Mark Sanford

Mr. SANFORD

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

Mr. SANFORD. Then following that logic out, the gentleman would suggest we ought to go to a 4-year authorizing process in Congress as we authorize or appropriate?

Mr. SANFORD. Mr. Chairman, I demand a recorded vote.

Mr. SANFORD

Mr. SANFORD. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for yielding me this time. I think it interesting that, over 100 years ago, an Army officer leaned down in the ground and scratched in the Pennsylvania soil and said this was sacred ground. As it turns out, his comments were prophetic, because that happened to be near a little place called Gettysburg. What I think is prophetic about this bill and so important about this bill is that, basically, it reaches out and it consecrates three national shrines to the theme of patriotism, to the theme of persistence. I think that it is particularly fitting that one of those shrines be the U.S. Yorktown. The Yorktown, as has already been mentioned, is tied up off Mount Pleasant, South Carolina, there along the coast of South Carolina, and it is named ``The Fighting Lady.'' The reason it got that name is that it earned 11 battle stars in World War II. It earned five battle stars off the coast of Vietnam prior to its retirement in 1970. In fact, it took a direct hit back in 1945. Yet, despite the fact that The Fighting Lady had been hit, she continued air operations. She continued to fight. Several men were killed, others were wounded, but they kept on fighting. The sailors on board the Yorktown, those Navy officers and enlisted folks, just would not give up. I think that that is what is so important about the Medal of Honor; it embraces this theme of patriotism, combined with the idea of persistence, and that is a theme I think we could all learn about, whether in wartime or in peacetime. So I would just applaud the gentleman from California (Mr. Calvert) and applaud the gentleman from Arizona (Mr. Stump) for their leadership with this bill and how it again consecrates these three national shrines to the theme of patriotism and persistence.

Mr. SANFORD

Mr. SANFORD. Mr. Chairman, I want to refute two of the points that have come up. I grew up on a farm in South Carolina, and we raised tomatoes and shrimp. Yet we have been told in this debate so far that milk is different, it is a perishable product. How many of my colleagues want to buy spoiled tomatoes or rotten shrimp? Nobody. So there are a lot of other goods that somehow miraculously make their way from the farm to the grocery store without a price-fixing system in place. I would make that one point. The second point that I would make would be if we had a price-fixing system on the farm that I grew up on for shrimp or for tomatoes, would we want to leave that system in place? Absolutely. But to say that those farmers who voted for that, those few that happened to benefit, that that should be the barometer by which we judge this amendment, I think, would be a big mistake. Lastly, if we are going to go this route, why do we not adopt the ideas of pricing software based on its distance from Redmond, Washington, or the idea of pricing timber based on its distance from the Southeast. This does not make sense. This amendment does.

Mr. SANFORD

Mr. SANFORD. Mr. Chairman, I thank the gentleman from Connecticut (Mr. Shays) for yielding me this time. Mr. Chairman, everybody has a different perspective on this; but one thing that I do know is that there is a very simple break in the track and that is some people here in this body view government as coercive and that if it grows, it will basically destroy freedom. Other people view that, no, it is not coercive. Leave it alone. Let it grow. It is not going to impact us one way or the other. I am a conservative. I fall into that first camp, and if someone views the government as coercive, it seems to me logical to say that they would want to limit one's ability to control the leaders of government that would affect its ability to coerce others to do other things. Tamaraz, when asked by Senator Thompson, why did you give all the money that you gave, his response was, because it worked. If we look at Bernard Schwartz, who was brought up with the technology transfer with China, we can see a clear correlation between money spent and results. So it would seem to me perfect logic to say I am a conservative, I want to limit government, and I want to limit people's ability to pull the levers of government. We can see this, for instance, again, with the sugar subsidy. If we look at, for instance, the sugar subsidy program, it is a perfect example of how a small group is able to coerce the wheels, the machinery of government, to their own gain because that program takes a billion dollars a year in the form of higher sugar prices for all of us as consumers and it distributes it to about 60 domestic sugar producers.

