Dave Weldon

Mr. WELDON of Florida

Mr. WELDON of Florida. I really appreciate the gentleman from New Jersey sharing that and that chart illustrating the point very effectively. There is one other thing I want to mention to my colleagues on the left. We are in a competition worldwide with the Europeans, with the people on the Pacific rim. For competitiveness sake we need this capital gains tax cut. If you go to those countries, their capital gains rates are much, lower than ours are. The result of that is capital tends to move out of the United States into those other countries, so if we lower our capital gains rate it will not only create jobs, it will not only stimulate the economy, it will not only help the middle class, working class people, unemployed people looking for jobs, it will also bring foreign investment into the United States which further stimulates our economy, strengthens our dollar which is currently taking a beating in foreign markets. Mr. Speaker, this bill is good for America, it is good for working- class Mr. Speaker, I support this bill. I encourage our colleagues on the other side of the aisle to put partisan politics aside and join us in a bill that is good for the whole Nation.

Mr. WELDON of Florida. Mr. Speaker, I rise to speak out in support of our tax package coming before the House to be voted on this week, and Mr. Speaker, I specifically want to talk about our capital gains tax cut. I had a woman in my district who called me in support of our capital gains tax cut, and contrary to what we may hear from our colleagues on the left that this is for rich people, well connected people, fat cats, so to speak, this lady was actually unemployed. She is at home and she is recovering from cancer surgery. And indeed, she is a widow, her husband was killed in an automobile accident 5 years ago. But she called me to tell me that she supports the Republican capital gains tax cut because she has a house that she is putting up for sale and she needs that money to pay her medical bills and to pay for her son's education. We are going to hear a lot of rhetoric from the left that this capital gains tax cut benefits the rich. But in reality the number of people that it benefits, by and large, are middle-class working people. If you add up the dollars, yes, the dollars suggest that it helps the rich. But if you add up the number of people who are benefiting from it, the vast majority of the people are middle-class working people, people earning less than $50,000 a year. There is another benefit from our capital gains tax cut which goes totally neglected by the opponents of initiative; it is that the people who benefit from this then appreciate those capital gains and when they do not have to send that money to Washington and they take that money and they invest that money, it creates jobs. It creates jobs for working class people. There is something much, much better in our economy when you stimulate investment and when that creates jobs than when jobs are created by make-work projects here in Washington. This capital gains tax cut is going to help the middle class, it is going to help working people, it is going to help unemployed people who are looking for work, and I support this tax package.

Mr. WELDON of Florida

Mr. WELDON of Florida. Mr. Speaker, as I go through life, there are many events and things people say that become very riveting and memorable for me, and one of the most memorable events that I experienced in my campaign for the U.S. Congress was when I met a man who was an administrator of one of the hospitals in my community in the 15th District of Florida, and this gentleman told me that, before he had moved to Florida, he had lived in Oklahoma, and he had taken part in a program where he would go into inner city housing projects and read to young children in those projects. This program started because it has been you can improve their reading score. Actually there are some studies that show that, if you read to a child, you may actually be able to raise their IQ slightly, and he told me something that I will never forget. He was going into those projects and reading to those kids, and those children were, by and large, children of single parents on welfare, and he would ask, many of them 5, 6 and 7-year-old children, ``What do you want to be when you grow up?'' And, yes, some of them would say I want to be a fireman or a nurse, but some of them would say: ``I don't want to work. I want to collect a check.'' Mr. Speaker, a program that does that to millions of children is not a program of compassion and caring to children. It is a program that is cruel and mean spirited to children. Today a young male being born to a mother, a single mother on welfare in the United States, has a greater likelihood of ending up on drugs or in the penitentiary than graduating from high school. The problem that we have with illegitimacy in our Nation today is a problem that has been created by the program that we are trying to change, and you cannot fix this problem by tinkering around the edges. The illegitimacy rate in this country has gone up from 5 percent to almost 25 percent in the white community. In the black community it has gone from less than 25 percent to, in some areas, as high as 70 percent. If you look at what correlates best, what correlates in communities with problems like teenage pregnancy, drug use, illiteracy, juvenile crime, the thing that correlates best in those problems in those communities, Mr. Speaker, is the amount of illegitimacy, the amount of fatherlessness in those communities. A program that perpetuates and cultivates things like this is a cruel and mean-spirited program, and that program needs to be changed, and our bill makes a serious attempt at doing that. We are not talking about tinkering around the edges. We are talking about promoting family unity, discouraging teen-age pregnancy and illegitimacy. The fact that this program perpetuates it, Mr. Speaker, was driven home to me when I was a medical student working in an inner-city obstetrics clinic, and I had a 15-year-old girl come in to see me who was pregnant, and I had never seen this before, and I was so upset. I was grieved to see this. I looked at her and said her life is ruined, she cannot go to college, and I said to her, ``How did this happen, why did this happen,'' and she looked up to me and told me that she did it deliberately because she wanted to get out from under her mother in the project, and she wanted her own place and her own welfare check. This program needs to stop. The people have asked for it; we are trying to deliver. Mr. Speaker, I encourage the Members of the minority to stop their partisan rhetoric and join with us in reforming welfare and creating a program for the poor and the needy that strengthens family, does not undermine them, that strengthens the bonds of marriage, because it is strong families that make strong communities that makes strong nations, and our Nation cannot survive with a perpetuation of a program like this.

