Paul Wellstone

Mr. WELLSTONE

Mr. WELLSTONE. Mr. President, I am pleased to yield to my colleague to make sure that none of his time would be taken. Motion to Recommit

Mr. WELLSTONE. Mr. President, my amendment is designed as a follow-up or a follow-on to a close vote we took in this body last week on an amendment to the DOD authorization bill from the Senator from Wisconsin, Senator Kohl, and the Senator from Iowa, Senator Grassley, which I cosponsored. That amendment would have reduced by $7 billion the total authorized defense spending provided for in this bill. The same amount of defense spending provided for in the Senate version of the budget resolution passed earlier this year. Mr. President, during consideration of the budget resolution in May, a bipartisan majority of 60 Senators voted against an amendment which would have increased defense spending above the level requested by the Clinton administration. To my surprise, some of those Senators switched last week and voted to support the bill even with this huge increase, which they had opposed just a few months earlier. My amendment seeks to find the middle ground by cutting a modest $3.2 billion from the amount appropriated in the bill overall, without identifying specific programs to be reduced. Unlike the Kohl amendment, which I supported, and which would have reduced total spending in the bill by $7 billion, the amount requested by the administration for this year, this amendment would simply cut the overall total by $3.2 billion, leaving a total of about $240 billion to be spent next year on defense. Mr. President, that is still about $3.2 billion more than the Pentagon itself requested for next year. As outrageous as this may seem to Americans who were listening, especially those who consider programs like job training and education and student loans and Medicare, programs that are being slashed in both the House and the Senate, this defense bill, in its current form, provides $6.4 billion more than the President, more than the Secretary of Defense and more than the Joint Chiefs of Staff have requested for this year--an amount, I believe, Mr. President, already vastly more than is necessary to defend our Nation. With the Kohl amendment, not only has the Senate gone on record as wanting to hold the defense budget completely harmless as we work to reduce the deficit, but it has even gone on record as opposing attempts to scale back defense spending to the administration's request. Sadly, the Kohl amendment to cut $7 billion was defeated by a close margin last week. This amendment will test how far Senators are willing to go back toward the principle that all sectors of our society, including defense contractors, ought to bear some modest share of the deficit reduction burden. From that earlier vote, I conclude that there are 48 Senators who believe that the Pentagon budget provided for in this bill is too high and should be lowered as we move forward in the budget debates this year. Mr. President, while the amendment does not designate specific programs to be cut, I will be discussing specific examples of programs that were not requested by the administration and that should be removed from it. Some have been focused on by Senator Bingaman, Senator McCain and others already. They are mostly weapons systems included in this bill to satisfy various Defense Committee members and military contractors but that were not judged to be needed by the administration. Some were ships or planes that were not scheduled to be bought by the Pentagon until after the turn of the century, but which were accelerated by 6 or 7 years, at a time when we are supposed to be doing deficit reduction. Others were rejected by the Pentagon, altogether as ineffective or too costly, but they are included in this appropriations bill. If we pass this bill without my amendment, my Minnesota constituents will continue to pay their taxes to bolster the treasuries of bloated defense contractors, who are building ships, planes, and weapons systems that we do not need and cannot use and that will not make our Nation any more secure. So that there is no mistake, Mr. President, let me repeat that for those who are listening, we are considering today a defense spending bill that spends a full $6.4 billion more than the President requested in his budget. We are doing this despite the fact that there is no sudden extraordinary threat to justify such an increase and many of those in this body who are pressing for such a huge increase are precisely the same people who are out on the floor day after day, week after week, month after month, howling about how we simply have to get this deficit under control. They are doing this while at the same time larding defense bills with billions in spending for the local shipyard or weapons contractor, or plane manufacturer. Have we no [[Page S 12172]] shame, Mr. President? Is there no sense of limits in this body when it comes to wasteful and unnecessary weapons programs? Mind you, this $3.2 billion is all for deficit reduction. Now, controlling the deficit is important, and I have supported responsible, fair-minded deficit reduction proposals totaling hundreds of billions of dollars. But I cannot allow this debate to move forward without observing a few of the blatant incongruities here. Mr. President, while virtually every other agency of the Federal Government is taking huge cuts in order to help reduce the deficit and programs that actually serve millions of people in our States are being scaled back or shut down altogether, the Pentagon budget is actually growing by leaps and bounds. As I said the other day, Mr. President, this is one of the craziest things I have seen during my time in the Senate. Even during the defense budget of the 1980's, Congress was not pressing more spending on the Pentagon than it had requested, as this bill would do. Make no mistake, Mr. President, the post-cold-war defense budget is becoming less and less focused on our real national security needs and more and more on the needs of particular Members of Congress to sustain jobs in their home States. American taxpayers are paying for costly, obsolete, fantastically expensive cold war era weapons systems that are no longer justifiable, basically to preserve the political health of certain Members of Congress. Mr. President, that is the sad, unvarnished truth. Many of the weapons systems we are still paying for were initiated during the 1980's defense buildup and have little or no relation to the changed strategic situation we now face in the post-cold-war era. Yet, we continue to fund them, terrified that scaling the spending back modestly will cost precious jobs in our States. And it is particularly troubling that the Armed Services Committee has proposed these hefty increases at the same time that the Defense Department is being called to task for not being able to account for billions of dollars--over $13 billion, Mr. President, at last count, in its own spending. In May of this year, the Pentagon's own spending watchdog, its Comptroller General, John Hamre, conceded that the DOD could not account for over $13 billion of spending. Their own report says that they could not account for $13 billion of spending. We now have here $6 billion more than was in budget. Mr. President, it has just been lost in the ocean of paperwork at the Pentagon, and this $13 billion will never be sorted out. In fact, the Comptroller has all but given up trying to find out what happened to most of the money, arguing that it would be more expensive than it would be to track it down. So here we have a report, $13 billion of wasteful money, expenditure of money that we cannot even account for. Now we have $6 billion more in this appropriations bill than requested, and this amendment says just cut that in half and, for God's sake, can we not use that for deficit reduction? I see my colleague here on the floor. He will be part of the discussion on this amendment.

