Floor Statements

Mr. Speaker, I rise to recognize Bowater's Catawba Operations, the largest coated paper manufacturing facility in North America. The plant makes paper used in magazines, flyers, inserts, and coupons, and I am proud to say that it is located in my congressional district.

Fifty years ago, when Bowater chose the site for a paper-making plant on the Catawba River in York County, South Carolina, a special session of our General Assembly was called to amend the state constitution so that Bowater, then a British firm, could purchase unlimited timberland acreage.

That plant site has proven its worth many times in the years since then. Now, Bowater's Catawba Operation has been recognized for meeting and surpassing world-class standards in manufacturing, employee programs, community outreach, and environmental stewardship.

The Catawba plant employs 1,000 associates. Most live in York, Chester, and Lancaster counties. And they are the reason that the Catawba plant won Industry Week's 2005 Best Plant competition, one of just 10 plants out of 220 nominated. They are also the reason that Catawba plant was named South Carolina's Manufacturer of the Year for 2004 by the South Carolina Chamber of Commerce and the National Association of Manufacturers.

Industry Week calls the plant a ``pacesetter'' that will ``continue to lead the way in the future.''

Bowater's Catawba Operations recently undertook major capital improvements, including the construction of a $175 million state-of- the-art kraft-pulping mill, along with a $106 million paper machine conversion. Both were completed while the mill maintained a full 24- hour production schedule.

The plant's associates and managers not only work hard and smart, they work safely--recently reaching a significant safety milestone by working four million hours without a disabling or lost time injury.

It comes as no surprise to us in South Carolina why the Catawba plant is second to none in its class.

As the editors of Industry Week put it in honoring the Catawba plant and the nine other ``Best Plants'': ``These plants produce different products from one another, operate different machinery, rely on a host of different improvement methods, and face different competitive challenges in their quests to excel at the jobs they do. What they share, however, is a vision of excellence by design, not by accident. They hire the right people and train them well, and they focus continually on improvement. They have leadership that encourages input from all employees and employees who take up the challenge; and they look outside their four walls to their upstream and downstream partners in their efforts to be the best.''

Mr. Speaker, I am proud to represent Bowater's Catawba Plant and its outstanding associates, and honored to call them today to the attention of the House.

Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for yielding me this time.

Mr. Speaker, I rise in full support of the $1.5 billion in veterans health care funding for 2005, which was added on to this conference report. I am pleased that my colleagues on the other side have finally come around to our position on veterans funding and now acknowledge that their budgets have not funded this priority accurately or adequately.

This shortfall has not occurred for lack of notice or foresight. Over warnings from veterans groups and our own strenuous objections, the budgets passed by this House have consistently, consistently, understated the cost of veterans health care.

This is the Veterans Administration borrowing from Peter to pay Paul, denying or delaying service until a supplement finally comes through. And then when the supplement comes through, it busts the spending caps imposed in the budget and adds to the deficit.

This is no way to budget for veterans health care, and it is no way to budget generally. The White House just 2 weeks ago issued a midsession review of the budget, which we received with some skepticism. We observed that their projections of the deficit seemed better, partly because they omit the full cost of various policies like veterans health care, the ongoing cost of operations in Afghanistan and Iraq, and fixing the alternative minimum tax, extending other tax credits.

In the short run, these omissions make the deficit look better, sure, but in the long run the true costs emerge, and the actual deficits turn out to be worse than projected.

Here, for example, is what happened to veterans health care in the fiscal 2005 budget cycle. When we brought forth our budget resolutions on the Democratic side for 2005, we argued that the discretionary spending levels in the Republican resolution were too tight, not realistic, and would shortchange essential priorities like veterans health care.

We were not alone. The chairman of the Veterans' Affairs Committee argued that more funding for veterans health care was badly needed, but our concerns went unheeded. Now we have to face the truth. The funding provided for veterans health care in the 2005 budget was, in fact, not sufficient.

And since an accurate funding level was not built into the budget, today's bill will move discretionary spending for 2005 over the allocation included in the Republican budget. This misestimate, like others, was left out of the deficit projections that OMB announced just a couple of weeks ago.

For the record, let me point out that the Democrats put forth a responsible budget for 2005. Our budget brought us to balance by the year 2012, yet we funded veterans health care priorities and other priorities adequately.

Our budget provided $1.3 billion more for veterans health care in 2005, and $1.5 billion more over a 5-year period of time. Unfortunately the same story is playing out, unfolding again in 2006. Once again, once again, this year we warned that the budget provided too little for veterans health care, and once again it was to no avail.

Our resolution provided $1.5 billion more for veterans health care in 2006, $16.4 billion more over 5 years, and a budget, mind you, that balanced by 2012. Just 3 months later, 3 months later, we are told that the VA appropriations bill for 2006 will have to exceed its budget allocation to accommodate the administration's amended request for veterans health care. And, of course, the deficit estimates for 2006 will have to be revised upward accordingly.

Mr. Speaker, I would gladly vote to raise veterans health care to the level it should have been to start with, but I urge that we learn a lesson from this experience and be forthright in the future about the cost of veterans health care. And in that connection, I would note that in the outyears, 2007, 2008 and onward, the official estimates of the Republican budget still grossly underfund veterans health care, they understate the deficit, and they definitely will have to do this all over again until the numbers are finally done right.

Mr. Speaker, there are various good reasons to vote against CAFTA, but the first is enough and it's basic: this is not a good deal.

The U.S. is running unprecedented trade deficits--$618 billion last year, $195 billion this year in the first quarter alone. And the deficit worsens every year, weakening our economy and our independence. Virtually every trade deal the U.S. has made has resulted in far more imports than exports. Yet we keep creating free trade zones in the blind faith that the market will optimize the outcome.

Central American countries are part of the Carribean Basin and already enjoy wide-open access to our markets by virtue of tariff Item 807, the Generalized System of Preferences, the Carribean Basin Trade Partnership Agreement, and the Uruguay Round of GATT, which has removed all quotas on textile/apparel imports. Far from being disadvantaged, these countries enjoy preferential access now.

In fact, the Caribbean Basin countries as a group already export more to the U.S. than Mexico and import less. The CBI countries shipped $2.6 billion in apparel exports to the U.S. versus $1.6 billion in apparel shipments from Mexico. During the most recent quarter, CBI countries imported $655 million in fabric from the U.S. Mexico imported $809 million. Overall, in 2004 our textile/apparel trade deficit with Mexico was $3.765 versus $5.669 with CBI countries.

CAFTA purports to be based on a rule of origin adopted from NAFTA. NAFTA provides that for textile and apparel goods to move freely among Mexico, Canada, and the U.S., they must be made from the yarn stage forward in these three countries. CAFTA follows the same rule, but carves out so many exceptions that the exceptions swallow the rule.

Here are some of the exceptions to the rule of origin that CAFTA allows for textiles and apparel:

Only the component that gives the garment its essential character is subject to the rule of origin. Non-essential components are excepted.

Textile or apparel goods that contain fabric or yarn deemed ``in short supply'' in the U.S. are treated as originating in CAFTA, regardless of origin. This opens the door to more Chinese components entering the U.S. duty-free.

Denim, wool, cotton, and man-made fiber woven products from Mexico and Canada, are permitted under the rule of ``cumulation.'' Cumulation allows countries that have free trade agreements with us to supply component parts to CAFTA countries without affecting duty-free treatment. This opens the sale of U.S. yarn and fabric to competition and increases the likelihood that transshipped textiles from China will enter the U.S. duty free.

For the first 10 years, CAFTA grants Tariff Preference Levels (TPL) to Nicaragua, for up to 100 million square meter equivalents of out-of- region cotton or man-made fiber garments. These goods come into the U.S. at nominal duties. This exception represents \2/3\ of Nicaragua's current capacity and opens another back door to Chinese imports.

The origin of collars, cuffs, and linings is not considered when determining the origin of the apparel goods. This allows the use of Chinese collars, cuffs and linings.

CAFTA allows Central American countries to use components from anywhere--including China--to make pajamas, bras, and boxers and import them duty-free. The import of these goods from China has been found disruptive to our markets. So, they are subject to ``restraints'' under a special ``safeguard'' agreement with China. By allowing duty-free access to the U.S. for these goods, CAFTA allows China a route around the ``safeguard'' restraints.

Here's another oddity about CAFTA. CAFTA benefits are retroactive to January 1, 2004. Manufacturers will receive duty rebates if CAFTA is ratified. Under the Caribbean Basin Trade Partnership Act, garments made in the region from U.S. yarns and fabrics already receive duty- free treatment. The only manufacturers who will benefit from retroactivity are the ones who want to use non-U.S. fabric as part of the single transformation, TPL, or cumulation loopholes. Retroactivity is essentially an invitation from the U.S. government to manufacturers to start using non-U.S. fabrics immediately.

