Floor Statements

Mr. Speaker, I rise to address this body on the National Day of Prayer.

The Constitution--in a word--is the document that defines the values and principles of America.

Nearly 220 years ago, a few men, with extraordinary vision, used the lessons that history taught us to create this binding document that has served as the burning touch of our Nation's freedom. But over time, that flame has been has been dimmed, and its power has been mitigated, and before we know it, it will be a dull light that is indecipherable.

You see, over time, Mr. Speaker, we have let the Judiciary, slowly chip away the freedoms that are guaranteed to us under the constitution--chipping away so much that some of our liberties are unrecognizable.

For example, Mr. Speaker, the First Amendment to the Constitution says, ``Congress shall make no laws respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof . . .'' It says that those of us who have faith in a Higher Power have the right to pray, express our beliefs.

Yet, our Federal Judges have ruled out prayer in schools. They have ruled that the Pledge of Allegiance, particularly, ``. . . one Nation, under God . . .'' is a violation of separation of state doctrine. Those who would ban our inalienable right to express our beliefs in a higher power selectively choose to cite the first part of the clause that says ``Congress shall make no laws respecting an establishment of religion . . .'' They leave the second part, which says ``. . . or prohibiting free exercise thereof . . .''

Congress opens up every session with a prayer, the President of the United States uses a Bible when he is sworn into office by the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. The Declaration of Independence, arguably the single most powerful political document in world history, mentions God in the first paragraph and ``divine Providence'' in the last.

Religion in the public sector is not prohibited by the Constitution, the Constitution is what makes our ability to freely exercise our belief possible!

The Second Amendment to the Constitution says, ``A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.'' Some would argue, and unfortunately some have successfully done so, that this is not an individual right, but a collective right associated with service in a militia, or in modern terms the National Guard.

The Founders had a profound understanding that individuals and their rights were the only true check against an overzealous government. After all, they had just defeated one that sought to control access to arms.

Just a moment ago I added emphasis on the ``people,'' I did so because right belongs to them, not the President and most assuredly not the Federal Government.

The Fifth Amendment says unequivocally that no person shall ``. . . be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without due compensation.''

Yet Mr. Speaker, in my district of Southern New Mexico, we can't water our crops because our water is being diverted for a minnow based on science that only a writer of fiction could love. We have people who are prevented from using their God-given resources to feed, clothe, house and provide energy for their neighbors.

The Endangered Species Act, Mr. Speaker, was noble in its intent and just in its cause. Not one of us would seek the termination of a species. Yet the law has been twisted, turned and implemented in ways that directly violate our constitutional rights. Simply stated, and directly supported by the plain wording of the 5th Amendment, Uncle Sam can't take our property without due process. He definitely can't take it without compensating for the loss. So we must ask ourselves, when does it matter to us enough to make a difference?

And the Tenth Amendment says that we have States Rights, ``The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.'' Yet the Federal government, at the behest of highly objectionable rulings by the courts over the last 100 years, has intruded on every aspect of our lives and ignored those rights reserved for the states and the people.

We know that we live under a constitution, but we are living in a time when the Constitution only means what the Judiciary says it means--simply stated, we can't let that happen.

The constitution has been tyrannized by people who honestly believe that we are incapable, as a free people, of living our lives in the manner that best serves us and our families. The courts have been willing accomplices and many of the core freedoms that are guaranteed to us under the constitution have been slowly but continuously taken from us.

I believe that the Constitution has been treated unjustly by the courts, and I believe we need to take a look at how our Constitution-- this symbol of freedom--can be returned to its rightful place as the foundation of our freedom--instead of being just another document that tourists visit at the National Archives in Washington.

Thomas Jefferson, James Madison and the Framers of the Constitution feared tyranny from the judiciary more than from the other two branches, so they placed deliberate limitations on the judiciary.

As a result, under their plan, ``the Judiciary is beyond comparison the weakest of the three departments of power . . . [and] the general liberty of the people can never be endangered from the quarter.''

These are not my words, but taken directly from the Federalists Papers. Can there be any doubt that our forefathers saw a danger to our way of life and intentionally erected a wall of separation to protect us from it?

There shouldn't be a doubt, but it stares us in the face every day.

The bottom line is, Americans should not have to fear ``judge-made laws'' as a reality of life. We elect our legislators to make our laws, we elect the executive branch to implement those laws, and the judiciary is charged with holding people accountable to these laws and determining the constitutionality of laws.

There should be no doubt, either, that government is the greatest, if not only, threat to individual liberty. Neither the United States, nor any of the branches of the government, nor the states, is the ultimate authority of the

Constitution. The ultimate authority of the Constitution is the people of the Union, just like Thomas Jefferson said.

We need to make sure that the Constitution doesn't just stay locked up in a display case at the National Archives on Pennsylvania Avenue. We need to bring it into our homes, our schools, our businesses, and our courtrooms.

Only then can we make sure that our schools are symbols of freedom-- that our families are symbols of freedom . . . that our businesses are symbols of freedom . . . that our state legislatures, and local governments are symbols of freedom.

When its all said and done, my greatest desire is for my grandchildren to look back on their grandfather and their neighbors and say, ``They left us a better country than they inherited. They cared enough to protect freedom for the generations to come.''

Mr. Speaker, I was in Vietnam in 1971, 1972, the early part of 1973, and the early part of 1974. I was in Vietnam flying when Jane Fonda made her visit to the north giving aid and comfort to the enemy.

Mr. Speaker, I was in Vietnam, or on my way there, when the presumptive Democrat candidate threw his ribbons across the fence into the dumpster or his friends or his medals, or some similarity of that representation, of our country.

Mr. Speaker, as I listen to the comments from the floor of the House that said that this war is not winnable, I would remind my colleagues that all wars are unwinnable in the heart; and as they seek to undermine the will of the American people, they should consider carefully what they are doing.

Mr. Speaker, we must complete the job that we started before the terrorists complete the job that they started.

Mr. Speaker, I was in France on 9-11. So I was compelled to fly to come back to this country as soon as flight service was restarted. I came through Dallas-Ft. Worth about 10 days after the attacks.

Mr. Speaker, when I came through Dallas-Ft. Worth regional airport, that bustling busy hub of much of the traffic, the air traffic in the western United States, I think that our plane was the only one deplaning. I looked up and down the corridors and walked the full distance to the baggage check without seeing one other plane deplaning. Mr. Speaker, when I went to get a cab to go to the hotel, there was not one cab available because there were no passengers to ask for cabs.