Mr. WELLSTONE. I will be pleased to yield.

Mr. WELLSTONE. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the reading of the amendment be dispensed with.

Mr. WELLSTONE. Mr. President, I send my amendment to the desk.

Mr. WELLSTONE. Mr. President, I wonder whether I could ask the Senator from Alaska, included in this agreement would be that I could have 2 minutes to summarize before the vote.

Mr. WELLSTONE

Mr. WELLSTONE. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that after the Bumpers amendment I be able to offer an amendment.

Mr. WELLSTONE

Mr. WELLSTONE. Thank you, Mr. President. First of all, I ask unanimous consent to be included as an original cosponsor of the Domenici amendment.

Mr. WELLSTONE. Thank you. Mr. President, I told my colleague from New Mexico that I did not come to the floor last night to speak on this amendment because I wanted to get a clear understanding of the offsets which are contained in the amendment. Mr. President, frankly, some of the offsets are troubling to me. Especially those which pertain to the National Biological Service, the Bureau of Land Management, the Fish and Wildlife Service, and the Minerals Management Service. As a strong environmentalist, I wish we did not have to make any tradeoffs in these areas at all because they are all important. But I think this is a matter of simple justice and equity. I believe the Domenici, McCain, and Inouye amendment is extremely important. Mr. President, as I look at the proposed cuts, I am troubled that most of these cuts really are not in Federal bureaucracy but instead go right down to the tribal programs at the reservation level. Mr. President, the statistics all translate into personal and human terms. It is unconscionable to have deep cuts in programs at the tribal level; be they education programs or health-care programs. It is one thing to talk about all these statistics in a cut and dried way. But when you travel in Minnesota, New Mexico, Arizona, or any number of other States, and you visit with people in the Indian nations, it is just staggering to observe the poverty, including the horrifying poverty of children. Mr. President, it strikes me that this amendment is about simple justice and fairness. This amendment deserves the support of all Senators. It is just that simple. Mr. President, we cannot turn our gaze away from a history that none of us can be proud of. We cannot turn away from the dire poverty that still is out there in Indian country. We cannot turn away, Mr. President, from the impact these cuts are going to have on the lives some of the poorest Americans. Therefore, I rise to strongly support this amendment.

