Tom Osborne

Mr. OSBORNE

Mr. OSBORNE. Mr. Speaker, today the House is considering the conference report for H.R. 2215, the 21st Century Department of Justice Appropriations Authorization Act. While this conference report authorizes appropriations for the Justice Department, it also establishes federal judgeships. Despite the efforts of Chairman Sensenbrenner, this legislation fails to make permanent Nebraska's temporary judgeship, which is set to expire November 20, 2003. Caseloads for U.S. district judges in Nebraska have climbed steadily largely because of an increasing number of criminal cases, particularly those related to drug trafficking. In fact, criminal cases have more than doubled since 1995. Like many other states in the Midwest, Nebraska has been plagued in recent years by an influx of methamphetamine (meth), and criminal cases involving meth represent 66 percent of Nebraska's drug docket, compared to the national average of 14.5 percent. The influx of meth in Nebraska will continue to cause the criminal caseload to increase. In the last year alone, the number of meth defendants increased by 88 percent. Interstate 80, which runs the length of the state of Nebraska, is one of the primary transit routes used for drug trafficking across the central United States. This has contributed to Nebraska being ranked second in the number of high-level drug trafficking defendants indicted and convicted in the Central Region, which includes 12 states. This substantial increase in Nebraska's criminal trials leaves Nebraska's federal judges with extremely heavy caseloads. In fact, Nebraska's judges carry a heavier criminal caseload than judges in New York City, Chicago, and Los Angeles. This fourth judgeship is critically important to Nebraska, and without it, criminal cases will move more slowly and handling civil cases will become increasingly burdensome. Mr. Speaker, while I am grateful for the efforts of Chairman Sensenbrenner on this issue, I am very disappointed this conference report does not address Nebraska's serious need for a permanent judgeship. Without this fourth judgeship, Nebraska's criminal justice system will be in real trouble.

Mr. OSBORNE

Mr. OSBORNE. Mr. Speaker, I thank the chairman for his support and for the support of the ranking member for this small, but critically important $500,000 feasibility study to address water quality and quality needs on the Santee Sioux reservation. This reservation is located on the Nebraska-South Dakota border of northeastern Nebraska; and as has been the case in many previous bills, what we have found is that the water quality on the reservation has really been degraded. Currently, the system is antiquated and is not working well. It is dependent upon a great number of small wells and water treatment systems; and at times, the water quality is either terrible or the water supply is relatively nonexistent. Currently, the water distribution systems are at maximum capacity, which limits housing expansion and deters economic development. In this particular case, this small tribe needs all of the housing and all of the economic development that they can possibly secure. So this is critical as far as they are concerned. The feasibility study authorized by H.R. 4938 would be administered by the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation and the Santee Sioux Tribe through a cooperative agreement. The study will identify safe, domestic water sources, water treatment requirements, water distribution renovations, and engineering recommendations based on a 40-year projection. A revitalized tribal water treatment and distribution system will serve the tribal communities and adjacent communities and will incorporate population growth and economic development activities in an area where economic development is desperately needed. This bill addresses a critical need of the Santee Sioux reservation, and it has been allowed to go on far too long. I urge the House to pass this important measure for the people of the Santee Sioux Tribe, and I again thank the chairman for his support. I urge passage of H.R. 4938.

Mr. OSBORNE

Mr. OSBORNE. Mr. Speaker, I thank the chairman for yielding me this time. Mr. Speaker, I think it is imperative that we do something to repeal the death tax permanently. We can change many taxes, such as the income tax, the sales tax, the property tax, from year to year; and it does not promote long-term devastation. But when we have a death tax that is in force until the year 2009 and in 2010 it goes away completely and in 2011 it comes back to 55 percent, we have an untenable position. It is absolutely impossible to do any long-term estate planning under the present system, and that is why this has to be repealed so people can plan now in 2002 what is going to happen in 2012, 2013, 2014, and 2015. Let me give a quick example. We have heard about the very wealthy people who are profiting from this. There was a ranch that was owned by Doris and Harry Coble in Nebraska. This was a 12,000-acre ranch in the Sand Hills. That is a small ranch that will barely support one family, maybe an income of $30,000, $40,000 a year. It was in the family for over 100 years. The land appreciated over time. The land and cattle upon their death was worth about $5 million. The inheritance tax on that ranch was over $2 million. The capital gains ran that up to about $3 million, and the heirs absolutely could not afford to own that property. So who bought the property? Ted Turner. Will Ted Turner pay an inheritance tax? Will he pay a death tax? No, he will not. That is the upper three-tenths of 1 percent we have been talking about. So our property in Nebraska and other parts of the Midwest is being bought out by absentee landlords who are able to buy those lands and those properties at those prices. So we are losing the income, we are losing the capital from those areas, and the ownership is moving out of the State. So I think for the benefit of ranches, farms, small businesses, we absolutely have to make this permanent which will provide us with some long-term planning capabilities.

Mr. OSBORNE

Mr. OSBORNE. Mr. Speaker, I come to the floor today to discuss a very pressing and most distressing issue in the Great Plains States and much of the mountain West; and as can be seen by the map here, the drought map, we are currently experiencing a drought across the United States that affects roughly 45 percent of the land mass of the country. In a normal year we can expect drought in maybe 10 percent or 15 percent of the country. And you can see by the severe brown marks and the red marks that the drought is not only extensive, it is extreme. These are areas where essentially all the pastures are gone. The cattlemen have no feed left for the winter. They have had to sell off their herd in many cases because there is no way that they can feed their cattle. And as we have had the glut on the cattle markets, prices have declined and a great many cattlemen have taken huge losses, so we are seeing tremendous distress in the livestock industry, particularly in the cattle industry. Also, what we have found is those who have raised crops have experienced a similar difficulty. The dry land crops are totally gone in all of those areas that are red and brown. And, of course, this has caused huge economic distress. Even those areas that are irrigated have lost substantially because one cannot run a center pivot fast enough to keep up with the drought. In many areas they have lost their ditch water. The water has been cut off because the rivers are dry. There is no water available. So even irrigated crops are severely impacted. So some have said, well, what we have to do is take the money out of the new farm bill because there is a huge amount of money in there and just take it out of there. We have not been able to figure out how we can get enough money out of the farm bill without destroying the farm bill that will undo this huge problem. So as a result, the gentleman from South Dakota (Mr. Thune), the gentleman from Kansas (Mr. Moran) and myself have introduced legislation that we think addresses this problem. At the present time we are estimated to lose $1.4 billion in the State of Nebraska alone. Kansas also is roughly $1.4 billion and the other States that we see here will have similar losses, so it is a huge loss. The thing that we are concerned about is if there were a hurricane that affected that amount of land mass in the United States, or if we had a wildfire that burned up that much area in the United States, or if we had a tornado that affected that much, or a flood or whatever, we would immediately have assistance. But a drought occurs slowly over time and it is not quite as visible, but the economic devastation is every bit as great as what these other disasters might have. So we need help and we need it now. We cannot take the money out of the farm bill because there simply is not that much there. So what we have proposed is another solution, and that is that we look at this, at the spending currently in the farm bill. We will see in the heavy blue line here what has been budgeted for the farm bill in the year 2002, roughly $19 billion. Yet, recent projections by CBO indicate that roughly $13 billion will be spent this year. So it is a $6 billion shortfall. And, you say, why is that? Well, the reason is because the drought, the drought has reduced production of corn, soybeans, milo, sorghum, rye, many other crops by 10 to 15 percent. Therefore, the price has risen. So as the price has risen, there is no need for government payments, no countercyclical payment, no loan deficiency payments. So as a result we will see a savings, so to speak, of roughly $6 billion, and the reason for the saving, if you want to call it that, is simply because we have had a drought. And those people who have been affected most by the drought, who have been hurt by the drought, will not receive any payments. What we are proposing is we take this shortfall, this $5 billion or whatever, and allocate it to emergency drought assistance. It does not break the budget. It falls within what has already been budgeted. This contrasts sharply with what the other body has proposed. They want to add roughly $6 billion of new spending. We think this is fiscally responsible. We think it certainly addresses the issue that is going on in the West and other parts of the country, even in the southeastern part of the country. But the main thing we are trying to drive home is this is critical and this is not emergency spending. It is not because of low prices. It is because of natural disaster. It is disaster spending which we need badly. Mr. Speaker, I urge careful consideration of my colleagues to this dilemma that we are now facing.

