Major Owens

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. They have been reading Alan Greenspan.

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Gephardt said ``I want to thank you for holding this important hearing--for realizing that, even as many Republican call for the outright abolition of the minimum wage--even as they refuse to schedule real hearings or a vote on a minimum wage increase--it is an issue we simply cannot ignore.'' I might emphasize that we have repeatedly called for hearings in the committee. I am on the committee of jurisdiction. Just yesterday we called for hearings again on the minimum wage, and so far have had no response from the chairman of the subcommittee or the chairman of the committee. Quoting Mr. Gephardt, ``Real wages for all working people have been declining in this country for 20 years; some economists believe it is our longest and steepest income slide since 1820. ``And the people at the bottom of the income scale have been doing the worst. Between 1983 and 1989, two-thirds of all new wealth created in the United States went to the top 1 percent of American households. The bottom 80 percent actually saw their assets drop by about 3 percent. No wonder America has the greatest gap between the rich and the poor of any industrialized nation in the world.'' Continuing to quote from the statement by the minority leader, ``That is why we must question the wisdom of the Republicans' supply-side revival, which would shower more tax breaks on the wealthy, while raising taxes on the poorest working families, and making huge cuts in Medicare, student loans, and education. The Republican agenda would actually make America's income gap much worse. ``Democrats have a different philosophy. We believe in valuing and encouraging work--not passive profit and speculation. We believe in making work pay, and making sure that no working family has to live in poverty and deprivation. That's why, early this year, President Clinton joined with Congressional Democrats to propose a 90-cent increase in the minimum wage over the next 2 years--a way to lift up millions of hard-working families who have been falling behind.'' Continuing to quote Minority Leader Gephardt, ``Even before we announced this proposal, it came under fierce attack by Republicans who see stagnant wages and eroding job security not as problems, but as the solutions to their ultimate goal: ``Helping those at the top of the economic ladder, even while they're sawing off the bottom rungs. Why else would Republicans propose a tax plan that cuts taxes by $8,500 a year for the top 1 percent of families, while raising taxes on the poorest working families by slashing the earned income tax-credit, cutting back on one of the best ways for struggling families to lift themselves into the middle class: ``The fact is, for the millions of Americans who try to support a family on the minimum wage, real wages have plummeted by 30 percent since 1979. ``We're not talking about a bunch of kids working at summer jobs. The fact is one-third of America's 4.8 million minimum wage earners are the sole earners in their families. Seventy percent of them are adults. They are now faced with the virtually impossible task of raising a family on $8,700 a year. In fact, one in five of them are still living below the poverty line. ``Is that the message we want to send to working America? That you can work hard, and take responsibility for your family, and still live in poverty and deprivation? ``That is why it's time to raise the minimum wage by 90 cents. It's a matter of fundamental fairness. It's a matter of basic decency for those at the bottom of the ladder, struggling to climb up. But there are other reasons to support this proposal. ``Raising the minimum wage would help make work pay more than welfare--and too often, that's just not the case today. ``Republicans keep saying a minimum wage increase will cost jobs. But it has been proven time and again that raising the minimum wage won't cost jobs. The last time we raised the minimum wage, Republican Members of the House said it would be a `death warrant * * * for small business,' and that it would destroy jobs, increase the Federal deficit, and raise inflation. It did none of those things. ``On the contrary, recent research--including a study of noted economists David Card and Alan Krueger--shows that a minimum wage increase has little or no effect on the number of jobs. Since when it is bad for our economy to put more money in the pockets of our workers and families and consumers? ``And it has been proven that raising the minimum wage pushes up wages for millions who already earn more than the minimum wage today. ``Republican leaders have already pledged to fight this increase, as they have resisted similar increases in the past. Republican Leader Dick Armey does not merely oppose an increase--he wants to abolish the minimum wage altogether. To the Republicans, lower wages--combined with huge corporate tax breaks--are just money in the bank. Never mind that people are suffering while those profits soar. ``The American people want this increase by overwhelming margins. After too many years of declining wages and opportunities, they deserve it. And Democrats are going to fight to give it to them--because it's right for our economy, and it is right for the hard-working families who are the heart of our country.'' I end my quote from the statement made by Minority Leader Gephardt on November 30, 1995, at a hearing held by the Democrats on the workplace, Subcommittee on Work Force Protections, which I will include for the Record. Testimony by House Democratic Leader Richard A. Gephardt in Support of Minimum Wage Increase, Hearing of Democratic Members of House Economic and Educational Opportunities Committee, Thursday, November 30, 1995, 10:00 a.m. Ranking Member Clay, and Members of the Committee on Economic and Educational Opportunities: I want to thank you for holding this important hearing--for realizing that, even as many Republicans call for the outright abolition of the minimum wage--even as they refuse to schedule real hearings or a vote on a minimum wage increase--it is an issue we simply cannot ignore. Let's begin at the beginning: America needs a raise. Real wages for all working people have been declining in this country for twenty years; some economists believe it is our longest, steepest income slide since 1820. And the people at the bottom of the income scale have been doing the worst. Between 1983 and 1989, two-thirds of all new wealth created in the United States went to the top one percent of American households. The bottom eighty percent actually saw their assets drop by about three percent. No wonder America has the greatest gap between the rich and the poor of any industrialized nation in the world. That is why we must question the wisdom of the Republicans' supply-side revival, which would shower more tax breaks on the wealthy, while raising taxes on the poorest working families, and making huge cuts in Medicare, student loans, and education. The Republican agenda would actually make America's income gap much worse. Democrats have a different philosophy. We believe in valuing and encouraging work--not passive profit and speculation. We believe in making work pay, and making sure that no working family has to live in poverty and deprivation. That's why, early this year, President Clinton joined with Congressional Democrats to propose a ninety-cent increase in the minimum wage over the next two years--a way to lift up millions of hard-working families who have been falling behind. Even before we announced this proposal, it came under fierce attack by Republicans who see stagnant wages and eroding job security not as problems, but as the solutions to their ultimate goal: helping those at the top of the economic ladder, even while they're sawing off the bottom rungs. Why else would Republicans propose a tax plan that cuts taxes by 8,500 dollars a year for the top one percent of families, while raising taxes on the poorest working families by slashing the Earnest Income Tax Credit, cutting back on one of the best ways for struggling families to lift themselves into the middle class? The fact is, for the millions of Americans who try to support a family on the minimum wage, real wages have plummeted 30 percent since 1979. We're not talking about a bunch of kids working at summer jobs. The fact is, one-third of America's 4.8 million minimum wage earners are the sole earners in their families. Seventy percent of them are adults. They are now faced with the virtually impossible task of raising a family on $8,700 a year. In fact, one in five of them are still living below the poverty line. Is that the message we want to send to working America? That you can work hard, and take responsibility for your family, and still live in poverty and deprivation? That is why it's time to raise the minimum wage by 90 cents. It's a matter of fundamental fairness. It's a matter of basic decency for those who are at the bottom of the ladder, struggling to climb up. But there are other reasons to support this proposal. Raising the minimum wage would help make work pay more than welfare--and too often, that's just not the case today. Republicans keep saying a minimum wage increase will cost jobs. But it has been proven time and again that raising the minimum wage won't cost jobs. The last time we raised the minimum wage, Republican Members of the House said it would be a ``death warrant . . . for small business,'' and that it would destroy jobs, increase the federal deficit, and raise inflation. It did none of those things. On the contrary, recent research--including a study by noted economists David Card and Alan Krueger--shows that a minimum wage increase has little or no effect on the number of jobs. Since when is it bad for our economy to put more money in the pockets of our workers and families and consumers? And it has been proven that raising the minimum wage pushes up wages for millions who earn more than the minimum wage today. Republican leaders have already pledged to fight this increase, as they have resisted similar increases in the past. Republican Leader Dick Armey does not merely oppose an increase--he wants to demolish the minimum wage altogether. To the Republicans, lower wages--combined with huge corporate tax breaks--are just money in the bank. Never mind that people are suffering while those profits soar. The American people want this increase by overwhelming margins. After too many years of declining wages and opportunities, they deserve it. And Democrats are going to fight to give it to them--because it's right for our economy, and it's right for the hard working families who are the heart of our country. Thank you for listening. Now I'm happy to take your questions. Mr. Speaker, I now would like to yield to the gentlewoman from North Carolina [Mrs. Clayton] for a statement.

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, I would very much like to continue the discussion on the minimum wage. I serve as the ranking Democrat on the Subcommittee on Workforce Protections, which is directly responsible for the minimum wage, and I am certainly delighted that I hear rumors that suddenly there are manifestations taking place within both the House and the Senate, which means that our great logjam on the minimum wage may soon be broken. I understand there are some Members of the Republican majority in this House who have begun developing a bill calling for an increase in the minimum wage, and this may lead to the call we hoped for for a long time. There are moments in this House when reason does prevail. There are times when parties lay aside their particular ideological bents and understand the best interests of the American people are served by a particular course of action and the two parties come together. I hope we are on the way to doing that. I hope the Republicans will recognize that there is a terrible injustice that has been done to working people over the last 20 years. We have a wage gap that is increasing. The value of the dollar has fallen, the minimum wage value has fallen, and we should take steps to do something about that as soon as possible. As the ranking Democrat on the Committee on Workplace Protections, I chaired a hearing on the minimum wage increase on Thursday, November 30 of last year. I invited several people to come. One of them was the minority leader for the Democrats, Mr. Gephart. Mr. Gephardt's testimony summarizes it very well. That testimony I think is such that it would be good to quote it here again, because it does summarize very well where we are and it talks about where we should be going. Mr. Gephardt is the sponsor of the prime legislation that is now introduced in the House on increasing the minimum wage. Mr. Gephardt and Mr. Clay together are calling for a minimum wage increase of 45 cents per year for 2 years. We are talking about a 90- cent increase in the minimum wage over a 2-year period. This is a very modest increase, and the President has endorsed the increase, and indeed held a press conference at the White House where he announced that endorsement. I just want to read some excerpts from the testimony of the Democrat minority leader, Mr. Richard Gephardt. I would ask unanimous consent to include for the Record the statement in its entirety. I would like to note that I have requested unanimous consent on a few documents and they have not been entered in their entirety. In addition to entering this in its entirety, I will comment on it now. I would like at the end of the presentation to have it entered in its entirety.

Mr. OWENS. Let us take care of our economy. Mr. Greenspan wants to take up inflation. Seems to me Mr. Greenspan would address his concern to inflated salaries at the top levels, and deal not so much and scrutinize not so much the wages paid to people at the very bottom.

Mr. OWENS. Nowhere in Japan will you ever find anybody earning $60 million or $20 million.

Mr. OWENS. $60 million. Oh, that is an aberration, most of them are at around $20 or $15 million.

Mr. OWENS. So there is a kind of war on the poor. I want to yield to the gentlewoman from Georgia and say to her that her State is about the same in terms of the percentage of people who are making only the minimum wage, working people who are earning only the minimum wage, about 11.9 percent in Georgia.

Mr. OWENS. Some of these people are at the very bottom of the rung. Although they are working, they are at the very bottom in terms of wages and income and were benefiting from the earned: income tax credit. You just mentioned that. But not only have the Republicans refused to allow a discussion of an increase in the minimum wage, but they have gone ahead and cut the earned-income tax credit also.

Mr. OWENS. I thank the gentlewoman from North Carolina, and I wonder if she knows that she has about 11.3 percent of her working population in North Carolina that earns a minimum wage. I wonder if she also knows a lot of fuss has been made about Davis-Bacon and how Davis-Bacon artificially inflates wages. The figures for North Carolina for Davis- Bacon, prevailing wages under Davis-Bacon, are only slightly higher than the minimum wage in North Carolina. So the gentlewoman has a great depression of wages in her State. It is very interesting.

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, Ron Brown was a renaissance politician, a jack of all trades who mastered them all. He was a mentor for seasoned professional politicians and he was qualified to tutor most of us. Ron used his considerable influence and charm to become an extraordinary fundraiser for the Democratic Party. From the complex job of raising money to the details of election day engineering, Ron performed with great enthusiasm. I first met Ron Brown in Chicago while campaigning for Harold Washington for mayor of Chicago. Former Majority Whip Bill Gray, Ron, and I were on a campaign swing through the public housing projects on Chicago's Southside. At that time, Ron was working with a well-known, prestigious, and powerful law firm in Washington. However, on that day, he was simply Ron the loyal friend, campaigning for a fellow Democrat. We went into huge, tall, cold concrete buildings and walked on floors which seemed to be completely out of this world. The deterioration and garbage inside the halls were unbelievable even to a poor boy like me whose father had never earned more than the minimum wage. I had lived in some of the poorest neighborhoods of Memphis and worked in some of the poorest neighborhoods in New York, but never had I seen such despair. The only glimmer of light we saw in those highrise urban tunnels were the Harold Washington posters that the residents waved at us when they saw our familiar signs. We had connected with the most oppressed among us. As my eyes met Ron's he broke into his signature smile: ``This is what politics has got to be all about,'' he said as we plunged into the crowd of outstretched hands and marched through the halls reminding folks that tomorrow was the day to go out and elect the first African-American mayor of Chicago. Ron Brown was the unifying force behind the most successful and conflict-free convention the Democrats have had in nearly two decades. Ron was a star who kept his poise, kept peace among the many party factions, and made the Democratic National Committee an effective force to be reckoned with in politics. Ron Brown was a masterful strategist who began his tenure as party chairman with several special election victories despite great obstacles. He was a great communicator and a great cheerleader who also understood the nuts and bolts of winning campaigns. Seldom in America does one man so gracefully transcend the racial chasm. Ronald H. Brown did, and in his journey, he deeply touched the heart and soul of a nation. As our Secretary of Commerce, he was our corporate ambassador to the world. As the chairman of the splintered, fractious Democratic Party, he was the glue that held it together, and in so doing, delivered the White House and became the most beloved chairman in history. Ron Brown was undaunted and unfazed by challenges. Being a first was not unusual for him. He was the first African-American in his college fraternity, the first African-American counsel for the Senate Judiciary Committee, and the list goes on. Ron was a trailblazer and an eternal optimist. He saw no mountain that couldn't be climbed or moved or conquered. The Nation has lost a great leader and statesman. I join Ron's many colleagues and friends not in mourning his death, but in celebrating his life, his accomplishments, his style, and his spirit. Ronald H. Brown will be missed, but never forgotten.

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, today I would like to continue the discussion about taxes, let us talk about taxes and expenditures and budgets. But before we do that, there were some tributes by my colleagues to Ron Brown, and I would like to add my tribute to that number. And I think that the chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus, the gentleman from New Jersey [Mr. Payne], is here for that purpose, too. I yield to the gentleman from Virginia [Mr. Payne] for his statement on Ron Brown, and then I will follow with my statement on Ron Brown and then go on with the rest of the discussion. tribute to ron brown

