Consumer Price Index. The fact is, we have at least four distinct price indexes in our present statutes and in our practices. They are spread all over the Government. One of them indexes Medicare expenses in ways that it seems to me probably overstate inflation. Next the commission is asked to make recommendations regarding the financing of graduate medical education, including consideration of alternative broad-based sources of funding for medical education. This could not be a more important matter. The question of medical schools and medical education is absolutely essential as we begin the process of economic rationalization in the provision of health care, as we do in this measure making a wide range of HMO's available to Medicare beneficiaries and Medicaid recipients. In this regard, Mr. President, might I just go back to 1994 when the Finance Committee was taking up the health care proposal sent to us by the administration in the last days of the first session of the 103d Congress. I was in New York City and asked the distinguished head of the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York--Dr. Paul Marks--if he would arrange a seminar to bring me up to date on the thinking of medical deans and medical academic researchers in the area of health care generally. We met one morning in a conference room in January at 10 o'clock. And at about 10:20, one of the deans, who comes from another part of the country, said, ``You know, the University of Minnesota may have to close its medical school.'' That was said to me and I knew I had heard something important. Minnesota is the kind of State where they open medical schools. They don't close them. I asked, ``How could that be?'' They said, ``Well, managed care is making its way from the west coast to the east coast. It has reached the high plains, and is now widely used in Minnesota.'' Persons enrolled in managed care plans are not sent to teaching hospitals because they are, by definition, more expensive. If you do not have a teaching hospital, you can't have a medical school. And, indeed, the teaching hospital at the University of Minnesota has since merged with another health care institution. We are dealing with something profoundly important. An ancient practice of medicine goes all the way back to the Greeks. The establishment of medicine doesn't go back just to the Greeks, but the idea of a profession of medicine with a code of ethics, a Hippocratic oath, certain responsibilities, certain immutabilities in medicine-- something of a mystery, something of a guide. In my youth, doctors would prescribe medicines taken from drugstores in a handwriting that was illegible to the laymen. Only the pharmacist could read it. All of that is disappearing. In our hearings in the Finance Committee, Msgr. Charles J. Fahey, a professor at Fordham University said to us, ``What you are seeing is a `commodification' of medicine.'' There is a striking image here on the Senate floor. For generations, we have argued the issue of whether labor is a commodity. Finally, in the Clayton Antitrust Act of 1914, we said labor is not a commodity. Well, medicine is becoming one. The next week, Dr. Raymond G. Schultze, at the time the head of the UCLA Medical Center volunteered, and said, ``Can I give you an example of that?'' We were discussing it with our witnesses, saying that is a new idea. He said, ``In southern California, we now have a spot market of bone marrow transplants.'' Well, when you get into that, that is good. It keeps control on prices. It brings rational decisionmaking into this market. But it doesn't provide for the public good. Markets won't provide for the public good that a teaching hospital and a medical school constitute. So our commission must pay special attention to these institutions. Finally, we ask the commission to make recommendations on modifying the age of eligibility for Medicare so that it corresponds to the changes in the age of eligibility for Social Security. I would simply suggest that this provision--the instruction to the forthcoming commission to deal with this matter of age of eligibility--obviously reflects the decision in the Finance Committee and the Senate that it ought to be increased to be in harmony with that of Social Security. The Medicaid changes in this legislation will save about $10 billion over 5 years by providing greater flexibility to the States, and at the same time, as I have remarked earlier, the Medicaid recipients will be encouraged to participate in HMO's just as Medicare recipients do. When we began Medicaid and Medicare, there were very few arrangements which we now call health maintenance organizations. Fee-for-service medicine was almost the universal experience. So, naturally, when people retired, they continued it, and Medicaid recipients took it up. That has changed with the general population and ought to change with this population as well. To the one bit of really strikingly good news in this measure, we have taken action to provide health coverage for uninsured children, $24 billion over 5 years. This will be the largest expansion in Government health insurance since the enactment of Medicare and Medicaid in 1965. We have done something that has not been done in a generation, and something that is needed. It will be financed by an increase in the cigarette tax that will eventually reach 15 cents per pack. Both of these measures were also an initiative of the Senate Finance Committee. I would also note that the conference committee, even prior to our commission, includes provisions to ensure an adequate stream of Federal funding for teaching hospitals. Financing of health care continues to undergo dramatic change. We will have a more comprehensive proposal from our commission. But we have done some things in this bill. Medicare payments to HMO's now reflect the higher cost of providing care in teaching hospitals. Under the legislation before us, these payments will be carved out, as we say, and sent directly to the teaching hospitals, thereby ensuring that the money will go where it is intended. In addition, while payments for medical education have been reduced as part of the overall reduction in payments to hospitals and physicians that are inevitable in a deficit reduction bill, the conference report includes the Senate language which limits the cuts to about $5.5 billion rather than $6.5 billion recommended by the House. Again, sir, I would say that had we not decided to go for a large tax increase, which we will talk about tomorrow, we wouldn't have had to make some of these reductions which I think we will find difficult, if not indeed painful. Finally, it should be noted that this bill sensibly increases the statutory debt limit from $5.5 trillion to $5.95 trillion, which will be sufficient to take us through December 1999--a much smaller increase would be required if we decided simply to stay the course that we set in 1993. So, Mr. President, I will support this conference report. It is the product of a long and difficult effort to reach compromise between the Congress and the President. It was characterized by extraordinary unanimity in the Finance Committee, where 80 percent of the mandatory program reductions are to be found, and by very large majorities here on the Senate floor. I think that speaks to the sincerity of the participants and, I hope, to our knowledge. If I consult my hopes in this matter, there is no real alternative. And, in the meantime, we have done some things that we surely can be proud of. I see my friend, the Senator from West Virginia, is on the floor. I know what particular pleasure he will take in the provision of $24 billion in health insurance for children, the largest such increase in health care in a generation since the enactment of Medicare and Medicaid was done. With that, Mr. President, and seeing that there are other Senators present, I yield the floor. I thank the Chair.