Mr. OSBORNE

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

Mr. OSBORNE

Mr. OSBORNE. Mr. Speaker, during the past 30 days of working recess, the number one topic in my part of the country has been the drought, and I would like to display a map of the drought as was portrayed at the end of August. Note here that roughly 45 percent of the country is in an extreme drought. The area that is brown is so excessive that there is practically nothing growing. Pastures are burned up, no dry-land crops, and even irrigated crops have a hard time surviving. The red area is a little better. Again, very little can grow there because the rainfall has been probably less than 50 percent of normal, and we have even seen some of this on the east coast. So very, very few times in the history of our Nation have we had a drought that is this widespread, 45 percent, because in a normal year we normally have a drought covering somewhere between 10 and 15 percent of our Nation. The other thing that has been remarkable is not just the extent of it, but the severity of it. As I mentioned, we have a huge proportion of the country that is in extreme drought condition. Most years you might have a very small percentage that would have that type of drought. The other thing to mention is that this has been a very persistent drought. Many of these areas are currently in their 3rd or 4th year of drought conditions, and so when a farmer or rancher has had to go through multiple years, obviously he becomes even more distressed than if it was just a 1-year occasion. So the situation is dire. Some type of help is needed, some type of disaster assistance. And the one thing I would like to point out is that in recent farm bills we have had what is called emergency assistance and in the last 3 or 4, 5 years we have averaged somewhere between 6 and $7 billion in emergency spending. That emergency spending has been primarily due to low prices, the fact that no one can get an adequate return on their crop. What we are talking about now is not low prices. We are talking about no crop at all, and we are also talking about really dire circumstances for the livestock producers because in these areas where there is no pasture, what has happened is that a great many people who own cattle, and in some cases even hogs, they have had to sell off their herds because there is nothing to feed them; and most of their feed for the winter has already been used up as well. So because of the glut on the cattle market, and in some cases the hog market, what we are finding is terribly low prices; and people are losing tremendous amounts of money, and a great number of cow/calf operations will be simply driven outside of existence because of this and of course a great many farmers as well. So this is a very difficult situation and one would assume that under these circumstances, it would be almost automatic that we would be able to come up with some type of assistance because the economic impact here will be much greater than the wildfires that we have seen in the West; and of course those were very serious and we certainly needed some aid, and we gave $700 million very quickly to provide assistance for the damage that was accorded to those wildfires; and yet here just in my State alone we are talking about roughly $1.4 billion, State of Nebraska, and we would multiply that by 10 or 15 when we look at this larger region. So the damage is tremendous. What we notice is that if we have a hurricane such as we had down in southern Florida a few years ago or if we had a tornado or a wildfire or even 9-11, the events are very dramatic. We see destruction, we see television 30-second soundbytes, and in a drought it is more insidious. It is slower, but the economic impact is every bit as great, if not greater than some of these other situations that we have addressed with disaster assistance. So, anyway, we feel this is a difficult situation. What I would like to do at this point, Mr. Speaker, is to amplify some of the arguments that have to do with why we are having such a difficult time getting the word out here in Congress and getting approval nationally for disaster assistance for agriculture; and the big problem that we have is that there is a widespread belief that the new farm bill that was passed just a few months ago is very fat, that it has all kinds of money in it; and therefore because of the excessive amounts of money in the farm bill, any disaster assistance for agriculture should be covered by the farm bill. And so you might say, well, is this perception correct, this perception that the farm bill is really overloaded with money? And I would like to point out just a few newspaper articles that I think pretty much capture the tenor of the time. One major newspaper said this and the headline said ``Farm Welfare'' and went on to say in an editorial ``. . . the House voted to slide backwards some 70 years, choosing socialism and abandoning market-based reforms in the Nation's Stalinesque farm policy'' in voting for the new farm bill. Here they are talking about a Stalinesque farm policy which is, of course, totally a socialized system which is absolutely not true. The Washington Post said this: ``Cringe for Mr. Bush.'' This was the headline. And the editorial said ``Mr. Bush signed a farm bill that represents a low point in his presidency, a wasteful corporate welfare measure that penalizes taxpayers and the world's poorest people in order to bribe a few voters.'' So the President took some tremendous hits for signing this farm bill and the idea being that this was just done to appease a few farmers to get some votes and it was done at the expense of urban citizens and also the world's poorest countries. We will examine the accuracy of this statement in a little bit, but this again captures the tenor of the time. This is essentially how this is perceived in so many quarters, particularly in urban areas. The Wall Street Journal went on to say this. The headline was ``The Farm State Pig Out.'' The editorial said, ``That great rooting, snooting noise you hear in the distance, dear taxpayers, is the sound of election-year farm-state politics rolling out of the U.S. Congress. This alone amounts to one of the greatest urban-to-rural wealth transfers in history, a sort of farm bill Great Society.'' So the gist of this editorial was that it is going to be a huge economic transfer from urban areas to rural areas, kind of a get-rich- quick scheme. So let us examine this a little bit in greater detail. Did the President really sell out for the farm vote? Did we really have a tremendous urban-to-rural transfer of wealth? Is the new farm bill obscene, as so many have said? I guess what we might do here is look at some figures. We will note here, Mr. Speaker, that under Freedom to Farm in 1999, 2000, and 2001, we spent an average of $24.5 billion a year on agriculture. This year in 2002, under the new farm bill, we are projected to spend $19 billion; in 2003, about $22 billion; then $21 billion, and then $20 billion. It will tail on down from there. So what we are saying is, projected for the first 4 years of the new farm bill, we are going to spend less than $21 billion a year on agriculture, whereas in the last years of Freedom to Farm, we spent $24.5 billion. So if that is the case, can we really say that this new farm bill is obscene, it is a sell-out to rural America? Is it something that is irresponsible? Should the President be castigated for signing this bill? I think very clearly the answer in this case is no, that this is a responsible piece of legislation. The thing that we will see later on is that actually now we have had enough production and crops are pretty much done in their growing season, and the prices are becoming more and more fixed for this year. Actually, this year, in 2002, and we know this is not going to be a projection, the reality is going to be that we are going to spend not $19 billion but we are going to be spending somewhere in the range of $15 billion this year, $14 billion, for the new farm bill; and we will go into the reasons for that. Instead of being up here, this bar should be down here. There is some pretty good evidence that leads us to believe that these may not be as high. So, actually, these estimates here may turn out to be a little bit on the high side, and obviously the new farm bill may actually prove to be a considerable savings over the old farm bill. Let us talk about this a little bit, too. Is the new farm bill a large part of the budget? As we read those editorials and as we hear conversation, we would assume that payments to the farm sector are maybe 10 percent of the total Federal budget; maybe 15, maybe 20, maybe even 25 percent. What is it? How much do we spend each year on agriculture? The actual case is that we spend a little bit less than or right at one-half of 1 percent of the Federal budget on farm policy. So out of every $200 of tax money that is spent, roughly $1 goes to the farm economy, $1 out of every $200. So this is not a huge giveaway. This is not something that breaks the Federal budget. I think it is important to realize this. Also, I think it is important for people to understand that out of that one-half of 1 percent that goes to the farm bill, the farmers do not receive all of that money. There are school lunch programs, there are conservation issues, there are environmental accounts. So actually the farmer himself receives only somewhere in the vicinity of 65 percent to 75 percent of that one-half of 1 percent, so it is not nearly as big a boondoggle as some would have us believe. What do we receive in return for that one-half of 1 percent that we are spending in tax dollars? What we have is the most diverse, the cheapest, and the safest food supply in the world. In the United States, we have no foot-and-mouth disease, where many other countries do have that in their livestock herds. We have no mad cow disease, or BSE, in this country. We do not use DDT. We do not use dangerous chemicals in our livestock and in our crops. So for all of this, we have a very safe food supply, we have a very diverse food supply, and we are totally self-sufficient. We do not have to import, although we do import some, but we would not have to import to sustain ourselves. Then lastly, I would like to make the point that we spend less than 10 percent of our total income on food. Now, most countries spend much more than that. They spend 15, 20, sometimes 25 or 30 percent of their total income to purchase food. In the United States, we have a cheap food supply that is safe, that is diverse, and is the best in the world. For that, we are spending roughly one-half of 1 percent. Another common myth is that farmers are getting rich off of this farm program. Let me just go through a few numbers here. Last year in the State of Nebraska, we lost 1,000 farmers in 1 year. There are not that many to lose anymore. We are down to under 2 million farmers and ranchers in the United States, whereas at one time it was many, many times that. In 1987, there were 12,600 farmers under the age of 35 in the State of Nebraska. Ten years later, in 1997, according to the U.S. census figures, the number of farmers under the age of 35 in the State of Nebraska was 5,500, so that is less than half of what we had 10 years before. That is a trend that is seen throughout rural America, not in Nebraska but in all States everywhere. So we are running out of young farmers, and we are running out of farmers, period. If it was so lucrative, if this was something that was a get-rich-quick scheme, then we would certainly see more young people coming into it. We would certainly see more people staying in farming and more people in ranching. The facts are that this is a very, very difficult profession; and it is very, very hard to make a living in it. One of the things that I have noticed in traveling my district is that out of the poorest counties in the United States, the three poorest counties, one, two, and three in ranking, are in my district in Nebraska. These counties are totally rural. They relay totally upon farming and ranching. There are no metropolitan areas, or there is not even a large town in any of these counties. So when we talk about per capita income, we are talking somewhere in the range of $6,000 per person. We can go to inner cities, to any part of the country, and we will find that the poorest counties in per capita income are in rural America. This is not a wealthy situation. I think one of the reasons we have this perception of how much of a giveaway the farm bill is is that the Environmental Working Group put up a Web site this past year in which they published the farm payments to all those who received payments over the last 4 years. Naturally, it is the exception that catches our eye. A lot has been made about the fact that Scotty Pippen, the professional basketball player, received some farm payments. He probably owned a farm and probably qualified for some farm payments. But the typical farmer, the average person who is in farming and ranching, is not Scottie Pippin. They point out the fact that some people make large amounts of money. And the assumption is if somebody got a $200,000 check or a $300,000 check or a $500,000 check, that that is net profit, that that farmer took that check to the bank and put it away because it was profit. Let us take a hypothetical situation here. Let us suppose someone has 2,000 acres of corn, which is a large but not real large farm in our part of the country. Let us say the cost of the production for a bushel of corn is $2.20 a bushel, which is about what it is. So by the time you bought your seeds, you bought your fertilizer, you planted, you put on some water if you irrigate, and you bought your machinery and it is about $2.20 a bushel. But in recent years the price that you receive at the marketplace for a bushel of corn is about $1.70 a bushel, some cases more, some cases less. So what it means is that the cost of production is about 50 cents higher than what you receive in the marketplace. So if you produce 200 bushels of corn per acre, that means you are losing $100 per acre. If you have 2,000 acres of corn, that means you have lost $200,000 simply in terms of what your cost of production was in comparison to what you receive at the marketplace. So