Jim Talent

Mr. TALENT

Mr. TALENT. Mr. Chairman, I thank the gentleman from Indiana (Mr. McIntosh) for yielding me this time. Mr. Chairman, the Committee on Small Business had concurrent jurisdiction over this bill, and I was happy to waive it in part because we have had so many hearings on this and these kinds of issues that I thought it really was not worth additional hearings or deliberations on the part of the committee, because to me, this just seems to me a very simple thing. Do we want to stand with and for the small businesspeople of this country against one of the things that irks them and demoralizes them and costs them the most, which is useless kind of government paperwork and arbitrary kinds of fines? Or do we want to stand with the government, with big government, with the regulatory state that believes that unless these people are minutely watched in all they do, they are going to go out and do all of these terrible things? It is a question of where we put our faith. Mr. Chairman, all the bill says is we do not want agencies to fine small businesspeople for paperwork violations that do not matter to anything, that do not matter to the interest of the agency or public health and safety. They can check the paperwork violation, they can inspect them and tell them to do it over again and tell them to do it over in the future, but they cannot fine them. Mr. Chairman, I do not want the agencies spending their enforcement time and effort tracking down people like Mr. Pat Caden of Caden's Restaurant in Tacoma, Washington, who was fined $1,000 because he had one missing material safety data sheet on handsoap, which he offered to provide by fax in 2 minutes. I want OSHA worrying about safety. I do not want them worrying about material safety data sheets that do not have anything to do with safety and that nobody even reads outside the context of an inspection. Mr. Chairman, I do not want small businesspeople to feel like in order to do business in this country they have to pay protection to agencies, because that is what it amounts to. They come into the workplace and hit businesspeople with paperwork violations because that is easy for them to find. They pay the agencies $1,000 or $2,000. Mr. Chairman, I hate to stop when I am in the middle of ``catharting.'' Mr. Chairman, businesses pay them fines of $1,000 or $2,000 and they go away for a while, just for a while. It is like the mob. They will leave people alone if they pay them protection. That is what this bill is about. The argument on the other side seems to be that there are drug dealers out there, people smuggling in thousands and thousands of illegal immigrants who this bill will unleash, I suppose on the assumption that the possibility that the government might hit them with a fine for a paperwork violation is currently deterring them from selling millions and millions of dollars worth of illegal drugs on the black market or bringing in thousands and thousands of immigrants; that, Mr. Chairman, these people who are not deterred by the huge felony penalty for doing these things might be deterred by the prospect that INS might come on their workplace and fine them for a meaningless paperwork violation. Again, we talk about the bill being a ``solution in search of a problem.'' The arguments against it are rationalization. It is just a question of where one stands. I would say that these kinds of bills do highlight the deep philosophical divisions in the House. My faith is with the small businesspeople in this country, the private sector in the country, 99 percent of whom are trying to do good things in their communities for good reasons. All we are saying is, look, do not fine them for meaningless things. Agencies should concentrate their energies on health and safety or social justice in the workplace or environmental quality, and let businesses concentrate their efforts on building jobs and building the economic infrastructure in their communities and everybody will be better off.

