Dave Obey

Mr. OBEY

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, I rise because of the statement just made by the last speaker to simply point out that the lockbox provision being attached to this bill is a king-size joke. All year we have tried to defend the right of Members to offer an amendment on lockbox which essentially would save any money that is cut during floor consideration of a bill and use that for deficit reduction. We objected to the rescissions bill earlier in the year because lockbox was blocked. But now cynically the lockbox provision is provided on this bill at the end of the process; the only problem is that there is not going to be any money to put in the box because this bill is already so decimated that I doubt seriously that the House is going to make any significant reductions in the bill. All the lockbox amendment is is a cover-your-tail amendment that allows politicians to pretend that they are setting up a system to save money when, in fact, there will be no money to be saved the way this bill is being handled.

Mr. OBEY

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Chairman, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from Montana [Mr. Williams].

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Chairman, I yield 1 minute to the gentleman from Massachusetts [Mr. Olver].

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Chairman, I yield myself 17 minutes. Mr. Chairman, I have a great deal of respect for the gentleman from Illinois, as he knows. He has worked very hard, and he has dealt with all of us in a very fair way. But he is, frankly, caught in a maelstrom not of his own making. This is not a bill which he would have produced had he been able to control events. Mr. Chairman, this is the worst appropriation bill that I have seen come out of the Committee on Appropriations in the 25 years that I have had the privilege to serve the Seventh District of Wisconsin in this House. Mr. Chairman, the public, in the last election, tried to send us a message. I think what happened in the last election is that working people for more than a decade saw their living standard fall. They have seen costs slowly rise, while their incomes have stood still or even declined in real dollar terms after you adjust for inflation. Young workers see that it takes two workers per family to maintain the same kind of living standards that you could maintain a generation ago with one person in the workplace. You have what many people call the sandwich generation. They are desperately worried about how to take care of their retired parents at the same time that they are trying to find enough money to send their kids to school. And I think for many years individual Americans have been looking in the mirror when they get up in the morning and saying, ``Hey, what am I doing wrong?'' But in the 1990's I think they have come to understand that it is not just them. I think they have come to understand that everybody is being squeezed. And in 1992, President Clinton was elected because I think the public wanted him to pursue a solution to fundamental problems. In 1994 they were not satisfied with the progress that they thought had been made. They saw a national failure on health care. They saw too much time being devoted to marginal issues, and so they put our Republican friends in charge. And I think what they were hoping was that by doing so, that would force both parties to work together to produce a common agenda on common ground for the common good of the greatest number of people in this country. They wanted us to deliver a dollar's worth of service for a dollar's worth of taxes. They wanted programs that were as well managed as they were well meaning, and I think they wanted us to weed out unnecessary spending and make Government smaller and make Government work better at the same time. I think they also wanted a war on special interest domination of the Congress and the Government. Now, certainly I think many of us in the Democratic Party got the message. If we did not, we would have had to be deaf. And I think many of us are willing to work to try to pursue that kind of agenda. But this bill goes far beyond that. This bill eliminates a number of unnecessary and duplicative programs. I say ``good.'' It makes additional cuts in the name of deficit reduction. Maybe we are not thrilled about that because some of these programs we deeply care about, but we understand it is necessary. But it goes far beyond that and, in doing so, becomes the meanest and the most vicious and extreme attack on women and kids and workers of any appropriation bill in the postwar era. It reveals in the process enormous differences between my party and the Republican majority about the priorities that ought to be given to raising the quality of our children's education, to protect the health and dignity of workers, both in the workplace and at the bargaining table, and to provide the skills necessary for workers to compete in a changing world economy. And it shreds the vulnerable and those who are often cruelly neglected in a materialist society. Next to the fight over Medicare, this bill is the epicenter of what I call the Gingrich counterrevolution. As I said, some of the cuts are necessary to help reduce our Federal spending, but this bill goes far beyond that because the economic game plan, of which this bill is a part, is insisting that we provide, among other things, some very large tax cuts for some very rich people. If you take a look at what is being prescribed, you understand what I mean. We are being told by our Republican friends that we need to eliminate the corporate minimum tax. This is a list of companies who, from 1982 to 1985, paid no taxes