Christopher Shays

Mr. SHAYS

Mr. SHAYS. I bet it was.

Mr. SHAYS. Exactly. That was one. The other area was that we made health care fraud a Federal offense in terms of Medicare and Medicaid so that you would not have to find someone guilty because of wire or mail fraud but you could find them guilty for the actual offense. We all know that fraud, waste and abuse in our Medicare system is about 10 percent, if not more. That alone is a $17 billion savings.

Mr. SHAYS. I appreciate my colleague for that and thank you, Mr. Speaker, for taking the time to listen to us. With than we yield back the balance of our time however short it may be.

Mr. SHAYS. This Republican majority is working to get our financial house in order and balance the Federal budget. We are looking to save our trust funds for future generations, and we are also looking to transform our caretaking social, corporate and agricultural welfare state into a caring opportunity society. In the process we are looking to bring power, money and influence out of Washington and bring it back to local communities. In the process we are looking to empower people who are in our communities. So it is an effort that we are working hard at. Very candidly, we are not looking at the polls. If Abraham Lincoln had looked at the polls, we would not be one Nation, under God, indivisible. We would be two nations very much divided. For us the polls simply do not matter. What matters is our kids. Mr. Rabin, the former prime minister of Israel, said you and I, politicians, are elected by adults to represent the children. And frankly that is what this is all about, representing the children.

Mr. SHAYS. But see, some people would call that a cut in the program. That is what is ludicrous about the description. If we save money in the program, therefore, do not have to spend as much because we eliminate an abuse like this, it is referred to as a cut, and that is just simply an inaccurate way to describe what we did.

Mr. SHAYS. Mr. Speaker, I remember being the chairman of the task force, on the Committee on the Budget, on Medicare and Medicaid, and I remember the fact that the gentleman was not going to vote for the plan unless we realized that urban areas were treated in a much more beneficial way than a number of your communities. I remember you having a dialog with me, and more particularly the Speaker, and convincing him to put more money into the rural areas so they would in fact get more.

Mr. SHAYS. I was making reference to the fact as a moderate Republican I voted for a number of programs that I have had to look at and say in some ways what that has allowed me to do is it has allowed me to go back to some of my constituents and say, you know I care because I voted for that program. But as I have seen the program unfold, some of them, not all of them, I have had to go back and say you know, really what I have been is a caretaker and I have done something the exact opposite of what you would do for someone you love. What I started to do about 3 years ago is I asked anyone who really started up in a lower echelon economically who now is a very successful person, far more successful than I would be, and I would say, what happened? Why are you so successful? When you were there in a development, in poverty, happened to have been a minority, so you had the laws against you and so on, and you had racial prejudice; and yet you succeeded? Yet in every instance, in every instance it was, I had someone who took an interest in me, I had someone who sometimes kicked me in the butt. I had someone who did not always give me what I wanted. I had someone who did not let me get away with the excuse I do not want that because it is a dead-end job. I had someone would taught me to dream. There were a lot of things they had, but they did not have someone just giving them something. When I was growing up, my dad would commute from Darien, CT, for an hour commute into New York. He would get to read three papers in the morning and three at night because he had an hour on the train. He would read, and he would come back, and he would be filled with information. We would have a wonderful dialog at the dining room table. He would invariably make some reference to something written in Ann Landers, and Ann Landers would write something back, and it would be kind of a crazy story. I found myself looking at these calendars. I had these calendars with the thought of the day. I noticed the calendar for April 3. It was a Wednesday. I looked at it, and it was Ann Landers. And I thought, oh, my gosh, there is Ann. And I read it. And in a sense I thought this summarizes a lot about how I think about what we have to do in government. She wrote, ``In the final analysis it is not what you do for your children, but what you have taught them to do for themselves that will make them successful human beings.'' Now, we want our constituents to be successful human beings. We do not want them just used to handouts. We want them to be basically creators. We want them to be contributors to society. I was thinking about the true love that I think our society has shown and the true caring for making sure that people in our society are truly learning to do things for themselves, to be independent. It is really great. I have gone to some programs where welfare recipients have taken meaningful job training programs, had the day care they needed, and then they have a mentor who follows them for a year or so in the job to make sure they do get up in the morning, make sure when they have an excuse not to go to work, help them sort out that that excuse will not be very helpful in their job. And what they do in these graduations a year later is they hold up a check and say: ``You know what I like about my job? I earned this.'' We had to encourage everyone to have that same kind of feeling of accomplishment and contribution because it is there in the heart of every American citizen. Every person wants to add and to be of contribution. They also then make reference to the fact that not only did they earn it and how proud they are but how proud their kids are of them because mom is making a contribution to society and helping to support the family without having to turn to someone else. Before yielding to my colleague, if I could say this. I proactively went out looking for some people to work in my office who, frankly, were not white, who were maybe Hispanic or black; and I guess I would call that affirmative action. One person that we ended up hiring was someone who had gone through a job training program. She is a very valued member of my office. But I had a program that I was trying to help people understand how they could buy a home, and she did not want to come to this program as a staff person on a Saturday, but we needed her. She was happy to come based on that. And she came. And a month later I found out that she had just bought a home. She had gone to this program, learned how she could own a home. She and her brother and her sister bought this home and live in a beautiful home in the city of Bridgeport, now realizing all the pluses and minuses of home ownership. But a few years ago she was on welfare. She had job training. She had day care. She had tremendous initiative. She is a very important person in our office, someone who is making a wonderful contribution and someone who we receive a lot of compliments on because of the way she treats people and the way she is able to help people. To me, it is just a very satisfying thing, and this can be repeated time and time again. That should be our goal. I would love to yield to my colleague.