Mr. SANFORD

Mr. SANFORD. Mr. Chairman, I move to strike the requisite number of words. I first of all want to commend the gentleman from Florida (Mr. Weldon) because if I lived in the area around Cape Canaveral, Titusville, Florida, I would want the gentleman as my representative; but I do not, and so I find myself with the gentleman from Indiana (Mr. Roemer) on this amendment, reluctantly, because the gentleman has consistently been a tireless advocate for NASA and associated programs. I rise in support of this amendment, though, because I think it makes common sense, first of all simply from the standpoint of the budget caps. The budget caps have become a bad word here in Washington, but in essence they are the rails along the highway that set the course in terms of what we are willing to spend out of people's pockets, our folks back home. We may well go over those rails, we may break the budget caps; but if we are serious about the budget caps, we have to find a couple of areas wherein we say we actually want to limit the growth of Government in this, that, or some other program; and this is an amendment that actually does that. And, again, if we are going to stay true to those budget caps, doing that is incredibly important. And that is why, for instance, Citizens Against Government Waste have come out in support of this amendment, the National Taxpayers Union has come out in support of this amendment, and Taxpayers for Common Sense has come out in support of this amendment, because it helps us maintain some kind of fiscal discipline in this House. The second reason I think this amendment makes sense is that there is a giant check floating around Washington, D.C. and on the top of that check are marked the words ``insufficient funds.'' And the person that that check is to be made payable to are the veterans of America. Because what I consistently hear from folks back home is that they fought in World War II, they had some friends killed in World War II, they either lost a limb or was shot, or maybe they were not even hurt at all but the promise made to them by the Federal Government was that when they grew a little older, when it came to retirement age, they would be taken care of. It turns out there are insufficient funds in that account. So this amendment does something about that. It moves $350 million out of this funding, which is truly out in space, to something very much in need here on Earth. And that is why this amendment is supported by the American Legion, it is supported by American Veterans, it is supported by Paralyzed Veterans of America, and it is supported by Vietnam Veterans of America, because it addresses this critical need to which right now there is a check marked insufficient funds. Thirdly, I support this amendment, going back to this theme of gravity, because we are looking, as the gentleman from Indiana (Mr. Roemer) correctly pointed out earlier, we are looking at a program that basically started to the tune of around $8 billion or so and it has now grown to $100 billion. We are not talking about the elimination of NASA; we are not talking about the elimination of space programs. What we are talking about is one specific program. Because it is crowding out a lot of other priorities. Going back to the point that the gentleman from Indiana raised earlier, if we were $200 short toward fixing our car, let us say the fixup would supposedly cost $1,000, but the $800 would not fix the car, would we spend the other $800? Or if we were going to make an investment and it was going to cost $2,000, but the total investment would be $10,000, would we spend the other $8,000 if it was a bad investment? I think the answer is clearly no. And that is where we are on this, I think. Because this is what this amendment does: it moves $675 million of funding to things like, for instance, the Pathfinder, where for $250 million we can get to Mars; for $75 million on the Clementine we can get to the Moon. It goes to some fairly effective space programs. In fact, it restores 62 percent of the cut that was in that particular account in NASA, and it moves to some things that we can actually do something about, I think some much higher priority items. Fourthly, I would just mention the issue of certainty. This has been touched on by several other folks. But anytime we have in the course of a critical path, whether it is in commerce or whether it is in business, a partner that is uncertain, is that the kind of investment we would make? At minimum we would put the brakes on and say let us look at this thing closely. I think that is where we should be with the Space Station. Finally, this is about priorities. There are a limited number of dollars in Washington. And while inspiring schoolchildren is nice, if we really want to motivate them, we should put dollars into the classroom. That is how we really motivate students. This is about priorities and, therefore, I urge its adoption.

Mr. SANFORD

Mr. SANFORD. Mr. Chairman, I move to strike the requisite number of words. I rise in support of the Coburn amendment, and I would say first off that I admire the job that the gentleman from Kentucky (Mr. Rogers) and others on the committee have done, and I think they literally have been between a rock and a hard place because a lot of the people making, frankly, the most noise today about the sanctity of the budget caps are the very people that have been crowding them on spending, and so I struggle with that. I would say as well, I mean it is just bizarre that in Washington, D.C. we can create a budget that does not include in it something that has been mandated for over 200 years, and yet he did find himself in that spot. I would say that most of all, though, I rise in support of this amendment because what this amendment is about is calling an ace an ace in Washington, and I think we have gone a long way from there. I mean this notion of emergency spending, as the gentleman from Delaware (Mr. Castle) very correctly pointed out just a moment ago, needs to truly be an emergency, because if not, we go down a really slippery slope adding all kinds of things in that may or may not be an emergency. I remember with the emergency spending bill of last year we had, for instance, a Capitol Hill Visitor Center. As my colleagues know, the Capitol Hill Visitor Center has been the subject of debate for over 10 years, and yet we called it an emergency. We had funding upgrades for embassies around the globe, and admittedly what happened in Africa was horrible. But to say that we suddenly found out about that at the last minute is not true. The Inman Commission had been out for over 10 years talking about the need for embassy upgrades in terms of security. So we have gone down a very slippery slope in calling nonemergencies emergencies, and the reason it is so timely that he offered this amendment now, because if we do not, then we get to VA-UD, and frankly we are going to have a lot of other things added as, quote, ``emergencies.'' And if my colleagues look at the numbers, we have gone $62 billion over the caps since the budget deal was signed in 1997. We simply leave more room for that if we go down this emergency route. Second, I would point out I think that this amendment is fairly modest. I was going to offer an amendment. As my colleagues know, this amendment goes after the 2.8. I was going to offer one that as well went after the 1.7 and had an across-the-board cut in the rest of the 1.7. So from my perspective, this is modest because he leaves it in place; and as the gentleman from California earlier pointed out, this is not about ending the census, because as we all know, Washington is a place from which we would find a way to find the money for the census. Finally, I would say what this is about is about basically the three monkeys: Hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil. We cannot pretend to look very narrowly on the budget that is before us and pretend that things are not happening in the Senate, because, as we know, they have marked up a bill that has billions of dollars of farm emergency spending in it that is going to put us over the caps, and, in fact, when you look at the assumptions behind the budget, what you would say is it is going to be very, very difficult for us to really stay within our promise of not reaching into Social Security, because what the assumptions suggest is, one, we will stay at a peacetime high in terms of what the government takes from economy, and, two, we will have a frontal lobotomy in Washington and drastically reduce spending from 19 percent of GDP to 16 percent of GDP. Mr. Chairman, I would add only that this amendment is supported by Citizens Against Government Waste.

