Dave Weldon

Mr. WELDON of Florida

Mr. WELDON of Florida. I yield to the gentleman from Minnesota.

Mr. WELDON of Florida. I yield to the gentleman from Oklahoma.

Mr. WELDON of Florida

Mr. WELDON of Florida. Mr. Speaker, we need to talk about exactly who is paying for the cost of Government in Washington, DC, and what effect that will have after we pass our tax cut. We have heard a lot of talk about this being so-called tax cuts for the rich. Mr. Speaker, this chart I have next to me is based on data from the Joint Economic Committee, and the data that they obtained from the Treasury Department. They break the American public into five categories. The lowest 20 percent of earners are now paying, in the yellow, 1 percent of the cost of big Government. After the tax package is passed they will continue to pay 1 percent of the cost of Government in Washington, DC. The next 20 percent are currently paying 4 percent, and they will be paying, after this tax cut package, 4 percent. I would like to draw the attention of my colleagues on the other side of the aisle to the upper 20 percent. They are now, today, in America, picking up 63 percent of the cost of Government in Washington. Guess what? After the Republican tax cut, they will continue to pay 63 percent of the cost of Government in Washington. I appeal to my colleagues, this is a good middle class tax cut.

Mr. WELDON of Florida

Mr. WELDON of Florida. Mr. Speaker, if the gentleman will yield further, only at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue does that have any credence, because I believe people like the gentleman from Ohio, Mr. John Kasich, and the gentleman from Texas, Mr. Bill Archer, do not use these kinds of convoluted figures.

Mr. WELDON of Florida. I am really glad you brought this issue up, the National Debt Repayment Act, because that was one of the reasons I came over to join you and Mr. Gutknecht. I want to thank you for allowing me to join you in this conversation. I think it has been very informative.

Mr. WELDON of Florida. In effect it is a win/win situation that taxpayers would get to keep more of their hard-earned money and we would pay off the debt and we would not have these big interest payments. And we would actually have more money within the Federal budget to pay for roads, for example, or say maybe a manned mission to Mars, for example?

Mr. WELDON of Florida. Mr. Speaker, if the gentleman will continue to yield, as I understand it, we are paying out about $340 billion to pay interest on that debt. So with your legislation, which I am a cosponsor of, not only would we be able to pay off the national debt and take that burden off of our kids and the future of our children and not only would we be able to provide more tax relief for working families, but we would no longer be paying these $300 billion a year interest payments; is that correct?

Mr. WELDON of Florida. That was the question I wanted to ask the gentleman. Go ahead.

Mr. WELDON of Florida. If the gentleman will continue to yield for a question, Mr. Speaker, I want to look to the future. As the gentleman knows, I represent an area of Florida that includes the Kennedy Space Center, an area that has always had its eyes looking to the future. The question I have for the gentleman is, I believe if we remain committed to our principles that that black line that is showing there will come down to the zero mark and we will have the budget balanced. If we stay true to our principles and hold the line on spending, we will actually start showing a very small surplus. Is that not correct?

Mr. WELDON of Florida. Mr. Speaker, if the gentleman will continue to yield, that gets back to what I was talking about before. This is not about numbers. We tend to spend a lot of time here in Washington throwing around numbers, but this is really about moms and dads in Minnesota, in Wisconsin, in Florida, where I come from, having more money to buy clothes, to buy braces, to set aside for college education. One of the points that I really want to stress is we, the Republicans in the House of Representatives and in the Senate, are delivering on a Clinton campaign promise of 1992 to provide a middle class tax cut. One of the things that motivated me to run for Congress back in 1994 was that Bill Clinton had campaigned on ending welfare as we know it, and then just did not follow through on that. He campaigned on a middle class tax cut and he raised taxes. Of course, it did take us to pass welfare reform, and now we are following through on another Clinton campaign promise, to provide that middle class tax cut. Our tax cut is a middle class tax cut. What boggles my mind is to have Members on the other side of the aisle get up day after day and tell us that, if we would just let them do the tax cut, that they would do a better tax cut. These are the people who raised taxes in 1993, who did not want to cut taxes in 1993, or 1994, or 1995, or 1992, or 1991. They want to increase spending, and increase spending, and raise taxes, and raise taxes. For them now to come before this body, to come before the American people straight-faced and look us in the eye and say their tax cut would be a better tax cut, or their tax cut would really, truly be a middle class tax cut, to me is absolutely amazing. It is the Republican Congress, the Republican Senate, and yes, we have been working with the administration on this, and this is a cooperative effort and he is agreeing to go along with us, it is a Republican initiative to finally deliver on the Republican promise of 1994 and the Clinton promise of 1992 to provide a middle class tax cut.