Mr. SHAYS. Mr. Speaker, it is a privilege to be here tonight to address this Chamber and to have you be the acting Speaker, and I thank you for your willingness to take the time to do this. I was particularly motivated to come tonight because I listened to the presentation of my colleagues and I would like to give you the other side of the story. I would also like to say without any hesitation that I believe when you tell the American people the truth, they will have you do the right thing, and I feel very strongly that what this new Republican majority tried to do last year and what we are trying to do this year will make our children better off than we, this generation, find ourselves, and that if we fail, I think they will be worse off. I believe that with all my heart and soul. I believe that what we tried to do last year was to get our financial house in order and balance the Federal budget. I believe we tried to save our trust funds from bankruptcy, particularly Medicare, and I believe we tried and are still trying to transform our caretaking society into a caring society, our caretaking social and corporate and agricultural welfare state into a caring opportunity society, and in the process we are trying to bring power, money and influence out of this city back to local communities, back to our local communities, back in some cases to our State governments, but closer to home. That is what we are trying to do. Now, I know that getting our financial house in order and balancing the Federal budget is not the end all and be all. There is no logic to saying that just balancing the budget is what we have to do and then we can walk away. Balancing the budget is what I view as just creating a strong foundation in which to build the many things that we need to build, but if we have a weak foundation, everything on top of it just crumbles away. I do not know how my colleagues on the other side of the aisle feel comfortable when we know that we are spending over $233 billion just on interest on the national debt. It seems to me we would not want to spend $233 billion interest on the national debt. It would seem to me we would want to spend it on meaningful programs that help make individuals more self-sufficient. But when we balance the Federal budget, we know logical things happen. We have a strong financial foundation in which to then do meaningful programs, not a lot, but meaningful programs. But we also know that interest rates come down. There is no question in anyone's mind that our interest rates have been high for many years and has slowed the productivity of this country and that we need to get interest rates down by balancing our Federal budget and getting our financial house in order. Getting interest rates down does some significant things. It lowers the mortgages people pay on their houses, it lowers the amounts they pay on their cars, it lowers student loans. It seems kind of logical that we would want to do all those things simply by getting our financial house in order and balancing the Federal budget. Mr. Speaker, we did that by basically cutting some programs. We cut Government programs. We made Government smaller. We did not want Government to keep growing, we wanted it to be smaller, so we eliminated a plethora of individual commissions and boards that were created by some Member of Congress so he could go out and have a press release and tell people that he created this new program that had a wonderful sounding name. So what we did was we eliminated a lot of that. I do not know if many people know that almost 52 percent of all education programs do not even belong, are not even in the Department of Education. We have a Department of Education that has 48 percent of all education programs. Why? Because there are a whole group of individuals here who wanted to make sure their committee had jurisdiction over an education program, so they made sure it came out of their committee. They did not oversee the Department of Education, so they made sure it came out of HUD or Labor or Veterans' Affairs or the Defense Department. We have all these programs with great sounding names that we simply started to eliminate. We cut discretionary spending, and I know, Mr. Speaker, that you are on the Committee on Appropriations. When you came in this year, or last year, we were already halfway into our budget, or almost halfway. I guess we were about 4 months into our budget. You and the committee members made a decision to have a rescission package. You decided to cut $20 billion out of the existing budget. Now, there were cuts. You cut some programs. You saved $20 billion. That meant that taxpayers saved $20 billion. Then this year the President wanted, the year we are in, and we had Government shutdowns, and we have 13 individual appropriations