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, I would like to add my voice to the numerous voices that have been raised to pay tribute to Ron Brown. Ron Brown, the mentor for all public servants, he could teach us all a great deal. I will enter my statement in its entirety into the Record, but I would like to read the statement and comment on it. Ron Brown was a renaissance politician. He was a jack-of-all-trades who mastered all the trades in politics. He was a mentor for seasoned professional politicians, and he was qualified to tutor most of us. Ron used his considerable influence and charm to become an extraordinary fund raiser for the Democratic Party. From the complex job of raising money to the details of election day engineering, Ron performed with great enthusiasm. Ron Brown was the kind of person who could raise funds, and I admire him most for that. He probably had a problem like everybody else but he plunged into the process of raising funds and did a great job of that. There are some people who do fundraising very well, but they are not good at strategy. They are not good at tactics. They do not have certain other qualities. But in addition to being able to raise funds, which we all admired him for, Ron Brown had the talents that went across the entire spectrum in terms of skills that are needed in public life. I first met Ron Brown in Chicago while campaigning for Harold Washington for mayor of Chicago. Former majority whip Bill Gray, Ron, and I were in a car on a tour through the public housing projects on Chicago's south side. We had been assigned that area to campaign. At that time Ron was working with a well-known, prestigious, and powerful law firm in Washington. However, on that day it was simply Ron, the lawyer, friend, campaigning for a fellow democrat. We went into huge, tall, cold, concrete buildings and walked on floors which seemed to be completely out of this world. The deterioration and the garbage inside the halls were unbelievable, even to a poor boy like me, whose father has never earned more than the minimum wage. I had lived in some of the poorest neighborhoods in Memphis, TN, and I had worked in some of the poorest neighborhoods in New York. but never had I seen such despair. The only glimmer of light I saw in those high-rise urban tunnels that day were the Harold Washington posters that the residents waved at us when they saw our familiar signs. We had connected at that point with the most depressed among us. As my eyes met Ron's eyes, he broke into his signature smile. This is what politics has got to be all about, he said, as we plunged into the crowd of outstretched hands and marched through the halls reminding folks that tomorrow was the day to go out and elect the first African- American mayor of Chicago. Ron Brown was the unifying driving force behind the most successful and conflict-free convention the Democrats have had in nearly two decades. Ron was a star who kept his poise. He kept peace among the many party factions and made the Democratic National Committee an effective force to be reckoned with in politics. Ron Brown was a masterful strategist who began his tenure as party chairman with several special election victories despite great obstacles. He was a great communicator, and he was a great cheerleader who also understood the nuts and bolts of winning campaigns. Seldom in America does one man so gracefully transcend the racial chasm as Ron Brown did, and in his journey he deeply touched the heart and soul of a Nation. As our Secretary of Commerce, he was our corporate ambassador to the world. As the chairman of the splintered, fractured Democratic Party, he was the glue that held it together, and in so doing he delivered the White House and became the most beloved chairman in history. Ron Brown was undaunted and unfazed by challenges. Being a first was not unusual for him. He was the first African-American in his college fraternity, the first African-American counsel for the Senate Judiciary Committee, and the list goes on and on. Ron was a trailblazer and an eternal optimist. He saw no mountain that could not be climbed or moved or conquered. The nation has lost a great leader and statesman. I join Ron's many colleagues and friends, not in mourning his death, but in celebrating his life, his accomplishments, his style and spirit. Ron Brown will be missed, but Ron Brown will never be forgotten. Ron Brown was an ambassador for corporate America. Ron Brown was about the business of expanding the markets of America across the globe. Ron Brown understood that a prosperous America was an America that would generate the revenues needed to do the things that had to be done in our country for all Americans. At this point in our year, April 16, it is a day after tax day. April 15 is a dreaded day by most Americans. My colleagues who preceded me in this special order before talked about taxes and the need to lower taxes for American families, and although my colleagues who have spoken before were all Republicans, I want to go on record and have the whole world hear that I agree 100 percent with my Republican colleagues. We need to lower taxes for families and individuals in the United States. We need to lower taxes, and I have talked about that on many occasions here. The problem is that we are taxing families and individuals too harshly. Families and individuals are paying too much because corporations are paying too little. In 1943, the corporations were paying almost 40 percent of the total income tax burden in this country, 27 percent by individuals and families, and almost 40 percent by corporations in 1943. By 1983, the amount of money being paid by corporations under Ronald Reagan's administration fell as low as 4 percent, 4 percent, while individual taxes went up to 48 percent. The share of income taxes paid by families and individuals went as high as 48 percent, while the share for corporations went down as low as 4 percent in 1983. Today we still have a gross inequity. The share of taxes paid by corporations, income taxes, is only 11.4 percent, while the share paid by individuals and families is four times that amount, 44 percent. So I agree with my Republican colleagues. I only regret that they spent so much time talking without confronting a few very basic truths. The basic truth that they refuse to come to grips with is that the corporations who represent the energies in America that are making the greatest amount of money; prosperity has been good to corporations because corporations have known how to take advantage of technological progress. They have taken advantage of all the research and development that has gone forth under the aegis of the taxpayers. Taxpayers are the ones who have paid for the research and development for computers for radar. Taxpayers are the ones who have led to many who finance transistor research and miniaturization, telecommunications of all kinds. Taxpayers of America have been the driving force behind this. Corporations have known how to organize, take advantage of this and produce products. So our economy is booming on Wall Street, and corporations are making a great deal of money. And nobody regrets that at all. We applaud that. The corporations should be paying a greater share of the taxes, and, as we move past income tax day, April 15, Americans should think very seriously about the inequities, the imbalance in the share of taxes paid by corporations verusus individuals. Yes, we need a tax cut. My colleagues before who were speaking said they spoke to crowds and asked people do you think you are paying enough taxes, and nobody raised their hands and said, yes, I am paying enough. I would agree. I do not--yes, I am paying too much. I mean do you think you pay too much tax? Everybody raise their hand and say, yes, I pay too much. I would agree I am paying too much. Most families and individuals are paying too much, in my opinion. In order to raise the revenue needed to run this country, we need to have a more equal balance in terms of corporations paying their fair share. We need to have some of the corporate welfare programs taken away. The other side of it is reducing the expenditures. You know, Federal taxes also, we must understand, spread the wealth in America, and I think my colleagues on the other side who talk at length about taxes did not bother to mention the fact that Federal taxation polices represent some of the greatest generosity in America. Some of the spirit of being my brother's keeper, especially in the case of the east coast, especially even more so in the case of New Yorkers on the east coast; you know, the tradition has been that the wealth first accumulated on the east coast, and Franklin Roosevelt and his tax policies were such that he increased the taxes of people who had the money, most of them residing on the east coast and the Rust Belt States, they call them now, industrialized States. The money was there, and by initiating Federal programs like the Social Security Program and other Federal programs, Rural Electrification Program and a number of other programs that had to be paid for, he can only pay for them with taxes raised on the east coast and in the industrial States where they had the money, and that tradition has continued until today. New York was one of the States that had to pay out large amounts of money in order to help take care of the needs of the rest of the country, and so it is even until now on many occasions I have stood here and talked about the fact that New York for the last 20 years, as a State, has paid into the Federal Treasury more money than it has received back from the Federal Government in terms of aid. Federal aid going to New York has always been lower than it has been, than the amount of money that New Yorkers have paid in taxes. New York State in 1994 paid $18.9 billion more into the Federal Treasury than they got back in terms of Federal aid. Before that, in 1993 New York paid $23 billion more in Federal taxes than New York State got back in Federal aid. Now, many people have asked me, well, you know, what are you talking about, where do you get these outrageous figures, where they come from, and I have quoted before, and I just brought back the booklet today, a study that is done every year. It is called ``The Federal Budget and the States,'' and this study is done every year. It documents everything that I have said in terms of some States are donor States and some States are recipient States. The Federal budgets in the fiscal year 1994 is what I am holding in my hand. Its introduction is by Daniel Patrick Moynihan because Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan of the State of New York has pioneered and highlighted these great inequities for many years. This study, this report, was done by Monica E. Fryer and Herman B. Leonard, and it is published by the Taubman Center for State and Local Government at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. So the study is available for anybody who wants to see it. There are many fascinating facts beyond the fact that New York State consistently has paid more in taxes than it has received back. They have looked at aid in terms of salaries of military personnel who live in a given State, they looked at aid in terms of Medicaid and Medicare, dollars that come from the Federal Government; they looked at aid in terms of programs for job training; title I; all the aid lumped together. And they can tell you how much each State received back from the Federal Government versus what the State paid in. So New York is a big donor State. It has been that way for a long time, and I think Franklin Roosevelt clearly understood that, that Federal taxes spread the wealth, and they have spread it across to places that most of the States in the South. Practically all of the States in the South are recipient States, they get more from the Federal Government than they give back to the Federal Government. Mississippi receives $6 billion more from the Federal Government than Mississippi pays in taxes to the Federal Government. And some of the gentleman who were speaking before had better beware; if you remove the role of the Federal Government in collecting taxes and you want to leave more of it to the States, the States who will lose the most are States in the South because the States in the South combined receive $65 billion more from the Federal Government than they pay into the Federal Government. And I will repeat that because I do not want the figure to get lost: $65 billion more is received from the Federal Government than the States of the South collectively pay into the Federal Government. Georgia receives $2 billion more from the Federal Government than Georgia pays into the Federal Government in taxes. The county in the United States which receives the highest amount of money per capita is the county represented by the Speaker of the House. That county receives more money per capita than any other county in the country in terms of Federal aid. So we should beware, and when we talk about taxes let us talk about all the facts. Let us talk about the most significant facts. Yes, individuals and families are paying too much in taxes. Yes, the corporate world is not paying their fair share. They are paying too little. They are making the money, but they are paying less. If we want a tax cut, I am all in favor of a tax cut. I stand here as an acknowledged, unashamed, proud liberal, and I agree with my Republican colleagues on the other side who said that families are being taxed too much. We need a tax cut. It may begin with where President Clinton has begun in terms of a tax cut for education, to aid with tuition, a tax cut for families in terms of creating a situation with families with direct benefits, so much per child, $500. There is agreement between Republicans and Democrats on that. I think as we do it, we should look at the situation. I would understand that a tax cut should not mean that we end up cutting aid to education or cutting Medicaid. A tax cut for individuals and families means we should balance off the situation and make certain that where the money is needed, it goes there. We cannot responsibility deal with tax cuts unless we deal with the expenditure side, what is happening with respect to the budget. The budget and the waste in the budget must be dealt with also, and I have a great disagreement with my colleagues on the other side about where you ought to begin dealing with the waste. The waste is not in aid to education, the waste is not in Medicaid, although there is waste and corruption in health care programs. The real waste is in other places. I have cited some of that waste before. I have gotten some questions over the recess, and people said, ``How dare you say that the CIA has $2 billion that they did not know they had and $2 billion that are just sitting there while the deficit grows and programs are being cut''? And my answer was, ``Yes, they probably have more than $2 billion, because the public figure that has been stated, not confirmed by the CIA but not denied by the CIA, has been $2 billion. They probably have more. It was in the coffers over there, petty cash, slush fund, whatever you want to call it. Folks have challenged that. I have said I am only quoting from the New York Times and the Washington Post. There were several articles that appeared on the pages of the New York Times and the Washington Post. Many of my friends did not see them. Even some of my colleagues here in Congress, when I asked them to sign a letter to the President asking him to use that $2 billion to restore the funding for title I and for Head Start and for summer youth employment, they questioned me, ``Where did you get your figures from?'' I told them, off the front pages of the New York Times and the Washington Post. One article that appeared talked about the President firing two people who had been considered responsible for this. This was in February, on February 27, 1996: The top two managers of the National Reconnaissance Office, a secret agency that builds satellites, were dismissed today after losing track of more than $2 billion in classified money. It goes on to talk about how no audit had been done for a long time, and this agency had accumulated these funds. And $2 billion, you know, if there is $2 billion there, then the question is how many other entities, sacred cows in the government, also are sitting on funds? That popped into my head, how many others. And then, lo and behold, just a few weeks ago a report came out which said that the Federal Reserve, the Federal Reserve that is responsible for our economy, who are responsible for advising us how to run the economy most effectively and efficiently, the Federal Reserve has $3.7 billion, $3.7 billion in its slush fund. An audit by the GAO shows that the Federal Reserve has $3.7 billion in what they call the surplus account. A surplus account. Now, if that $3.7 billion was returned to the Treasury, think of how much interest we would not have to be paying on the debt. The interest on $3.7 billion worth of money would be relieved and we would not have to pay that. It could reduce the deficit by $3.7 billion, but it is sitting in the Federal Reserve coffers. It is called a surplus account. The General Accounting Office makes this statement: Although the surplus account is intended to absorb possible losses, the Federal Reserve has recorded substantial net profits for 79 consecutive years. Do Members hear what I am saying? The surplus account is kept, the Federal Reserve says, because they may have losses in their operation. It is a self-sustaining operation. They loan money, they charge interest for that, they charge money for services. They might lose money 1 year, so they say they keep the $3.7 billion around because they might lose money and they need to make that up. It is a rainy day fund for the Federal Reserve. But they have not lost any money for 79 consecutive years. ``Even though the likelihood of the system's incurring losses, exceeding its revenues, appears remote,'' I am reading from the GAO report, ``the total surplus increased 79 percent in the 1988 to 1994 period, rising from $2.1 billion to $3.7 billion.'' The Federal Reserve has $3.7 billion lying around, doing nothing, as a rainy day fund. So yes, you are paying too much taxes. You are paying too much taxes, because we do not have corporations that have carried their fair share. You also pay too much taxes because we have waste in government. When the President says and all of the leadership says, and I agree, that the era of big government is over, we have different meanings. The era of big government ought to be over. I think the government should be downsized, but the commitments of the government maybe should be increased in certain areas. But in the process of downsizing, how do you not see $3.7 billion in the Federal Reserve? Why is the search for funds only conducted in job training programs? They go looking for programs that do not operate effectively and efficiently. Why do they go looking there? Why do they go looking in the AFDC programs, Aid to Families with Dependent Children? Why do they go looking in the WIC programs? Why do they always go looking in the programs where the poorest people are served? Why do they go looking in the Medicaid program? Why do you not look first at the CIA? Why do you not look at the Federal Reserve? The head of the Federal Reserve, Mr. Greenspan, was up for reconfirmation. He has already been there for a long time, so he certainly would be derelict if he did not know about the $3.7 billion that the Federal Reserve has lying around. If he did know, then he ought to answer some questions about, ``Why is this sitting in your coffers as a rainy day fund when it could reduce the deficit?'' But I do not think he was asked those questions because he is an icon of some kind, and he is not a welfare mother. He is not on WIC. We do not treat all people equal in this Government. It is tax time, Mr. Speaker. It is tax time. We ought to all be concerned with taxes. I hope that the result of our concern with taxes will mean that we will insist on an overhaul and a total reform of our tax system. In the past I have talked about the fact that progressives and liberals have ignored the revenue side too much. We have dealt with expenditures, meeting the needs of people, meeting the needs of the environment, doing what has to be done to make certain that all Americans share in the prosperity of America. All of that is highly desirable, but we have not looked at taxation enough. We have not looked at revenue enough. Revenue is everybody's business. I propose a Commission on revenue reforms. We ought to take a look at the proposals for flat taxes. We ought to take a look at other proposals that have been offered; a consumption tax, a value-added tax. We ought to take a look at tax possibilities that exist in terms of taxing the sale of the spectrum, taxing the air above us that belongs to all the people. All of these things should be examined. This past weekend at the Omni Shoreham Hotel, a conference is being held called a Summit on the Politics of Meaning. I spent a few hours of the last 3 days at this summit. I want to congratulate the organizers of that summit, particularly Michael Lerner, who is the editor of Tikkun magazine. I would like to congratulate him for being the guiding light and the spearhead for this organization of this summit, because it brings together people from a lot of different areas who are concerned about values, and they are concerned about values and how those values and how love, compassion, can be applied to public policies. They are concerned about public policies without being necessarily concerned about which person implements those policies. They do not want to get into the dirty business, in quotas, they call it a dirty business, of electoral politics, endorsing candidates, et cetera. I do not think politics is dirty. I think electoral politics is very necessary. I think more good people need to get into electoral politics. But I agree that it is very useful to have groups and individuals who are concerned primarily about issues, and this particular summit on the politics of meaning, which was called by Michael Lerner, the editor of Tikkun, focused on how do you apply a concern for your brother, for your neighbors, in an effective manner in the present situation, when marketplace values dominate, and people talk about family values, but they really do not come to grips with the fact that too many times, the market values dominate our thinking. How do you apply compassion, how do you apply love, how do you apply concern for your fellow human being if there is a health care industrial complex taking over health care services, and if private health care providers, drug companies and insurance companies, are buying up health maintenance organizations, and health maintenance organizations are set up to make a profit, in addition to providing a service? It has been hard enough for health care providers to just provide a service, but now, in addition to delivering a service, they have to make a profit. It may be good, it may be an improvement, but we are moving so rapidly in this area that it is clear that a government health care industrial complex is about to take over, and it is not moving in a way which gives anybody else an opportunity to have developed this new emerging health care system for all the people. So how do we apply love and compassion to the problem that is confronting us? I want to just read part of Michael Lerner's call for people to come and join this summit on the politics of meaning. They brought together people from all walks of life, they brought together people from all religions. It is very interesting to see people of the Jewish religion with people who are in every denomination of the Christian religion: Unitarian Universalists, Baptists, Methodists, Catholics. I heard all kinds of people speak. I heard a lesbian minister speak. They were all there asserting the fact that human beings have hearts, and human beings, at their very best, are capable of great compassion, and human beings need to return from the values of the marketplace and assert those values of love and compassion in their daily lives and in public policy development. It was quite a summit. It is closing out tonight. I just want to read a few sections from the call for the summit, in tribute to what Michael Lerner and his colleagues have done. I am quoting Michael Lerner: Like many people, I am distressed at the deep ethical and spiritual crisis facing this country. The attempts to dismantle social support for the poor without setting up anything else in its place is only the latest stage of the continued erosion of fundamental human values. It is not clear that the Democrats have adequately grasped why people have turned to the right. In addition to my normal job as editor of Tikkun Magazine, I am a psychotherapist, and for 10 years I did extensive research leading 12-week groups for middle-income working class people, focused in part on why they were turning to the Right. What I found was this. People turn to the Right because it speaks, although in a distorted way, to the hunger people have for meaning and higher purpose. The fundamental problem with liberal and progressive forces is that they don't understand this hunger for meaning, and so they come up with programs and policies which are narrowly technocratic and don't speak to the soul. I am quoting from Michael Lerner, the convener of the summit on the politics of meaning. I continue to quote: Faced with a society whose dominant ethos is selfishness and cynicism, many people conclude that the best way to protect themselves is to narrow their ``circles of caring'' to themselves and their immediate families and narrowly- defined communities. My research suggested that many people actually wish for a very different kind of society, one based on Biblical values of love, justice, and mutual recognition, the ability to see others, and be seen oneself, as an embodiment of the image of God. Yet everyday in the world of work people are rewarded for precisely the opposite, the ability to see others as objects, the supposed commonsense that ``looking out for No. 1'' is the only reasonably way to live, and the ethos of selfishness, materialism, and cynicism. Continuing to quote Michael Lerner: Ironically, it is this very ethos, learned in the world of work, which becomes the central source of people's unhappiness in personal life. Surrounded by others who live by that very same ethos, people increasingly come to feel that everyone is only out for themselves, and that they had better do the same. A ``rip-off mentality'' begins to pervade the social order, and people increasingly come to feel frightened, alone, and cynical about others. No wonder that it becomes hard to hear those who call upon them to ``love thy neighbor,'' when doing so seems so counterintuitive to the ``real world.'' There is no way to change this without a frontal assault on the ethos of selfishness, materialism, and cynicism in our society, and that is precisely what the politics of meaning advocated by the Foundation for Ethics and Meaning attempts to do. The goal of the politics of meaning is to ``switch the bottom line'' in American society away from measuring productivity or efficiency primarily in terms of the degree to which institutions maximize wealth or power to a new criteria: the degree to which an institution helps to foster ethically, spiritually, and ecologically sensitive human beings capable of sustaining long-term committed loving relationships. I continue to quote Michael Lerner: This may all sound very visionary and far-off, but in fact it is actually far more practical short-term politics than the various attempts to protect this or that item in the budget at a time when the dominant climate is calling for dramatic budget and tax reductions. It is far more likely that large sections of the American public will respond to an alternative vision to the conservative one that is increasingly dominating both parties than to a nit-picking approach that accepts the dominant assumptions and seeks to minimanage how it is implemented. It is not that these details are totally unimportant, and the response of many Americans to Clinton's willingness to stand up to the Republicans gives us some indication of the power his presidency might have had had he been willing to fight for something at other points along the way. But the basic problem is that Clinton is not putting forward a different set of principles, and eventually most people get weary of staying tuned to the details of implementation of assumptions that both sides seem to share. ``The first stage'' of a strategy to change this ``is to convene a gathering of people who may be interested in becoming the core group for a politics of meaning strategy. This is the `ground floor' meeting. We are calling it the national Summit on Ethics and Meaning at the Omni Shoreham Hotel in Washington, D.C. April 14-16, 1996. This summit will bring together a wide variety of people who wish to challenge the materialism and selfishness in American society, but who have previously not thought of themselves as part of a political movement to do so. The Summit will serve a dual function. On the one hand, it will be an opportunity to explore the ideas of a politics of meaning in some detail,'' to refine the politics of meaning ideas,'' and to refine the strategy around them. I end the quotation from the call put out by Michael Lerner for the Politics of Meaning Summit, and I mentioned that because I found the summit very inspiring. They expected 600 people to show up, to turn out for the summit and they got 1800 instead of 600. There is a hunger for meaning and there is a hunger for values. There is a hunger for ways to express compassion and love in the making of public policies, and I think that the summit on the Politics of Meaning is a great beginning in the movement in this direction. I say all of this because in the present budget battles, we talk about taxes and I said before when you talk about taxes and the need for taxes, taxes are kind of a necessary evil. If you are going to deal with a fairer taxation system, then we should get on with the business of trying to make certain that corporations pay their fair share, because corporations are entities that are now making large amounts of money and they can afford to pay that share. In the absence of fairness, in the absence of an approach which reaches out to those who can afford to produce the revenue and get the adequate amounts of revenue, we have a situation where an attempt is being made to make up for what the corporations are not paying, their fair share, by cutting the expenditures for programs that help the people who need the most help. This has produced a crisis in this country. There is a crisis in neighborhoods like the neighborhoods that I represent because people are very much concerned and they are very much appropriately alarmed by the speed at which certain programs that have existed for the last 30 years or 40 years are being taken away. Medicare and Medicaid are merely 30 years old. Medicaid and Medicare are now being threatened. The entitlement for Medicaid is under a great threat because the governors of all the States, both Democratic governors and Republican governors met and they decided that the entitlement for Medicaid should be removed, that the Federal Government should no longer assume the responsibility for providing health care to everybody who is poor enough to meet a means test which says that they are eligible to have the health care that they need when they meet it. The States will not assume that responsibility of providing health care to everybody who needs it when they need it. The States will only spend as much as they have. They want a block grant. They want the Federal Government to give them the money in a block grant and they will decide how to spend the money, they will decide who is eligible for it, and when the money runs out, they have no vehicle. Most States operate on balanced budgets. They must not spend any more than their revenues take in. When they run out of money, then if there are any sick people or any people who need to go into nursing homes because two-thirds of the money that Medicaid spends provides nursing homes for people who cannot afford their own nursing home expenses. Many people who are middle class and they are on Medicare, when they get very ill and they are forced to spend large amounts of money beyond what their insurance provides, they end up being poor by the time they are required to go into a nursing home because their health has degenerated. When they are required to go into nursing homes, they have no more funds, so it is Medicaid that picks up the cost. Two-thirds of the money spent by Medicaid goes to pay for nursing homes for elderly people. So we have a situation where people are alarmed because that is threatened. Medicaid has been here now for 30 years. Medicaid is the only step we have taken in this country toward universal health care. All of the other industrialized nations except South Africa have some form of universal health care, health care for every citizen who needs it. But we do not have it. Medicaid represented a step in that direction. If they take away the entitlement for Medicaid, which is very much a possibility, right now here in Washington, if they take away that entitlement, we are in serious trouble. We have not only lost a service that is a vital need for the survival of many Americans, we have also taken an ideological step backwards. We will never have universal health care if we allow that retreat to take place. So people are concerned that this crisis has been created and we are acting as if the country is going to go broke if we do not have drastic cuts in public housing money, drastic cuts in education, drastic cuts in Medicaid, Medicare, drastic cuts in job training programs. That is what the Republican majority has done in the last 15 months. They have generated an atmosphere of crisis. That atmosphere of crisis is being used as an excuse to cut the safety net programs that have been built up since World War II and really started before that with President Roosevelt's New Deal. They are going to take all that away. At the same time they are going to spend large amounts of money on new fighter plane systems, on a new antimissile system and continue to spend large amounts of money on the defense budget. All of this is a crisis that they have created and it is very interesting to note some of the effects of that crisis. Some of the effects is that the people in our communities instead of understanding the need to rise up and fight this kind of artificially created crisis and to fight the people who have created the crisis, they are turning on themselves. In health care we have situations where hospitals in New York City are being proposed to be sold. Some are being proposed for leasing. One hospital that is a State institution primarily, Kings Borough Hospital in my district, has been told they will shut down by August. They are going to shut the hospital down, which is primarily a hospital for the mentally ill. In this process, we find some other hospitals in the area nearby willing to speed up the process of closing their fellow institution by agreeing to take over various parts of their activities, even when it is not feasible. Brooklyn is a community with 2.5 million people. Brooklyn if it were a city would be the sixth or seventh largest city in the country. But in Brooklyn there is one mental hospital of this kind. So 2.5 million people need that hospital. We do not need to be told we can travel somewhere else. We have the population concentration. We need it. The institution should not help the Republican governor balance his budget on the backs of the mentally ill by taking parts of the functions of this hospital. So I have asked all the hospitals to take an anticannibalism pledge, don't cannibalize the institution, and I have asked other hospitals in other parts of the city, as we fight to maintain decent health care in the communities that need health care most, let us not cooperate with the mayor, the Republican mayor who wants to sell hospitals and lease hospitals, let us not cooperate by cannibalizing each other. Hospitals should not cannibalize each other. They should take a pledge that New York City, with 8 million people, needs all of its hospitals. If it does not need all of the beds, then we do not have to have all the beds. We can restructure health care in various ways. But we basically need all the hospitals. And we can provide health care for people who are from outside the city. An accumulation of the best experts in the medical fields has taken place in that city and health care should be seen as an industry as well as a service, and that industry can serve areas from outside the city as well as inside the city. So the cannibalism should not take place. I caution every American who is wary and concerned and even panicked by the budget cuts that have been generated by the Republican majority not to participate in cannibalization. I have seen examples of it in the area of education recently. There are people who want to see special education programs closed down or drastically reduced because they want more money for the regular education program. Well, the regular education programs and the people who advocate them, as we all do, the regular education programs should confront the people who have created the crisis. We do not need cuts in title I. We do not need cuts in the teacher training programs. We do not need those cuts. We need instead the kinds of increases for education that President Clinton has proposed. Education is ranked very high in the polls by Americans every time polls are taken. So why are we cutting back on the education budget and why are people in the education community willing to engage in cannibalism? Don't try to eat the special education programs. Let us fight for more funds, both for special education programs and for title I programs and for any other programs that are needed. Let us fight the State governments, let us fight the city governments, let us fight the Federal Government to get the fair share of the allocated dollars for education. The cannibalization of special education is under way now. There is a bill that is being introduced by the Republican majority in the community that I serve on, and they are trying to take advantage of the fact that shortsighted people out there are moving to try to rush into a shutdown of special education programs because they cost more than other education programs do and my answer to them is let us all put our heads together with reason and some hard examination and scrutiny, and let us try to come up with the best possible program we can come up with. Let us make cuts of waste where it exists. Let us not cannibalize education programs. Let us not destroy good special education programs. Across the country, I hope that the people in the community of people with disabilities understand the kind of hostility that has been generated by this Republican majority here in the House of Representatives toward all programs for people with disabilities. What is happening to the special education programs right now and the legislation is indicative of the kind of hostility that is shown by the Republican majority. We have to meet that hostility with a demand that adequate amounts of money be made available for all education. Let us celebrate today, the fact that according to reports that have appeared in a number of places, it has not been voted on, on the floor yet, but the cuts in title I are no more. Title I will not be cut in this budget, I am told. This year's budget will be at the same level as last year's budget. Let us celebrate, all of the people out there who have been so anguished by the assault on education programs, know that we have fought the good fight. We have kept our promise and stopped the extremists from rolling over us and the extremists have decided to retreat. There will be no cut in title I. Title I will be kept at the same level as last year. There will be no cut in Head Start. Let us celebrate. Let us celebrate the fact that we have kept the faith. We have stopped the extremists. There will be no cut in Head Start in this annual budget. Let us celebrate the fact that the money is now almost assured for the Summer Youth Employment Program. It is less than it should be, but it is about almost at the same level as last year, last summer. Let us celebrate, a few weeks ago, there was zero in the budget and no talk of remedying that problem. So let us celebrate what the great fight has proposed. Let us celebrate the fact that by fighting, by standing up, Democrats have kept their promise of stopping the extremism. Extremism, the manufactured crisis, the artificial crisis, the unreal crisis created by an extreme majority in this Congress, has not prevailed in the area of education. So let there be no more cannibalization. Let all the people in the education world, the superintendents, the State education commissioners, the principals, let us stop sharpening our knives for the funds that may be available if drastic cuts are made in special education programs. We do not need to do things which we would be ashamed of in a few years. We do not need the atrocities of throwing children out of classes because of the fact that they are disruptive, we have not been able to deal with it. But we mainly want to use that as an excuse to cut down on the number of children in special education programs. We do not want to abandon the free-education doctrine that has prevailed for so many years. We do not want to abandon the right of parents to follow a due process procedure and to have legal assistance in doing that in going through that process. We do not want to cannibalize special education programs any more than we want to watch health care programs cannibalized also. On May 19, in New York City, we have declared that it is Hospital Support Sunday, Sunday, May 19. On that Sunday, we are trying to bring out as many people as possible to show that everybody cares about health care. It is not just the unions who have people who work in the hospitals. It is not only the doctors and the professional staff who have a vested interest in the hospitals. But it is everybody. It is the patients, it is the community, the people surrounding the hospital. It is everybody who cares about hospitals in New York City. They want to come out. Mr. Speaker, we want to have a set of demands established. The No. 1 demand is that every process of change in the hospital system in New York, whether it involves HMO's or hospitals or clinics, all of those things should be frozen and let the people come forward to participate. We want a citizens' committee instead of cannibalization to make up for what is being cut. We want the people to participate in the restructuring and in the fight to get additional funds where they are needed. New York is often criticized for spending more money on Medicare and Medicaid than other States. But that same New York, as said before, gives to the Federal Government $1.9 billion more than it gets back. In 1994, we gave $1.9 billion more than we got back. In 1993, we gave $23 billion more in taxes to the Federal Government than we got back. If we were to let New York have its own money, leave the taxes that we pay to the Federal Government in New York, we could have decent health care. We could have lots of other programs. We could have adequate funding for our colleges and our universities, adequate funding for our schools. We can do a lot with $1.9 billion that does not go somewhere else across the Nation. That generosity once was a proud gesture for New Yorkers. But we have been spat upon so much and criticized so much, there is so much ingratitude throughout the Nation, especially in the recipient States, that we do not want to continue that any longer. We would like to find a way to have revenue justice. Let the revenues come back. Let us have some kind of formula where States that year after year pay more into the Federal coffers in taxes than they get back would receive some kind of rebate to go back into their own treasury to meet the needs of their own people. We will not have people so distressed and so distraught that they are stampeded into cannibalizing institutions and taking valuable resources from one much-needed institution in order to put it over here to another. Mr. Speaker, teachers, principals, commissioners, administrators should not indulge in that in education. Doctors, hospital administrators should not indulge in that kind of practice in the area of health care. We do not need to eat each other. Instead we should fight for a fair share of the resources that are available, and we should fight to make more resources available by having the corporations pay their fair share of the taxes. We started the discussion with taxes. Let us close it out with a discussion of taxes. I have an article here, April 15, 1996, Mr. Robert D. Novak. I do not usually quote Mr. Novak. The article is entitled GOP Deficit Trap. In this article, Mr. Novak says that it appears from reports from the Congressional Budget Office that we will have a balanced budget by the year 2002, without all of these drastic cuts that are being made and proposed by the Republican majority. It appears that the deficit can be erased without one dime from entitlements. Members do not have to take one dime from social security, Medicare and Medicaid alike. That is what Mr. Robert D. Novak said, who is not a proud liberal on my end of the spectrum. He is on the other end of the spectrum. And Mr. Novak goes on to talk about what he calls a GOP deficit trap. He says the GOP has been, unfortunately, obsessed with ending the deficit and balancing the budget. They made a great mistake. We are going to be able to balance the budget and have funds for everybody on a reasonable basis without having to make the Herculean, drastic kind of cuts being proposed. So I end by saying yesterday was tax day. Today every American should take it very seriously. Take a harsh look at your Government. Examine how we are being taxed, how unjust the tax system is, how uneven the tax system is, how the corporations are paying only 11 percent while individuals are paying 44 percent, four times as much as the corporations are paying. That is part of the answer. The other part of the answer is; where is the waste? Where do these expenditures need to be cut? Go look in the coffers of the CIA. They have $2 billion in a slush fund, a petty cash fund. Go look in the coffers of the Federal Reserve. They have $3.7 billion. Then they are jamming some of these other agencies. We better take a look at a lot of the others, the space agency, the nuclear commission. All of these icons of Government need to be closely examined to see where is our money. The Department of Agriculture, which gives away money, has forgiven $12 billion in debts to farmers, for Farmers Home Loan mortgages. Mr. Speaker, it is tax time. It is a time we take seriously where the revenues come from and where the expenditures go. Every American ought to get involved. They ought to get involved with compassion and love and concern for their fellow man. Mr. Speaker, I include Mr. Novak's article of April 15, 1996, for the Record: [From the Washington Post, Apr. 15, 1996] GOP Deficit Trap (By Robert D. Novak) As Republican congressional leaders on March 28 were poised to flee Washington for a two-week Easter break, they failed to notice a ``preliminary report'' on the government's long- term fiscal outlook prepared by their own Congressional Budget Office (CBO). But President Clinton's eagle-eyed number crunchers quickly perused it and could scarcely contain their delight. The report estimated the federal budget deficit for the year 2002 down to $107 billion--miraculously, $37 billion lower than the CBO number just three months earlier. Thus, the president and the Republicans are but a short, easy hop away from balancing the budget in seven years as measured by the CBO, as they each have agreed to attempt. Good news? for Clinton, yes. For the Republicans, no. The hop to budget balance is too short and too easy. By this route, the deficit can be erased without one dime from entitlements--Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and the like--whose immense growth could eventually ruin the economy. What's more, the deficit would be eliminated without downsizing the present massive structure of the federal government or relieving the onerous tax burden. The Republicans are in a deficit trap. In their first experience controlling Congress in 40 years, they have gradually lost emphasis on revolutionary change in government by obsessing on the deficit. The president is on the brink of a major victory--achieving a zero deficit without significantly altering the federal leviathan and without providing real tax relief. This became clear to Clinton's budget experts when they read the CBO's March 28 report forecasting the effects of a freeze at 1996 dollar levels of ``discretionary'' spending-- amounts affected by the congressional appropriations process, as contrasted with entitlements. The 2002 deficit estimate of $107 billion was reduced from the $144 billion in CBO's December 1995 update. Its reason: ``largely'' the piecemeal reductions in appropriations painstakingly passed by Congress that were not vetoed by Clinton. Assumed lower interest rates that would result from a balanced budget also were factored in. The president's aides immediately telephoned their Republican counterparts in Congress, pointing out the new numbers and proposing: Let's get together now and make a seven-year budget deal! The components of such a deal are not hard to envision: the small reductions in Medicare and Medicaid growth already proposed by Clinton, plus a few more cuts in discretionary spending. The package might also include a modest tax reduction (with some capital gains cuts) drafted by the Joint Tax Committee and tentatively endorsed by administration officials. But Capitol Hill was empty of Republican policy-makers for the last two weeks, and what the White House was proposing was above the pay grade of GOP staffers still there. Such a budget deal would have far-reaching effects on the presidential election. Deficit reduction, budget-balancing and even tax reduction would be neutralized as issues for Republicans. Senate Budget Committee Chairman Pete Domenici, campaigning for reelection in New Mexico, has been informed. So has Sheila Burke, chief of staff for Senate Majority Leader Robert J. Dole. House and Senate GOP budget staffers met last week. But as Congress reconvenes this week, it is safe to say that there is no Republican policy for dealing with these numbers. In fact, only Bob Dole is in a position to make this decision now that he is the party's prospective presidential nominee. In his long-accustomed role as a self-described ``doer'' rather than a ``talker,'' the decision would be easy for Dole: Make the deal and accept the congratulatory signing pen from Bill Clinton at the Rose Garden. It is more difficult now that he must confront Clinton in a broader arena. He must determine whether he will rule out a quick budget agreement and insist that the deficit is not everything and that it is essential to reduce entitlements and taxes for the sake of the economy. He might even propose a package that adjusts the Consumer Price Index in a way that would cut entitlement payments but also increase tax payments, so that it would have to be accompanied by significant tax reductions. This course might rescue the Republicans from the deficit trap constructed by congressional leaders, including Bob Dole.