Mr. SANFORD

Mr. SANFORD. Mr. Chairman, I thank the gentleman for yielding me this time. I support this amendment and am, indeed, a cosponsor on this amendment because it makes sense to the United States taxpayer. This amendment is not about the inefficiency of OPIC. As government organizations go, it is quite efficient. It is not about the management. It has a good management. I have met with George Munoz, who is head of OPIC. The issue that this amendment gets to is not is OPIC able to handle the mandate that it has been given, but rather is that mandate in the best interest of the United States taxpayer. And I think if we look under the hood on this, we would come to the conclusion that no is the answer. First, Mr. Chairman, there is a financial risk to the U.S. taxpayer with OPIC. OPIC was given a billion dollars of seed money in 1971 when OPIC was begun, and yet if we look, since 1971 there has not been, for instance, a world war. These loans or guarantees are backed with the full faith and credit of the United States Government. If there was a war, we would see the cost to those guarantees. There has not been a global depression since 1971. If there was a severe economic downturn, we would see the cost to those guarantees. In fact, if we look in Brazil, where there is $1.9 billion of taxpayer exposure, OPIC itself has said that fully half of their portfolio could be affected by the crisis there. The same could be said, for instance, in Russia. So, one, there is a contingent liability that goes back to the United States taxpayer. Two, there is a direct cost. With the money that was originally provided, interest is earned on that money. And if we look at the income statement of last year, $139 million was the net income and $193 million came as a result of these interest payments. That leaves a loss of $54 million. Admittedly, $54 million is not a lot of money in Washington, but back home that is a lot of money. In fact, I did a back-of-the-envelope calculation, and it would take 13,500 taxpayers, average taxpayers, working and paying taxes for a full year, to send Washington $54 million. Third consideration is that it does cost American jobs. And that is not my opinion or the opinion of the gentleman from New Jersey (Mr. Andrews). That is the opinion of Time magazine. They did a three-part series on corporate welfare. What they found was, for instance, a $29 million loan guarantee for Levi Strauss and Company to build a manufacturing plant in Turkey, while, at the same time, the Labor Department was handing out unemployment and training benefits for 6,400 American workers who had been laid off in 11 American plants with Levi Strauss and Company. The point of that article was saying that the two were directly correlated. Finally, I would just make mention of the fact that this changes markets. If we change a market, we change where an investment can be made. And so what we are doing is subsidizing development off our coast. And as well, what we are doing is preventing a marketplace from developing with other insurers. This is a need that needs to take place, but it could be easily handled by the Lloyds of London, who are not in this business right now because OPIC is.

