Realistic Roofing Tax Treatment Act of 2003

Mr. President, today I want to introduce legislation to direct the Census Bureau to develop a test census of Americans living abroad in 2004. The long-term goal is to develop methods to include Americans living overseas in our next decennial census in 2010.

There are approximately 3 million to 6 million private American citizens living and working overseas, and many of them continue to vote and pay taxes in the United States. These citizens help increase exports of American goods, because they traditionally buy American, sell American,and create business opportunities for American companies and workers. Their role in strengthening the U.S. economy, creating jobs in the United States, and extending U.S. influence around the globe is vital to the well-being of our Nation.

I believe that Americans abroad deserve to be counted, and to achieve this goal we must begin with a test census next year.

For many years, I have been proud to work on policies to ensure that Americans living abroad are treated fairly.

Mr. President, I am proud to join Senator Grassley and a bipartisan coalition in sponsoring the Adoption Promotion Act of 2003. This legislation will reauthorize and expand on the adoption bonuses created as part of the 1997 Adoption and Safe Families Act.

The Adoption and Safe Families Act stated clearly that a child's health and safety are paramount, and that every child deserves a permanent home. Key policy changes were made to promote permanency, including streamlining the process and creating incentives for adoption. Since 1997, the number of adoptions from foster care increased by 64 percent, and the number of adoptions of children with special needs increased by 63 percent. This is wonderful news for the children and families. But over 500,000 children are still in foster care, and 126,000 of those children have adoption as a goal.

This legislation would reauthorize the existing adoption bonuses, and it would create a new bonus for children over the age of 9 who represent almost half of the children waiting for adoption. The Adoption Promotion Act is an important next step to improving our child welfare system.

In West Virginia, over 900 children have been adopted from the foster care system since enactment of the Adoption and Safe Families Act. This is good news for the children and families, but many more children in my State and across the country are waiting for a safe, permanent home.

Adoption is a wonderful event that changes a child's life and creates a special family. Today, in addition to introducing this legislation, the Congressional Adoption Caucus will celebrate its Angels in Adoption Award, including an award to a very special West Virginian, Millie Mairs, who has worked on adoption issues in my State for almost 30 years at the West Virginia Children's Home Society. Her work has helped to change many lives.

This legislation is key, but it is only part of the puzzle to improving our foster care system which, according to the findings of the Child and Family Service Reviews, needs to be strengthened. As more children move into adoption, especially older children, we must become more aware and respond to the needs for post-adoption services. I hope that future action on child welfare reform will be bipartisan, like the Adoption Promotion Act. It is encouraging to know that the Pew Commission on Children in Foster Care is working to develop recommendations regarding child welfare financing and the role of the courts in child welfare policy. Hopefully, these recommendations can help forge bipartisan consensus for future changes that will enhance the lives of our most vulnerable children, those in foster care.

Mr. President, I would like to draw your attention to a few very troubling statistics. Manufacturing employment in the United States has now fallen to its lowest level in 41 years. In the last five years, we have lost 16 percent of all our factory jobs. In the last 2 years alone we have lost approximately 2.5 million manufacturing jobs.

These are frightening statistics. They ought to jolt every Member of the Senate and prompt an urgent call for action. A vibrant manufacturing base is essential to our standard of living. For generations, factory jobs have been the path to the middle class, providing good wages, health insurance, and pension benefits. Advances in manufacturing technology accounts for most of our economy's increased productivity. And every dollar spent on finished manufactured goods is estimated to produce $2.43 of economic activity. Simply put, we cannot become a service-only economy and expect to maintain our high standard of living. We ought to act swiftly to ensure that Americans still produce steel and computers and cars and pharmaceuticals.

We ought not be timid in the face of the devastating statistics I cited. Piecemeal efforts will not revitalize our industrial base. Therefore, today I am introducing the Securing America's Factory Employment (SAFE) Act. This bill will offer relief to American manufacturers on several fronts. First, my legislation would provide a tax deduction to any company that offers manufacturing jobs in the United States. Second, this bill helps companies cover the cost of providing health care for retirees, a crippling obligation for many of our once proud industries. And third, I propose that we strengthen our trade laws to ensure that they offer the protections that our domestic industries deserve from unfair and illegal trade practices.