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, the Dingell-Kennedy-Kassebaum substitute is a modest but significant step forward for health care. I rise in support of the substitute. It is good that we are here addressing problems such as portability or increased deductibility for small businesses and preexisting condition discrimination. These small steps forward are important, but the American people should not be misled. The noble goal of universal health care, health care for all Americans, is not being discussed tonight. The administration bill in the 103d Congress was striving to help Americans join the other civilized, industrialized nations and provide health care for the 43 million Americans who are not covered with any health care plan. This bill moves us no closer to health care for everybody. Looming over all of us in our present health care system is the dangerous threat to the Medicaid entitlement. That is not being discussed, but the Medicaid entitlement is America's beachhead for universal health care. Even if we pass the highly desirable Kennedy-Kassebaum-Dingell substitute, we will be taking a giant step backward if we throw away the Medicaid entitlement within a few weeks. The American people must not be swindled. Two actions are needed. Tonight we have to pass the substitute, and we also have to make certain that in the future, the next few weeks, we deny the Governors, the majority Republicans in this body, the opportunity to roll back the clock to destroy 30 years of good health care by eliminating the Medicaid entitlement. The Medicaid entitlement is absolutely necessary for the 43 million Americans who are not covered. The hope for those 43 million lies in keeping the Medicaid entitlement and expanding it. This was the noble goal of the administration's bill in the 103d Congress. It was very difficult because they were looking to close that gap. It was very difficult because the 103d Congress proposal by the administration was attempting to have America join the other civilized industrialized nations for universal health care.