Mr. TALENT

Mr. TALENT. Mr. Chairman, I thank the gentleman for yielding and for his kind compliments. I rise in support of the bill on each of its sections, and I want to address specifically the single facility site section and to do that, Mr. Chairman, I need to explain just a little bit of the background about what happens when a union seeks to organize a multifacility site. That can occur in a lot of different lines of businesses. It can occur where you have a franchisor who owns several different shops or stores, restaurants. It can occur in the trucking business. When a union wants to organize a site like that, we first have to determine what the appropriate unit is for bargaining. Is it one of the facilities, or is it all of the facilities, or is it some, but not all? The union has the right in the first instance to file a petition and choose the size of the bargaining unit that it wants. If a union files a petition and limits it to one facility, that is presumptively, under Board law, and has been for 30 years, under both Republican and Democratic boards, that is presumptively the appropriate unit for bargaining. But it was also possible for the last 30 years for a question to be raised concerning representation, a question to be raised concerning whether that was, indeed, an appropriate unit of bargaining. Then the Board would look at a hearing at a number of different factors. This is the way it has been for a generation. Mr. Chairman, the key here is to decide whether the control over those facilities is so centralized; whether, for example, labor relations are controlled by one central supervisor at one location, and that controls it for all the locations, that it would be inappropriate, as the Board says, to have bargaining in one location. You can understand why, Mr. Chairman. We do not want to have a franchisor who has several different chain restaurants, for example, bargaining with different unions in each different restaurant, when the classic tradition has been to have one set of policies, one set of pay, one policy regarding uniforms and vacations and the rest of it. So the Board looked at a number of different factors to determine whether control was so centralized that one single facility would be an inappropriate unit for bargaining. Then a couple of years ago the Board decided to throw all that out. The Board proposed a rule and made the whole thing turn on the presence or absence of several factors, which really do not have anything to do with what the Board has traditionally considered to be relevant; factors like are the locations more than a mile apart? What does that have to do with anything? What does that have to do with the stability of collective bargaining? That is what we are trying to achieve with these laws, the stability of labor relations. That is why the National Labor Relations Act was passed in the mid-1930s. Mr. Chairman, you can run a business from around the world today with a fax machine and a phone, so what difference does one mile make? Another factor, whether there are more than 15 employees in the facility, it is a totally arbitrary criterion. So Congress for the last 2 years has passed riders in appropriations bills saying, no, do not implement that rule. It will disrupt collective bargaining, it is frankly kind of silly, and do not do that. Now what we have is an opportunity to enshrine into law the standard that has been applied for 30 years that was developed by the Kennedy- Johnson Board in the sixties. It has worked very well. It is not overburdensome. It allows these matters to be taken up in a hearing, to be disposed of. Let us do that with this bill. Let us preserve the stability of labor relations in this country, and with regard to this important aspect of collective bargaining.

Mr. TALENT

Mr. TALENT. Reclaiming my time, Mr. Chairman, a local arbitration procedure with a neutral expert master at arbitration is the only way to permit these issues to be heard and give everybody a chance to have their rights vindicated.

Mr. TALENT. I yield to the gentleman from Florida.

Mr. TALENT. Reclaiming my time, so far the gentleman is fine.

Mr. TALENT. I yield to the gentleman from Florida.

Mr. TALENT. Mr. Chairman, reclaiming my time, of course the gentleman knows I am not supporting an amendment that destroys all property rights, and the gentleman is setting up a premise that is a false premise. The copyright is vindicated in every case because it is paid for at least once, sometimes it is paid for twice, sometimes it is paid for three times. And now if the gentleman will indulge me, let me ask him a question: Does he expect a tavern owner or a dentist who lives in Fargo or who lives in Nebraska to be able to come to St. Louis to vindicate his right maybe to pay 20 or 30 or $40 less? Why is the gentleman afraid of an arbitration procedure, which is what we have in the Sensenbrenner amendment?

Mr. TALENT. I yield to the gentleman from Florida.

