Major Owens

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Chairman, this amendment would impose financial penalties for the misuse or abuse of Federal training dollars. One of the great mythologies, as I pointed out when discussing the previous amendment, one of the great mythologies upon which this bill is based is that the only bad government is the Federal Government, that waste and corruption can only occur in Washington and that State and local governments are populated by saints and angels. Massive amounts of Federal dollars are turned over to States and local governments in this bill with minimal supervision and minimal accountability. There has not been a job training program this loosely structured since CETA, the Comprehensive Employment Training Act. Do Members recall what happened to CETA? Do Members recall how infamy was brought to CETA by local and State governments? I have served at all levels of government. I know from experience that the sponsor's faith in the purity of State and local government is misplaced. This is a myth that has been deliberately created to justify moving large numbers of programs to the State and local level in order to cut those programs in the process. Mismanagement, incompetence, greed, and venality are, if anything, more pervasive the lower one goes into government. It is less visible, but it is more pervasive. For that reason I have no doubt that, if this bill is enacted into law, we will all be reading about outrageous scandals and abuses in a year or two. But if we are going to adopt the honor system when it comes to job training programs, if we are going to create CETA part 12, we should obtain some mechanism for the Federal Government to recover taxpayer dollars that are misspent or wasted. Under our current job training programs, as under all Federal grant programs, grantees who misspend funds must repay them to the Treasury with non-Federal dollars. This bill, however, includes a very generous forgiveness provision that lets the wrongdoers off the hook. Taxpayers listen closely. Instead of repaying the money they misspend, they can just deduct is from their next grant. No questions asked. The taxpayers lose their money. Persons who need training do not get it. And the bureaucrat responsible for it all gets away without even a slap on the wrist. My amendment would more carefully target those instances in which the forgiveness provision would be available. It would deny forgiveness and require restitution when a bureaucrat misspends funds due to, one, a willful disregard of statutory requirements, gross negligence or, three, a failure to observe accepted standards of administration. In other instances when an auditing exception is due to simple error or an honest mistake, grantees could deduct the funds from the next grant. But when the misexpenditures are deliberate, or due to incompetence, restitution must be made. In many cases, the problem will be deliberate misuse of funds, and this is not play money. These are tax dollars. No one, whether they are in Federal, State, or local government, should be given license to misspend the taxpayers' dollars. This is a very elementary amendment, very elementary proposal. This is a very standard requirement that is included in all legislation up to now. Why are we suddenly creating incentives for misspending funds? Why are we creating temptations for people to play with Federal money? The amount of Federal money gets smaller and smaller that is available for education and for job training. We want to make small amounts of money more vulnerable to being raided by people who prey upon Federal programs and who prey upon the people who need these very critical programs. I would like to know why this amendment cannot be accepted as sort of standard operating procedure being continued? We have it already. For what purpose has the majority decided to make things more easy, lenient for people who engage in misspending of Federal funds? For what purposes are we courting corruption? What do we gain by making the laws more lax as we go through this gigantic transformation of government pushing down to the local level and to the State level programs which recently worked under the jurisdiction of the Federal Government? I do not understand why we have taken this step. All of us know that there are still cities and towns in this country controlled by organized crime. All of us know that there are rampant examples occurring every day of gross mismanagement in various departments of State government and city government. I do not like to refer to the O.J. trial in this setting, but we see massive incompetence in every level of Los Angeles City government, and we see in the context of the police department a department of city government with ongoing gross corruption of the worst kind. In New York State recently we had the State police facing a scandal of fingerprints being planted by State police. On and on it goes. Corruption at the local level is the basic problem, and we should try to counteract it.

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Chairman, I offer an amendment.

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Chairman, reclaiming my time, I thank the gentleman for his observation, but what I am speaking of, has the gentleman seen these values that liquid can flow one way but it cannot flow back? We need a valve where they can transfer money into the school systems and not out of it. If we can get transfer that way, that is the most appropriate transfer, because the bleeding is taking place in the public school systems, in the systems that serve children. That is where the tremendous lacerations have been made by this Republican controlled Congress; $4 billion, almost, is being lost, and now we are jeopardizing just another $200 million we say might be transferred. But every bit counts. Mr. Chairman, there are some school systems, like the one that serves my constituents in New York City that started out with a negative: 8,000 high school children and no seats to put them in. There is no hope on the horizon for getting funds for new buildings. At the elementary school level they do not have money for chalk and erasers. So we are in a desperate situation here, and it will not be made better by the cuts they are going to face next fall. They think things are bad this fall, wait until the Republican cuts go into effect next fall. And $1.1 billion is being cut out of title I. That is one-seventh of the title I funds. That means one-seventh of the money flowing into the New York City schools will be cut from the title I program. That is no small amount of money. So, Mr. Chairman, we have a problem in terms of education, which we need so drastically. It is on the losing end. Never before have we had such drastic cuts in Federal aid to education. But that does not tell the whole story. The Federal Government is setting the tone for what is happening at the State and local levels. So there are cuts all around. The other thing we must consider is the fact that this myth that has been perpetrated this year is totally inaccurate. The myth that State and local governments are superior to the Federal Government in terms of incorruptibility, in terms of competence, in terms of efficiency. That is a myth that has been generated this year. There is nothing in history to support that myth. There is nothing in the clippings of our local newspapers that will support that myth. Mr. Chairman, if we go back and examine some of the worst corruption cases in the history of the country, the corruption cases are at the local level. There is corruption at the State level. If we look at Federal funding for programs close to the one we are considering today, look at the SETA program. SETA was destroyed by corruption and incompetence at the local level. It is the local and State levels that were the problems and continue to be the problems. This myth we have invented for the convenience of the budget cutters, people who want to make drastic reductions in the Federal aid to education, have chosen to blow up local government and State government as some kind of paragons of virtue. They are not. The likelihood that we will have patronage considerations over educational considerations, the likelihood that we will have out-and-out corruption is greater at the local level and at the State level. Sure, it does not get as much publicity, and one of the reasons that corruption goes on and on forever is because it is not exposed in the way the Federal Government is exposed. At the Federal level we have much more visibility. Mr. Chairman, we are up against a situation where there is the likelihood that Governors and local administrators will have more pressure put on them by the local clubhouse hacks to produce jobs and to produce results for the adult programs than for the children. That likelihood is very real. It is very real, and we need safeguards against it. Beyond the safeguards, we need to have some kind of incentives provided, some kind of protection provided for education. Mr. Chairman, the one-way valve I am talking about would be a much more innovative and useful device for the education of children. I do not think children would be protected at all by leaving it wide open and allowing this flexibility at the level of the Governors and the local level. I think that the fact that this language was slipped in at the last minute shows that the people who are the authors of the bill do not lend credibility to themselves.

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Chairman, I rise in support of the amendment, and I would like to speak briefly about two aspects of this problem. One is, education is being cut drastically. Education is being cut by almost $4 billion. Federal aid to education. Those are not the only cuts in education. They are cutting education at the State levels and cutting education at the city levels. Education for children in school.

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Chairman, I move to strike the requisite number of words. (Mr. OWENS asked and was given permission to revise and extend his remarks.)

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Chairman, I ask unanimous consent to withdraw my amendment.

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Chairman, I rise in strong support of the Green amendment. Mr. Chairman, I rise in support of the Green amendment for the sake of all Americans with disabilities and for every American that might tomorrow find themselves among those with disabilities. I think we must exercise the greatest possible care in how we reform the vocational rehabilitation system. Let us not do it haphazardly as this bill is doing it. Let us not do it with confusing last-minute amendments. Let us go back to committee and do it right. That is what the Green amendment is telling us to do. I support integrating vocational rehabilitation into a one-stop system. I support enhancing consumer choice, and I support adopting a more market oriented approach. But I cannot support the haphazardly constructed mess that we are faced with here in title V. It is important for Members to understand the shoddiness of the process through which these provisions were developed, very shoddy process. The bill makes the most far-reaching changes in vocational rehabilitation in 70 years. Yet our committee did not hold a single hearing on these provisions, not one hearing. No public opportunities were provided for people with disabilities who rely on vocational rehabilitation to make comments and suggestions. Everything was drafted behind closed doors without meaningful input from the public. Unlike other parts of this bill, no efforts have been made to involve the minority in crafting title V. For as long as anyone can remember, disability policy in this House has been forged on a bipartisan basis. Republicans and Democrats worked in harmony together to set policy. That proud tradition ends with this bill. Everybody recalls the Americans with Disabilities Act. I think we all recall the leadership of Justin Dart in that, in the passage of that act. Justin Dart is a Republican disability activist, and Justin Dart was the Bush administration commissioner for the Rehabilitation Services Administration. In a letter dated August 30, 1995, Justin Dart says the following: I oppose the Careers Act, H.R. 1617, as it applies to vocational rehabilitation. The present form of H.R. 1617 would be harmful to people with disabilities and the Nation. I agree wholeheartedly with Justin Dart. To make matters worse, the sponsors of this bill keep making dramatic changes in title V at the last minute. Last Friday one set of changes was made. Late last night another set were made. This morning still another set of changes. Instead of improving the bill, each one of these changes had made title V progressively stranger and more convoluted. What these new provisions will do is impossible to know for sure. Preschoolers take greater care in making a fingerpainting than the sponsors of this bill have in putting together title V. They have great contempt for the community of people with disabilities in this process. The sponsors say that anything is better than the current system. That is garbage. Some 9 million Americans with disabilities now have jobs, thanks to this program; 1.2 million are currently receiving services. The program's performance has been improving impressively. The job placement rolls increased 6.4 percent last year over the previous year. This year they are estimated to go up another 6 percent. The system is also doing more with less. The number of persons served has skyrocketed since 1992, while the funds have remained even. Most of these new persons being served have the most severe disabilities, also. I recently received a letter from a woman in Parkersburg, WV who did not think anything is better than the current system. She was first disabled in a car accident and then abandoned by her husband after he got his hands on her insurance check. She could not afford a private hospital. She called vocational rehabilitation. She writes, ``I was treated wonderful. They taught me everything, like how to get in and out of bed, the shower, and how to drive with hand controls, all of this all by myself. They gave me back my independence. I am living at home, caring for the children, doing almost all I did before the accident. I thank God voc rehab exists, and I pray it will be there for others. Until you have been in my shoes, you cannot understand the destruction that passing H.R. 1617 would cause.'' None of the people with disabilities have had a chance to say to the committee, to the majority Republicans in this House, what great destruction H.R. 1617 would cause. I hope that perhaps the committee managers would reconsider at this point in light of the bipartisan opposition to the bill, and recall it, and let us start all over on title V.

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Chairman, I move to strike the requisite number of words. (Mr. OWENS asked and was given permission to revise and extend his remarks.)

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Chairman, in placing liability, I did not see where liability will be placed on the recipients. The gentleman said the recipients of the training would be suffering. I do not see where the recipients would suffer at all except in the case of where we take money out of next year's program to pay for mistakes that have been made in the previous program. Then we are shortchanging the recipients.

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Chairman, will the gentleman yield?

Mr. OWENS. I yield to the gentleman from Wisconsin.