Mr. WELDON of Florida

Mr. WELDON of Florida. Mr. Chairman, I have a prepared text here, but there is something else that I really want to say as part of this debate here. I began to realize there was something wrong with our food stamp program when I was in college. I worked my way through college, and I had a friend who did not work, but he went out, and he applied for and qualified for food stamps, and, when I was working on weekends from 11 o'clock at night until 7 a.m. in the morning and when I was working in the evenings in the dormitory, he was not, and he was qualifying for food stamps, and that is the problem with these programs. Some of the people who get them really do need them, and some of the people do not. What we are saying here with the Hostettler amendment is we are going to put it out at the lowest level where the local officials can really seriously monitor who really needs these programs and who does not because we have a serious problem with fraud, and we are spending the people's money. We are not spending our money; we are spending the people's money, and most of the people work very, very hard for this, and my colleague here has come up with what I think is is very good idea, to help improve the efficiency of this program, and I throughoughly support the Hostettler amendment to this bill. Mr. de la GARZA. Mr. Chairman, I yield 2 minutes to our distinguished colleague, the gentlewoman from North Carolina [Mr. Clayton].

Mr. WELDON of Florida

Mr. WELDON of Florida. Mr. Chairman, that was a very impassioned speech that we heard, but one thing needs to be kept in mind when we hear these kinds of comments that all of the terrible problems that this gentleman spoke of have actually increased over the past 30 years with all of these programs that we have seen emanating from Washington. They have not decreased. What we are trying to do here with our welfare reform program, Mr. Chairman, is reinvigorate the family, reinvigorate personal responsibility, do something about the terrible problem of illegitimacy. I as a physician worked in inner-city obstetrics clinics and I saw 15-year-olds coming into the clinic pregnant. I would ask them why they are doing this? And they would tell me they want to get out of their unit, they want to get out from under their mother, they want to get their own place in the project, and they want to get their own welfare check. This system that has been created over the past 30 years is broken. We need to strengthen families. We need to deal with this problem of illegitimacy.

