Christopher Shays

Mr. SHAYS

Mr. SHAYS. Not to pay back the national debt, just to pay the carrying charge.

Mr. SHAYS. If you can clarify.

Mr. SHAYS. Does the gentleman mean since 1984?

Mr. SHAYS. If the gentleman will yield, the bottom line is we did the heavy lifting with a lot of programs, but in some cases, and particularly with Medicare, we have a better program and yet we save about $240 billion. We do it by not increasing the copayment, not increasing the deductible, not increasing the premium for Medicare Part B. The seniors should have still paid 31.5 percent, which is what they paid last year. That is what we said, just keep it at that rate. We did say that the very wealthy in our society would pay more for Medicare. If you make more than $125,000 of taxable income, you would pay more for Medicare Part B. Then we get into how are we able to make the savings? By, as the gentleman has pointed out, giving seniors choice. They are allowed to go into a variety of private health care plans. We still keep Medicare. No one has to leave. But we allow seniors to get private care, and the private care has to be as good or better, otherwise they are not allowed to participate. They cannot offer seniors less service and charge them less. They have to provide equal to or better, and the way they are going to attract them is by providing eye care or dental care, prescription drugs, allow copayment rebate or deductible rebate or even give MidiGap.

Mr. SHAYS. Before the gentleman yields to my colleague, I just want to make sure that we cover this, because we do not want any senior to think that they have to participate in choice. They can keep their traditional fee-for-service, their 1960 Blue Cross/Blue Shield model. If they choose to get into private care and they do not like it, they have 24 months, each and every month within these next 2 years, they can get out of the private care and right back under the system they had. I know my colleague wanted to speak.

Mr. SHAYS. That is a great illustration of why it did not happen. There is no way a family of four would have tolerated paying $76,000.

Mr. SHAYS. If the gentleman will yield, the bottom line is this: As you point out, the gentleman from Wisconsin [Mr. Neumann], 50 percent of the budget is on automatic pilot. It is entitlement. We do get to vote on it, but if we do not vote on it, it stays the same, and so Congress simply never voted on it. I have been in Congress since 1987. I never got to vote on changes. The majority party never wanted to change the entitlements and to control their growth. So I never had an opportunity to vote.

Mr. SHAYS. Up until now, with the balanced budget, for the first time, this is the Congress that is willing to take on the heavy lifting of controlling 50 percent of the budget that is basically on automatic pilot. We voted on a third, as the gentleman pointed out so well, those appropriation items, defense and nondefense, that come out of appropriations. There is the 15 to 16 percent of interest on the national debt which we do not vote on. We have been voting since I have been here on a third of the budget, trying to control it. For the first time, we are trying to control the entitlements. All we are trying to do is slow their growth to 5, 6, 7 percent a year. We are not cutting them. We are allowing them to increase. That is just bottom-line issue. You know, I would love to just get into this issue. I would like your reaction, I have been here now for about 9 years, and I am seeing good men and women not run again, and some of them have very real personal reasons. I just want to express my concern about some of them. I happen to think of myself as a moderate Republican. I think of myself as a centrist in terms of my ideology. I like to think of myself as passionately moderate. I am in the center. I am seeing some of my fellow moderates quit. They say this is not a fun place anymore. I am thinking to myself, with all due respect, when has it ever really been a fun place? I get up in the morning and say I have one of the best jobs in the world. To call it a fun place, I have never known it to be a fun place. Now, to listen to them further, you know, people are getting nasty with each other. I see that. I mean, to the public this must look like a food fight when really what it is about is some very heavy lifting about whether we end those obscene debts and annual deficits that we have, whether we stop adding to the national debt, and this is what my colleagues are saying. I think the Senator from New Jersey, even your own Senator, with all respect; in my judgment, they have participated in our getting deeper and deeper and deeper in debt by their silence, in some cases, by their willingness not to step and stand out and say no more, we are going to call the question. So now that we are deeper in debt and we are clawing our way to get out of this means, people are quitting, and then some, not your Senator, but some Senators have said, ``You know, now I can be honest with the American people. I can tell them now, since I am not running again.'' And I am thinking, why did you not just be honest with them when you were a candidate? Tell the American people the truth. They will have you do the right thing. So I just wanted to express some disappointment with some very good people who are leaving, and my take on it is they are leaving now that we have got to do heavy lifting, now that we have got ton confront seniors, young people and everyone else and say, you know, we have got to address this issue. Some things you may not like, but we have got to do it for the sake of our country. I do not know if any of you have had that same reaction. Has this place been a fun place? No. Is it going to be a fun place? No. Do we have heavy lifting? Yes. Are we deep in the hole? You darn right, and we are clawing our way to get out of the hole.

