Floor Statements

Mr. Speaker, this is an issue of sovereignty. The democratically elected governments of Europe have chosen, with tremendous support and urging by their own people, to urge more study and delay on the massive introduction of genetically modified organisms into their agricultural system. A large majority of Americans would like to see the same testing.

We heard about testing, that this is regulated by the FDA. No, it is not. It is not regulated by the FDA. They said

they have no jurisdiction, and it has been tested by the EPA. No, these things have not been tested by the EPA. It has been tested by the industry, who tells us, do not worry, it is safe. So the peer review tests we heard about and the government regulation that we heard about do not exist for the American people, and certainly not for the European people.

So are we going to turn to this faceless, conflict-ridden bureaucracy, the WTO, and ask it to preempt the laws of the sovereign nations of Europe? Then how about next week, when someone asks it to preempt some of our consumer health and safety or labor or environmental laws? That will happen, we can bet on it.

We heard a lot about Africa. Well, they will accept the food aid if the seed corn is ground up or the wheat is milled. They will take it. They are happy to take it. They just do not want the starving people there to take it out and plant it and begin to have it cross with their traditional crops. So that is not too tough of a thing to accomplish.

There are huge problems in the distribution system, these massively corrupt dictatorships. People of Africa are not being starved because the Europeans have chosen to protect their people and their agriculture against unknown, untested science, unregulated. That is not a true fact.

Let us have the debate about what this is about, which is new corporate interests that want to increase profits. Most of this is about increasing profits. Tell the people in India who have to buy patented seed year after year, or the people in Canada who have been prosecuted because they tried to replant the seed or it crossed into their crops and they have been prosecuted by Montana, that this is about making the world safe for people to not starve, and for the environment and all those things. No, it is, pure and simple, about profits for American industry.

Mr. Speaker, after the passage of the largest tax cut in history 2 years ago, the President began to talk about a little glitch in that, and a glitch that no one could have anticipated, not the Republican White House which wrote it, the Republican Senate which passed it, and the Republican House which passed it who deliberately wrote the glitch in, which was, gee, the estate tax would only expire for 1 year and then if you did not die during that 1 year, you would be subject to the full estate tax again. And a number of other taxes were phased back in.

Well, it was not a glitch. They knew about it. They had to do it so they would not bust the bank and that was when they were predicting a surplus. But guess what now? Whoops, here we go again. There is a little glitch in the second largest tax cut in American history passed at the time of the largest deficit in American history 2 weeks ago in the dark of the night, personally written and negotiated by Vice President Cheney and the Republican leadership of the House and the Senate.

How could they have known that they left out half of the American people? I mean, after all, it was Ari Fleischer who said, ``And, of course, for people in the 10 percent bracket, they benefit the most and that's the lowest income workers in America.'' He went on to say that it certainly does deliver tax relief to the people who pay income taxes. The President surrounds himself with waitresses. But unfortunately it is all a lie because those people are not going to get tax cuts under this bill. In fact, 51 percent of income-tax-paying Oregonians will get no cut under this bill and about 49 percent of income-tax-paying Americans will not get any cut under this bill. 7.6 million people who are in this 10 percent tax bracket that Mr. Fleischer referred to who were supposed to get a lot of benefits are going to get zero, zilch, nada under this bill. But every millionaire is guaranteed $93,500 or more under this bill.

To even heap more irony on top of the injustice, the $93,500 for each millionaire will come from FICA taxes, payroll taxes paid by wage- earning Americans. Wage-earning Americans pay about 7 percent of the first dollar they earn and every dollar they earn up to about $88,000 on FICA tax. In fact, more than half of American workers pay more in FICA taxes to the Federal Government than they do income taxes. No relief for them. And, hey, guess what? We have really suckered you, because we are going to borrow every penny of the FICA taxes you

have paid that you thought was going into a trust fund, in fact, a lockbox, passed seven times while the Republicans have been in charge of this House. Seven times we passed a lockbox for Social Security. Well, we cannot afford a lockbox anymore. It is busted open and robbed. Empty. That money is going to be used to finance the tax cut and replaced with IOUs. So the millionaire who gets a $93,500 benefit under this bill, they pay a FICA tax at the rate of .7 percent, one-tenth of the rate at which a wage-earning teacher or sales clerk pays that same tax, because they do not pay it on any income over $88,000 a year.