Mr. TALENT. Mr. Chairman, I move to strike the requisite number of words. Mr. Chairman, we have heard a number of different artistic products quoted this afternoon. I think that is probably appropriate in this context. I remember when I was growing up I was a big fan of the show All In The Family. I remember one time somebody said to Archie Bunker, who was of course the lead character in that show, to those old enough to remember, they said, ``The times they are a-changing, Arch,'' quoting a Bob Dylan song. He said, ``Yeah, and every time they do they turn around and kick me in the rear end.'' That is how I think the small businesses of this country continually feel. They are ganged up on by big government, by big business, by monopolies, whether you call them trade societies or artistic units or whatever, by the big people who come in and nick them for a little money here and there and under circumstances where even if they tentatively or theoretically have some rights under the law, they cannot do anything about it. The politicians always say, ``Yeah, small businesspeople, we love you. You're the backbone of our economy, the backbone of our communities.'' Now we get a chance to do something to help these people, to vindicate their efforts, to vindicate their efforts to achieve the American dream, and we have difficulty doing it. Let us talk about what the real-world situation is here. It is a dentist or somebody who runs a funeral home or somebody who runs a small restaurant. They have some speakers in the background and they carry a local radio broadcast. Somebody comes in from BMI or ASCAP and has a beer or sits there in the waiting room and listens for a little while and writes down some songs and then asks to see the manager and says, ``You're playing music that we've licensed. You owe us a hundred dollars a month. Here's the contract. Sign it. If you don't think you owe us or if you don't think you owe us that much, you can do something about it. You can go to the Southern District of New York and file suit in Federal court and try and vindicate your rights under the law.'' And they know and we know and everybody knows that is not going to happen. That is what the Sensenbrenner amendment is designed to fix. We have been trying to fix it for years. Even the supporters of the McCollum amendment admit we need to fix something here, we need to do something about the situation. Now the reason I support Sensenbrenner and not McCollum comes down to a couple of things, a couple of the biggest things. First is, the McCollum amendment does not cover everybody who is in the situation, only covers some restaurants. How many? Sixty-five, 70, 55; I do not know if it does not cover all of them, and it does not cover the funeral homes or the florists or the dentists' shops, so this will not be the end of it if we pass Sensenbrenner. They will be coming back because they are manifestly being treated in an unjust fashion where they cannot vindicate their rights under the law. And the other problem with the McCollum substitute is that it requires these small businesspeople to go to circuit court in the seat of where? In the city where the circuit court is headquartered. Might as well be the Southern District of New York or Honolulu or Russia or the Moon. If one lives in North Dakota or South Dakota they cannot go to St. Louis, where the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals is located, and try and vindicate their rights to be only charged $80 a month like the guy next door instead of $100 a month. And again, we all know that. It will not make any difference. We will be right back where we started from if we pass McCollum instead of the Sensenbrenner amendment. Mr. Chairman, there is a lot of interest at stake here. That is why these things are hard, and that is why Members honestly feel differently about these kinds of issues, because we have a conflict of interest. It is important to protect the intellectual property rights, as my friend from California talked about, people who write songs, and protect them not just here but all over the world. We need to protect them in sub-Saharan Africa as well. But there is another interest, the interests of these small businesspeople who stake everything on their investments in their small business, for whom that is their life. They are interested in being treated fairly. That is important too, and we ought to recognize that. I agree there is no such thing as a free lunch, and we have all learned that in a lot of different endeavors and a lot of different circumstances. But how many times does one have to pay for lunch? Go to a restaurant, pay for it once. Every situation where a small business owner is playing radio music, that license has been paid for at least once by the radio operator, sometimes twice, three or four times if it is a TV broadcast. Let us deal with this issue. Let us admit what we all know. Incidental use of this music by people who are not charging admission, who do not have a jukebox, who do not have a CD player, they are too small on the chain for us to go out and get them in a way that is fair and a way that is appropriate and a way that allows them to vindicate their rights when they feel they have been treated unfairly. We can solve this issue and solve it now. Let us pass the Sensenbrenner amendment. Let us be fair to the small businesspeople.

Mr. TALENT

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

Mr. TALENT. Mr. Speaker, I move to suspend the rules and pass the bill (H.R. 3412) to amend and make technical corrections in title III of the Small Business Investment Act, as amended.