As I finally got a transport van from the hotel, arrived at the hotel to find that there were very, very few customers in the hotel. Mr. Speaker, our economy was this close to collapsing. If we first lose the airlines and the cab industries and the hotel industries and the hospitality industries, we are looking at losing banks and financial institutions and insurance companies.

Mr. Speaker, the terrorists set out to do a job a decade ago first attacking the twin towers of the World Trade Center. Mr. Speaker, they did that attack in 1993 and then again in 2001. If we are going to sit on our heels trying a policy of appeasement to deal with the terrorists, I will tell you that the terrorists will win because we cannot sustain repeated attacks on our economy and of the civilian population of America like occurred on September 11, 2001. There are estimates that that cost alone, that one day, exceeded $2 trillion, Mr. Speaker.

Our economy is $11 trillion. So we took over 15 percent, close to 20 percent of our economy out in one day, not to mention the 2,000 lives.

Mr. Speaker, what I hear from the House floor and what I hear from my friends on the other side of the aisle sounds more partisan when I put it in context of the many complaints that I should have heard from them under the deployments that President Clinton had. We went into Bosnia in the early part of the 1990s, and President Clinton said we would be out by the end of that year. Instead, troops are still there today. Yet, I do not hear one comment about his deployment into Bosnia.

If the names Kosovo, Somalia, Haiti, and Macedonia do not mean anything to my colleagues, those are additional areas in which the previous President dispatched our troops to try to stabilize a very unstable region.

Mr. Speaker, Mr. Clinton launched cruise missiles into Sudan and Iraq, into Haiti with no U.N. resolution. Yet I hear no comments from the floor of this House.

So when I hear my colleagues saying that this war is unwinnable, I think that they are engaged in partisan politics which strikes at the very desire of this country to fight its war. And when I watched the aid and comfort of 1971 and 1972 by the presumptive Democrat candidate for President and Jane Fonda, I am beginning to hear a similar tone.

I will tell you, Mr. Speaker, as one of the Vietnam vets who returned to this country without one public or private official saying thank for your time, Mr. Speaker, I caution our friends to be careful of the rhetoric they use.

Mr. Speaker, I thank the body for allowing me to come and address them tonight.

America is absolutely a magnificent place. I was one of six children growing up on a small five acre farm just south of Hobbs, New Mexico. My father worked in the oil industry as a roustabout. We were not poor but we definitely did not have as much as many families have. And to have the six children graduate from high school and go on to college, and for each one of us to become successful in our own ways, to be blessed with the opportunity to serve in this House of Representatives, is truly one of the great blessings that this country offers.

My wife and I were able, about 14 years ago, to make a down payment on a business. And in this country we were able to pay that business off and able to build that business from four employees to 15 employees because of the tremendous opportunities that this country has.

One of the things that became obvious to many people in the last several years is that with all of the opportunities and with all of the hope that is there were still things that needed to be done.

Last year, as many as 75 percent of Americans said that we needed to pass a prescription drug bill. Mr. Speaker, when I got here to Congress, I began to look at the Medicare program. And one of the things that struck me was that both Democrat and Republican analysts, the economists, both forecast tremendous difficulties in the financial part of Medicare within the next 4 to 10 years, depending on which economists you talked with.

So it became obvious to me that we had two significant problems. We had a need for a prescription drug plan because America's seniors were having to choose between food and medicine, and we had a Medicare program that faced insolvency, some say earlier than the 2017 projected by the trustees of the Medicare program. At any rate, whichever figure that you use, the tremendous financial difficulties faced by the budget created by the Medicare problems needed facing.

As a business owner, I was not about to sit by idly and let that train wreck come toward me. We began to address the problem. So these were the two things that we put into a bill. The prescription drug bill and we began to reform Medicare in order to have Medicare available to the next generations and to the generations beyond that.

Now, we wanted to craft a bill that was entirely voluntary. That was very important. Many of our seniors wanted a choice. They said we want a choice but do not mandate the choice. Make the choice voluntary. So that was one of the elements that we put into this bill, that it was entirely voluntary. Seniors can choose to participate or they can choose to stay exactly as they have been.

Now, in my own marriage we are a couple that would probably split our choices because I do not like change. I am like the seniors that do not want change, but my wife every day reads all she can about medical literature. She reads all she can about the different medicines that are available. Myself, I just want to know what ones I am supposed to take and I will keep taking it. So I think that in our marriage that my wife and I represent the two different choices that seniors told us that they would like to have in, and this bill allows both camps to have it the way they would like to.

Now the reform process that we have put into place was significant. For the first time under Medicare, we are able to give physicals, people entering into the Medicare program will have physicals. And if there are problems that are noted, then Medicare can pay for those problems to begin curing because another reform that we have put in is that for the first time we are allowing disease management instead of waiting until the problem becomes catastrophic, which was the old method under Medicare. We are now proactive in dealing with the illnesses out front in allowing the physicals, but then also allowing disease management.

Now, under this program, another reform that we put into place is that we now allow screenings for cancer. We allow screenings for diabetes. We all know that if you screen and detect early, that the cost of cure and the cost of remedy is less than if you wait until the catastrophic point. Not only is the cost less, Mr. Speaker, also the survivability is much greater. So there are many reasons that we felt reform was desperately needed in this plan and we have addressed those one by one and put deep reforms into this plan so that Medicare could begin to lower its costs currently while offering better care, greater survivability, and offering financial stability into the next generation and the generations beyond.

Now, I mentioned that we wanted competition in this bill and we got competition. Seniors are going to be allowed to choose private parties if they would like that, but they are allowed to stay in Medicare as they know it if that is what they want.

Now, there has been much hubbub, Mr. Speaker, many of our friends on the other side of the aisle declare that this bill is full of corporate welfare. Now, what they are trying to cover up is that we have made some very good decisions. Many of the seniors in this country have retiree benefits. My father is an example. He retired from Exxon and has medical benefits through that retirement plan. Almost always when seniors tell me that they want us to not mess with their retirement benefits, they are hoping that their company will continue retirement benefits into the future.

What we did in this bill, Mr. Speaker, that is described as corporate welfare, is we gave an incentive to those companies who have retiree benefits. We are willing to pay almost a quarter or maybe a little bit more if the companies will keep those plans in place.

Now, we will tell you, Mr. Speaker, that before we put in plan into place in the bill, 40 percent of the Nation's companies that offer retiree benefits were scheduled to drop them or delete them. After we passed the bill, that 40 percent dropped to 16 percent.

Now, keep in mind that if the retirement benefit has dropped, is dropped by companies, that the Federal Government will pick up 100 percent of the costs as those people transition from retiree benefits over into Medicare.