bills, and as some bills came out he signed some of them that we wanted that reduced the amount of Government spending, and he vetoed others. We had Government shutdowns. Those various parts of the budget, if it was HUD or Health and Human Services and he vetoed that budget, then we had Government shutdown. We had no budget. Ultimately, though, we had an agreement. The agreement was pretty interesting. He wanted to spend $7 billion more than the previous year, and we ultimately had an agreement with him that we spent $23 billion less. So we spent $20 billion in the existing budget, that 1995 budget, and then we spent $23 billion less in the budget we are in right now. We have an agreement. We got the President to agree to slow growth by $23 billion. He wanted us to spend some of that money differently and we had an agreement. That was a compromise. That is the way the system should work. But ultimately, we saved $20 billion last year, $23 billion this year; $43 billion less in the bottom line of the deficits. Each year the difference between the spending and the revenue is the deficit, and it is added to the national debt, so we made that national debt not grow as high. So we cut what we call discretionary spending that came out of the Committee on Appropriations, and we made Government smaller, and it was what we said we would do before we were elected, and that is exactly what we did. When we came to the defense spending, we froze defense spending. We did not increase it, we did not cut it. We froze it. Some would probably say, and I am one who would like to have seen a reduction in defense, and others of my colleagues would have wanted to see an increase. But what we need to understand is that we are oversubscribed in defense budgets. We have so many programs, procurement programs for weapons systems, that funded out, they will be higher than what we even have in the budget. So we are going to have significant cuts in defense, even with a freeze in defense spending, because we are going to have to pare down some of these programs. So we cut discretionary spending out of appropriations, we froze defense spending. Then what we did is we came to entitlements. Entitlements are 50 percent of the budget. What is alarming about entitlements is that they are growing at 10 percent and 11 percent and 12 percent, so you have half the budget that is doubling every 5 to 6 to 7 years, and they are programs like Medicare, a very important program; programs like Medicaid; programs like our Federal and military retirement; food stamps; veterans' benefits; AFDC, which is welfare for mothers and children; the earned income tax credit, which is a program that goes to the working poor, so instead of their paying taxes, they actually get money back from the Government. It also includes student loan programs. What did we do with entitlements? First off, I just want to say when I came from out of the State government where I voted for 100 percent of the budget, when I came here I found I only voted on a third of the budget, and I tried to control spending when I voted on a third of the budget. I only vote on the 13 budgets that came out of the Committee on Appropriations. I do not vote on interest on the national debt, about 30 percent of the budget, and I do not vote on 50 percent of the budget, which are entitlements. I did not have that opportunity. You fit the title on Medicare, Medicaid, student loan, agricultural subsidy, you fit the title, you get the money. You get the money. I do not vote on it. What did we do with these very important programs, that are all very, very important programs? What did we do to these programs? We slowed their growth. Mr. Speaker, Medicare was going to grow at 10 percent a year. We decided, for instance, that we would allow it to grow at 7 percent a year. I notice a colleague of mine is here. What I would like to do is just spend about 5 more minutes; then I would like to ask the gentleman from Iowa, Mr. Ganske, to respond to the whole issue of health care. What I heard that preceded this special order just boggled my mind. I think my colleague can shed some light on it. But this is what we did with some of these entitlements. We allowed the earned income tax credit, which is a payment to the poor who are working, to grow from $19.9 billion to $25 billion. That is an increase in spending. But in this place here, in Washington, in Congress, in the Senate, down here, people call it a cut. I am hard-pressed to know how going from $19 billion to $25 billion is a cut. In fact the only place I know that is called a cut is right here, and where the virus is spreading. The Student Loan Program. I think of the Student Loan Program and I remember how outraged I was when I saw the President go to a school and basically tell the