if that farmer gets a $200,000 payment, he does not have any net profit. He has not even paid himself a salary. He has nothing left for his family. He has simply covered the cost of production. If he is a larger farmer and he has 5,000 acres of corn, he would get a payment of $500,000 under this set of figures to break even. And so what we are seeing here are some false assumptions, the assumption that because someone is getting a payment from the government is that they are getting wealthy, that they are putting that money in the bank, when in actuality many people are not even breaking even with government payments. So this is the thing that I think is important for people to understand. Let us take a look at why we need a farm bill. I think this is something that people sometimes do not totally understand and I will try to take a shot at explaining why I think it is important that we do have a farm bill. The first reason I will mention that I think is important is that farming is a unique industry and the first thing we might mention is that farming is almost totally weather-dependent. If we think about it, just think of any industry that you can think of and you would be hard- pressed to find one that was almost totally dependent on the weather. So a farmer can plant at the right time. He can put his fertilizer on at the right time. He can do everything right. And if he has a hail storm the day before he harvests, he has nothing. He could be totally wiped out in 20 minutes. Or if he does everything right and he has no rain and he has dry crops, he has got no crop at all. If his irrigation water gets shut off, which happened in many parts of the West this year halfway during the growing season, he makes no crops. So all agriculture is almost totally dependent on the weather. Secondly, in agriculture it is almost impossible to control inventory. That may sound like a strange thing to say, but when you plant your crop in the spring you have absolutely no way of knowing what the worldwide production is going to be in the fall. You do not know whether there will a drought in China. You do not know what the production of the United States will be. For instance, if we took corn as an example this year when we planted, people assumed that we would have 10 billion bushels of corn as a harvest. But because of the drought we will have less than 9 billion bushels, so no one can control that inventory. If you are making Ford automobiles and you have too many Ford Explorers out there, you simply shut down an assembly line. Instead of operating 24 hours a day, you operate 14 hours a day. If you are making suits of clothes and there are too many in the store and you cannot sell them, you simply cut down the production. But in farming there is no way in the spring that you can control inventory because you do not know what is going to happen during the growing season. So inventory is impossible to control. A third factor is producers do not set the price. In farming, interestingly enough, you do not say, well, I am going to charge $2.50 per bushel of corn. You go down to the elevator and you say, What will you give me? If the elevator operator says, We will give you $1.90, that is what you get. If they say $1.70, that is what you get. But in almost every other industry, if you are manufacturing an automobile, if you put a sticker on there of $25,000, if you make a suit of clothes, it is $400, $500, if it is a box of grapenuts, that is $3. But the producer sets the price. In agriculture the price is set for the producer. So again that is a little bit different than most any other industry. Fourthly, farming is critical to national security. We have to have a food supply. If you do not have a food supply, you are in bad shape. Let me give you an example of how this can work. About 15, 20 years ago in the petroleum industry we found that we could get petroleum from OPEC for roughly $10 a barrel, $10, $12 a barrel and it was costing us about double that amount to produce petroleum here in the United States. So we said, okay, we will take you up on this, OPEC, we will buy from you. And as a result we began to shut down our exploration. We shut down some of our refineries, some of the pipelines, and we began to reduce our production and we farmed our petroleum industry overseas. And now we find that we were roughly 60 percent dependent on foreign oil. Much of that is from OPEC. And, of course, we are very concerned because we are so dependent on countries that are so volatile and many of whom do not like us. And so the situation can be very similar in farming. If we do not have a farm program, if we do not support our farmers in some way, very quickly much of our agriculture will be sent overseas. And that $10, $12 a barrel that we paid OPEC for the last 10 or 12 years is now in the 20s. And furthermore, many people have estimated that when you figure out the cost of the Gulf War, which was basically over oil, maintaining a fleet in the Gulf, maintaining a military presence in the Middle East because of oil, that our actual cost of oil has not been $10 a barrel, it has not been $20 a barrel, it has been somewhere between 70 and $100 a barrel. That is what we have actually spent on our oil supply to keep it safe and keep it coming to the United States. Now that can happen very quickly to agriculture. If you do not support your farmers, if you let all of our farmers fail, it is not long before our food supply goes overseas and then you are at the mercy of other people for your food supply. We cannot afford to do this. This is a national security issue to some degree which many people do not think about because we assume every time we go to the grocery store you will have what you need. So you take it for granted, but it is not something we can take for granted. Fifth, there is no level playing field worldwide. It is important to understand this: The European Union has been very critical of our farm policy. They do not like us having any type of farm support. Yet in the European Union they subsidize their agriculture roughly $300 per acre; $300 per acre in the European Union. Japan subsidizes their agriculture more than $1,000 per acre. In the United States with our farm program we would subsidize our agriculture roughly $45 per acre which is one-sixth of the European Union and, of course, much, much less than what Japan subsidizes their agriculture. And so just to maintain some type of parity, we have to have some type of farm program, some type of price support so we can be competitive with these other countries. Also I think it is important to understand that land, labor and production costs vary widely worldwide. I was in Brazil in January. It is very interesting, you can buy topflight soil down there, topflight land, the topsoil is 50 feet deep. In many cases you can grow two crops because of the rainfall and the weather, and that land will cost an average of about 100 or $500 an acre, probably an average of about $250 an acre. That land is equivalent to the very best land in the United States. That land in the United States would cost somewhere between 2,000 and $3,000 per acre. So we are dealing in multiples of ten here. Farm labor in Brazil averages somewhere around 50 cents an hour. The United States, it would be 8, 9, 10, $11 an hour. So again our costs are much higher. The other thing that is different about Brazil and the United States is that there are very, very few environmental regulations. In the United States the agriculture people have to comply with clean air, clean water standards, use the right kinds of pesticides and fertilizers and so on, so it is a more expensive proposition. So what we are saying is if we do not have a farm program, we are really at the mercy of the European Union and other countries who subsidize agriculture. And we are also at the mercy of those developing countries who have extremely low production costs. We think that for $45 per acre in the United States, we receive a tremendous benefit at a very reasonable price when looked at the worldwide situation. So I think that this here is something that we might think about a little bit. So you might say, well, given all of these facts and given the fact that we have a drought and maybe people will concede the fact that the farm bill is not quite as bad as it has been portrayed. Maybe the President did not sell out. Maybe the President did a pretty good thing by signing the farm bill. If all this is true, then what do we do? What do we do to resolve the situation with the drought? What can be done with those farmers who are hanging on? There is no question in talking with those people who are bankers and agriculture lenders that we will lose more farmers and ranchers this year than we ever have because of the drought situation. So what is the possible solution to this? And I think that what we would like to do here is talk a little bit about a proposal that the gentleman from South Dakota (Mr. Thune), the gentleman from Kansas (Mr. Moran) and myself have introduced that we think makes some sense. We will take a look at it at this time. Mr. Speaker, what we are going to do now is just focus in on 2002. As I mentioned earlier, what was budgeted, the predicted cost of the farm bill for this year, the new farm bill, was going to be roughly $19 billion. In actual fact, as I mentioned earlier, what we are going to spend, based on August prices, is probably going to be about $14 billion, maybe a little bit less, that we will spend this year, which leaves a shortfall of roughly $5 billion. You say why did that happen? How could that be? How could you be off by $5 billion? What has happened, as mentioned earlier, the estimated corn production for this year was going to be just slightly under 10 billion bushels of corn. What it looks like now that the growing season is almost done is that we are going to have roughly 8.9 billion bushels of corn primarily because of the drought in those States that we saw on the map earlier. So our production for corn, for soybeans, for sorghum, for rye, for barley, and for wheat is going to be down about 10 percent across the country. And as a result, we will not need farm supports because prices are higher. We have less product, so when you have less product, the demand is greater, and when the demand is greater, the prices are higher. So instead of $1.70, $1.80 for corn, we will see something like $2.50, $2.60 per bushel. The same thing for wheat, soybeans and other products. So when we have higher prices, the government does not have to provide the price supports. There will be no loan deficiency payments. There will probably be no countercyclical payments this year so there will be a saving of roughly $5 billion this year. What the gentleman from Kansas (Mr. Moran) and the gentleman from South Dakota (Mr. Thune) and myself are proposing is that we take this difference of $5 billion and we allocate that in the form of disaster assistance to those very people who have, because of their loss of crops, because of the crop failure that have caused this gap to occur, because if they had not had the crop failure we probably would not have the higher prices, we probably would have had more government payments coming out and so we need to do something for those people who have had the trouble. Of course, the other thing we might mention here is that the livestock producers basically receive almost no Federal subsidies. Whatever they receive is very, very minimal in the form of equipment dollars, and so the livestock people who have lost their pasture and feed and herds in many cases are really on the verge of simply going out of existence in many areas. So we think that they need to have some aid here along with the crop producers. Anyway, this is our proposal. We say let us take this gap here, let us take this money here and let us give it back to the people who were hurt so badly, that caused the prices to go up and resulted in no price supports and very low farm payments that has resulted in the $5 billion shortfall. One of the solutions that many people have advocated is that we simply take the money out of the new farm bill, and my hypothesis here and the reason I am appearing on the floor tonight is to explain to people that this is something that absolutely cannot happen. We have shown earlier that the new farm bill does not appear to be more expensive than what we were doing. It seems to be more accountable. It provides a better safety net, and the other thing to remember is that there is an 80 percent increase in conservation payments. Most environmentalists, most people in cities, most people around the country would say, yeah, we need to protect our environment, and the farm bill does this. The other thing that is in the farm bill that we did not want to see attacked is rural economic development. We are losing young people at a tremendous rate in rural America. They are simply leaving and they are not coming back. If we do not do something to diversify the economy, if we do not do something to shore up our rural areas and to build up our small towns and to bring in broadband services where they can have high speed Internet access, we are simply going to have a more and more difficult time and we are going to unravel more and more. We think this is a responsible solution. It does not break the budget because we are not talking about spending money over and above what we thought we were going to spend in the first place. The House has a budget. The House has to stay with a budget. The other body does not have a budget; therefore, they can propose whatever they want to and then ask the President to pass it or veto it. In our case, we have to stay within the budget. In this case, we feel that we are staying within the budget, and we think it is the best thing for agriculture. We think it is the best thing for the country because it is not in the national interest to see a bunch of farmers and ranchers go out of business because of the draught. Mr. Speaker, I conclude my remarks and we certainly urge consideration for those farmers and ranchers out there who are struggling with drought. We hope some disaster assistance will be forthcoming, and we certainly hope that my colleagues here on the floor of the House will see fit to help them out in the near future.