To the Republicans in the House, it made sense that we would do what we could to encourage companies to hold those retirement benefits because our seniors liked them, but also they are cheaper for the Federal Government. So it can be described as corporate welfare if you would like, but the greater and deeper understanding is that we wanted to create an incentive which would allow companies just the possibility of extending retirement benefits.

One of the most dramatic things we did under the bill, Mr. Speaker, is we put a health savings account in. Health savings accounts are a fairly simple process. It is a medical IRA. You can put money in tax fee at any age. You build up interest on it tax free. You can take the money out tax free at any age if you use it for medical purposes. And then you can pass it on to the next generation if you do not use it, and the next generation has a head start on the cost of their medical care.

Mr. Speaker, the health savings account can, by itself, revolutionize the way we buy and spend our health dollars in this country today. The health savings account can be used for medical purposes which are described very broadly in this bill. It can be used to

pay for premiums. You can buy your insurance through your health savings account.

You use it to pay for deductibles. You can use it to pay for office visits, emergency room or prescription drug costs.

Mr. Speaker, I would tell you that my company that my wife and I had built, if we still had that company, I will tell you that we would give the bonuses that each year we gave to our employees, instead of writing the check to the employee, we would have put it into their health savings accounts. Typically, we would have put $2,500 or $3,000 into our employees' accounts each year. Then it probably also would have lowered their take-home pay, and we would put that money over into the health savings account so that we reach the maximum of $5,000 per year per account.

After we had put 5 to 10 or $15,000 into the account, we would then start shopping for insurance which instead of having a $500 deductible, it would have had a $2,500 deductible or $3,000 deductible. It is at that point that the insurance costs begin to collapse, usually to about one-quarter of what they are. So that $3,000 deductible, maybe the insurance rates might fall from $500 per month down to $100 or $150 a month.

As we compress the cost of health insurance, Mr. Speaker, more of our young couples will opt back into buying health insurance; and the young people in the system, those who use it the least, make our health insurance system more stable.

Again, another thing that, of course, we did in this plan is we built the prescription drug benefit into it. Basically, we wanted to make sure that the people of low incomes were treated as well as we could, and then people of higher incomes would receive a different treatment. We simply split that up in order to allow the government to pay for it. If we had given the same prescription drug benefit to all people, as our friends on the other side of the aisle have suggested, the cost would have been driven from about $400 billion to $1 trillion. We felt like that for the future generation's sake that we must watch the cost on this bill as much as possible.

So for our seniors, at 150 percent the rate of poverty and less, that is about $18,000 for a married couple, we have no gap in coverage. They are covered at 75/25. That is, government pays 75 percent; the participant pays 25 percent. And that is up to about $5,200, at which point we said we think that is catastrophic coverage and we will begin to cover it at 95 percent of everything above that upper threshold, the cap of the program.

The cap is available to all income levels because we did not think anyone should risk losing their house and home. If you have more than $18,000, if you are more than 150 percent the rate of poverty, then we have a different program. Up to $2,200, you again have the 75/25 split, the government picking up 75 percent, the participant 25 percent; but then there is the gap in coverage that has been so demonized by our friends on the other side of the aisle. We put the gap in simply to allow the bill to be paid on this, the Medicare bill to be paid by the government.

My mom is an example of someone who falls into the gap. So I called her before we voted the first time on this, Mr. Speaker, because I, like other Members, still go home for Thanksgiving dinner and need to talk to my mom when I get there. I felt it best to address the issue up front. So we called her and asked. Her response to me was, Son, we have been blessed more than most people. We are not rich, we are not wealthy, but we have a pension that comes in from Exxon. We think that if we can pay more we should pay more.

It helped me to make up my mind on this bill, to vote for that famous gap that people are talking about, which simply is an effort to make this bill affordable to this generation and the next generation, but the prescription drug benefit again is voluntary. You have the ability to opt in or the ability to opt out of it, but it is available for all.

Now then, that program starts in 2006, Mr. Speaker; and so we wanted to do something for our seniors that are currently facing the desperate need to pay for their prescription drugs. We have this year and next year a $600 card for those people at 150 percent the rate of poverty or less. Those people get the $600 card, which is just like a credit card and can be used to pay for their prescriptions. We felt that the people on the lowest end of the income spectrum needed attention immediately, and we did give that.

Also, one of the reforms that we built into this Medicare bill was income as it relates to Medicare. It is a very high income relating but still not only in the prescription drug bill; but in the Medicare portion of it, we felt like it was needed to begin to control costs so that Medicare is available to the next generation and the generation beyond.

There were some leveling mechanisms that we also put into this bill. Mr. Speaker, I campaigned, talking about the need to reimburse all States equally. Before this bill, an urban State received higher reimbursement than a rural State for the same procedure. If a person went into a hospital in New Mexico and had a procedure done, Medicare would reimburse at a lesser rate than if they went into the hospital in New York City. I campaigned saying that we needed to level those two amounts, the reimbursement amounts, and we did that 100 percent for the hospitals. The hospitals in rural areas now receive the same reimbursement for procedures that hospitals in urban areas previously did.

I will tell you, Mr. Speaker, that another important thing in this bill for New Mexico was the fact that we addressed the border question. By immigration law, when a person comes to the border, immigration law says that the nearest hospital will take that person and cure any medical deficiencies that they have. If the Federal Government is going to mandate that, and my district is on the border, then the Federal Government needs to help pay the bill, because I have hospitals in my district that have been greatly penalized by this requirement that should face all of us if it is a Federal law but instead was being faced just by the border hospitals. There is $1 billion in this bill, Mr. Speaker, that helps to defray the cost during the next 4 years that border hospitals have faced dealing with this immigration question.

Mr. Speaker, we also recognize that disproportionate share hospitals, the DSH hospitals, should receive greater reimbursement in this because they deal with a greater percentage of Medicare patients. If that is the case, then DSH hospitals, the disproportionate share hospitals, are receiving also a little more help under this bill.

Mr. Speaker, we have done dramatic work in this bill. I will tell you that the enrollment process for the prescription drug card began just yesterday. First of all, let me share, Mr. Speaker, with the House the enrollment process. You can get enrollment information from your local pharmacy or on the Web site, www.medicare.gov. That is www.medicare.gov, or you can call a toll free number of 1-800-MEDICARE, and you should receive packets in the mail from your local drug card sponsors. You can log on to the www.medicare.gov or call the 1-800- MEDICARE number to find out if you qualify for a prescription drug card and which card will benefit you the most.