Mr. WELLSTONE

Mr. WELLSTONE. This was a study, for the information of my colleagues, a study of the family cap; to have an additional child, there will not be any more assistance. Initially, there were, as I remember--I am kind of going by memory-- there were initially proclamations and claims that, as a matter of fact, this had cut down on the number of welfare children and the number of people who were obtaining welfare. I think probably what happened, it was underreported. I think probably a lot of mothers just did not report it.

Mr. WELLSTONE. Understanding that point, is there any evidence that higher payments--that is, any correlation, much less causation, between higher payments and larger welfare families, women having children?

Mr. WELLSTONE. If I could ask another question, is there any evidence of higher payments--understanding that there is not one State in the country that provides an AFDC benefit up to what we define as poverty, am I correct?

Mr. WELLSTONE. Mr. President, let me just go on and let me get a response from my colleague from New York. As I understand the premise that Senator Packwood is proposing--and Senator Gramm probably has, I argue, a more extreme version--there are two premises here. One argument is that in most cases it is single parents, women, who do not want to work. That is the first argument. The second argument is welfare causes women to have more babies. It seems to me that is the case, if I had to get to the essence of it, unless you just sort of hate welfare mothers, and I doubt that is what is going on here. Could I ask my colleague to just very briefly respond to each of these arguments. Let me take the first one. Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1935 said, ``I hope to be able to substitute work for relief altogether.'' He talked about the importance of work. Then we went to the family assistance program. In 1970, we had the WIN Program by President Ford. We had the Better Jobs and Income Program by President Carter. We have had any number of different programs. We had the Senator's important program in 1988. I am trying to be empirical about this. Let me take the first argument. Does the Senator believe that, as a matter of fact, welfare prevents women from working? Is it not true that roughly speaking, 70 percent plus of AFDC members go to work within a 2-year period? The problem is that many then come back to welfare because they cannot afford child care. The job does not pay enough to support a family. Is it true that welfare is the reason that women do not work?

Mr. WELLSTONE. I am happy to yield to the Senator.

Mr. WELLSTONE. For the record, the best known study of the effects of the family cap was the Rutgers study of the New Jersey plan. Here is the principle investigator for that study who recently reported that during the first year of the program, ``There is not a statistically significant difference between the birth rates in the experimental and control groups. We find a 6.9 percent rate for women subject to the family cap, and a 6.7 rate for those in the control group.'' As a matter of fact, Mr. President, there is not one bit of research that I know of that suggests policywise we are going to be able to do anything to stop out-of-work wedlock births. Does the Senator know of any research that suggests we can do that?

Mr. WELLSTONE. Mr. President, we are talking about, we should listen to the foremost expert, not just among people in the Senate but in the country on welfare, Senator Moynihan, if we want to base our policy not on stereotypes, some of them crucial stereotypes, but on whatever evidence there is. As a matter of fact, I heard the Senator from Texas proclaiming we will do this all in the name of helping children. The only thing that happened was there was less money for food. Senators, that is the only thing that happens. And we are profamily? And we are going to take food out of the mouths of hungry children? Senators, if you have some studies that you can bring to the floor of the Senate, if you have some empirical evidence that these proposals will, in fact, make a difference in terms of reducing the rate of out- of-wedlock children, fine. If you have some evidence that a family cap or other harsh proposal will reduce the rate of ``illegitimacy,'' fine. [[Page S 11751]] If you do not have evidence, please understand on the basis of what studies have taken place so far, a family cap is no help whatsoever. Also, remember, that over 70 percent of welfare mothers have one or two children at the most. But what you will do is you will, by this kind of change, make sure that these families--and, Senators, there is not one State in the lower 48 that has a welfare benefit up to the poverty level income--will have less income to feed their children. Is that what we are about? Is that what we are claiming to be reform? That is not reform. It is punitive. It is degrading. It is reformatory. It is hot-button-issue politics. That is all it is. It is not a policy based upon evidence. It is not sound public policy. We are being very reckless with the lives of children in the United States of America. Mr. President, who receives AFDC? Eight percent of all AFDC families are headed by teens. The vast majority, 81 percent, are young families headed by mothers in their twenties and thirties. How many people receive AFDC? Nine point five million children. Who are we talking about? These cheaters we want to drive off the rolls and the slackers we want to drive back to work, who are we talking about? Mr. President, 9.5 million of the 14 million AFDC recipients are children. A little less than 5 million are mothers, and many of them are mothers of small children. And you do not have any additional funding for child care at all. You do not want to raise the minimum wage for working families. You do not want to have additional assistance for child care. Some of you, I ask the Senator from Oregon, I assume that Medicaid is carried for an additional 2 years? I do not want to give up the floor, but let me say that I assume--I ask unanimous consent to ask the Senator from Oregon whether or not in his proposal there is a transition period of time, 2-year period of time, where a welfare mother is able to keep her Medicaid? Under the unanimous consent, I ask the Senator from Oregon, and I keep my time on the floor.