Mr. OSBORNE

Mr. OSBORNE. Mr. Chairman, it seems to me that 42 years of trade embargoes with Cuba have not changed Cuban Government policies, have not changed North Korea, Sudan, Libya, or Syria. Forty years ago U.S. controlled most of the ag commodities in the world. The embargo might have had some impact at that time. Today we have a global economy. Countries simply buy elsewhere if we have an embargo. It costs us market share. A 2002 Texas A&M study showed that Cuba trade restrictions costs U.S. agriculture $1.24 billion annually and $5 billion for ag and ag-related business. Reaching back into my somewhat vague and sordid past, it seems to me that if someone ran the same play for 43 years and it did not work, maybe they would try something different. So I would suggest that we might try that. Not asking to trade weapons, computer chips, petroleum or plutonium. We are simply saying that food and medicine does not jeopardize national security. It helps our country and our ag.

Mr. OSBORNE

Mr. OSBORNE. Mr. Speaker, I thank the chairman for yielding me time. Mr. Speaker, I rise to support H. Res. 496, sponsored by the gentlewoman from Connecticut (Mrs. Johnson). I really appreciate her leadership on this particular issue. As other speakers have mentioned, there are a number of former major league baseball players who have indicated that steroid abuse is widespread. Some have said 50 percent, some 60 percent. I do not know what the exact figure is, but the perception is certainly there. I guess recent records would lend some credibility to these allegations, because in the first 125 years of major league baseball, we had two players who hit 60 home runs or more. In the last 4 years, we have had three players who have hit over 70 home runs. Home run production has skyrocketed. Strength, size, speed has always increased. So, again, we do not know the exact figures, we do not know the exact facts, but, obviously, there is something going on here that is a matter of concern. I think the perception of steroid abuse is damaging, because the National Football League, as has been pointed out, the National Basketball Association, the Olympics and intercollegiate athletics have tested for steroids for a number of years. It is hard to understand why all of these people would test and be very much against steroids, while Major League Baseball seems to turn their head. I cannot really understand that. I know the intercollegiate athletic scene the best. For an average top football player in an intercollegiate athletic institution, you will find that the NCAA will test twice a year, the conference will come in and test twice a year, and the school will test two to three times a year. All of these are random, unannounced tests. When that happens, you will find that steroids abuse goes down and practically disappears, because, if it is an oil-based steroid, it is detectable for up to 12 months, and if it is a water-based steroid, it is detectable for 3 to 4 weeks. So with that frequency of testing, it is almost impossible to dodge the bullet, to use steroids and get away with it. So we think this has worked very well. In the late '70s and early '80s occasionally you would hear rumors about this guy or that guy using steroids. He would gain weight and get stronger. We had the testing capability from the middle '80s on. From that time forward, we have seen practically no steroid abuse among NCAA athletes, at least in the football arena. Of course, if a person is caught using steroids, they are suspended automatically for at least 1 year. There are three damaging issues regarding steroids. As has been mentioned earlier, there are severe health implications, heart disease, cancer, it caps growth of young people. But an adjunct to this is psychological. Steroids greatly increase aggression. There is something called ``steroid rage,'' where someone is irrationally angry all of a sudden. This is something that can be caused by steroids. Suicide rates generally go up with those using steroids, and certain psychotic events occasionally occur as well. Secondly, as has been mentioned earlier, there is the issue of competitive advantage. The thing I would like to mention is if you are a player and you are in a league where you think 30, 40, 50, 60 percent of your colleagues are using steroids, you may not want to use steroids, but you feel you have to use steroids in order to be competitive. If you can play in the league 2 more years, that may be several million dollars. If you can raise your home run average by 10 a year, your batting average by 15 percent, that also translates into huge contract increases. So I think we will find it is sort of a situation that to be competitive, you have to keep ratcheting up the steroid abuse. The last thing I would mention, the reason I have really gotten behind this resolution is the fact that there is no question that young people look up to athletes, and if they see that home run production skyrocketing, if they see these guys getting bigger and stronger and faster and it seems as though the league is turning their head, we are sending a very powerful message to these young people that it is okay to do what you can get by with. As the gentleman from New York (Mr. Israel) mentioned earlier, we really have had a crisis of confidence in so many areas of our society, whether it be the clergy, whether it be politics, whether it be business, and we really cannot afford to have this crisis of confidence spread and affect our young people and particularly the game of Major League Baseball, so I urge support of the resolution and want to thank the gentlewoman from Connecticut (Mrs. Johnson) for her work in this area.