Mr. TALENT. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume. This bill will have a real impact on the businesses in this country seeking start-up financing. At the end of the day, that is the most important part of our job. Let me again thank the gentlewoman from New York (Ms. Velazquez) and her staff, Michael Day and Salomon Torres, for their assistance in moving this measure before us. Let me also extend my appreciation to my staff, particularly Emily Murphy, Harry Katrichis and Tee Rowe. Mr. Speaker, I urge my colleagues to support H.R. 3412. Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. TALENT. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume. Let me start by thanking the gentlewoman from New York (Ms. Velaz- quez), the ranking member of the Committee on Small Business. I appreciate her assistance in moving the bill and her help in fashioning it. Mr. Speaker, I will not take too long. This is a technical corrections bill. While it is important work, there is no reason to spend a great deal of time on it. The purpose of H.R. 3412 is to make certain technical amendments to title III of the Small Business Investment Act of 1958. Title III authorizes the Small Business Investment Company program. The small business investment companies are venture capital firms licensed by the Small Business Administration that use SBA guarantees to leverage private capital for investment in small businesses. The technical corrections proposed by H.R. 3412, as amended, will improve the flexibility of the SBIC program and allow increased access to this program by small businesses. Congress revamped the SBIC program during the 103rd Congress to provide for a new form of leverage geared specifically toward equity investment in small businesses. Over the past few years as the new program has become established, certain deficiencies have come to light. In addition, certain statutory provisions have become obsolete. Moreover, the nature of the SBIC industry has changed. The result is a participating securities program that is made up primarily of smaller SBICs. The fact that these smaller SBICs are dominating the program points to shifting dynamics in the SBIC program. Smaller, start-up investments are more typical, and therefore the demand for SBA leverage has shifted to smaller individual placements. H.R. 3412 seeks to correct these deficiencies and remove provisions that may produce confusion due to changes in law and the character of the SBIC program. Under H.R. 3412, a provision in the Small Business Investment Act that reserves leverage for smaller SBICs will be repealed. Changes in SBA policy regarding applications for leverage, statutory changes in the availability of commitments for SBICs and the makeup of the industry present the possibility that that provision may, unless repealed, create conflicts and confusion. H.R. 3412 also modifies the test for determining the eligibility of small businesses for SBIC financing. Current statutory language does not account for small businesses organized in pass-through tax structures such as S corporations, limited liability companies, and certain partnerships. These small businesses do not pay taxes at the enterprise level, but instead pass through income and the ensuing tax liabilities to their partners and shareholders. Consequently, many of these small businesses face difficulties when the income test is applied to them, and are often declared ineligible for financing they should receive. Finally, H.R. 3412 will allow the SBA greater flexibility in issuing trust certificates to finance the SBIC program's investments in small businesses. Current law allows funding pools to be issued every 6 months or more frequently. This inhibits the ability of the SBICs and the SBA to form pools of certificates that are large enough to generate serious investor interest. Allowing more time between fundings will permit SBA and the industry to form larger pools for sale in the market, thereby increasing investor interest and improving the interest rates for the small businesses financed. Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. TALENT

Mr. TALENT. Mr. Speaker, I rise today to pay tribute to Dr. Henry Clever, Jr., who will be retiring from private practice on April 30, 1998. I hope you will join me in honoring his fine career and in wishing him a happy and healthy retirement. He and his wife, Roseann, have been married since June of 1956, and they have eleven children and 21 grandchildren. Not only has he distinguished himself with an impressive career in pediatric medicine, he has been a leader in his community for well over thirty years. Dr. Clever graduated from the University of Missouri Medical School in 1960, and started his private practice in St. Charles, Missouri, in 1963. He was the second pediatrician to open an office in St. Charles County. Since that time, he has been actively involved with numerous professional and community organizations dedicated to serving the residents of St. Charles County. Among these organizations are: the American Academy of Pediatrics, the Missouri State Medical Association, the St. Louis Pediatric Society, the St. Charles County Association for Retarded Citizens, the Handicapped Facilities Board, the Missouri Mental Health Commission, the Four County Mental Health Board, the Board of Directors for Duchesne Bank of St. Peters, the Advisory and Endowment Board for Duchesne High School, Youth In Need, the St. Charles County Board of Trustee's for Mental Health, the March of Dimes, and the United Services for the Handicapped. He has also distinguished himself with his service to the Archdiocese of St. Louis. Dr. Clever has served on numerous committees for the Archdiocese including being a past-president and member of the St. Louis Archdiocese's Board of Education. His service as the co-chair of the Archdiocese's Pro-Life Committee has been an inspiration to all of us in the St. Louis area who are fighting to protect the lives of the unborn. Mr. Speaker, I hope you will join me in congratulating and thanking Dr. Clever for his service to his patients, his community, his faith, and his family. He is truly a great humanitarian, leader, and citizen.