Mr. SANFORD

Mr. SANFORD. Mr. Chairman, I yield myself such time as I may consume. Mr. Chairman, this amendment would simply set at 1998 funding, the funding for the Asia Foundation, the Center for Cultural Exchange East- West, and the Dante B. Fascell North-South Center. It would save $13.5 million each year, which though not viewed as a large amount of money in Washington, with many folks back home it is still, I think, a great sum of money. Finally, this is an amendment that is supported by Citizens for a Sound Economy, Citizens Against Government Waste, the National Taxpayers Union and Americans for Tax Reform. I think they support this amendment for a number of reasons, and I think it has a number of great things standing behind it. The first thing that I think stands out in terms of why this amendment would make sense would be, whether a Republican or whether a Democrat, whether a liberal or whether a conservative, I think all of us would agree on the simple idea that we would not want a foundation out there receiving in essence disproportionate care. In other words, we would not want the care for these foundations to be above or, frankly, below that of which a foundation in one's home district receives. In other words, we would want it to be on par. Yet, that is not at all the case, because these three foundations, which are each in university settings, receive disproportionate care and feeding from the Federal Government, because, unlike a foundation in any one of the 435 congressional districts across this country that have to go out and compete for grants, these three foundations receive not only a Federal guaranteed flow of money but then they can also pick up private grants as well. The Congress recognized that back in 1995, and as a result, cut funding for these three foundations by $25 million. Well, what has happened since then is that the funding has crept back up basically to the level prior to the cut. I do not think this is fair to foundations we might have in any of our respective congressional districts. I will give an example of just a few of the outside funding sources I saw here. For instance, East-West Center received $100,000 from the Taipei Economic and Cultural Office. The William H. Gates Foundation provided $2.3 million for population and health research to East-West Center. The government of Japan contributed $363,000 to the East-West Center, and I could go down a long list, again, of grants in the marketplace that have been received by these foundations when they are also receiving Federal Government money. Second, I would say there is a lot of duplication in each of these foundations. We could look up these topics, whether it is with the U.N., whether it is the World Health Organization, the Department of State, the Department of Commerce, there are a long list of agencies that also handle these type studies. Third, I would say maybe they deserved disproportionate funding during the Cold War, but the Cold War is over. As an instrument of national policy, that policy is now gone. I mean, Asia Foundation has been around for 44 years. East-West Center has been around for over 30 years, and I think it ought to be brought back to par, again, which is what we did as a Congress in 1995. Finally, I would just mention the fact that a number of these grants are just plain bogus. I mean, I looked here at a number of the grants, methods of multiple stakeholding management of community forest, management in community-based forestry. Given the free enterprise system that we know works so well, if one really wants to manage a forest, put one person in charge of it and give them reason to be in charge of it, as opposed to community-based forestry whatever that means. I see a second grant here on young adult sexuality. This collaborative project involving institutions in the Philippines, Thailand, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Nepal, Taiwan, and the United States will assess the extent, nature, determinants and reproductive consequences of premarital sex. Call me old fashioned on this, but determinants I think simply to be attraction. Reproductive consequences I think are fairly simple. Sperm meets egg; somebody is going to get pregnant. I do not know that we need another study to tell us this. I see with the Asia Foundation, a study on nuclear weapons in North Korea. The study went on to argue that the media reports of the construction of an alleged underground nuclear facility in North Korea are the results of deliberate leaks by the U.S. intelligence community. Now how in the world is that in the best interest of the American taxpayer? How is that a benefit to U.S. overall interest? So I would just say that there are a number of these studies that are funded with American tax dollars that do not make a whole lot of sense. I would again remind folks of the fact that it is supported by Citizens for a Sound Economy, supported by Citizens Against Government Waste, the Americans for Tax Reform and the National Taxpayers Union. I would urge a ``yes'' vote.

Mr. SANFORD. Mr. Chairman, I demand a recorded vote.

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

Mr. SANFORD

Mr. SANFORD. If the gentleman will continue to yield, I would agree with him on that, but I guess the point I'm getting at, as we both know, there was no White House when George Washington was here. There are a number of different things that go into the package now.

Mr. SANFORD. Mount Vernon.

Mr. SANFORD. His own, though.