Mr. WELDON of Florida. If the gentleman will continue to yield, does he mean Members of the House of Representatives?

Mr. WELDON of Florida. Let me just clarify, OK? It is not the Government in the sense that the Congress is not saying that, the Congressional Budget Office is not saying that.

Mr. WELDON of Florida. Mr. Speaker, if the gentleman will continue to yield again, I am aware that the President wants to do that. He wants to give the $500 per child tax credit that is in our bill to people who do not pay taxes, so it essentially amounts to $500 per child. We can call it a welfare check, we can just call it benevolence, but this is somebody who is not paying any taxes, no Federal withholding at all. He wants to turn around and give them the $500 per child tax credit. I agree with the gentleman that the $500 per child tax credit should go to people who are paying taxes. It should not be turned into a welfare program. One of the other things that is really bothering me about what the White House is doing is they are doing some very, very strange calculations on people's income. They are doing something that totally boggles my mind, where if you have a house and you have a family income of $30,000 a year, but if you lived on the street and you rented your house out for $500 a month, then they do $500 times 12 and they get $6,000 and they say, really, your family income is $36,000.

Mr. WELDON of Florida. Mr. Speaker, if the gentleman will continue to yield, I think a lot of this gets right at the issue of what is right and what is fair. I rose on this floor over an hour ago and I was talking about the President's criticism of our decision to index capital gains to inflation. He is going around saying that is going to explode the deficit. I just take real offense at him saying that, and some of his staff saying that, because the problem was created by too much spending. The charts that the gentlemen have put forward make that very, very clear. The issue of indexing capital gains to inflation is a very simple one. If you are a working man and you manage to set aside $1,000 for an investment, let us say it is for your children's college, you have an 8-year-old, and in 10 years they are going to be in college and that doubles in value to $2,000. But if inflation has been such that it has really only gone up about $500 in value, we say you pay capital gains on that $500. Bill Clinton wants you to pay capital gains on the whole $1,000 increase in your investment. In effect you are paying capital gains taxes to Washington, DC, on inflation. I just think that is dead wrong and it is an issue of fundamental fairness. Likewise, it is just wrong and unfair for elected officials to come up here to Washington and to vote over and over again to increase spending and then throw up their hands and say we have to raise taxes to balance the budget.

Mr. WELDON of Florida. I thank the gentleman for yielding, and I want to thank you in particular for the hard work you do here on this budget issue. I think you have clearly stood out in our class as somebody who has worked very, very aggressively to rein in the deficit monster. And I was sitting over in my office, and let me just add, by the way, that the gentleman from Minnesota [Mr. Gutknecht] as well has been doing a super job fighting for--and you know this is not just a fight for us. This is a fight for the working people all across America, working families who have trouble making ends meet, who do not know how they are going to pay for the braces, who do not know how they are going to pay for college when, you know, the little girl and the little boy who is getting big gets to that college age. How are they going to do it? This is not about numbers. This is about families. This is about how American families are going to make ends meet. I want to thank both of the gentlemen. I was sitting over in my office, and I was watching the charts they were displaying and the way they were explaining all of this. I wanted to come over here and just join in. I just want to ask a question if I can, I would say to the gentleman from Wisconsin [Mr. Neumann]. That chart that is on the floor there, if we could just put that up, I have a question about that. Mr. Speaker, I would ask the gentleman, is he saying that spending prior to our arrival in January 1995, when the 104th Congress got sworn in, when all three of us arrived, spending was increasing here at almost 2 percentage points ahead of the inflation rate?