Mr. TALENT

Mr. TALENT. I thank the majority leader for yielding to me. It is always hard to follow my friend from Arizona. Mr. Speaker, we are a country that has been blessed with great prosperity. With our affluence has come more choices for all the American people. The more choices we have, the more important it is to exercise responsibility along with our freedom. Mr. Speaker, the law does not directly legislate responsibility typically. It does not require directly that you engage in moral activity. It just says you cannot engage in activity that hurts other people. There is no reason why the law should do that. Typically there are very important consequences that follow socially if you do exercise these choices in an irresponsible or an immoral way. There is no law, Mr. Speaker, against lying. If you lie too much, you are going to find yourself without any friends. There is no law against borrowing too much. But if you do, you typically end up losing everything. The problem is not that our laws do not, except in very limited areas, legislate responsibility along with freedom; the problem is in the last generation or so, we have allowed government policies to develop that actually detach responsibility from freedom, that actually seduce people into exercising their freedom in a way that is irresponsible because it at least holds out the prospect of immunizing them from the natural and normal consequences that typically follow from making bad choices. We see that in a lot of areas of the law. The criminal justice system over the last generation developed in a way that tended to treat criminals as if they were the victim and so sent the messages to young people that they were not responsible for their behaviors, that if they did wrong it was because they were the victim of an unjust society. The tax system that punishes savings and investment by taxing it tends to reward people who consume and spend everything that they earn. And then the subject, the area that I want to discuss tonight very briefly, Mr. Speaker, the welfare system, which is perhaps the best example we have of a system that over the years made it harder and harder for decent people to live honest, responsible lives. Today we are living and they are living with the consequences of that system. Mr. Speaker, in the immediate postwar era in the late 1940s, the poverty rate in this country was around 30 percent. It declined steadily for the 20 years following that until 1965 when it reached 15 percent. It was at that point that the Federal Government declared war on poverty. The Federal Government decided that it was going to help poor people in this country, a natural and good impulse. But it did it by providing the wrong incentives. Mr. Speaker, there are two programs, if you will, two things that typically over the generations have gotten Americans out of poverty, that has gotten my parents out of poverty, that gets people out of poverty or got their parents out of poverty, because, Mr. Speaker, almost everybody in America either grew up poor or had a parent who grew up poor or at least had a grandparent who grew up poor. So this is not something that most people are not familiar with. Those two things that tend to get people out of poverty the quickest in this country are work and family, typically marriage. The Federal Government decided in 1965 that it was going to condition a very substantial package of assistance on people doing neither of those things, a package of assistance that grew until it reached $8,000 to $15,000 a year in cash and other kinds of benefits, an amount of money that seems very, very large to a person coming from a low income background. What the government said in effect to people was, ``Look, if you don't work, if you get married without having children, we will provide you with a large package of assistance.'' And so we effectively changed the behavior that people would otherwise engage in. If people wanted to get out of poverty in the way my parents did it, that is the way that requires a lot of faith, a lot of work, a lot of long-term thinking, a lot of responsibility. You have to decide that in America, you can make it out by working, make it out by staying in school as long as you can, make it out by raising a family after you have married someone who has made a commitment to doing that. That is one alternative that was available to people from lower incomes. Then the other alternative the government was offering was, ``Now, wait a minute, you can have an apartment of your own, you can have health care, you can have food stamps and you can have walking around money. All you have to do is not get a job and have a child without being married.'' Then we were surprised at the results, Mr. Speaker. The poverty rate in 1965 when the Federal Government declared war on poverty was 15 percent. In 1995, 30 years later, it was still 15 percent. Only we had changed the poverty from something that was transient, that typically went away after a generation, to a situation where people were mired in dependence on the government without the family or neighborhood support that had made it possible for them to get out of poverty. What we got was not a decrease in poverty but a vast increase in the out of wedlock birthrate, from about 6 percent in 1965 to about 32 percent in 1995. What a sad thing, Mr. Speaker. I talk very often to teen moms. What a sad thing, because if you are 16, 17, 18 years old, you have had a child, you are not married, you have not finished school, you do not have any family support, well, then you really are not going to get out of poverty very quickly probably, and it is heroic that so many young people are trying, notwithstanding the incentives in this system. They wake up after a couple of years and realize that what they were seduced to do is a dead end. We changed that with an act in 1996 that was aptly called the Personal Responsibility Act of 1996. We are already experiencing the good consequences of that as caseloads around the country are dropping on average 20 to 25 percent, something that has not happened in the postwar era. The system, Mr. Speaker, was such that as my friend the majority leader said one time, ``We need to reform welfare, not because people on welfare are abusing the system but because the system is abusing people on welfare.'' Let me just say, Mr. Speaker, that that bill should be a model of what we try and do and in fact have done in other areas. We have reformed substantially the incentives in the criminal justice system. We have made a start in changing the tax system. We need to continue linking once again the law to responsibility, linking once again the responsibility that people normally have for the decisions that they make. That is the way to rebuild America. That is what we are trying to do here. That is the new consensus that is emerging in Washington. Mr. Speaker, it has been a pleasure to declaim on this subject for a few minutes.