Mr. WELLSTONE. Mr. President, how many children do AFDC families have? I went over this, but we should be clear. The average family receiving AFDC has two children, about the same as a typical nonwelfare family; 73 percent of the families receiving AFDC in 1992 have only one or two children. The average number--for my colleague from Texas--the average number of children in an AFDC family has actually dropped 33 percent since 1970. You would think, from what my colleagues are proposing, that we are having this explosion of additional children to welfare mothers. Quite to the contrary. But do not let the facts get in your way, because it is easy to bash these people. It is easy to bash them. Are AFDC families mostly white or black? I tread on some sensitive ground here. But I have noticed all too often, when my colleagues come out with their pictures, we have African-Americans, usually. So let us be clear about this. Recipient families are about as likely to be white as black. In 1992, 39 percent of the families were non-Hispanic white, 37 percent non-Hispanic black, and 18 percent Hispanic. Mr. President, are you ready for this? This is an important piece of information. How much do AFDC families receive each month? The maximum cash grant for a mother and two children in a typical State is $366 a month. Now, my colleague from New York pointed this out earlier when he was talking about entitlements--actually, the State defines the benefit. The Federal Government is willing to make a contribution, but the State defines the benefit. And there is a tremendous variation. Mississippi, which is the least generous State, provides $120 per month. By the way, I am not picking--before my colleagues from Mississippi come out here, let me be clear. I think, and I would be willing to be corrected by the Senator from New York, usually what happens here is it is the per capita wage that sets the level of AFDC benefits. Those States which have lower working wages, those States that are poorer States have lower benefits, by and large.

Mr. WELLSTONE. Plus food stamps. I am going to talk about food stamps in a moment, I say to my colleague. AFDC--I will get from my colleague in a moment the 1995 figures. In 1992, the AFDC payment programs cost the Federal and State Governments combined $22 billion; 1 percent of the Federal budget, and the States' share was about 2 percent. One percent of the Federal Government. Now, the Joint Tax Committee, in talking about corporate welfare, says we have $425 billion a year in tax expenditures. We have a total of welfare for the poor, Federal and State, of $22 billion, or a little more now. One percent of the Federal budget. And now we have an all-out attack. I am all for reform, by the way. But reform means affordable child care and reform means there has to be a job so a parent can support her or his children. That is what reform is all about. You would think from the way in which we see this bashing of welfare that we were spending huge amounts of money. Mr. President, that average $366 per month is, roughly speaking, $4,392 per year. I do not know what the Federal poverty line is, it must be $13,000 per family of four?

Mr. WELLSTONE. Mr. President, I would like to ask a few questions of the Senator from New York, if I could.