Mr. WELDON of Florida

Mr. WELDON of Florida. Mr. Speaker, I rise tonight to talk about the issue of indexing capital gains for inflation. I was very disappointed to recently hear that the President of the United States, Bill Clinton, opposed this, and he felt that this would be some sort of a time bomb that would explode the deficit. I am very disappointed to hear him take this position because I believe very strongly that indexing capital gains for inflation is an issue of fairness. It is fairness to working people. It is fairness to the American taxpayer. And the best way to get this point across, Mr. Speaker, is to give an example. Let us just suppose that 10 years ago you saved up $1,000 and you decided to invest in something. Let us say you were investing for maybe your daughter's college education, she was 8 at the time, now she is 18. And now today your thousand dollar investment was increased to $2,000. Well, you have got a $1,000 capital gain on that investment. And according to the kinds of tax policy that Bill Clinton would like, you would pay a capital gains tax on that $1,000. What we Republicans who support tax fairness say is that if inflation was such that that thousand dollars that you had 10 years ago is now only worth $500, then your real capital gains on that investment is $500. It is not $1,000. And we should pay, Mr. Speaker, our 28 percent, or now, with our new capital gains reduction, it would be a 20-percent tax on the $500, and that is what we call indexing capital gains for inflation. Now, the President says this is a time bomb that is going to explode the deficit. I feel compelled to talk a little bit tonight about why we are in the fix that we are in right here in Washington where we have these huge deficits, and it is spending. It is not a problem with revenue. The American people have been sending more and more and more money to Washington, DC, and for years the deficits got bigger and bigger. It was not until the Republicans took control of this body that the deficits really started coming down. Mr. Speaker, the problem is spending. As a matter of fact, when Ronald Reagan cut taxes in 1980, revenues into the Federal Treasury went up more than $400 billion. But the reason the deficit exploded is because this body, the Congress of the United States, the House of Representatives, doubled spending over the next 8 years, and that is where those huge deficits came from. If the Congress had held the line on spending, we would not be in the fix we are in today and we would not have a $5 trillion national debt, $18,000 for every man, woman, and child. So when the President gets up and talks about this being a time bomb that is going to explode the deficit, what he is really saying to us is that he does not want to control himself, he does not want to control Washington when it comes to spending, and he wants to tax inflation. Our dollar is worth less, our investment is worth less because of inflation, but the President wants us to pay taxes on that. I say, Mr. Speaker, that what we in the Republican Party stand for is tax fairness. And, Mr. Speaker, indexing capital gains is just an issue of fairness. If we have made that investment but inflation has eaten away at the value of that investment, we should not have to pay income tax to Washington, DC, for inflation. Mr. Speaker, our tax bill is the right tax bill. It is a tax cut for the middle class, and it does provide badly needed capital gains reduction so that we can stimulate the economy and create good, high paying jobs well into the future. But what is very, very important, Mr. Speaker, is that we treat the wage earners all across America with fairness. This indexing of capital gains, in my opinion, is a fundamental issue of tax fairness. It will not explode the deficit if this body controls themselves on spending, if they hold the line on spending. If the Congress of the United States can live within its means, we will keep the budget balanced well into future years. The problem is not a deficiency of revenue for Washington, DC; the problem is, Mr. Speaker, too much spending.

Mr. WELDON of Florida

Mr. WELDON of Florida. Mr. Speaker, the debate we are having about whether or not most of the tax cut goes to the middle class or to the rich is downright goofy. It should be a simple question with an agreed- upon way to score it. There should be a clear-cut answer whether it is primarily the middle class or the rich who will be able to keep more of what is already theirs. At least when discussing capital gains, I could understand some disagreement, for one can score it two ways, either by the number of people who are receiving capital gains reductions or by the value of their capital gains cut. But in terms of this tax package, charges that the majority of the tax cut goes to the wealthy are simply ridiculous. Democrat class warriors in the Treasury Department are using bogus numbers. Redefining household incomes so that people making $45,000 a year are scored as actually making $75,000 a year is nothing short of scandalous. Imagine trying to convince a shipyard worker that he is actually making $30,000 a year more than he thinks he is making. It is downright dishonest.