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, I move that the House do now adjourn.

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, I rise in vehement opposition to the Gun Crime Enforcement and Second Amendment Restoration Act, H.R. 125. This bill is an abominable action that is a Republican assault on sane gun control laws. It is disgustingly apparent that H.R. 125 is motivated by the Republican juggernaut bank-rolled by the NRA. H.R. 125 would repeal current law which prohibits the possession, manufacture, and transfer of many of the most egregious man-hunting weapons that proliferate American communities--TEC-9, Colt AR-15, and TEC-22. In a country where there is one gun per adult already in circulation--or 210 million guns--this repeal would be deadly. Only in America is the safety of children, women, men, and families sacrificed for political, as well as economic profit. Most other industrialized countries have a virtual ban on handgun sales, which account for the vast difference in homicide rates between the United States and other nations. In 1990, handguns killed only 22 people in Great Britain, 13 in Sweden, 91 in Switzerland, 87 in Japan, 10 in Australia, and 68 in Canada. The United States infamous handgun fatalities statistic totaled 10,567. Facts and compassion do not drive this Republican Congress. We should not be surprised by yet another affront to human decency and protection. Ironically, under this bill, the hunters will have their way. They will now be able to hunt with Uzi's and street sweepers. As ridiculous as this sounds, it is ridiculous to vote for H.R. 125. I strongly encourage my colleagues in the other chamber of Congress to oppose this travesty.