Mr. WELDON of Florida. Mr. Chairman, I thank the chairman for yielding time to me. It is, to me, a tremendous opportunity to be able to be here to take part in what I think will prove to be a very historic event in the history of our Nation. For 40 years we have had more and more spending on these programs, and what we have been getting is more poverty, more illigitimacy, and more social problems in our Nation. Bill Clinton ran on a lot of promises in 1992, and one of them was that he was going to end welfare as we know it, and he did not. It has just continued. Indeed, in 1993, the Census Bureau reported that poverty in America had reached an all-time high under Bill Clinton. Indeed, at the end of the first year of the Clinton administration there were 39.9 million poor persons, the highest since 1962. The number had been going up ever since Ronald Reagan left office. Indeed, it was only during the Reagan years that those numbers came down. And now, for the first time in 40 years, the Republican Party is in control of this Congress and implementing policies that will, indeed, attempt to end welfare as we know it. And the reason why we need to implement these changes, particularly the changes in this particular welfare bill, is because it is more compassionate. Indeed, the American people have been very compassionate and very patient, but they want change and they want real change that will end the cycle of poverty and despair. The gentleman from Oklahoma [Mr. J.C. Watts], a member of our class, was quoted as saying, We can no longer measure compassion by how many people are on welfare. We need to measure compassion by how many people are not on welfare, because we have helped them climb the ladder to success. Today in this Congress we are beginning that change, and I thank the gentleman again.

Mr. WELDON of Florida

Mr. WELDON of Florida. I thank the gentleman. Before I get into my remarks, I want to congratulate you on an excellent presentation of the true facts about the Republican proposal to reform our school lunch program, our child nutrition programs, in ways that put more food in the mouths of kids and helps more people in this country, and you clearly, in your presentation, dispelled the falsehoods and the untruths that are being stated not only by people in the opposition but as well by people in the media who do not understand what we are trying to do here. When I won my election, and this is my first time in Congress, I am one of the new freshman Congressmen, I had a lot of people tell me, ``Dave, you have challenges up there in Washington, and the biggest one of them all, the budget deficit.'' How do we rein in this budget monster? Clearly there was no other issue that Republicans and Democrats came together on more clearly than that issue. They all recognized it as being a serious problem, and how do we deal with it, particularly when we look at so much of the money that is spent up here in Washington is going to so many very, very good causes. When I first was delighted to find that I was going to be on the Education and Economic Opportunities Committee with Chairman Goodling, I was very challenged to see what we could do to make the system better and help us move our Nation towards a balanced budget so that we could have our children, instead of inheriting bankruptcy and debt, inheriting prosperity, so that our children would be able to have the opportunities that I had as a young man growing up in our Nation. And there was probably no program that I saw a bigger challenge than our school nutrition and our childhood nutrition programs, because I have been able to see firsthand the benefits of so many of these programs. And I was very, very intrigued to see in the hearings that we held in our committee that many of the people directly involved in these programs were able to recognize that there were some very, very clear inefficiencies. We had witnesses come before us telling us how they were just burdened with too much bureaucracy and too much redtape and how there is a separate application program for the breakfast program, and a separate application for the lunch program, and a separate accounting process for the summer nutrition program, and how much better it would be if we would block grant these programs and eliminate bureaucracy. After we held those hearings, I was so delighted to see you, Chairman Goodling, come forward with a program, a solution to this problem, that would allow us to eliminate bureaucracy, eliminate redtape, and put more resources in the hands of State officials that would allow them to feed more kids, feed more of the hungry, and at the same time help us move towards that desired goal of reining in this deficit monster and moving towards a balanced budget. And we were able to do all of this in the framework of actually modestly increasing the funding for these programs at 4.5 percent per year. We had Governors come before us and tell us that in that type of an environment they could feed many more children than what we were able to do with the current system. I think what we have seen coming from the opposition for the past 2 weeks, the past 3 weeks, as well as liberal members of the media, in my opinion, is just fear of change. The American people are the people who are asking for change. They voted in change on November 8, and we are coming up with innovative ways to change the system for the better and, yes, there are people who are stuck in the past, stuck in the old ways of doing business who are making claims that are not true. But I am very proud to be on the committee with you, Mr. Chairman, and to be able to support you in this effort, and I can say that the other freshman members of the committee, the Republican members of the committee, stand with you and are ready to help you get this program through and make sure it does what we desire it to do.

Mr. WELDON of Florida. If I may interrupt the chairman, could you explain why so many of those people who need it are not participating in the program?