Let me take a moment to explain in greater detail how these proposals can help our domestic manufacturing base. This Congress is compelled to repeal the Foreign Sales Corporation/Extraterritorial Income provisions of the U.S. Tax Code in order to avoid $4 billion in trade sanctions authorized by the World Trade Organization. Regardless of my opinion of the WTO's decision in this matter, I recognize that it may be that to protect our economy from a trade war we must update our Tax Code. We can do so and still encourage manufacturing by reducing the overall effective corporate income tax rate on domestic manufacturing.

The SAFE Act provides a 9-percent deduction for profits derived from manufacturing activities in the United States; this is the equivalent of lowering the corporate income tax rate from 35 percent to 32 percent for the portion of profits that can be directly linked to U.S. factories, mining operations, and the like. This straightforward tax break will lower the cost of doing business in the United States and will help companies that employ Americans compete in the global marketplace.

In addition, this bill includes a tax credit to employers to encourage them to retain their retiree health insurance coverage. As you know, employers and other health plan sponsors continue to restructure how they provide health care benefits for both workers and retirees. The percent of employers offering retiree health benefits has declined substantially over the past 15 years. Two-thirds of all firms with 200 or more workers sponsored retiree coverage 15 years ago. According to the most recent data, only 38 percent of such employers provide retiree benefits today. Despite these reductions, the employer- sponsored health care system is the largest source of health care coverage in this country today. The SAFE Act would provide employers with a tax credit to cover 75 percent of the costs associated with providing health care coverage to their retirees in order to protect existing coverage and reverse the current trend.

Finally, my legislation would strengthen our trade protections. Our antidumping and countervailing duty (AD/CVD) trade law are often the first and last time of defense for U.S. industries injured by unfairly or illegally traded imports. These laws are absolutely essential to the survival of our manufacturing sector in an increasingly global market-- but some of their provisions have become antiquated by recent changes in our global economy and the new structure of international trade. The Americans steel crisis has made it clear that these trade laws need to be strengthened. Companies, workers, families and communities rely heavily on these laws to prevent the ill-effects of unfair trade. Our antidumping and countervailing duty laws need to be updated and amended so they work as intended, and as permitted, under the rules of international trade.

For example, the SAFE Act includes a provision that allows us to consider whether or not an industry is vulnerable to the effects of imports in making antidumping and countervailing duty determinations. Another provision in this bill will make it tougher for our trading partners to circumvent antidumping or countervailing duty orders by clarifying that AD/CVD orders include products that have been changed in only very minor respects. This will help prevent foreign nations from making slight alterations to products that they are exporting to us to in order to skirt existing AD/CVD orders.

Another clear problem under our current trade laws is that foreign producers and exporters of subject merchandise may avoid AD/CVD duties by using complex schemes that mask payment of countervailing duties resulting in the understatement of duty rates. My legislation would restrict such practices by requiring the importer, if affiliated with the foreign producers or exporters, to demonstrate that the importer was in no way reimbursed for any AD/CVD duties paid. There are certainly other changes we should consider to update our trade remedy laws. These provisions are by no means an exhaustive list of needed reforms. But we do need to get the debate started, and I offer this bill as a way to re-energize the debate.

The SAFE Act addresses several of the most dire needs of our manufacturing companies. It improves our trade laws, helps with the burden of retiree health care costs, and effectively lowers the corporate tax rate on manufacturing activities. This package of reforms is an effective plan to stem the flow of good manufacturing jobs overseas. If we are serious about revitalizing our economy and maintaining our standard of living, we must act quickly to shore up our manufacturing base. I hope that my colleagues will join me in this effort.

I ask that the text of my legislation be printed in the Record.

Mr. President, I rise today to introduce the Realistic Roofing Tax Treatment Act of 2003 which would amend the Internal Revenue Code to provide a more realistic depreciation schedule for commercial roofs.

In 1981, Congress eliminated component depreciation and put into place a general depreciation period of 15 years for all building components. In 1993, the recovery period for nonresidential property was extended to 39 years in order to raise revenue. The current 39-year depreciation period is not a realistic measure of the average life span of a commercial roof. It is a disincentive for building owners to replace non-performing roofs, because replacing failing roofs more frequently than 39 years means carrying the burden of roofs that no longer exist on the books.