Mr. SANFORD. Mr. Chairman, I concur wholeheartedly with what the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Sessions) said and what this amendment is about. As the gentleman suggested, it is simply about leaving the presidential salary at $200,000 rather than doubling it to $400,000. That has absolutely nothing to do with Bill Clinton. It has absolutely nothing to do with George Bush. It has everything to do with George Washington. Because our Founding Fathers, and George Washington in particular, went to absolutely great degrees to make sure that we did not elect a king but that we had representative government. The idea of representative government was that it would be of the people, by the people, for the people. Instead, we have gone from there to the point where, and as we all remember, George Washington was going through the checkout line at the grocery store, and he could not remember how much a gallon of milk cost. People have become very removed in this political process from what regular day people feel. So what this amendment is about is simply trying to keep some small thread of connection between elected leadership and what people feel on a daily basis. This is very much a back-of-the-envelope kind of write-up here, but what it points to is that the President's compensation is about $20 million. I think that that is the back of the envelope. An average CEO compensation, according to Forbs magazine is $2.3 million. So I think that he is adequately paid. Let me just walk through a few of these numbers. The numbers up here, we begin with the White House. If a corporate CEO is paid, he has to go out and rent a place or buy a place. One gets a pretty nice pad, if one wants to call it that, if one is staying down at the White House. One has a staff of about 100 on the domestic side. One has got cooks. One has got housekeepers. One has got calligraphers. One has got a pool. One has got a hot tub. One has got a bowling alley. One has got a theater. One has got a few goodies in there. It costs about $10 million to run. That is not including security. That is just, again, on the domestic side. One also has a vacation home. It is called Camp David. I do not know exactly what it costs to run, but I do know that if one is to go into the mountains and rent a vacation place like that that had stables, a tennis court, a swimming pool, a theater, it would run one maybe $10,000 a week. So let us just throw it in at $40,000 a month. So that would be about $480,000 of compensation there. One has got a plane called Air Force One. It is a pretty nice jet. One can go with Marine One. I do not know what the numbers would be in terms of operating costs. An executive jet would run one $5,000 an hour. A 747 would surely run one a lot more than that. One has got a retirement plan. Every President, after he becomes President, gets $151,000 a year for the rest of his life in a pension plan. And if we were to blow that number backward, what that means is that wealth is accruing at about the rate of $275,000 a year on top of the $200,000 base pay the President is already getting. There is the Presidential office, the Presidential library, there is unlimited earning power after they get out of office. There is a fair bit of prestige. We have the Ronald Reagan National Airport, the Ronald Reagan Federal Building, the Ronald Reagan Aircraft Carrier. The President gets a few benefits and he has a chance to affect public policy. The point of all that is that the President is by no means undercompensated, and I think that is what the heart of the gentleman from Texas is trying to get at.

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

Mr. SANFORD. Mr. Chairman, I would just say to the gentleman that I think that one has to look at how George Washington got around. He did not get around in Air Force One; he did not get around in Marine 1. He got around on a horse.

Mr. SANFORD. Mr. Chairman, I move to strike the last word. Mr. Chairman, I will not take all that time, and I would agree with many of the things that the gentleman from Maryland said. He makes very good points in the fact that we by no means want to have an underpaid President of the United States. I guess the only point I was trying to make is that, A, there are a number of other ways that one is compensated besides just the base pay, and there are some benefits that, frankly, come with the job of being the President of the United States. I guess that was all I was trying to point out. And, too, I would point out the fact that I know of no poor Presidents. Thomas Jefferson, in other words, if we look back into the history books, Thomas Jefferson basically died broke. I am not suggesting that we want that to be the case, by any means, but that was the end of public service for him. That is not at all the case with modern-day public servants. We do not hear any stories of past Presidents being poor Presidents. In fact, Ronald Reagan makes, when he was giving speeches, was making about $2 million per speech. And there was the big write-up on the speech George Bush gave in Japan wherein he took stock in lieu of the speech, and it turned out to be worth $13 million. So these guys do pretty well on their compensation package that seems to follow their time in office, and that is all I am trying to suggest. I guess tied to that would be the fact that I do not know of a shortage of people running for President. When compensation is out of whack in a given job, we generally do not see people seeking that job. But that is not at all the case that we see these days in Washington in terms of people seeking the office.

Mr. SANFORD. I yield to the gentleman from Maryland.

Mr. SANFORD. Reclaiming my time, Mr. Chairman, I would simply say that the gentleman from Maryland raises great points. I guess it is just a philosophical divide on this particular one issue.

Mr. SANFORD. I yield to the gentleman from Texas.

Mr. SANFORD. Mr. Chairman, I demand a recorded vote.

Mr. SANFORD

Mr. SANFORD. Mr. Chairman, I move to strike the requisite number of words. Mr. Chairman, I just rise in support of this amendment offered by the gentleman from Colorado (Mr. Tancredo), because I think if there was ever a case such as a terminal illness when it comes to stupidly spending money, I think this is the case. It is amazing to me, if we look at the Forest Service program, basically we have 191 million acres spread over 144 forests throughout this country. If we add all that up, basically it is the size of Texas. If the gentleman or I were given all the forest lands in Texas, would we or would we not be able to make a dime? If the gentleman was given all the forest lands in Georgia, in South Carolina, in North Carolina, would we or would we not be able to make a dime? Yet the GAO reports shows that the Forest Service has lost $2 billion basically over the last 6 years. So we have a real terminal problem here with the way that money seems to be spent within the Forest Service. I think this is just another excellent example of what is being spent.

Mr. SANFORD. I yield to the gentleman from Minnesota.