Mr. SHAYS. We will still be borrowing from the trust funds, the gentleman is right.

Mr. SHAYS. Both parties, not just one.

Mr. SHAYS. The gentleman likes that Maine honesty. You want people in here to speak like the people in Maine.

Mr. SHAYS. I thank the gentleman for making sure we kept this time. Mr. Speaker, this is an extraordinary opportunity that we have to just really clarify certain issues and just make sure that we are all focused on our ultimate objectives. We want to get our financial house in order and balance the budget, and we want to save our trust funds, particularly Medicare, from bankruptcy. We thought they were going to start to go insolvent and be bankrupt in the year 2002, if we did not do anything. Now we learn it started to go insolvent last year, and will be bankrupt just at the turn of the century, so we have some heavy lifting to do to save our Medicare plan for seniors, even present-day seniors. Then that third issue, and it all relates, we want to transform this caretaking social, corporate, even farming welfare state into what we would call a caring opportunity society. We want to help people kind of grow the seeds instead of just hand them the food. Mr. Speaker, the gentleman related it so well to our children. It is amazing to me that in the last 22 years we have allowed the national debt to increase 10 times, from about $430 billion in 1974 to about $4,900 billion; just 22 years in a time of relative peace. There it is. It is growth out of control. In that case you are doing it from 1960. But if we notice the number of 1975, down there, it just starts to go up at an alarming rate. I think former Prime Minister Rabin, who was assassinated, he was a politician, and he used to enjoy telling people and reminding all politicians around the world that elected officials are elected by adults to represent the children. We are going to be judged on our success on what kind of world we leave our kids. The kind of world we are leaving our kids is not a hopeful one unless we get this incredible runaway debt in line. I thank you for letting me share this time with you which you have claimed, and I am grateful you have.

Mr. SHAYS. Per child.

Mr. SHAYS. The bottom line to this issue, though, is that revenues are increasing significantly, and the challenge is that expenses are increasing even at a greater amount. We need to start to slow the growth of spending. I am seeing where the gentleman from Michigan [Mr. Smith] is, and basically the minority has accused us of, say, cutting the earned income tax credit, which is a tax credit that was designed to help working poor, transition them to a point where they are actually making enough to not be poor. They do not pay any taxes, they actually get a credit back from the Government. We are expanding that program. But this is what we are being told. We are being told that we are cutting the earned income tax credit, that we are cutting the School Lunch Program, that we are cutting the student loan program, that we are cutting Medicaid and Medicare. That is what we are being told, and they call it a cut. This is what is happening. Our bill increases the earned income tax credit from $19 to $25 billion. It increases the School Lunch Program from $5.2 to $6.8 billion in the seventh year. The student loan program, and that is the one that really gets me, is going from $24 to $36 billion. Only in this place and in this city when you spend 50 percent more, it is $24 billion now, we are going to add $12 billion to be $36 billion in the seventh year, do people call it a cut.

Mr. SHAYS. In other words, a 50-percent increase. I think we would all like it, especially if we could get away with calling it a cut. I am not proud that there are certain parts of the Government that are going up. I would like to be able to get a better handle on spending. It is just that I think if you tell the American people the truth, they will tell you to do the right thing. If you kind of obfuscate it and you distort it, they are going to give you a mixed signal back. The fact is the earned income tax credit is going up, the School Lunch Program is, the student loan, and Medicaid. Medicaid is going from $89 billion, which it was last year, to $127 billion. Medicare is growing from last year, $178 billion to $289 billion. We are going to spend 7 percent more each year on Medicare, we are going to spend 60 percent more in the seventh year than we did now. And on a per beneficiary, because everybody says we have more seniors, you have more seniors, but even if we take all the seniors, we are going from $4,800 to $7,100 in the seventh year, $7,100 per senior, a 49 percent increase in the seventh year over now. Hardly a cut.