To enroll in a Medicare-approved discount card program, beneficiaries must first select the discount drug card that best meets their needs. They then will submit basic information about the drug coverage status to select a drug discount card program. You will turn in your ZIP code, the drugs that you are currently taking, and how far you are willing to drive to your pharmacy, and then you are told how much that it is going to cost you.

Mr. Speaker, I received information just yesterday about the first person who was able to sign up for one of these cards. This person was 85 years old. She lives in New Mexico. She gets a $400-a-month Social Security check. Her prescription cost is $409 per month. Mr. Speaker, she is the target that we had in mind when we built this bill: people of low incomes, modest means, who are paying almost everything out for medicines that they take in.

She called the 1-800-MEDICARE to find out if she would benefit from a prescription drug card. She told them which medications she used, how much she paid for them, which pharmacy she wanted to go to, how much her Social Security check was, and what current

benefits she had. They used all of her information to determine which prescription drug card would benefit her.

Mr. Speaker, I myself felt like we had passed a good bill; but when I got the information from this lady in our State in New Mexico, I knew that we had done a good job.

Mr. Speaker, we have not yet gotten into the heart of the competition; yet this woman in New Mexico, a retiree, 85 years old, $409 a month in medications, with her card, her cost is going to be $13.61. Mr. Speaker, this is the value of competition. It is this competition that the Republicans in this House wanted to unleash and to get active in people's lives, allowing competition, not the government, to drive down the prices that we find our seniors paying.

Mr. Speaker, I will tell you that there was great debate. People wanted the Federal Government to negotiate for prices. Much was made of the fact that we did not have the government negotiating prices. Three of the letters that are most hated in the alphabet by our seniors are HMOs. When I go to town hall meetings, I hear the anger at HMOs because the HMOs have someone sitting in a room somewhere that is not a physician, who is telling them what medical procedures they can have and what prescriptions they can have.

Mr. Speaker, I will tell you that in the debate of whether or not the Federal Government should be buying medications and redistributing them, I felt like the competitive model was going to be the most powerful, and when I see that the competitive model that we have unleashed in this bill drives the cost from $409 a month to $13.61 per month, I know that we have chosen correctly. I do not think that the government could buy and distribute medicines that well. If we think the government can do it, then we think that the postal service is going to work efficiently tomorrow. I myself do not feel that way.

Mr. Speaker, I am joined tonight by good friends and colleagues of mine. We have got the gentleman from Georgia (Mr. Gingrey) and the gentlewoman from Florida (Ms. Ginny Brown-Waite). I would welcome them to the discussion and would ask that the gentlewoman from Florida (Ms. Ginny Brown-Waite) take the floor, make any comments that she would have, and then allow her to turn the floor to the gentleman from Georgia (Mr. Gingrey), who is a physician; and I would like to continue this discussion of the Medicare bill and the things that they are finding in their districts.

Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from Georgia (Mr. Gingrey).

I thank the gentleman for his comments and the gentlewoman for her comments. They both pointed out many things that we really should be discussing. I have seen the Mediscare tactics that are used in my State. In fact, State officials are going around and trying to convince senior

groups that in fact this is not a good plan, but they are sledding against heavy opposition because the seniors themselves have been reading the bill. The seniors have looked at the endorsements of this bill. I think the endorsements were a very key part of not only passing the bill but feeling comfortable with passing it.

We are endorsed, of course, by the AARP. Almost all of the hospital associations endorsed this. The physician associations endorsed this. The prescription manufacturers endorsed it. One group after another and maybe either the gentlewoman from Florida or the gentleman from Georgia can tell me exactly, but I think there were over 130 endorsements of groups that cater to seniors and watch out for seniors, saying at the end of the day, this bill is a good bill. So it was with some comfort that I voted for it.

There are questions that come up about this bill when we are talking, people get concerned about the reimportation and why we cannot reimport drugs from other countries and why we did not put the reimportation of drugs into this bill. Mr. Speaker, I would remind this body that about 2 weeks ago we saw on the evening news, in China, a firm that was distributing counterfeit formula for infants, and we began to see hundreds of infants dying and hundreds of infants sick because there was a counterfeit drug used. I will tell you, Mr. Speaker, the last question that you have to ask is if we allow the wholesale reimportation of drugs, are we going to have those same counterfeit problems on our shelves here as China saw? At the crux of the problem is the security that we face when we purchase anything from our drug stores on the shelves of our stores. Mr. Speaker, that is one of the most important concepts that seniors ask about and there was a very good answer and a very sad answer given on that evening news report.

The one piece of legislation that as we look at our medical facilities, as we look at our medical costs, as we look at the ability of physicians and hospitals to provide care, the one thing that we need to have passed, Mr. Speaker, and I am sure the gentleman from Georgia will concur, is we need medical liability reform. The personal injury lawyers are driving up the costs of medicine, but they are driving providers out of business. We have been told, Mr. Speaker, in my district in one town we may not have an OB-GYN left in the town and it is a town of about 75,000, that there will not be an OB-GYN left in that town by the end of the year because of the threat of lawsuit. Mr. Speaker, one of the desperate problems that we must cure is the lawsuit abuse that is occurring in this country. No one person would watch while there was no remedy in our courts. What is going on right now is not a remedy. It is considered a lottery. The trial lawyers feel like they have a lottery, and they have access to everyone who provides medical coverage in this country, and it is literally driving the costs up too high to continue to practice.

I yield to the gentleman if he would like to discuss this.

I thank the gentleman for his comments and the gentlewoman for her comments. Women are the great beneficiaries, and a tremendous number of the people who will participate in this prescription drug program under Medicare will be women because many of them fall in the lower income strata and many will qualify for the 100 percent coverage throughout the spectrum, but they have been made afraid that they are going to be the ones falling into the gap.

The only people who fall under the gap are those who can afford it. Those with the most desperate needs get coverage all the way up and down the spectrum, Mr. Speaker. So that is an important distinction to make.

One of the things that we have not yet talked about that the prescription drug bill did, it did three things to kind of give the prescription drug makers a wake-up call. None of us would choke the prescription drug manufacturers down to nothing because they are making magnificent miracle-like drugs that are extending life and extending the quality of life. But we did three things in this bill to really get the attention of the prescription drug manufacturers just a little wake-up call, if the Members would.

First of all, we cause generics to come to the market sooner in this bill. Secondly, we give incentives for people who will use the generics to convert useage over from the more expensive prescriptions into the generic field. But the third thing that we did was to stop an abusive pattern of constantly extending patents which kept competitive prescription drugs from coming to market. A prescription drug maker gets a patent when they reinvest in a new drug. When they do the research and development and create a new pharmaceutical, they have a patent period, and what they are doing is just indefinitely extending the patent. They would go to a second patent period, a third, a fourth, a fifth, and a sixth by minor changes in their patent application. It was legal, but it was not right.