whatsoever, despite the fact that they made one whale of a lot of money. We are going to return to those good old days because our majority party friends want us to eliminate the minimum tax that those corporations have to pay. So we will go back to the good old days when AT&T, DuPont, Boeing, General Dynamics, Pepsico, General Mills, Trans America, Texaco, International Paper, Greyhound, you get the idea, all the way down. You see, those corporations, during the 1982 to 1985 period, made $59 billion in profits, $59 billion in profits. Yet in many of those years they escape paying a dime in taxes. We are going to gouge Medicare and gouge programs in this bill to help finance that kind of nonsense. If we take a look at the Federal Reserve studies which have been done on what happened in the 1980's, this shows who has gotten what and what has happened to the American dream in the 1980's. The Federal Reserve shows that from the end of World War II to roughly 1979, beginning of 1979, indeed a rising tide did lift all boats in this country, because whether one was in the bottom 20 percent of income in the country, or in the middle, or in the top, everybody's income rose, even after inflation. And so everybody, despite the fact that we had the Vietnam war, despite the fact that we had the race riots after Martin Luther King was killed, this society hung together because everybody was getting a piece of the growing economic pie. But from 1979 through the latest year for which the Federal Reserve has been able to compile statistics we see that, instead of growing together, this country has been growing apart. I say to my colleagues, If you're in the bottom 20 percent of income, you have lost a bundle since 1979. If you're in the middle, you have lost ground. Only if you're in the top 20 percent of income earners in this country have you done well, and especially the richest \1/2\ million families in this country have done exceedingly well because the new Federal Reserve study shows that the richest \1/2\ million families in this country, about \1/2\ percent of the total family number, have increased their share of national wealth since 1980, the beginning year of the Reagan revolution. They've increased their share of national wealth from 24 percent of the Nation's wealth to 31 percent. Mr. Chairman, that is a huge expansion of wealth for the wealthiest people in this society who already had a awful lot. The wealth for those few families increased by a greater amount, by almost twice as much as the entire national debt increased during that period. And yet our Republican friends on this side of the aisle think that that is not enough disparity, that is not enough trickle-down which starts by taking care of the needs of people in the top berths. So they have produced a tax package which has a distribution table roughly this way: The average tax cut per family from the House tax bill is mighty slim for someone in the bottom 40 percent, or even in the middle of this society, but, oh man, someone in that top 1 percent, $20,000 in a tax cut. So we are going to chisel on programs for poverty-ridden senior citizens, and we are going to chisel on the aid that we provide local school districts to help educate the most difficult to educate kids in this society in order to provide those folks a $20,000 tax cut. Mr. Chairman, that is what is behind this bill, and that is why this bill is so wrong. If we take a look at what is happening, the biggest cut in this bill is aimed at the aid that we have traditionally provided local school districts, some $2\1/2\ billion. Going to clobber chapter 1. Going to clobber ``Drug-Free Schools'' that helps schools teach kids to avoid drugs before they get hooked. Going to clobber vocational education. Going to lay it to the School to Work Program which helps non-college- bound kids move out of high school into the world of work and helps them to try to find someplace that will give them a good bit of training to transition into the work force. The main results from that, my colleagues can be assured, will be lower educational quality and higher property taxes. For the first time in 34 years the Federal Government is not going to make a contribution to the Stafford student loan program. I would bet my colleagues that a good third of the people in this Chamber, if they are 30 years of age or older, used that Stafford program when they went to college, but now we are going to have an awful lot of folks who have climbed the economic ladder of opportunity pulling that ladder up after them by not making a contribution to that program. Goals 2000 to improve educational quality: bipartisan, started under George Bush, wiped out under this bill. The next biggest hit comes on the vulnerable, the seniors, the disabled, and the poor kids in this society. In the late 1970's Senator Muskie and I started a program to help low-income people, mostly seniors, pay their fuel bills, heat their houses in the wintertime, cool them in the summertime, because we got awfully tired of seeing senior citizens who had to choose between paying their prescription drugs and keeping their house warm in the winter. So we passed a low- income heating assistance program. We just had almost 800 people in this country die in a heat wave 3 week ago, and lots of Governors put out press releases saying, ``We are going to release emergency money under the Low-Income Heating Assistance Program that the Federal Government has just given us so that we could help people in that situation.'' Guess what? Under this bill there is not going to be any more funding available to provide that kind of emergency relief because the program is wiped out. Eighty percent of the people who use that program make less than $10,000 a