So $912,000 of their income is exempt from FICA tax, and the poor person who works for minimum wage or for a decent wage is paying FICA tax of 7 percent on every penny earned.

Finally, they made much hay on the fact that they were going to do so much with the child credit. Of course, it was temporary and going to expire in 2 years, but that is probably a glitch and they would have discovered that later.

But there was another little glitch. Most Americans, in fact, all Americans who earn between $10,500 and $26,625 will not get the child care credit. That is an awful lot of people who have an awful lot of need. That includes 11.9 million children.

So, all in all, what we have here is one of the biggest scams in history. Never before has this country in a time of huge deficit borrowing, and that is how this is being paid for, borrowed so much money from so many wage-earning Americans to give to so very few at the top under the premise that somehow those really rich people might invest or spend that money in a way to give those working people jobs so they can pay more FICA taxes that can be transferred to them in next year's tax cuts, which the President has already targeted toward those who earn over $1 million a year, to help them have more to contribute at election time in what is expected to be a record expensive Presidential election.

The system is incredibly corrupt.

Mr. Speaker, Congress can recess for the Memorial Day break with a big bang. We are going to increase the debt ceiling by $984 billion, almost $1 trillion, and also later today the Congress will vote to borrow over $300 billion to reduce the taxes, principally of a wealthy few in this country, under the premise that under trickle- down economics, they will invest that money in such a way it will create jobs.

Well, the last tax cut of $1.2 trillion cost the country 1.7 million jobs and caused us to borrow another $1 trillion, because we are now running deficits.

We could make real investments and put people back to work, investments in roads, bridges, highways, mass transit, sewer, water systems, things that increase the productive capacity of the country and the wealth of the country.

By the administration's own measures, if we diverted that money instead of borrowing it to give to wealthy people in the hope it might create the 1

million jobs the President hopes for, we could create 13 million jobs directly in construction, with a huge spillover in economic activity across the country.

There is a very viable alternative: do not borrow money to give to a few people. Never have we borrowed so much to give to so few.

Mr. Speaker, next week the Nation will celebrate Memorial Day. A fitting celebration of Memorial Day in this House would be to crack down on the waste, fraud, and abuse at the Pentagon so that we can better equip our troops and we can meet our obligations to our veterans.

At the run-up to the last war, the Pentagon was scrambling to find chemical and biological suits. But it turned out that another part of the Pentagon had put them up for sale for surplus on the Internet, usable suits, and were selling them for pennies on the dollar at the same time that we did not have enough to go around in the field.

But that is nothing new at the Pentagon. They have misplaced $1 trillion, T, trillion, not million, not billion, trillion dollars according to the GAO. They lost 56 airplanes, 32 tanks, 36 Javelin missile command launch units. They spent $20 billion trying to overhaul their accounting system, and then abandoned that effort.

That did not help one soldier in the field, did not help one veteran, did not help the Nation. Waste, fraud, and abuse by contractors and bureaucrats is not patriotic. Let us clean up the Pentagon. Let us do something in the bill today to make certain this no longer occurs.

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

I had hoped today that we would have a fair and balanced rule. Traditionally, when the Committee on Resources, formerly the Committee on Natural Resources, formerly the Committee on the Interior during my time here in Congress, has brought important bills to the floor, they have been under open rules with each and every Member being allowed to offer amendments. I had two amendments that would have improved this bill which might have given it a better chance of actually becoming law instead of just scoring big political points.

Unfortunately, neither of those amendments are to be allowed because the House is in a hurry. A hurry for what? So we can get out for golf games this afternoon? We are going to be done between 4 and 5 o'clock this afternoon so Members can make phone calls for the big Republican fundraiser tomorrow night? I do not know. But for some reason the United States House of Representatives cannot work after 4 o'clock in the afternoon and allow Members whose districts are most affected by this legislation an opportunity to offer amendments. That is absolutely outrageous, unconscionable, and of course violates everything the Republicans promised in the ``Contract on America'' when they took over the House.