Mr. TALENT

Mr. TALENT. Mr. Speaker, I rise today to pay tribute to the St. Louis Small Business Monthly. this month, the St. Louis Small Business Monthly celebrates its tenth anniversary. Mr. Speaker, the St. Louis Small Business Monthly is more than just a newspaper. It is a valuable networking tool, resource center, and clearinghouse for all things small business. It's a resource by and for the small business owner; it is invaluable to this important community. Small businesses are not just the engine of our economy, they are the backbones of our communities. The St. Louis Small Business Monthly was founded to support the spirit of entrepreneur and recognizes the vitality and importance of the growth and success of this community. It fills a need in the community and fills it well. Mr. Speaker, I'd like you to join me in congratulating editor Judy Meador, co-founders Katie Muchnick and Bill Schneider, and the rest of the staff at the St. Louis Small Business Monthly for a terrific first ten years and to its long and prosperous future.

Mr. TALENT

Mr. TALENT. Mr. Speaker, I rise today to make the point that as this Nation prepares for the 21st century, we are facing a severe shortage of skilled workers in the metalworking industry. For years we have relied on inefficient, big-government programs to train our workforce. This approach has obviously failed and the time has come to change. The metalworking industry covers precision machinists, die makers, mold makers, as well as tool and die designers. These workers can make just about anything. They produce the parts that are shipped off to larger companies, such as Ford Motor Co. or Boeing, just to name a couple of examples. If you ask a person in the industry ``What do you make?'', he'll respond, ``What do you want?'' and proceed to produce your tailor-made products. These companies are the backbone of manufacturing in America. Without them, mass production of manufactured goods would not be possible. That is why it is imperative we act to help this industry recruit and train new skilled workers. Something must be done. In my district in St. Louis, we have a large number of small precision machining plants. These plants have good jobs available at good pay but cannot find trained employees. The tax burdens placed on these small firms makes it nearly impossible for most of them to even consider taking on the high costs of training new workers themselves. The Department of Labor estimates that the need for skilled labor in these trades is 2 percent annually of the current workforce. But with little new blood entering the industry, that percentage climbs to 5 percent when you take into account the aging factor. Indeed, the majority of workers in the industry are fast approaching retirement age. If we fail to alleviate this shortage of skilled workers, we will soon see the Ford Motor Cos. and Boeings take their business overseas to foreign competitors who have sufficient labor, while American businesses just disappear. On January 27, I introduced H.R. 3110, the Skilled Workforce Enhancement Act, to return power and resources back to these small business owners so that they can address their need for new skilled workers. My bill would allow these small shop entrepreneurs to train people in their own plants. Currently, such training is cost- prohibitive to most small businesses. H.R. 3110 would allow the employer to train an individual through an 8,000 hour, 4-year apprenticeship program and, after completion, the trainee would be hired on for at least 1 year. In exchange, the employer will receive a tax credit of up to 80 percent of the wages paid to the apprentice, starting after the 5th year, in 20 percent increments for 5 years. The newly trained employee will have already been paying taxes for 5 years before the employer begins to receive the credit. We need to pass this bill because it will: I. Provide a needed incentive to have the people who know the industry train the next generation of skilled workers in the metalworking trades; II. shift the responsibility of training from the bureaucracy to the private sector; III. encourage us to keep jobs in this country rather than recruiting from overseas; and IV. give small business some much-needed tax relief. I would like to thank my constituent, Mr. Bill Bachman, Sr. of Bachman Machine Co., Inc. of St. Louis, MO, for his research, hard work, and most of all, his persistence in getting this legislation introduced. It is a workable solution that he and Mike Mittler of Mittler Bros. Machine & Tool proposed to help solve a real, and increasingly urgent problem in their industry. I would also like to thank John Cox and Becky Anderson of the National Tooling and Machining Association for their assistance on this issue. And I thank my colleagues, Representatives Ron Paul (R-TX) and Steven LaTourette (R- OH) for being original cosponsors of this bill. Mr. Speaker, we have people who need good jobs and good jobs waiting for the right people. Let's match them up. I urge all my colleagues on both sides of the aisle to become a cosponsor of the Skilled Workforce Enhancement Act.