Mr. WELDON of Florida. I just want to thank the gentleman from Minnesota, and I just also would like to share with the chairman that as a physician who practiced medicine up until I came here, that I had the opportunity firsthand to see the effects of malnutrition and the medical consequences of that and how it really is in our Nation's best interest to make sure our children are properly fed. However, I do feel that it is the primary responsibility of parents to make sure that their children are properly fed and that we have had an erosion of responsibility in our Nation over the many years that the minority was in control because of an excessive tendency of the Government to take responsibility where parents should have been having responsibility. And if I may go on a little further, Mr. Chairman, into this, I have seen the consequences of malnutrition and I expressed some of those concerns to you and to other members of the committee and I was very alarmed and shocked to learn that a substantial percentage of the program as it was devised up here actually was going to feed the children of people who really did not need this kind of financial support, that there were lots of middle class and actually children from affluent families who were getting subsidized meals in schools, and this is one of the very reasons why the Governors came to us and said that they wanted to take over managing these programs, because they, in their States at the local level, like the gentleman from South Carolina was describing, can better determine where the areas of poverty are, who would benefit the most from these programs, and I thought that was wonderful that you could design this program through this block grant to go make sure that the people who really needed it were getting it and the people who did not need it were no longer getting it. I commend you and I commend the other members of the committee and the staff who were able to come up with this Child Nutrition Block Grant Program, and I think it is going to be a tremendous success.

Mr. WELDON of Florida. I thank the chairman and I would like the chairman, if he would, from his years of experience here, perhaps he could comment on why the President would do such a thing as accuse us of cutting these programs excessively when we, in reality, increased the funding for these programs over and above what the President had requested? He requested, as my colleague from South Carolina very, very eloquently and appropriately pointed out, he requested a 3.1 percent increase and we on our committee, under your leadership, came in with a 4.5-percent increase, which is a 1.4-percent increase over and above what he himself had requested, and then he engages in the shameful act of appearing in school lunch lines claiming that we are cutting these programs too much. I do not understand that, Mr. Chairman, and maybe you can explain that to me, and I took the liberty of putting up that chart there that I think shows our growth, and maybe you could explain that to us here and let us know what those numbers mean. That is a little complicated, but perhaps you could.

Mr. WELDON of Florida

Mr. WELDON of Florida. Mr. Speaker, it is a pleasure for me to rise today and speak in support of the tort reform or lawsuit reform being brought before the House by the Republican leadership. As a physician who has practiced medicine in the community for the past 7 years, I can say that I have seen firsthand the terrible effect of this runaway problem with lawsuits on our Nation and in particular on our ability to practice good, high quality, cost effective medicine. The people who have been paying for this runaway crisis in excessive lawsuits are the people of the United States. The patients have been playing the costs. The time has arrived, it is long overdue. Reform is needed and reform is now, this week, before the House of Representatives. And I beseech all of my colleagues on both sides of the aisle to support the Republican programs for dealing with this problem in our Nation and restoring true balance to our criminal and civil justice system.