Mr. OWENS

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

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, today we passed the CAREERS Act. I was proud to vote against the CAREERS Act. The CAREERS Act is a consolation of job training programs, some adult education programs, and the programs for people with disabilities, the vocational rehabilitation programs. It is all merged into one program and given to the States in block grants. The problem is that even if you agree that these programs should be merged, there are many small programs--and small is not necessarily bad, small can be very worthwhile--many of the small programs related to job training, like the small programs relate to education, were developed during the reauthorization processes of various reauthorizing committees. They represented a great deal of thought and care and interaction with community groups and professionals. So many of the small programs that have been wiped out now and consolidated in one big set of block grants were good programs. To judge them by the fact that there were so many and they proliferated is to make a rather primitive assessment of the situation. That, nevertheless, has taken place already. I am sorry to say that the Clinton administration started some of that small is bad philosophy, and it just got of hand. I agree that some consolidation was necessary and is desirable, especially if you are going to be flexible, and when you consolidate and you give the option to the States as to how they are going to run the programs, they also have something to work with in terms of resources. The problem with this consolidation is that whatever gains you acquire through consolidation, you lose because of the fact that the overall budget has been cut dramatically. The amount of money available for job training and education programs has been drastically reduced by the same Congress that has focused on consolidation. We have cut $9 billion from the job training and education programs. The House of Representatives has passed an appropriation bill which cut $9 billion from education and job training programs. No matter how you consolidate and how you reconfigure, you have a situation where less will be done. It is impossible to do as much as you were able to do before with such drastic cuts in resources. I do not believe that throwing money at a problem is going to solve the problem or resolve any problems. Throwing money will not do it alone, but I assure you, you are never going to solve any problems unless you do have adequate resources. You do need some funds. You do need some reasonable amount of resources to deal with a problem. Why am I opening with this particular recounting of today's activities. Because I think it is very appropriate in terms of what I have been talking about for the past few weeks. That is, that we are in an economy that is in a state of transition. The economy is changing in very rapid ways. It is changing in ways that are generating a great deal of upheaval, quite unsettling. We have a phenomenon which is contradictory. The economy is robust and booming. The profits were never higher on Wall Street. The stock market is booming. Corporations are making tremendous profits. Yet at the same time the job market is being squeezed. The amount of jobs available is dropping dramatically, and the quality of those jobs in terms of the income that those jobs produce is changing rapidly. You have a contradictory movement, a Wall Street economy on the one hand, and on the other hand a job market that are going in different directions. I had talked about this previously in terms of the very consolidated, solidified, economical way in which Lester Thurow stated this whole situation. I cannot help but come back to the quote that I have made several times in the last 2 weeks from Lester Thurow's article that appeared in the Sunday, September 3 issue of the New York Times on the op-ed page. I cannot help but begin with that first paragraph, because it is very appropriate for what happened today on the floor where we were cutting opportunities for people to get education. We were cutting opportunities for people to be retrained so that they can fit into this new rapidly changing economy. We were cutting opportunities for people to move from the industrial age into the age of information. We were saying that the Government is going to play less and less of a role in preparing people for making these adjustments. If Government does not provide the resources and the funding for job training programs, if Government does not provide the resources and the funding for adult education programs, then who will? The corporations are not going to do it. The corporations will only train the people they need to do the work they have available at a given moment. They are laying off these people. They are downsizing and getting rid of people who will have to be retrained. They will not devote any resources to those people that they are putting out of their doors, the people they are giving pink slips to. In the more benevolent corporations, those that have some compassion, they give people a few months' pay and let them go. Some they may even give them half a year or a year of health benefits. In various ways some corporations do try to ease the burden of downsizing and streamlining which affects human beings. But the manner in which they do this at best is very limited, very temporary in the lives of the people that they are streamlining or downsizing out of a job. We cannot depend on corporations. After all, corporations and businesses are set up for the purpose of making a profit. They are not humanitarian organizations. They are not social organizations. It is the Government that has to take care of the welfare of the general public. But the welfare of the general public is not being taken care of. The welfare of those workers that are being victimized by the rapid changes of the age of information technology, they are not being taken care of. You have the results that Mr. Thurow talks about again in his first paragraph, he summarizes it very well. I quote from Lester Thurow's article from the Sunday, September 3 issue of the New York Times: ``No country without a revolution or a military defeat and subsequent occupation has ever experienced such a sharp shift in the distribution of earnings as America has in the last generation. At no other time have median wages of American men fallen for more than 2 decades. Never before have a majority of American workers suffered real wage reductions while the per capita domestic product was advancing.'' Let me just read another paragraph that I read before: ``The tide rose, the real per capita gross domestic product went up 29 percent between 1973 and 1993, but 80 percent of the boats sank.'' I repeat, ``The tide rose, but 80 percent of the boats sank. Among men, the top 20 percent of the labor force has been winning all of the country's wage increases for more than 2 decades.'' To quote another paragraph from Mr. Thurow: ``With our global economy where anything can be made anywhere and sold everywhere, the supply of cheap, often well-educated labor in the Third World is having a big effect on First World wages. One month's wages for a Seattle software engineer gets the same company an equally good engineer in Bangalore, India for a whole year.'' In other words, you can get a competent, effective, well-educated Indian engineer for 1/12th of the wages you pay Americans, an Indian software engineer. Software is very important. I need not dwell on that issue. What is driving the information revolution now is not so much the computers and the hardware but it is the ability to make use of the hardware with ever more creative software. One of the second or third richest men in America is the owner of a software production company. They do not produce computers or hardware. Mr. Gates, Bill Gates, produces software. These software engineers in India will work for one-twelfth the wages of the software engineers in Seattle. We are talking about an information age revolution which has just begun, ladies and gentlemen. Those who have college degrees are not any safer than those who are unskilled. Nevertheless, today we had a program on the floor, a CAREERS program which deals with job training and adult education, and we were emasculating the program dramatically through the block grant process, we were pushing the responsibility away from the Federal Government down to the States, and we were in the process of doing that cutting the budgets, also. The first ripoff, the first emasculation is by cutting the budget. The second ripoff, the second emasculation is to give the power to the States, with very little accountability. I had an amendment on the floor just saying, at least we ought to hold people accountable for mismanagement, patterns of mismanagement. They should be liable, the States should be liable. That, of course, was a great subject of controversy, just simple safeguarding of the taxpayers' money is a problem because in the process of pushing the money down to the States, we are holding our carrots and incentives to the Governors and the people at the State level, no accountability, you accept this reduced package and you tell us you want it and you applaud it and you support it and we will let you have your way. You do not have to be accountable. That is just part of the process of washing the hands, like Pontius Pilate washed his hands, washing the Federal Government's hands of the problems and the miseries of people who need to be retrained. Like Pontius Pilate, it is about as heartless in its cold, calculating civilized way. ``Let's forget about the dilemma of the workers. Let the States take care of that.'' Then we know that the States do not have the capacity, they will have to deal with reduced money, and the myth of State government being more efficient and more effective than the Federal Government is just that, a myth. There are no facts to support that. State governments have suffered a great deal of corruption, of incompetency. The records of history, newspapers, exposes, go on and on about various things that have happened at State and local levels. Some of the worst corruption in the country has occurred at State and local levels. Some of the most embarrassing bureaucratic nightmares will be found at the State and local levels. But we are pushing that away and washing our hands of the dilemmas, of the problems of working people in this fast-changing economy and saying that we do not want to be bothered. Let us let the States deal with it. And if the States cannot handle it, we really do not care. Speaker Gingrich has said we want to remake America. The question has not been answered directly, remake America for whom? For whom do you want to remake America? For what purpose do you want to remake America? Who will benefit after you are finished remaking America? Who benefits from your conception of the Contract With America? According to Mr. Thurow, 80 percent of the American people are not benefited from what is happening now. You cannot blame that on Speaker Gingrich or the Republicans who control the House and the Senate at this point. It has been going on for 20 years, and so Democrats have to take some of the blame also. The rapidity of the technological revolution, forces that have very little to do with government, may all be blamed and take the greatest share of the blame. But that is a 20-year phenomenon. Now we have observed it for 20 years. Now we understand that something radically different is happening. We should be blamed if we do not take hold. We should be blamed if we do not develop policies, public policies which are designed to counteract and to soften and to make a more compassionate situation in the midst of all this turmoil and change that is being generated by the technological revolution, economic turmoil. During the last campaign, the Clinton campaign wisely focused on the economy. ``It's the economy, stupid,'' was the famous slogan that came out of that campaign. It is the economy. It is the economy. It was the economy during that campaign. It is the economy now. When Speaker Gingrich says he wants to remake America, what he is saying is he wants to remake the economy of America. That comes first. We have to keep our eyes on the economy. Keep our eyes on the resources. Keep our eyes on the money. Keep our eyes on the taxes. Keep our eyes on policies which deal with expenditures, appropriations and budgets. Those are the things that matter, and the remaking of America is remaking the way America uses its resources, starting with the way the Federal Government uses its resources. We have to keep our eyes on this, and I cannot stress that too much, because right now we are focused on the economy, on money, on budgets, on appropriations. Today, the Republicans took one step further in issuing their plan for Medicare reform. Medicare is going to undergo a traumatic $270 billion cut; $270 billion over the next 7 years will be cut out of Medicare. That is a traumatic upheaval. That is a lot of money that has to come out of Medicare. They are not talking much about Medicaid, but $180 billion will be cut out of Medicaid, and maybe they will go further. Since neither the Democrats nor the Republicans are focusing on Medicaid, they will take heavier cuts. That is about money and resources and it is about where the revenue and the tax dollars of the United States of America are going to go. Keep our eyes on that. Keep our eyes on the fact that while we are going to take away from Medicare and Medicaid these hundreds of billions of dollars, we are proposing a $240 billion tax cut which will go mostly to the wealthier Americans. We are moving resources away from the sick and the elderly and the children and the people who are disabled to those people who are already wealthy and able to take care of themselves. That is the remaking of America. It is not so subtle, if you just keep your eyes on it. The problem is that it is so obvious and so horrendous, that the Republican majority has no intentions of allowing us to keep our eyes on the economy, on the remaking of America by moving the resources around. They will come with diversions later on as we get closer and closer to the 1996 election. You are going to hear less and less about the economy and more and more about affirmative action, and more and more about abortion, and more and more about gays in the military, and more and more about set- asides, and more and more about voting rights acts. More and more they will try to divert the attention of the American people by focusing on victims and scapegoats. There will be more and more about how the immigrants are destroying America. Get ready for all of these diversionary issues. The great smoke screen will be thrown in our way. Start right now to prepare to look through the smoke screen and keep focusing on the economy. Keep focusing on the tax dollars. Keep focusing on the appropriations bills. Focus on the Contract With America, which never said they were going to take Medicare and take $270 billion out of it. Focus on the Contract With America which never said that they were going to place a B-2 bomber in the highest priority, and in two big votes on the floor of the House and fight very hard to maintain a B-2 bomber, which nobody wants. A B-2 bomber which the President does not want; a B-2 bomber which the Secretary of Defense does not want and the Air Force does not want; the Joint Chiefs of Staff does not want; only the people who are manufacturing the B-2 bomber and making money off of it, they want it, and the people whose districts benefit from that, and the people who benefit from political action committees that are promoting the B-2 bombers. Those are the people that want the B-2 bomber. Not the military. There is no smoke screen. You cannot say that we need it in order to defeat the evil empire. We do not need it. Russia defeated itself, along with some pressure and some preparedness from here. We will not take the credit away from American strategy, but it is no longer the excuse to use to maintain the B-2 bomber. And yet the B-2, which may absorb $33 over the 7-year period, that bomber is given precedence over Medicare and Medicaid, and over school lunches and over job retraining programs. Just stop for a moment and consider, $9 billion was cut from the adult education, job training, vocational rehabilitation programs for the blind, disabled and the deaf, et cetera, $9 billion. That $9 billion is just one-third of the cost of a B-2 bomber over a 7-year period. Just one-third of the cost. That $9 billion is the cost of four Seawolf submarines. A Seawolf submarine is $2 billion. They are pushing star wars. You know, we are going to go back to the pebbles in the sky to defend us from rockets that nobody has the capacity to launch. We are going to have additions being made to the budget of millions of dollars for defense systems that nobody needs. Think about it all. You know, think about the scare tactics of the Republicans. Medicaid will go bankrupt if we do not do something about it. Yes, Medicaid could go bankrupt if we neglect it, but Medicaid was structured to be solvent 2 or 3 years ahead of time, but nobody thought that Medicaid would have instant solvency by itself. The Government stands behind Medicare and Medicaid. Medicaid will be funded if you have a Government that cares about health care. We will set our priorities so that we do not waste our money on B-2 bombers or F-22's or Seawolf submarines. The F-22 program will absorb $12 billion in the next 7 years. We will spend $12 billion on F-22's, produced in the Speaker's district of Marietta, GA, a district that receives more funds than any other district in the country. I take time to point that out, because I am from New York City and recently the Speaker renewed his attacks on New York City. They are nothing new. He has been doing that for the last 8 years, but in his new exalted position as Speaker, I thought that he would refrain from his attacks on New York City, which made him famous over the last 8 or 9 years. And yet we have again attacks on New York City as being a place of welfare waste and you think that it is a danger to the country. The simple facts are that New York City and New York State has always generated more income for the Federal Government than it has received from the Federal Government. The history of New York State is the history of giving to the rest of the country. There was a time when $22 billion more was being paid into the Federal coffers than was received back from the Federal coffers. Now, $9 billion more is coming out of New York State into the Federal coffers than will go back to New York State through any Federal programs. That is not true of Georgia. Georgia receives $1 billion more from the Federal Government than it pays to the Federal Government. Certainly not true of Marietta, GA, if you narrowed it down in terms of the Federal contract they have there to manufacture the F-22 fighter plane, and probably some other Federal contracts around. You will find that they are getting far more than they are paying into the Federal coffers. So, keep your eyes on the dollar figures. If you took each State of the Union and asked yourself the question: How much money does this State pay into the Federal coffers, and how much money does it get back from the Federal Government, you would be shocked. Many of the States that are screaming for States' control of programs are going to find in a few years that if you are really serious about State control and you lessen the taxation on the States universally across the country, and have each State carry its own weight, you will find it impossible to maintain your State budgets and your local budgets, because the money that you get from the Federal Government, which is a loss from New York, flows out of New York, out of some of the bigger industrialized States, even though they are not as wealthy as they used to be, they are still generating more tax revenue than they are receiving back from the Federal Government. That money is distributed in programs like Medicare and Medicaid. It is distributed in programs like Social Security too. It is distributed, certainly, in defense contracts, which New York City has almost none, but many of the States that complain about New York City receive very lucrative huge defense contracts. The money that they receive in the State of Kansas, and some of the other surrounding States that have for years gone to the farmers, or the so-called farmers, the farming industry, the farmer cartels and businesses; the subsidies which average per family between $30,000 and $40,000 a year, money that is given not for any service rendered but for not planting corn or not planting grain, not plowing up the field, money that comes as a subsidy from the Federal Treasury, that money comes out of States like New York. That money will not be there if you are really serious about letting States carry their own weight. Stop and think about it. If you remake America, a lot of people who believe that they will benefit under the assumption that they are not on some form of government subsidy or welfare are going to find that they really are the beneficiaries of a lot of Federal subsidy and some welfare. I would call the farm subsidy program a welfare program that has gone on and on. We should end farm subsidies as we know them. We should get rid of that kind of welfare. We have some corporate welfare too we should get rid of. But my point today is to keep your eyes on the prize. Focus on the economy. Focus on the appropriations bill. Focus on the budget. Do not let them later on move you off into a concern for affirmative action, a concern for abortion, a concern for pornographic lyrics. All of these problems are important. Family values are important. I think Mr. Thurow talks about family values in this article. The title of Mr. Thurow's article, what I am reading quotes from, is ``Companies Merge and Families Break Up.'' There is a point in here where he talks about the traditional family is being destroyed. I am quoting from Lester Thurow's article, the same man who started out telling us that this country is undergoing radical changes economically and 80 percent of the people are being left out, and only 20 percent are benefiting. This same Lester Thurow, who is professor of economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who has written 10 or 15 books, who has testified in hearings in most of the committees here in Congress, such as the Joint Economic Committee, the Committee on Energy, the Committee on Economic and Educational Opportunities, he appeared many times before our committee, so he is well-known here and respected. He is not a wild-eyed liberal or a radical. He believes in the global economy, he believes in free trade. He was in favor of NAFTA, in favor of GATT, a lot of things that I was not in favor of, but even this Mr. Thurow, who I would say leans toward the right in his economics, talks about the traditional family and ways in which you do not hear discussed here on the floor. Let me quote from Mr. Thurow's article, which is about the economy. It is about what it means to have an economy which is throwing people overboard, wages are declining, hope is lessening because of the fact that nobody seems to care about the fact that you are undergoing this transition that is so devastating. Mr. Thurow talks about the traditional family. Let me quote: The traditional family is being destroyed, not by misguided social welfare programs coming from Washington, although there are some government initiatives that have undermined family structures, but by a modern economic system that is not congruent with family values. Let me quote that again, quoting Mr. Thurow: The traditional family is being destroyed, not by misguided social welfare programs coming from Washington, but by a modern economic system that is not congruent with family values. Besides falling real wages, America's other economic problems pale into insignificance. The remedies lie in major public and private investments, in research and development, and in creating skilled workers to ensure that tomorrow's high-wage, brain power industries generate much of their employment in the United States. Let me just read that again: The traditional family is being destroyed, not by misguided social welfare programs coming from Washington, but by a modern economic system that is not congruent with family values. Besides falling real wages, America's other economic problems pale into insignificance. The remedies lie in major public and private investment and research and development, and in creating skilled workers to ensure that tomorrow's high-wage, brain power industries generate much of their employment in the United States. Today we have on the floor a bill which turned its back on the effort to create skilled