Mr. OSBORNE

Mr. OSBORNE. Mr. Speaker, I would like to thank the gentleman from Colorado for yielding this time, appreciate his insights on the business community and some of the difficulties we have been having; and Mr. Speaker, tonight I would like to discuss the general perception of the farm bill that was passed in May, the Farm Security and Rural Investment Act. It has been very interesting as we have watched what has gone on around the country, particularly in the urban areas, particularly areas of both coasts here in Washington. The farm bill has been labeled as obscene. It has been labeled as fat. It has been labeled as pork, et cetera. I would like to read just three quotes from leading newspapers that pretty much express the general sentiments that we have been hearing. This was from the Las Vegas Review Journal. The headline was ``Farm Welfare,'' and the body of the article said this: ``The House voted to slide backwards some 70 years, choosing socialism and abandoning market-based reforms in the Nation's Stalinesque farm policy in voting for the new farm bill.'' Those are very strong words, that we decided to slide back 70 years, chose socialism and Stalinesque policy. The Washington Post, under the headline: ``Grins for Mr. Bush,'' editorialized, ``Mr. Bush signed a farm bill that represents a low point in his presidency, a wasteful corporate welfare measure that penalizes taxpayers and the world's poorest people in order to bribe a few voters.'' So the farm bill was labeled as a bribe and was a low point of the Bush presidency. The Wall Street Journal, under the headline, ``The Farm State Pigout,'' says this: ``That great rooting snooting noise you hear in the distance, dear taxpayer, is the sound of election year farm State politics rolling out of the U.S. Congress. This alone amounts to one of the greatest urban to rural wealth transfers to wealth in history. A sort of farm bill great society.'' The question is are these perceptions, are these quotes truly representative of the farm bill? Is this what we are all about? I would like to take a look at some of the actual data concerning this farm bill that was passed in May. We will see that the spending on agriculture in 1999 was about $19 billion. In 2000, under Freedom to Farm, spending was roughly $33 billion; and in 2001, a year ago, it was roughly $23 billion. So those were the last 3 years of Freedom to Farm, and the amounts above these marks here were emergency payments. In other words, farmers were losing their livelihood so Congress passed emergency payments. Here we see a substantial increase of about $12 billion emergency here, an increase of 6 or $7 billion for emergency payments. The interesting thing is that if we look at this very carefully, we will find that the average here of these last 3 years of Freedom to Farm were $24.5 billion per year. We look at the new farm bill, 2002. We are projecting roughly $19 billion. Then it goes up to 22. Then it starts to level off, and from that point on it is projected to go down. So what we are talking about in the first 4 years of the new farm bill, the projection, a little less than $21 billion a year, which means that is $3.5 billion less than what we averaged in the previous 3 years under the old farm bill. Now, as far as I can tell, this does not represent a huge increase. Actually, it is a decrease. I do not believe that this is irresponsible policy. And so the thing that people need to remember is that the reason that the new farm bill was passed was people decided that we could not continue to rely on emergency payments. These emergency payments were not made until October-November, so the banker did not know at the planting time what the farmer was going to receive and the farmer did not know what he was going to receive until well after harvest. So in this policy we have folded in what is emergency payments, and we believe this is a more reasonable approach and, actually, probably, will save money at this point. Is this farm bill 15 percent of the Federal budget? We have heard of all the anguish, the weeping, wailing, and gnashing of teeth about how expensive it is. Is it 20 percent of the total tax bill? Is it 25 percent of the Federal budget? The answer, Mr. Speaker, is that this farm bill costs roughly one-half of 1 percent of the total Federal budget. Roughly one-half of 1 percent. And, actually, less than one- half of 1 percent goes to farmers, because 30 percent of the farm bill goes to school lunch programs through nutrition programs. So we feel the question probably should be asked then at this point, is that one-half of 1 percent being well spent? Certainly, even though it is not a huge amount of the Federal budget, do we want to waste that money? I guess if people think about it, they will realize that in that one-half of 1 percent, the United States has the safest food supply in the world. We have no foot-and-mouth disease in this country. We have no mad cow disease in this country. When we buy a piece of fruit at the grocery store, we know it has not been sprayed by DDT. So we have the safest food supply, we have the most diverse food supply, and we also have the cheapest food supply in the world. We spend roughly 9 percent of our total income on food in this country, whereas most countries are spending 20, 25, 30, sometimes as much as 50 percent for food. So I think that this one-half of 1 percent is certainly well spent. Another question that might arise is, are farmers getting rich? That is the perception, that this farm bill makes farmers wealthy and it is sort of a welfare system, as one of the newspaper articles said, for agriculture. Actually, I guess I can speak in terms of what my own home State has experienced. Last year, we lost 1,000 farmers in the State of Nebraska. These were farmers who no longer could keep going. Most of them left because of financial reasons. The census figures in 1997 indicated that there were 5,500 farmers in the State of Nebraska that were under the age of 35 years of age. Ten years before that, in 1987, there were 12,600 farmers under 35 years of age. So we lost 60 percent of our farmers 35 years of age and younger. There simply are not young farmers in the business any more because it is not profitable. So you may say, well, certainly the older farmers increased. And actually, again in Nebraska, the ages between 60 and 64 declined. Two thousand farmers left the profession at that point. So we have been losing all age brackets in the farm community. In addition, I might mention, Mr. Speaker, that at the present time Nebraska has the three poorest counties in the country in terms of average per capita income. Now, that does not mean just three of the poorer. It is the three poorest, one, two and three. In one of these counties, the average per capita income is a little over $4,000 a year per person. The other two counties are in the $5,000 range. All of these counties do not have any urban area. They are totally rural. They are totally dependent upon agriculture. So I can assure my colleagues that we do not find that agriculture is something where people are getting rich. The environmental working group has published a Web site in which all of the farm payments over the preceding 4 years have been published and anyone can access that site and see the horror stories that Scotty Pippin, the NBA player, got some farm payments; and we see cases where multiple entities of 10 or 15 or 20 or 30 people have gone together and maybe they have received payments of $1 million. So the assumption is that those payments represent net profit. And yet I guess anybody in agriculture understands that that is not the case. Now, let me give an example. Over the past 3 or 4 years, the pricing of a bushel of corn, what it will bring at the elevator, has probably averaged about $1.70 per bushel. The cost of production for a bushel of corn is roughly $2.20 per bushel. So after paying for fertilizer, seed, equipment, the combine, the tractor, the pesticides, it costs about $2.20 a bushel, on the average, to produce a bushel of corn, which means, obviously, that the farmer is losing 50 cents a bushel. So if that farmer has a couple thousand acres of corn and they are losing 50 cents a bushel and their yield is roughly 200 bushels per acre, that means, essentially, that the farmer would need a $200,000 payment just to break even. Now, that does not allow the farmer any profit. It does not allow for any surplus of any type and obviously, he goes out of business if all he does is break even. So most of these farm payments have been to cover rather severe deficits in the farm economy. The question we might ask ourselves is, well, why do we need a farm bill? People often wonder, well, the person who runs the drugstore on Main Street, the person who has an implement dealership or a clothing store has no guaranties. If Wal-Mart moves in, they have trouble. Why in the world should we help farmers? Let me talk a little about that tonight, Mr. Speaker. I believe there is some reasons why we want to think about the importance of agriculture and why agriculture deserves some special attention. First of all, farming is a unique industry in this sense. Farming is almost totally weather-dependent. I cannot think of any other industry where you can work a whole year and do things right, and in 10 minutes of hailstorm lose your whole crop. You cannot make it rain nor can you have it rain too much. You cannot prevent a 60 or 70-mile-an-hour windstorm that knocks down all your corn or your wheat. So because of the fact that agriculture is totally weather-dependent, it is somewhat unique. Second, in regard to agriculture, it is impossible to control inventory. When you start to plant your crop in the spring, you have no idea what your yield is going to be, you have no idea what the yield around the United States is going to be, you have no idea what the yield in Australia or China or the European Union is going to be. And so there is no way, if there is too much of a crop, to cut back at that point. Now, if you work for Ford, and there are too many SUVs on the road, you close down a production line or you begin to cut back on a whole plant. If there are too many suits of clothes on the market, then you begin to produce fewer suits of clothes. It is impossible for the agriculture industry to do this in adjusting their inventory. Third, producers do not set the price. Now, I cannot think of any other industry where the person producing does not decide what it is going to cost, what the price is going to be. If you produce an automobile, you put a sticker on there that says $20,000, $25,000, $30,000. A suit of clothes is $300, $400, or whatever. Yet the farmer, when he has harvested his crop, goes down to the elevator and finds out what the elevator operator will pay him for his crop. It may be $2.50 for a bushel of corn, it may be $1.50 for a bushel of corn. The same is true of the livestock producer. The cattleman has to go to the packer, the pork producers go to the packer to find out what he can receive. So in agriculture, the producer does not set the price. Fourth, and this is a very important point, farming is critical to national security. And the reason I say this is if we think about our oil industry, our petroleum industry, about 15, 20 years ago we realized that we could buy petroleum from OPEC for roughly $12 a barrel, $10 a barrel. In this country, it was costing $18, $22 a barrel to produce. So what we did is we quit exploring, we shut down our wells, and we began to decrease the number of refineries and began to shift our petroleum industry overseas. We decided if we could get it for $12 a barrel from OPEC, that was a good deal. So now, all of a sudden, we wake up and one day we find that we are roughly 60 percent dependent on OPEC for our oil. As we begin to add up the price of the Gulf War, as we begin to consider what it cost to keep the fleet in the Gulf and all of the military maneuvers that we have had to protect our oil supply, we would probably have to admit that we are now paying $60, $70, $80, maybe even $100 a barrel for that oil. So we have let our petroleum industry slip overseas. The point is, Mr. Speaker, that this can easily happen to our agriculture. If we begin to ignore agriculture, it can easily go to other countries and then, all of a sudden, we are dependent upon our food supply, which is even more critical than being dependent upon the petroleum industry from OPEC. Fifth, there is no level playing field worldwide. So it is assumed right now by many who have criticized the farm bill that the United States is the only country in the world that is helping our farmers, or farmers in general. And, actually, Mr. Speaker, the European Union subsidizes their farmers more than $300 per acre, Japan subsidizes their farmers more than $1,000 per acre, and in the United States our average subsidy is $45 per acre. So it is a tremendous disparity here. It is much less than these other nations are subsidizing their agriculture. So when we throw in the fact that our agricultural exports are being taxed or have tariffs of roughly 60 percent as they are sent overseas to other countries, and as goods come in from other countries to our Nation the tariff is roughly an average of 12 percent, and we look at that great disparity and then look at the difference in subsidization, we realize our agriculture producers right now are at somewhat of a disadvantage. Sixth, I might mention this, that land, labor, and production costs vary widely worldwide. In Brazil, for instance, you can buy top quality land for $100 to $500 an acre. About an average of $250 an acre. And that is top grade land. The topsoil is 50 feet deep, enough rainfall to sometimes produce two crops in one year on that cropland. And cropland like that in the United States would cost at least $2,500 to $3,000 an acre. So you can buy it in Brazil for one-tenth what you would spend here in the United States. The labor cost in Brazil is 50 cents an hour. Here in the United States it would be at least 20 times that amount. And, of course, in Brazil and many South American, many Third World countries, there are absolutely no environmental regulations. Of course, here in the United States, we have those regulations. So the point of all this argument is that if we do not do something to protect our farmers, if we do not have a farm bill of some kind, we will simply be run over by what is going on around the rest of the world, and we need to be competitive because we do not want to rely on someplace else and the rest of the world for our food supply. Let me also mention another item here, Mr. Speaker, that I think is very important. It may have some relationship to our previous speaker, the gentleman from Colorado. And the reason I am going through all of this background work is that at the present time we are experiencing a tremendous drought throughout much of this country, particularly in the Western States. At the present time, roughly 40 percent of the United States is in a severe drought situation. In an average year, we have 15 percent of the country in a drought. So we have reached a crisis situation. Looking at this chart, we can see the areas that are heavily affected. Most of the western States are in severe drought. For instance, the home State of the gentleman from Colorado (Mr. McInnis) had the driest spring ever in recorded history, the last 97 years. They are in this black area. Arizona is in a huge drought. Southern California is in the same situation. We see the same thing in North Dakota, South Dakota, Kansas, Nebraska and so on. Our livestock producers, particularly our cattlemen, have no pasture. The roots are dead in the pasture. There is no moisture. Cattlemen are very independent people. These people have no safety net. They do not participate in hardly any of the farm bill. Right now we are concerned because these folks need some type of disaster assistance. Yet because of the perception of the farm bill, that it is so fat, there is so much money for agriculture, it is going to be very, very difficult to get any help for these people who are going to have to sell their herds because there is no pasture. When everybody sells their herds at the same time, there is a huge glut and the price goes way down. We have been told that we have to have an offset from the present farm bill. In other words, we have to get some money from the farm bill that is already in the bill from somewhere else, and that is going to be very, very difficult to do. So the perception makes it difficult for agriculture at the present time. If we think about New York State, if they had a huge flood, we would expect that they would get some disaster assistance, and we would hope that somebody would not say New York State has already received a great deal of disaster help for other causes and, therefore, they really should not get any more. This is the mentality that we are concerned about with regard to this drought and particularly with regard to our livestock producers at the present time. Mr. Speaker, this really is pretty much the summary of what I wanted to say tonight. I appreciate the gentleman from Colorado (Mr. McInnis) yielding me this time. I would imagine that the gentleman has a comment or two regarding the drought situation that he has endured in his State.

Mr. OSBORNE

Mr. OSBORNE. Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. OSBORNE. Mr. Speaker, I move to suspend the rules and pass the bill (H.R. 4609) to direct the Secretary of the Interior to conduct a comprehensive study of the Rathdrum Prairie/Spokane Valley Aquifer, located in Idaho and Washington.

Mr. OSBORNE. Mr. Speaker, on that I demand the yeas and nays.

Mr. OSBORNE. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume. H.R. 4609, the Rathdrum Prairie/Spokane Valley Aquifer Study Act of 2002, directs the Secretary of the Department of Interior to work with the State of Idaho and the State of Washington to conduct a comprehensive study for the Rathdrum Prairie/Spokane Valley Aquifer by preparing a groundwater model to help establish a mutually acceptable understanding of the aquifer as a groundwater resource. The tools developed by this legislation will help to better coordinate and understand the various factors that influence the quantity and quality of the aquifer and encourage better cooperation between the two States charged with its maintenance operations. I would like to commend the gentleman from Washington (Mr. Nethercutt), the sponsor of this legislation, for his work on this bill. Mr. Speaker, I yield such time as he may consume to the gentleman from Washington (Mr. Nethercutt).

Mr. OSBORNE

Mr. OSBORNE. Mr. Speaker, I move to suspend the rules and pass the bill (H.R. 3380) to authorize the Secretary of the Interior to issue right-of-way permits for natural gas pipelines within the boundary of Great Smoky Mountains National Park.