Mr. WELDON of Florida

Mr. WELDON of Florida. Mr. Speaker, I rise to speak regarding the issue of our balanced budget amendment. The balanced budget amendment yesterday in the other body failed to receive the necessary votes required to pass this amendment on to the State legislatures. I believe that if it had it would have been one of the most rapidly approved constitutional amendments in U.S. history, that it would have very quickly been approved by the required three-fourths of the State legislatures necessary according to our Constitution. I feel that this would have occurred because the people really do want this, and it really, truly is a bipartisan effort. I was very, very disappointed to see our President using the issue of the scare tactic of Social Security cuts as a way of fighting this bill or fighting this amendment. Indeed, former Senator and Democratic Presidential candidate Paul Tsongas recently said it is embarrassing to be a Democrat and watch a Democrat President raise the scare tactic of Social Security to defeat the balanced budget amendment. The greatest threat to Social Security is not the balanced budget amendment, but our continued deficit spending. We have a national debt of $4.8 trillion and growing. Last year we spent $296 billion just to pay the interest on the public debt. This year we will spend $333 billion; next year it is anticipated that it will be $364 billion. The interest on the debt is one of the fastest growing accounts in the Federal budget. This is the greatest threat to Social Security and the greatest threat to every other element of the Federal budget. Passage of the balanced budget amendment would have been the best guarantee of the integrity and protection of the Social Security trust fund. Let us remember that in 1993, when faced with a $300 billion deficit and a desire to find funding for his new programs, President Clinton's tax-and-spend plan cut seniors' Social Security benefits by $25 billion. Also let us not forget, last October Alice Rivlin's memo where President Clinton's economic top advisors proposed tens of billions of dollars in additional cuts in Social Security benefits. Mr. Speaker, the American people are not fooled by the rhetoric out of the White House about Social Security. The American people know that the White House is not concerned about the effects the balanced budget amendment would have on Social Security. The American people know that the real fear by the White House is that the balanced budget amendment would curb the growth of new liberal spending programs. Mr. Speaker, a recent survey by CBS News/New York Times found that 79 percent, 79 percent of Americans favor the balanced budget amendment. Last week's poll by the Seniors Coalition found that 80 percent of those 55 to 65 favor the balanced budget amendment. Of those over 65, 71 percent favor the balanced budget amendment. Mr. Speaker, seniors know the truth. The balanced budget amendment will stop the wasteful spending and reduce the threat that the deficit and growing interest payments cause to the Social Security trust fund. economic advisors was asked if she had a family budget that her family lived by, and she responded ``no.'' I think that this is part of the problem. My family lives by a budget, and we plan for our future. Indeed when I was elected to this office, we had to budget for the cost of maintaining two households and we had to reduce our spending accordingly to compensate for those increased expenses that we were going to encounter. We need to instill some of those basic fundamental rules that families govern their finances by. We need to instill into this body, the Government of the United States. I believe this balanced budget amendment will become an issue in the next election of 1996, and I believe that we will see more Members elected both to this body and the one on the other side, more Members elected who will support the balanced budget amendment, and the will of the people of the United States will not be thwarted and that we will have a balanced budget amendment to the Constitution.

Mr. WELDON of Florida

Mr. WELDON of Florida. Mr. Speaker, right now, the shuttle Discovery is orbiting 170 miles above, on a remarkable mission. This shuttle mission, commanded by James Wetherbee is a mission of firsts. Yesterday we witnessed a historic event: the rendezvous with the Russian space station Mir. The shuttle Discovery maneuvered within 44 feet of the Russian space station. This was a major effort of two former enemies, with different languages, cultures, and technologies, working together in peaceful cooperation. This cooperation gives us great hope for the continued success of the U.S.-led international space station. On board the space shuttle is Eileen Collins, the first woman to pilot a space shuttle mission. She is joined by the second Russian cosmonaut to fly aboard a United States space shuttle, Vladimir Titov. Mr. Speaker, I salute and applaud the employees of Kennedy Space Station as well as Johnson in support of this remarkable shuttle mission.