Mr. WELLSTONE. Mr. President, about $14,000 for a family of four. We can get into a long debate about poverty. We will not today. We have a definition of poverty, first defined by Molly Orshanski--who I think regrets some of the ways in which it has been used--but we have a definition of poverty. Our definition of poverty is, we say this is the definition of what a family needs to purchase the minimum amount of needed goods and services. We are talking about children here. Now, when we define poverty, we say this is the income a family needs to purchase the minimum amount of goods and services. The next piece of evidence is there is not one State in the United States of America with welfare payments and food stamps combined that even equals what we say a family needs to purchase a minimum amount of goods and services. And we are going after these mothers and these children. Mr. President, from hearing my colleague from Texas speak especially, one would think we have seen this dramatic increase in welfare benefits. The Senator from Texas combined all the programs in this statement earlier. But, again, I do not think we can be talking about all the programs. If you wanted to have a debate about the welfare state broadly defined, let us have that debate. But do not keep mixing apples and oranges and throw out a $5.4 trillion figure here and talk about increases here. With the AFDC program, which is the program we are talking about, benefits have decreased 47 percent since 1970 in real dollar terms. It is pretty amazing to me. You have an average benefit of $366 a month for a family of three, and then I think the maximum increase of a benefit for another child in a typical State is $72 more. We make $130,000 a year as Senators. Think about this for a moment. Think about what it costs to raise your child. Do you really believe that, with a typical benefit being $377 per month, and you get an additional $72 a month, that that is why women have children? Do you think they are further ahead? Do you think that is a good deal, with what it costs to raise a child? There is no evidence of that. No evidence supporting that. No evidence for that whatsoever. And if you are honest with yourselves and you think about your own family, you will know that it costs much more than that to raise a child. We have heard a lot. I will conclude just with a little bit more factual information. This is just an average monthly AFDC benefit per family, in 1992 dollars. From 1970 to 1992, the real value of the AFDC benefit fell 45 percent. If anybody wants to dispute me on the floor of the Senate, do so. Does anybody want to? Good. We have established that fact. Mr. President, AFDC and food stamp benefits as a percentage of poverty line for a family of three, from 1980 to 1993--AFDC only, average benefit is now 38 percent of poverty line; AFDC and food stamps is 67 percent of poverty line. It was 83 percent in 1980, 74 [[Page S 11752]] percent in 1985, 72 percent in 1990. It is now down to 67 percent of poverty. So I guess we have not seen a dramatic increase in benefits. Not even on the average 67 percent of what we say it takes a family to purchase a minimum amount of goods and services; 1 percent of the Federal budget. And this is where we are targeting all of our guns. Right? Mr. President, here is a chart called ``Percentage Spending for AFDC as a Percentage of Total Federal Outlays, 1970 to 1992.'' In 1970, it was 1.40 percent; 1975, 1.5 percent; and 1992, 0.88 percent. Is it 1 percent now? Is there any dispute about that? Mr. President, now we are going to talk about just block granting; cut child care, tell people they have to work, no affordable child care, do not even talk about the job opportunity structure, do not try to raise the minimum wage--not just for welfare mothers but for working families, and Medicaid for 1 year. Then what happens after 1 year, given the job opportunity structure, and how do you afford decent child care? I am going to make a child care point. I am going to make a State point. And then I am going to sit down. But I cannot wait for us to get into some real debate on the floor of this Senate, because if there is any role I can play, it is to make sure that nobody gets away, with just impunity, with coming to the floor with all these stereotypes. Senators can disagree, and that is fine. I am all for that. I just want to make sure when the final policy is enacted it is not based on myths about many of these women who cannot fight back. By the way, we are talking about women and children in the main. Women and children. On the child care part--I will not go into child care. We will wait. We will have that debate. Mr. President, let me just give you a feel for the AFDC benefits in States. I see my colleague from Texas. Texas--but I will not pick on Texas. I will talk about a lot of different States. The maximum monthly AFDC benefits, as of January 1994, was $184. That is for a family of three--$184. That is 19 percent of the poverty level. Mr. President, the decline in the monthly benefits for a family of three, after adjusting for inflation, in the State of Texas was 67 percent, a decline. In Alabama, it was $164. That is 17 percent of the Federal poverty line. In Maryland--I am going through this at random--$366, 38 percent of the poverty line. Minnesota, $533, 54 percent of the poverty line. New York, $577, 60 percent of the poverty line. This is just welfare benefits. This is AFDC, not the food stamp part. New Jersey, $424, 44 percent of the poverty line. Vermont, $638, 67 percent of the poverty line. Arkansas, $204, 21 percent of the poverty line; Mississippi, $120 per month, 13 percent of the poverty line. Mr. President, let us just finish up this way. Quite to the contrary, people are not living ``high off the hog.'' Quite to the contrary, people are trying to obtain work. Quite to the contrary, most welfare mothers and most policy analysts I know are for reform. But you have affordable child care, and I think the biggest job we have is job opportunity, to be able to get the job, to be able to support yourself. Look at the jobs available. Let me say this to my colleague from New York. With regard to this whole notion of ``get off your duff and get a job'' mentality, a recent study on the availability of jobs in the fast food restaurants found that for each job, there were 14 applicants. As the study's authors put it, ``In short, it is simply not the case that anyone who wants even a low-wage job can get one.'' This is the study ``The Job Ghetto.'' This was in the American Prospect, summer of 1995.