So what we begin in this bill is saying that they get one patent period, they get one extension, and no more. The effect of that is it is going to bring those competing products to the market sooner. So we did three things in this bill, Mr. Speaker, to really address the seniors' frustration with their prescription drug makers to let them know that we appreciate what they do, they do good work, they are good companies, they are good corporate citizens, but to please look at their practices just a little bit.

Access and affordability are the two parameters of care. It does not matter if one has affordability if they do not have access. This bill attempted to cure access as well as affordability. And, Mr. Speaker, I think that we have done well in our job.

I thank the gentleman from Georgia and the gentlewoman from Florida for coming out tonight. This is a very important topic, and since yesterday was the initiation point of the ability to sign up for the drug cards, those discount cards, we felt like it was important to remind the people of this House exactly what that means and what the bill means. We wanted to have a review of the process which was directed at again the two basic overarching problems. One is the need for a prescription drug benefit in this country because our seniors were having to choose between food and medicine.

The second need we were addressing is the financial difficulty that Medicare faces in a very near-term future, extending on into the very distant future. This Medicare bill and this prescription drug bill began the process of reforming the Medicare program to where its financial viability is greater to where the next generation and the generation beyond that has access to the Medicare bill. But we also put in a prescription drug benefit that has the potential to dramatically lower the prescription drug cost that our seniors will face.

Mr. Speaker, I for one am proud of the work that we have done. And as I have visited with seniors around my district, and we have had 10 or 12 town hall meetings in my district about the prescription drug bill, I find that seniors are energized and excited about what we have done here in our legislation. They are excited about what it does currently for seniors, but they are also excited about the reforms that we have made to where their children and grandchildren will hopefully have access to the Medicare plan which they have grown to love and to trust.

Mr. Speaker, I share with the gentleman from Georgia (Mr. Gingrey) and the gentlewoman from Florida (Ms. Ginny Brown-Waite) the pride in what this body has done.

Mr. Speaker, as most of the Members did, I just concluded about 16 days in my home district. We had visits about Medicare for the first week and about the economy and the job growth for the second, first of all, addressing concerns and answering questions.

Mr. Speaker, I will tell you that as I talked to my constituents about the prescription drug Medicare bill, there was a deep understanding that we have done significant work here, first of all, in creating the benefit for our seniors that is desperately needed, but, secondly, causing deep reforms in the Medicare program which should begin to increase the financial stability of that program.

Mr. Speaker, while we were home, there was a dramatic event. During my entire life, I have seen Tax Freedom Day, that day which every American works up until that time to provide their entire income for the Federal Government. That Tax Freedom Day has been as far out as the middle of May, tending toward the first of June.

Mr. Speaker, this year, because of the tax cuts created during the last 3 years, Tax Freedom Day came on April 11. That means every American worked their entire workweek for the Federal Government up to April 11, but those days from April 11 on to December 31, they are working to use the money for their families, for the education of their families, for just the rent, paying for their house, owning a car, or those things that the American dream really entails.

Mr. Speaker, it is extremely important that we are beginning to cause Tax Freedom Day to move back toward January 1, rather than further out toward December 31. We should work less for the government and more for our families.

I will tell my colleagues, Mr. Speaker, that without doubt the family is the key building block of society. Strong families create strong individuals. And strong individuals create strong countries. That is exactly the paradigm that we should be following and have followed in this country throughout our history.

And as we tax less and put more into the pockets of hard-working Americans, I will tell my colleagues, Mr. Speaker, that the strength of the family increases, thereby increasing the strength of our country.

Mr. Speaker, one of the questions that comes up, and it is a fair question, why are we in the economic straits that we are in? What things have contributed to the financial situation that this country faces?

Mr. Speaker, the first event which really shocked our economy, and there have been three deep events that shocked our economy, and it is instructive that we would remember all three of those, but the first of them was the collapse of the dot-com economy.

Most Americans will remember in the late 1990s that the dot-com industry had really sprung up from very little to something significant, companies that really did not have product. They were not even selling anything. They had no cash flow, no revenues. Those stocks were escalating from no value to $200 and $300 value.

Just the capital gains tax off of those sales of stocks began to thrust our growth curves upward. It was primarily due to those capital gains taxes, Mr. Speaker, that we were seeing what economists and what politicians felt like were surplus as far as the eye could see. We remember those days at the end of the Clinton administration where there were the surpluses as far as the eye could see, but they were based on stock values that really had no foundation under them. It was an explosion in value that was driven by emotion, but not fact.

Now, that collapse in the dot-com industry came, as well it should have. Stocks absolutely at some point have to have something to back them up. That collapse came, brought us back down actually to the same level of economy we had been sustaining, about a 3.5 percent of growth. It was the incline up, then it bubbled back over. And after the collapse we had about a 3.5 percent rate of growth.

That shock into our economy was significant, though, shocking us into a mild recession, one that we should have come out from fairly soon. But just as we were coming up out of that recession, 9/11 came without warning. Now, that was a significant shock on the economy, Mr. Speaker. That shock, by the estimates of some, cost $2 trillion and over 2,000 lives. $2 trillion needs to be put into the perspective that our total economy is in the $11 trillion range, so approximately 20 percent of our economic size was taken out of the economy in one day.

When people are concerned about the cost of the war on terror, and it is extremely high, no doubt about it, if we assume that we are up to around $200 billion at this point, Mr. Speaker, it still is only about one-tenth of what that one day cost on 9/11 was.

That shocked our economy on the heels of the dot-com collapse into a deeper recession and continuing difficulties. But until 9/11, several things had happened. In those eras and those times of surpluses as far as the eye could see, both the Federal Government and the State governments began to reorient their spending, beginning to pay for programs that had long been underfunded.

It is a complaint of our friends across the aisle, and that is fine that they would complain about it, that spending increased tremendously under President Bush. But I will tell you that some of the areas that the spending increased in are the very ones they are criticizing as underfunding.

It is really difficult for me to understand when education spending was at $27 billion from the Federal programs and has increased under President Bush to over $66 billion, approaching $70 billion, that we are described as underfunding education. But if one listens to the rhetoric very carefully, Mr. Speaker, it is underfunding the authorized amount. They do not want to say they are cutting funding, although they occasionally slip over the line and say that, because the truth is we have more than doubled funding for education from Federal sources under President Bush.