The U.S. has been unable to make labor and environmental standards a condition of free trade for GATT/WTO members, though they should be. Otherwise, free trade becomes a race to the bottom. Our goal should not be just to expand markets, but to raise living standards. All CAFTA says is that a country must enforce its own laws. CAFTA sanctions the status quo, doing nothing for labor or environmental laws.

All in all, CAFTA strikes a poor bargain. China is now making trade deals world-wide, using as leverage the largest emerging market in the world. The U.S. still has the largest existing market in the world. Surely in exchange for access to our markets, we can cut a better deal than CAFTA--better for our workers and theirs.

Madam Speaker, when China joined the WTO, the U.S. and China entered into an ``accession protocol.'' Among other things, that protocol anticipates that the United States may find that China is subsidizing exports, and in that case, the United States may seek to impose countervailing duties, to level the playing field. The Department of Commerce is required to use Chinese data to measure the size of the subsidy, ``where practicable,'' but use of Chinese cost and pricing data is not always practicable, so similar data must be drawn from a comparable country. As originally drawn, this bill dropped the key phrase, ``where practicable.'' It restricted the ability of the Commerce Department to measure subsidies in China and other non-market economies. Due to a barrage of complaints from U.S. industry, that phrase was added back at the last moment, before this bill was brought to the floor.

But two other problems, to which U.S. industry objects, were not corrected.

First of all, this bill requires the Department of Commerce to ensure that there is no ``double-counting'' of countervailing duties and anti- dumping duties. Current law only requires that there be no double- counting of export subsidies, but makes no provision with respect to antidumping duties. Commerce has called this change ``wholly inappropriate.'' These are the words of the Commerce Department: ``The proposed change would put China into a special category distinct from all other countries when subject to concurrent anti-dumping and countervailing duty investigations.'' According to the Department of Commerce, this restriction ``would raise complex methodological questions, the costs of which may far outweigh any purported equity gains of any such adjustment.''

Secondly, this bill gives the WTO Dispute Settlement Body special influence over U.S. law. WTO decisions are not self-executing. The Congress decides how, when, and whether to implement a WTO decision. This bill would require the Commerce Department to ensure that our application of countervailing duty law to non-market economies is consistent with our international obligations. There

is no guarantee how the WTO would rule if this aspect of this law were brought before it. This provision could place WTO dispute settlement tribunals on a special footing when dealing with U.S. laws.

If this bill were brought up as a regular bill, it would be amendable, and these troubling provisions could be changed or deleted.

Mr. Speaker, six senior members of the Fort Mill Rotary Club in Fort Mill,

South Carolina are being honored for life-long contributions to their community.

All six have demonstrated the ideals of Rotary in their lives and made significant contributions to their communities, Fort Mill and Tega Cay. All are Paul Harris Fellows and all are World War II veterans. They are not only dedicated Rotarians but dedicated civic leaders, and most importantly, they are men who love their families, their country, and their church.

I want to share with my colleagues in the House of Representatives sketches that indicate the contributions of these six outstanding citizens: O.T. (Buddy) Culp, Robert C. (Bob) Hill, William H. (Howard) Jones, William C. (Bill) Kimbrell, Roderick W. (Rod) Snider, and Phillip D. (Phil) Ray.

Buddy Culp--U.S. Army Artillery, Fort Mill native, 1999 Fort Mill Business Person of the Year, Charter Member of Fort Mill Rotary Club, Sustaining Member and Paul Harris Fellow Award, Life-long member of Unity Presbyterian Church, served on the session and board of deacons several terms. Fort Mill Area Chamber Board of Directors, Life-long membership in York County Regional Chamber of Commerce, United Way and Boys & Girls Club of York County Board of Directors. Owned and operated Culp Brothers, oil jobber and convenience stores. Married to Bette Jo, two children.

Bob Hill--U.S. Marine Corps, Fort Mill native, 2005 Lifetime Achievement Award--York County Regional Chamber, Charter Member of Fort Mill Rotary Club, Sustaining Member and Paul Harris Fellow Award, Fort Mill Chamber--First President and First ``Man of the Year,'' Rock Hill Advisory Board of NationsBank, Retired Officers Association (Retired Major, SC ARNG), Veterans of Foreign Wars, American Legion, Former Member of York County Economic Development Board, United Way, Fort Mill Community Playhouse Past President, Member of the first York County Library Board, Masonic Lodge--Past Master, Optimist Club--Past President, Member for 60+ years of Unity Presbyterian Church. Owned and operated State Farm Insurance Agency in Fort Mill. Married to Dot, two children.

Howard Jones--U.S. Army Air Corps--saved three of his crew of four in a plane crash in combat over Italy, Member of Fort Mill Rotary Club since 1992, Sustaining Member and Paul Harris Fellow Award, Tega Cay Chamber--Past President, Carolina Historic Aviation Commission, Civic Air Patrol since 1948, Tega Cay Lions Club. Owned and operated American Management Appraisal. Married to Nancy, three children.

Bill Kimbrell--U.S. Navy, Fort Mill native, 2001 Lifetime Achievement Award, York County Regional Chamber, Charter Member of Fort Mill Rotary Club, Sustaining Member and Paul Harris Fellow Award, Fort Mill Chamber--Past President and ``Man of the Year,'' Member of Unity Presbyterian Church Choir for 55+ years and served on the session and board of deacons for several terms, American Heart Association, Boy Scouts of America, Boys & Girls Club of York County, Winthrop University Foundation, York Technical College Foundation Board of Directors. Married to Joanne, three children.

Phil Ray--U.S. Army Air Corps, Member of Unity Presbyterian Church and served on the session and board of deacons for several terms, Charter Member of Fort Mill Rotary Club, Sustaining Member and Paul Harris Fellow Award. Started Ray Textiles of Fort Mill from scratch and has been running it for 25 years. Married to Fannie, two children.

Rod Snider--U.S. Navy, Member of Fort Mill Rotary Club since 1995, Sustaining Member and Paul Harris Fellow Award, Member of Unity Presbyterian Church, Good Folks of York County, United Way, Vintage Club of Tega Cay, York County Foundation Board. Owned and operated Snider Plumbing. Married to Peg, three children.

Mr. Speaker, let me quickly point out that this should come as no surprise. The President's budget for 2005 cut veterans appropriated funding $248 million below the Congressional Budget Office estimate of what was needed to keep pace for inflation in 2005 and $13.4 billion below current services over 5 years. For 2006, the President's budget called the even deeper cuts. Excluding the proposal to impose new and unrealistic fees, it cut funding for veterans appropriated programs $759 million below current services necessary to keep pace with inflation, $18 billion below inflation over 5 years.

Democrats have offered alternatives every year on this floor that would have covered the shortfalls the V.A. has identified. In 2005, we offered a budget resolution with $2.5 billion more than the President requested. In 2006, we offered a budget resolution with $2.3 billion over the President's request. And every year the outyear funding that we proposed was also substantially more than they proposed, and that is a problem we are not even discussing tonight because consistently what has happened here is there has been a little plus-up in the near term and a flattening out in the long term, and we inherit the consequences and episodes like this.

If we had passed the resolutions that Democrats supported and brought to this floor, we would not be here tonight discussing this bill.

Mr. Speaker, this is not the first nor will it be the last time that we take the floor of the House here in the well of the House to address a problem that is of great concern to all of us, and that is the budget deficit. This year past, it was $412 billion and while it appears to be improving, thankfully, a bit for the current fiscal year, it still will come in likely in the range of $350 billion, and that will make it the third-largest deficit in our Nation's history, the third in a row where we have approached the pinnacle, the largest deficits we have run in our country's history.

We are not here to score political points. We are here to call attention to a problem that we think has grave consequences. It may be that we do not feel or see the consequences right now, but we feel that a day of reckoning lies on or just over the horizon. I believe that, because sooner or later the fundamentals in any market begin to take hold. It happened to the dot coms; it could happen again to us with the budget deficit that we are running today and the trade deficit we are running also today. It could hammer the dollar. After all, the fundamental is, simply stated, like this. When you raise the demand for credit, which is what you do when the government runs a deficit of $312 billion, $412 billion, when you raise the demand for credit, eventually you raise the price of credit. In other words, you raise interest rates. What do interest rates do when they go up? They stifle growth in the economy, long-term growth and short-term growth. They could have devastating consequences, for example, on the housing market, on the automobile market. That is a likely consequence of the policies we are running today.

For the time being, we have not felt or seen the results, the consequences, and largely that is due to the fact that this country is running large current account deficits, which means we are pumping dollars into the world economy which come back here, are recycled here by the purchase of our Treasury bonds and Treasury notes. So for now, foreigners are lending us the money to bridge our budget, which is sparing us the effect of high interest rates.