But I am sure there is a good reason why they shut us down and they will not allow the amendments. Maybe because they are afraid some of those amendments might win, might improve the bill, might go against the wishes of the White House who is running this process.

We had a good, collaborative, bipartisan process going last fall. We reached agreement on a bill. It would have actually had a very good chance of becoming law. Instead, suddenly this bill springs up on a Friday afternoon to be considered in full committee the next Wednesday without one single public hearing, without even consideration in the subcommittee, and it was being driven by the White House.

The Republicans would never vote for this bill if we had a Democratic administration, even this exact bill. It gives total discretion to the Secretary of Agriculture and the Assistant Secretary who runs the Forest Service and the Secretary of the Interior over what and where they will apply this bill. They do not have to prioritize. They do not have to go and protect communities first. They do not have to protect old growth. No. In fact, this bill will rely upon harvesting old growth, which can be done without appeal by the Secretary under this bill. Sometimes only in thousand acre segments, sometimes in smaller segments, timber harvesting.

There is no money in this bill. This is a very expensive process. One hundred years of mismanagement of the national forests cannot be fixed on the cheap. There is no money in this bill. There was money in the bipartisan substitute last fall, but the White House will not allow them to ask for money because they want to pretend this can be done for nothing.

It cannot be done for nothing. They will just give the contracts to people, and they will go out there and clear the stuff out and just take what they get. But, guess what, the brush, the underbrush and the little dead poles and the small trees, they are not worth much. So what are they going to have to do to carry out this bill? They are going to harvest the old growth, the large fire-resistant trees that are what we should be leaving according to all the scientists while we clear out the understory and the underbrush.

But that will be harvested or not harvested at the discretion of Mark Ray and other bureaucrats in the administration. Appointed bureaucrats will have the discretion, total discretion without appeal, virtually without being able to go to court because their decisions have to get deference in the courts.

We could have done something real. We could have done something bipartisan. We could have done something that would become law. We could have done something that would begin to address the 100 years of mismanagement of our forests and deal with the real threats to my community.

There are going to be a lot of people talking today who do not have a darn thing at risk. I have got people and communities at risk. The largest fire in the country burned a good deal of

my district last year, and we are still threatened.

I feel very strongly about this, and I am offended that I cannot offer a single amendment, get one vote on one substitute, and the House is going to rush out of here at 4 or 5 o'clock for people's golf games or fundraising phone calls. That is outrageous.

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

Mr. Speaker, there are some grounds for agreement here. This chart shows what we want to prevent. Fires are not partisan. In fact, last fall we negotiated a bipartisan agreement, something that was not everything the timber industry wanted; and it certainly was not everything the environmentalists wanted. But that approach was abandoned several weeks ago. Now the White House is calling the shots here, and they are going to jam through a bill.

There are a lot of reasons to oppose this bill. I mean, one is do we trust appointed bureaucrats with our precious natural resources? They created this problem through 100 years of mismanagement; and this is giving all the discretion in terms of appeals, protection of old growth. Even the courts have to give deference to the judgment of the appointed bureaucrats. I do not think the Republicans would support that for a Democratic administration. I would not support it for a Democratic or Republican administration.

But there are another 5 billion reasons to oppose this bill. There is no money in it. The bill we wrote last fall admitted that this is an expensive proposition. Undoing 100 years of mismanagement is very expensive.

There is no money in this bill, and they are going to finance this bill potentially by cutting the very resource that should be protected, what we wanted to restore.

We just heard about low-intensity fires. We want to go back to low- intensity fires, big old trees, widely spaced in Eastern Oregon and down through the intermountain States.

But we give all of the discretion on the harvest to the Secretary of Agriculture and his or her appointees, and we say there is no money and that we are going to finance this by putting contractors out there and having them remove things and paying for the

projects that way. If you do that, guess what they are going to take first? They are going to take out the big old trees. They might not bother with the brush and poles and dead stuff, which is what we need to be targeting.