workers to ensure that tomorrow's high-wage brain power industries generate much of the employment in the United States. The CAREERS bill is going in the opposite direction. The appropriations bill which reduced the funds available for education and job training by $9 billion is going in the opposite direction. The people in charge of the Government are not acting to promote the general welfare as they are charged with in the Constitution. They are not acting to take charge and understand that we are going through a transitional period, and because we are going through a transitional period, the Government and public policies must step in and do what the private sector can never do, what the private sector is not created to do, what the private sector has no duty to do. It is Government's duty. Before I go on, let me just go back and read a complementary passage from Mr. Thurow related to the family. ``Falling real wages,'' a quote from Mr. Thurow again: Falling real wages have put the traditional family into play as the one-earner, middle class family becomes extinct. With children needing ever-more costly educations for ever- longer periods of time, the cost of supporting a family is rising sharply, just as earnings plunge. I repeat: Falling real wages have put the traditional American family into play, as the one--earner, middle class family becomes extinct. With children needing ever-more costly educations for ever-longer periods of time, the cost of supporting a family is rising sharply, just as earnings plunge. Continuing to quote Mr. Thurow: Children exist, but no one takes care of them. Parents are spending 40 percent less time with their children than they did 30 years ago. More than 2 million children under the age of 13 have no adult supervision, either before or after school. Paying for day care would use up all or most of a mother's wages. This is not a minister talking, it is not a politician talking, this is an economist. This is an economist looking at the hard, cold facts of the way our society has been altered, the radical changes that are being forced on society by the changes in technology and by economic changes. It is not just somebody's morality is automatically lower or his character is no good, there are economic forces at work which are creating a situation where children exist, but no one takes care of them: Parents are spending 40 percent less time with their children than they did 30 years ago. More than 2 million children under the age of 13 have no adult supervision, either before or after school. Paying for day care would use up all or most of a mother's wages. I think it is important to emphasize the fact that Mr. Thurow is not a minister, he is not a politician, or an opportunistic politician, trumpeting family values because that is the appealing message of the day. Mr. Thurow is a hard-core economist, and we should take a look at what he is focused on: The resources, the opportunities to earn a living, income, jobs, and who is the technological revolution going to benefit? That is the question. Let me just go back for one more minute and repeat again: Besides falling real wages, America's other economic problems pale into insignificance. The remedies lie in major public and private investment and research and development, and in creating skilled workers to ensure that tomorrow's high-wage brain power industries generate much of the employment in the United States. I am going to talk about that for the rest of this evening, the remedies. What are the remedies for a transitional economy which has produced a phenomenon where Wall Street and corporations are making the highest profits they have ever made, the economy is booming for Wall Street, while at the other end, workers are getting lower wages, and there are fewer jobs available. The streamlining or the downsizing which creates more profits as you replace human beings with machines creates misery on the bottom. Nobody wants to stop the information revolution. The industrial revolution could not be stopped. It is foolish to try to stop it, it is foolish to try to put chains on capitalism. Capitalism is the order of the day. But it is up to Government to understand that this is a transition period with an upheaval taking place which is causing a great deal of dislocation and misery, and it is going to escalate and get worse at a more rapid pace, and we as Congressmen, Senators, mayors, everybody elected to office anywhere, we have the responsibility, and if we do not take hold of the burden of the catastrophe that is coming, it will be on our shoulders. We deserve to be blamed. Mr. Thurow says, The remedies lie in major public and private investment and research and development and in creating skilled workers to ensure that tomorrow's high-wage, brain powered industries generate much of their employment in the United States. I think Mr. Thurow is naive if he thinks that private industry is going to invest in that endeavor. Private industry will invest only if they see an immediate profit, and when that is over, they will let it go. It is Government. The remedy lies in major public investment. We have to, the Government has to do it. We have to go in the opposite direction of the bill on the House floor today. The CAREERS bill should have been doubled in size. Oh, yes, there are problems in making it effective and efficient, there are problems in making certain that there are jobs for people that are going to be there 10 or 20 years ago. All of those problems are soluble. It is like winning a war, it is like fighting a war, you do what you have to do, you develop the weapons you have to develop, you develop the systems you have to develop. You institute the policies for the training and for the recruitment, everything that has to be done. We are in a war to save America from economic chaos. One of the things we have to do in order to win this war is to have a new approach to revenue. We have to have the money, the resources necessary. Taxpayers have to take a look at the revenue side of the problem and not just at the expenditure side. Yes, we need some cuts. I am in favor of cutting waste from government. Yes, it may be a good idea to have a balanced budget in 10 years, probably, or a longer period, not 7 years, but we ought to go toward a balanced budget as a way of getting accountability and squeezing the waste out of Government. Yes, expenditures are always important. We must always be vigilant and make certain that we do not waste our resources, do not waste money, do not waste the taxpayers' dollars. On the other hand, there is a need for tax revenue, there is a need for a fair system of accumulating the revenue you need. The problem is that we are not looking at all at the revenue side enough. We should take a look at the fact that revenue in America has been left in the hands of the Senate Finance Committee and the House Committee on Ways and Means. Mr. Speaker, these entities are part of a legislative body, but they have far too much power and the power has been abused and misused. They have done a horrendous job over the last 50 years. The example I give over and over again, and any sophomore in high school can take a look at it, if you take a look at the revenue burden, the way the tax burden was structured in 1943, in 1943, corporations were paying 40 percent of the tax burden, were shouldering 40 percent of the tax burden in 1943, Individuals and families were shouldering 27 percent of the tax burden in 1943. From 1943 to 1995, today, individuals have gone from 27 percent of the tax burden to 44 percent of the tax burden. We are carrying 44 percent of the tax burden instead of 27 percent. In the same period of time, corporations have gone from 40 percent of the tax burden to 11 percent of the tax burden. The people who are making the money on Wall Street, the profits are going to corporations. The folks who are making the money and getting the benefits of all of the years of science and technology and military research and development and law and order in the United States and wars that have been fought and won by American boys and the American total effort, those benefits are flowing to Wall Street, they are making the profits, yet they are paying the smallest share of the taxes. They are paying only 11 percent of the tax burden, while ordinary families and individuals are paying 44 percent of the tax burden. One of the things we should be discussing is the way to balance the budget is to balance the tax burden, bring it down. Yes, give tax cuts. Families and individuals need tax cuts. I am certainly not in agreement with the Republican proposed tax cut which will give tax cuts to the people who are the owners of the corporations and the beneficiaries to the stocks and bonds. We are giving the tax cuts to the wrong people. People, individuals and families do need a tax cut. We need to bring taxes down for individuals and families. But we do not have to drastically cut the flow of revenue, because we should be bringing up taxes for corporations from the 11 percent, we should go slowly up over a 10-year period and from the 44 percent for individuals and families, we should come down. We should reach a point in 10 years where the burden is equally shared by corporations and individuals and families. In the process of doing that, you will find more revenue will be generated and less of a burden will be on individuals and families. Additional revenue generated should be used to do what Mr. Thurow says needs to be done: Major public investment in job training, in research and development and creating new skills, new skilled workers. The money that you get from increasing the share of the tax burden borne by corporations should go into creating skilled workers, adult education, job training programs. That is where the answer lies. We do not know exactly what the future holds in terms of which industries are going to prevail and what the exact specific occupational titles are going to be. But we have an idea that you are going to need very educated people. People are going to have to have a great deal of computer literacy. There are things we know already. There are things we can do already. But you need resources. You need finances. You cannot be cutting the budget for job training and adult education at a time like this. You should be using the increase in revenues coming from a fairer tax structure to finance the transition. A massive program is needed. The GI Bill of Rights and the GI program that put thousands of men returning from World War II into colleges and universities and into trade schools, that massive endeavor, that massive undertaking by the American Government has been one of the best investments of public money ever in the history of the Nation or in the history of governments all over the world. They should show you where those trained GI's went, where they went after they left the universities and the colleges, where they went after they left the trade schools, what they did for the American economy. It should be a lesson, how a concentrated effort in the area of jobs training, adult education, and academic education, many of them went to colleges and universities, how it pays off. We need that kind of massive, intensively financed program now. You can do it without increasing the deficit. By raising the revenue that is produced by corporations, at the same time you can be bringing down the tax burden on individuals. Several tax plans have been proposed. I want to conclude tonight by saying, my staff is preparing a bill which would call for the creation of a creative revenues commission, a creative revenues commission. We cannot leave it to Ways and Means. The Ways and Means Committee of the House of Representatives has shown that they will take us from a burden of 40 percent for corporations to 11 percent. At one time, under President Reagan in 1982, it went down as low as 8 percent. I serve on that Committee on Ways and Means and I might be accused of shirking my responsibilities. I am a Member of Congress. I stand on this floor. I vote for the bills that the Committee on Ways and Means brings here. But for your edification, it is important that you know that whenever a bill comes from Ways and Means which deals with taxes, there are no amendments allowed. We have never had on the floor of the House of Representatives an open rule for a Ways and Means bill, for bills that relate to taxation. You cannot amend. You can debate, but you have to debate what is brought to you by the committee. The Senate Finance Committee, I suppose it may be a little different over there, but bills related to revenue and taxation have to originate here. The Constitution, they all come out of Ways and Means first. So Ways and Means and Members of Congress and Members of the House of Representatives and the Senate, we have betrayed the American people, some directly, some indirectly, by allowing a situation to develop where the burden of taxation borne by corporations has gone down from 40 percent to 11 percent. We have swindled the American people. We let the burden on them go up from 27 percent to 44 percent. We need to correct that. We need to address that. If we cannot address it through the Ways and Means, then perhaps we should do what we are doing with the base closing. Base closings were such a difficult issue until we came up with a formula for retaining the power and the ultimate authority of Congress while at the same time taking advantage of the wisdom of more objective, nonpolitical, nonpartisan people out there. A Base Closing Commission was created. They go through a process. The President is involved and then we have the final say. They come back with rational recommendations. We can vote them up or down. So the power of the representatives of the people is the final power. But we have a rational product produced by people who are not on the phone with lobbyists, lobbyists in their ears promising all kinds of things that they can deliver on. We are not overwhelmed by the almighty might of corporate wealth in the process of making decisions. We can deal with the situation rationally. Let the revenue commission, the creative revenue commission take a look at all the proposals for tax reform that are now being proposed. Senator Lugar and the CATO Institute have proposed a national sales tax. They propose to replace personal and corporate income tax taxes with a 16 to 24 percent national sales tax on all consumable items except stocks and bonds. The benefits of this, according to Senator Lugar and the CATO Institute is that it eliminates any complicated tax filing system. Some of the problems with this is that it is regressive. Wealthy people would pay a smaller share of their income in taxes than lower middle income tax people. We would end up with people with the real wealth paying a smaller percentage of their income, and you probably would have the corporations bearing no greater proportion of the tax burden. But that is a plan that has been put forward by Senator Lugar and the CATO Institute. It deserves to be looked at by an objective, rational group of Americans who are chosen for their expertise and their knowledge of the economy and taxes, and they can constitute a creative revenue commission. The gentleman from Texas, Mr. Armey, and Senator Specter have proposed a flat tax. The flat tax concept you have heard a lot about. It is not revenue neutral. In the process of enacting the flat tax, as the gentleman from Texas, Mr. Armey, is proposing and Senator Specter is proposing, if you enact it now the way they propose it, you will end up with a deficit of $187 billion. We do not need a taxing plan which creates a greater deficit. The Armey-Specter plan would not treat all income the same. Only wage and pension income would be taxed, wages, the thing that hourly people work for, not the big executive compensation packages and great amounts of money. They would not be taxed. Only wages and pension income would be taxed. Interest, capital gains, and other forms of unearned income would not be taxed. Wage and pension income would be taxed at a flat 20 percent rate in the first rate, dropping to 17 percent when the proposal is fully phased in. This tax would only apply to earned wages and pension income, as I said before. Corporate income tax would be replaced by modified value-added tax. In the Armey-Specter flat tax plan, corporations will get away with even more than they get away with now. They are going to not have to pay any corporate income tax. We are going to have a value-added tax. Businesses would pay a 17-percent tax on their gross sales minus wages paid to employees. The current deduction for entertainment expenses capped at 15 percent would be 100 percent. Tax withholding would be eliminated. Taxes would be paid monthly by each individual like any other bill. That is the Armey-Specter flat tax plan. Send the plan on. I do not agree with it. I think it is a continuation of the advantages to the rich and advantages to corporations. But let us send it on. Send the Armey-Specter tax plan to the commission, the creative revenues commission. There is a value-added tax proposed by the gentleman from Florida [Mr. Gibbons]. He does not have a specific proposal, but his basic concept is that you can replace income and corporate income taxes with a consumption or value-added tax administered at point of sale by businesses. Value-added taxes are being used in many industrialized countries, and there is a lot of experience with value-added taxes. Australia and the United States presently are the only Western nations that do not have broad based consumption taxes. All European nations use both consumption and income taxes. All European nations use both consumption and income taxes together, but they are able to charge less, have less of a burden borne by income taxes because they have the value-added tax which is based on consumption. And generally it discourages people from consuming so much. Americans consume more than any other industrialized nation. That is why our balance of payments, while we import so much more than we export, because we are always consuming, consuming, and we need more and we buy more from those places which do not consume quite as much. One of the reasons they do not consume as much is because the value- added tax increases the cost of consumption. So I think it is one that really ought to be looked at very carefully and worked into some total scheme of taxation, of revenue production. Let the commission take a close look at it. There is the Nunn- Domenici tax. The basic concept is that all income, wages, interest, et cetera, would be treated the same and subject to tax. The taxpayer would not pay any taxes on savings. In other words, savings would be deduced from income before calculating the tax. What you put in the bank as savings would be deducted from your income before calculating the tax. Individual exemptions and deductions would be eliminated. This plan is silent on what the tax rates for individuals would be. It could maintain progressive rate structure. It might tax the rich at a greater percentage than it does the middle class and the poor, but it might not. We do not know. It is not spelled out. They do say that businesses would be taxed at a 10-percent flat rate and will retain most of the current deductions that they have already. I think it is a grand ripoff. If you are going to let businesses and corporations not only do what they are doing now but get away with even more, right now they are paying 11 percent of the tax burden. We are going to give them a 10-percent flat rate, which means they will be paying less. And while we give them the flat rate, we are going to let them deduct what they deduct now. If they decide to pay the chairman of a corporation or the president of the corporation $10 million, that is deducted from their tax bill. That is a tax deduction. There is no way to stop them. It they decide that they are going to up their budget for training and have a vast network of sumptuous training quarters all over the world and move their employees around from one beach to another and call it training, that is deductible. Anything that they decide to do they can make a little sense with, it is deductible. So not only do they pay a very small percentage, 11 percent of the total tax burden, but they get away already with deductions which are horrific. If individuals could get away with those kinds of deductions, everybody's tax bill would go down a great deal. What this Nunn-Domenici bill does do is create a powerful incentive for saving. And it is simpler than current law. The great problem with it is what I have just stated. Only the wealthy can save. The wealthy can save. Middle-income people can save. Those who can save more would benefit more. But those who can save the most would be the wealthiest people. So you would have again a skewed system where the system is advantageous for the people who are most wealthy. Then there is the Gephardt flat tax. The Gephardt flat tax is revenue neutral. It would not increase the deficit as the Armey flat tax would. The Armey flat tax would increase the deficit by $187 billion. The Gephardt would not increase the deficit. All income, wages, interests, income, et cetera would be treated the same under the Gephardt flat tax plan. All income would be taxed except Social Security benefits. A 10-percent flat rate would apply to 75 percent of all taxpayers. But progressively higher rates of 20 percent to 34 percent would apply to higher income taxpayers, and all of these rates are lower than the current rates. The only deductions that would be retained by the Gephardt flat tax are the mortgage interest deduction and job related expenses. You could deduct your mortgage interest as you do now and job related expenses. That coincides with Mr. Thurow's remedy of jobs and job training being a priority. If it is a priority, then one way the Government can show it is a priority is by allowing individuals to deduct any expenses related to job training. The Gephardt plan eliminates $50 billion in corporate welfare tax benefits that exist now. The Gephardt plan requires a national referendum to raise taxes in the future. The Gephardt plan has a great benefit. It would actually reduce taxes for most Americans. You probably have guessed by now that I would say that the Gephardt plan is a superior plan. That is my individual opinion, but let it go to a tax revenue commission. We do not need my individual opinion, we do not need the opinions of the Committee on Ways and Means and the Committee on Ways and Means' schemes that have resulted in a drastic, uneven tax burden being borne by individuals and families versus corporations. We do not need anybody's opinions. Let them all take a very close look at what is happening with these plans. Let them all examine these plans. They may look at some other creative proposals that have come forward, like we have proposed to tax--instead of selling the frequencies in the air, lease them. Why not lease them and tax the income on them? Why not, if you are going to sell them, put them in a trust fund and use that revenue for some purpose, as they are proposing with the public broadcasting? Public broadcasting wants a certain portion of the revenue we get from selling the bands in the air, frequencies. There is another word for that. I cannot get it right now. We have auctioned off about 9 billion dollars' worth. Why not have trust funds which generate income? Why not have the savings and loans contribute, at least the $250 billion that they took out of the taxpayers' coffers, out of the Treasury? Why not have a tax on the financial industry, a temporary tax which is a surcharge on everybody connected with the financial industries, and get back our money that we put into the savings and loan industry? Why not take a look at that? Why not look at a more rapid reforming of the mining laws, so we stop giving away gold mines and copper mines and coal mines for pennies? We sold a mine recently for $250 which is expected to generate billions of dollars in gold. There are a lot of things that this tax commission could look at. We need a creative revenue commission to take a look at all these possibilities, to come back to the American people with a new revenue generation plan which will be a plan with enough money to finance the transition. We are transitioning from the industrial age to the information age. The money to pay for the transition for the job training, for the research and development, can come out of a new, creative revenue tax plan. We can balance the budget at the same time we generate that income, and this commission is the key. We should accept the responsibility that has been given to us as elected officials, and understand that the problem is our problem. We have to solve it. A creative revenue tax commission would be a great step forward in solving this monumental problem.