But at the same time, debt means dependence, and over the course of years if we continue this practice, we will find ourselves having undercut our independence in foreign policy which is something none of us wants. Even when foreigners buy our debt and spare us the outlay for now, we still have to pay the interest. We still have debt service. The debt service in the total budget this past year was $165 billion, $170 billion, and it is going up inexorably because we have got more debt, and interest rates are rising again. As those two factors converge, you are going to see the debt service, the interest we pay on the national debt, go up to $200 billion, $225 billion, $250 billion within the foreseeable future. This is an obligation that has to be paid. Indeed, there is no other item in the budget that is more obligatory. The United States of America has to pay its interest on its national debt or otherwise our currency and our credit would collapse. But once we pay the debt, once we pay the debt service, the effects are that priorities in the budget we could otherwise afford and fund and increase, such as medical research and scientific research and education for our children and Social Security and Medicare for the elderly become all the harder to fund because the interest has to be paid first.

This deficit problem is all the more distressing because it did not have to be. Just a few short years ago in the year 2000, the last full fiscal year of the Clinton administration, this country was running a surplus of $236 billion. It is a fact. You can look it up. Every year the Clinton administration was in office due to two budget plans we adopted, one in 1993, another in 1997, the bottom line of the budget got better and better and better.

The President came to office and inherited a deficit of $290 billion. He sent us on February 17 a deficit reduction plan that barely passed the House, a one-vote margin, barely passed the Senate, the Vice President's tie-breaking vote.

But look what happened, as this chart here shows. The deficit every year came down and down and down to the point where in the year 2000, we had a surplus, without including Social Security, a unified surplus of $236 billion. Unprecedented. This was the surplus that President Bush inherited when he came to office in the year 2001. And that is why I say this did not have to be. We did not just fall out of the sky with these enormous deficits. We did it because of policies that were adopted and passed in this House. Not by all of us. Most of us on our side of the aisle voted against them. Foreseeing this problem and knowing how difficult it had been to move the budget finally back into the black again for the first time in 30, 40 years, we did not want to see us backslide into deficit, but that is exactly what happened.

What we have seen now is that we have gone from a surplus, projected, of $5.6 trillion between 2002 and 2011. That was the 10-year projection that Mr. Bush's own economists made at the Office of Management and Budget when he took office, $5.6 trillion. We have gone from a projected surplus of $5.6

trillion to a projected deficit of $3.8 trillion over that same 10-year period of time. That is a swing of $9.4 trillion in the wrong direction. We have never seen a fiscal reversal like this, at least since the Great Depression, $9.4 trillion in the wrong direction, and much of that was policy driven.

The President says we have got to get our hands around spending, but a large part of this problem was driven by his insistence that we have unprecedentedly large tax cuts, and when the surpluses that we thought were going to obtain over that 10-year period of time appeared to be overstated substantially, by some estimates as much as 50 percent, the President charged ahead with his tax cuts. In 2002, 2003, in addition to 2001, there were substantial tax cuts, and the loss of revenues has had a big impact on the bottom line and has helped put the deficit almost intractably in the red again.

But most of the spending increases have come on the discretionary side of the budget in the appropriation bills that we adopt every year in four different accounts, four different programmatic areas, which is important to know, because all of these areas are areas where the President has sought and we have provided what he has sought in the way of additional increases in spending.

If you look at the increases in spending over and above current services, and that is the amount of money necessary to maintain the government services at their existing level, if you look at those spikes in the budget that rise above funding for current services alone, you will find the landscape for 4 years dotted by the same increases, namely, defense, homeland security, the response to 9/11, they account for 90 to 95 percent of the increases in spending.

So, while the President is saying that Congress needs to tighten spending, in truth much of the spending that has driven the budget into deficit is spending that has been called for for defense and homeland security and for the response to 9/11, called for by the President, passed by the Congress, and the fact of the matter is we are simply not paying the tab for these necessary expenses.

I am not disputing the need for this money. What I am disputing and calling attention to is the fact that we are taking the tab for defense in our time against terrorists in the Middle East and elsewhere and shoving this tab off onto our children.

That is why I often say that the deficit is a problem for the economy because eventually it will raise interest rates and stifle long-term growth, eventually it will affect the priorities in the budget because debt service is obligatory and has to be paid; and as debt service increases, other things get eclipsed and shoved aside. But the biggest problem with the deficit in my book is moral, because what we are doing is instead of paying for defense in our time, we are telling our children they have got to pay for defense in their time and our time, too, or at least the incremental cost of it.

This is the concern that we would like to address tonight, the fact that we are not facing up to the situation that confronts us and the fact that we have a budget deficit of enormous proportions and by any honest, fair, and accurate calculation or projection of what it is likely to be, it shows little signs of abating over the next 10 years, as this particular chart right here will show.

This chart shows where we believe, using Congressional Budget Office numbers, the President's budget, if implemented over the next 10 years, will take us. The budget deficit will get a bit better, as indeed it is scheduled to improve this year, probably $350 billion. Good news. The bad news is that the President in projecting the future course of the deficit, number one, is only giving us a 5-year projection; and, number two, he has left out some significant costs, such as the cost of maintaining troops in Afghanistan and Iraq after the year 2005, such as the cost of fixing Social Security, such as the cost of repairing something we call the alternative minimum tax, which actually raises tax revenues above the level that would otherwise exist if people were not required to pay this alternative minimum tax. It will soon, by 2010, affect 30 million tax filers as opposed to 4 million this year.

I do not think politically that is likely to happen, and if you fix it to avert that problem, the problem of having the alternative minimum tax apply to middle-income families, for whom it was never intended, then you get a result here of a deficit, 10 years from now, equal to $621 billion. No improvement; and indeed after a few years of slight moderation, a worsening deficit every year to the point where at the end of our 10-year time frame, it is up to $621 billion.

Let me just wrap up this introductory presentation of what concerns us about the budget by showing you sort of the back-of-an-envelope, the easiest way I know to explain what I think is an out-of-control situation. Back in 2001 when the Bush administration was pushing its tax cuts, they came to us and they said, The future looks so rosy that you can pass these tax cuts, you can pass these defense increases, you can pass our budget, and we won't be back to ask you to increase the debt ceiling of the United States, a legal limit beyond which we cannot borrow. We won't be back until 2008, 2010.

Well, the Republicans in the House and the Republicans in the Senate passed the President's budget pretty much as he requested, with a few moderations. The next year they were back, hat in hand. 2002, notwithstanding what they told us the previous year, they needed an increase in the debt ceiling of the United States of $450 billion. The following year, 2003, they were back again. This time they wanted a phenomenal increase in the debt ceiling of the United States, $984 billion, an increase in 1 year of $984 billion. How much is that? That amount is equal to the entire debt of the United States the year that Ronald Reagan took office. It is a bit more than that, as a matter of fact. The following year, having obtained a $984 billion increase on May 26, 2003, the following September, 2004, Secretary Snow was back saying, I need $800 billion more.

They ran through $984 billion of debt ceiling in 1 fiscal year and came back hat in hand and asked for $800 billion more, which the Congress passed in late November of last year. And then when the budget resolution was brought to the floor this year, the Republican budget resolution, when it passed the House and passed the Senate, buried in it was a provision that called for another increase in the debt ceiling of $781 billion.

This is a budget which they claim will eventually move us to halving the deficit over 5 years. At the same time they make that claim, they bury in that budget a request provision that Congress increase the debt ceiling by $781 billion. Add those together, 4 fiscal years, we get an increase in the deficit, an increase in the national debt of $3.015 trillion. That is just phenomenal.

There it is on the back of an envelope. It sums up the fiscal course and policy of this administration as succinctly as anything we can present: $3 trillion of additional debt-borrowing capacity, which will basically all be used up by the end of this fiscal year, and they will be back again asking for more.

So this is what concerns us. We frankly do not think the country can continue on this course. And that is why we are here tonight to talk about a problem that we think should be a front-burner problem for both parties, both Houses, both executive branch and the Congress. It needs more attention than it is now receiving.

Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from Maine.

Mr. Speaker, reclaiming my time, the chart we have here shows graphically exactly what the gentleman is saying, namely, interest just a bit over $150 billion in 2004, the last fiscal year; but by 2010 if the Bush policies are completely implemented over the next 6 years, look what happens to debt service. That big rising red spike goes from $150 billion to over $300 billion, and it eclipses everything else in the budget.

I yield to the gentleman from Maine.

Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from Maine for his comments.

Mr. Speaker, I now yield to the gentleman from Virginia (Mr. Scott).