Mr. TALENT

Mr. TALENT. Mr. Speaker, I commend the remarks of William Bennett to my colleagues. His recent speech at the United States Naval Academy is an excellent discussion of what is important in our society.

Mr. TALENT

Mr. TALENT. Mr. Speaker, I request the following eloquent article be inserted into the Congressional Record. [From the New York Times, Jan. 22, 1998] (By Peggy Noonan) On the 25th anniversary of Roe v. Wade, we know certain facts. We know that at this point about 1.5 million abortions are performed each year in the United States. And we know that the fight over whether legalized abortion should continue has not waned with time, as many thought it would, but grown. The debate has always been by adults about adults. What are the effects on women when they terminate a pregnancy? Do they suffer unusual depression a year or two after the procedure? Opponents of abortion also talk about the effects of abortion on the fetus being aborted. Does it feel pain? But there is another group of children who have been overlooked in the debate--the children who have grown up in the abortion culture, the children now 10 or 15 or even 20 years old who have had it drummed into them by television and radio and in magazines, what abortion is and why and how it became legal. It is part of the aural wallpaper of their lives. They have grown up knowing phrases like ``abortion on demand'' and ``the right to abortion'' and hearing nice adults, the people next door, talk about supporting politicians who will ``protect'' these ``rights.'' I wonder if such talk has not left many of these children confused, so deeply that they do not even know they are confused, and morally dulled. We all know the recent horror stories. According to prosecutors and news accounts, a girl at a prom delivers a baby in the bathroom and lets it die, then rearranges herself, washes up and goes back to the dance. A pair of college-aged lovers from ``good families'' in ``pricey suburbs,'' as news accounts put it, rent a motel room, where he delivers their child, which they throw into a Dumpster. Is it too much to see a connection between the abortion culture in which these young people came of age and the moral dullness they are accused of displaying? Of course, such crimes have occurred throughout time; history and literature are full of them. But what is new, I think, is the apparent surprise of the young girl at the prom, and of the young couple at the motel, at the disapproval society has shown toward them. And why should society disapprove? What, after all, is the difference between what the girl at the prom is accused of doing and a late-term abortion, something she would have heard discussed, explained and defended on television and in the newspaper? A late-term abortion means pulling a fully formed but not yet born baby out of the womb, piercing its brain with scissors, sucking out the brain, collapsing the skull and then removing the dead baby. In the girl's home state, New Jersey, this was legal. Why wouldn't she think there is no difference, really, between that and choking a baby to death in a bathroom stall and then dropping it in a trash bin? And what, in fact, is the difference? Only that one death occurred in a bathroom stall, and the other happened in a hospital with clean white sheets and a doctor. Consider, too, the young couple in the motel and the reasoning that may have left them free of any sense of sin or crime. If the accusations are true, what did they do that was wrong besides refuse to suck into life an inconvenient baby? Isn't that what the culture they were born into, and grew to young adulthood in, does? I think that's the great ignored story--what we have done to our children by legalizing abortion and championing it. The daily abortion stories and abortion polls and abortion editorials and abortion pictures and stories showing how the movement to ``protect these rights'' is faring--all this has drummed into their heads the idea that human life is not special, is not sanctified, is not a life formed by God but a fertilized ovum that makes demands and can be removed. What we teach the young every day is moral confusion about the worth of an ordinary human life. This has wounded, in a very real and personal way, big pieces of an entire generation. And I suspect it has left them frightened, too.