Mr. OSBORNE. Mr. Speaker, I have no further requests for time, and I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. OSBORNE. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume. Mr. Speaker, H.R. 3380 was introduced by the gentleman from Tennessee (Mr. Jenkins) to authorize the Secretary of the Interior to issue right-of-way permits for a natural gas pipeline to tie in an existing pipeline within the boundary of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. In 2000, the Sevier County Utility District in rural east Tennessee made the request of the National Park Service to grant authority to tie in a natural gas pipeline to an already existing underground natural gas pipeline along U.S. Highway 441 in the Gatlinburg-Pigeon Forge spur. The existing pipeline was installed prior to the Park Service's acquisition of the right-of- way along the highway. After preparing to grant the request, it was discovered that while the Secretary possesses the authority to grant right-of-way permits through the units of the park system for various utility services, the Secretary did not possess the authority to grant a permit for natural gas and petroleum product pipelines. The pipeline would service homes in Gatlinburg, Tennessee. At the present time, these homes are reliant upon propane and electricity to meet their energy needs. Given some air quality issues at Great Smoky Mountains National Park, the Park Service believes it is in the best interests of the park to permit natural gas pipelines as a clean alternative for new homes and businesses. No permits will be granted until all environmental and safety reviews have been conducted. This authority would be consistent with the authority granted at the Blue Ridge and Natchez Trace Parkway park units. This is a noncontroversial bill supported by both the majority and the minority, as well as the administration, and I urge my colleagues to support it. Mr. Speaker, I yield such time as he may consume to the gentleman from Tennessee (Mr. Jenkins), the sponsor of this bill.

Mr. OSBORNE

Mr. OSBORNE. Mr. Speaker, on that I demand the yeas and nays.

Mr. OSBORNE. Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. OSBORNE. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume. Mr. Speaker, H.R. 2643, as amended, would allow for the expansion of Fort Clatsop National Memorial, the only unit of the National Park System solely dedicated to the Lewis and Clark expedition. It commemorates the camp where the Corps of Discovery spent the winter of 1805 to 1806. As we approach the bicentennial of this monumental expedition, our Nation continues to draw inspiration from this great journey across the American West. The expedition, led by Captains Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, gave birth to new interest in the American frontier as they provided the first detailed information about the Northwest that ultimately led to a steady procession of settlers into the region. These explorers made their trek following President Thomas Jefferson's orders to explore the Missouri River to its source, establish the most direct route to the Pacific Ocean, and to make scientific and geographic observations. They were also instructed to learn about the Indian tribes they would meet along the way and attempt to impress them with the strength of the United States and to report back regarding their observation. After their great journey across the continent, the members of the Corps of Discovery spent the winter of 1805-1806 at Fort Clatsop before beginning their return trip back east. This legislation would also authorize the National Park Service to study the suitability and feasibility of three sites in the State of Washington, all of which have significance to the expedition, for the possible inclusion as units of the National Park System. This expansion, supported by all property owners within the boundaries, would help prepare for the influx of visitors expected during the upcoming bicentennial. We commend all parties who have worked together on this legislation to address some issues of concern that came up during committee consideration. This is a good bill that is supported by the administration as well as both the majority and the minority, and I urge my colleagues to support it. Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. OSBORNE. Mr. Speaker, I move to suspend the rules and pass the bill (H.R. 2643) to authorize the acquisition of additional lands for inclusion in the Fort Clatsop National Memorial in the State of Oregon, and for other purposes, as amended.

Mr. OSBORNE

Mr. OSBORNE. Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent that all Members may have 5 legislative days within which to revise and extend their remarks and include extraneous material on H.R. 4609, H.R. 3380, and H.R. 2643.

Mr. OSBORNE

Mr. OSBORNE. Mr. Speaker, I would like to express my support of H.R. 4858, introduced by my good friend, the gentleman from Kansas (Mr. Moran). I am very pleased to be a cosponsor of this legislation, along with the gentleman from Kansas and the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Stenholm), who recently spoke. All of us serve sparsely populated rural areas. There are a lot of small towns with great distances between these towns. It is very, very difficult in these areas to recruit doctors. Usually in these types of communities there is only one doctor, and usually that doctor is the only doctor for many, 30, 40, or 50, miles. So the problem is that the doctor knows when he goes to that community that there is not going to be any rotation, and that doctor is always on call at 2 o'clock in the morning, 6 o'clock in the morning, late at night, whatever. So, number one, it is difficult to find somebody that will answer that call. Then once you get somebody who will agree, oftentimes it is even more difficult to recruit that doctor's spouse, because in those communities there is no shopping center, there is no symphony, there is no major league sports team in any close proximity. So to get that combination of a doctor and the spouse that will come to that type of community is very difficult. When a small town loses a doctor, then it loses its hospital and then begins to lose young people, because young people with children usually do not want to be in a community where there is no hospital or no doctor. The community very rapidly begins to unravel. By April 15 of this year, 36 physicians were placed in rural Nebraska communities under the J-1 program. An example of this would be Oshkosh, Nebraska, which is a county of roughly 1,700 square miles with one doctor serving 2,500 people. We were able to secure an internist from Poland on a J-1 visa waiver. This has been critical to the survival of the hospital and the community. So this has been a tremendously important program to rural areas as well as to urban areas. We like the flexibility of the program. It has been able to provide some key specialists in certain communities. Mr. Speaker, we urge support of H.R. 4858. I would like to thank the gentleman from Kansas (Mr. Moran) for his leadership, and I would like to especially thank the gentleman from Wisconsin (Chairman Sensenbrenner) for bringing this legislation to the floor.

Mr. OSBORNE

Mr. OSBORNE. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Smith) and the gentleman from Florida (Mr. Foley) for bringing this legislation forward. Many times, defenders of the first amendment claim that what we hear and see has no bearing on our behavior; hence, pornography is harmless. If this is true, why is it that advertisers spend billions of dollars annually? Obviously, there is a strong connection between what we see and what we hear and what we do. A recent study indicates that 80 percent of molesters of boys regularly use hard-core pornography, and 90 percent of molesters of girls use hard- core pornography. The important thing to realize here is that these people, these perpetrators, are incited by an image. It does not make any difference whether that image is real or virtual. They are incited by that image, and real children are hurt. That is the whole issue, that real children are being hurt by this practice. Pornography is a $15 billion business or industry in our Nation. There were 1 million porn sites on the Internet. This has become a real threat to our young people, and it has become a national disgrace. The courts have consistently allowed more and more obscene material under first amendment protection. The Supreme Court recently overturned a law similar to H.R. 4623. The courts have overturned three other laws in the past 6 years intended to control the spread of pornography. This has inflicted great damage on our young people and on our culture. Hopefully, H.R. 4623 is written tightly enough that it will withstand a court challenge. I believe it is. The stakes are too high not to try. I urge adoption of H.R. 4623.