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, some of the most passionate letters that I have received come from my constituents concerned with the fate of the Ryan White Comprehensive AIDS Resources Emergency [CARE] Act (H.R. 1872). Today, hundreds of thousands of people are breathing sighs of relief as we finally reauthorize the Ryan White CARE Act, the bedrock of Federal comprehensive assistance for women, men and children living with the HIV or AIDS virus. As my colleagues and I consider this significant legislation, it is crucial that we do not diminish the crisis that currently exists. It is a chilling reality that AIDS has etched a place in history as the disease that has taken the lives of more Americans in the United States than all of the wars combined since the Civil War. I appeal to all to remember that AIDS is not a distant nightmare relegated only to those communities and individuals who behave irresponsibly. We must remember AIDS is now the leading cause of death for individuals between the ages of 25 and 44. Since AIDS was first identified in the 1980's, one-half million individuals have been diagnosed. Tragically, one-half of those, or 250,000 people, have died. According to the Centers for Disease Control, between 800,000 and 1 million Americans are currently HIV infected; and close to 100 Americans will die from the disease each day. Our urban epicenters have become depositories for AIDS/HIV-infected persons. My own State of New York has nearly 20 percent of reported AIDS cases in the U.S., although the State holds only 7 percent of the Nation's population. Moreover, in New York City, AIDS is among the top five causes of death for children up to 9 years of age. And by the year 2000, it is estimated that 30,000 children will be orphaned by AIDS in New York City. It is in our common interest, socially, medically and fiscally, to fully fund the Ryan White CARE Act. Ryan White CARE programs have become integral components of the entire health care system. By providing early intervention, housing assistance and case management to some of our most fragile citizens, these programs have effectively and efficiently served as their safety net. The impact of these programs is evident everywhere including New York State. Despite the fact that the number of people living with AIDS in New York doubled between 1989 and 1992, the number hospitalized increased by less than one third. In the State, Ryan White HIV home care services average a cost of $194 per day, while 1 day at the hospital costs $993 and nursing home care costs $424 per day. At the very least, we would be fiscally irresponsible to ignore these facts. Without a doubt, the scope of this crisis merits the full employment of Federal resources. Last month, the House passed other measures that acknowledge the AIDS emergency, including funding for AIDS research at the Centers for Disease Control and the National Institutes for Health. But, more resources should and can be devoted to combatting this epidemic. In the Labor-HHS-Education Appropriations bill (H.R. 2127), Ryan White AIDS programs were authorized for $67.5 million less than the administration's request. America cannot afford to fall short on the Ryan White CARE Act. The provision of food, housing, medical care, prescription drugs and other important services is the least that the government can do to ensure that the appropriate level of care reaches the infirm. Ryan White CARE programs are to the AIDS community what Social Security is to senior citizens. I appeal to my colleagues with any sense of compassion to vote ``yes'' for H.R. 1872 and pledge their support for further efforts to fully fund these vital programs.