Mr. WELDON of Florida

Mr. WELDON of Florida. Now it is 16 percent. So it is incredibly important that we balance the budget, that we pay off the debt, that we provide badly needed family tax relief, that we fix the welfare system as we have. This is about the future. I am told by teachers, there is nothing that motivates kids more to study math and science than to talk about the space program. It just makes their eyes get big, and if we can relate what they are learning in the classroom to applications in our space program, it just gets them so excited. I do not think there is anything that the American people are more proud of than the tremendous accomplishments of our astronauts and the people who work in our space programs. But yet we as a nation would never be able to do that if we were not able to have the financial resources to do it. The financial resources only come from managing our resources properly. This is just simple stewardship. It is the same stewardship that families use back home. The gentleman was talking about the farmer. I can tell the gentleman that I have met countless families in my district, some of them ranchers, some of them working in the citrus industry, some of them working in the space program who have said to me, why can Congress not just do things the way we do things around the kitchen table? We realize we cannot do everything every month, so we set some priorities. And that is what this budget proposal, a lot of it is about, and what the Republicans in the 104th Congress and the 105th Congress have been about. Let me just say it has been a real pleasure to join with the gentleman in this colloquy tonight. I would say to the gentleman that he has been a stalwart activist in getting the job done and delivering on the promises we made to the American people in terms of balancing the budget, preserving Medicare, providing badly needed family tax relief, and finally, fixing welfare. It has been a pleasure for me to be able to work with the gentleman and the leadership that the gentleman has provided in all of these areas and to join with the gentleman tonight in talking about this. Because this is about the future.

Mr. WELDON of Florida. I am really moved by the gentleman's comments, particularly as it relates to family. I was reminded as the gentleman was speaking of a family that goes to the church that I attend. They have five children. Ann and Bill Tanner, a lovely couple, with five kids, little stairsteps, from age 9 down to, I think their newest one is about a year old. Bill was working as an electrician. Now I think he is a caseworker for one of the county commissioners in Brevard County where I live. This translates to $2,500 a year for Bill. And that means more money for clothes for the kids, money for vacation, something maybe that they have not been able to take for a long time. So this is really about families, kids and peoples' lives, and, as you mentioned earlier in your special order here tonight, how back when our parents were raising us, that they sent just a small fraction of their income to Washington, and the biggest amount of the money went to pay the mortgage payment, and how now families are sending more to Washington than they spend on the mortgage payment and the food bill and the clothing bill. It is amazing. Food, shelter and clothing do not consume as much as the bill from Uncle Sam. That is just wrong, and when you cannot put more money into the family pocketbook, it can make a real difference and a real difference in their lives. And really what makes this country great, as you were looking down across the fruited plain at all the wonderful towns and cities that make this country the great country that it is, what makes those towns and cities work are the strong families in those communities, and it is really strong families that make strong communities that make strong nations. Mr. Speaker, we for 40 years have been undermining the integrity of the family, and I was reminded as you were speaking about the failure of the welfare system of a book that I recently read by Marvin Olasky called The Tragedy of American Compassion, and it is really a fascinating book. If you have not read it, I would highly encourage it to all the Members of the House of Representatives, because Mr. Olasky is a very, very learned scholar, and he researched how we in America took care of the poor and needy in that time period in the late 1800s when Alexis de Tocqueville came to America and wrote his famous book. One of the things he said in that book, Democracy in America, how he was amazed that there were no beggars and no homeless people on the streets of America, but if you went to London and Paris, that there were all these needy people there, and the thing that he discovered was that it was the faith-based organizations that were trying to intervene in the lives of people and to bring about a real hard change to enable them to be able to deal with their situation. One of the great tragedies of our welfare system is there is no accountability, and you refer to that in your five principles that you mentioned. You mentioned faith. You mentioned family. You mentioned work, thrift, and you also mentioned personal responsibility, and that relates very much to accountability. Personal responsibility involves if someone is in need, that you help them out if they are in need. But if they are in need because they are spending all their money on drugs or alcohol or they are not willing to work when they are able to work or they are engaging in other high risk behaviors, then I believe you have a responsibility not to help that person out because you keep them from dealing with the problems in their lives. The great tragedy of this system is there is no accountability. You can be engaging in all kinds of behaviors that are very, very counterproductive that are an impediment to you being able to turn your life around. But the way the law is written, you cannot have any accountability, and simply by requiring people to work, it brings a very, very high level of accountability into this system. You cannot continue to get the benefits. Faith is critically important. I have learned from experience that the people who really turn their lives around are the people who make a personal faith commitment and have a personal heart conversion where they can actually come to grips with the problems in their life and help them to be productive and become productive. It really boils down to what is the right thing to do and what is the best way to help the people out. Marvin Olasky's book was fascinating because one of the things he did in the book, of course, was he dressed up as a homeless person and he went into many of these homeless shelters and these soup kitchens.