year, one-third of them are disabled, so that is just another of the grace notes in this bill. Under this bill we are going to have thousands of students who are learning to teach handicapped kids who are going to lose their scholarships to do that. Under Healthy Start; it was started by President Bush to attack infant mortality in communities where it is more than twice as high as the national average. That program is going to be cut in half under this bill. Thirty-six thousand babies are going to die in this country this year. Head Start, which the gentleman from Maryland [Mr. Hoyer] and others will talk about later: 45,000 to 55,000 kids going to be tossed out the window on that program, and we are essentially going to be saying to local school districts, ``You find a way to take care of it, kiddo. We're not going to do that anymore.'' Both parties talk a grand game on welfare reform, and yet this bill clobbers virtually every program on the books to move people from welfare into work. It clobbers the dislocated worker program, it clobbers adult job training, and it hammers State vocational educational grants. And what disturbs me more than anything in this bill is the attack it makes, the attack it makes on the protections that workers have a right to expect will remain: protections for worker health, protections for worker safety, protections for their bargaining rights. There are deep cuts in the Labor Department enforcement here which will make it easier for some corporations to make a profit, no doubt. It will also make it easier for those corporations to violate wage hour laws. It will make it a lot less risky for them to set up bogus pension systems. It will make it a whole lot easier for corporations to abuse workers who try to organize to get better pay. So that is another one of the ``grace notes'' in this bill. All in all what this bill is going to do is make it harder for ordinary people to hang on to a middle-class lifestyle, and it is going to make workers more vulnerable to the whims of their employers who want to avoid paying the minimum wage, or the 40-hour week, or rules for fair labor practices, or standards for a safe working environment. I think what we are regrettably witnessing in this bill--and indeed across the board in this Congress, but especially in this bill--I think we are witnessing a giving up on our efforts to be one people with a common interest and a common cause. We are ceasing to be a country with a large and growing middle class. Instead we are accepting the fact that we are going to have fewer and fewer tickets into the middle class, and we are accepting the fact that we are going to have a level of insecurity for those in the middle class that used to be associated with being poor. We are becoming in my view a society with a very rich people and a great number of people trying desperately to hang on to some semblance of what is left of a middle-class living standard, and not many people in between, and this bill makes all of that worse. Mr. Chairman, this bill savagely cuts financial support for crucial programs that have been used by millions of Americans to help work themselves up the economic ladder. And the New Centurions who are running this House, I think, after having made it themselves are perfectly willing to pull that ladder up after them, and my response is, ``Shame on you, shame on you. You ought to know better.'' This bill also contains a number of legislative riders which are slipped into this bill literally in the dead of night because that is when we met, from 9:30 at night until 3 in the morning. And those provisions rip into the protections that we provided workers and working families for decades. We will be offering amendments to try to strip that language out, but we will not be offering amendments to fix this bill financially because this bill is beyond repair because of votes previously already cast in this House which locks this subcommittee into an allocation of resources which will allow this Congress to continue to fund the B-2, for instance, over $1 billion a plane. That is the cost of the B-2, just one B-2 bomber, and we are buying more than the Pentagon asked for, more than the President asked for, more than the Joint Chiefs of Staff asked for. Just one of those babies would pay the tuition costs of every single kid at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, for the next 12 years, to put it in perspective. While we are going to be gutting the programs for the people in this bill, Mr. Chairman, we are going to continue the production, or we are going to begin production, of the F-22 in the Speaker's home State; $70 billion for that airplane to complete production. That is more than we have got in this entire bill in discretionary spending, for everything that this bill is supposed to do for education, and workers and seniors. So we will be trying to make people understand, as we go through the amendment process, what is at stake, not inside the beltway, but for people out there in the country, and we will be trying to focus people's attention on the vote on final passage. There are going to be a lot of Members offering amendments, what I call get-off-the-hook amendments, or what I call holy picture amendments to try to pose for holy pictures and look good on a little narrow issue on this bill, hoping then people would not notice that they voted for final passage. The only way to correct the gross injustices in this bill is to vote the bill down, send it back to the committee, insist that the committee redo its budget allocation process so that we do not have to gouge seniors, gouge our future education prospects in order to provide a big tax cut for some of the richest people in this country.