Mr. Speaker, PAYGO is shorthand for a rule we adopted in 1991 and helped us achieve the phenomenal fiscal results I just showed the Members, where every year from 1993 to the year 2000, we had a better bottom line and a surplus of $236 billion in the year 2000. PAYGO simply provides that if we want to have a tax cut when we have got a deficit, it has to be deficit neutral. That is to say the tax cut must be offset by a tax increase somewhere else within the Tax Code, or we must go to an entitlement program, which is permanent spending, and cut it enough to offset the loss of revenues. By the same token, if we want to increase or improve a new entitlement, we have to identify a revenue stream or other entitlement cuts to pay for it. It has to be, bottom line, deficit neutral.

Reclaiming my time, Mr. Speaker, the blue line, believe it or not, is the path the Bush administration plotted when it was trying to sell its initial budget, its tax cuts, its defense increases, to the Congress of the United States. They said even with these policies, this is the budget we foresee. This is the bottom line that we foresee between 2005 and 2011.

Mr. Speaker, reclaiming my time, I do not think, given his budget policies, it is a realistic statement of what is likely to happen. One can call it a goal if they will, but I do not think it is a goal that is likely to be achieved under the policies that are now being furthered by this administration.

Reclaiming my time, Mr. Speaker, the gentleman is holding a chart there that indicates the likely path that we think the budget will follow if we factor everything into it that is politically realistic: a fix in Social Security, a fix to the alternative minimum tax, and some reasonable provision for maintaining troops in Afghanistan and Iraq after 2005.

Mr. Speaker, reclaiming my time, I said earlier that one reason we do not have the sort of moral outrage in the country about the deficit, that people are concerned about it but they do not quite feel and see it, this is the reason why.

Foreigners have been buying our debt in copious quantities, relieving us of, for now, the outlay that we would have to make, digging out of our own capital and our own savings, they are picking it up, for now. But what this means is that over time, debt means dependence, and we are incurring dependence to our debtors, and this has happened increasingly since the year 2000.

In the year 2000, foreigners held 30 percent of our Federal debt. Today, at least at the end of the last fiscal year, that had risen by 50 percent, almost 50 percent, or 44 percent; almost half of our debt is held today by foreigners, and that is a matter of some concern. It has to be one of the reasons that we do not need to be running persistent, perennial, huge deficits.

We did. We offered it on the House floor this past budget season, and we will put it up again. As my colleagues will see, it involves foregoing some of the tax cuts that the Bush administration has pushed through Congress, primarily for the reason that the projections upon which those tax cuts were based have not been obtained, they have not come about, they are a fraction of what was forecasted and expected.

So, we have to adjust our budget, our taxes, back to fiscal reality. If we do that, by the year 2010, 2012, we are back in the black again. But it is a big decision. It is a big decision. It can be done, and that was one of the purposes of our budget presentation, was to show that it can be done. We can argue about how to do it, but it is certainly feasible.

Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from Virginia, and I now yield to the gentleman from Kansas (Mr. Moore).

Mr. Speaker, I recognize the gentleman and yield to the gentleman from Tennessee (Mr. Cooper).

Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from Tennessee.

I now yield to the gentleman from North Carolina (Mr. Price).

We say we have gone from a projected surplus between 2002 and 2011 of $5.6 trillion to a cumulative deficit, over the same time period, of $3.8 trillion. That is your $9.4 trillion.

Yes, sir

I thank the gentleman for his insights into this very critical problem. And I yield again to the gentleman from Virginia (Mr. Scott.)

Well, the administration avows its aversion to debt. And yet it keeps tacking debt on top of debt. The deficit in the year 2003 of $378 billion, a record. A deficit the next year of $412 billion, another record. A deficit this year of $350 billion. And they claim to be cutting it in half, but it does not appear that way if you accurately project it.

And then the Bush administration begins it second term with this policy initiative, the first that the President brought forth, namely, to privatize Social Security. In order to privatize Social Security, the Bush administration would allow workers today to take up to a third of their payroll taxes, take them out of the Social Security trust fund account where they accumulate to a surplus, and put them instead into private accounts.

That means a diversion of well over $3 trillion over the next 10 years, or the first 10 years during which that program would be implemented. And here is a depiction in bar graphs of how much additional debt would be stacked on top of the enormous mountain of debt already accumulated if privatization took place as the President proposed it. As you can see by the year 2025, 2028, we would have racked up $4.9 trillion in additional debt on top of even more debt incurred in the ordinary budget of the United States.

So the Bush administration claims that it does not like debt any more than anyone else, but its policies contradict that claim; and the Social Security proposal coming on top of an already out-of-control deficit-ridden budget just leaves one incredulous as to what they say about their fiscal policy.

This would clearly make the problem worse, probably 100 percent worse over this 20-year period of time

What we have seen in the 1980s and 1990s in coming to grips with the budget deficit, a compelling problem that nevertheless eluded a solution for years, is that unless the administration, the President and the leadership of the Congress, is focused upon this problem and there is a driving priority, it simply will not be resolved.

And that is the problem we have today. When we finally put the budget to bed, the deficit to bed, got rid of the remaining deficit in 1997, it was because President Clinton had not only made that his number one priority for his second term, but he put his first team on the field.

Every time we met for negotiations, Frank Raines was there, Bob Ruben was there, Erskine Bowles was there, everyone in the room had the President's proxy and could speak for him; and the participants, the budget principals, knew that the administration was pushing hard.

Unless everybody pulls hard in that same direction, there are too many otherwise outside forces that stray you off course. So you have got to have leadership to get this done. And we do not have that leadership.

Well, if the gentleman will recall, in the late 1980s, we came to this conclusion that we had to have Presidential leadership as well as congressional leadership solidly behind us. And so we sponsored resolutions several years in a row which called for a budget summit.

We finally passed such a resolution, convened a summit, they met at Andrews Air Force Base something like 60 different days, and once again they succeeded. They capped discretionary spending; they devised the PAYGO rule. They reduced entitlements, rates of growth, did all of the things you needed to do.

The results were obscured by the fact that we had a recession. But the Clinton administration built upon the successes and upon the processes of the Bush administration, the Bush budget that moved us from a $290 billion deficit, to a $236 billion surplus. That was built on that foundation.

Well, the chart that the gentleman from Virginia (Mr. Scott) is holding tells an awful lot. Every year during the Clinton administration, due to those three budget agreements, which the gentleman just described, the bottom line of the budget got better and better to the point where we finally had the budget in surplus for the first time in 30 years.

Every year since the Bush administration came to office in 2001, the bottom line has gotten worse to the point where today we have record deficits, three in a row, record deficits: 378 last year, 412 in the year 2004, it looks like 350 this year. There have been changes made in the margins, but nothing as dramatic and emphatic as what we did in 1993 and 1997, and that is why you do not see any real results of any substance on the bottom line.

In 1995?

Well, in 1995 and in 1996 we had better and better bottom lines because we had a PAYGO rule, and we had discretionary spending caps.

He did indeed. And then we had a point where we could not come to a conclusion on the budget. As a consequence, the whole government was shut down and President Clinton, upon being reelected said, I do not want to go through that again. I would like to see the budget principals get together with the White House budget principals and try to negotiate a deal earlier in the fiscal year, as opposed to near the end of the fiscal year with our backs against the wall.

Absolutely not. And then took the situation by the scruff of the neck the next year and saw to it that we finally brought it to a successful resolution, a phenomenal resolution: a surplus of $236 billion in the year 2000.

On that high point, since we are just about out of time, let me thank the gentleman from Virginia (Mr. Scott), the gentleman from North Carolina (Mr. Price) and the others who participated, about a subject that is of great concern to all of us. We all have this feeling that the day of reckoning awaits us, and we would like to see this done consensually, with good policy.

Mr. Chairman, I offer an amendment.

Mr. Chairman, before mentioning my amendment, let me also commend the gentleman from Florida (Mr. Young) and the gentleman from Pennsylvania (Mr. Murtha), the chairman of the subcommittee and the ranking member. There are not two Members of the House for whom I have greater respect. This is a good bill. I intend to support it. But I have an

amendment which I think will make it a better bill.

My amendment is simple and it is straightforward. It would take $84 million in funding for missile defense that is not needed and add it to an area where it is woefully in need, to the nonproliferation of nuclear weapons and nuclear materials.

Everyone here remembers the first debate between Senator Kerry and President Bush last year. They agreed on one thing for sure, that the gravest threat facing the United States is that of terrorists armed with nuclear weapons. Our front line in the defense of this threat is variously called Cooperative Threat Reduction, nonproliferation, or Nunn-Lugar. Whatever we call it, its object is to stop, secure, and dispose of nuclear weapons and nuclear materials at the source if at all possible.

I referred to the President. Just this past February, he met with the President of the Russian Federation, and together they cited the fact that nuclear nonproliferation is a matter of compelling importance for both countries. Five years ago we appointed a bipartisan commission headed by Howard Baker and Lloyd Cutler. They came back after 1\1/2\ years of lengthy study and recommended to us that we take these accounts dealing with nonproliferation of nuclear weapons and increase them to $3 billion over the next 10 years.