Mr. WELDON of Florida. He did some of it right here in Washington DC; that is right. And one of the things he was amazed at, and I heard him, he not only talks about this in the book, I heard him speak. Nobody would ask him why he was homeless. Nobody would ask him what his name was even or if he had a family. They would give him a meal, they would give him clothes, they would help him to get to the shelter, but they would never personally get involved in his life. And he compared that to what went on at the turn of the century when we were more effectively dealing with many of these problems and how they did that, they actually spoke into the peoples' lives, they got to know them. I think what it really boils down to is whether charity is being performed by the church or by the faith-based organizations or by the bureaucracy in Washington, the government, the faceless, heartless, bloodless bureaucracy that just dishes out checks or units in the complex, and it is that human intervention that really changes people. It is funny we should be talking about family tonight because one of the things that led me to getting into politics was I formed an organization in the community that I lived in called the Family Forum back in 1990. Ultimately that got me more involved in the political process and brought me to the point where I ran for Congress in 1994, as you did. But it was the family, the breakdown of the family, that caused me to form that group, the Family Forum, to try to make a difference in our community to try to deal with the terrible breakdown of the American family that we were experiencing.

Mr. WELDON of Florida. Yes, I just want to briefly add to something you were talking about, however well-intentioned, the programs can undermine family integrity. And I just want to say this in defense of our colleagues on the other side of the aisle who in many ways have been defending the status quo in some instances particularly as it relates to welfare reform, and the intentions were good. I do not believe when Lyndon Johnson and the Democratic leadership of the House and the Senate passed some of these Great Society reforms they had any intention to see the kinds of consequences that resulted. They were really trying to help people, and the unfortunate reality is that the amount of poverty increased or stayed the same and a lot of the other social pathologies got much, much worse. I know that the figures in New York where I grew up are astronomical in terms of the impact the Great Society programs had on family breakdown. I think, if you go into some of those inner-city communities, the illegitimacy rate or fatherlessness rate is 70 percent, whereas it was 25 percent. And the academic scores in those communities have gone downhill, whereas you could go into Harlem in the 1940's and the academic scores in Harlem were no different from what they were in the poorer white communities in the Lower East Side. They were about the same. And the thing, it is not a racial thing at all. It has to do in my opinion with the breakdown in the family and the tremendous impact that fatherlessness has on those families. Mr. Speaker, let me just say that I know there are a lot of hard- working single moms trying to raise kids at home and that many great Americans have come out of those single mom homes, and some of those women just do an absolutely fabulous job. But just the reality is when you look at the communities and you look at the impact that the welfare state has had in terms of promoting illegitimacy and the impact that that has had, in turn, on breaking down the family, and the road was paved with good intentions. And you are absolutely right, Gil, the American people knew for a long time before all the studies, before all the statistics came in. They knew that it was not working, and they were asking for change, and they were asking for change for years and years just as they have been asking for tax relief. They have known for a long time that they are sending too much of their money to Washington, they are not getting their money's worth, the product is too expensive, and they need a refund. They need a little bit more in the family account and a little less money going up here. And it is really, I think, long overdue to provide family tax relief. I think the family child credit is going to go a long way to helping a lot of working families to be able to take home more. I think the inheritance tax, though it is very small and it is phased in over many years, is a good start. I think that tax is immoral, to take somebody who has worked their whole lifetime, pumped typically millions of dollars into the economy in terms of creating jobs, in terms of paying taxes, and then once they are dead to put along a death tax and then come along and basically appropriate a third of what they had earned their whole lifetime. In my opinion it is just morally wrong. We are making some headway in that. And there is probably nothing that we could do more to stimulate our economy, to help create high- quality jobs, to help ensure that America remains the world's leader economically than to put through this capital gains reduction. I think the capital gains rate should be zero. If you want to have a thriving growing economy that is creating high quality jobs, you make the capital gains rate zero. Now, we were not able to get that, but a capital gains rate, I believe, of 20 percent is a good start. I think it is going to go a long way to help a lot of middle class families better make ends meet.