A study by Ducker Worldwide, a leading industrial research firm, found the current aggregate commercial roof life span is 17.45 years. Ducker estimates that a shortened depreciation schedule will stimulate economic activity and generate 30,000 new jobs in a two-year period. I am particularly concerned that we help America's manufacturers and this legislation will provide them immediate tax relief. It will also provide relief to America's small businesses, which find it more difficult to absorb the impact of capital improvement expenditures than larger entities.

Congressman Foley will shortly be introducing similar legislation in the House of Representatives. I am pleased that this proposal has the support of the United Union of Roofers, Waterproofers and Allied Workers, and I urge my colleagues to support this important piece of legislation when it comes before the Senate.

Mr. President, today, I am pleased to introduce a bill that will address an issue of inequity in the U.S. Tax Code. Current tax law requires that certain production expenses of a product for sale by a manufacturer be capitalized into the inventory cost of that product. One such expense is the allocable portion of interest expenses that are attributable to equipment used in that production. However, this capitalization requirement only applies when the product being produced has a production period in excess of 2 years.

The bill I am introducing today will clarify that, for the production of distilled spirits, the production period for purposes of this capitalization rule includes only the distilling of the liquor--it does not include time that the liquors are naturally aged following the distillation.

This is an important clarification to insure that distilled spirits that are aged for long periods of time--in some cases many years--do not face adverse tax consequences merely due to this aging process. The clarification of this inequity will aid many small distilleries located in the United States by not forcing them to carry additional inventory costs over long periods of time.

I urge my colleagues to support this important legislation.

Mr. President, I would like the opportunity to talk for a few minutes with my colleague from Iowa about the important role of adoption and foster care. Today, I am proud to be supporting legislation that the Senator from Iowa is introducing to reauthorize the Adoption Incentive Program. This is an important program that encourages States to do all they can to find permanent homes for children in foster care.

I am pleased that we are continuing the bonuses for States that increase the number of adoptions each year, along with keeping the additional incentive for adoptions of special needs children and providing a new incentive for States to focus on the adoptions of older children.

I am proud to say that Kentucky has also done fairly well under the Adoption Incentive Program over the years, and I am glad we are continuing the program. From 1998 to 2001, Kentucky received $1.6 million adoption incentives. For 2002, the Department of Health and Human Services recently announced that my State will receive $204,000 in adoption incentives.

I am sure the Senator from Iowa will agree with me that we need to make it as easy as possible for loving families to either adopt or become foster parents for children in need. There is nothing more special than a family opening up their home to a child and providing a safe and supportive environment. This is why I have worked on adoption and foster care issues for so long in Congress.

In fact, last year I was pleased that one of my foster care initiatives was passed as part of the 2002 economic stimulus bill. Many families who take in foster care children receive stipends from the placement agency which helps pay for food, clothes and other expenses.

In the past, some of these stipends were tax-free for families, while others were taxable. I didn't feel that was fair, so my provision made all stipends that foster care families receive to be tax free. This provision corrected an inconsistency in the tax code that unfairly punished foster care families and the children for whom they care, and I was happy we could finally correct this problem.

I certainly agree with you that the adoption tax credits are good policy, and I am very familiar with them. In fact, back in 1996, I worked as a Member of the Ways and Means Committee to pass the original legislation providing for the tax credits to help families afford to adopt children. We finally got this credit passed as part of the Small Business Job Protection Act which passed over seven years ago. I was very supportive of the provisions in the 2001 tax bill to expand these credits, but would like to take them one step further.

Within the next couple of weeks, I will be introducing legislation to make these tax credits permanent. If we don't eliminate the sunset which was built into the tax bill, then the current maximum credit of $10,000 will be reduced back down to $5,000 in 2010. To me, this seems like a common-sense change that needs to be made.

I introduced a similar bill in the 107th Congress, and I am hopeful that we can get this bill passed before the end of the 108th Congress.

Finally, I would like to say a few words about the importance of promoting interracial adoptions. In the past, many times there were barriers to families adopting minority children. This isn't fair to the family or the child. That is why in 1996, I pushed for legislation stopping discrimination against minority children in order to make it easier for them to move from foster care into a loving, permanent home.

All of these initiatives are designed to help find permanent or temporary homes for our Nation's children. Today, we are taking another important step by reauthorizing the Adoption Incentive Program, and I hope that we can get this bill through the Senate and onto the President's desk soon.