students that they would have no Student Loan Program, or excuse me, School Lunch Program, because Republicans were going to take it away. When I got back from the weekend, I went to my colleagues and said, how could we have done something so stupid? And they said, Chris tell me something; if it goes from $5.2 billion to $6.8 billion, is that a cut? It is not a cut. ``But the President said we were cutting, we were going to spend less.'' That is not true. It is simply not true. It is not factually correct. Our programs, percentagewise, instead of growing at 5.2 percent, we said it could grow at 4.5 percent a year, and then we said that 20 percent of it could be allocated to the students that really needed it, because every student in this country is subsidized 13 cents in a school lunch program. My daughter is subsidized. I make a good salary. My wife makes a good salary. Why is my daughter's lunch subsidized? We, under our program, said that we could take that money, the State could decide to take that money and give it to an urban area that might want to have a breakfast program or a lunch program or a meal in the evening for a kid who simply may need that meal. Then the Student Loan Program, this is the one that really gets me, it grows from $24 billion to $36 billion. That was our plan last year. That was referred to as a cut. If it is $24 billion and we are adding $12 billion more in the seventh year, in the seventh year we are going to spend $12 billion more than we spend today, and it is $24 billion more than we spend today, and it is $24 billion, I am hard pressed to know how that is a cut. It seems to me it is a 15-percent increase in spending. It is simply not a cut, it is an increase in spending. Now we get to the health care issues. In the health care, under our plan last year it was to grow at $89 billion to $127 billion. Again, in this place, that is called a cut. Back in my home when you spend $89 billion in the last year, and in the seventh year, in the year 2002, you are going to spend $127 billion on Medicaid, health care for the poor and nursing care for the elderly who are poor, I call it an increase in spending. I think most rational people do. Now we come to Medicare. This is where I would like to really engage my colleague. We learned from the trustees last year it was going to go bankrupt, Medicare part B, by the year 2002. Then we learned this year, as we suspected, because the fund actually started to go insolvent this last year, so we knew it was going to ultimately become insolvent totally and completely sooner than they said, and they said at the beginning of the year 2001, and the beginning of the year 2001 is really the end of the year 2000, it is going bankrupt. What did Republicans do? We said that Medicare could grow from $178 billion to $289 billion, a 60-percent increase in the total amount we spend, and people said, yes, yes, but you have a lot more seniors in the program. True, we have more. On a per person basis it went from $4,800 last year to $7,100, a 50-percent increase per beneficiary. We slowed the growth and saved $240 billion. Yet, we are still allowing the program to grow from $4,800 to $7,100. That is called a cut? No, it is called an increase of 60 percent in terms of total dollars, 50 percent per beneficiary in total dollars. Before I call on my colleague, I would just point out, we did it without increasing the copayment, without increasing the deductible, without increasing the premium. Seniors paid last year 31\1/2\ percent and the taxpayers paid 68.5 percent. We said freeze it. Do not increase it, do not subtract from it, freeze it. We were able to save $240 billion for the taxpayers, and in this program, the reason we were able to save it was we were able to bring in the private sector, that said if you allow Medicare to grow at 7 percent, we can make money and we can offer a whole host of new services: eye care, dental care, a rebate and a copayment of the deductible; maybe even pay the premium, maybe even pay MediGap. We had some providers who said if you allow it to grow at 7 percent, which is very generous, we can provide a whole host of programs and we can save you money, because it does not have to grow at 10 percent a year. Then the seniors said, what happens if I do not like the program? Then the gentleman from Iowa [Mr. Ganske], for instance argued they should be allowed to go back each and every month for the next 24 months. The gentleman from Iowa worked on this program with others, but he was a leader in this area, and he created a better program and saved money. I am just really grateful that he is here. I would love to give him the opportunity to just kind of express his concerns about what we did. Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from Iowa [Mr. Ganske].