This is not the bill we should be voting on today, and not a single Democratic amendment was allowed. What the heck kind of a process is this?

Parliamentary Inquiry

There is some room for agreement here. This is what we want to prevent. It is a fire in my congressional district last summer.

The gentleman who just preceded me talked about bureaucrats. This bill is a bureaucrat's dream, because this bill gives all the discretion to appointed bureaucrats, and I know that that party would not be supporting this bill if there was a Democrat in the White House. They would not want to give Bruce Babbitt this authority. But they do want to give it to this administration.

This bill was written at the White House and sent down. This is not the bill we negotiated last fall. If this was the bill that we had negotiated last fall, and I give the gentleman from Colorado and others credit for sitting down in tough negotiations where we took flack from both sides, from the environmentalists and from the industry, and came up with something that would have worked, would have gotten this done, would have turned this into a nonpartisan problem. If it was that, I would vote for it in a split second. But it was not, so I tried to offer some amendments to improve it.

No, we cannot have any amendments because the House has to adjourn at 5 o'clock this afternoon. Why? I do not know. Someone has got a golf game. People have got to make fund-raising phone calls for the big event tomorrow night. I do not know. We do not have time for amendments. This is only the Congress after all in the House, no time for amendments.

There has been a lot of talk about whether or not this would allow the harvesting of big old trees. The bottom line is we do not do this on the cheap. It is 100 years of mismanagement. The only good study was done in Oregon at Oregon State. Sixteen hundred and eighty-five dollars an acre is the estimate to do this work. And guess what? They do not get $1,685 an acre for a bunch of brush and dead poles, do they? No. If they are going to generate that much money to do the work that needs to be done, they are going to high-grade the damn forests the same way that they high-graded them early in the last century when we were really stupid.

That is what is going to happen under this bill. It gives the discretion to protect or not protect old-growth to Mark Rey. I love Mark. Great guy. But I do not want to give him that discretion. I would like a definition of what has to be protected and what is not. No, he has that authority and people cannot hardly appeal his decisions because the White House wants to pretend it can be done on the cheap.

The President's budget, his big request is $230 million for fuel reduction this year. At that rate, if we did all of the land that they want to put into this bill, it would take 174 years. So I do not think the President is exactly asking for the money needed.

Where is the rest of the money going to come from? How are we going to do it more quickly than a 174 years? There is only one answer: The gentleman from California (Mr. George Miller) said the truth, and the truth hurts. We have got to take high-value products out.

What is a high-value product? It is a big old tree. And only one person stands between cutting that tree to fund this bill and the reality of that, and that is an appointed bureaucrat.

This is really too serious to consider in this way, and it affects too many of us too much. I am really sad that it has come to this.

I was willing to take the heat, and I did last fall. A couple of Democratic Senators took a lot of heat, attacked by national environmental groups for trying to do something that made sense in this area. The environmental groups, they succeeded. They stopped the bill last year, and now we are going to see something in the House much worse. There is a lesson in that.

But there is also a lesson in overreaching. My colleagues know this bill cannot become law as it is. It is either a bargaining chip with the Senate. That is one thing I hear. It is a bargaining chip with the Senate to try to pull them back, or it is a political event so that they can blame a couple of prominent Democrat Western Senators who are up for election for stopping the bill over there and use it against them as an election year issue. I do not know which one it is.

I do not know which one it is, but either are pathetic reasons to stick this bill through in this way without a single amendment being allowed.

I yield to the gentleman from Colorado.

Mr. Speaker, reclaiming my time, one other point: the President also did not ask for enough money to fight the fires. It is not new. We had the same problem with Clinton, we had the same problem with Bush I, we had the same problem with Reagan. They never ask for enough money to fight the fires. So what do they do? They go back in. They used to borrow the money from the KB funds. KB funds do not exist anymore. What do they do now? They rob all the other accounts of the Forest Service.

Do you know what the first one they rob is? The Fuel Reduction Program. So you are not going to put out any real money to do the work. We know that money is going to be stolen this year and used for fighting the fires, because there is not enough.