Mr. OSBORNE

Mr. OSBORNE. Mr. Speaker, I am new to this environment, and it is truly amazing to me sometimes what we hear on this floor. I had not planned to talk on this issue tonight, but I thought I would say a couple words. I have heard that the Republicans are out to destroy Medicare, been bought off by the drug companies, went to expensive banquets. I am a member of the majority. I have not heard from anyone in the drug companies. I have not taken a dime from anybody in drug companies, and I really wonder how many people on both sides of the aisle can say exactly the same thing. This is something I would be very interested in hearing. I am really interested in basic fairness. That is something that I think in my former life usually we felt we saw. There is a significant difference between the two plans. The main difference, which I did not hear discussed here this evening, is that one plan costs between $800 billion and $1 trillion, and no one knows exactly how much. The other plan spends $350 billion. So the Democrat plan is three times, roughly, as expensive. Now, if we spend three times as much money, we can probably just about provide anything that anybody wanted. But at some point, we have to pay for it; and $350 billion was budgeted more than a year ago for Medicare and prescription drugs. The Republican bill fits within that $350 billion frame. Therefore, it seems that, in fairness, that should be mentioned here after the debate that I heard tonight; not the debate, but the discussion. But that is not why I am here this evening, Mr. Speaker. I came here to discuss something quite different. I used to be in the coaching profession for 36 years, and I worked extensively with young people during that period of time. I guess over that 36-year period I saw some significant changes in our culture. These changes disturbed me greatly. I saw progressively more and more young men who were coming from dysfunctional situations, from broken homes, and particularly young men who had no father. I saw more drug abuse. Actually, when I started coaching in the early 1960s, drug abuse was relatively unknown. Of course, today we have a major problem. I saw progressively more violence, more violent behavior. I saw more promiscuous behavior. I would have to say that, in searching about for a reason, trying to determine where that came from, I would have to say that I think it was fueled to some degree by an ever-increasing amount of obscenity, violence, drug abuse, and promiscuity presented in our media. I do not mean to totally bash the media. I am sure there are other factors. But there is no question that there has been a significant increase in media violence, pornography, obscenity, and all these types of issues. So it was very easy for me, when someone came to me several months ago and asked, would you sign on and cosponsor a bill called the Media Marketing Accountability Act, and since I was interested in this issue and I was interested in young people, I said, sure, I would be glad to. The reason this was a bill that I thought made sense was that the purpose of the bill was to stop the deceptive marketing of adult-rated, sexually explicit, graphically violent products to children. The entertainment industry has their own rating system, and the movies are rated R, PG-13, or whatever; the video game system has their own rating system; and the music industry has their own rating system. What we are finding, according to the Federal Trade Commission, was that people were not beaming their advertising in accordance with their rating, so we would have an R-rated movie, an adult video game; we would have an adult recording that was advertised in magazines that preteen and early teen children read; or TV programs that were watched by young children. So we thought there would be no problem. Certainly these people would agree. Yet, the day after this bill was introduced, I got a visit from one of the chief lobbyists with the entertainment industry. He began to tell me what a bad bill this was and how I should not be on the bill and on and on and on. I began to realize that they were serious, that they were going to market their products to children that were much younger than what the product would indicate by their own rating system. So that was what piqued my interest in the subject. I think it is important that we think about this a little bit tonight. I not long ago visited with one of the Congressmen who has been here a while who has been interested in this topic. He seemed a little discouraged. He seemed a little beat down. He said that he was not sure we were going to make any progress. That was concerning to me. I think the reason that he felt this way is that there had been a number of court decisions over recent years that have certainly led to the conclusion that it is going to be difficult to get anything done. Let me just explain a few of these. In 1997, the Supreme Court ruled that indecent speech is protected by the first amendment and overturned the Communications Decency Act. That was in 1997. In 1998, the Supreme Court refused to rule decisively on the Child On-line Protection Act, thereby allowing the legislation to remain law while preventing it from taking effect. Effectively, it killed the bill in 1998. In 2002, the Supreme Court overturned the Child Pornography Prevention Act, ruling that child pornography must either involve minors engaged in sexual activity or meet the legal definition of obscenity to lose first amendment protection. What this was about was there was a provision in there that would not allow adults who were dressed as or masquerading as children to participate in this type of pornography or to use some type of computer graphics that would simulate child pornography, which can be very realistic, and can be very difficult sometimes to tell between the real thing and the simulation. Again, the Supreme Court overturned this. In 2002, a three-judge Federal court declared the Children's Internet Protection Act requirements that all schools and libraries receiving Federal funds use Internet filtering material to protect minors from harmful materials on the Internet; and, of course, what this means is you need a computer chip, you need some way to protect children from accidentally, in libraries and public spaces, from contacting pornography. Again, that was overturned. So there have been a series of cases where the courts have simply overturned acts that seem to make sense and that are aimed at protecting our children. Of course, one of the bills that really interested me was a few years ago the court ruled that a minute of silence at the beginning of a school day was unconstitutional. One minute of silence at the beginning of a school day was unconstitutional. So that minute was intended to focus kids to spend a little bit of time if they wanted to in prayer, or they could look out the window if they wanted to, or think about their history exam that was coming up, just one minute of silence. Yet it was deemed by the court that somehow this violated somebody's religious freedom. So we have seen our culture shaped consistently by court decisions over the last 15, 20, 25 years; and sometimes the shift is so imperceptible we are not aware of it, but over time it has moved us from here to here in a very clear fashion. The effects of pornography are sometimes difficult to even talk about, but I thought I would mention some of them tonight. First of all, let us mention that pornography is not a victimless industry. Oftentimes, those who are interested in first amendment rights will indicate that what one sees and hears and reads really has no bearing on how one behaves. I guess to some people that makes sense. But if we think about the advertising industry, which annually spends billions of dollars, it would not seem to me that the advertising industry would go along with that. Because, obviously, what we hear and what we see and what we read and what we listen to does have some impact on our behavior or we would not spend all that money in the advertising industry. There are hundreds of thousands of dollars that are spent each year during the Super Bowl for a 30-second spot, prime time, hundreds of thousands of dollars maybe for a minute, 1\1/2\ minutes. If we think about it, an advertising company, if they can get their soft drink product out there, Coca-Cola, Pepsi, whatever, and they can get somebody to look at that product in a commercial or on a billboard, in a magazine, in a newspaper, and they can just see it five or six times a week, they realize that that is going to substantially increase the sales of that particular product. And on the other hand if you think about it, if you see material that glorifies drug use, whether it be in a recording or on a television program or whatever and that is presented maybe 10, 15, 20 times a week, it certainly is going to move your behavior in that direction. Last night I happened to be tuned into a television show very briefly and someone was interviewing a rock star, and the rock star apparently had received an award sometime previously, and the interviewer asked the rock star what he was doing when he heard about the award that he had gotten. And he said, well, he really could not remember because he was stoned at the time. And the interesting thing was the reaction of the audience. They seemed to enjoy that. They clapped and they applauded. And so there is no question that the entertainment industry is impacting our values and impacting the way that we would view drug abuse. Another issue, if a young person views promiscuous behavior, 20, 25, 30 times a week, whether it be in movies, television, whether they hear it on a recording, again, that is certainly going to impact behavior and it certainly has. If we see very violent acts 50, 60 times a week, and it may be more than that for many young people, again, we are going to shift our behavior towards violence. Pornography exploits and victimizes women and children, and it does so for money. Pornography is a $15 billion-a-year industry. Just a few years ago, it was a matter of hundreds of thousands of dollars. Today it is a $15 billion industry. In one study, nearly 80 percent of convicted molesters admitted to regular use of hard-core pornography. Roughly 80 percent. When you talk about people being sexually aggressive, attacking young women, the figure went up to 90 percent being regular users of hard-core pornography. So again we would have to say that there does appear to be a link between what people hear and what they see and what they read and what they do. And so we are really flooding our society today with material that I believe is really dramatically affecting the lives of our children. Currently, there are over one million pornographic Web sites on the Internet. Let me say that again. I did not say a hundred. I did not say a thousand. I did not say a hundred thousand. I said one million porn sites on the Internet. I remember back in the eighties we had a Senator from Nebraska, Jim Exon was his name, and he tried to pass some legislation to regulate pornography on the Internet, and at that time people laughed at him and they said it will never happen, and it got nowhere. Today there are one million porn sites on the Internet. So if you put in a search word, girls dot-com, which some young person might do, you are going to get a host of porn sites. I guess on a personal note, a few months ago I found that anyone who entered my name in a search engine would pull up a porn site. And so some young person out in the third district of Nebraska who was told to write a report on his Congressman very innocently would type in my name and there would be a porn site or someone who is trying to do a research project on old broken-down football coaches would put in my name and see the same thing. So it is virtually impossible today for a young person to be on the Internet very long, very often, very regularly and not run into this. And some of it is so graphic that it can actually sear a young mind in a way that that young mind never quite gets rid of that image. So the effects are really disastrous. I would like to give you some examples of what this industry is doing to our culture. It was reported in a national review that a rural Canadian town began receiving television signals for the first time in 1973. Apparently, this Canadian town was somewhat far removed from metropolitan areas so they really did not get a television signal until 1973. They found over the next 2 years, by 1975, that violent and criminal behavior in that community had gone up 160 percent. Maybe that was just accidental, but I would have to believe that there may have been some cause-and-effect relationship. In 1999 a survey found that two-thirds of American teens believed that violence in America's television and music ``is partially responsible for crimes like the Littleton shootings at the Columbine High School,'' and this was put out by the Senate Judiciary Committee. So we find two out of three people living in the community in the environment where they are inundated by some of these messages say that they believe that there would be a link between that violence and that culture and what happened at Littleton. And I guess they were pretty much on track because 5 days after the massacre, NBC reported that the Littleton killers idolized shock rocker Marilyn Manson. And Marilyn Manson was described by the music press as an ``ultra-violent satanic rock monstrosity.'' Kip Kinkel, who murdered his parents and two students in Springfield, Oregon, also was a great fan of Marilyn Manson, and that was reported in the Oregonian. The American Academy of Pediatrics has said in 1999 in a formal report: ``Children do not naturally kill. It is a learned skill, and they learn it most pervasively from violence as entertainment in television, movies and interactive video games.'' A new national poll is out and it says this, that 76 percent of young people between 12 and 17 years of age say that pop culture encourages drug use. Of course, we have talked about that a little earlier, but particularly I think you will find in the recording industry that there is a great glamorization of the drug culture. So 75 percent of young people have drawn that conclusion as well. The National Education Association estimates that many of the 5,000 teenage suicides each year are linked to depression that have been fueled by fatalistic music and lyrics. As you know, we lead the civilized world in teenage suicides. I believe the National Education Association is probably correct here, that some of the music that young people are absorbing is so fatalistic and glorify suicide to some degree to the point that some of these suicides obviously have to be linked. The headline in the Wall Street Journal in May of 2000 says this: ``AT&T To Offer Hard Core Adult Movies In Drive For Digital Subscribers.'' That was a headline in the Wall Street Journal. And AT&T, as most everyone listening would know, is one of the premiere industries in the United States. It is a so-called blue chip stock, and yet here we find a company with the stature of AT&T marketing hard-core pornography. So what we have seen is that the bottom line has become more important than integrity. The bottom line is more important to industry than the welfare of our children. And this was, I guess, one of the most discouraging things I saw. Senator Joseph Lieberman said this, he was referring to the traditionally family-friendly fare between eight and nine o'clock, the children's hour. He said, there is ``material we never even imagined being on commercial television are now the nightly norm.'' He said, ``Sex is being marketed to children not only as desirable but good, regular and normal.'' Then there was an editorial by the New York Post. It said: ``Increasingly, parents recognize the need to protect their children from popular culture. Indeed, it is scandalous that law-abiding, church-going citizens have come to see themselves as strangers in their own land. Their values and aspirations are under constant assault from the violent and sexualized images the entertainment industry pumps in their lives.'' I think most of us can relate to that. Many of us sit in our living rooms and wonder, What can we do to protect our children? What can we do to protect our grandchildren? Where are we headed as a Nation? A 15-year-old raped an 8-year-old girl, and he said he got the idea from watching the Jerry Springer Show. Many of you may have heard of the movie ``Natural Born Killers.'' I did not happen to see it, but I heard about it. I understand that there are multiple cases where young people have seen that movie and gone out and done copy-cat killings, and they ascribe ``Natural Born Killers'' as their primary motivation. I knew a young man several years ago who was a good person, very gentle, very mild mannered; and for some reason he got addicted practically to a particularly violent recording. And he listened to it over and over and over again over roughly a 48-hour period. And some of his friends told him you have to quit this. It is not good. It is a very unhealthy practice, and not long after he went out and attacked a young woman and beat her severely, someone he did not know who was just walking down the sidewalk. Of course, there were probably some other factors going on here, but I certainly believe that that particular recording was part of the picture. Obscenity has been given a free pass under the auspices of the first amendment. In assuring the rights to free speech, we may have destroyed other freedoms. And certainly I am in favor of free speech. I think everyone out there would say free speech is something we have to have, and I agree with that. But in the process of protecting free speech, I guess my question is, have we taken away some other freedoms from other people, particularly young people? And so if you are the victim of someone who has assaulted you, primarily inspired by some type of pornography, your freedoms have been taken away. There are hundreds, I think, in our country every year that are killed annually by those influenced by violence in the media. Tens of thousands are assaulted and raped by those addicted to pornography. What about their rights? Pornography and pedophilia result in sexual assaults on our children; rape, assaults, and degradation of our women; and the break up of marriages. One half of our marriages currently end in divorce. There is no question that in some cases pornography is a major factor in the break up of a marriage. This is something I have found very discouraging. The Center for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that 3 million teens per year contract sexually transmitted diseases and many of those diseases are incurable. The important thing to remember is that we are talking about 3 million each year. And since many are incurable, we are developing a fairly large number of young people who are infected with diseases that they will never be able to overcome. Out-of-wedlock birth rate was 5 percent in 1960. Today it is 33 percent. So one out of every three children born in our culture today is born with two strikes against them. I have to believe that to some degree the degradation of our media has had a direct influence on that. I might also mention that obscenity is not protected by the first amendment. This is something that runs contrary to the belief of most people as the only type of speech to which the Supreme Court has denied first amendment protection. When the founders drafted the Constitution, obscenity was ``outside the protection intended for speech and the press.'' The recognition of this understanding contrasts sharply with recent decisions regarding pornography, obscenity, and indecency. It appears that the Court has drifted from that earlier concept and drifted rather severely. To determine obscenity, the Court determined a three-part test, which is called the Miller Test which I will put up here and let you take a look at. The Miller test says this: that something is obscene if ``the average person applying contemporary community standards would find that the word taken as a whole appeals to prurient interests.'' Which means simply arousal and it has no redeeming factor. Secondly, whether the work depicts or describes in a patently offensive way sexual conduct specifically defined by applicable state law. And, third, whether the work taken as a whole lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value. I would imagine most people would say that a great deal of what they are seeing, what is coming into the living room at the present time would certainly be declared obscene under the Miller Test. So you say, well, why do not we have more prosecutions? Why is this continuing to go on? And the reason is essentially that we do not have very many people that are willing to take it to court, and we do not have very many courts that are willing to hear the case. And so we have sort of had an abrogation of responsibility in this case, and we certainly have the tools to attack the problem. Child pornography is defined in material that visually depicts sexual conduct by children, is not protected by the first amendment, and is also not subject to the Miller Test. So child pornography, period, even the possessing of it is illegal. So as a people, I think we have not expressed outrage, we have not spoken out, we have not taken obscene material to court. We certainly have become desensitized, and we continue to support companies who support obscene material through advertising, such as AT&T. Last, on this particular point, what I would like to mention is that the Department of Justice has not prosecuted an obscenity case in the United States in the last 1\1/2\ years. In 1\1/2\ years, no obscenity cases have been prosecuted by the Department of Justice, and I know that this was one of the President's priorities when he ran for office. I know this is important to the President; and so it seems to me that our courts and we as the public, we as the Congress certainly need to be more responsible, more active. I would like to reflect in the remaining 5 minutes or 6 minutes that I have here this evening exactly where we are historically; and this may seem like sort of a stretch, but I think it is important that from time to time we stand back as a Nation and try to look at where we are and where we are headed. Sometimes one of the best ways to do that is to see where other nations have been in the past. Certainly, today, the United States is the most powerful Nation in the world. Fifteen years ago, we could have said, well, the Soviet Union was certainly close. Maybe 100 years ago we would have said the British empire, but I would say that, more recently, that we are pretty much in a position of pre-eminence where we stand alone. We are the most powerful Nation in the world politically, economically, in terms of ability to act socially throughout the world; and so it may be that we would have to go back a ways in history before we found another culture, another civilization that was similar. I guess where I would head would be to Rome, and that is a long ways back. That is 2,000 years ago, but the Roman empire was a similar phenomenon to what we see today. The Roman empire totally dominated the then civilized world in almost every facet of its being. So if my colleagues think about the Roman empire and if they ever studied Gibbons' Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire, they would realize there were a number of factors that led to the demise of the Roman empire. One of the major reasons for the fall of Rome was a decaying of values and the decaying of unity within the nation. Roman citizens became self-absorbed. If my colleagues have thought about the Roman coliseum, I happened to be in Rome a couple of years ago and saw the coliseum, and I thought about the fact that there were literally thousands of people who met their death in that arena. So to entertain the Roman mob, through name popular, the Romans had increasingly violent displays of gladiatorial combat, chariot races, simulated boat races where people inevitably died. So the violence escalated, corruption escalated; and, as a result, eventually Rome began to disassemble. It began to collapse from within. So I think that we need to think about this and realize that there may be some lessons that we can learn here. I think we can continue to be the predominant Nation in the world but only if our moral and spiritual underpinnings remain strong. I think if we look at our current crisis in the business community, we can see very clearly what a crisis of confidence in just three or four companies does to the overall economy; and, right now, it is not 9/11. It is what happened at Enron and Andersen and Global Crossing and companies like this, which is really holding our economy back more than anything. The framers of the Constitution did not envision freedom of speech embracing obscene material. That simply was beyond their thinking. The framers of the Constitution did not envision that even a minute of silence at the beginning of a school day would be unconstitutional, would violate somebody's religious freedom. The framers of the Constitution did not envision the rise of post- modernism. Post-modernism is basically the idea that there are no moral absolutes, that everything is relative. This has become a very pervasive thought pattern in our world today, in our country today. So the idea would be that adultery is not absolutely wrong. It may depend on what part of the country someone is in, who is involved, but it really is relative to the circumstance. Today, we would not say that stealing is absolutely wrong, according to post-modernism, because it depends on how much someone needs, what they are stealing, who they take it from, and certainly if someone steals from the government, it does not count. Lying is not absolutely wrong, according to post-modernism. Everyone does it. Sometimes we need to protect our career, our reputation. It may even be possible to lie under oath and get by with it. Then, of course, fourth, it is not absolutely wrong to take an innocent life, according to post-modernism, because maybe that life is not old enough to be viable; maybe that life is too old to be useful; maybe that life is terminally ill; maybe that life simply does not want to live anymore. So it is all relative. This is a very prevalent philosophy, and I think it would be very foreign, be something unheard of to the founders and the framers of the Constitution. As great of a threat as terrorism is, I believe in the present time that the greatest threat to our Nation is a collapse of values. That may sound like an extreme statement to say at this particular junction. I do not want anyone to believe that I am at all minimizing the importance of the war on terrorism. I believe that every dime that we have appropriated here to fight the war on terrorism, everything the President has done to try to keep things on track has been very, very appropriate, but I would also say that what is happening internally, what is happening to our children, what is happening to our value system, long-term, long haul, may prove to be every bit as threatening, if not more, than the war on terrorism. Someone once said America is great because America is good. I believe that is true, and I believe America is still good. There is no country in the world that is as generous, as philanthropic, is based on spiritual values as the United States. I would also say that there are some storm clouds on the horizon. There are some things out there that concern me, and so those who do not like the shape of those clouds should do all that they can to elect people who will appoint people to the courts who reflect their values. Currently, in the other body, we have failed to fill 100 vacant judgeships for various reasons. It has almost brought our judicial system to a halt. The question is, who in the next 2 or 3 years is going to be making those decisions over in the other body as to who will fill those judgeships? Within the next 2 to 3 years we will probably have two to three members of the Supreme Court who will resign or retire; and when that happens, who is going to shape those nominations and those decisions? If people like the way we are headed right now, then they certainly are committed to one course of action. If, on the other hand, people think we are treading on dangerous ground, then I think we better think very carefully as to who we send to the other body, who represents the people in this area here. I think it is incumbent upon the American people to elect people who aggressively promote a moral society and will protect our young people from obscenity. This has not been an easy thing to talk about. It has not been an easy thing to think about, but I do believe that we cannot put our head in the sand. I believe this is a real problem. I think it is something we are all involved in, we can certainly address. So I would encourage, Mr. Speaker, those who are listening tonight to become active, to become politically active, become involved. Because the only thing that is going to let this thing continue to succeed and continue to fester is if we stand by as a Nation and continue to let it happen.