Here is how they sized up the threat 4 years ago: ``The most urgent, unmet national security threat to the United States today is the danger that weapons of mass destruction or weapons-usable materials in Russia could be stolen and sold to terrorists or hostile nation states and used against American troops abroad or citizens at home.''

That was 4 years ago. And DOD's nonproliferation budget, together with the DOE budget and the State Department budget today, all together come to $1.9 billion, way short of what was recommended 4 years ago by Howard Baker and Lloyd Cutler.

The DOD program called Cooperative Threat Reduction, CTR, Nunn-Lugar, was launched in 1991 to secure, to deactivate, to dispose of weapons of mass destruction in the former Soviet Union and in other countries. Since then, it has racked up quite a scorecard. Since 1991, the CTR program has deactivated 6,564 warheads, destroyed 570 ICBMs, eliminated 543 SLBMs, retired 142 bombers, and I could go on with a host of other potentially threatening missile and nuclear components which this program has eliminated.

Despite these successes, the CTR program has been virtually flat- funded since its inception at around $400 million a year. This year, the budget request of $416 million falls $27.6 million below the level at which this program was funded on 9/11; $26 million less than 9/11.

My amendment makes a modest correction to this shortfall. It allocates an additional $84 million to Cooperative Threat Reduction to bring total funding to $500 million. It pluses up the CTR budget, allowing DOD, the Department of Defense, to do something it has urgently wanted to do: upgrade security at Russian weapons storage sites.

DOD has indicated that to get all of the upgrades needed at Russian sites, to secure nuclear weapons and nuclear components, it will need funding each year that is about $150 million more than the budget provides for the next 5 to 7 years. My amendment puts up about half of that shortfall.

We make this funding possible by an offset that I think we can all accept. My amendment reduces the Ground-Based Missile Defense budget by $84 million. Now, here is how it does it. It would do so by limiting the funding for silos at Fort Greely, Alaska, to 26 silos this year, and Vandenberg to four silos. In other words, my amendment would permit, would fund 30 ground-based GBIs and silos. The Missile Defense Agency is planning to provide 34 silos for the first 30 GBIs. The extra four silos are referred to as ``swing space,'' additional, nice to have; but this is a cost, nearly $16 million, that we can avoid per silo that we can avoid for now and spend more wisely elsewhere. So my amendment does just that. It withholds funding for these four extra swing silos and saves $63 million.

The fiscal year 2006 budget also includes $20.7 million as an advanced payment on 10 additional silos, even though the chairman's mark cuts the funding for the missiles that would actually go in these silos. My amendment, therefore, eliminates this funding at least for 2006.

If the interceptors work, 30 silos should be sufficient for defense against a rogue nation like North Korea, and 30 silos should be sufficient for now for the ground-based interceptor until testing has finally shown that it works.

In any event, let me suggest simply that we ask ourselves, which is a more likely threat, that we be attacked by ICBM with a return signature on it, or by some stealthy terrorist in the back of a paneled truck with some hidden device in Lower Manhattan or Los Angeles? I think the answer is obvious.

That is why I think our money is better spent putting it into nonproliferation to avoid that threat as opposed to putting more money on top of the $7.8 billion into ballistic missile defense.

Mr. Chairman, will the gentleman yield?

Mr. Chairman, there is $7.8 billion provided for this program, vastly more than any other program in the budget. We are shaving it at the edges and putting it into an area where I think we would all agree there is a critical threat and a real need.

Mr. Chairman, I move to strike the requisite number of words.

Mr. Chairman, as I understood the gentleman from Pennsylvania, my good friend (Mr. Murtha), he is offering us a deal, namely, if we will withdraw the amendment, he will endeavor to raise nonproliferation to a level that is commensurate with the need, particularly for upgrading nuclear storage areas in the former Soviet Union. With that commitment to go to conference and try to improve the allocation within this bill for nonproliferation, with that understanding, I will withdraw my amendment.

Mr. Chairman, I ask unanimous consent to withdraw my amendment.

Mr. Speaker, the aftermath of the war in Iraq has been marred by miscalculations and mistakes, made up for in many cases by our troops, who have filled the breach brilliantly by improvising, often doing duty for which they were never trained. You cannot go to Iraq and talk to our troops in the field and come home without saying to yourself, thank God there are such Americans.

But their valiant efforts would have been more effective if the Pentagon had not ignored General Shinseki and deployed too few troops initially to secure the country and capitalize on our victory in battle.

Their efforts would have been more effective if the Pentagon had not ignored General Garner and cashiered the entire Iraqi Army.

Their efforts would have been more effective if we had moved much sooner to set up a representative government and stand up Iraqi security forces to whom we can ultimately and must ultimately hand over the responsibility for securing their own country.

Before we disengage from Iraq, we have to do both of the above. I firmly believe that. We have to stand up security forces, and by that I mean police and border guards and the army, adequate to stabilize the country; and we have to steer the Iraqis through the shoals towards the adoption of a constitution and the election of a government under that constitution.

We cannot leave any sooner without risking the collapse of Iraq into a fractious and bloody civil war which could very well require us to return. I believe that.

But to be sure that we are moving systematically in the right direction, the minority leader, the gentlewoman from California (Ms. Pelosi), is asking for a yardstick, milestones, by which to measure our progress. This is not a plan of withdrawal. If it were, I would not vote for it. This is a strategy for success.

Let me give you one reason from a budget perspective why we need it. Basically, the budgets in the out years beyond 2006 contain no estimation of what the deployments in Iraq, Afghanistan, and North American Air Defense are costing us. Even though the cost is $80 billion to $100 billion a year, it is not included in the budget.

CBO undertook to estimate, to model, what our likely deployment in Iraq may cost, because otherwise there is a gaping hole, an unrealistic aspect, to the budget. Their estimate was that if we drew down to 20,000 troops in theater by the end of 2006 and 20,000 troops in Afghanistan by the end of 2006, and then taper that force off over the rest of the remaining 10-year period, the cost over 10 years would be $384 billion. That is a significant item.

If that is what is in the cards, if that is what is likely, given the strategy for success, we need to know it, we need to plan for it, we need to be expecting it.

Given what is at stake, given the lives that have been lost, given the billions that have been spent, what we are asking is a modest request to make of the Pentagon; and, Mr. Speaker, it involves the sort of planning that I would hope they would be doing anyway and should be sharing with us if they are doing it.

I would therefore urge a ``no'' vote on the previous question and a vote for the leader's amendment.

Mr. Chairman, first question, what is the effect of this amendment?

This amendment in simple terms will stop the slaughter or human consumption of horses, the meat of which will be exported to foreign countries. It does not stop, affect or any way impede euthanasia by veterinarians. It stops the brutal slaughter at slaughterhouses. Sometimes horses are jacked up by their hind legs and have their throats slit. This is the kind of slaughter that this bill will prohibit so that the meat can be exported to Europe and other places.

Secondly, who is affected? Slaughterhouses in two States. That is it. Three different slaughterhouse locations in two States. That is it. Those are the net effects because, you see, Americans do not eat horse meat.

These horses are not slaughtered in this country, 65,000 last year, for consumption here. They are slaughtered for consumption in Europe and Asia, and 35,000 were not trucked to Mexico and Canada only to be euthanized there. They were shipped there to be slaughtered. So this affects foreign consumers of American horse meat. That is all. No Americans are affected, and only three plants in two States are actually affected.

Who is for it and who is against it? I will leave this 7-page memorandum which shows individuals, organizations, horse raisers, horse racers, horse farmers, horse lovers of all kinds who support it, including a substantial number of veterinarians. Seven pages long, that is how many people are in favor of it.

Next question: What do we know about the consequences of this? What happens when you stop the slaughter of horses at, albeit, just three plants? Well, we know from practical experience in five States, including California, the largest State for the last 7 years, this law has been in effect Statewide in California and four other States and in California since 1998. What has been the effect? Have there been horses that have been left for neglect, derelict horses? No, there have been no effects. Have there been horses that have been too numerous to be euthanized? No. Practically, in the five States that have implemented this law, there has been no effect whatsoever.

Finally, what is the legislative history of this bill? The legislative history is we filed a bill like this in the last Congress. We filed it again in this Congress. In the last Congress, after we put on an effort to win support for it, we collected 225 co-sponsors. We never had a hearing. We were entitled to one. So we come here today using a different parliamentary procedure.

But this bill has been thoroughly exposed, thoroughly supported, thoroughly argued for and against; and today we are entitled to this vote on the House floor. And if the 225 Members who have supported our bill in the past come forward, we will see that the will of the House is that this becomes the law of the land.

Mr. Speaker, the well of this House ought to be a free market of ideas. It ought to be a great national forum where we dissect legislation and debate the big issues both.