Mr. President, Senator Landrieu, Senator Bunning and I are happy to introduce the Adoption Promotion Act of 2003, a bill that would extend and improve the Adoption and Safe Families Act of 1997. Across the country there are thousands of children of all ages and needs who are waiting to be adopted into stable families. This legislation provides a reward to States that place an emphasis on finding loving homes for children who are in foster care.

The Adoption and Safe Families Act of 1997 rewarded States with cash incentives for increasing the number of adoptions of children in foster care, concentrating on children with special needs. Adoption levels were on the rise before the introduction of this legislation, but grew even faster after implementation of the program. Studies project that an additional 34,000 children were adopted during the first 3 years of the program. Currently each of the 50 States, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico have received incentive payments from the increased number of adoptions. My home State of Iowa just received a payment of $524,000 because of its success in finding children in foster care permanent homes. The results are clear, adoption incentives are working.

There are many people in this country who have opened their arms to children that do not fit the typical mold. The Lippert family of Council Bluffs, IA is just one example. Over the last 25 years, they have adopted 16 children, in addition to their two biological children. Their doors are still open to children in need. Within the next 6 months their nest will become even larger; they have three teenage girls who are in the process of being adopted. All but one of these children have special needs, ranging from emotional to physical disabilities. None of these challenges have stopped the Lippert family from helping their children become successful members of the community. The Lippert family has given these children a chance to be part of a loving and permanent family, an opportunity they would otherwise not have had.

But much remains to be done. While adoption incentives have helped states place a large number of children in families, there are still thousands of children without such luck. The incentive program helps to promote the needs of children for whom it is challenging to find an adoptive home. Take for example, children over the age of 9. The probability that these children will ever find a permanent home exceeds the probability they will be adopted into a loving family. This legislation adds an incentive for States to increase the number of older children adopted out of foster care.

Adoption is a positive life-changing experience. My bill builds upon the success of the Adoption and Safe Families Act of 1997. It recognizes these successes and continues to challenge States to remove children from foster care and place them with a permanent family. Adoptions give children a loving home and families an opportunity to share their love with a child in need. I encourage the Senate to consider this important piece of legislation and continue to reward States that are working to place children in permanent homes.

I ask unanimous consent that the text of the bill be printed in the Record.

I appreciate that the Senator from Kentucky has worked so hard with me on the reauthorization of the Adoption Incentive Program. I also appreciate the lead the Senator took several months ago when he introduced the original legislation to reauthorize this program, which was based on the administration's proposal. This was an important step to help get the ball rolling on this program's reauthorization.

Our legislation builds upon the Adoption Incentive Program created in the Adoption and Safe Family Act of 1997. This bill sets the authorization level for this program at $43 million for each of fiscal year 2004 through fiscal year 2008. Through this legislation, States would continue to be rewarded for all increased adoptions of children in foster care.

States that earn incentive payments for increased adoptions of foster children would also continue to be rewarded for increased adoptions of special needs children. However, the special needs payment would be limited only to adoptions of special needs children who are under age 9 at the time the adoption is finalized.

Senator Bunning, as you well know, our bill would create a third incentive payment, for each increased adoption of all children in foster care who are age 9 or older at the time of adoption. This is important because children over the age of nine are less likely to find a permanent adoptive home. In fact, the probability that these children never find a permanent home exceeds the probability they will be adopted into a loving family.

My home State of Iowa and its child welfare program has also benefited from this program. Last year, Iowa received a payment of $524,000 because of its success in finding children in foster care, permanent homes. Our States' successes underscore the results of this program; adoption incentives are working.

In the recent past, Congress has also taken some positive steps to promote adoption through tax credit. In 2001, as chairman of the Finance Committee, I extended and expanded two important provisions which provide tax relief for adoptive families.

The 2001 tax bill ensured that neither adoption tax credit, nor the exclusion from income for qualified employer-paid adoption expenses expired. In addition, the amount of each of these benefits was doubled--i.e., from $5,000 to $10,000 per qualifying child. Finally, in the case of special needs adoptions, Congress eliminated expense reporting requirements thus ensuring that the families who take special needs children into their homes receive the maximum relief possible under these provisions, while minimizing their administrative burdens.