Mr. WELDON of Florida

Mr. WELDON of Florida. Mr. Speaker, this morning I rise to talk about what I feel is a historic change in the Congress of the United States. When I was running for Congress last year and I received the Contract With America in the mail, I was very, very pleasantly surprised, because when I read through the contract I felt like I was reading my own campaign platform. For months I had been campaigning on how we need to reform the Congress itself and how the Congress does business, how we needed to shrink the size of Government, and how we needed to start in the Congress itself by reducing the number of committees and the number of committee staff. One of the most important things that I ran on was how strongly I felt that the Congress needed to make all of the laws that they exempted themselves from apply to themselves. Indeed, I was very impressed when I read in the Federalist papers No. 37 written by Madison, how he described in that paper how the Congress should not be allowed to pass laws that did not apply to themselves and their friends. Mr. Speaker, I am so delighted to actually be here and to see us fulfilling our commitment to the American people, how on that historic day on January 4 we passed all of those congressional reforms reducing the staff, reducing the number of committees, and then how we went on to pass legislation making all of the laws the Congress had exempted themselves from applying to the Congress itself. Then in recent weeks we have seen historic vote after vote, the passage of a balanced budget amendment, the passage of legislation stopping the practice of passing unfunded mandates on to our cities and on to our counties. I heard over and over again in my campaign from local legislators, local politicians how the burden of unfunded mandates and regulations was killing them. Then last night again we had another historic vote where a Republican Congress, with a sitting Democrat President, voted to give the President line-item veto authority. It was doubly ironic, it was sweet that this occurred on the birthday of President Ronald Reagan, a man who had campaigned over and over again for the need for a line-item veto for our President. He stated over and over again how there were dozens of Governors in our Nation, in our States who have line-item veto authority, and how they exercise that line-item veto authority prudently to pare back pork-barrel spending and to trim State deficits and help State governments to be more efficient. Last night we had a historic bipartisan vote where we passed a line- item veto. Mr. Speaker, we have many, many more important votes coming before this body, votes on some real criminal justice reform to lock up violent offenders, some real welfare reform. Mr. Speaker, I am excited and delighted to be here and be part of this historic Congress, restoring to the American people, their body, faith in Government again.

Mr. WELDON of Florida

Mr. WELDON of Florida. Mr. Speaker, I rise to first commend my colleague, the gentleman from Oklahoma [Mr. Coburn], on his, I believe, very timely and very cogent comments. I ran for the U.S. Congress not only because I though our Nation needed things like the line-item veto, passed tonight, as well as the balanced budget amendment, some real welfare reform, but I also ran because I was concerned about the moral and spiritual direction of our Nation. I believe that our Nation because the great nation that it is not only because our Founders worked hard but also because they were a disciplined and virtuous people who planted the seeds that grew into the great nation that we are today. I, too, am a physician, and I began to become concerned about the future of our Nation when working in inner-city obstetrics clinics. I began to see many, many young people coming in with not only unwanted pregnancies but also venereal diseases that in many cases were incurable and that were going to lead to permanent scarring that would affect their future, their future ability to have a family. And then after I finished my training and my time in the military, I went into practice in Florida. I has the opportunity to work with a very skilled and knowledgeable infections disease specialist, Dr. Tim Poyer, who was the only physician in our part of the county seeing AIDS patients at the time. And I spent a good part of the last 7 years taking care of AIDS patients. I have had the opportunity to treat some of the most terrible, devastating complications of AIDS that I could ever imagine seeking. I have had the opportunity to counsel grieving families. I have had the tragic opportunity to have to pronounce many of these young people dead, to fill out their death certificates. And I have to say that we have a terrible problem in our Nation today with AIDS, and that it is very wrong for our leaders here in Washington to propose that the distributions of condoms is a solution to this problem. The failure rate of these devices in preventing pregnancy in various studies ranges from 5 to 25 percent. Mr. Speaker, a women can only get pregnant 1 day out of the month, and yet the failure rate preventing pregnancy is that high. The failure rate for preventing AIDS is much, much higher. Nobody would risk their life to anything that has a failure rate that high. There are many Americans who are afraid to get on an airplane out of a fear of a plane crash, when the failure rate of an airplane is something in the range of one in a million, yet the failure of a condom to prevent AIDS is much, much higher than that, probably in the order of 5 percent or more. Yet our leaders in Washington and now our new nominee for Surgeon General is proposing this device as the solution to our problem. The problem, Mr. Speaker, is the morality that was presented to America's youth in the 1960's, that sex outside of marriage is safe and acceptable, is wrong. It is leading to unprecedented problems of terrible disease amongst our Nation, amongst our young people. And it is yielding terrible problems of infertility in our Nation. Mr. Speaker, we need a nominee for Surgeon General who will tell the young people of America the truth, who will expose the lie of the safe sex proselytizers who would have our young people believe that a condom is the solution to the problem. The solution to the problem is abstinence, Mr. Speaker, and I would urge our President to appoint a Surgeon General who supports that philosophy.