And particularly today, as we take up the Defense authorization bill, with thousands of troops deployed all over the globe in harm's way, suffering casualties daily, we are spending $440 billion a year on national defense, plus the $80 billion in supplementals, over a half trillion dollars, today particularly we should have a full, vigorous, and complete debate.

In the 1980s, it was this way. At the height of the Cold War, when this bill came to the floor, 100, 200 amendments were offered; and most of them, many of them were made in order. It sometimes took us 2, 3 weeks to get this bill off the floor. We had a full, free, and open debate.

Today the debate will be circumscribed, carefully controlled to bar the issues that our Republican colleagues want to avoid or fear losing if the House were allowed to weigh the issues and work its will. This is not the way this institution should treat something so important.

In addition, in years past, when we ran the House, there was something called comity. And senior members of the committee in particular were allowed to have the deference at least of a few amendments that would be offered on the House floor. Their experience was valued.

Today, the gentleman from Missouri's (Mr. Skelton) amendment, shut out. My amendment on nonproliferation, well crafted, carefully considered, at least I wanted the opportunity to present that choice to the people of the House, shut out. I will go down the list with senior members on the committee, senior Members in the House, offering thoughtful amendments that at least this House should consider, weigh and work its will upon, all have been shut out. This is no way to run a debate on something of such gravity and importance.

I thank the gentleman for yielding me this time.

Mr. Chairman, I rise to speak in support of the en bloc amendment and also a particular provision of it whereby the leadership of the committee has worked with me to include some reporting requirements. They are not as complete as I would like. In fact, we have pared them back three or four times in order to reach consensus, but nevertheless I am glad that we will put them in here because they relate to reporting and oversight of our commitment in Iraq and Afghanistan and Operation Nobel Eagle.

There are three main areas that will be covered in these war-related reports: costs with numerous breakdowns, the reconstitution of equipment, and military construction, partly because it is a good indicator of where we are headed. The Congress has just passed an $82 billion supplemental making the total amount provided this year for Afghanistan and Iraq over $100 billion. Only 2 weeks after its enactment, the Army is already hinting that they may run out of O&M funds. As a consequence, we have a bridge provision in this particular bill authorizing an additional $49 billion. The House Appropriations Committee just approved a $45 billion bridge, a supplemental that is intended to carry the services through the early months of fiscal year 2006, at which time another supplemental will be needed.

We need a better system for tracking these costs as they are incurred. We do not get it in advance on the Committee on Armed Services. That is why we are providing an advance authorization in this bill. But we need to have at least the information retrospectively so that we can see where the costs are being incurred and we can keep tabs on some of the contingencies that are going to have to be paid down the road, costs that are being incurred now like repairing equipment which has suffered greatly in the environment in Afghanistan and in Iraq.

These are, I think, essential amendments if we are to do our oversight job on the Committee on Armed Services. I appreciate the chairman and the ranking member working with me to see that they are included in the en bloc amendments.

Mr. Chairman, I do not object to the amendment, but ask unanimous consent to claim the time in opposition.

Mr. Chairman, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

Mr. Chairman, my good friend and colleague, the gentleman from Pennsylvania (Mr. Weldon), has been a leader in the Congress on relations with Russia for some time. I reviewed his amendment, and I support it and would like to state several reasons for supporting it that I think others can readily identify with.

First of all, this is not a new idea. It has been talked about at least as long ago as Reagan's Presidency, when Mr. Reagan was trying to make the point that he did not necessarily seek nuclear dominance, and that he was ready to share certain parts of missile defense with the Russians if necessary to show that it was consistent with the balance of power between our two countries.

But today, if you want principle reasons, one reason to have an amendment like this and the policy that it supports is to show the Russians that ballistic missile defense need not be perceived by them as adverse to their security. Just as our missiles are no longer explicitly targeted at the Russians, the ballistic missile defense systems we are building are not directed really at countering their systems, but of the adversaries.

The gentleman from Pennsylvania (Mr. Weldon) mentions two good reasons, two practical reasons, for making this amendment our policy. Number one, it is possible that the Russians could cooperate with us in allowing us to test specific elements of their tracking equipment of their own missile systems. And, number two, they have early warning radar that the Missile Defense Agency may find very useful. In fact, if we begin some day in the near future to install systems that will give us protection against threats like Iran, we may find the geography inside Russia is ideal geography, ideally located for the kind of early warning system and detection that we would need and want and would be preferable possibly to locating some of these systems in Eastern European countries.

So there are many good reasons at this point in time to support this policy and therefore to support this amendment.

Mr. Chairman, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. Chairman, I thank the gentleman for yielding.

Mr. Chairman, I have at the desk an amendment, a proposed amendment that I intended to offer, but that I will not offer as a result of the ensuing colloquy.

Mr. Chairman, I have filed an amendment for myself and the gentleman from South Carolina (Mr. Barrett) that states that none of the funds made available in this act may be used in contravention of the Nuclear Waste Policy Act of 1982. The committee report directs the Secretary to begin accepting commercial spent fuel for interim storage at one or more DOE sites within fiscal year 2006. The gentleman from South Carolina (Mr. Barrett) and I are concerned that the interim storage facilities called for in the report could divert funds from a nuclear waste fund and further impede completion of the repository at Yucca Mountain.

Mr. Chairman, if the gentleman will further yield, can DOE conduct such interim storage consistent with the Nuclear Waste Policy Act? What force does the committee report have when it comes to modifying existing law?

Mr. Chairman, I thank the gentleman for the clarification and the explanation.

Mr. Chairman, earlier I entered into a colloquy with the chairman, and he was good enough to clarify for me some parts of this committee report that are important to me. I would like to further build a context on which my concerns were built.

In this committee report accompanying the bill, there is directive language at pages 122 and 123 and 124 that can be taken to amend the explicit terms of existing laws. And the laws at issue, which the report language could be construed to change, of the Nuclear Waste Policy Act and possibly even the National Environmental Policy Act, both carefully wrought, are both vitally important. I do not think it is the intention of the committee report to change the laws because I do not think it can but nevertheless it makes some strong recommendations.

The committee report laments the latest delays at Yucca Mountain. The start-up date has slipped again, this time from 2010 to 2012. The committee, to its credit, with the chairman's strong support, funds Yucca Mountain at the requested levels, I think we should, $651 million for fiscal year 2006; and I commend you for that and finds this sufficient to do the engineering work, continue the license application, continue the design work.

I have an interest in this because I represent four nuclear reactors, and I live in an area where nuclear generation accounts for 50 percent of our electricity. My constituents pay one mil per kilowatt per hour to fund a permanent waste facility, and they and the others who pay this assessment deserve to have their money spent well and used solely for that purpose, a spent fuel repository. The chairman has assured me wholeheartedly that he wants to see, too, that that end is accomplished.

But Yucca Mountain in the words of the report ``recedes into the future.'' I am concerned if we open up new options, even expedients like interim storage, and if we use the Nuclear Waste Fund to pay for these options, then Yucca Mountain will keep on receding into the future.

This report proposes a concerted initiative. It is a bold proposal for interim storage of spent fuel and for reprocessing of spent fuel. These are ideas that have been considered in the past, but abandoned. The committee brings them back to life, provides some funding; but it is only a tiny fraction of what these facilities are going to cost. So you cannot avoid the concern that some, if not all, of this money may come from the Nuclear Waste Fund at the expense of Yucca Mountain.

I have this concern because Savannah River Site is among the specific sites singled out as a candidate for interim storage. I become more concerned when I read the report which says: ``The committee directs the Department to begin the movement of spent fuel to centralized interim storage at one or more DOE sites within fiscal year 2006.'' That is next year.

If this is taken literally, I do not see how they can possibly prepare an EIS. That is why I was saying that the report would almost override the National Environmental Policy Act. There is no way they can finish an EIS on a matter of such importance in a year.

The report recognizes that the Nuclear Waste Policy Act applies to these matters. For example, the report recognizes that the NWPA borrows an interim storage facility at the same location as the permanent repository, Yucca Mountain, and yields to that law by proposing that the storage facility be sited elsewhere.

In another place, the report calls for a plan of implementation within 120 days. Here again, it anticipates that legislative changes may be necessary to execute the plan by asking DOE to submit them.

In these respects, the committee report supports my point that explicit law cannot be amended or overridden by report language. But in pushing for an interim storage facility, the report is on the collision course with the Nuclear Waste Policy Act because it abandoned the idea of interim storage in 1990 by sunsetting the law that passed it. In its place it authorized a retrievable storage facility, but only after Yucca Mountain is licensed.