Mr. SHAYS. Yes.

Mr. SHAYS. I just wanted to emphasize that one of the things that we are doing with welfare is we are giving it back to the States with resources. We are not just saying ``It is your responsibility.'' We are giving significant resources for day care, for the actual payment to the recipient but also for day care and jobs, because we know that a caring bill has got to provide someone the opportunity for training and a place to have your child so that you can get that training and ultimately get that job. But what we do know is that a lot of the traditional job training programs have been basically make-work, not really teaching someone for a job that exists but just giving them some kind of program that in the end does not serve any value to them in terms of actually getting a job. So the day care and job training kind of programs that we are seeing now are quite significantly different.

Mr. SHAYS. No one said it would be easy, did they?

Mr. SHAYS. You did not tell your dad you did not want to do it because it was a dead-end job?

Mr. SHAYS. Let me ask the gentleman, why would they call it a cut, our colleagues on the other side of the aisle, when we spend 60 percent more and 50 percent more per beneficiary? I am trying to understand, and I have to say I thought President Clinton would do a number of things. I did not think he would veto our Medicare plan. I honestly did not think he would do it. I described it this way to my daughter. I do not have the resources to give my daughter $20,000, but if I had $20,000 and I said to my daughter, ``I want you to buy a particular automobile but of course you can't afford to have leather seats and other nice features in the automobile. I can't give you more than $20,000 this is what I have. And so I want you to go buy that automobile.'' And she comes back to me and she says, ``Dad, I bought that automobile you talked about but I didn't spend $20,000. By the way, I got leather seats and a sun roof.'' I said, ``Honey, I told you you could not do that. I only had $20,000.'' She said, ``Dad, I bought it for $18.000'' I would not call that a cut. I would say she got a better car and she saved $2,000.

Mr. SHAYS. Or watching a football game.

Mr. SHAYS. And they get a choice. They get to choose a plan that could be better or a number of plans that could be better and in the end if they did not like those plans they could go back to the traditional system.

Mr. SHAYS. I was thinking, as my colleague was talking, that it was quite difficult during the fall when we started to get this program through the House and the Senate, present it to the President, when he called the earned income tax credit a cut when we went from $19 billion to $25 billion; in the School Lunch Program when we went from $5.2 to $6.8. The Student Loan Program he is calling a cut when we went from $24 billion to $36 billion. I really believe in the earned income tax credit, because this gets to the third effort. We are trying to balance the budget, get our financial house in order. The second thing is we are trying to save our trust funds for future generations, so we are not the only ones that enjoy the trust funds but they are there for our kids and our kids' kids. The third thing is we are trying to transform our caretaking society into a caring society, to transform our caretaking social and corporate and welfare state--we just do not have welfare for individuals, we have it for corporations, and we even have it in the farming communities to some extent as well--and to try and move it into a caring opportunity society. We know that one of the better programs is the earned income tax credit for someone who is at the level of welfare but making money, working, not getting something from the Government, but really not enough to survive. They actually get a cash payment of $1,000 or $2,000, in some cases it could be $3,000. Instead of paying taxes, they get back $2,000 or $3,000. But what we found was that some people simply were not reporting their income. Well, they were reporting it, saying they were not going to make money when they actually made money. We found that a lot of single people were able to get some of the benefits when it was not intended for individuals, it was intended for families. So we are going to spend lots more, but we just want it to go for the people it was designed to help. It gets to this whole issue that is something I have had to wrestle with as what I view as a moderate Republican. I think I am pretty much down the center in terms of the political ideology. I believe that what we have done for too many of our young people, and we see the result of it, I see too many young kids who are pregnant, I see too many young children that are selling drugs. I see too many young children who are literally killing each other. We have 18-year-olds who cannot read their diplomas. The thing that gets me is when I see a 20-year-old or 22-year-old who has never had a job, not because jobs do not exist. I would acknowledge if everyone who wanted a job sought one, there might not be. But we have too many people who are not answering the opportunity to work because they say it is a dead-end job. If I ever said to my dad, ``I do not want that job, it is dead-end,'' my dad would have said to me, ``Son, how many hours are you working there?'' I would have said 10. He would have said it just doubled to 20. He would have known that so-called dead-end job would have taught me to get up in the morning, it would have taught me that for that work I earned something, that I was of service, instead of taking something from someone else. That is what welfare does. It is taking something that someone else earned, and getting it without having to earn it but it was given to them. There are people who have needs, and we have to make sure their needs are met, but we do not want the system to be perpetual so that we now have 30-year-old grandparents who literally, they are on welfare, their kids are on welfare, and their kids' kid is on welfare, three generations.