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, we are concluding today's session, the session for the week, going home. And it has been a very busy week. I will not say it has been a very fruitful week but certainly we have been very busy. I am looking forward to going home and talking to my constituents for 12 hours in an all night teach-in that I will be holding at the Borough of Manhattan Community College from 7 p.m. Saturday night to 7 a.m. Sunday morning. We are having this all night teach-in because there is just not enough time to talk about all of the things that need to be talked about in this very critical period in the life of our Nation. There are forces moving very rapidly and overnight they want to remake America. The Speaker of the House has said that politics is war without blood and that he wants to remake America, and we are trying to remake America in a very short period of time. The fallout is hurting a lot of people. In New York State and New York City it seems that the Governor and the mayor want to get ahead of the Republican majority here in Congress. They are have instituted certain cruel harassing programs that are worse than anything we have yet passed here in this House. So our people need to know a whole lot about what is going on. We need to talk about just exactly what is happening, and there is not enough time to do it in a regular day. Mr. Speaker, also, if we want to get people together who are experts and can throw some light on this subject, they are too busy, they cannot stay long or, if we have an opportunity to talk, the amount of time available is too little. So I will have a marathon teach-in, all night long, 12 hours. We are going to talk about the fiscal future of New York City, the fiscal future of New York City. The discussion begins with a discussion of what is happening here in Washington because the fiscal future of New York City is inextricably interwoven with the policies that are generated here in Washington, our Capital. I am going to start by talking about the fact that New York City is often discussed on the floor of the House of Representatives. People often talk about New York City and New York State. It is the favorite target of the Speaker of the House. Speaker Gingrich often refers to New York State and New York City as a welfare State and a welfare city. For that reason, the people of New York need to understand the perspective of our relationship with Washington better. We are called a welfare State, welfare city. We are often accused of draining, being a drain on the Nation, and yet New York City pays taxes to the tune of $9 billion more into the Federal Government than it received back in 1994. New York City, the city alone, paid taxes of $9 billion more to the Federal Government than it received back from the Federal Government in various forms of aid. In that same year, 1994, New York State paid $18.9 billion more. The total of New York State, the city and all the other parts of New York State, paid $18.9 billion more to the Federal Government than we received back from the Federal Government. The year before that, in 1993, New York State paid $23 billion more to the Federal Government than we received back from the Federal Government. So New Yorkers need to know in this all-night teach-in we are going to start by talking about the fact that our city is not bankrupt. Our city is not broke. Our State is not bankrupt. Our State is not broke. Mr. Speaker, it is baffling. We do not quite understand why Members on the floor of the House of Representatives like to single out New York City. New York City is often singled out, and New York State, for its high expenditures on Medicare and Medicaid. Well, after we take away our high expenditures for Medicare and Medicaid, which are the highest in the country, I admit that. I can think of no more noble way to expend public funds than by taking care of the sick, the infirm, the elderly in nursing homes. That is a noble way to expend funds. Yes, if there is waste, we want to get rid of the waste. If there is corruption, we want to get rid of the corruption. We do not have any money to spend for anything except the intended purposes. But even if we take away the high expenditures for Medicare and Medicaid, New York City is still paying more and New York State is still paying more to the Federal Government than they are getting back from the Federal Government. Stop and seriously consider it. According to the formulas in the way things are arranged here in Washington, New Yorkers, New York City people have to pay for 25 percent of their Medicare costs, and then again the State pays another 25 percent, which means that New York State pays 50 percent of its Medicare costs while Mississippi only pays a small fraction of its Medicare costs. Most of it is paid by the Federal Government, and other Southern States pay only a small fraction of their total Medicare and Medicaid costs. The rest is paid for by the Federal Government. The result of all this is that in 1994, the Southern States combined--I mention the Southern States because often the Blue Dogs and the Republicans and various people are the ones who are criticizing New York. Certainly the Speaker of the House is from Georgia and he is a major critic of New York. The Southern States combined receive $625 billion more from the Federal Government in terms of aid than they pay in to the Federal Government. Mr. Speaker, Mississippi gets the highest amount. In 1994, Mississippi got $6 billion more from the Federal Government than the people of Mississippi paid in taxes to the Federal Government. In Georgia, in 1994, the people got $2 billion more from the Federal Government than the people of Georgia paid to the Federal Government. The county in the country, in all of the United States of America, the one county which received the highest per capita in Federal aid, the highest amount of money in Federal aid was the county represented by the Speaker of the House. Speaker Gingrich's county received more money per person from the Federal Government than any other county in the United States of America. So why is New York City constantly being lambasted? Why is New York State constantly being lambasted? I suppose we should call upon some psychologists and students of human nature because not only was it the case in 1994, when New York paid $18.9 billion more to the Federal Government than it received in Federal aid, but in 1993, we paid $23 billion more to the Federal Government than we received in Federal aid. But this has been the case for the last 20 years. The last 20 years, New York State has consistently paid more into the Federal Government than it has received from the Federal Government. Why do the States that are recipients of the money who always pay less to the Federal Government than they receive become the critics of New York? That is a challenging study of human nature. Why are we kicked in the pants and why are we spat upon because of our generosity? If we were to have complete States' rights as some Members are proclaiming economic States' rights, and if everything was block granted and the State was left on its own, New York would have no budget problems. If we had the $18.9 billion from 1994, and probably 1995 will show a similar pattern, if we had the money that we pay into the Federal Government, which is so much greater than we get from the Federal Government, we could balance our budgets. We could take care of all our problems. In my all-night teach-in, I want to let New Yorkers know this. I am going to let the people who live in my district know this, constituents know this, because they are assuming a posture of fatalism. Too many people, too many people, those who are using the day care centers and do not find that they are able to find places anymore, those who are being laid off in various city departments, those who are being denied public assistance, Aid to Families with Dependent Children, harassed, too many people have given up already, and they say that the city cannot do any better. It is not a matter of an administration which is unduly harassing people who need Aid to Families with Dependent Children. It is a matter of the situation is such that the city cannot do any better. The city is almost broke. It is about to go bankrupt. It cannot do any better. The all-night teach-in is designed to let people know this is not true, that New York City is a wealthy State, New York State is a wealthy State, and there are many ways we can do better. So I am looking forward to this all-night teach-in because it will give us a chance to have the kind of dialog necessary in this critical period when there are forces moving to remake America. They want to overnight change the way America is. They want a revolution. Revolutions are always dangerous because the people who are the strongest are sometimes the dumbest, and the people who are the strongest and the dumbest can do a lot of damage before you can get them back under control. It has been a busy week, and we have seen some of this dumbness played out here in Washington. Some of the stupidest are here in Washington. At this very moment, the 32,000 young people in New York City who got jobs last summer in the Summer Youth Employment Program do not know whether they are going to be able to get jobs this time because it is a federally funded program. Last year, 32,000 young people were employed in the Summer Youth Employment Program in New York City. Across the country, in other big cities, and in some suburban areas, youngsters were employed in summer youth employment programs who could not get jobs in any other way. That program has existed for the last 20 years. It has been steadily cut. When I was commissioner of the community development agency responsible for parts of the program in 1968, 90,000 young people in New York got jobs in the summer program. It went from 90,000 in 1968 to 32,000 in 1995. The reduction was so great that we went down to one- third the total amount of the original program. But it is still a very important program. We do not want to go from 90,000 to zero, and right now there is zero in the budget for the Summer Youth Employment Program. There is no budget for the Summer Youth Employment Program. That kind of stupidity is still prevailing here in Washington. I do not know why the Republican majority targets programs for young people. I do not know why they went after the School Lunch Program and reduced the School Lunch Program. I do not know why they went after the Title I Program. Title I has been reduced by one-seventh, $1.1 billion taken from tile I designed to help youngsters in elementary and secondary schools across the country. Ninety percent of the school districts in America get some part of title I funds. Why is the Republican Majority insisting on going after young people? We are supposed to be a family-oriented Congress and we hear the words ``family orientation,'' ``family values'' all the time, but the children are the target of the Republican majority in this Congress. They went after school lunch programs, they have gone after title I programs. The only body in the history of Washington since the very beginning of the Head Start Program, the only body to cut the Head Start Program is this Republican-controlled majority here in the House of Representatives. We cut Head Start by $300 million. That cut is still hanging over the head of the Head Start Program. Head Start cut back $300 million; title I cut by $1.1 billion; Summer Youth Program last year was about $650 million, that is cut, now zero at this point. All of those actions by the Republican-controlled Congress and House of Representatives add up to a war on children. The war to remake America is first a war on children, a war on education. The President released his budget earlier in the week. As I said before, it has been a busy week. The President released his budget and in that budget he has less for a tax cut than the Republican-proposed budget. He is proposing, I think, $100 billion over a 7-year period in tax cuts. Among the tax cuts that President Clinton proposes is a cut which would allow parents who are paying tuition for children to deduct tuition costs. Up to $10,000 in tuition costs can be deducted under President Clinton's tax cut plan. I think there is no more noble tax deduction that you could give than a tax deduction that relates to the education of young people. I have three sons and all three of my sons are out of school already, but I assure you it was a very difficult period to put three sons through college. I was glad when the last one graduated and only a few years ago I paid off the last parent's loans. It was a very difficult situation when it comes to putting young people through college. It gets more expensive all the time, and so President Clinton has moved in a direction which will help family. I do not think you can have more of a family orientation than that. At the same time it will help the economy of the country by providing the kind of high-skilled, highly trained individuals that we get only when people go to college. There is a certain kind of training needed now that requires that you go to college. In addition to that, the President's tax cut includes the $500 per child tax deduction increase, an increase of $500 per child. Again, it is family-oriented, and I must say that the Republicans also have that in their proposed tax cuts. At least we are guaranteed that there will be agreement on a tax cut, a tax deduction for children, $500 per child increase in the coming budget because both groups agree. But, in general, the President has stayed the course and kept in his budget the money which allows for increases in education. Not only does the President not accept the cuts of Head Start or the cuts of title I or the cut of the Summer Youth Employment Program, but the President puts additional money in there for education. The only basic increase in the President's budget is money for education and job training. Those are the two areas that are increased. We know that Americans are suffering, families are suffering a great deal of anxiety now because of the fact that there is a great gap in the income of the 10-percent who make the most money in this country and those at the bottom whose wages have stagnated in the last 20 years. There is a need to deal with that in many ways and one way, of course, to deal with that is to make sure we have the proper education and the proper training. We cannot emphasize too much the necessity to take the initiative on education and maintain the initiative on education. During this busy week we also took up the immigration bill. The immigration bill is very important to me and to my district. I do not know of any other district in the country that probably has as many legal immigrants as my district has. I have not checked it, so I do not know, but I know that according to the last census 150,000 of the 581,000 people in my district are not citizens; 150,000 of the 581,000 people in my district are not citizens, and I interpret that to mean that they are legal immigrants because the illegal immigrants do not allow themselves to be counted. Illegal immigrants do not come forward and do not get counted. The people who have been counted and who have admitted that they are not citizens is a staggering number of 150,000 in my congressional district. The 11th Congressional District of Brooklyn has more than one-third of all the immigrants who are legal and who are counted in the census in New York City. New York City has between 400,000 and 500,000 legal immigrants and 150,000 of them are in my district. The immigration bill is very important. These are people who are hoping to become citizens. We have an intense drive on telling everybody who can become a citizen, do become a citizen as rapidly as you can. You need to defend your own interests, your own rights. We think that the attack on immigrants reflected in the immigration bill, that attack is unwarranted. We think that the attack on immigrants is un-American. Never before have the people of America attacked immigration. Immigration has always been the great source of new life and new blood in America. We are a country of immigrants. Why all the sudden are immigrants considered bad people? Immigrants helped to build the country. Right now in the country we have fewer immigrants than any period in history. In New York City we have 400,000 to 500,000 immigrants, whereas 20 years ago 1.5 million people in New York City were immigrants. Why are we attacking immigrants with such intensity and hostility now? Is it because the immigrants now are not white? Most of the immigrants are Asians or Hispanic, or they are people of African descent from the Caribbean area. Is the attack another form of racism? I think so. We have fewer immigrants. According to a New York Times editorial, the immigrants in New York earn on average greater income than a lot of other people who have been there longer than they have been. The immigrants in New York put back into the economy a large amount of money because they serve as entrepreneurs or are very active in many different ways in the economy of the city. The immigrants of New York are a benefit to New York. In fact, one of the things I am going to talk about in the all-night teach-in that I will be hosting at Lower Manhattan Community College will be diversity and the contribution of immigrants to New York City. One of the great strengths of our city is that it is a diverse city. The population is one of the most diverse in the country, just as the population of the country as a whole is a diverse population, and that is one of the great strengths of America. People of all kinds from all over the world live here. It is not a weakness; it is definitely a strength. We should not, through hostile immigration legislation, turn our backs on what is a self-evident truth. All of a sudden we have grown very stupid and very dumb. We are blinded by racism which tells us that we do not want Hispanic immigrants or we do not want Asian immigrants or any black immigrants from the Caribbean area. We are blinded by the truth of the matter, and that is that immigrants have always contributed to our Nation through immigration and our diversity puts us in a position that is advantageous in the rest of the world. As we move in this so-called global economy and the United States is competing for global markets with other nations, because of our diversity we will always have a salesman out there in that marketplace, no matter where the marketplace is, we can have a salesman that looks just like the people there, who talks like the people there, and who can share a cultural heritage of the people there, whether you are talking about the Pacific Rim countries or you are talking about China. China is now the third largest economy in the world. We have a lot of Chinese in this country. They are not in any way a liability. The Chinese are an asset. There are a lot of Koreans. Korea is a bustling economy. I visited Korea a few years ago, the City of Seoul, where three of my relatives, a uncle and two brothers were in the Korean war. They were in Korea during the time of the war, and they know the City of Seoul as a city which was totally demolished by the communists. The City of Seoul is one of the most beautiful cities in Asia now. The City of Seoul has probably more people than the City of New York right now. Not only did they rebuilt the city for the residents individually, tremendous rows and rows of apartment houses and stores and all kinds of buildings, but they have built into the city a park system which is second to none to take care of the open air needs of their citizens. We have a lot of Koreans in New York. We have a lot of Koreans in the rest of the country. We will interchange with them in a very profitable way in the future. The diversity helps New York City. The diversity helps the Nation as a whole. I would like to report good news. In the debate on the immigration bill somebody convinced somebody, because we had bipartisan support, for a separation of the legal immigrant issues from the illegal immigrant issues. Many have counseled that for some time and begged for it. We thank the President and the White House for coming out at the last minute, but they did come out in support of a separation of legal immigrant issues from the issues of how to take care of illegal immigrants. Nobody is going to stand on this floor and countenance illegality of any kind. Illegal immigration is a representation of the inadequacy of our Government to take care of its basic business of guarding the borders and making certain that certain laws are enforced. Illegal immigration is a signal that there is a tremendous incompetence in the way that we handle certain matters. We should move to end that incompetence. Maybe we are not allocating enough resources. We should move to do that. But we should not be preyed upon by illegal immigrants, just as we should not be subject to the ravages of any other kind of illegal activities. We did vote and I am happy to report to my constituents and to many others that basic issues of how to handle legal immigration, how to establish new numbers, how to deal with families being reunited, a number of issues were separated out, and this bill in the end finally dealt mostly with illegal immigration. There were some bad moments, and there was a provision voted in that said that immigrants coming into this country must be proficient in English. That, I think, is a step in the wrong direction, and there were some other things that I consider steps in the wrong direction, but we did get the separation of the legal immigration issues from the illegal. One other thing was voted down, and that was an attempt by the corporations to bring in selected personnel so that they could drive down the costs of doing business. The same people who argue that we should limit immigration in general, the same people who have made war on immigration in general suddenly want to make an exception. They want to bring in computer programmers. They want to bring in people from countries where salaries are much lower for technicians and professionals, and use them to undercut the wages of professionals and technicians in this country, including nurses. In particular there was a specific vote on nurses. Now, at a time when we had a need for nurses, nurses came from other countries and filled that need and many or some have become citizens. I do not want to make war on any particular ethnic group or country that provided nurses when we needed nurses, but this Nation does not need to import nurses from abroad at this point. They are closing nursing schools in New York City and New York State. There are nurses who are being laid off in hospitals, large numbers of nurses experiencing great anxiety at the restructuring of hospitals in ways that utilize less nurses and endanger the welfare of patients. Nurses are planning a big march here in Washington for May 10. Independent nurses are coming to Washington on May 10 because they are very upset and very concerned, not only about what is happening to their profession, but also concerned about the implications of what is happening to their profession to the health of their patients. I applaud the independent nurses who will be coming here on May 10. I applaud the action taken by the Members of the House of Representatives yesterday to vote down the provision which would allow more foreign nurses to come in and undercut the salaries and the working conditions to nurses that are here already. Finally, today, in this busy week we voted on the repeal of the ban on assault weapons. In my all-night teach-in which is focused on the fiscal year of New York City that will take place tomorrow, Saturday, from 7 p.m. to 7 a.m. Sunday morning, we will not focus a great deal on crime and violence and the ban on assault weapons but certainly it will be a part of the discussion. You cannot discuss New York City without discussing the need to lessen the amount of crime. You cannot discuss New York City without dealing with what guns have done to New York City and the surrounding area or what guns have done to the Nation as a whole. You cannot discuss New York City without understanding that the city cannot survive with its very strong gun control policies and laws unless we do something in the Nation's Capital to relieve New York City and all the other big cities of the burden of guns. There are too many guns in America. Too many guns in America. We are the only industrialized nation, other than South Africa, which permits widespread ownership of guns, and as a result we have too many murders and too many deaths by gunshot wounds. It was 16,000 people 2 years ago. I do not know what the latest figures are because they are not compiled completely, but 16,000 people in 1 year died from gunshot wounds in America. At the same time less than 100 people died as a result of gunshot wounds in Japan and the same thing was true in Britain and in Germany and in France. Very small numbers of people died as a result of gunshot wounds in countries which have policies which restrict the ownership of guns. We voted in the last Congress to get rid of, to ban the manufacture of assault weapons in this country. Under Ronald Reagan we had already voted to ban the importation of assault weapons. So we didn't want to bring assault weapons from outside. Last Congress we decided we don't want to manufacture them in this country. That is all the ban on assault weapons did, it stopped the manufacture of assault weapons in this country. It specified the kind of weapons. So why do we have it on the floor today to repeal it? Why did we have on the floor a law to get rid of a law which had gotten rid of assault weapons? Across America the public pays a high toll. Yesterday, in the suburbs of New York City, a man with a rifle killed a policeman and held all the law enforcement officers at bay for 12 hours before they finally got into his house and found that he had killed himself. The pattern plays itself out over and over again. The large numbers of guns generate violence at a level that would not exist if the guns were not there. Yes, people will be violent. Yes, people will get angry, but the more guns there are, the more deadly the violence; the more deadly the anger. Any civilized nation should be able to clearly see that if you lessen the number of guns, you will lessen the number of deaths due to gunshot. You will decrease the murder rate, you will decrease the serious crime rate. We say we care about the public. We say we want to lower the dangers for crime. We say we want to make people feel safer, but we come to the floor, and we repeal in a law--and it was not a close vote. I do not think they have enough votes to override a veto, but it was not a close vote. The repeal of the ban on assault weapons took place. That has great implications for New York City, and we will talk about it because the health and welfare of the city, the ability of the city to expand its major industry and the major industry in New York City is tourism. People come from all over the world to see New York City. Every educated person who knows about cities in the world want to see New York City at some time in their lifetime. We are going to try to make it cheaper for people to come there. We also have to make certain people feel safe. And the safety of New York City is dependent on policies that take place in Washington. We have very tough gun control laws. You cannot own a gun in New York City without a gun permit. You cannot own a gun in New York State without a gun permit, and the criteria for issuing guns in New York State and New York City are very, very strict. But people bring illegal guns in from Virginia, from Texas, from all over the country because we still have illegal guns being sold in many States. Guns being sold are not illegal in those States, but they are illegal in New York. But they are transported to New York. We need to make guns illegal, the purchase of guns illegal anywhere in the country. But that is not our total major subject. It has a bearing and it is most unfortunate that we voted today, the majority voted today to repeal the ban on assault weapons. Next week we will have another busy week. We are going to deal with a minimum health care bill. We have gone away from 2 years ago from a comprehensive bill offered by the Clinton administration, a comprehensive health care bill which wanted to move the country toward universal health care. We were moving in the right direction. We were moving in the direction to catch up with the rest of the industrialized nations. All of the industrialized nations of the world, again except South Africa, all of the industrialized nations of the world except South Africa have universal health care programs except South Africa and the United States. In this country we still have 40 million people, many of them poor children, who are not covered by any kind of health care plan; 40 million. So we were moving 2 years ago, a little more than 2 years ago toward a comprehensive health care plan which would deal with the provision of health care for all families and for all individuals. Now, next week, we are going to have what I call a minimum, a bare minimum health care bill on the floor. We are going to be discussing a health care bill which is only going to make a few cosmetic changes in the way health care service is delivered. We are going to deal with portability, an ability to allow people to carry their health care plan from one company to another if they change jobs. We are going to deal with people who retire and how they deal with the health care of those who have retired. We are going to deal with a few little issues affecting people who already have health care plans. We will do nothing next week, nothing, absolutely nothing, zero, to help people who have no health care plans whatsoever. I think in this proposal next week there will be some Democratic proposals which will take the Kennedy-Kassebaum bill, and Democrats have agreed, generally, to support what Kennedy-Kassebaum are proposing and not to support what the Republican majority will put on the floor next week. We will take the Kennedy-Kassebaum bill and try to add a provision for equal deductibility for entrepreneurs and some small businesses. In other words, we are going to try to have people who are on their own now, who have their own business be able to make the same kind of deductions on their taxes for health care that many corporations are allowed to take now. In other words, we call it the equal deductibility for entrepreneurs provision. That is a small change, again, but it is very important. The large amounts of people have been thrown out of their corporate jobs. They no longer are tied to a big health care plan. They are on their own, as entrepreneurs and small business people, and they need a health care plan which deals with their problems. If they were able to deduct more of their health care payments from their taxes, it would solve a big problem for a large number of Americans who have been caught in the middle. So we want to add that. The other thing that is important about next week is that there is no discussion in next week's schedule for Medicaid. Medicaid is a health care plan that does cover poor people, very poor people. You have to meet a means test. You have to be eligible in order to get Medicaid. Now, Medicaid is not being discussed next week, but a shadow, a deadly shadow, a deadly silence hangs over Medicaid. There have been proposals that Medicaid will be changed drastically. Not only will the budget for Medicaid be cut, but the eligibility requirements, the fact that in the law the Federal Government stands behind the payment for health care of any person who meets the means test, any person who is poor enough to qualify for Medicaid will receive Medicaid, that entitlement will be taken away. The entitlement is threatened. Not only has the entitlement been threatened by the Republican majority here in this Congress, but the entitlement is also threatened by the Governors' Conference. Both Democratic and Republican Governors have agreed that they would like to take away the Federal entitlement. They want to take away the Federal entitlement and have the States totally in charge of the health care of the poorest people. They want to run the Medicaid Program under a block grant arrangement. A block grant arrangement means the Federal Government will give the State a set amount of money, and when the State runs out of money the State is supposed to make up the difference or the State will cut off the service. It means that we have gone a long way in the 30 years since Medicaid started, but we will be going backward rapidly. Medicaid is the one definite step toward universal health care coverage for everybody. Medicaid is the one step the Government has taken in that direction. By the way, it is important to point out that Medicaid, two-thirds of the money spent for Medicaid goes to cover the cost of nursing homes for the elderly. Two-thirds of the Medicaid funds go to cover the cost of nursing homes for the elderly. Only one-third goes to poor families. So you are jeopardizing the ability of elderly people to have nursing home care when you deal with taking away the entitlement for Medicaid. Many elderly people have Medicare, but if you are really ill for a certain period of time, even with Medicare, it costs you a certain amount of money. You have to pay some portion of the cost. And when people are ill for a long time and run out of money, they move from Medicare to Medicaid in order to qualify, in order to be able to pay the fees for a nursing home. So nursing homes are filled with people who started out that they were middle class before they got so ill that they ran out of resources, and they are, in the end, paid for by Medicaid in nursing homes. So all of this is threatened. There is a shadow hanging over the head of Medicaid, a deadly silence about Medicaid in this capital. The White House is too silent, the leadership of the Senate is too silent, the leadership of the House is too silent. When all this silence settles, past experience has shown us that the silence means that somebody is about to pull a fast one; that suddenly we will find Medicaid on our desk one day, a rapid movement to the passage of Medicaid legislation, and it will not be good legislation. There is going to be a rapid attempt to rush through a take away of the entitlement for Medicaid. We must be vigilant. We must watch. At my all-night teach-in I intend to talk to my constituents about the need to watch and be vigilant about Medicaid, the need to make certain every elected official at the State, city, and Federal level is aware of the fact that there is a great threat to Medicaid, the entitlement. There is a double need to put the pressure on the Congress. There are many Congressmen who say they do not want anything to happen to Medicaid, but they are sitting silent and nothing is happening while the deadly silence surrounding Medicaid moves in on us like a fog, that is the kind of fog that strangles people with asthma. So next week will be a busy week as we consider health care. I hope that my colleagues who care about health care for poor people will be vigilant and watch for a possible last-minute trick on Medicaid. Finally, let me just talk about the all-night teach-in in a little more detail. Why are we having an all-night teach-in? As I said before, there is so much that needs to be said until we have to set aside the time to say it. We cannot have a town meeting which lasts for 2 hours and people are ready to run. There are experts who need to talk. We can't hear them at any other time because they are busy during the day on various jobs and there are people who have grievances and who are living in the middle of the results of this so-called revolution to remake America, people who have great anxiety about what is come. Some people in New York City and New York State are already suffering because the Governor of New York State and the mayor of New York City have gotten ahead of the revolution here in Washington. They need to be heard. So we are going to have an alternating situation where we will spend part of the time listening to people who have a great deal to tell us about specifically what is happening in their lives and their agencies and their institutions, and the other time will be for experts who will explain to them the nature of what is happening politically, the nature of what is happening economically. And then another part of the time will be used to talk about creative solutions to the problem. We do not want to have 12 hours of whining. We have people who are coming to make vision statements, to tell us how we can solve the problems that are afflicting our big cities in general and specifically how we can solve some of the problems that are afflicting New York City. We are going to break it up into segments and there will be 1-hour segments. We will start off with vision statements. James Forbes, one of the leading ministers in New York City, will led off with a vision statement. We have the actor-activist Archie Davis who is going to make a vision statement about where he thinks New York City ought to be going. Why do we have a person like Archie Davis? Because New York City's future is all tied up with the tourism industry. The one industry that is growing in New York City is tourism, the major industry. Now, tourism strikes most people in America as a strange industry. We have been acclimated and educated not to understand how much money is generated by people traveling into a place and spending their money. The average tourist coming to New York City spends $600 a visit. The $600 goes into the economy, it creates jobs, it creates revenue, it creates a whole atmosphere which allows other entrepreneurs to be able to develop their businesses and profits. So tourism is a big industry. It is a big industry all across the country, by the way. Many big cities have had a great increase in tourism, other than New York City. In fact, New York City, the tourism rate of growth has slowed down because other cities are being visited by tourists in greater and greater numbers. We have to deal with that and make certain that in the coming next 5 to 10 years, we take actions to encourage more people to come to New York City. But tourism to the Members of the Congress who say they have vision, tourism to the Members of the Congress who want to go forward to the year 2000 and talk as if they are a member of the cyberspace generation and they know everything and they are going to lead us into a great new future, tourism to them is not an industry. The Congress criticized the President for spending money to promote tourism. We have just closed down in the Department of Commerce the office of tourist promotion. The office that is designated to promote tourism in the U.S. Government is gone. There is no agency in the U.S. Government promoting tourism in the Nation as a whole. We are the only nation in the world, the only industrialized nation that does not have at the national level an ongoing effort to promote tourism, to get people to come from all over the world into our Nation and its cities, countryside, whatever, and spend their money. We are the most backward people in the world on that issue. We do not see it. We had an effort going forward. The President even had a conference on tourism. The White House had a conference on tourism. I tried to get a report on the conference. They do not have the money to print up the report. I congratulate the White House for its vision, I congratulate the Department of Commerce for its vision, but it came under attack from this Congress. The Neanderthals of this Congress have defended giving McDonald's Federal subsidies in order to promote hamburgers abroad. We give Federal subsidies to the fur industry to promote furs abroad. We give subsidies to a number of those industries to promote those industries abroad. The same Neanderthals cannot see that McDonald's does not need any help to promote hamburgers abroad but we should be promoting our own cities, our own wonders. The Grand Canyon is something that people all over the world want to see. It is not a city, but people all over the world are willing to spend money to come see the Grand Canyon. The sea coasts, the gulf coast of Florida, the California coast, all kinds of great features we have in this Nation that people all over the world want to come and see. The exploding middle class throughout the world wants to travel. One of the features of middle-class people is that they have disposable income. When the disposable income gets through taking care of the immediate normal luxuries, the immediate normal luxuries dealing with the TV set, refrigerator, a house, the next level of desire that takes over is the desire to travel. This is a pattern of middle-class people all across the world. They want to travel once they reach a certain level. Just consider for a moment what happens in an economy like the Chinese economy. The Chinese economy is now the third largest economy in the world. Overnight China has eclipsed a number of nations and become the third largest economy in the world. How did they do that? Because one of the features of economies is that economies are very much interrelated with people. If you have a billion people, automatically you have an advantage. If you can ever get yourself organized and have that society organized in a certain way, a billion people will automatically generate a lot of wealth. Consider yourself out there selling shoestrings or pencils to a billion people. Just a shoestring or a pencil sold in China, you have got hundreds of millions of people who are going to buy it. Just the impact of the numbers is staggering. This Nation has a little more than 250 million people. Two hundred fifty million people is one-quarter of the Chinese population. It is expected that in the next 4 or 5 years, China will have a middle class which is about one-quarter of its population. That means that 250 million Chinese will be in that middle class in the next 4 or 5 years. If one-tenth of those 250 million decide to travel to America, you have 25 million people coming into this country just from China in the next 4 or 5 years. There will be a great boom in tourism. Then you have the other Asian countries. Japan already has the second largest number of tourists coming into this country. I think Germany has the largest number. Japan has the second largest number. But you will have a big boom, a big increase when the other Asian/Pacific rim countries increase their travel into this country. Then you have eastern Europe where people have not been able to travel and there is a new middle class in eastern Europe. Then you have South Africa. And we should not leave out the booming middle class in South America. So there will be a great increase in all the cities of tourism. And it would be greater if you had some kind of planning setup at the level of the Federal Government. New York City needs a planning process. It could double the number of tourists. The number of tourists that came into New York City was 24 million last year. Twenty-four million tourists came into New York, most of them from other parts of the United States. About 5 million came from foreign countries. If in 5 years we could double that amount of tourists coming into New York City, we could double the amount of money earned from tourism. How much money does tourism generate in the economy of New York City? Last year it generated $54 billion. Do you hear what I say? In various forms, $54 billion. Of that amount, $13 billion was collected in revenue by the city, revenue collected in various ways: Revenue collected from the hotel tax, which has been lowered greatly now, revenue collected mainly from the income of those people who work in the tourism industry, and as a result of the tourist industry, they had an income and they paid taxes. Revenue collected as a result of the increase in the property values. Revenue collected in the restaurant tax. Everybody eats when they come to New York, or when they go anywhere else. So just one industry, if we were to take a creative approach to increasing it. How do you increase the tourism industry in New York City? Any business traveler to New York knows right away our biggest problem. Our biggest problem is the high cost of hotels. The high cost of accommodations in New York is a barrier to more people coming. We now have 24 million a year and almost 25 million expected this year. Then if we remove the barrier of the high cost of hotels, we could have millions more. In New York, most people who come stay in hotels. If you go to Paris or to Rome or to Berlin or anywhere in Europe, they have high-priced hotels, they have hostels for youth, they have dormitories for families, and they have camping grounds right in the city for people who want to just camp. They have all kinds of alternative accommodations so that the tourist does not have to spend all of their money on accommodations, on housing. If they do not have to spend all their money on housing, then they put the money into the economy in restaurants, they go to visit museums, they go to plays and shows and other forms of entertainment. At the same time, all of them eat, of course, in a restaurant, and many of them buy large amounts of retail goods in the stores. So a simple feat has to be performed in New York. But nobody has ever looked at the situation and said, ``Let's do that.'' They have said instead, ``New York is getting less and less money from taxes, we're going to go broke, so let's cut the services of the schools, let's keep cutting the schools.'' The schools in New York have become a joke almost because we keep cutting. ``Let's cut the schools. Let's cut the day care. Let's cut the senior citizens' programs.'' And finally, ``Let's cut health care. Let's sell hospitals.'' The mayor is proposing to sell hospitals, or lease hospitals. A more creative approach is to improve the industries that are naturally growth industries in our city. Medical-related industry is also a natural growth industry. We should not be selling hospitals, we should be expanding hospitals. Because a population of 8 million people, it is hard for most people to comprehend. Eight million people in one place, very compact, very dense, 8 million people is a population that not only needs health care services but they are diverse. Any disease known to mankind, you are going to have it in New York City because of the diversity of the population. Which means that any cure, any regimen, any protocol that can be developed for a disease or for a condition can be developed in New York City. Medical research should not be leaving New York City as it is now. The medical research industry should be expanded in New York City. That is another source of income for the city. The city has a million schoolchildren, a million kids in our public school system. It has 200,000 college students in the City University of New York system. We have great private schools like New York University, Columbia University, Fordham University. You add up all the students in higher education and you are talking about 300,000 to 350,000 students in higher education within the borders of New York City. So education byproducts, educational technology products, any computerized products, any products requiring imagination and creativity, the production of those kinds of products should be encouraged in New York City. Those are the kinds of things we are going to talk about in the all- night teach-in. We want to answer the doomsayers. We want to answer the people who stand on the floor of the House and say that New York City is a drain on the Federal Government because it has too much welfare and too much of our Federal money goes to take care of Medicaid and Medicare and other problems in New York City. Not only is that a lie, it is a big lie. Currently New York City is paying more money into the Federal Government than we are getting back. I cannot repeat the figure too often. In 1994 we paid $9 billion more in taxes to the Federal Government than we got back from the Federal Government. New York City alone. New York State as a whole paid $18.9 billion more to the Federal Government than we got back from the Federal Government in 1994. In 1993, the figure was $23 billion. New York State paid $23 billion more to the Federal Government than we got back in various forms of aid from the Federal Government. So New York City is not a basket case dependent on the Federal Government. On the contrary, there are many States in the country that get more from the Federal Government than they pay into the Federal Government, and they are the problem. Mr. Speaker, in closing, I just want to remind you that we cannot talk too much about the present condition that we find ourselves in in the country in general. And in New York City on this Saturday night from 7 p.m. to 7 a.m., 7 p.m. Saturday night to 7 a.m. Sunday morning, we will have an all-night teach-in giving everybody an opportunity to deal with the problem that New York City has as a result of the attempt to remake America. The Republicans in this House of Representatives have said that they want to remake America. The Republicans in this House of Representatives have said that politics is war and blood, they do not care if some people have casualties. We do not want New York City residents to be casualties. We do not think they have to be casualties. We think this city, our city, can defend itself, first by energizing its assets. We do not think the mayor is correct when he says that the only way he can solve the city's problems is by cutting the budget for education, cutting the budget for schools, the only way to solve the problem is by cutting the hospitals, selling the hospitals, the only way to solve the problem is by harassing the people who need welfare, whose children are on aid to families with dependent children. We do not think we need to close our nursing homes. We think the seniors of New York can be taken care of in the future as they have in the past. We have some of the best senior citizens centers in the country. We want to keep it that way. The city has the resources. We want to talk about what the city has to do in terms of changing Federal policies and changing State policies which strangle the city. We want to talk about certain policies the city itself promulgates. The city gives too much tax incentives to businesses to stay. The city allows the State to trick it into a formula where they give school aid on the basis of attendance rather than on the basis of enrollment. There are a number of policies that have to be changed. In addition to changing policies, and all New Yorkers have to fight to get these policies changed at the Federal, State, and city level. We have to take actions to get more creative efforts launched by the city to increase those industries in the city which are naturally compatible with industries for New York City, industries related to tourism, industries related to medical research, industries related to education and students and the talent of the faculty and students of our colleges and universities, and those things can happen and provide a positive answer to the problem of the remaking of America. Yes, if America is to be remade, do not try to do it in 2 years. We do not need a revolution. We can have an evolution. Part of the evolution of cities like New York should call upon their citizens and get the best possible wisdom from those citizens to deal with the problem of remaking our cities into forms which allow them to be self- sufficient and self-supporting. We can take care of our own problems. We need the Federal Government to get off our back in New York. Everybody needs to know they have to participate if we are to do this. I will see everyone at the all-night teach-in at Manhatten Community College, corner of Chamber Street and West Side Highway, from 7 p.m. to 7 a.m. I urge all interested persons to join us there, and we will have a dialog that is good for the city, good for the State, and good for the country.