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Chairman, would the gentleman yield?

Mr. OBEY. As the gentleman knows, Will Rogers said once that when two people agree on everything, one of them is unnecessary.

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Chairman, I yield myself 3\1/2\ minutes. Mr. Chairman, just very briefly to respond to the previous two gentlemen, I would say first to the gentleman from Illinois [Mr. Porter], he suggests that our tax charts are not accurate. Is the gentleman truly suggesting that the middle-class families in this country have done better the last 10 years than the super rich? If he is, I would respectfully suggest somebody is smoking something that is not legal. I do not think anybody else sees it that way. The gentleman says that the Perkins loan is amply funded. All I can tell you is there are going to be 150,000 students who are not going to be able to be helped by the Perkins loan program this year if we do not make a contribution to it. The gentleman says in terms of low-income heating assistance, there is no crisis. Good gravy, 600 people died in Chicago just 2 weeks ago because they were overcome by heat. The low-income heating assistance program is the program that is supposed to help folks like that. No crisis? The gentleman says that because schools are in trouble, we ought to cut back on chapter I. To suggest you ought to cut back on the major program we have to help local school districts educate the toughest to teach kids in their districts, to suggest we ought to cut that back and somehow that is going to improve education performance is, I think, backwards. The gentleman says that we should not worry about the dislocated worker program; 193,000 fewer workers aren't going to get help on job training after they have lost their jobs, through no fault of their own. Is that the answer America is going to give to the workers who have fallen victim to programs like NAFTA and GATT? I hope not. With respect to the gentleman from Louisiana, he recites a great number of small programs that ought to be eliminated. He is beating a dead horse. We have already said 15 times we support the elimination of those programs. Fine. The gentleman says that this bill is an end to socialism. Well, with all due respect, I do not think helping kids to get an education is socialistic. I do not think helping workers to get job training is socialistic. I ran into one young woman in the community of Rhinelander in my district, 22 years old, I think she was. She was in school, in a 2-year school. She had a couple of kids. She and her husband split because her husband had beaten the living devil out of her time after time after time. She was homeless for 2 months last year, yet she kept going to school every day trying to make something of her life, and she was using a Perkins loan and other educational help. Is it socialism to help a person like this? Nonsense. The gentleman says we should stop throwing money at programs. I agree. Why do not you join us in eliminating the B-2 and the F-22? We will save a whole lot more money than we are spending in this bill. The gentleman says that we are going to provide plenty of money for the truly needy. Here is a list of the truly needy giant corporations in this country who are going to wind up again paying no taxes whatsoever because of the Republican party insistence on eliminating the corporate minimum tax. The gentleman says you are going to have some benefits to lower income people in the tax bill. Undoubtedly. But they will be table scraps in comparison to the caviar given to the people at the top of the income scale. The gentleman says we should not worry because this bill is spending $68 billion in discretionary funds. It is not. It is spending $62 billion. If it was spending $68 billion, we would not be having this fight.

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Chairman, I yield 1 minute to the gentleman from California [Mr. Tucker].