Mr. OSBORNE

Mr. OSBORNE. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for yielding time to me. I would like to speak in support of H.R. 4931 and against the substitute. One of the key features of the bill, as far as I am concerned, is portability of pension benefits. In my previous occupation, the average term that anyone had at one school was usually 3 years. Sometimes they left because they wanted to; most of the time they left because people did not want them around anymore. So, as a result, we had a lot of people at the end of their coaching careers that had absolutely no retirement benefits left. These were not necessarily wealthy people. These were usually assistant coaches, sometimes high school coaches. So since their population was more mobile, I think this really applies to a large percentage of our population. Secondly, I would like to mention the fact that I think this bill is particularly critical for our young people. Both parties, whether they are Democrat or Republican, are certainly going to see to it that the Social Security retirement benefits are there for those who are now retirees or those who are near retirement; but the future is not nearly as bright for those young people who are in their teens, in their twenties, or their thirties. I think everyone can recognize over the next 30 years the proportion of retirees rises and the proportion of those paying Social Security taxes declines. Eventually we have a train wreck that is on the way. It is a pay-as-you-go system, so permanently increasing 401(k) and IRA limits is critical, particularly for our young people, because the main hope these young people have for any type of retirement security has to do with their long-term strategy, and 401(k)s and IRAs. So one cannot plan if the rules change in 8 or 9 or 10 years, particularly if one is a young person. This is not a tax break for the rich. It is critical for our young people, it is good for the country, and I urge passage of H.R. 4931.