Mr. WELDON of Florida

Mr. WELDON of Florida. Mr. Chairman, I move to strike the last word. Today, I rise to fulfill my promises to the people of Florida's 15th District. We have a debt of nearly $5 trillion. Our Government has run a deficit in 33 of the last 34 years Today each newborn's share of the national debt is about $17,000, and will reach over $28,000 by the time this child reaches the 1st grade. We will spend $310 billion to pay the interest on our debt this year. The interest alone is about $4,600 per year for a family of three, such as my own family. We must stop burdening our children. Like the balanced budget amendment, the line-item veto is long overdue. In combination, these two bills will go a long way in limiting expenditures and helping cut waste out of the budget. Past attempts at line-item veto legislation have failed to produce cuts, primarily because these bills left the final authority for cutting the funding with those who appropriated it in the first place. We have all heard the examples of waste that numerous private and government studies have pointed out. This line-item veto has teeth and gives the President permanent authority to cut out wasteful spending. For the first time, the weight is in favor of cuts, not against them. Along with the balanced budget amendment, this will help us bring fiscal responsibility to our Government. Every expenditure will be forced to stand on its own merit. Democratic Congresses rejected giving a Republican President the line-item veto, they even rejected giving a Democrat President a true line-item veto. Today the Republican Congress gives a Democrat President and every future President line-item veto authority. This is the clearest demonstration of just how serious the new Republican Congress is to ensuring a bright future for our children. We recognize that our children's future is on the line. Republicans continue keeping our promises to the American people. amendment offered by ms. slaughter

Mr. WELDON of Florida

Mr. WELDON of Florida. Mr. Chairman, I speak out in support of the balanced budget amendment not only because I believe it is good policy or that it is a policy that is supported by many of the leaders of this body, but because it is a policy that is supported by the people of my district. There was no issue that I found stronger support for than a balanced budget amendment during my campaign, and I believe the reason that the public recognizes that our States that the States, when they implement their constitutional amendment to balance the budget, that the leaders in their legislative bodies are able to balance the budget. Yes, they have to work hard, make tough decisions, stay until late at night, but they are able to when the fire is put to their feet. The people of this great country have been very patient with this body, asking for the past 15 years that we balance our budget. They are not holding us to a higher standard. I believe we need to submit to their will, pass a balanced budget amendment.

Mr. WELDON of Florida

Mr. WELDON of Florida. Mr. Speaker, in his campaign for the White House, President Clinton said that he favored tax relief for the middle class. Well, Republicans in the new Congress agree that the Federal Government taxes and spends too much and that taxpayers should have their tax burden reduced. Through his Reinventing Government, President Clinton also supports efforts to reduce the size of Government. Republicans in the new Congress will work with the President to achieve a smaller, efficient Government. You see, Mr. Speaker, there really are areas of agreement. In our Contract With America, Republicans have promised to accomplish many of the things that the President says should be done. But there is one slight difference: Instead of just talking about these things, Republicans have and will continue to deliver on our promises. And, we welcome the President to our agenda of lower taxes and less government.

Mr. WELDON of Florida

Mr. WELDON of Florida. Mr. Speaker, I move that the House do now adjourn.

Mr. WELDON of Florida

Mr. WELDON of Florida. Mr. Speaker, I too rise to speak on the issue of the recent quote from our Secretary of Labor, where he said the President is against simply balancing the budget. I believe the American people have clearly spoken this year that they really want serious action, and the fact that they have elected, for the first time in 40 years, a Republican House of Representatives, they are expecting and demanding serious action be taken on this issue of a deficit. People are concerned; they are concerned about the future for themselves, for their children and their grandchildren. To hear our Secretary of Labor stating that the goal of the balanced budget ``is not my goal,'' and the President is against simply balancing the budget, Mr. Speaker, I believe is a grave disappointment, and the American people need to speak to our President, they need to speak to our Secretary of Labor so that they get the message. The people want the budget balanced.