Mr. WELDON of Florida. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from Minnesota for yielding. Let me just say that I too am a sponsor of the legislation of the gentleman from Wisconsin [Mr. Neumann] to deal with the issue of paying off the debt. His plan I think is a very good plan. Once we start showing some surplus after the budget is balanced, what are we going to do with that money? It is a real legitimate question. What do we do with that money? There will be people in this body, there will be people in this city, who will want to spend it all. And to take some of that money and use it to pay off the debt early, a $5 trillion debt, use some of it to provide some more tax relief, and yes, use some of it for targeted important spending like on infrastructure. We have not been spending the kind of money we need to for roads and highways. We have to keep in mind that when we pay off that debt sooner, the interest payments get smaller, and suddenly, it is a double benefit because we are spending about $360 billion paying interest on the debt. If we did not have to make interest payments today, there would be no deficit. We would have a $100 billion, $150 billion, $250 billion surplus that we would be arguing about if the people who preceded us had made the tough decisions and had not run up this kind of a debt. What a wonderful situation to be in, where we have those kinds of surpluses and we could really talk about putting more money into needy areas in our Nation's infrastructure and needy areas such as more health care, for example, or better health care for Americans, and then to be able to take some of that money and return it back in the form of tax relief. I know for me and my district, people would like to see more money on the space program. I am proud to be able to represent Kennedy Space Center, the home of our space shuttle program. People in my community always talk about when are we going to go back to the Moon? When are we going to go to Mars? In those early years in the space program, in the 1960's, when we were making that investment, that critical investment in the Apollo program, in the Mercury, in the Gemini program, entitlement spending was about 7 percent of spending. The debt service was 4 or 5 percent.