Mr. SHAYS. Basically, it is half the budget.

Mr. SHAYS. One reason I like my community meetings, I call it my community test, if I have got to go to my community in a community meeting, I have got to tell them what we are doing, and if it does not pass, you know, if I cannot pass it through my constituents in a community meeting, I do not vote for it. There is no way I can justify seeing what has happened in the last 22 years, and my constituents have told me almost to a person, ``You get a handle on this Federal budget. You stop the obscene annual deficits.'' Revenue is here, spending is here, at the end of that year the deficit is added to the national debt; they want us to end it. That is what we are going to do. I mean we have three objectives. We want to get our financial house in order and balance the Federal budget. We want to save our trust funds, particularly Medicare, from bankruptcy, and we want to transform this social and corporate welfare state into a true caring opportunity society. We are not going to give up. I noticed, you know, I just am in awe of my freshmen. I mean, I wish I could be an honorary freshman. I know you all have taken some criticism, but my take on what you have done is you basically watched what we have done and said, ``I can't believe it.'' Men and women have run and owned businesses, and you said, ``You know I am going to end this.'' You do not care if you get reelected, and that is your strength. If you do not care whether you get reelected, you are going to do the right thing, and I tell my people, thank God for the freshmen.

Mr. SHAYS

Mr. SHAYS. If the gentleman will yield, we do it for a number of reasons. First off, the peanut farmers make a killing in this program at the expense of the consumer. If they do not want to be part of the program and make that payment, there is nothing that requires them to do it.

Mr. SHAYS. Mr. Chairman, I yield myself 20 seconds. First off, the minorities only hold 13 percent of all the quotas but only 3 percent of the production. And two-thirds of the people who own the quotas do not even farm the land. They live in New York, London. They just get a payment called a quota. Mr. Chairman, I yield 1\1/2\ minutes to the gentlemen from New Hampshire [Mr. Bass].

Mr. SHAYS. Mr. Chairman, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from Delaware [Mr. Castle].

Mr. SHAYS. Mr. Chairman, I yield 1 minute to my distinguished colleague, the gentleman from Pennsylvania, Mr. Jon Fox. (Mr. FOX of Pennsylvania asked and was given permission to revise and extend his remarks.)

Mr. SHAYS. Mr. Chairman, I yield myself such time as I may consume. I would first like to thank the chairman of the Committee on Agriculture for honoring his word and allowing these amendments to this very important agricultural bill, particularly allowing this amendment. I do not know what its fate will be. I may have an idea. I do not know, but the gentleman has kept his word. He has been a gentleman throughout the process, as have all the members of the Committee on Agriculture. I thank them for that. I also thank the Committee on Rules for making this amendment in order. Quite simply, Mr. Chairman, this amendment eliminates a Depression era program started in the 1930's, the quota program for peanuts, a program that basically establishes a price in the United States that is double the world price, a program that basically says that if you own a quota, you are allowed to farm peanuts and only if you own the quota. Approximately two-thirds of those who own quotas do not farm peanuts anymore. It is farmed by people who pay rent to have these quotas. We are looking to eliminate this program. I cannot think of a program that needs to be eliminated more than this. I cannot think of a program more compatible with elimination to a Republican frame of mind than that which eliminates a quota program for farmers. Mr. Chairman, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. SHAYS. Mr. Chairman, I ask unanimous consent that I be allowed to yield 10 minutes to the gentlewoman from New York [Mrs. Lowey], and that she be allowed to manage that time.

Mr. SHAYS. Mr. Chairman, I yield 1\1/2\ minutes to my distinguished colleague, the gentleman from New Jersey [Mr. Zimmer].

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