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Chairman, I rise in opposition to the Immigration in the National Interest Act, H.R. 2202. This bill is a misnomer, for it denounces a historical tradition of the United States--to welcome different cultures that add to the richness of this diverse land. On the contrary, H.R. 2202 is not in the national interest of the United States. It further reinforces the modern conservative tactic for solving the Nation's current economic and social woes: Blame the poor, our children, African-Americans, women, and immigrants. H.R. 2202 is an underhanded assault on the foreign-born, in general. This bill would punish those who illegally exploit America's generosity, along with those who legitimately seek an opportunity in America. By unifying the illegal and legal immigration problem, H.R. 2202 makes the mistake of lumping everyone together, whether they commit a crime or not. The bill reflects a number of misconceptions that have infiltrated the policy debate on immigration. Unconscionably, H.R. 2202 would reduce the number of legal immigrants by 30 percent. This reduction unreasonably implies that the United States is plagued by an illegal and legal immigration invasion. The number of foreign-born that enters this country each year is 1 million. Of that number, 700,000 are legal immigrants. Currently, the foreign- born represent only 8 percent of the total population as opposed to the period between 1870 and 1920 when nearly 15 percent, or 1 out of every 7 individuals was foreign born. H.R. 2202 would limit the immigration of people under the Immigration and Naturalization Service's [INS] family sponsored category. This bill would restrict entry for parents, adult children, and siblings. In effect, this new policy would impose America's definition of a family onto the culture of immigrants. Excluding more than 100,000 children, parents, and brothers and sisters from reuniting with family members in this country is not a pro-family policy. It is distressing that the term immigrant has been smeared to connote a terrible meaning. My Republican colleagues have resorted to ignoring the contributions that immigrants have made to this country. Immigrants do not come to America just to hop on the public dole. In fact, according to the Urban Institute, immigrants generate an estimated $25 billion in surplus revenues over what they receive in social services. Furthermore, immigrants create more jobs than they fill by starting new businesses and buying U.S. goods and services. No conclusive data have proven that even illegal immigrants have an adverse effect on job opportunities for native workers. Ironically, the person most likely to be displaced in a job by an illegal immigrant is another illegal immigrant who has resided in this country for some time. Clearly, the United States must address the dangers of illegal immigration; but, in the interim, legal immigrants should not have to defend their rights, integrity, and culture. In light of the imminent rollback on affirmative action, possible abolishment of the welfare and Medicaid entitlement, and this current unfair immigration reform proposal, I challenge my colleagues to stop this Congress from going down in history as the most vicious and regressive Congress since reconstruction. We must not forget the 1987 Hudson Institute's pioneer study, Workforce 2000; in the next century, America's workforce will be more female and more ethnically diverse with native-born white males comprising only 15 percent of the new labor market. It is time to accept this fact and addresses the real problem. I urge a ``no'' vote on H.R. 2202.

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, I want to thank my colleague from Connecticut for the special order. We cannot come to this floor too often. We cannot say too much about education at this critical hour. It is a critical hour, and I would like to use it to make one last appeal to our colleagues on the other side of the aisle. The majority, the Republican majority, has the power, and they can use that power to strengthen education and do a great deal for this Nation. They can use that power to wreck what has been accomplished to date in this country in terms of building some meager Federal support for the great educational apparatus that we have spread out across the country. The Federal Government only has a small role, you know, of all the money spent for education. It is about 7 percent to 8 percent, and a large part of that goes into higher education. So we only have a small role to begin with, but that role is critical. We are like the gyroscope on an airplane. That role is critical in terms of giving guidance and direction and inspiration and encouragement to the rest of the country. When you do not have that support coming from the Federal Government, all kinds of things begin to happen at the local level. The commitment is lessened at the State level, the commitment is less than at the local level. We have had a retreat which has followed the drumbeat of the Republican majority here in Washington, a retreat across the country, in terms of Governors and legislatures and local mayors, in terms of commitment, their commitment to education. What the Republicans have done, the majority of Republicans have launched a savage guerrilla warfare against education. I am baffled. I do not understand why the attack has been launched against the children of America, starting with the School Lunch Program, which baffled me greatly in terms of the amount of money. They squeezed some savings out, but the amount of money they saved is relatively small. Yes, we want to eliminate inefficiencies; yes, we always want to eliminate waste. And that is a constant process. We must constantly strive to eliminate inefficiencies, to eliminate waste. We must constantly strive to get rid of incompetence and to replace it with competence and the best possible management. But more than that is being attempted here, and money seems not really to be the problem. We are not really talking about saving money. There seems to be a concerted effort to wreck, to recklessly destroy, the education improvement effort in America. They call for the elimination of the Department of Education as key, and anyone observing the situation and understanding what is going on here, it is not about saving money only. It is about destroying the public education effort in America. Someone has made a determination that they can take care of a small elite group of children, students that they want to take care of, but they do not want the burden of educating all Americans, a commitment that is made from the very origins of the Nation. It is made not so much by the Federal Government, but certainly by the various State governments, and as the society has gotten to be more complex, that part of our Constitution which talks about promoting the general welfare is a joke if you do not focus your attention on improving education. No modern society can prosper and grow without paying a great deal of attention to education, and all of our competing industrialized nations, they all clearly understand this. It might be that we may never want to go as far as Japan or Germany in terms of centralizing the direction of education through a Federal department; that is not necessary. But we are a long ways from that when you only have a 7- percent investment at the Federal Government level, a long ways from any centralization that is going to destroy local initiative. Local control is there now. Local control will be there for a long time to go. If you increased education, the Federal share of education expenditures, by 25 percent, and we have a comparable amount of control, then you might have 25-percent Federal control, using that word, and 75-percent State and local control. Well, with 75-percent State and local control, it is still basically a State and local control operation. We have no danger of that happening with our 7- percent commitment. We have to understand, however, that we cannot go forward and promote the general welfare, we cannot go forward and produce the kind of population, which is the greatest resource that any civilized nation can have right now, is an educated population. Our military might will do us no good if we do not have an educated population to win the economic competition. Our military might will not do us any good if we do not have an educated population, and we cannot maintain basic law and order, and we cannot have a society which is a viable society. You know the kind of recklessness that we see first with the missiles aimed at the Department of Education and then the guerrilla warfare conducted against school lunches, and even the summer youth employment program is not a part of the school system, is not a part of the Department of Education; it is a basic part of the orientation of children as a basic part of a message that the Federal Government sends to children that it cares. And that, too, is under attack. Small amounts of money within the context of the overall Federal budget, but they have chosen to go after it anyhow. They have chosen to deal with the one area where there is some possible relief for local and State governments. Local and State governments are under a lot of pressure, the expenses for education expenditures are increasing to deal with some of the modern requirements of education, and some of the myriad of problems faced by our schools means they need more money. Where can the money come from? It should come from the Federal Government. Certainly research and development, certainly support for populations that need extraordinary attention; that is the whole philosophy behind Title I and the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. We need more help from the Federal Government. All taxes originate locally. Tip O'Neill used to say all politics is local. All taxes originate locally. The taxes that run the Federal Government come out of the pockets of people who live in cities and towns and school districts, and some portion of their taxes they should be able to get back in order to deal with the crisis in education. We ought to be able to get back more than 7 percent. To cut it off completely, however, and to wage a guerrilla warfare on the commitment that has been made, and chip away at it, as we are presently, is a reckless and savage act. Jonathan Cozel uses the term ``savage inequalities'' when he is describing the differences between the best in America and the schools that are usually serving our poor and minority populations. But what we have here is a savage attack on the whole public school system, a savage attack that will destroy the effort that has been made over the years, and we were making some progress, even through Republican administrations, the steady movement from President Reagan's recognition of the fact that something had to be done when he commissioned the report that led to, commissioned a group that produced support called a Nation at Risk. Following that, George Bush and his efforts with America 2000, and all of it has just been one seamless effort, not such a disjointed partisan effort. And suddenly, after President Clinton follows through on George Bush's goals, and we are moving in the same direction that the Governors and a whole lot of very intelligent and powerful people have decided we should move, suddenly the Republican majority in this House decides they want to wreck it all, they want to destroy it all. They are barbarians, and this is a barbaric act.

Mr. OWENS. Our economic viability is directly threatened. Education is the basis for the kind of skills that we need in order to compete economically. Bangalore, India is now called the computer programming capital of the world, Bangalore, India which is in a country which is considered a developing nation. But they have as good a computer program in English as you have anywhere in the world, and many of the companies of this country are contracting their computer programming to Bangalore, India where they can get a year's worth of work for a month's salary, what they pay to computers in this country. Economically the competition is going to broaden, and the competition economically will be more dependent upon the educated population that a nation has and the way it utilizes that educated population. People are not going to have the jobs if they do not have the skills and the education. The corporations that are now uniting with the Republican majority to cut the budget for education are the same corporations that are asking for, in the immigration bill, that we allow them to keep bringing in technicians.

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, in less than 2 years the barbarian Republican majority has destroyed all of that. A piece of civilization that has been wrecked by the pressure that has been put on them, budget-wise. We have large numbers of people being forced to sort of retire early and drop out. Experienced administrators and experienced teachers are going. You have large numbers of people who are planning to get out, and are just marking time in the system. You have reductions in any investment in equipment and plant buildings. They have, in less than 2 years, done an amazing job. I tremble when I watch what the blitzkrieg against education has accomplished so far. The American people had better take note of what you can do with the appropriations process, how you send a message out there. As well as take away the dollars, you send a message to every level of government that public education is expendable, public education is no longer a part of the grand design of a great America. They have accomplished that in less than 2 years, the Republican barbarians.