I look forward to working with you on this issue in the near future.

It is also my hope that we can get this bipartisan bill through Congress and allow it to become law. I would like to thank you, Senator Bunning, and the other members of the Senate who have worked so hard on this legislation.

Mr. President, I rise today as a cosponsor, along with my colleagues, Senators Bingaman and Murray of the Manhattan Project National Historical Park Study Act.

This bill authorizes a special resource study to determine the suitability and feasibility of developing a national park site at one or more of the facilities that playing a major role in the Manhattan Project--the Federal Government's top-secret effort during World War II to develop nuclear weapons before its opponents, an initiative that changed the course of world history. I believe it is tremendously important for the citizens of our Nation to learn about the important functions the various Manhattan Project sites served in defending our Nation, from World War II through the cold war, and to recognize and understand the complicated and weighty issues arising from the production and use of nuclear weapons, their impact on world history as well as their human and environmental costs.

In January of 1943, Hanford, WA was selected by the War Department to serve as a part of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's Manhattan Project plan. The site was selected for several reasons: It was remotely located from population centers, which fostered security and safety; the Columbia River provided plenty of water to cool the reactors; and cheap and abundant electricity was available from nearby Federal dams.

The history of this era is a complicated one--as farmers and tribes were displaced, given 30 days to move from their homes in central Washington. By March 1943, construction had started on the site, which covers about 625 square miles. At the time, the priority facility on the Hanford Reservation was the B reactor. Built in just 11 months as American scientists and their allies engaged in what was then perceived as a race with the Germans to develop nuclear capability, B reactor was the world's first large-scale plutonium production reactor.

The need for labor for the project turned Hanford into an atomic boomtown, with the population reaching 50,000 by the summer of 1944. Workers at the sprawling Hanford complex were not even sure of what they were producing, and tales of German rockets used during battles led many workers to believe they were producing rocket fuel. In fact, this secrecy continued even after the atomic bombs were dropped. One worker recalled that many children who lived in the area didn't even know what their parent who worked at Hanford did on the job.

Clearly, the B reactor at Hanford made significant contributions to U.S. defense policies during its production run, from 1944 through 1968. Plutonium from the B reactor was used in the world's first nuclear explosion, called the Trinity Test, in New Mexico on July 16, 1945. B reactor plutonium was also used in the ``Fat Man'' bomb dropped on Nagasaki, Japan on August 9, 1945. The blast devastated more than two square miles of the city, effectively ending World War II. The B reactor also produced plutonium for the cold war efforts until 1968.

The B reactor is simply a stunning feat of engineering. Built in less than a year, the reactor consisted of a 1,200-ton graphite cylinder lying on its side, which was penetrated through its entire length horizontally by over 2,000 aluminum tubes. Two hundred tons of uranium slugs the size of rolls of quarters went into the tubes. Cooling water from the Columbia River, which first had to be treated, was pumped through the aluminum tubes at 75,000 gallons per minute. Water consumption approached that of a city with a population of 300,000. The B reactor was one of three reactors that had its own auxiliary facilities that included a river pump house, large storage and settling basins, a filtration plant, huge motor-driven pumps for delivering the water, and facilities for emergency cooling in case of a power failure. It was the first of an eventual nine nuclear reactors that remain on the banks of the Columbia River--a potent reminder of both the war effort and the environmental burden with which we must contend.

The people of Washington State, and especially the residents of the tri-cities, are proud of their contributions to the World War II and cold war efforts. We are left with these irreplaceable relics of the Manhattan Project--such as the B reactor--which are incredibly important in understanding the engineering achievements that propelled this country into the nuclear age, with all of the complicated moral issues it poses for the possessors of such technology. As the Department of Energy continues its work to clean up the Hanford site, the country's most contaminated nuclear reservation, it is important that we also honor the achievements of the important work done here, as well as commemorate the tremendous sacrifices made by workers, displaced families and tribes, and this era's environmental legacy.

There is already strong support in the communities that surround Hanford for preserving the history of the Manhattan Project, and I would like to commend the B reactor Museum Association and Bechtel Hanford, Inc. for all this work to date. In recent years, they have worked hard to decontaminate, clean, inventory, and spruce up B reactor's interior so that people can walk in to see three chambers. But more work needs to be done if we want to preserve the reactor for future generations, which must learn about the Manhattan Project and its impact on world history.