Offered By: Mr. DeFazio

Amendment No. 1: At the end of title X (page 333, after

line 21), insert the following new section:

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

Mr. Chairman, I rise in support of the bill. Just following up on the remarks of the esteemed chairman, I am really pleased that he has strongly supported and we have included in the bill a mandate that on an annual basis we have a report of essentially the 10 ``most wanted,'' is the way I would phrase it.

Too many times we have seen in the past where the National Transportation Safety Board raises serious concerns in the aftermath of an aviation incident or accident; and oftentimes, because of various pressures or bureaucratic inertia, we find that those recommendations never again see the light of day.

Minimally, we would want to see a substantive response on each and every important recommendation that would track it and give us a meaningful document that shows why it was implemented, why it was not implemented, or where we are in the implementation process or what modifications the FAA has made to it in moving forward with the implementation.

So I think that is an excellent addition to the authority of the NTSB and will enhance their status as the world's number one transportation safety watchdog. And that, indeed, is what the NTSB is.

They are sought after in accidents overseas, have conducted some very,

very difficult investigations and technically assisted in very, very difficult investigations and recovery efforts. So I am also pleased to see that there is a modest increase in the funding for the NTSB recommended here and for the NTSB Academy, which provides the world- class standard of training for accident investigators.

And then finally, there is a provision regarding families of passengers. The NTSB does not have really the extensive resources on an ongoing basis to provide assistance to the families and the bereaved of passengers in accidents; and this bill would move that on to other, more appropriate Federal agencies at the appropriate point in the investigation, something which today, unfortunately, often languishes so that neither the NTSB and their principal functions are served, nor are the bereaved family members of the passengers.

So also I think this bill is an improvement and a long-needed reauthorization of the NTSB.

Mr. Chairman, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. Chairman, I yield such time as he may consume to the gentleman from Minnesota (Mr. Oberstar), the distinguished ranking member of the full committee.

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

Mr. Chairman, will the gentleman yield?

Certainly, Mr. Chairman. I thank the gentleman from Colorado (Mr. Udall) for his leadership on this issue.

The tragedies are not unique to Colorado. We have had similar tragedies in the Pacific Northwest, and I think it raises very, very severe questions about whether these vans should be on the road at all. And I certainly would encourage the continued study and action on the safety of these vehicles.

Yes. As I said in my earlier statement, my understanding is that the NTSB is continuing to study the van stability issue for these 15-passenger vans and to see whether or not they are more likely to roll over and cause injury or death. And since they are too important just to be put aside, I certainly congratulate the gentleman in his persistence in his legislation, and I believe we will accommodate, at least partially, his concerns in a subsequent amendment.

Mr. Chairman, I ask unanimous consent that the remainder of the bill be considered as read, printed in the Record, and open to amendment at any point.

Madam Speaker, I ask unanimous consent to proceed out of order in place of the gentleman from New Jersey (Mr. Pallone).

Madam Speaker, today the Bush administration unveiled its transportation funding plan for the next 6-year surface transportation bill. It is pathetically inadequate. If you look at the inventory of needs across the United States of America, the crumbling bridges, the crumbling highways, the congestion, the need for investment, the President and his staff believe that this budget should be flat-lined. We can't afford the investment, they tell us. We can't afford to invest more in roads, bridges and highways, in high-speed rail and congestion mitigation. We just can't afford it. Oh, we can afford massive tax cuts for the wealthy, but if we are going to have massive tax cuts for the wealthy, his number one job creation proposal, we can't afford to create real jobs, jobs in the construction industry.

By his own measure, by the measure of the Bush administration Department of Transportation, every $1 billion spent on transportation infrastructure and construction produces 47,000 jobs in the United States of America. If the President would just increase his proposal to come close to that being made by the Republican Chair of the Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure, they would create 705,000 new jobs a year in the United States of America; real jobs, construction jobs and related jobs in small businesses, and suppliers for those construction companies.