Mr. OWENS. At the CIA. Two billion dollars. There is an agency that the President does not know has $2 billion, the director does not know has $2 billion, it is just wandering around there. Think of what that could do for the education budget. One and one-tenths billion dollars of those $2 billion could go to end the cuts. That is the exact amount of the cuts, the $1.1 billion proposed for title I. You could take another $300 million for Head Start. Those are the Head Start cuts proposed. You could take $600 million for the summer youth employment program. It is $2 billion. That adds up to quite a bit for education funding. People of America should not rally to fill up the gaps when our Federal Government really has the resources, and the resources are still going in the wrong directions. They are being wasted, and not being directed at the priority of the moment. The priority of the moment is an educated population in America. We need more money in education from the Federal Government.

Mr. OWENS. They are not rational. That is the most foolish thing.

Mr. OWENS. Why should they raise property taxes and other taxes when the Federal Government has a tremendous amount of waste that ought to be transferred into education? Just to give one example. Most Americans are not aware of the fact that auditors at the CIA found $2 billion. Hear me carefully; I use the word B--billion--$2 billion was found in the petty cash funds that they had lost track of.

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague from New Jersey. He is from the great city of Newark, and he mentioned the fact that Newark used to have a bustling downtown area filled with people, you know, not too many years ago, and that has declined greatly now. I am going to talk a little bit about that. That is part of the problem. And we have had a situation develop where our cities have been drained of resources. Money has flowed from our cities to the rest of the country, and we have lost a great deal of the resources that we need to keep our own cities going. And it is not through mismanagement, it is not that our cities are not still, our cities and our States, are not still very wealthy States. New York State is a State in the Nation which provides the greatest amount of surplus over in terms of the Treasury, and when you compare what New York State receives from the Federal Government, what it receives from the Federal Government in terms of aid is much less than it pays in, and that has been true for the last 20 years. In 1994, the last year that they have figures available, New York State paid into the Federal Treasury $18.9 billion more than it got back from the Federal Treasury in terms, in Federal aid. New York State was the, you know, most generous of the States, but New Jersey also paid far more into the Treasury than it got back from the Federal Government. And this has been a pattern. Michigan, many of the Northeastern States, have consistently paid more into the Treasury. The States with the large cities like Chicago and Detroit, Philadelphia, those States are being discriminated against in many ways by the Federal Government policies. One way we would get our money back in terms of Federal aid would be through programs like the summer youth employment program. New York City, for example, over the last 20 years has lost $10 billion in Federal aid, and we hear on this floor a lot of criticism about New York State and New York City spending too much money on Medicare and Medicaid. Medicare and Medicaid, we have the highest expenditures in the country. But even with the highest expenditures in the country in Medicare and Medicaid, New York State is still putting in, paying out to the Federal Government, $18.9 billion more than it is getting back. We do not have any big defense plants, we do not have any disasters like hurricanes or earthquakes or floods. There are a number of ways that we do not receive money back from the Federal Government that other areas do. Highway funding; we have a great need for mass transit funds, and they are being cut. Now I want to focus on the summer youth employment program. But you cannot tell the whole story and you cannot show how vicious, how vicious the process is here in Washington, unless you look at the total picture. And at this point I want to pause and make certain that everybody understands that for the next few days we are going to be talking about this problem. The summer youth employment program will be on our agenda, and a lot of people say, well, the situation is not so bad because the continuing resolution says that all programs will be funded at 75 percent of their last year's funding level. Well, you know that is not true of the summer youth employment program. The last year was zeroed out. There is no authorization, there is no--the rescission process killed the program. So it would be 75 percent of zero that you are talking about. Let me read from the latest statement on it that appeared just a few days ago in the House action reports. The Congressional Quarterly's House action report reads that the bill that the House has put forth, H.R. 1944, has no funds for the summer youth employment program. Yes, the President had requested $958 million for this program, but since the fiscal year 1995 rescissions and disaster supplement appropriations bill--I am sorry that was H.R. 1944. The bill that we are talking about is the appropriations bill for the Labor, Education and Health. That is the bill we are talking about, H.R. 2127. H.R. 2127 for this year is the bill that has this language in it--I mean that has no funds for the summer youth employment program. Since the fiscal year 1995 rescissions and disaster supplemental appropriations bill, which was H.R. 1944, rescinds all funds that were appropriated in advance for the summer of 1996, the summer of 1995 will be the last year for the operation of this program. The last year, gone; 1995 is the last year that there are funds available. So they have been clear that let every member of Congress understand when you talk to your constituency, understand that there is no amount in the budget for which we can take 75 percent of. It is zero at this point. Now the Senate, I do not know why the Senate has abandoned the program also, because it did take the initiative last year, and in the conference process put back the money for the 1995 summer youth employment program. This year the Senate majority has done nothing, and the Senate Democrats have an amendment that they are using to try to get back the funds for the summer youth employment program. They have an amendment which includes a number of things, Senate Democratic education--this is as of March 12. I am reading from the day's national journal, Congress Daily. Senate democratic education amendment would provide $1.28 billion for the title I compensatory education program, $208 million for school improvement programs, $91 million for school- to-work programs, and $60 million for the Goals 2000 program. In addition, the Democratic amendment would provide $136 million for Head Start, as well as $635 million for the Labor Department's Summer Jobs Program and $333 million for aid to dislocated workers. The Democratic amendment is being proposed but there is no guarantee that that is going to be passed. We are in a situation where the summer youth employment program has zero in the budget for it at this point, and a lot of work has to be done to save the situation. Why the hostility toward the summer youth employment program? Why are we in a situation in a Congress where family values are touted by everybody on both sides of the aisle, in a Congress where young people are said to be of great concern by both sides of the aisle, and I have heard the Republican majority speak again and again about being concerned about the future. Children are the future, should not be made to pay for the debts that we make today. They are very concerned about drastic budget cuts, draconian cuts in order to guarantee that our children will not have to pay for the debts we make today. I am glad they are so concerned about children. I am, also. There is a lot of concern about unborn children, children in the womb. I am concerned about them, too. I think every mother who has a child has to think twice about it, because of this cruel backward world we live in where we will propose to pay $20,000 to keep a juvenile delinquent in jail but we are not willing to pay 2 months' salary to a youngster who wants a job during the summer. There is something radically wrong with our thinking. We have a lot of arrogant sophomores who think they are philosopher kings, and they spout off about saving money and the need to downsize the Federal Government while they are completely blind to the fact that the CIA has a $2 billion slush fund. They are blind to the fact that today's New York Times talks about a new set of jet fighters we are going to build that eventually will cost $1 trillion, a whole system of jet fighters that we are going to be building, all the manufacturing companies are gearing up, and that cost is going to be $1 trillion. do you want to saddle your children with $1 trillion in costs for a new jet fighter plane when we have the most modern sophisticated jet fighter planes already? One is being manufactured at Marietta, GA, in Speaker Gingrich's district. That one, the F-22, is already the most sophisticated thing you can imagine. Why do we need another set? We say we are going to downsize Government, the era of big Government is over, but the defense spending continues to go on at the same pace. The CIA is the same size that it was 10 years ago. Yet we say we are downsizing Government. We also insist that places like New York State and New York City get their house in order in order to qualify for the largesse that the Federal Government confers upon them. I have just told you, the Federal Government does not do New York State any favors. If New York State stood alone, it would be in receipt of $18.9 billion that it does not have now. If you gave us back the $18.9 billion in 1994 that we paid into the Federal Government, which was greater than the amount we got back in terms of aid, we could solve our budget problems. In fact, just give us back half that amount. If we had $9 billion, the New York State budget could be balanced, we could increase the budget for education, we could take care of our own youth this summer. We could have a New York State summer youth employment program, if you give us back the great amount of money we pay in that we do not get back in terms of aid. I mention this because last Thursday, March 7, the Washington Post, and I think it is very significant that the Washington Post did this and not the New York Times. I would like to know where is the New York Times on this issue. I have never seen them do an article of this magnitude. The Washington Post, last Thursday, had a front page article which talked about this very situation. It is entitled, ``U.S. to New York: It's Still Dutch Treat. Balance of Taxes to Services Favors Washington--So Does the Rhetoric.'' It was written by a reporter, a Washington Post staff writer, named Malcolm Gladwell. Mr. Gladwell makes some very interesting statements here, and I commend him on his research here but I marvel at his naivete. I am going to read some of this. We have a little time left. Quoting from Mr. Gladwell's article on the front page of the Washington Post: In a memorable outburst late last year, Representative Newt Gingrich declared that New York City was saddled with ``a culture of waste for which they want us to send a check.'' The rest of the country, the House Speaker said, in a blunt summation of Federal urban policy, `` is not going to bail out the habits that have made New York so extraordinarily expensive.'' I guess one of those programs that have made us extraordinarily expensive is the summer youth employment program. We get more than anybody else in terms of young people because we have more poor young people in our city than anybody else. To repeat the quote, Newt Gingrich says, ``We will not be saddled with a culture of waste for which they want us to send a check. The Federal Government is not going to bail out the habits that have made New York so extraordinarily expensive.'' Continuing to read Mr. Gladwell's article: As Republicans campaign in the New York primary, no one is talking about aid to the cities, mass transit and urban renewal. And the prevailing assumption in Washington, as Gingrich put it, is that places like New York City are financial sinkholes, inefficient, wasteful, and a drain on the public purse. It is a powerful new idea, central to the fate of American urban life. But it has one problem, economists say: It isn't true. According to statistics complied by economists at Harvard University, Illinois, Massachusetts, Ohio, New Jersey and Michigan--in other words, those States powered by the metropolitan economies of older cities such as Chicago, Boston, Cincinnati and Detroit--all send billions of dollars more to Washington each year in Federal taxes than they get back in social programs, defense spending or public works projects. And the biggest contributor of all to the Federal budget--the cash cow of the United States Treasury--is the place Gingrich derided as a dead weight on the rest of the country: New York City. New York State in 1994 contributed $18.9 billion more to the Federal Government than it received in return. It ran a surplus of that amount in 1994. The Speaker's home State of Georgia, meanwhile, is one of a large number of southern, largely Republican States that receive far more from the Federal Government than they send out in taxes. Quoting Mr. Moynihan: I told Mr. Gingrich, what are you talking about, my friend? In Atlanta, 59 percent of the children are on AFDC, Aid to Families with Dependent Children, in a single year. Where do you think that money from from? By the way, Atlanta is in Georgia, in case somebody does not have their geography straight. Atlanta is in Georgia. Georgia is the Speaker's home State. The idea that cities like New York run huge surpluses with Washington is, according to urban experts and economists, one of the best-kept secrets in American politics, an idea that-- if it ever gained currency--could force a fundamental transformation in the relationship between the Federal Government and the States. Here is where I applaud Mr. Gladwell's naivete. It is a beautiful purity. He thinks that if we really understood the facts, if we really had the information, it would change our behavior. But, of course, most of the people on the Budget Committee here, Republicans and Democrats, understand this fact very well. Most of the people on the Appropriations Committee understand this fact. They are not dumb. The idea that Congressmen are dumb and do not understand statistics and do not understand the complexities of the modern world is a ridiculous idea. Congressmen are some of the smartest people in the world. They understand. They have the knowledge. But where is the morality? Where is the integrity which says that this is not just? I am going to read Mr. Gladwell's statement again. The idea that cities like New York run huge surpluses with Washington is, according to urban experts and economists, one of the best-kept secrets in American politics, an idea that-- if it ever gained currency--could force a fundamental transformation in the relationship between the Federal Government and the States. I hope that by ``currency'' he means that the American people, ordinary people with common sense out there, are going to learn more and more about this injustice and begin to pressure to have something done about it. I hope that that is what he means, because it is understood by the people who are making policy here. They are bullying the situation. Power, the power to harass the cities, the power to neglect the cities, the power to swindle the cities. We had a big swindle in the private sector. Money flowed from the depositors in New York City, Detroit, Philadelphia. The big cities of the Northeast poured money into their banks and the banks would not invest in the big cities, very little investment in the infrastructure, very little investment in shopping malls, in stores there. They said that the cities were a bad risk, so the money flowed out to the Midwest, the South, the West, into the savings and loan associations, into the banks, and they used the money to invest in shopping malls and condominiums and all kinds of programs which were supposed to be not risks but good buys, good investments. Then came the savings and loan scandal, which up to $300 billion was found to be bad investments or crooked investments, stupid investments, and the taxpayers of the whole country were saddled with a bill which they do not even know about yet because nobody talks honestly about it in the Government here, of about $300 billion it has amounted to, the savings and loan swindle, money we have to pay back to depositors, plus the administration of the process of getting all this straightened out. It is still going on. They put out reports that are not very clear, but at least $300 billion of public money has gone down the drain. That is the private sector taking the money out of the cities, refusing to invest in the cities, and putting it into so-called better investments in the South, the West, the Midwest, and losing the money. Now we have the Federal Government, and this has been going on for some time. It was started really by the New Deal, and I am going to read on quickly because he talks about that. The New Deal was an altruistic action, where Franklin Roosevelt and the people who conceived the New Deal were not dumb, either. They understood that the wealth was in the Northeast. They understood that the States in the Northeast had more money, and they wanted to help the rest of the country by having programs which spread the money across the rest of the country. They wanted to. They did not talk about States rights. If New York had talked about States rights 50 years ago, then you would have never had the money to have the agricultural subsidy program across the rural areas of the country. You would not have the money to rebuild the infrastructure in the cities. The WPA would have been limited to those States that could pay for it. But they did not have States rights and block grants and all this nonsense about States being able to administer programs better. Fortunately, that was not around, and the beneficiaries of that are mainly the southern States. Southern States get more than anybody else. When you add up all the figures in this same Harvard report, $65 billion more go into the southern States than they pay out to the Federal Government; $65 billion. One of the biggest recipients is Mississippi. It gets $6 billion more from the Government than it pays in. But Virginia, Georgia, a number of others, Georgia gets $2 billion more from the Federal Government than it pays in. The county where the Speaker resides is the county that gets the most money from the Federal Government per capita than any other county in the country, in the whole country. Speaker Gingrich's district gets more money from the Federal Government per capita, per person, than any other. Let me read on from the Washington Post article of Tuesday, March 7, by Mr. Malcolm Gladwell: It strongly suggests, for example, that the decline of many northeastern American cities may be due not just to mismanagement--as is now popularly imagined--but to the emptying of their coffers by the Federal Government. It also suggests that keeping cities healthy should not be seen by Congress as an act of charity so much as a prudent step to protect one of the Treasury's real moneymakers. Let me repeat that. The cities should not be treated as an act of charity, Aid to cities: So much as a prudent step to protect one of the Treasury's greatest moneymakers. Money has been drained steadily from the cities. The policies of the Federal Government the last 20 years have been draining money away from the cities, but the cities are the moneymakers. Cities are still, despite this great drain and despite the stress on their infrastructures, they are still producing more tax money than any other part of the country: Manhattan sends an awful lot of money to Washington, says Sigurd Grava who teaches urban planning at Columbia University. But Manhattan is beginning to suffer from problems that require very heavy capital investment, and that is where we should expect the money to be coming back. And if the money does not come back from the Federal Government, then we have a serious dislocation. The cow is being milked in the city, and that is fine because that is what cows are for. But you have to feed the cow, too. There are two reasons why States in the Northeast tend to pay much more to Washington than they get back. The first is that the northeast is still, as it has been since colonial days, the seat of much of the country's wealth. As a result, the region pays the lion's share of the country's taxes. I heard somebody here before talking about the terrible amount of taxes the pay, and I think the American people really deserve as individuals and families to be relieved of some of the tax burden. We should have corporations paying a greater share of the taxes, because corporations are making great amounts of money. We should do something about the great tax burden on the families. But let us understand where the taxes are coming from. They are still coming from the Northeast in great amounts. In New York State, for example, the per capita income in 1994 was $25,999, which means, according to the Harvard study, on average every New Yorker paid just about $5,000 in Federal taxes. In Connecticut, the same statistics are $29,402, and $6,281 for every individual family. But in a much poorer State, such as South Carolina, for example, where the per capita income is $17,695 the average Federal tax bill was just $3,816. The other side of the equation is that what States get back from Washington, and here the Northeast is an exception as well, New York State, New Jersey, and Connecticut each have over the years gotten a big chunk of Federal funds for Medicaid programs. We have been criticized for spending money on Medicaid and Medicare. I say if you are going to spend money, and I can think of no more noble way to spend it than to help people, if they are spending it for the health of people, to take care of people, the elderly, the sick, the injured, children, their health, then that is a great way to spend money. Let us get rid of the corruption in health care programs. Let us get rid of the waste, but if you are spending it on health care instead of on weapons systems that are not needed, then you are certainly a few steps higher on the moral plane than those people who are spending it for weapons systems. They go on to say: By national standards, our Medicaid programs tend to be quite lavish. But if all the payments the Federal government makes to the States are totaled, the Northeast's share of money for welfare, salaries of military personnel, public works projects, social security checks, highway construction, and other federally funded programs lags well behind the rest of the country. New York State got $3,948 per capita from Washington in 1994, while New Jersey received less, $3,648. Both were well below the national average of $4,732 and far behind North Dakota at $6,001, or New Mexico at $6,734, both of which received large Federal agricultural and land management subsidies. You want to know where the money is going in this country? You want to know where the great injustice is, where those people who are really on corporate welfare because many of these agricultural subsidies are not going to individuals and families, they are going to agricultural businesses, and it is going to States that receive Federal agricultural and land management subsidies. The biggest winner of all in terms, and economists say there is nothing wrong with this kind of income redistribution. In an open economy such as ours, it is not necessary, even desirable, that Federal expenditures of taxes always be in balance in every State. Harvard economists Monica Friar and Herman Leonard wrote in a 1995 balance of payments report, an annual study initiated 20 years ago by Senator Moynihan, indeed one of the main purposes of a progressive income tax is that the more well-to-do, wherever they may reside, pay a higher share for the services provided by the government. They go on to talk about the New Deal and how the people who concocted the New Deal knew that they were spreading the wealth throughout the entire country, what would they say if they heard people talk about block grants now and the States having the right to do what they want to do. New Yorkers ought to wake up. Maybe they ought to get on board block grants, States' rights, and have New Yorkers have the right to take the money back. If New York had control of the $18.9 billion, the State, half of that is the city, $9 billion, we could have a summer youth program without begging anyone. We have been begging, begging; we begged last year. I have a set of letters here written by the Congressional Black Caucus, where we begged the Honorable Mark Hatfield, Senate Committee on Appropriations, we begged Honorable Bob Livingston, chairman of the Committee on Appropriations, we begged David Obey to help us, we begged Robert Byrd, the ranking member on the Senate Committee on Appropriations, we begged for a summer youth employment program in 1995. Now we are on our knees again begging. We are begging to help young people, begging to do something which makes a great deal of sense. We are begging to do something which anybody with common sense knows is right and is productive. We are begging. Let me just conclude by saying that I appreciate the eloquent statements made by the persons who were concerned about teenage pregnancy. But I am very sorry that the hypocrisy is so thick in this Chamber. I am very sorry there is so much hypocrisy that we can talk in ``hifalutin'' terms about helping teenagers with the problem of teenage pregnancy, helping teenagers with their lives, sense of self-worth, and then we turn down a program which is directly aimed to help teenagers. Let me tell you about the teenage problem where it first originated in America. Let me tell you about the teenage pregnancy, where it happened, overwhelming in moral terms. America's greatest teenage pregnancy problem existed for 232 years, when Africans were enslaved in this country. For 232 years, African girls who were enslaved were required in this country to become pregnant in order to be able to keep eating. Let me read you just in closing from ``Bull Whip Days: The Slaves Remembered,'' an oral history, where the slaves during the Federal rightist project told their stories, and they were recorded and here is a slave named Hilliard Yellerday, who says, and this is teenage pregnancy on a massive scale, when a girl became a woman, she was required to go to a man and become a mother. There was generally a form of marriage. The master read a paper to them telling them they were man and wife. Some were married by the master laying down a broom and the two slaves, man and woman, would jump over it. The master would then tell them they were man and wife, and they could go to bed together. Master would sometimes go and get a large hale, hearty Negro man from some other plantation to go to his Negro woman. He would ask the other master to let this man come over to his place to go to his slave girls. A slave girl was expected to have children as soon as she became a woman. Some of them had children at the age of 12 and 13 years old. Negro men 6 feet tall went to some of these children. This is a testimony by Hilliard Yellerday, an ex-slave woman. Here is a system that oppressed teenagers, and we have a system that neglects teenagers, plays games with teenagers, and refuses to offer the simplest form of health at the lowest cost, the summer youth employment program. We are in a moral dilemma as great as those slave masters who made their slave girls become pregnant as soon as they were old enough to become pregnant.