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Chairman, I yield 4 minutes to the gentlewoman from California [Ms. Pelosi].

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Chairman, I yield 1 minute to the gentleman from New York [Mr. Engel].

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Chairman, I thank the gentleman for yielding me this time. Mr. Chairman, I would like to respond to my hyperventilating friend from Louisiana if I could. Let me simply say that we are resisting the cuts in worker training for one very simple reason: Because corporate profits are headed up, and wages are headed down, and we would like to see the two traveling upward together. That is why we are doing it. There are millions of Americans who are going to be downsized out of their jobs this year. It would be kind of nice if we provided them the same thing every other industrialized society does, which is some decent job retraining. It would also be kind of nice if we did not ignore kids who are not going to college. That is the purpose of the School-to-Work Program, to take kids who are not going to college, who usually flounder around for 3 or 4 years in our society, unlike other societies who provide a good number of apprenticeship programs. We want to take those kids, put them in a program tying together their high school, their technical school, and employers, and give them a track into a decent job. This bill cuts the guts out of most of these programs. We passed NAFTA last year and we passed GATT, and I did not vote for them. But what we told workers at the time was ``Look, don't worry; if you are going to lose your job, you will get some retraining help.'' Instead, what you are doing is cutting 34 percent out of training programs. There are going to be 193,000 American workers who cannot get help which they would have gotten previously under the displaced worker program. Now, you talk about all of the duplicative programs in labor. The fact is, and you know it, the Secretary of Labor is already reorganizing those programs. He is consolidating a lot of them, and we said, five times now, we support the elimination of those programs in this bill. Write it down. We support the elimination of that duplication. What we do not support is cutting job training by one- third so you can provide a $20,000 tax cut for somebody making $300,000 a year. That goes too far.

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Chairman, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from Illinois [Mr. Durbin].

Mr. OBEY. Yep, 1 percent.

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Chairman, yield 1\1/2\ minutes to the gentleman from Texas [Mr. Gene Green]. (Mr. GENE GREEN of Texas asked and was given permission to revise and extend his remarks.)

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Chairman, I offer an amendment. the Chairman. The Clerk will designate the amendment.

Mr. OBEY. I yield 3 minutes to the gentleman from New Jersey [Mr. Andrews]. (Mr. ANDREWS asked and was given permission to revise and extend his remarks.)

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Chairman, I have a parliamentary inquiry.

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Chairman, I yield 3 minutes to the gentleman from California [Mr. Miller]. (Mr. MILLER of California asked and was given permission to revise and extend his remarks.)

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Chairman, as you know, the Chair is considering rolling some votes. The next amendment scheduled to be discussed, depending upon whether or not my amendment passes, is the Pelosi amendment, which, in contrast to my amendment, is only trying to remove some of the legislative language with respect to some labor problems or worker problems. Mr. Chairman, my question is this: How do we proceed to the Pelosi amendment if we have not actually had a vote on my amendment; and should we not, therefore, vote on my amendment before we proceed to the Pelosi amendment?

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Chairman, further parliamentary inquiry. Is it the Chair's intention to roll the vote on the Obey amendment now before us?

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Chairman, since we are not at a point where the Chair has to make that decision, I would urge that the Chair make that decision in consultation with both sides, not rolling that specific vote, so that we could, if it fails, proceed to the Pelosi amendment; unless, of course, the committee wants to accept the amendment, in which case we do not have any need to go to the Pelosi amendment. Mr. Chairman, in fairness to both sides, I think it would not make sense to vote on the Pelosi amendment, or spend the time debating it, if mine passed. I am not asking for a determination now, but I would urge the Chair to consider that problem.

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Chairman, I yield 30 seconds to the gentleman from Maryland [Mr. Hoyer].