Instead, they want to engage in the charade of producing jobs through trickle-down economics and tax cuts. It did not work in the 1980's for Ronald Reagan. It did not work for George Bush the First, and it is not going to work for this George Bush. In fact, his first tax cuts, which were record tax cuts, have not produced any jobs. We have lost nearly a million jobs since his first tax cuts. They have lots of excuses why we have lost those jobs since his record tax cuts went into effect. Mostly Bill Clinton, a few other things, world events; but they have got people to blame, and they are saying since those tax cuts did not work, let us borrow money from the Social Security trust Fund, from the Medicare trust fund; let us borrow money to fund more tax cuts because that is what we have to do now.

When we did that first set of tax cuts, we supposedly had a surplus. We no longer have a surplus. We have a huge and growing deficit. We are accumulating debt by more than $1 billion a day; $1 billion a day we are adding to the future debt of the young people of this country. And they want to borrow more money to finance tax cuts for woefully few people, an average of $105,000 for every millionaire. But somehow they think that $105,000 granted to every millionaire in this country in tax cuts will put more people to work than $1 billion invested in crumbling bridges, roads, and highways.

It is pretty simple. We could put people back to work. We could make this a more productive country. We could make our transportation system work better. But, no. Tax cuts for precious few political campaign contributors are more important to this administration.

Mr. Speaker, 2 years ago, as the recession began and the government was projecting a $5.6 trillion surplus, the President muscled through a big $1.2 trillion tax cut based on those rosy projections that we would have surpluses as far as the eye could see. He said we could have it all. We could fully fund the Social Security Trust Fund and the lockbox and the Medicare Trust Fund and the lockbox, we could increase spending for education, the military, and we could cut taxes. A number of us at the time said, well, we really should not spend the money before we have it in the bank, and we said, let us do it year by year. We lost and we went forward.

Now, they also said at the time, and this is a quote from the gentleman from California (Mr. Thomas), the chairman of the House Committee on Ways and Means, that their $1.2 trillion tax proposal was the solution for the then beginnings of the malaise of the United States economy.

The quote, ``By moving quickly our hope is to have both monetary and fiscal policy pull this economy out of its nose dive.''

Since the gentleman from California (Mr. Thomas) made that statement on the day the bill was passed, March 8, 2001, the United States of America has lost a million jobs and the economy is still in decline.

Now the entire surplus has vanished. We are now confronted with deficits as far as the eye can see. And what do they propose? They propose now to borrow money to give tax cuts. That is right. We are going to borrow money to give tax cuts. Never before in the history of our Nation will we have borrowed so much, a trillion dollars, to give to so few. A few thousand individuals will benefit principally from this massive tax giveaway.

Every penny of the Social Security surplus only paid by wage-earning Americans will be borrowed and in great part transferred to those who earn over a million dollars a year, $105,000 each average tax cut for people who earn over a million dollars a year. It is an awful lot of Social Security taxes. That is an awful lot of hours worked by Americans and their families to finance those tax cuts for the wealthiest of the wealthy. The top 5 percent, $200,000 and up, will get 64 percent of the benefits. And as I said, families $1 million and up will average $105,600. And it principally goes to people who do not work for wages.

Somehow this administration honors those who either inherited or otherwise, perhaps they were part of the Enron scam or something else have accumulated a bunch of money, or otherwise honorably earned a bunch of money, but they can invest for a living. They do not work for wages. They do not have to go in 40 hours a week, 60 hours a week. They do not have to hold two jobs. They do not have to work for wages. They should pay a tax rate lower, according to this administration, than working American families.

Now, in the short term they say this trickle down from these wealthy people will put those working wage-earning folks back to work, and understand their theory since wage earners will pay higher taxers than investors, that will ultimately undo the deficits. We will get the money from the wage earners because the investors will not be paying the taxes anymore. But even to get there, they had to put in a Brooklyn Bridge provision which is that many of the provisions of this legislation will expire in a few years. Otherwise, the cost tag would go over a trillion dollars; and since we are borrowing all this money to give back, that would be a problem with a lot of folks. So the Brooklyn Bridge provision says that most of these tax cuts, except the ones that go to the wealthy, will expire in 2005. So the child care credit increase up to a thousand dollars, well, that drops back down to $700 in 2005. The increasing of the 10 percent bracket for the lowest income earners, those around $12,000-$14,000 a year, well, that expires in 2005. Married couples, helping to do away with the marriage penalty, that expires in 2005. The AMT, a lot of people do not know what that is, but a lot of middle-income families and upper-middle-income families will be falling into this trap, it needs to be fixed, that expires in 2005.