Mr. SHAYS

Mr. SHAYS. Madam Chairman, I thank my colleague for yielding me this time. Madam Chairman, this new Republican majority has three primary objectives: One is to balance our Federal budget and to get our financial house in order; the second is to save our trust funds for future generations; and the third, and that is the one most involved with this effort today, we are trying to transform our caretaking social and corporate and welfare state into a caring opportunity society. There is nothing caring about our present welfare system. When I see my own communities, I see young children having babies, I see young children selling drugs, I see young children killing each other. In my communities there is nothing humane or caring about the system that we have. I see 24-year-olds who have never had a job, not because a job does not exist, because maybe it is a dead-end job, in their view. If I had ever said that to my dad, my dad would have doubled the amount of time I took that job. And 30-year-old grandparents. We basically have three generations of people on welfare. We have helped subsidize and create the very system we are trying to eliminate. Madam Chairman, I believe that child care and job training should be designed by the States, not the Federal Government. I believe child care and job training should be designed by local governments, not the Federal Government. I want to move power and money and influence out of this place and back to local communities, who know how to spend the money. Madam Chairman, I want to add to what the gentleman from Arizona [Mr. Kolbe] said: $441 billion for welfare up to $578 billion, an increase of $137 billion. Hardly a cut. We need to change the system, and this bill does it. I would conclude by saying that in the final analysis, it is not what we do for our children but what we have taught them to do for themselves that will help make them be successful human beings. We need to teach them how to grow the seeds, how to grow the seeds, not just hand them the food. This is a caring bill, and the sooner we pass it, the better.

Mr. SHAYS

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

Mr. SHAYS. Mr. Chairman, my staff sent me here a number of hours ago in anticipation of this amendment, and I realized I was here a little earlier than I needed to be, but it was a hard place to leave. There is some tranquility here that I have not seen in quite some time. It was enjoyable, frankly, to listen to the competence of the chairman in this committee and to hear the debate and dialogue that took place among a number of Members, and the competence, I might say, of the now ranking member. Mr. Chairman, this amendment was introduced by myself and my colleagues: my neighbor, the gentlewoman from New York, Mrs. Lowey; the gentlemen from New York, Mr. Lazio and Mr. Schumer; the gentleman from Wisconsin, Mr. Gunderson; the gentlewoman from Connecticut, Mrs. Kennelly; the gentleman from California, Mr. Horn; the gentleman from Massachusetts, Mr. Studds; the gentlewoman from California, Ms. Pelosi; the gentlemen from New York, Mr. Boehlert and Mr. Nadler; and the gentleman from Illinois, Mr. Flanagan. What this amendment does is it increases the housing for people with AIDS from $171 million to $186 million, which was the pre-rescission amount that we had in our budget in 1995. To pay for the increase, the $15 million increase, and I just would hasten to point out, it is a very modest amendment, one that almost would make me feel that the chairman of the subcommittee might want to endorse it; but it is $15 million taken from the mission support account of NASA, which will go from $2,562,000,000 to $2,547,000,000. The account for this mission support is $113 million more that the House had in the fiscal year 1997 authorization levels, so the authorization level is $113 million less than what is in this budget. Our concern, Mr. Chairman, is for housing for people with AIDS. The number of people who are HIV-positive with AIDS is growing. We have 10 additional jurisdictions, and as some may know, we fund 90 percent of the HOPWA money by providing funds based on 115 cases per 500,000 people. As more people are HIV or have AIDS, the number of demands on this limited money is resulting in those that have had money in the past are actually experiencing cuts. So while we are freezing this at $171 million, by the chairman's attempt, there will be cuts unless we add $15 million, and we are hoping that the full House will act favorably on this. We think it is a modest amendment. We hasten to point out that the daily cost for persons with AIDS in acute care facilities is $1,085, and that the daily cost of community housing under the HOPWA grant ranges from about $40 to $100 a day. Mr. Chairman, one-third to one-half of all people with AIDS are either homeless or in imminent danger of losing their homes. It is estimated that 15 percent of all homeless people are in fact HIV- positive. I just cannot emphasize enough, we are fairly modest in our approach to helping people with AIDS. We obviously are doing research. We have services. But what we spend to give people who are HIV-positive or have AIDS a place to live, I just cannot emphasize the extraordinary need to do this. There is a McKinney home that is run by the Whitman-Walker organization that has six families. If Members can just visualize those six families, those six families tend to be a mother and her children. Her children in most cases do not have AIDS, are not HIV-positive, but the mother is. The mother knows that she is going to die. She knows she is going to die. With her in the home is the new mother for her children. This is the kind of expenditure that the HOPWA funds go, to help that mother live in an environment for the rest of her very short life to usher in and help her children grow and meet their new mother, and it is a beautiful program. There are a number of programs throughout the country where we have people really dedicated to helping extend a loving hand to those who simply need a place to stay, a place to call home.