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, the hour is late, and I will try to compress my remarks into about 30 minutes. Mr. Speaker, I think it is very important that we realize also that the hour is late for the funding of the Summer Youth Employment Program, and that is the subject which I feel compelled to talk about tonight. We are going to be talking about it more this week. The members of the Congressional Black Caucus at a meeting on Friday decided we would make this item a priority item this week and try to rally our colleagues, both Democrat and Republican, to come to the aid of the young people in our country. Most of those young people reside in big cities, and that is where most of the money for the Summer Youth Employment Program has traditionally gone, to big cities. That is where the population is, in big cities. It has gone to big cities because that is where the poor young people are. There are requirements for the program. It is a means-tested program. You have to be poor. You have to meet certain standards in terms of poverty before you can participate in the program. So it has gone to the big cities, where the poor youth are. It has gone to a large number of minority youth, Hispanic and African- American. It has gone to a large number of young people who come from poor neighborhoods that do not have people voting as they should vote, so they do not have much political power. For all these reasons, the program seems to have become very unpopular, certainly become a cast-off by the leadership perhaps in both parties. But certainly the Republican majority in this Congress seems to delight in going after the Summer Youth Employment Program. The Republican majority in the rescission process more than a year ago zeroed out the program. It was zeroed out for 1995, the past summer, and zeroed out for 1996 and forevermore. Why does this Summer Youth Employment Program merit being targeted for the hostility of the Republican majority in this Congress? I do not know. I cannot understand. There are protestations from both sides of the aisle about being concerned about young people, about being concerned about youth. We have heard some eloquent speeches tonight about being concerned about pregnant teenagers. Well, I think one of the speakers said if you are concerned about pregnant teenagers, that means you have to be concerned about programs that impact on both males and females. So we are talking about male and female youth and being concerned about them. Here is a program that is targeted to young people in a very direct way. Here is a program that does not have a lot of red tape. Here is a program that does not have a great deal of bureaucracy. The money goes to young people to pay them to do jobs in the summer. The money goes to young people to pay them for about 2 months, I think it is an 8-week program. They work at minimum wage. They work for a limited number, 6 hours a day for 4 or 5 days a week. It is a very short program, about 30 hours, I think, a week. For a small amount of money, it reaps a great dividend. There are many young people who have never been employed before who are employed for the first time. They learn good work habits. They get a sense of worth, self-worth. I was surprised the other night as we were talking about the dilemma of the Summer Youth Employment Program that one of my assistants who is a college graduate already, she does a lot of my case work and who voluntarily works with young people, was talking about how upset the young people are about the fact that the summer youth program appears to be lost. Normally at this time of the year, there is notification that there is a program and there are dates already offered as to when you can file your application and the process has already started. But they were told it is a hazy situation at best, and, at worse, we have to recognize the fact that there is zero in the budget for the Summer Youth Employment Program. Yes, the President did ask, I think, for $900 million for this year's program. I think the budget for the previous was $1 billion. He asked for $900 million-some in his budget. But the Republican majority zeroed that out. They asked for zero. The Senate, the other body, has not made any effort to put the Summer Youth Employment Program back in either. The Republican majority zeroed it out for 1995, but it was saved by the Senate before. The other body put it back in in the conference process. We regained a program that was of a smaller size, but it was nevertheless a program. I think you had more than 600,000, about 700,000 young people serviced in the 1995 program. I might add that is a long way from the original Summer Youth Employment Program. They used to serve in New York City, for example, 90,000 young people in the summer. New York City is a big place, with 8 million people and a lot of young people. Our school system has 1 million young people in school. Of that number, teenagers are about 400,000. So of that 400,000, 90,000 received jobs at the height of the program in the late 1960's and the early 1970's. I know, because I was the commissioner of the Community Development Agency, which was the agency responsible for community action programs. Those community action programs were primarily the employers of the summer youth program youngsters. Community action programs operate all year round. They did various things for the community in the area of housing, education, and cleaning streets and doing all kinds of things. They employed those 90,000 young people. In 1995, the number had dropped from 90,000 to 32,000. So, all we could do is give 32,000 young people jobs. They are upset. They have good reason to be upset. So my assistant, Necole Brown, was explaining to me about how upset the young people are about the fact, the prospect that there will be absolutely no jobs this summer, and she said, you know, the first job I ever had was in the Summer Youth Employment Program, the very first job I ever had. The first job my brother ever had was in the Summer Youth Employment Program. The first job my sister ever had was in the Summer Youth Employment Program. For the first time, I felt like I was somebody, that I belonged to the mainstream as a result of having that job during the summer. The story can be told by numerous others. The numbers are very large. I meet lots of young people, because I started my career in the community action program in a local community action agency in Brownsville, which was a front-line employer. So I saw the faces of the young people who were employed by the hundreds summer after summer, and I still meet them on the street 20 years later. I meet them and they remind me that they were employed. They think it was my Summer Youth Employment Program, and they tell me about what they are doing. Not all of them have made good in life, and I have not done a case study to tell you exactly what the longitudinal effect of it has been, but most of them have been greatly helped by that program. And if you do a longitudinal study, careful study of youth who went through the Summer Youth Employment Program, I am sure you will find a great positive benefit between the difference of among poor youths who when through the program and those poor youths who never had the opportunity. We have had longitudinal studies done of Head Start. Head Start is a program for poor youngsters starting in preschool, and they followed youngsters who went into the program 20 and 25 years ago, and those longitudinal studies always show great benefits when you compare the youngsters in the Head Start Program with a control group that they used of youngsters who did not go into the Head Start Program who came from the same kind of backgrounds. These programs do benefit young people. We do not know a lot about how to handle our present crisis with youth, but we do know that some things work, some things work and they work very well. We cannot solve all the problems. Nobody is going to stand here, I am certainly not going to stand here and pretend I can tell you what the prescription is for handling teenagers in 1996. There are some teenagers, I just wrote a letter for one recently, who have all the benefits in the world, came from a very good family, you know, good income in the family, they took good care of him and put him through the best schools, and still he is in trouble with the law, facing 3 or 4 years in jail because of drugs. Not only did he have drugs, but when the police approached the car, he tried to drive off, so the situation is worse. Here is a good youngster from a good family, and I am writing a letter to try to get some kind of leniency and get the judge to look at the situation in total. He has a good opportunity to be rehabilitated because he has the support of a family. I do not know why he went wrong, though. I cannot explain the phenomenon of young people who have all the advantages in the world going wrong, but there are many of them. They come from all neighborhoods, and Members of Congress certainly know some of them. They have relatives and they have friends who are confronted with this situation. But there are situations where youngsters in poverty, when you apply some kind of assistance, you get a result. There are some things that we know do work, that large numbers, the greatest, overwhelming majority will rise to the occasion if they get some help. One of the things that Necole Brown told me about the young people she is working with. My office is not equipped to work with young people. I do not have a grant for that. I have what you call a youth advisory committee where I wanted to get involved a little bit, have youngsters tell me what is going on, but we get more and more involved, because once you show them attention, teenagers want more attention, and they respond in such a way that it inspires you to get more involved, you want to do more for them. So we found ourselves trying to do more and more all the time. But right now the rock bottom thing is to get them access to summer youth employment, those minimum wage jobs, about 30 hours a week can mean all the difference in the world. We say we care. We say we care as a nation. We say we care as a Congress. But we do things which are quite the opposite. In fact, it is kind of an evil situation that we confront when we have people who are knowledgeable about exactly what is going on and they stand here and tell us that we do not have the money to fund a Summer Youth Employment Program where youngsters all across the country can get same jobs this summer. It will bust the budget. We do not have the money in the budget. What are we talking about? We are talking about probably $600 or $700 million out of a trillion-dollar budget, $600 or $700 million. The same people who stand here and tell us that we do not have the money to fund a program for youth, which will employ more than 600,000 young in the cities, give them hope and help us to deal with some of these problems that cost so much more money. It costs $20,000 to keep a young person in jail for a year, and yet here is a Summer Youth Employment Program, we are going to pay minimum wage for 2 months, 10 weeks, 8 weeks, I am sorry. That tiny amount of money we cannot invest. It is some kind of distorted, evil kind of thinking that comes out with a conclusion that we cannot afford it. The same people who say we cannot afford it will do nothing about the fact that the CIA just discovered the fact that it has $2 billion in its petty cash fund that it did not know it had. Two billion dollars, the auditors have discovered $2 billion. That is what has been made public. When the CIA makes something public, we always have to sort of look at it and add something to it because we know they do not tell the truth. They are in the business of not telling the truth, so it is probably more than $2 billion, $2 billion. So we have written a letter to the President saying that, you know, you can solve the problem of the Summer Youth Employment Program. It is the same letter we intend to distribute to the whole Congress and certainly the Republican leadership of this House, which started the problem. The Republican majority instituted this attack on the Summer Youth Employment Program, this irrational attack, this evil attack, this attack which runs counter to the purposes of any sane group of people who want to help young people. We hope that they will also read the letter and respond. We wrote to Bill Clinton, the members of the House Committee on Economic and Educational Opportunities. The gentleman from Michigan [Mr. Kildee] and I initiated the letter. We will be asking other people to join us: Dear Mr. President: We respectfully and urgently request that the $2 billion in unspent funds recently discovered by auditors of the CIA be reprogrammed to eliminate the cuts in title I Head Start and the Summer Youth Employment Program. We have noted with great shock and indignation the revelation that the CIA has $2 billion in unspent funds that no one in the government was aware of, $2 billion that no one in the government was aware of. It is our understanding that these funds are not on any budget schedule and therefore are available to be utilized for more positive purposes. More specifically, Mr. President, we propose that the following budget actions be initiated by your administration: Transfer $1.1 billion to title I, the education programs that go to the elementary and secondary schools, title one. Transfer $300 million to Head Start; $300 million is that amount that Head Start has been cut in the budget initiated by the Republican majority in the House of Representatives. And transfer $600 million to summer youth employment programs, $600 million. It all adds up to $2 billion; $2 billion is a lot of money but look at the great good you can do if you put it to positive purposes. We are certain the Democratic Members of both the House and the Senate would enthusiastically support these actions. We are also certain that the Republican opposition would find it very difficult to show cause why these recently discovered funds that are free and available cannot be used to guarantee the same level of funding for these vital education programs. Mr. President, we look forward to working closely with you and to achieve this very practical goals. I would like for the Republican majority of this House to show cause, tell us why you have attacked the Summer Youth Employment Program and, if your reason is that there is no money in the budget and it is impossible to make room for the program now, then tell us why you cannot join with us in reprogramming $2 million that the Central Intelligence Agency has that it did not know it had, that nobody knew it had. So it certainly is not on anybody's budget schedule. Tell us. This is a challenge and this is a moral challenge. If you care about morality, if you care about family values, if you care about pregnant teenagers, we have heard some eloquent speeches about pregnant teenagers and people who want to take steps to deal with the problem of pregnant teenagers in any way possible, and I applaud every suggestion that was made. I applaud those speeches on both sides of the aisle. We need to come to grips with the problem. But you certainly do not care about the problem of pregnant teenagers if you are going to wipe out a program like the Summer Youth Employment Program which is quite simply, a direct way of giving hope to young people. It gives hope. I heard the people who talked before me about teenage pregnancy use the phrase over and over again about hope, hope for young people. I heard the gentleman from Connecticut [Mr. Shays] on the other side of the aisle talk about dreams and the fact that as a young person his parents guaranteed he had the opportunity to dream and how you wreck the dreams of young people when their dysfunctional lives lead to pregnancy and you throw them into a quagmire that they can never get out of. I heard this with great sympathy. I hope that we as intelligent people, we as intelligent people also act as honest people, because we are not honest, it is not honest to look at the situation and see the $600 million will solve the problem, $600 million will take us a long way toward giving some of those teenagers hope, the males and the females because they are both part of the problem; $600 million will save us a great deal of money by keeping young people out of trouble, out of jail. Jail always costs $20,000 or more per year for young people. All of these are so obvious, so self-evident until only some kinds of evil force can be at work to not make decisionmakers in Washington see it and act on it. What is going on? I really do not know what is going on. Mr. Speaker, I think the gentleman from New Jersey wants to join me here. And before I go any further, I want to give him an opportunity to join us. I think we will take our entire hour at this point. The gentleman from New Jersey [Mr. Payne] is welcome to join this discussion. Mr. Payne is the chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus, which had a retreat last week on Friday. On Friday, we looked at all the priorities and all the problems. We concluded that the problem facing us more right now, the problem that has a deadline on it, the problem that has a time clock, a time bomb ticking away is the problem of summer youth employment. Summer youth employment, the program, decisions need to be made now. They need to be made soon. The process needs to be engaged. We have a lot of talk about AmeriCorps, and we are all for AmeriCorps. Both of us serve on the committee, the Committee on Economic and Educational Opportunities, which is responsible for AmeriCorps. It used to be called the Education and Labor Committee when we passed the bill that created AmeriCorps. Nobody ever said to us, when you create AmeriCorps you have to get rid of the Summer Youth Employment Program. I want everybody to hear me carefully. If you bring AmeriCorps into our neighborhoods this summer and there is no Summer Youth Employment Program, I fear for the safety of the AmeriCorps youth. It would not be just to wipe out the Summer Youth Employment Program and then send in middle-class youngsters from the AmeriCorps program and expect there not to be a reaction. It is wrong. It is unjust. And I hope you understand how explosive that could be. Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from New Jersey [Mr. Payne].