But guess what? The capital gains and dividend provisions, those that give the $105,000 a year to the families that earn over a million dollars, that never expires under the proposal the House will vote on tomorrow. And the top bracket rate reductions, those will not ever expire either. Wage-earning suckers will pay the bill while people who can afford to invest for a living will reap the benefits.

But this is trickle-down economics revisited; and as we know, it worked really well in the 1980s. In fact, Dick Cheney was one of the principal architects back then to the deficit-producing, job-killing, trickle-down economics of the 1980s; and now we will revisit it in the 21st century. Shame on this House of Representatives for bringing up this bill in this manner with this constrained debate with no alternative that would produce jobs and wealth in this country allowed to be offered.

Mr. Chairman, the University of Oregon has a well- established nanotechnology program that along with its partners at Oregon State University occupies a special niche in the field of nanoscience research.

The University of Oregon is working closely with Oregon State University to put nanotechnology to work in real micro systems with applications in sensors for human safety, reactors for reduced environmental impact, more efficient energy sources, life saving medical devices, and integrated circuits for the next generation of computers and communications systems. The legislation speaks to the need to apply nanoscale research to microscale devices and will strengthen national research policy in support of such work.

Beyond that, the University of Oregon is pioneering research into inherently safer materials and manufacturing or ``green nanoscience''. Through deliberate design at the moelcular or nanoscale level, University of Oregon researchers aim to produce products and processes that pose dramatically less risk to human health than traditional manufacturing methods. The potential impact of nanotechnology derives from the fact that unprecedented material properties are being discovered in nanoscale materials. These properties can be harnessed to invent entirely new products and processes. UO researchers have already discovered new phenomena in nanoscience such as thermoelectric materials that present energy efficient, refrigerant-free cooling solutions and biomolecular lithography, a possible candidate for the ultimate minuritzation of electronic circuits and computers.

If nanotechnology is the both a path to the next industrial revolution and a source of concern about societal and ethical issues involving nanoscale research, then federal agencies should be proactive in funding research that seeks ways to develop materials and manufacturing methods that are inherently safer--less wasteful in their use of materials and energy, less harmful to human health and safety, and just as economical to produce.

Mr. Speaker, I am voting yes on H. Con. Res. 141, a hortative resolution with no legally-binding impact, but which has a lot of predictable political rhetoric about the need to reform the enormously complex and loophole-ridden federal tax code.

I am voting yes because the ``whereas'' clauses in the resolution are by and large inoffensive, if deliberately vague about the true intention behind the rhetoric, which is to fundamentally reform the U.S. tax code in a way that eases the tax burden on the rich and corporations and raises the burden on middle and lower-income Americans.

I agree that the federal tax code is too complex. Billions are spent trying to comply with its provisions. Though, I would also point out that the wealthiest Americans and most profitable corporations also spend billions in an effort to avoid their fair share of the federal tax burden.

The resolution is also correct to say the tax code is full of loopholes and special interest exemptions. Though, I would point out that these loopholes and exemptions, which largely benefit the most powerful in our society, did not get into the tax code by accident or osmosis. They were put there by Members of Congress at the behest of wealthy campaign contributors.

Although I am voting yes, I want to go on the record in opposition to the second ``resolved'' clause of the resolution, which in my opinion is too deferential to the tax reform concepts laid out in the February 2003 Economic Report of the President.

The President's report lays out its utopian vision of reduced, or ideally zero, taxes on corporations, reduced taxes on capital, and increased taxes on consumption and wages, which would hurt middle and lower-income Americans.

Mr. Speaker, if the U.S. tax code is going to be overhauled, I believe it should be made more progressive than it is today. That would mean eliminating special interest loopholes for corporations and wealthy Americans. Cracking down on tax dodging by powerful individuals and businesses. Doing so would allow us to relieve some of the tax burden on middle and lower-income Americans. Further, any overhaul of the federal tax code must not add to the crushing burden of debt we are leaving to the next generation.