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentlewoman from Connecticut for this special order. I associate myself with the remarks of my previous colleagues and will try not to be repetitive. I have served on the education committee for the whole 13 years that I have been in Congress. H.G. Wells said that civilization is a race between education and catastrophe. That may not be the exact quote but that is the gist of it. Catastrophe has stared us in the face as we go forward with these reckless cuts that have been proposed by the Republican majority in this House. Speaker Gingrich says his objective is to remake America. And in this process of remaking, this behavior has become very reckless. Education, which is the cement, the glue, the adhesive which helps to hold our society together, is being destroyed. We have proceeded step by step, starting with Ronald Reagan who offered the report or commissioned the report called ``A Nation at Risk'' and moving from that to George Bush, ``America 2000,'' and moving from that to President Clinton's ``Goals 2000,'' all of which had some continuity. We were moving in the right direction. Suddenly the Republican majority proposes to wreck all of that. Instead of remaking America, we are going to destroy America because we do not recognize the critical role of education. These cuts are very mean, they are very extreme. They are very dangerous. The Republican majority in the House of course proposes to wipe out the Department of Education totally. Only the Senate prevailed and has slowed the process down, but they are still moving with legislation to wipe out the Department of Education; a modern society in this complex world of ours would not have some central direction from a Department of Education. A Department of Education at the Federal level plays a small role compared to the role played by centralized departments of education in other industrialized societies, but that is a very key role. It is a critical catalytic role. Only about 7 percent of the total budget spent for education is Federal money. But it is key in terms of stimulating, in terms of pushing for reform, and it is all very well packaged in ``Goals 2000,'' in title I and Head Start. It is all very well packaged, but they have taken a sledge hammer to it all, and they are destroying it all in the process. In the process they will destroy the country. We cannot have a society able to compete in this very complex and competitive industrialized world of ours, a global economy, without having great emphasis on education. I applaud President Clinton's proposal to make education a priority. When he laid out his 10-year budget proposal, education receives increases in that budget of $47 billion over the 10-year period. Similar to the Congressional Black Caucus before where we increased over a 7-year period the education budget by 25 percent. Education deserves the priority. it has to have a priority. Not only should we not have these cuts, we should be moving forward with increases. The civilization of New York City once boasted of having free universities. The city universities were free without tuition when I moved there in 1958. We do not have that any longer. But we are instead going rapidly backwards where not only do we have free universities but even with all of the aid that is offered by the State and the city and the aid available from the Federal Government, with it being cut so drastically and forcing tuition costs up, large numbers of people in New York City who want to go to college will not be able to go to college in New York City. These same city universities compete with Ivy League schools in terms of the number of Nobel Prize winners. Nobel Prize winners have come out of these city universities. The numbers of Ph.D.s that have come out of our city universities are as great as the Ivy League schools when you take a look at it and add it all up. So all of this is being wrecked when they say they are going to remake America. What they are doing is destroying America. Unfortunately, the powerful juggernaut approach that is being taken here will wreck education right across the country. it is most unfortunate. American voters, taxpayers should rally to stop the destruction of our civilization, and the first place that we should focus on is to stop the cuts in education.

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Chairman, I rise in strong opposition to this legislation. There is a lesson in democracy which the taxpayers and the voters should look closely at here. Democracy is a deliberative, long-term process. You start with a great communicator like Ronald Reagan. Nobody is confused about what Ronald Reagan meant when he said pension funds should be invested in America to make jobs for people in America. He was talking particularly about the construction industry people, but there are numerous other situations where pension funds invested in America make jobs for Americans. They also create other benefits for Americans. At the same time, they are subject to the same standards as any other investments. Over and over again, every document produced by the Federal Government, by Secretary Reich, everything says assuming everything else is equal, you must make certain first of all the standards are met. We have on the one hand Ronald Reagan initiating the idea, picked up by a number of other people, including Jesse Jackson. That does not make it any more radical if Ronald Reagan said it first. Certainly, it is respectable and acceptable. George Bush goes further and creates a clearinghouse. He institutionalizes it a few steps further. Secretary Reich is only carrying it further and putting out a booklet that helps clarify a few things. We have this deliberative process on the one hand, and on the other hand you have hysteria and panic being generated by a wolfpack that needs a rabbit to chase, and they have invented this one for reasons I am not quite certain of. But I suspect those reasons are to create an investment environment which is safe for some truly risky investments, for some overseas investments which are more risky and do not bear benefits for Americans. What happened in the savings-and-loan situation? Americans are out of at least $250 billion. The taxpayers have had to cough up at least $250 billion, and that is a conservative estimate, as a result of investments made by the savings-and-loan industry. Where were these people who are now generating this hysteria? Were any of these investments made by the savings-and-loans associations which resulted in $250 billion worth of losses to the American people? Where they ETI's? If you find 1 percent for ETI's, I assure you you will have to do a lot of miraculous searching. Most of them were usual marketplace investments, applying the usual standards, no economically targeted investments. There is a target for the wolfpack to go chase. You know, the hysteria of their argument sort of rises up from the page. You know, you can feel the sweat and saliva. Goebbels would be very proud of the kind of hysteria generated by the written statements made about this menace to America of economically targeted investments. Where were they when the real menace was there via the savings-and- loans' waste that has led to $250 billion in losses of American taxpayer's money? Where were they when that was happening? In an effort to create an issue where none exists, these Republican supporters of this measure are stretching the truth, to say the least. One particularly bad example of this is a letter the gentleman from New Jersey [Mr. Saxton] sent in May to a number of corporate chief executives. The letter is fully of inflammatory language and baseless allegations. The full letter appears in the minority views. I urge that all my colleagues take a look at that letter. The letter says more about what is going on here than most of what we will hear on the floor today. The Council of Institutional Investors wrote the rhetoric in the letter of the gentleman from New Jersey [Mr. Saxton], ``Smacks of the pension equivalent of McCarthy era scare tactics.'' I agree. The letter, of course, repeats the big lie ETI's are unduly risky or pose a threat to fiscal safety, never mind ERISA has always provided that, [[Page H 8748]] in order to be permissible under the law, ETI's must be prudent investments in terms of risk and return. IB-94 reaffirms the Department of Labor's longstanding position that ETI's are only permissible if they provide the plan with a competitive risk-adjusted rate of return. In his letter, the gentleman from New Jersey [Mr. Saxton] also claims, without any support, ``A number of companies and pension investors have felt subtle pressure from the Administration,'' to invest in ETI's. In addition, the letter includes specious charges the Department of Labor engaged in ``coercive behavior, intimidation and other nefarious schemes.'' The letter even refers to a Clinton quota roof. One of the most egregious falsehoods is the alleged plan of the Clinton administration to establish ``compulsory ETI quotas.'' It is important to reiterate that IB-94-1 does not mandate ETI's nor does it in any way authorize investments in ETI's at a concessionary rate. In fact, the Clinton administration is on record in opposition to mandated ETI's, including testimony before this committee and testimony before Vice Chairman Saxton's Joint Economic Committee. More recently, in another irresponsible attempt to unnecessarily frighten the current and future pensioners, the so-called economists at the Joint Economic Committee have concocted an incredible scenario about the potential impact of pension funds on ETI's. They issued a report claiming the Labor Department ETI investments possibly will cost pensioners $43,000 over 30 years. No self-respecting mathematician, sophomore with arithmetic, would accept those assumptions made in that report.

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

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Chairman, I thank the gentleman for yielding time to me.

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Chairman, I move to strike the last word. Mr. Chairman, I hope the taxpayers are listening very carefully. Taxpayers are angry and they have good reason to be angry. We are paying too much taxes. Taxes should be lowered for families and individuals, while we raise taxes for corporations. Families and individuals are paying something like 44 percent of the tax burden. Corporations are only paying 11 percent, but that is a discussion for another time. The other way we deal with the way our money is being handled is by streamlining and downsizing and cutting out waste in Government. Here is a concrete example of extreme waste in Government. We cannot talk about concrete figures because they will not give them to us, but there is general agreement. Nobody ever challenges the figure, but the overall intelligence budget is about $28 billion, no less than $28 billion. We are talking today about one portion of it which deals with information gathering activities related to the military which everybody agrees is no less than $16 billion. In previous amendments we have called for a 10-percent cut in the overall intelligence budget, and that would have been $2.8 billion, or a 10-percent cut for 1 year. And then we said over a 7-year period of course that adds up to much more. This is a reasonable amendment, very reasonable. As the gentleman from Vermont [Mr. Sanders] pointed out, it does not apply in wartime. A number of things are exempted. It is understood that we need an intelligence operation. Nobody is saying we do not need it. What we are saying is that, while we are streamlining, while we are downsizing, while we are going after military pensions and the pensions of Government employees, while we are cutting Medicare, while we are cutting Medicaid, while we have just cut the budget of the title I program for education by $1.1 billion, while we have cut out the whole summer youth employment program, while we are doing all this, then let us look at a piece of waste in this budget which is obvious. It is obvious that we do not need the CIA at the same level as we had it before. The gentleman before us said, and I will take him for his word, he said we have cut it by 16 percent since 1990. If half of the total activities of the CIA budget were dedicated to the Soviet Union, the evil empire, a major opponent, the other superpower, it used to be the other superpower, a real threat, half of the intelligence budget was dedicated to the Soviet Union, if half of the budget was dedicated to the Soviet Union and the Soviet Union is no longer that kind of threat, then surely we can cut the budget. If Members say the Soviet Union does not exist anymore, the fragments of the Soviet Union still constitute some kind of threat, let us cut the budget not by half, let us cut it by 25 percent. That is reasonable, instead of 16 percent, let us cut it by 25 percent, which means we have some more cutting to do. We can cut. We are talking about very real money, that if it is not cut here, will be cut from somewhere else. We can use this $1.6 billion a year. The $1.6 billion per year could be used to replace the $1.1 billion we just cut from the title I program for children's education. That is where we need the intelligence. Our intelligence budget should be increased in the area of education. Nothing is more significant, nothing is more important for the security of the Nation than an informed population, than a well-educated population. The brain power of America will decide whether we remain a superpower and the leader of the world, or not. That brain power is suffering right now because we just cut it $1.1 billion. Here is an opportunity to make a cut where it should be, $1.6 billion, out of the intelligence budget. What does the intelligence budget do? The present budget, it is bloated, and because it is bloated, because there is too much bureaucracy, because they do not have enough things to do, they get into situations like the Aldrich Ames situation. This should be called, partially, the Aldrich Ames Cleansing Act. Aldrich Ames, who had a high place in the CIA, for years did nothing but destructive activities. He carried on a whole series of destructive activities for many years, for which he was paid millions of dollars by the enemies he was supposed to have been spying upon. Aldrich Ames could get away with that because it had no significance. It had significance in terms of the people who died, agents who were in the service of this country died as a result of Aldrich Ames' treacherous activities, but it did not have any significance on peace or war in the world. It had no significance with respect to the security of the United States. We do not need to keep spending $16 billion in this particular area and $28 billion overall for the CIA. We can cut the intelligence budget.

Mr. OWENS. We want more money to go to the real defense budget, and not have Aldrich Ames and his colleagues wasting our money, at the same time killing our agents. We think it is being misspent and dangerously wasted in the intelligence operation.

Mr. OWENS. You agree with the 16 percent figure that he gave us?