So these were my concerns. These were the reasons for asking for the colloquy and asking for the clarification. I have problems with interim storage, and I have problems with reprocessing fuel. But I support the chairman in his endeavor to see Yucca Mountain finished, and I also support the chairman in his quest to see that nuclear power is able to make a comeback, because I think it has a role in our energy future.

That is the reason I asked for clarification, to make sure that the committee was not pushing the envelope and overriding the statutory law on pages 122, 123, and 124, which struck me as more than just report boiler plate.

I appreciate the confirmation, the clarification from the committee chairman and for all of his other efforts in bringing together this bill. I thank the gentleman for yielding to me to make this clarification.

Mr. Barrett and I have an amendment, but before I explain it, let me explain why I am offering it.

There is a longstanding rule of this House against legislating policy on an appropriation bill, but it's honored in the breach. In the case of this bill, the committee report contains directive language at pages 122, 123, and 124 that can be taken to amend the explicit terms of existing law. And the laws at issue, which the report language could be construed to change, are the Nuclear Waste Policy Act and the National Environmental Policy Act, both carefully wrought laws, and both vitally important.

The committee report laments the latest delays at Yucca Mountain. The start-up date has slipped again, this time from 2010 to 2012. The committee, to its credit, funds Yucca Mountain at the requested level, $651 million for fiscal year 2006, and finds this sufficient to do the engineering work in support of the license application and to continue the design work.

I represent 4 nuclear reactors and live in an area where nuclear generation accounts for fifty percent of our electricity. My constituents pay 1 mil per kilowatt hour to fund a permanent waste facility, and they and others who pay this assessment deserve to have their money spent well and used solely for the intended purpose: a spent fuel repository.

But Yucca Mountain, in the words of the report, ``recedes into the future.'' And I am concerned that if we open new options, even expedients like interim storage, and if we use the Nuclear Waste Fund to pay for these options, Yucca Mountain will keep on receding.

That's why I am concerned about this report. It proposes ``a concerted initiative'' (1) for interim storage of spent fuel and (2) for reprocessing spent fuel. These are ideas that have been considered in the past and discarded; but the committee report resurrects them, with a token addition of funds that is the tip of an iceberg, a tiny fraction of what these facilities will cost. One cannot avoid the concern that some, if not all, of this money will come from the Nuclear Waste Fund, at the expense of Yucca Mountain.

I have this concern because Savannah River Site is among the sites singled out as a candidate for interim storage. I become even more concerned when I read report language

which says: ``The Committee directs the Department to begin the movement of spent fuel to centralized interim storage at one or more DOE sites within fiscal year 2006.'' If this directive is taken literally, it will override the National Environmental Policy Act, because it is doubtful that an Environmental Impact Study can be finished in a year.

The report recognizes that the Nuclear Waste Policy Act applies to these matters. For example, the report recognizes that the Nuclear Waste Policy Act bars an interim storage facility at the same location as the permanent repository, and yields to that law by proposing that the storage facility be sited elsewhere. In another place, the report calls for a plan of implementation within an incredibly short time, 120 days, and here again, the report anticipates that legislative changes will be necessary to execute the plan by asking DOE to submit them.

In these respects, the committee report makes my point, that explicit, longstanding law cannot be amended or overridden by report language. But in pushing an interim storage facility, the committee report is on a collision course with the Nuclear Waste Policy Act. It abandoned the idea of an interim storage facility in 1990 by sunsetting the law that authorized it. In its place, the NWPA authorized construction of a Monitored Retrievable Storage Facility only after the completion of the license for construction of Yucca Mountain. This means that no interim storage facility is allowed under the Nuclear Waste Policy Act for the time being, and I do not believe that report language can change the explicit provisions of an existing statute.

Our amendment simply points out that despite the report language, ``None of the funds made available by this Act shall be obligated or expended in contravention of the Nuclear Waste Policy Act of 1982.'' So, unless the NWPA is changed, DOE cannot move forward with interim storage until Yucca Mountain is licensed.

What's wrong with interim storage?

Interim storage is risky because it puts spent fuel in facilities not constructed to hold them forever, yet there is a real risk that once in place, interim storage becomes permanent storage.

Interim storage is problematic because it could shift funds and focus off Yucca Mountain, and stretch out its completion indefinitely.

Finally, interim storage is expensive. It's expensive to put nuclear waste in interim storage, and even more expensive to take it out to move it to Yucca Mountain.

How does interim storage affect you? Under the committee's report language, anyone's district could be the next nuclear waste storage facility. If you have a DOE site, a closed military base, or any other federally owned site, your district could be a candidate to store nuclear waste.

So, pages 122, 123, and 124 of the committee report are more than the usual boilerplate. To clarify their effect, I asked the distinguished Chairman of the Energy and Water Subcommittee if he would engage in a colloquy, and he confirmed that the committee ``provided our guidance only in report language;'' and with that assurance, I withdrew our amendment.

Amendment to 2419, as Reported Offered by Mr. Spratt of South Carolina

At the end of the bill, add the following new section:

Sec. 503. None of the funds made available by this Act

shall be obligated or expended in contravention of the

Nuclear Waste Policy Act of 1982.

Offered By: Mr. Spratt

Amendment No. 3: At the end of the bill, add the following

new section:

Sec. 503. None of the funds made available by this Act

shall be obligated or expended in contravention of the

Nuclear Waste Policy Act of 1982.

Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for yielding. Let me say, I enjoyed serving here with your mother, and she has every right to be proud of the service her son is rendering here. He was well raised.

The young in this country, and you fellows are young by my reckoning, have a right to be concerned about the course that our government, the Federal Government, is taking under President Bush. Obviously, we have a huge problem with our own budget, our budget deficit.

President Bush enjoyed an advantage that practically no President in modern times has enjoyed. He came to office with a surplus that his economists projected to be $5.6 trillion between 2000 and 2011, over a 10-year period of time, an unprecedented surplus.

It was not just a projected surplus. The year before the year 2000, the last fiscal year of the Clinton administration, the United States Government ran a surplus of $236 billion.

That was the context, the fiscal context in which President Bush came to office.

Today, when we closed the books on September 30, 2004, that fiscal year, we had a deficit of $412 billion. OMB is still predicting a deficit this year, even bigger. But CBO has some good news. They tell us that revenues are coming in at a faster clip; and they are hopeful that deficit will be coming down to $350 billion. But $350 billion is only something to cheer in the context of deficits that have been running at a level of $412 billion, the highest level deficits in our history, and we went there in just 5 short years.

What we are effectively doing, I say this to the young people of America whom my colleagues represent, is leaving our children and grandchildren the tab for fighting a war, letting them pay for the lion's share of it by simply adding it to the national debt. We are adding to national entitlements. We are cutting taxes, above all, and then borrowing to pay for the revenues we give up by the tax cuts and letting our children pick up the tab, pay the bill.

I often go to civic clubs; and I tell them, there is clearly a fiscal problem for the United States Government's budget, because the more we borrow, the more interest we have to pay and, pretty soon, debt service begins to eclipse accounts in the budget, like education, that are critically important. But in addition to that, this is a moral problem. It is a moral problem when we shove these mountains of debt off on to our children and grandchildren. That surely is what we are doing.

Quickly, let me just show my colleagues what we have here. This chart, which has its own mountains, shows us where President Clinton started in 1993, at a deficit of $290 billion. On the floor of this House, by one vote, we passed the Clinton budget in 1993, one vote; and every year thereafter the bottom line of the budget got better, better and better, to the point where we had, as I mentioned a minute ago, a surplus of $236 billion in the year 2000. Since the election of Mr. Bush in 2001, the budget has gone down and down and down every year; the bottom line of the budget has gotten worse to the point where we had a record deficit of $412 billion last year.

Now, the Committee on the Budget and President Bush both tell us we have a plan. We have a plan that will cut that budget deficit in half over the next 5 years. Well, we can cut a budget deficit in half when we leave out some of the biggest items that we are likely to face over the next 5 years.

One of those is the cost of eventually dealing with the alternative minimum tax. More and more taxpayers are having to pay the AMT instead of the regular tax; and when that problem is finally fixed, it will have to be politically an inevitability, because it will, by 2010, affect 30 million tax filers. We will have to fix it. CBO says the 10- year cost in revenues lost to fix the AMT so that it only applies to the upper bracket taxpayers for whom it was intended is $642 billion in lost revenues.

Then there is the cost of our troops in Afghanistan and Iraq. We just passed an $82 billion supplemental. There is not a dime in the President's budget after 2005 for the cost of those troops; and CBO, the Congressional Budget Office, has said we need to have some kind of national estimation of what it is likely to cost to keep those troops there, assuming that they will be gradually redeploying. So they said, let us assume that there will be 40,000 troops, 20,000 in Afghanistan, 20,000 in the theater around Iraq for the next 6, 7, 8 years. Their calculation is $384 billion. That cost is left out of the President's budget.