And keep in mind it might have been at a better time. It might have been that we might have understood that those surpluses did not exist as far as the eye could see. But I am not sure anyone on either side understood the reality of what was going on. And it is very easy to understand after the fact.

A second area that often we hear our friends on the other side of the aisle discussing is the underfunding of the IDEA, the Individuals With Disabilities Education Act. Now, it is curious that we hear those descriptions of underfunding in that program, when the truth is that at the inception of IDEA the funding was about $1 billion and for almost 30 years stayed very constant, much of that time under Democrat control.

The funding stayed constant at about $1 billion. And finally under President Clinton, it eased up to almost $2 billion. Now, today you will hear all-out assaults that the President is desperately underfunding IDEA. One would think maybe he had cut it back to $1 billion. But if we actually look at it, the facts would show that the funding is actually at $11 billion, almost five times the dramatic increase that came under President Clinton.

Now, one has to begin to ask at some point, are we interested in communicating the situation that the country faces or are we simply throwing out facts?

I would say that this President made commitments to fund serious programs, including education, that at the point right now are causing us to stress as far as our deficits are concerned. So we saw that the Federal Government began to escalate its spending at a time when both parties felt like the surpluses were there as far as the eye could see. It is a fact also that almost every State did the same thing. The economists there were viewing the results the same as the Federal economists.

Just my State and, I think, one other actually preserved budget surpluses through that time because even in the surplus era as of the late 1990s, the Republican Governor of New Mexico said we are going to hold spending very, very tight. And to his credit he did that. Thus, when the dot-com collapse came, when the later 9/11 attack came, shocking our economy into recession and driving down revenues, New Mexico and one other State maintained a surplus, and we saw many of the States begin to have tremendous economic difficulties.

Now, was it their fault that they are in economic difficulties? I do not know. We could place blame. But I think the greater understanding is to know why.

So, again, we experienced increased spending because the perception was that we had surpluses, but we also had two deep shocks into the economy at the very time we were experiencing those surpluses, causing us to go into an economic tail spin.

The third shock, the third of three deep shocks came just as we were about to come out from underneath the effects of 9/11, Mr. Speaker. That is when Global Crossing, WorldCom, Enron, and several other companies had to reveal that they were actually cooking the books, that they were misleading their investors, that they were doing things with accounting procedures that they declared correct, that they declared legal, but which, in fact, may have been legal but certainly were not right. And they did not lead to right conclusions by investors.

At that point of deception, many, many investors began to pull their money out of the stock market and put it into savings accounts and banks. That began to remove needed capital from our companies where economic expansion was no longer available.

So three deep shocks into the economy: the dot-com collapse of the late 1990-2000 time period; 9/11/2001, a second deep shock; the third deep shock was the corporate scandals led by Global Crossing, Enron, and WorldCom. All those three things combined to give us a significant change in our economic climate.

Now, at that point in our economic climate, when we had increased spending believing that surpluses were there as far as the eye could see, we had increased spending and suddenly three shocks into the economy caused the revenues to drop. Now we are faced with some management questions.

It is easy at this point, Mr. Speaker, to sit and say what should be and should not be. But I will tell my colleagues when we get to that discussion there really are only three solutions that I see: one is to cut spending, the second is to increase taxes, and the third is to grow the economy. If we grow the economic size, and it is about $11 trillion now, if we grow the economic size from about $11 trillion or 13 or $14 trillion, it is easy for anyone to understand that at the same rates of taxes that we are going to have more revenues.

So we can, again, to solve the problem of deficits from both internal and external causes, caused by increased spending and recession that has been thrown into us from three violent shocks to the economy, given those situations, again, the three solutions are to increase taxes to bring in more revenue, to cut spending, or to grow the size of the economy. It is really simple. There are not many other choices than that.

Now, the problem is if you begin to increase taxes at a time of economic stress, you come into an economic principle and economic reality that when government spending begins to increase to a certain percent of the economy, and generally the range is in the 20 to 24 percent range, Mr. Speaker, at that point you begin to take so much of the investment capital out of the economy that recovery is simply not available.

The Germans find themselves in that situation right now. When I came back from Iraq, we stopped in Stuttgart and met with several key business leaders at a dinner at night. Around the table uniformly, and the head of DaimlerChrysler is at that location, it was in that meeting they said please get your economy going because if your economy is going, if the United States economy is going, maybe it will raise the level of the entire economic output in the entire world because we are one-third of the world's economy. And if we can get our economy going in the U.S., just maybe they can get their economy going in Germany.

Now, the difficulty they face in Germany is about 44 percent of their current gross domestic product is government spending. They cannot get out of a recession. They cannot create jobs. They cannot do it because they refuse to cut spending, and they refuse to cut taxes. Taxes would begin to lower that amount of government spending down as a percentage. But keep in mind they are desperately high at 44 percent.

We were approaching the 24 percent level, which really does begin to dampen down an economy and put the economic brakes on. So we had some choices to make in this Congress and the preceding Congress of just how to handle this. How do you go about creating economic growth? How could you create economic growth when you have had three deep shocks that have taken tremendous assets, both physical assets and the lives of our countrymen?

My colleagues recall after 9/11 people just began to stay home. They did not consume, and they did not spend. It was a sadness, there was a deep sorrow in our Nation that really affected us economically as well as spiritually and emotionally.

So, Mr. Speaker, we have those situations that existed in our economy. I will tell my colleagues that the Democrat Governor of New Mexico said it best last year. He said that my party should get over the fact that tax cuts create jobs.

That is what we wanted to do in this body. Keep in mind we have three choices: we can cut spending, we can increase taxes, or we can grow the size of the economy so that our tax rates bring more revenues.

We elected, Mr. Speaker, in this House, and I am proud to have been a part of that vote, to begin to try to

grow the economy. And we did that by decreasing the amount of government spending, that is, by increasing the take-home pay of our people in our economy. We began to give tax cuts.

Now, those tax cuts began to show immediate promise. The biggest tax cut took place last year. We had estimates in the House, estimates that said we hoped we would get 3.5 percent rate of growth from the tax cuts that we gave. But we would have been satisfied for any rate of growth. We were stunned, Mr. Speaker, when we saw the economic growth in the third quarter of last year jump to 8.2 percent. No one had even anticipated that level of growth in our economy. In the fourth quarter it settled down to a more stable sustainable 4 percent and continues in that 4 to 5 percent range today with Alan Greenspan saying that the economic indicators are good. Independent watchdog groups have looked at our economy and said it looks positive for the next 2 years.