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Chairman, the gentleman disputes the figures that were given to us by another member of the committee. Sixteen percent was a cut, he said, that has taken place, and you say it is more like a $100 billion cut?

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Chairman, will the gentleman yield?

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, yesterday I concluded some remarks related to the state of the economy and what it means to working people and members of labor unions. I hastily discussed a solution to the problem at that time. Today I would like to go back and do a more thorough discussion of the solution to the problem. I laid out the problem yesterday. I think it is only fitting that we spend as much time discussing a proposed solution to it. I do want to recapitulate a statement that started the whole process yesterday. That was a statement, I had read a series of statements that I had read from an article that was produced by Lester Thurow. It was an op-ed article in the Sunday, September 3, New York Times. I was struck by the opening paragraph of that article. The opening paragraph I would like to quote again: No country without a revolution or military defeat and subsequent occupation has ever experienced such a sharp shift in the distribution of earnings as America has in the last generation. At no other time have median wages of American men fallen for more than two decades. Never before have a majority of American workers suffered real wage reductions while the per capita domestic product was advancing. I think that is a very strong statement by Lester Thurow, who is a professor of economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is just making a factual statement. But it is a very compact and focused statement that all of us ought to really think seriously about. Mr. Thurow is not a progressive or liberal or politician. Mr. Thurow is an economist. Mr. Thurow I think has been on record numerous times as supporting free trade. He probably supported NAFTA and GATT. Mr. Thurow is not an ideologue. He is an economist, very much respected. Written about 10 books. He has been on the Hill at various hearings testifying numerous times before the Senate and the House, well respected. I think it is important to take a look at that opening statement and some other things he says, including a statement at the end of his article where he talks about the family. The traditional family--I am quoting Mr. Thurow again: The traditional family is being destroyed not by misguided social welfare programs coming from Washington, although there are some Government initiatives that have undermined family structure, but by a modern economic system that is not congruent with family values. Besides falling real wages, America's other economic problems pale in significance. The remedies lie in major public and private investments in research and development and in creating skilled workers to ensure that tomorrow's high-wage brain power industries generate much of their employment in the United States. Yet if one looks at the weak policy proposals of both Democrats and Republicans, it is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. So Mr. Thurow, the economist, professor of economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has sort of summed up the predicament of where we are, and he only touched on the solution. When he says we need a remedy in the area of public and private investment and research and development and in creating skilled workers to ensure that tomorrow's high-wage brain power industries generate much of their employment in the [[Page H 8671]] United States, I would like to begin at that point really today. The question is, what are we doing? Mr. Thurow seems to think Democrats are not doing anything significant and also Republicans are not doing anything significant to deal with the remedy. We have a phenomenon which is very real. Everybody factually agrees that this is an unprecedented phenomenon. No country without a revolution or a military defeat and subsequent occupation has ever experienced such a sharp shift in the distribution of earnings as America has in the last generation. At no other time have median wages of American men fallen for more than two decades. Never before have a majority of American workers suffered real wage reduction while the per capita domestic product was advancing. Our gross national product is advancing. The profits of our corporations are escalating. They have increased over the last 10 years. They are at record levels this year and last year. We have a very productive economy. We have a very productive private sector, but all boats are not being lifted. In fact, at another point in his article, Mr. Thurow, Dr. Thurow says that the tide rose but 80 percent of the boats sank. So we have a situation, the tide is rising, continues to rise, but the boats are sinking. The productivity is going up. The profits are going up. But jobs are being lost. We hear numbers every month about the number of jobs created, how so many more jobs are being created. But it is a simple fact that almost everybody knows that the jobs that are being created are in the service sector at far lower wages than the jobs that are being lost. And every day there are new announcements of mergers and various new arrangements among the private sector, conglomerates, that result in a decrease in the number of jobs available, a downsizing and streamlining of jobs so people in large numbers are losing out as the economy overall advances. What do you do when America's gross national product is increasing, the profits are increasing, what happens, what has to happen? Twenty percent, according to Mr. Thurow, among the men, the top 20 percent of the labor force has been winning all of the country's wage increases for more than two decades. So 20 percent are doing fairly well right now. There is a danger though, because at another point Mr. Thurow points out that with our global economy where anything can be made anywhere and sold anywhere, the supply of cheap, often well-educated labor in the Third World is having a big effect on First World wages. So the men in that 20 percent are also threatened. He points out with an example. Quoting Mr. Thurow: One month's wages for a Seattle software engineer gets the entire--gets the same company an equally good engineer in Bangalore, India, for a whole year. In other words, the Bangalore, India, software engineer will work for one- twelfth of the wages of the Seattle engineer, software engineer. Educated, educated, high skilled, that is a new threat. So to dwell on looking at the solution, we have unprecedented prosperity on one hand. The prosperity is defined as the gross national product increase, profits increase, private sector is booming. CEO's are making far more than they ever made. How do we deal with a situation where there is a great transition taking place? Yes, we cannot run back the clock. We cannot deny the global economy. I do not think we should have moved as fast as we did on NAFTA and GATT, but the reality is that the global marketplace is taking hold. Reality is that capitalism is the economy of the present and capitalism will be the economy of the future. There is no alternative to capitalism. There are variations on it. The Chinese are moving toward a capitalism that is very different from the capitalism in America and the Russians are planning on a capitalism that is very, different. The French practice a capitalism on an ongoing basis that is very, very different. There are differences, but basically capitalism is the way of the future. The market economy is the way of the future. Nobody wants to turn back the clock. I do not think they have the power to turn back the clock. But how do you operate within the situation that exists? It is the reality, and what is the creative approach to this reality? One creative approach of course is to move to capture a portion of the resources of the productivity, of the profits and use a portion of those profits to fund, to finance a transition. We hope that, as it has been in the past, of an industrial revolution, we hope this information age revolution will also over time work itself out. Nobody can predict what capitalism is going to do. Nobody can predict the future with any certainty. It is not planned, capitalism is not planned. So we have to depend on the same kind of phenomena that developed in the industrial revolution and hope that it is going to work itself out over time. Over time, we are going to have things happen which we cannot even predict now. But we know we are in a transition right now. We know that for the last two decades the wages of American men have fallen. We know that for the last two decades, only 20 percent of the labor force has benefited from the economy and that fewer and fewer of them are included in the big economic boom that is going on now. So how do we handle it? We have to finance a transition. We have to realize, this is the transitional period, this is the period where large numbers of people are beginning to feel the pinch. Large numbers are suffering. This is a period where the trend is pretty clear. More jobs are going to be lost over the next year or so. There may probably be an escalation of the number of jobs that are lost in middle management, of the number of jobs that are loss in clerical pursuits, of the number of jobs that are lost in semi-skilled factory work because the gains of computerization and automation eliminate those people first. The irony of it is that you may have unskilled workers having more opportunities in a few years than the highly educated. The educated people, you may reverse this whole thing. The service people may be able to drive their wages up because the supply of service people especially in services like plumbing and electricians and a number of service people may find that they can command higher and higher wages because there is a greater need for them and they cannot be replaced. You cannot move their jobs overseas. If you are going to build houses, you cannot take a carpenter's job and take it overseas and build housing, if you are going to install plumbing, et cetera. There are some jobs that will be able to make some demands, but the largest number of people are employed in manufacturing jobs, in big financial organizations, the clerical jobs, et cetera. They are definitely, the trend is obvious, going to be without jobs. How do we deal with this transitional period? It may last for 10 years, it may last for another 20 years, but definitely we are in a transitional period. It is not the job of the private sector to deal with this problem. The private sector is in business to make money. Capitalism, they may have ads on the television that say that they exist to make America great, they exist to improve life for humankind, and you have all heard the ads for General Motors and General Electric and Archer Daniels Midland. They all have an image to project, to make it appear that one of their primary concerns is the fate of humankind or the comfort of the Nation. Those are all auxiliary concerns. I will not question their motives, but they do not pretend that that is their primary business. Every private sector enterprise is in business to make money, to earn profits, and they are driven by the need for profits. It does not matter how prosperous they are, they cannot afford to let competitors get ahead of them in terms of their profit margin. It only spells trouble down the road. Even IBM slipped and stumbled. You can never get too big in the private sector, in the capitalist economy, so big that you are secure. We cannot criticize private industry for making profits. Let us get off the sentimental trip of expecting private industry to take care of the needs of the people. Private industry is not responsible for providing an economy [[Page H 8672]] which is fair and just. Private industry is not responsible for providing job training. It is the Government. We are elected officials, Congress Members, Members of the Senate, Members of the House, members of the State legislatures, members of the city councils, the mayors. We are elected to look after the general welfare, to provide for the general welfare. It is our duty. If that means that we upset some of the profitmaking enterprises, that we upset the corporations, that we upset the people who are generating the wealth in some way, then so be it. It is our duty to take care of the general welfare. Only elected officials have that duty. Corporations do not have that duty. Corporations would not be able to exist if they assumed that duty. Whatever they say, attempt to project to confuse us, they are not concerned with the general welfare except as a peripheral issue. If we are responsible, if the President of the United States is responsible for the state of the American economy, and the Congress and all the other elected officials who make decisions about the lives of people and who are responsible for keeping our society going, then we must take action to deal with a transitional period where things are happening that never happened before. We never saw prosperity before which was not shared by all of the people. We never saw prosperity before which did not automatically trickle down. This trickling down stopped some time ago. According to Mr. Thurow, we have been in this predicament for two decades now, 20 years. We are still talking about trickle-down economics. We are still talking about giving big tax breaks to corporations, letting them invest in activities which create jobs. Well, they invest, but they may make their investment in more machinery, more automation, more computerization, or they may make their investment overseas. Wherever the profits will be highest or whatever actions produce the highest profits is what they will do. That is what they are paid to do, but they must look at the situation and say, what can we do in this situation? One of the things that we have to do is look at taxation policies, because only through gaining more revenue will we be able to finance a transition period. I am sorry, that is one way. One way to finance a transition period is to streamline expenditures, change our expenditures and our priorities, and use the money that we save in Government from changing the priorities and from eliminating waste to finance a transition period agenda. The other way is to reach into the area of prosperity, the corporate sector, and get more revenues to deal with the crisis that we face. Of course the knee-jerk reaction of both parties is that this is a tax-and-spend liberal you have got talking to you, this is a tax-and- spend liberal who wants to go after more taxes. How dare anybody propose more taxes. Well, this particular liberal says we need less taxation in the area of income tax on families and individuals. In 1943 families and individuals were paying 27 percent of the total tax burden. Corporations in 1943 were responsible for 40 percent, 39.8 percent of the total tax burden. So corporations over the period since 1943, to the present, have been able to manipulate the tax laws, or they have been able to convince and to do whatever is necessary to get Government decisionmakers, most of them on the Committee on Ways and Means of the House or the Finance Committee of the Senate, and the rest of us who vote for the things that they bring to the floor. When the Committee on Ways and Means comes to the floor, they will not allow any amendments. It is very difficult to make any adjustments, but as a Member I cannot tell my constituents that I do not have some burden of guilt on me. Everybody who is a decisionmaker that allows this to happen is guilty. We have been guilty of allowing the American people to be swindled since 1943, because the amount of taxes being paid by corporations has gone steadily down to the point now where it is 11.1 percent of the total tax burden, while the amount of taxes paid by individuals and families has gone up from 27 percent to 44.1 percent. We have created a reason for the American people to be angry at us, only you have to know how to focus your anger. You have a right to be angry about high taxes. The taxes are not fair, not just. Individuals and families are paying too much in taxes. You heard this from a liberal, a progressive. Corporations, on the other hand, have swindled us because they are paying far less than their fair share. What we need is a balance of the tax burden. While we are trying to balance the budget, we should consider balancing the tax burden. We should not rush into this. There is no need to be revolutionary about it. Let us move it slowly and set as an objective an equalization of the tax burden by the year 2005. I agree with the President's analysis that we should not rush things and remake Government in 7 years. Let us take 10 years to remake Government. Let us set a goal. Let us say that by the year 2005, we are going to balance the tax burden and have corporations paying an equal amount of the tax burden with individuals and families. If you set that kind of goal and follow it, you can only win the praises of the people because that means taxes come down for families and individuals. It means that nobody can make the charge of tax-and-spend when it comes to families and individuals certainly. It means that fairness will relieve American families of a burden and the people who are making the money, the corporations are making the money, there is no relationship between their profits and the number of people who are working. The number of people that are working goes down, people are making as individuals and families less money, corporations are making more money, it is only fair, and even if they were not, it would only be fair that we balance off the tax burden. Why in 1943 was it the opposite? Why was almost 40 percent of the tax burden being carried by corporations and only 27 percent by individuals? And why now is it so out of balance? It went down even as low as 8 percent under Ronald Reagan in 1982. Eight percent was the portion of the burden being borne by corporations while individuals at that time were still at 44 percent. So you have a situation where part of the solution is we need more revenue directed at job training and education. That is the obvious way. There may be some other things that can be done to solve the present problem. We need more revenue directed at job training and education in order to be able to get out of the present bind where the workers and individuals of this Nation are slipping further and further behind while the corporate sector, 5 percent of the population, is going ahead with higher and higher profits. A just solution is the duty of the people who are elected, the President, Members of Congress, Members of the Senate, we have a duty to solve this problem. I see no other way to solve it unless you have the resources to solve it with. What would you do with the resources that you gained from raising taxes on corporations? You would use it to make an unprecedented education system in this country, an education system which nobody can sit and predict what the components should be, but we could begin a process of working at it with research and development, with implementation of experimentation, with the application of computerization and automation and all kinds of new things which would help enhance the education system, an education system for tomorrow that is unlike any that exists now in Japan or Germany, that is not the way to go. We need an exciting classroom that captures the attention of young people and holds them. We need a classroom that can put a youngster who is a slow learner off into a corner and by use of some kind of repetitive action, either by a computerized program or a videotape that he responds to interactively, there are a number of things underway now which offer the answer for the future. We need all of those things. We need to have every American school have whatever is available. We know that computerization requires that students be computer literate for tomorrow. We know that already. So there should not be a school in the country that does not have an ample supply of computers. [[Page H 8673]] Oh, they cost a lot of money, we might say. Let us get whatever money we need to do that by cutting waste, setting priorities differently, and by raising new revenues where we need them. Those are the two approaches that we should follow. It is doable. The American people have to say it must be done. The American people have to say, we are angry and we know what we are angry about. We are angry and we are angry at Government. We are angry at elected officials and we have good reason to be angry at elected officials. People say, well, why are they not angry at corporations? The corporations took their jobs. That is a waste of energy. Corporations are in business to make money. Therefore, you have to turn to your elected officials and say to the elected officials, you have to hold the corporations in line in terms of their responsibilities, and their responsibility, the major contribution they can make, is to generate more revenue where revenue is needed in order to finance a transition period while we deal with the problem of a declining standard of living of American families and American workers. Herein lies the solution. I think we need to appoint a tax commission, a commission on creative revenues. I think we ought to have a commission similar to the base closing commission, some kind of objective group of experts who would come back to the Congress and the President, and we would have the final say, Congress has the final word on the base closings commission. For years we could not close bases, for years, they were an inefficient, wasteful operation out there and it has not been totally solved. The base closing commission has problems, it is not perfect, but we are moving at a much more reasonable, scientific, logical way to close down bases than we ever did before. Hard decisions are being made by the base closing commission in connection with elected officials. Let us have a creative revenue commission that does the same kind of thing. Instead of relying on the Committee on Ways and Means, which has sold us out, which has swindled the American people since 1943, since the corporate sector started getting greater and greater breaks, paying less and less taxes and the individuals and families started paying more, you have a situation where our interests wee not being served by the Ways and Means Committee or the Senate Finance Committee. The political process has broken down. And it seems never to be able to get itself together again. I do not have any faith, there are no proposals on the table to give you any reason to believe that it is going to start self-correcting. In the absence of self-correcting, we need outside forces. We have brilliant people in America that could be a part of a creative revenue situation. Let me say to every State and every city that you have a similar problem and many States now have surpluses and are prosperous. Many cities are prosperous, but have little surplus. But there are an equal number or a majority of cities across the country who are struggling to make revenues and expenditures balance, so cities are in great trouble. There are a number of States in great difficulty in terms of making revenues and expenditures balance, so you have the same problem. There ought to be a clear message sent out to liberals and to progressives, and the people on my side of the aisle, Democrats, whatever name you want to take or want to be called, we need to preoccupy ourselves. We need to focus far more on revenue. Revenue policies and tax policies have been neglected by the progressives and the liberals. We do not have any