So major items have been left out. We have gone back and put in items that are not contentious, not controversial, but politically realistic; and we can see from this chart that the deficit does get a bit better, because the economy gets better; but 10 years from now, we have a deficit of $621 billion; $621 billion.

Mr. Speaker, we can see it coming down the track. This chart depicts it as graphically as we can make it. The deficit never rises below, never falls below $350 billion, and rises to $621 billion. Tally that up and we will see a mountain of debt added over the next 10 years, and then we have to pay debt service, we have to pay the interest on that debt; and that debt service begins to encroach upon other necessities, other critical priorities of the government like education, like health care.

So this is why we are concerned, the gentleman and I, and we, we are leaving to the next generation this legacy of debt. Surely, surely this generation of Americans, like every generation, which has strived to leave their children a better life, a better world, a better economy, does not want to be remembered for leaving our children and grandchildren a mountainous legacy of debt; but that is the course we are on right now.

Let me stop there so that we can yield to the gentleman from Alabama (Mr. Davis).

We have a number of different deficits. One is the Social Security deficit. The actuaries at the Social Security Administration tell us that the shortfall in Social Security funding over the next 70 years is $3.7 trillion.

What Mr. Bush is now proposing as a purported solution to that is to allow workers to divert 4 percentage points off their payroll tax, one- third of their payroll taxes into private or personal accounts and away from the Social Security trust fund. This will have enormous consequences.

First of all, everyone can see that it is counterintuitive. If you have got a trust fund which is $3.7 trillion, do you resolve that problem by diverting a third of the revenues away from that fund, so that you virtually double, and then some, the shortfall in the account?

That does not square with anybody's understanding of how to resolve this problem. But it is of particular concern for younger Americans, because they will be paying substantial sums into Social Security, and they may get, unless the reform being discussed is done differently from what the President proposes, the worst they will get out of Social Security. Thus far, Social Security, every generation would say, has been a success story. It has made the fabric of America a better country, a better society.

A lot of young people walk up to me, I would say to the gentleman from Florida (Mr. Meek), and they say: I do not ever think I will see my Social Security or at least nothing like what is promised to me. I am paying in big bucks, 12.4 percentage points of my gross income, after accounting for what my employer also pays. And I do not ever think I will see what I am contributing come back to me.

And I tell them all, Social Security is not just a retirement plan. Social Security is also a plan particularly for younger families. As a matter of fact, 37 percent of those on Social Security today drawing benefits are younger Americans who are disabled or have had a family member, a breadwinner, die, or they are the dependents of these particular beneficiaries of Social Security.

Social Security provides the equivalent for, let us say, a young couple, age 27, two children, it provides the equivalent of $403,000 in term life insurance. And for those who become disabled, nobody thinks he will, but many do; for those who become disabled, it provides $353,000 in disability insurance, which would be hard to buy in the individual market. And that is not to mention Medicare, which comes with the Social Security disability. Yes, sir.

And it does. One in seven workers ends up on disability before retirement

This chart shows it as graphically as we can express it. There are two claws impinging on Social Security under the President's proposal. First of all, most Americans do not understand this, but when you go to retire, if you have elected to put money into a private account, the first thing you will have to do before Social Security computes your benefits is pay Social Security back. That private account, that ownership account, is really a loan from the Social Security Administration. You have to pay back, upon retirement, every dollar you have diverted into a private account plus interest at 3 percent over the rate of inflation. That means that there will be a significant privatization tax which gets bigger and bigger over time, depending on how many years you are in the work force.

In addition to that, there is another factor buried in all the detail which is critically important because it changes the nature of Social Security. And that is that basic benefit computation will be free formulated. Let me express that differently.

Today, when you go to retire, the clerk at Social Security takes all your earnings from age 14 onward, takes the highest 35 years, averages those, brings them up to a present value, and then, each year, the amount of income that you can get is dependent upon a formula that is used to derive what is called the PIA, the primary insurance amount. You get 92 percent of the first $627. You get 30 percent of the next $3,779, and you get 15 percent of everything else. That is complicated.

But the net result of that is that lower-income workers tend to get more, a better deal out of Social Security than the higher-income workers do. It has this effect to it that makes it a social insurance plan and not just a retirement plan.

If you change the way that benefit is indexed every year, which the President proposes to do. Today that basic benefit will be indexed and changed according to the rate of inflation and wages in our economy.

The President wants to change it to price inflation. That is economic talk. But it is critically important in a practical sense because, over a 70-year period of time, it will slash in half the basic benefit to which you are entitled from Social Security. And this chart shows it right here.

Someone who is retiring in 2075, born in 2010, a couple of years from now, 42 percent of his accumulated benefit in his private investment account will have to be paid back to Social Security; 56 percent of the remaining amount will be diminished by the recalculation, the reformulation which President Bush is proposing. So we have what is left that this chart shows. You start out with the big blue bar, all along here. That is scheduled benefits under Social Security.

The green amount beneath that shows the traditional Social Security benefit to which you are entitled; in 2015, it makes up most of your benefit. But by 2045, about half of your benefit is traditional Social Security, and half is in your private account.

When you get to the 70th year, almost all of your benefit is coming out of the private account, and only a small part, this little green tip down here, is coming from traditional Social Security. So we are going to ask you, the young people of today, the families that are 30- something with kids, raising them, to continue paying that 12.4 percent in the traditional Social Security, only to get this in the way of traditional benefits out of it. It is going to change the nature of the program in ways that cannot even be fully anticipated.

Mr. Speaker, following up on what the gentlewoman has said, this chart spells it out, it is a little busy, but the President and others who are claiming there is a crisis point in 2017, 2018 as a pivotal year, that is the year when incoming dedicated revenues will be exceeded by outgoing scheduled benefits. But Social Security at that point in time, the trust fund will be sitting on a reserve, a cache of U.S. Treasury bonds equal to $4.7 trillion. The interest on those Treasury bonds will not only continue to ensure benefits in full; they will actually add to the surplus, the corpus of the trust fund, so that in the year 2027, $6.5 trillion will be in that cache of Treasury bonds held by the trustees of Social Security.

Now, at that point in time the interest income will no longer be adequate to fully cover the benefits outgoing, but with $6.5 trillion in Treasury bonds, by redeeming those bonds the system is assuredly solvent until 2041.

As the gentlewoman just said, the actuaries of Social Security are paid to be conservative. They are paid to be very, very cautious and they are. The rate of growth they are assuming is a very, very modest rate of growth. We do not want to be fools, so we take a very conservative view of things. But the CBO has taken a slightly more realistic view of the future and they say, we think you will make it to 2052. We think the system then will be able to pay out 78 cents on the dollar, not fully but substantially, and after that something in the range of 78 cents on the dollar.

So the system is faced with problems down the road, but we have got time to fix them. The sooner the better; and if we fix them right, we will not have a problem.

I was here in 1983. Social Security really was in trouble in 1983. Some forecasted that it would scrape bottom, run dry in the retirement trust fund in July of 1983. President Reagan got together with Tip O'Neill and the leadership of the Senate. We appointed a truly bipartisan representative board. You had Mr. Greenspan at one end. Claude Pepper at the other end. Dan Moynihan here. Jim Baker there. They got together and they came up with a menu of different choices to which every stakeholder contributed something. And the result was the system was made assuredly solvent for the next 60 years.

That can be done again. There is no reason we cannot do it again, and everybody then can breathe easily. But you cannot do it and incorporate these private accounts which are carved out of Social Security and make the shortfall today twice as large as it actually is.

Mr. Speaker, there is one thing we have not spoken about. We have talked about the budget deficit. We did not speak about the trade deficit, $666 billion, also an encumbrance we are leaving our children. We did not talk about the jobs deficit. In the last recession, 2.5 million manufacturing jobs, the best of our jobs, were lost, that have not come back. Service jobs have but not manufacturing jobs.

One of the solutions to all of this has got to be education. We have got to have a workforce that is educated as never before in American history, adaptable, keen, intelligent, quantitative, and if we look at the budget the President sent us for the first time since 1988, a President of the United States requested less for spending on education than we are currently spending at the present time.

He wipes out vocational education, $1.3 billion. Wipes out the drug free schools. Wipes out GEAR UP for underprivileged kids who want to get a college education. Wipes out Even Start. Wipes out educational technology.

There are some plusses and puts and takes so that a lot of these do not come out on the bottom line, but when we consider everything, this is the least forthcoming education request at a time when education was never needed as much as it is now. So we have got an education deficit as well.

That is why we are out here tonight, to talk about the 20-somethings and the 30-somethings and what they can expect for the future of America. We have got deficits, which means that we are leaving negative legacies in numerous different areas that we have got to reverse, we have got to undo, and it starts with the budget. We simply cannot keep stacking up mountains of debt which we shove off into the future for our children to pay.