One such way to do that is to look into the possibility of adding the B reactor as well as Manhattan Project sites in other parts of the country as a new National Park unit.

I look forward to working with my colleagues to ensure passage of this bill, as the study it authorizes is a much-needed first step in determining the best options for preserving this important piece of American history.

Mr. President, I rise to introduce the Manhattan Project National Historical Park Study Act. This bill authorizes the National Park Service, in coordination with the Secretaries of Energy and Defense, to undertake a special resource study to assess the national significance, suitability, and feasibility of designating various Manhattan Project sites and their facilities as a National Historical Park. Specifically, the study will evaluate the historic significance of the Manhattan Project facilities of Los Alamos and the Trinity Site in the State of New Mexico, of the Hanford Site in the State of Washington, and of Oak Ridge in the State of Tennessee. I am pleased that my distinguished colleagues from the States of Washington, Senators Cantwell and Murray, are cosponsoring this bill.

The significance of the Manhattan Project to this Nation--and indeed the World--would be difficult to overstate. The project was initiated as a desperate effort in the middle of World War II to beat Nazi Germany to the construction of the first nuclear bomb. The effort was of a magnitude and intensity not seen before or since: in a mere three years, 130,000 men and women went to work on a $2.2 billion mission that furiously pushed science, technology, engineering, and society into a new age.

The magnitude of the effort is easily matched by its legacy. This legacy includes an ending to the Second World War, as well as the foundation for nuclear medicine and great advances in physics, mathematics, engineering, and technology. A number of scholars have argued that it also includes a dramatic change to a sustained era of relative world peace. But this legacy also includes the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Japanese, and the sacrifices of the homesteaders that were forced off of the sites to make way for the project, its thousands of workers and their families, and the uranium miners, ``down-winders'', and others. This legacy has been the subject of hot debate for decades, and this debate continues today--as it must.

There are historic facilities at the four Manhattan Project sites that are absolutely essential resources for informing this important debate, and there should be no question that they are of great national and international significance. Pulitzer Prize-winning Manhattan Project author Richard Rhodes has said that ``the discovery of how to release nuclear energy was arguably the most important human discovery since fire--reason enough to preserve its remarkable history.''

But while the enormous significance of the Manhattan Project makes our obligation to preserve and interpret this history abundantly clear, it makes it equally challenging. The greatest challenge has been--and will continue to be--interpreting this history in a sensitive and balanced way. This Nation is blessed with historic assets that praise the best of humanity and some that mourn the worst, some that grace us with glory and some that humble us with anguish, some that impress us with brilliance and some that embarrass us with senselessness, some that manifest beginnings and some that mark ends, some that inspire us with awe and some that fascinate us with curiosities, and some that grip us with the fear of destruction and some that give us the hope of creation. But I don't know of any others that challenge us with legitimate passions for all of these.

Preserving and interpreting this history also includes the challenge of respecting the ongoing missions and responsibilities of the Department of Energy and the Department of Defense at the Manhattan Project sites. Access to some of the historic facilities must be restricted--to some prohibited--and other precautions also may be necessary. The Departments of Energy and Defense have begun to take on these challenges, and they deserve much credit for doing so. The Bradbury Museum in Los Alamos is a good example, as are the biannual tours of the Trinity Site on White Sands Missile Range. They have recognized that preserving this history offers great opportunities not only for the public, but for their employees. Employees who better appreciate this history will be more likely to appreciate their careers, and they certainly will appreciate the boost interested tourists give to their local economies.

This bill asks the question whether we will do better to preserve and interpret the important history of the Manhattan Project by unifying and promoting the various efforts at these sites as a National Historical Park. It is appropriate that our Nation's leader in historic preservation and interpretation--the National Park Service--lead the effort to answer this question. In doing so, they will consult with the Secretaries of Energy and Defense, as well as State, tribal, and local officials, and representatives of interested organizations and members of the public. The Park Service's expertise, experience, and enthusiasm is critical to the endeavor.

In asking this question we are neither celebrating the Manhattan Project nor lamenting it. But we are recognizing our responsibility to society to ensure it is neither forgotten nor misunderstood.

I ask unanimous consent that the text of the bill be printed in the Record.