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Chairman, I yield myself the remainder of my time. Mr. Chairman, the issue is not whether you like the language on paper balers. The issue is not whether you like the language on erogonomics or whether you like the language on any other OSHA action. The issue is whether or not this language ought to be considered as a slipped-in provision in this bill with no chance for hearings, no chance for examination, or whether we ought to do it in a more orderly way. One of the previous speakers said that I was trying to prevent jobs because we are taking out the language on paper balers. We are not trying to prevent jobs. We are trying to prevent the killing of kids. The fact is that it is true that some balers meet the new industry standards. But only one in five current machines meets all of the requirements, and 15- and 16-year-olds are sometimes not the most cautious of people. There have been six deaths because of paper baler machines, deaths of children. The ergonomics standards, I do not, frankly, know what the standards ought to be, but I do not believe that the agency ought to be precluded from even developing data on the injuries associated with this problem, and that is what this language does. Let me simply state, in response to the gentleman from Oklahoma [Mr. Istook], about other labor-health bills providing legislative language. The difference is that every single one of those provisions was brought to this floor under an open rule, and if a single Member of Congress objected, they could strike it on a point of order. That meant the only provisions in the bill were noncontroversial, and they were not special interest sweet dreams, as these are. Let me simply say that when you take, as you have done, 17 different legislative provisions and jam them into an appropriations bill, do not try to kid us. You know what you are doing. What you do is you circumvent the process. When you put it into an appropriation bill, what you do is you circumvent the normal congressional hearing process and the authorizing committees. You circumvent the process which is designed to make certain all of the parties who were impacted by a decision have an opportunity to comment on it before we, as the publics' Representatives, make a final decision and a final choice. What you are doing now when you slip it into an appropriation bill, you make sure that only certain special pleaders get taken care of. And the other folks who are affected by it? ``Sorry buddy, but you are not involved. We got it in before you even knew we were doing it. Your comments do not even get heard.'' That is not the way to do business when you are dealing with people's lives, when you are dealing with people's rights to have a safe and healthy workplace, when your dealing with the ability of families to save some money on student loans. That is not the way to do business. This is simply, pure and simple, a special interest end run of the normal legislative process. If you truly believe that some of this legislative language is correct, and some of it may very well be, then the way to deal with it is to have the proper committee bring it out under conditions which allow us to amend that language and change it. You cannot legislate, supposedly, on an appropriations bill, so we cannot do that here. Except you have slipped in these items so we cannot get at them through the normal point of order process. You know that these are special interest proposals. You know, if, for instance, you are going to subject a woman to fewer choices because she is a victim of rape or incest, it would be nice if she at least had a chance to comment on it. They have not, not the way you have brought this here. Strip out all of this language. Bring it here before us in the correct process. Some of it may pass. Some of it may fail. But at least you will give everybody in the process a square deal.

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Chairman, how much time remains?

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Chairman, there are a lot of people here that seem to laugh at OSHA as a pointy-headed agency. I want to tell you a story. The first day I ever served on this subcommittee, I walked into the hearing and I heard a witness saying that 40 percent of the workers, shipyard workers, who had worked with asbestos in World War II, had died of cancer. That got my attention because I used to work with asbestos. What I found out, after I started to dig into it is, that Manville Corp. knew since 1939 that their product killed people. They knew that workers like me were at risk. They did not bother to tell anybody. It is only the protection you get from an agency like OSHA that assures that people eventually find out what threatens their health in the workplace. Mr. Chairman, the issue is not whether you like individual OSHA standards or not. Frankly, none of us are qualified to determine exactly what those standards should be because those should be scientific not political judgments. All I am saying with this amendment tonight, on these labor issues, on these worker health related and worker rights related issues, all we are saying is leave the choice to the people who are supposed to be objective about it. Do not turn each and every one of these choices into political decisions. The gentleman from North Carolina [Mr. Ballenger] smiles. With all due respect, he is not objective on this issue and neither can I. We have both had our personal experiences. That is why we established these agencies, so they can make neutral judgments based on the best possible scientific information and based on the best possible legal evidence. If we want to toss this into the political arena and have worker health decided by a bunch of politicians based on which special interest got to them last, vote against the Pelosi amendment. If we think workers deserve better, vote for it.