Like Adam Smith, author of the pro-capitalism tome ``The Wealth of Nations,'' I believe in progressive taxation. Adam Smith wrote, ``The subjects of every state ought to contribute toward the support of the government, as nearly as possible, in proportion to their respective abilities; that is, in proportion to the revenue which they respectively enjoy under the protection of the state ... [As Henry Home (Lord Kames) has written, a goal of taxation should be to] `remedy inequality of riches as much as possible, by relieving the poor and burdening the rich.' ''

Madam Speaker, 18 months ago, the Republican leadership during the debate on the first $15 billion bailout for the airline industry promised that soon, promptly, we would consider employee relief, including financial assistance, health insurance and training for new careers. It is 18 months later, and those 150,000 airline employees are still waiting, 18 months of waiting.

The airlines project they will lay off another 70,000 because of the war with Iraq. Boeing has cut 30,000 workers. They are all still waiting for that financial assistance and extended unemployment package.

Finally, today, here on the United States House of Representatives floor for the first time, 18 months too late, we are going to take a vote on that issue; and we will see where people really stand, whether they are with the workers or they just want to bail out the corporations.

Mr. Speaker, today, finally, 18 months after it was promised, the United States House of Representatives voted overwhelmingly, almost 2 to 1 when finally forced, to provide some financial assistance to the 150,000 airline workers who have lost their jobs as a result of 9/11 and the horrendous recession in the United States. It is expected that as many as another 70,000 will lose their jobs because of the slowdown in travel due to the war in Iraq and even more probably with the threat of SARS and other problems.

It is time that we recognize the service of these people to our country and the fact that they need a little bit of help in their time of need. The Congress rushed through a $15 billion airline bailout shortly after 9/11 to try to help keep the industry in the air when people were afraid to fly. And that bailout provided more funds in one day than the entire deregulated industry has made in its entire history. Its entire 26-year history was eclipsed, their profits, by that one bill.

But the bill glaringly omitted any assistance directly to workers and it meaninglessly pretended to limit the salaries of CEOs. I have seen the results of the meaningless limits adopted by that legislation 2 years ago, or 18 months ago, in bailing out the airlines with the huge compensation packages and salaries and specially protected retirement that is being made available to the executives. It is defended. They said how could we get execs to work here if we did not pay them these outrageous salaries and if we did not totally protect their retirement? Guess what? All of the line workers, all the flight attendants, all the pilots, all the mechanics, all the gate agents, all the ticket agents, none of those people have specially protected pensions, and yet there has not been support from the industry or from this administration or from the majority in this House of Representatives to help those distressed workers.

And finally today, in one of those opportunities that rarely comes, a week ago when we were taking up the supplemental bill I tried to offer an amendment to help the workers; in fact, a Republican Member had gone earlier to a press conference with me and others to announce the legislation, and I asked him if he would go to the Committee on Rules and ask to have it made in order during the bill, and he said absolutely. Guess what? He did not show up. He did not show up because he was intimidated by the Republican leadership.

I came to the floor and offered that amendment, but the Republicans struck it down on a procedural technicality. They said we cannot take up a bill here to help the workers. We will get to it soon. Just like the 18 months we had promised previously, soon. Soon when?

Today, because we had one opportunity, which was a motion to instruct, usually a technical sort of thing in the House of Representative, we focused in on assistance to workers that has been long overdue; and when forced to vote, we find that nearly two-thirds of the United States House of Representatives supports that, but their leadership and the White House leadership has been preventing us from taking that step.

Congratulations to the House for that vote today and shame on the leadership and shame on the leadership downtown that did not allow that vote, and shame on them if they find some way to try to kill this in the conference committee because the White House is objecting that there is too much money in the bill to help the airlines now that we have added a little bit of money to directly help the workers. We will all be watching to see what comes in that final conference report, and we will know who killed the assistance to workers if it is stripped out of the bill.

After this overwhelming vote here and the overwhelming vote in the Senate, let the majority work its will and let us help these workers and their families.