One of the problems, though, in the recovery was that jobs had not been created. I heard a lot of my colleagues on both sides of the House express concerns, and I understood the concerns, but, Mr. Speaker, as a business owner, I also understood the other side because as a business owner, the last thing I wanted to do is hire permanent employees. If I am in a period of growth, then, first of all, I want to work overtime because I do not want to hire employees and then have to lay them off if we are just in a little bubble upward.

So the first thing we will do to see if we are going to get through this pick-up in activity is we begin to work overtime just an hour here or an hour there. The next thing we begin to do, Mr. Speaker, is work weekends. When those two things do not combine to fill the needs for employees, Mr. Speaker, at that point we would always bring in temporary employees, and I say ``we'' because my wife and I were co- owners in the company. She managed one piece, I managed the other piece, and we have always made our decisions together. But always on hiring we wanted to do the same thing, so we would progress through this sequence over time, working Saturdays and Sundays, temporaries, and then we would hire part-timers. Usually we would go to retirees who did not need full-time jobs, but always would like to have 3 or 4 hours a week or 3 or 4 hours a day.

So we would do these four steps before we hired full-time employees. And so, Mr. Speaker, it was not so concerning to me at that point that we had not seen the job figure growth after two successive quarters of significant growth in our economy. As we went into the early months of this year, again the job growth had been small, at about 300,000 for about a 2- to 3-month period, but in March alone, Mr. Speaker, we had stunning news that this economy that had shown all the signs of economic recovery in fact produced 308,000 new jobs in 1 month. That 308,000 new jobs, Mr. Speaker, combined to make almost a million since August of last year.

At this point, Mr. Speaker, we feel the signs of recovery. We are beginning to show those signs of job growth which is beginning to show growth signs, and we are beginning to hear it frequently on the floor of the House from our friends. I would expect to see the 300,000 jobs in 1 month. They will begin to rejoice with us because no one would like to see a Nation in suffering. We would like to see a Nation that has found the key to recovery, and these keys are not so simple as going out and causing recovery and passing a law. We have to rekindle the confidence of the consumer. We have to rekindle the confidence of the investor, the confidence in companies that were shaken by corporate wrongdoing, the confidence of purchasers that were shaken by the tragic events of 9/11. So this restarting of the economy should be a rejoicing for each one of us, and I hope that it is that, because, in my view, the last thing we want to do is begin to change courses.

I, along with my friends on the other side of the aisle, am very concerned about the deficit, but also I know that we have done some very expensive things last year that could not be put off. The Medicare prescription drug bill was an expensive bill that 78 percent of Americans said needed to occur because people were choosing between food and medicine. Yet it was very expensive. We must have the will to pay for it, and we must have the economic discipline to pay for it.

The war on terror is extremely expensive and is taking much, much out of our economy, and that needed to be done, and the President is pursuing that with bold determination to win that war on terror and preserve the liberty that is the world's, because terror and liberty cannot live in the world together. 9/11 changed forever the way we look at this world.

Mr. Speaker, another important expenditure that we have undertaken that have helped create the deficits, and even though we do not like them, we begin to understand that we are having to do things that could not be put off, homeland security could not be put off. We must begin to seal our borders so that the American people would feel safe. We must begin to do those things which will keep terror outside our borders. So we fight the war on terror to kill and disable terrorists in their own areas, but we begin to build our own borders that would protect the lives of our children and give them access to the hope and opportunity that peaceful neighborhoods give to each one of us and that we have raised our families with.

These are the things that we have been spending money on in the last year and 2 years that are going to fund a deficit. And do we like the deficit? No, we do not. But we must be patient. This year the discussion is should we allow the tax cuts to expire because they are temporary, and they expire towards the end of this year. So the discussion is, and we should be on the floor of this House having that discussion, and we have will it, should we allow the tax cuts to expire?

I will tell you that once we have charted a course, the worst single thing is to begin to withdraw and to find another course. In history we can determine that several courses usually will solve a problem, but we have elected to a course here; we have chosen the course of trying to grow the economy. We have given the tax cuts that have stimulated the growth and jobs, and the last thing we need to do is to retreat out and not pursue that one single objective of growing the economy, reestablishing our economic stability, creating jobs so that every American in this country is able to find a career that they look for, is able to have employment security with the outcome of raising and maintaining good families.

So, Mr. Speaker, we will continue this discussion this year. I myself believe that we must stay with the tax cuts that we have put into place; that to do otherwise would again begin to thrust up the percent of government spending as a percent of our gross domestic product and run the risk of pouring water on the flames, the low flames of our economic recovery.

Mr. Speaker, I am joined in the House tonight by my colleague from Colorado (Mr. Beauprez). We came in as freshmen. He, like I, has been a businessman. He, like I, has made a payroll; and like I, he married above his head, and his wife now runs their business, as mine does. So I, Mr. Speaker, would yield to the gentleman from Colorado to discuss this economic recovery from his eye, and is from the eyes of a man with a dairy background and with a banking background. I yield to the gentleman from Colorado.

Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from Colorado (Mr. Beauprez) for his thoughts on this subject and for the calm approach that he has to dissecting a very difficult problem.

Always when you face difficulties it is easy to discuss the difficulties, but understanding those elements that must be changed in the very measured way that they must be changed is the difficult part of this business.

He began to discuss why would American jobs be leaving our country. I think that he is on a very, very timely subject in discussing the cost of frivolous lawsuits, lawsuits that would drive companies out of this country.

About a year ago, Mr. Speaker, right at this time of year, I went to Ground Zero in New York. We went across the street to American Express; and the head of American Express told us, as congressional leaders, that if you do not reform lawsuit litigation problems in this Nation that you will not have a major company left in America in 20 years. I see those pressures that litigation costs us.

Currently, the cost of lawsuits on the U.S. is equivalent to a 5 percent tax on wages. Litigation cost $233 billion in 2002. This is $807 per U.S. citizen. Increased litigation costs have burdened American families and businesses with higher insurance premiums and contributed to higher medical costs and, in some places, removing medical care completely as doctors go into retirement or refuse to practice under the conditions that face them.

Individuals suffered directly by having less disposable income than they would otherwise have due to increased prices for products but also higher insurance premiums. Individuals suffered directly when businesses raised their prices on goods and services to pay for the litigation costs.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce 2 years ago was advertising in my district that the cost for every consumer who bought a new car for the litigation costs throughout the production of that car was over $500 per vehicle that every single American consumer paid.

Individual wages bear the brunt in the form of lower wages in jobs and fewer jobs when we are exposed to continued litigation, and that is not litigation to respond to problems. These are frivolous lawsuits that come up simply because the legal community feels like they can get redress outside the courts, that they can get settlements outside the court without jury trial.