Mr. TALENT

Mr. TALENT. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume. Mr. Speaker, the primary purpose of this legislation is to reauthorize the Small Business Administration and the programs which that agency oversees pursuant to the Small Business Act and the Small Business Investment Act. This reauthorization covers fiscal years 1998, 1999 and 2000. Except for a couple of new provisions added by the other body, this legislation is identical to H.R. 2261, which this House passed under suspension of the rules by a vote of 397 to 17 just 6 weeks ago. We regularly reauthorize the bulk of the programs contained in this legislation for 3-year periods. The programs contained in this legislation include the financial programs of the SBA, the 7(a) general business loan guarantee program, the section 504 Certified Development Company program, the Microloan program, and the Small Business Investment Company program. This legislation also changes and improves various programs, specifically modifying the section 504 Preferred Certified Lender Program, the SBIC program, the Women's Business Center program and the SBDC program. The SBA also provides hundreds of millions of dollars in vital disaster assistance to small businesses and homeowners every year, and this legislation reauthorizes that assistance. Title VII of the measure before us is the result of the collective work of multiple committees and individual Members. It contains a number of provisions which are designed to assist the Federal Government in better serving service-disabled veterans and small businesses owned by service-disabled veterans. These provisions are the products of bipartisan efforts by myself and the gentleman from New York [Mr. LaFalce], our committee's ranking member, working together with the chairman of the Committee on Rules and the chairman of the Committee on Veterans' Affairs. Section 501 of this legislation is also the product of a bipartisan and multi-committee effort both here and in the Senate. It contains most of the features of H.R. 2429, as reported by the Committee on Science, and is a 4-year reauthorization of the pilot Small Business Technology Transfer Program. As I said earlier, Mr. Speaker, the legislation before us today has some additional components that were added since we passed it here in the House in late September. These additional elements have been added as a result of collaborative and bipartisan efforts between the House and the Senate and, in fact, have involved the collective work of multiple committees from both Houses working in conjunction with representatives of the administration. Title VI of this legislation establishes the HUBZone program, which will provide incentives to businesses that locate in and employ residents from economically distressed areas, thereby targeting inner cities and rural communities that have low household incomes, high unemployment and whose communities have suffered from a lack of investment. Subtitle (b) of title IV of this legislation is another component which was added to this legislation by the Senate and addresses the important small business procurement issue of contract bundling. This provision is the result of lengthy negotiations, involving several Senate and House committees and the administration. Finally, section 507 of this legislation addresses the Defense Loan and Technical Assistance Program, or DELTA program, and is of great importance to numerous small businesses located in areas that have been adversely impacted as a result of the closing of military installations. Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. TALENT. Mr. Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the gentlewoman from Maryland [Mrs. Morella].

Mr. TALENT. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself 30 seconds in which just to say that that is also my understanding, and I have said from the beginning, that I did not want this bill to effect the 8(a) program, and as far as I am concerned, it is out of this bill, it is not mentioned in this bill; and that the HUBZone bill is designed to provide a little bit of an additional boost to procurement to businesses that locate in these disadvantaged areas and hire these individuals.

Mr. TALENT. Mr. Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from Pennsylvania [Mr. English], a member of the committee.

Mr. TALENT. Mr. Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from New York [Mr. Forbes]. (Mr. FORBES asked and was given permission to revise and extend his remarks.)

Mr. TALENT. Mr. Speaker, I am happy to yield 3 minutes to our last speaker on this side of the aisle, the gentleman from Montana [Mr. Hill], an outstanding member of the committee.