new ideas to propose. We have not seen any new ideas for a long, long time. Somehow we think that that is the dirty part of it. We will just focus on the expenditures and set priorities and talking about people's needs, all of which are necessary. People need Medicare, and we are going to fight hard to make certain that Medicare benefits are not cut. We are going to fight hard to make certain that Medicare premiums do not go up. We do not want senior citizens eating dog food in order to pay for their medicine and medical care. We are not going to change in that area. Liberals will be liberals. The Nation cannot exist without us. We are going to fight hard to get the school lunch program back on track so that little kids will not have to sacrifice their lunches to balance the budget. We are going to continue to do all of those, but some amount of energy must be addressed to the revenue question. In all of this, Ways and Means will be the star. Ways and Means will be on the front stage here in the Congress and across the country. You have already budgets of cities and States that have made drastic cuts. Large numbers of people, say in the City of New York, in my district, have told me we do not want to make these sacrifices. We think we still need these services. We think that old people should have home care because home care makes more sense than nursing homes. We think that we should still have decent meals for elderly people because that keeps them healthy and it saves money in terms of hospital care. And we want to continue our senior citizens programs. We want to continue our programs for young children and make certain that those immunizations take place. And if that means we have to have some outreach workers to make certain that certain kinds of people get those shots, then we want to do that. We want to continue. But we realize the city is broke. We are willing to sacrifice. We know we have to give up something. If our city is broke, we want to be loyal and good citizens and understand. My message to you in New York City, New York State, is, yes, we want to be understanding. We should never, never ever waste public money or private money. We should always be vigilant, and in the process of pruning the budget and making city government or State government or national government work efficiently and effectively as an eternal and ongoing process. Vigilance is necessary to make certain that every dollar that is taken in in revenue is spent wisely. That is necessary. We should do more in that area. On the other hand, do not accept the idea, do not accept the propaganda that the city is broke automatically or the State is broke. In New York City, for example, the revenue possibilities are as great as ever. New York City once had a City University that was completely free. No tuition was charged at all. That was during the Depression. During the Depression we had a free university; the revenue being generated was meager. But this was because the people who were in charge of the government, the decision-makers, the elected officials felt it was important, important to the people and the people in charge of the government, their families were the people who were going to those free universities. Now it is a bit different. The power is in the hands of a different set of people, and they have imposed tuition, and they are now saying, we cannot keep going; we have to cut back. The result is that large numbers of people who qualify, students who qualify and should be in college will not be able to go to college. We do not have to make that sacrifice. What the college professors in New York City should do is put their brains to work and talk to their students and link up with elected officials. In New York City you ought to have a discussion of creative revenue policies. What are the creative revenue policies to make us more aggressively take advantage of the fact that New York City is strategically located? It is strategically located and has a harbor, a shipping industry, is strategically located in terms of air lanes coming from Europe. There is a big volume of travel business from overseas that comes into New York City. The city has been giving that away for decades. There is a Port of New York and New Jersey Authority. That Authority is an independent authority. That Authority pays interest on bonds. That Authority is run by people who have salaries which are twice the salaries of city officials or State officials, as most public authorities do. They do not have the same level of salaries as people who are public officials. They make decisions, often bad decisions, without any accountability to the taxpayers or the voters. And they have [[Page H 8674]] been doing that for years. They have been squandering money for years. New York City citizens could be more aggressive in taking back the source of revenues generated for the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. This is just one example that we have been talking about for years, but very few people have done anything about it. We have a Republican mayor that I disagree with on a number of other things, but he has taken the initiative and he has made it quite clear he is not going to tolerate the continued swindling of New York City by the Port Authority. New York City has a large tourism business, in fact, probably unequaled in the country. The largest industry in the New York City is tourism. This has not come home to most people. It has been happening for the last 10 years, but they have not gotten the message. It is the second largest business in New York State. Agriculture is still the largest industry in New York State. But in New York City, tourism is the number one industry. Why? Because New York City is strategically located, as I said before, in terms of traveling, but it has a history that interests people all over the world. It has monuments that interest people. There are things in New York City that the world will always be interested in. Most people in their lifetimes across the whole Planet Earth would like to see New York City sometime in their lifetime, once in their lifetime. A lot of people say, I do not want to live there, but I would like to see it. And that is one of the greatest advantages. Tourism. The fact is that New York City has a diversified population, these terrible immigrants that people talk about. We have more than anybody else. We have a greater mixture. There may be some place in the country that has certain immigrant groups that are larger, but we have the greatest mixture in New York City. We could double the tourist industry if the decision-makers in New York City, the city council and the mayor would say, we are going to take this diversity and build on it. The fact that we have people from China, from Bangladesh, restaurants, Pakistani, Vietnam, to say nothing of all the Caribbean countries, you could have a festival in New York City every week of a different nationality or different ethnic group and promote the kind of thing that brings people into New York City in large numbers to spend their money in various ways. It is a gold mine. The diversity of New York is a gold mine. Let me give you one example in the heart of my district on Eastern Parkway. In the heart of the 11th Congressional District we have a West Indian Labor Day parade. It has mushroomed in 20 years from a few blocks to something like 50 blocks, and it is the largest tourist event in New York City now, 2 million people. And police always make conservative estimates; this is the police estimate. Last Monday on Labor Day, 2 million people turned out for the West Indian parade. They do not call it a parade, it is a carnival. They set up food stands. You cannot walk, there are so many people spread along the parkway. People come from all over the world because you have people of Caribbean descent in Canada and London. They come for the carnival and parade, 2 million people. Can you imagine how much revenue the industry receives from the impact? Those who come from outside have to have hotels. They have to travel in. All kinds of expenditures that come from the outside. Those who are on the inside spend money in great volumes for the various things that are for sale. And the city has ways to collect this revenue, but it turns over the economy. If the city collects not a dime, the people who are selling the wares and participating in the activity are earning money in a way which generates money for the overall gross income of New York City. Here is a tourist event started by amateurs that generates this kind of money. What if the city planned and made planning to have some kind of festive every week of the year with a different ethnic group? And we have a City University system which has 200,000 students. This is before the budget cutbacks and the raising of tuition, but I suspect it is hovering around 195,000 students. You have 200,000 students in the City University system. This is not the State university, just the City of New York. You have all those professors. You could have an institute for each one of the ethnic groups in the city. An institute which would help plan these things. You could have a welcoming committee for the visitors from Indonesia, Pakistan. You could have a welcoming committee organized by the city so that the activities are organized and the middle-class families of the world who are traveling, you can come to New York and expect more than just to see the sights. You can expect to be welcomed and have some of your human needs taken care of. You take China. We have a large Chinese population in New York. The best Chinese food in the world; a politically active population. China, with 1 billion people and growing, broken out of economic stagnation. China is creating a middle-class. If you have a billion people and 1 quarter of that billion people become middle-class, that is 250 million people. If 1 quarter of the 250 million decide to make a trip to New York once every year, we would be overwhelmed by Chinese tourists. But they are coming. It is going to happen. You can double the revenue from tourism. You can double the economic activity from tourism in New York City if you plan for it and if you encourage it. Every Eastern European country, you could have an exchange program. There are a thousand ways that we should take the initiative and say that we liberals and progressives are going to seize the initiative and force new activities which generate revenue. And on the national level as well, this is a diverse Nation. Instead of bashing immigrants, we should look at what that means in terms of a tourism industry. Our initiatives in tourism are paltry as a Nation. States do a better job of encouraging tourism. But nationally, we are not in the same league with Italy and France. They know how to promote tourism. They do whatever is necessary to make certain that people come from the outside to spend their money in their countries. They have all kinds of tricks and special coupons for gasoline and all kinds of tricks, not tricks, but options, inducements, incentives. We do not do that. We are arrogant about it all. They are going to come or not come. We will encourage a few things by sending out brochures, but revenue can be generated for the whole country if we just organize better the tourism industry. Mr. Abercrombie of Hawaii is disgusted by the fact that he cannot get an adequate response to the growth of the tourism industry. I will not dwell on that. That is just one example. I want to bring it home to New Yorkers. Instead of despairing, you have a mayor that says the city is broke. We cannot do any more. We are going to have a different standard of living and quality of life. City University cannot only not be free, but we are going to raise the tuition so that it is going to be as high as Ivy League schools. In order to have a different solution in New York City, the liberals, the progressives, have to concern themselves also with taxes and revenue as well as streamlining new priorities, setting new priorities. At the national level, the priorities are all mixed up. Today we had a vote on the defense appropriations bill, and while this Nation needs to be investing in research and development and needs to be creating skilled workers to insure that tomorrow's highways, brainpower industries generate much of the employment in the United States, going back to Mr. Thurow's article, while we should be doing that, instead of investing in research and development and in education, we made dramatic cuts, drastic cuts in research and development and in education. Before we went on recess, we had an appropriations bill for education, health and human services and education. Specifically, education suffered about $3 billion in cuts. The Head Start program, for the first time in history of the program, was cut. The title I program was cut by $1.1 billion. It is the biggest cut. It is the biggest program. Title I is the only program [[Page H 8675]] that funnels Federal funds into public schools, into elementary and secondary schools. At a time when we need to be increasing our brainpower, improving our educational system, even the programs that exist already are drastically cut. Large numbers of job training programs were wiped out. They say they do no good and, therefore, they should be wiped out. But we have had some weapons systems and some activities in government that have had problems that did no good. We do not wipe them out. The CIA has been in trouble for a long time. The CIA is a great embarrassment to everybody. We do not wipe it out. We insist on restructuring the CIA, get a new director, have some new codes, appoint a commission. Nobody wants to wipe out the CIA. We do not even cut the CIA. One of the items on the floor of the House today was an amendment to cut the portion of the CIA budget which deals with satellite activities, information-gathering activities only, which is estimated to be about $16 billion. We have to say estimate because we do not know the details of the CIA budget, of the intelligence budget. You are not allowed to do that unless you want to go to the secret room and, not a secret room, go to the room where the budget is as a Member of Congress, and behold the budget of the CIA and the other intelligence gathering activities. Once you look at it, you cannot talk about it. Nobody wants to go and look at it because they are muzzled. You cannot criticize. You are a traitor if you talk about it after you look at it. Everything is topsecret. So estimates that are never disputed are that $28 billion goes into total intelligence operations, a minimum of $28 billion. In the past we have had a budget amendment on the floor to cut the CIA budget by 10 percent totally across the board, the intelligence budget. That 10 percent of $28 billion would yield $2.8 billion a year. We said do it for 5 years so the CIA budget is cut in half. Today we were proposing less, just a portion of the CIA budget which deals with intelligence-gathering operations, with satellites and military aspects of it, which is estimated at $16 billion. We were going to cut that by 10 percent. That is $1.6 billion. When we first introduced the amendment to cut the CIA, we got 104 votes. The second year we introduced it, we got 107 votes. Today we got less than 95 votes. In a time when the state of the emergency is beginning to manifest itself clearer and clearer every day, at a time when it is clear that we need to devote some resources to deal with the economic emergency that we have in this country, the Members of Congress, Democrats and Republicans, refuse to cut a wasteful CIA budget. Aldrich Ames and his capers have shown us something is radically wrong with the CIA. Not only are we funding a wasteful operation, but the Aldrich Ames affair shows we are funding a dangerous operation where people are in high places, are allowed to get to high places because of a lack of accountability and standards, and an outright bum, an outright bum was allowed to rise to the top where he was directing the agents who were related to Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, and Aldrich Ames is responsible for the death of at least 10 agents, at least 10. He is not talking yet. He is in prison, but not fully talking. But they have admitted that he has caused the deaths of at least 10 agents. He has received at least $2 million from the Soviet Union. Even after the cold war ended, he was still on the payroll, and it was estimated that he was supposed to go, in the end, go to Russia, and there was a big mansion built for him. I suppose they are going to put him in the annals of history because who else has made such a fool of the American intelligence community, this man in high places who broke every rule. He was a drunk, an alcoholic. He used safe houses. We probably have beautiful safe houses that we pay a lot of money for across the world. He used safe houses for his sexual escapades. He broke all the rules. But he was the son of a former CIA employee. He was a member of the old-boy network. So he was allowed to do this because the agency is not into anything of great significance. If it had been into some significant activity, he would have been exposed a long time ago, with Aldrich Ames's traitorous activities, with the death of 10 agents, at least they admit 10 agents dies, peace and war have not been affected at all. Nobody will say that he had any impact on peace and war in the world. Nobody will say that he had any impact on the security of the United States, because whatever those agents knew and whatever games they were playing, whatever cop-and-robber activities they were engaged in were insignificant. Most of what Aldrich Ames was doing in getting people killed was insignificant to the welfare of the people of the United States, insignificant to the security of the United States, and yet the Democrats and Republicans both refuse to cut the CIA budget just 10 percent. That is not the only major vote that was on the floor of the House today. There was a vote for the B-2 bomber, an amendment to strike the B-2 bomber from the appropriations bill. The B-2 bomber the President says he does not want or need. The Joint Chiefs of Staff said, ``We do not want or need the B-2 bomber,'' that whatever functions the B-2 bomber could serve can be served in other ways that are more effective and more efficient. The chief of the Air Force says they do not need the B-2 bomber. The Secretary of Defense says, ``We do not want the B-2 bomber.'' All of the people that we pay to render expertise on these decisions say. ``We do not want the B-2 bomber,'' and yet the amendment to delete the B-2 bomber on the floor of this House, despite the fact that both Republicans and Democrats supported the amendment, Republicans came over in large numbers, led by the chairman of the Committee on the Budget, the Republican Committee on the Budget, the man who, despite the unpopularity of it, will put his vote where his philosophy is, it still lost by 3 votes. It still lost by 3 votes; by 3 votes, the Members of Congress, Democrats and Republicans, said, ``We want to keep a weapon that everybody says is wasteful.'' Over the life of the B-2 bomber production, we are talking about $30- some billion. Right away I think $30 million is involved in the next year's budget over the life of it, we are talking about $30-some billion, and yet Republicans and Democrats say ``no.'' What is the reason for rational people, elected by the people of the United States, to fund a weapon that the experts do not want, that the military people do not want? What is the rationale for that? I will not answer that question. I will let you call your Congressman and ask them how they voted, and let them answer it. But it is clearly an example of how the priorities that we need to be shaping for this transitional period are not being dealt with. We do not need any more money from taxes, either for families and individuals or corporations, until we eliminate those kinds of wasteful activities and wasteful weapons systems. We are not living up to the promise that we made in terms of streamlining the budget. The President made it. The Democrats made it. And the Republicans made it. And yet there are tremendous examples of waste, all of which I will not go into. We will not deal with the farm program. We will not deal with the subsidies that go to the farmers in Kansas, which average between $30,000 and $40,000 per family, and it has been doing that for the last 20 years, and they will not cut those subsidies. Farmers are no longer the poor people that Franklin Roosevelt decided to subsidize. Farmers are corporations now. Only 2 percent of the population lives on farms. But look at the size of the budget, between $12 billion and $20 billion, which go into various farm programs. We could move to seriously cut the waste and take that waste and put it into job training, education, research and development, and deal with the problems Mr. Thurow talks about. We could deal with the problems that we are in a global economy, and our greatest asset will be an educated population, a highly skilled population, a population that is fueled by economic activity that becomes more and more complex all the time but stays ahead of our competition in the rest of the world. This is the answer to the problems that Mr. Thurow lays out. [[Page H 8676]] We can talk in empty terms about family values all we want, but unless we increase the wages of American families, families will continue to fall apart. Mr. Thurow says that in the modern economy all over the world, except in Japan, there is a phenomenon which has been documented all over the world, except in Japan, men are leaving their families in order to deal with the economic crisis. That is a terrible indictment of males, but males are faster to leave their families than females. Everybody knows that. Males are leaving their families all over the world in order to deal with the crisis of not having enough wages to take care of their families. They run away. When men leave their families, their individual quality of life improves because all they have to do is take care of themselves while the family's quality of life that they left behind goes down. He points out if women start doing that, we are in real trouble. If women start to opt out and leave their children, then only the Government decides. Somebody has to take care of them. We will be in the position of having them shot down in the street like they are shot down in the street in Brazil. Orphaned children, with no homes, are often killed wholesale at night in Brazil. Their civilization has come to that. I conclude by saying Mr. Thurow's article should be read by every Member of Congress, by every voter out there, just to get an analysis that is mainly objective. He is respected. He is not a liberal; I mean he is not an ideologue. Take a look at his facts. Take a look at his compilation of what is going on in the world and in this country and understand the economic implications. We have to do something about the phenomenon where no country without a revolution or a military defeat and subsequent occupation has ever experienced such a sharp shift in the distributions of earnings as America has in the last generation. At no other time have median wages of American men fallen for more than two decades. Never before have a majority of American workers suffered real wage reductions while the per capita domestic product was advancing. We are in a unique period, a transitional period. The only people who can solve this problem are members of government, the President, the Congress, the elected officials all over the country. It is our duty to bite the bullet and come up with some solutions to this drastically changing economy and society. I hope that in the next few weeks ahead we will bear this in mind.