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

Mr. SHAYS

Mr. SHAYS. Mr. Chairman, I yield 3 minutes to the gentleman from Wisconsin [Mr. Roth].

Mr. SHAYS. Mr. Chairman, I yield myself such time as I may consume. Mr. Chairman, this is a very simple amendment. This is not a cutting amendment nor is it an increasing amendment. This is an amendment that says that this Congress will authorize and appropriate the same amount next year as we have appropriated this year, $243,251,297,000. This is an amendment that freezes defense spending for next year at the level that it is this year. With that, Mr. Chairman, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. SHAYS. Mr. Chairman, I ask unanimous consent to designate 15 minutes to my colleague the gentleman from Massachusetts [Mr. Frank], who is an equal cosponsor of this amendment for the purposes of yielding time.

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

Mr. SHAYS. Mr. Chairman, none of it was cutting defense. We were cutting discretionary domestic spending. We added back $11 billion; some of it went to defense, for very necessary things. In 1996, the President wanted to spend $7 billion more than 1995 in discretionary spending. We spent $23 billion less. All cuts to domestic discretionary spending. No cut to defense. We cut HUD $6.3 billion from 1995 to 1996. EPA we cut $713 million. FEMA we cut $143 million. The Department of Education, we cut $1.5 billion. NASA, we cut $473 million. The National Science Foundation, we cut $141 million. The summer youth program, we cut $185 million. We cut from legal services $122 million. We did cut domestic spending. We have to be truthful about it. We did not cut Medicare. We did not cut Medicaid. We allowed the student loan program to grow. We did not cut the earned income tax credit. That is all going up. Entitlement are going up under our budget. We are just slowing the growth. Domestic spending, nondefense spending, is going down. We are cutting it. And some of us happen to serve on those committees where we would have liked to have spent more, but we knew we had to cut to balance this budget in 7 years, and I just urge my colleagues to recognize that we need to get our financial house in order. If my colleagues did not like the bump in next year's budget and they were tempted to vote against the budget resolution, that was a plan, that was not all that of a hard vote to vote ``no'' if my colleagues thought so. What is important is to vote to actually cut spending where we can, domestic spending, to freeze it where we can, defense spending, to slow the growth of entitlements. If we do all three things, we will, in fact, balance the budget. I urge my colleagues to recognize this is not a cut from next year, from this year to next year. We are freezing defense spending. My God, if we cannot freeze defense spending, how the heck can we continue to say that we can cut domestic spending, that we can slow the growth of entitlements? This is our moment of truth for anyone who wants to get our financial house in order and balance the Federal budget. I urge adoption of this freeze amendment.