Mr. WELDON of Florida. I thank the gentleman from Minnesota [Mr. Gutknecht]. Let me just say it is really truly a pleasure to be back here on the floor with my colleague tonight. I know back in the 104th Congress we did this many times when we were trying to move through so much of the important legislation that the American people had sent us here to do and one of the most important things my colleague has been talking about, which is welfare reform. It did take the Republican Congress, the 104th Congress, to deliver on the President's commitment to end welfare as we know it. And the impact that this is going to have, the gentleman is absolutely right, we should not equate it in terms of money saved. The way we need to look at this is the impact that it will have on people's lives. The wrongness of the welfare system was driven home to me when I was a medical student. As my colleagues know, I am a physician. I will never forget my first day on my Ob-Gyn rotation as a junior medical student. I was sent to the Erie County Medical Center to work in the clinic there, and my first patient the first day was a 15-year- old young lady who was pregnant out of wedlock. I remember the tremendous feeling of grief that came over me as I was doing the initial evaluation on this young lady, and I just got to thinking about the impact that this is going to have on her life, that she may not be able to finish high school, that she may never be able to go to college, she may never be able to perhaps meet a fine young man, and she will have all the burdens of single parenthood. Finally, I just could not control myself, and as I was asking her those questions that doctors will typically ask an expecting mother on their first evaluation regarding her health, I finally just said, ``How could this have happened to you? I am so upset. You will not be able to finish high school.'' I will never forget the words that she said to me. She said, and I have told people this and they do not believe it sometimes when I tell them this, but she said, ``I deliberately got pregnant because I wanted to get out of my mother's place in the project and I wanted to get my own place.'' As we have talked about here on this floor for years now, we have second and third generations on welfare, and that is not what welfare was meant to be. It was supposed to be a helping hand in a time of need. It was never intended to be a way of life. And it is truly amazing the impact that the welfare reform is having. I know that some States passed welfare reform before the Federal reform went through. I have seen the data out of New Jersey, where Christine Todd Whitman in New Jersey passed welfare reform; Camden, New Jersey, dramatic reduction in the number of out-of-wedlock births without an increase in the number of abortions, suggesting that this program that paid more and more money for more children that were had out of wedlock was playing a role in the escalating rate of illegitimacy or fatherlessness. As I am sure the gentleman from Minnesota [Mr. Gutknecht] is very well familiar, the thing that correlates the most, the highest, with very high incidence in a community of juvenile crime, of drug abuse, of illiteracy, of dropping out of high school, is the amount of fatherlessness. There was a lady who wrote a book a few years ago and she made a statement that a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle. She implied in that book that fatherhood was an unnecessary component for the continuation of our society, of our culture, of the human race. We have demonstrated beyond a shadow of a doubt that fatherhood is an essential component to the family unit. All we have to do is look at those communities that have the highest rate of fatherlessness and the extremely high rates of drug abuse, of juvenile crime, of illiteracy in those communities. It is absolutely criminal that this welfare program has played a role. I harken back to that day, my first day in the OB-GYN clinic as a junior medical student, and that young lady looking at me with a cold calculating look in her eyes that this pregnancy was a planned pregnancy for her. I said to myself, at that moment, I said, we need to change the welfare system in this country. I had no idea that someday, of course, I would be here, like the gentleman, passing legislation. I believe the welfare reform that we passed may prove to be the most important accomplishment of the Contract With America, of all the provisions in the contract, because of the relationship between welfare and fatherlessness and all those other social pathologies that I talked about, juvenile crime and illiteracy and declining educational scores. But it is really I think wonderful to now be fulfilling more of that original Contract With America. Tomorrow we will be passing our tax cut. It is a smaller tax cut than I wanted. It was not the size of the tax cut that I wanted to see. I wanted to see the inheritance tax go to zero. I would like to see the capital gains rate phased out completely. This is the best we could get from the President. It is truly a middle- class tax cut. Just as it was ironic that it took a Republican Congress to fulfill Bill Clinton's campaign promise of 1992 to end welfare as we know it, it is again taking a Republican Congress to fulfill his campaign pledge of 1992, which was at that time, a middle-class tax cut. The reason Bill Clinton campaigned on those issues in 1992 is because the polling data showed that people felt like they were overtaxed, the polling data also showed obviously that people felt the welfare system was not working, and I think the gentleman spoke very eloquently on that issue, that the welfare system was a huge failure. So he knew that back then. Yet he did not deliver in 1993, he did not deliver in 1994, and he fought us on welfare reform in 1995 and 1996. Now he is unfortunately, well, at least it looks like he may go along with this middle-class tax cut. I think this is really a wonderful opportunity for the American public to see how the elected officials are really delivering on what they wanted. I think one of the greatest crimes when somebody runs and says I am going to pass welfare reform and then does not do it and says I am going to give you a middle-class tax cut and then increases taxes, it is not just that he is not delivering on welfare reform and he is not delivering on the tax cut, he is also undermining, undercutting the faith of the people in the political leaders they elect to Washington. One of the things that was most pleasing to me, and I do not know if the gentleman saw this, there was a recent poll on the public's opinion of the Congress in the United States and that the approval rating is about 50 percent, which certainly is nothing to write home to mom about, but it was 19 percent in 1993. Actually in the fall of 1994 it was 19 percent. I think we are getting the job done. There is a lot more to do. This is the greatest country in the world. The gentleman talked earlier about growing up in the 1950s. I grew up in the 1950s as well. Our parents gave us a great heritage. They inherited that heritage from their parents. The goal, the plan here is to be able to leave our children, I know the gentleman has kids, I have a daughter, to leave our children the same kind of heritage that we were able to inherit from our parents. I want to thank the gentleman for yielding. It is really a pleasure to be able to be here tonight with the gentleman and to discuss these issues.

Mr. WELDON of Florida

Mr. WELDON of Florida. Mr. Speaker, I have heard of people with a poor sense of direction, but this is ridiculous. Apparently there are some people in Washington who cannot tell the difference between money that comes out of your pocket and to Washington, and money that comes from Washington and into your pocket. Taxpayers send money to Washington. Washington sends money to people on welfare. In the first case, the direction of the money is out of your pocket. In the second case, the direction is into your pocket. A tax cut is when less money comes out of your pocket and goes to Washington. If no money is coming out of your pocket, you are not sending money to Washington, DC. I almost feel I am in the middle of an idiot test. Taxpayers are never confused about the direction their tax money is going. Let us stop this nonsense about giving a tax cut to people who do not pay income tax. Let us pass the tax relief bill for American taxpayers.

Mr. WELDON of Florida

Mr. WELDON of Florida. Mr. Chairman, on rollcall No. 233, I was unintentionally delayed. Had I been present, I would have vote ``aye.'' personal explanation