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, Sadie Feddoes is a shining example of the kind of conscientious, dedicated-citizen leader worthy of being designated as a ``Point of Light'' to be held high as a model for all Americans. In her years of service to the least among us and her long abiding concern for the personal welfare, as well as the public achievement, of those around her, Sadie Feddoes has proven that she can walk with bankers and kings but never lose the common touch. Sadie Feddoes is a vice president and community and government relations officer for Citibank, where she has been employed for 40 years; a columnist for the New York Amsterdam News since 1972; past chairperson of the board of Bedford Stuyvesant Restoration Corp.; member of the board of directors of Bedford Stuyvesant Restoration Corp.; chairperson of the board of directors of the Billie Holiday Theatre; a member of the board of directors of Brooklyn Economic Development Corp.; a member of the board of directors of the Kings County Overall Economic Development Program Committee; and served on the 1984-85 New York Regional Panel of President Reagan's Commission on White House Fellowships. She has worked on many community projects and is a member of several charitable and civic organizations. She is a past member of National Women in Communications and New York Women in Communications where she was recognized in 1984 as one of 60 outstanding members. Miss Feddoes was born in St. Vincent, West Indies and holds a bachelor's degree in business from Pace University. Miss Feddoes has received many citations and awards including Outstanding Performance Award from Citibank in 1970 and is the recipient of awards from the Salvation Army; American Red Cross; the New York State Black and Puerto Rican Legislative Caucus; National Urban League; National Association of Negro Business and Professional Women's Clubs; National Council of Negro Women; Lions International; the National Conference of Christians and Jews; the Boy Scouts of America; Coalition of 100 Black Women; the Navy Yard Boys and Girls Club; Church Women United of Brooklyn; Congressman Edolphus Towns; Senator Velmanette Montgomery; Assemblyman Clarence Norman Jr.; and from several churches and civic organizations. She was also a grand marshall for the West Indian-American Labor Day Parade, which attracts over a million persons annually and was the recipient of the Chairman's Award for Distinguished Service from the Congressional Black Caucus of the 102d Congress. Miss Feddoes received a citation from Borough President Howard Golden on behalf of the People of Brooklyn when she celebrated her 25th year with Citibank and was recognized in the Congressional Record on the occasion of her 30th anniversary by Congressman Edolphus Towns. Miss Feddoes was honored as the 1982 Woman of the Year by the board of managers of the Brooklyn Home for the Aged and also by the Brooklyn branch of the NAACP as its 1984 Woman of the Year for her outstanding leadership and dedicated work. She has made several television appearances including guest spots on NBC-TV's ``Today Show,'' ``Black Pride'' on WPIX-TV and was alternate guest panelist on the cable television show ``Face the Women.'' She is listed in Black American Writers, Past and Present; Who's Who Among Black Americans; Who's Who of American Women; Who's Who in Finance and Industry; and in the British published Dictionary of International Biography. It is quite fitting and proper that we salute Sadie Feddoes as a ``Point of Light'' for all Americans. In her career and for her community, Sadie Feddoes has always performed beyond the call of duty. It is our fervent hope that the bright light of Sadie Feddoes will continue to shine for many decades to come.