Mr. WELLSTONE. Mr. President, I will conclude with the following poem that was just given to me. It comes from Julia Dinsmore, a welfare mother in my State of Minnesota. My name is not ``those people.'' We always call them ``those people,'' and we had a Member on the floor of the House refer to animals-- ``wolves and alligators,'' a shameful debate. My name is not ``those people.'' I am a loving woman, a mother in pain, giving birth to the future where my babies have the same chance as anyone. My name is not ``inadequate.'' I did not make my husband leave us. He chose to and chooses not to pay child support. While society turns its head, my children pay the price. My name is not ``problem'' and ``case to be managed.'' The social service system can never replace the compassionate concern of loving grandparents, uncles, fathers, cousins, community. Oh, the people who need to be but are not present to bring children forward to their full potential. My name is not ``lazy, dependent welfare mother.'' If the unwaged working parent's home making, community building was factored into the gross national product, my work would have untold value. By the way, Mr. President, this is really counterintuitive where this debate is going, and I do think it is very important to have jobs with decent wages. I want to remind my colleagues that being at home and taking care of children, whether you are a woman or a man, is important, vitally important, productive work. My name is not ``ignorant, dumb and uneducated.'' I live with an income of $621 with $169 in food stamps. Rent is $585.'' This is from Minnesota. Our benefits are much higher than most. That leaves $36 a month to live on. I am such a genius at surviving that I could balance the State budget in an hour. Never mind that there is a lack of living-wage jobs. Never mind that it is impossible to be the sole emotional, social, and economic support to a family. Never mind that single mothers can work another job outside the home and lose their children to the gangs, drugs, stealing, prostitution, social workers, kidnapping, street predators. Forget about putting money into our schools. Just build more prisons. My name is not ``lay down and die quietly.'' My love is powerful and my urge to keep my children alive will never stop. All children need homes and people who love them. All children need safety and the chance of being the people they were born to be. The wind will stop before I let my children become a statistic. Before you give in to the urge to blame me, the blame that lets us go blind and unknowing into isolation that disconnects us, take another look. Do not go away, for I am not a problem but the solution. And my name is not ``those people. I yield the floor. Several Senators addressed the Chair.

Mr. WELLSTONE. Just looking at this comparatively for a moment, in other countries that have more generous, if you will, more broadly defined welfare payments, do we see more children born out of wedlock in those countries?

Mr. WELLSTONE. I hope later on we will have time for questions.

Mr. WELLSTONE

Mr. WELLSTONE. Mr. President, what the Urban Institute has come out with really should not surprise anyone who is a student of health care. And what the urban institute has said is that the kind of conventional wisdom in Medicare costs have been rising at a faster rate than private health insurance costs is simply not true once you look at the capital expenditure. That is, a matter of fact, what is happening with Medicare which is, of course, part of the success of Medicare--that more and more people, thank God, live to be 65, and more and more people, thank God, live to be 80. That is really what you have to look at. So it is not this sort of promise of shifting everything from fee for service to managed care and, therefore, reducing the costs, which needs to be questioned. [[Page S 11730]] The conclusion of this editorial is that in the long run, if the Government is going to pay appreciably less, the program is likely to provide less, or the recipients will have to pay more. Mr. President, let me just be clear about this in response to so much of what I heard this morning on the floor of the Senate about Medicare. The Medicare Program, which passed in 1965, and the Medicaid Program, which passed in 1965, made the United States of America a better country. And this legislation, this public policy, was a response to the real pain of elderly people in our country. Half of the elderly population prior to Medicare had no health insurance. It is that simple. People are no longer working. They do not have their jobs. So they do not have their coverage. In addition, when people are not working their employment earnings drop precipitously. Today 36 million elderly and disabled Americans, including more than 630,000 Minnesotans, are protected by Medicare. Mr. President, I only have about 8 minutes. But I just want to kind of respond to some of what I heard said this morning in one, two, three, four fashion. First, the concern of my colleagues about the Medicare trust fund and the need to finance Medicare would be more credible to me if we were not juxtaposing with the $270 billion in cuts in Medicare the $245 billion of tax cuts for wealthy people. It is a little bit suspicious, especially since the vast majority of the tax cuts--some 80 percent--go to families with incomes of over $100,000 a year. Mr. President, there is an important change being proposed here. As opposed to Medicare being a universal health insurance program--that is what it has been about for elderly people, senior citizens--now the proposal is to have a fixed amount of cash for each Medicare beneficiary that they can use to purchase coverage in the marketplace. And the difference between the value of that voucher and what happens with medical inflation, that needs to be made up by the recipient. Mr. President, there is something profoundly wrong with the direction we are going in. First of all, understand that what has made this program so successful--and it has been a huge success--is that it is universal for all citizens 65 years of age and over. Understand, second of all, that we are not talking about a high income profile. Elderly people pay four times as much out of pocket as those 65 years of age and less. Some 75 percent of the Medicare expenditures go to families or households with incomes of $25,000 a year or less. And I am not even talking about the, roughly speaking, $40,000 a year that have to be paid for nursing home expenditures which is the catastrophic expenses that so many elderly people have to phase in at the end of their lives which wiped out savings. Mr. President, the other point that my colleagues did not want to make is that while, on the one hand, we have the Medicare per person expenditure inflated to rise under 5 percent per year, the private health insurance expenditures are slated to go up over 7 percent a year. Who makes up the difference? Mr. President, there are some problems with this proposal that are really quite profound. And they ought to be laid out, and I have yet to hear anybody on the other side of the aisle respond adequately. No. 1, if you are going to cut $270 billion a year, then quite clearly beneficiaries are going to have to pay more, and many cannot afford to pay more. In addition, you are going to have, roughly speaking, 50 percent of those cuts go in the form of less reimbursement for the care givers or for the providers. But, Mr. President, No. 1, many elderly people cannot afford to pay more. And, No. 2, in greater Minnesota or greater Idaho where 70 or 80 percent of the patient mix are elderly people, those hospitals and clinics which have a tough time making a go of it right now will go under. That is the case in Minnesota. That is the case in rural America. This policy will not work. This is slash and burn. Third of all, Mr. President, what will happen is it is the same shell game. We have talked about this over and over again. I can assure you that when the providers can transfer the costs--and they can do that in some of the metropolitan areas--they will do so. So if the doctors or clinics or hospitals get less in reimbursements than the cost of providing care, shifting it to private health insurance, premiums go up for employers, who then in turn drop employees, and we have more employees dropped from coverage--hardly a positive change, hardly a reform for health care. Mr. President, we do not know how we are going to finance medical education since that right now, much of it, is out of Medicare. What happens to our hospitals, our teaching hospitals? Mr. President, as a Senator from Minnesota, what happens to my State, which is a State which has already reduced much of the fat in the system, which has weeded out many of the inefficiencies? We are at rock bottom. This slash-and-burn approach will not work for rural Minnesota and it will not work for metropolitan Minnesota. Mr. President, the fact is we are not talking about reform. If we want to talk about reform, I say to my colleagues, do not have the tax cuts, $245 billion. Second, why are we spending $7 billion more on the Pentagon budget, but we are going to cut health care for the elderly people? Third, why are we leaving all the subsidies for the oil companies, the pharmaceutical companies, the tobacco companies, but we are going to cut benefits for Medicare recipients? And finally, if you want to have cost containment, do it systemwide. Why not get back to health care reform. Why not move forward. This is not an effort to take us into the 21st century. This is an effort to move us back into the 19th century. Systemwide cost containment? Yes. Universal health care coverage? Yes. Focus on home-based health care so elderly people and people with disabilities can live at home in as near normal circumstance as possible with dignity? Yes. Health care reform but with financing for medical education? Yes. We can have health care reform, colleagues, but this is slash and burn. And no set of speeches will be able to ignore that reality. And so, Mr. President, this morning was the beginning of the debate. I look forward to much more of that debate, but I wish to be crystal clear what is at stake here. This is a program which made a huge difference in our country. As a Senator from Minnesota, I am going to fight very hard to maintain the integrity of this program. I yield the floor.

Mr. WELLSTONE. Mr. President, first of all let me ask unanimous consent that the editorial today in the Washington Post entitled ``Cutting Medicare'' be printed in the Record.