Frivolous lawsuits discourage businesses and individuals from taking risk, which means that fewer new products are brought to production and new technologies are either delayed or foregone completely. Consequently, good, high-paying jobs are not created because of the fear of lawsuits. Companies are left going bankrupt instead of being able to pay the high cost of litigation.

Currently, this House has passed four kinds of tort reform, four kinds of litigation reform that currently have stalled out in this city, unable to move further because of the influence of the personal injury lawyers in this community. Out of this House, Mr. Speaker, we have passed class action tort reform, asbestos tort reform, medical liability reform and then also, just recently, that cheeseburger bill because the personal injury lawyers are trying to tap into the pockets of every single restaurant owner in America saying they are the cause that people are sick or overweight.

Mr. Speaker, just the asbestos litigation reform is needed to begin to deal with the tremendous numbers of cases that face us. An estimated 300,000 claims are pending, 730,000 individuals have already brought claims and 60 to 100,000 new claims are filed every year.

Asbestos victims face uncertainty, delay, and risk in the current tort system. Today, a person's compensation is more likely to be determined by where and when the claim is filed and who is the lawyer or judge rather than by the severity of his illness. Many victims even die before receiving anything.

To name a few examples, after having his claim consolidated with 1,000 other plaintiffs in a Louisiana trial, a former Avondale shipyard employee died of mesothelioma before his trial even began. An Ohio welder died during trial. A flooring contractor died during his trial in California. While some courts prioritize cases where plaintiffs suffer from mesothelioma, other times plaintiffs can die before or during the trial. Exponential growth in claims involving plaintiffs who are not sick is clogging the system. Those people who are simply making claims with no physical symptoms are clogging the system so that those who are legitimately sick are unable to move forward with their claims. Mr. Speaker, this is an economic distress to companies that maybe never even manufactured asbestos. It is an affront to our entire system.

In 2001, an asbestos verdict awarded six unimpaired Mississippi plaintiffs $25 million each. None of the plaintiffs claimed prior medical expenses or absences from work due to any related illness; but they were awarded a combined total of $150 million, Mr. Speaker, and they had never claimed any absences from work due to related illnesses. These unimpaired awards have bankrupted 67 companies and wrung $54 billion from companies. Some experts estimate that under the current broken system the past and future trials of asbestos liability will ultimately reach as much as $200 billion or more.

Mr. Speaker, to put these numbers in perspective, the savings and loan sector crisis in the 1980s and 1990s cost approximately $153 billion. The collapse of Enron and WorldCom resulted in losses of as much as $42 billion in gross domestic product and as much as $50 billion in insurance industry losses and as much as $50 billion in insurance losses stemming from the September 11 terrorist attacks.

Most unfortunately, the asbestos litigation system imposes billions of dollars of costs, while claimants receive very little of what is paid. Transaction costs have accounted for well over half of the spending. Plaintiff attorney fees alone can be 40 percent of any settlement, with expenses often reducing the settlement to less than 50 percent.

It is not just the American companies that are left with the cost, it is the American worker. Companies bankrupted by these 75 percent of unwarranted asbestos claims have slashed 60,000 jobs and failed to create 423,000 new jobs. Each displaced worker has lost up to $50,000 in wages and an average of 25 percent of the value of their 401(k) accounts. Even the AFL-CIO testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee, noting that the uncertainty for workers and their families is growing as they lose health insurance and see their companies file for bankruptcy protection.

So while our friends on the other side of the aisle continue to talk about the jobs that move overseas and the failure of this economy to create jobs, they are overlooking one of the most important cures, Mr. Speaker, that can be found to be effective: that of litigation reform.

Mr. Speaker, I see that the gentleman from Colorado has additional comments, and I yield back to him.

Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from Colorado (Mr. Beauprez), and he is exactly right. We have passed the energy bill out of this Congress, and it is stalled out, unable to move further. The estimates are that energy bill would create 800,000 jobs nationwide.

Now, the most important thing it would do is begin to limit our dependence on foreign oil. And when people ask, what is suddenly causing the price of oil to escalate, it is very simple. The OPEC countries decided they are going to try to squeeze off the supply, understanding our demand is fairly constant. If they squeeze off the world supply of oil, the price goes up.

Now, those are independent countries. They operate on their own. Our President is asking them, it is an arbitrary decision on their part, if they will not consider going ahead and increasing the supply where the price will moderate. But the fact remains that we do get about 60 percent of our energy from overseas, and there are people in this country, the extremists, who would say we should not produce any energy in this country. They would like to move all drilling to other countries. They do not want to drill offshore, they do not want us to drill in the Rocky Mountains, they do not want those jobs in America, and they do not want an America independent of foreign energy production.

Mr. Speaker, this economy that America has is built on one thing and one thing only: It is built on affordable energy. And right now the price of natural gas in this country is between $5 and $6, last year spiking up to $10. In Russia and in Africa right now the price is between 50 cents and 70 cents. We cannot sustain our economy at the levels it is and the levels that it has traditionally been, paying five times for our energy.

There are those extremists who say that we cannot and should not drill in areas that have been drilled before on our public lands. Mr. Speaker, we are going to decide in this country if we want a vibrant economy or if we are going to send all those jobs overseas, because that is what will happen. Infrastructure will eventually relocate to the area where energy costs are one-tenth of what they are today. In the meantime, we are going to be faced with paying more at the pump because we have internal policies which refuse to allow drilling to occur in places in this country where there are known and proven reserves.

Mr. Speaker, I would also make comment that it is time that we have these discussions. I think that in this Nation we can reach the balance between preserving the environment and providing affordable energy, and it is time that we begin to look at those policies which will allow us to do that. We cannot continue shipping jobs overseas because of the cost of litigation, because of the cost of energy, because of our unwillingness to deal with the regulatory climate that simply frightens people out of investing in new jobs in this country.

Mr. Speaker, we ourselves, as Americans, are going to determine at what level our economy operates, and it is each one of those small increments that will determine exactly what we do.

In concluding the discussion tonight, Mr. Speaker, and I thank the gentleman from Colorado for participating with me, I would remind the House that our economy has been suffering

from three deep shocks. It is suffering from the deep shock of the dot- com collapse, of the 9/11 strike, and finally the corporate scandals, which are now being tried in our courts.

Mr. Speaker, the Republicans and the President have charted bold initiatives that are pulling us out of the economic recessions that began in the late 1990s and early 2000. Those recoveries must be sustained. That tremendous job growth in March is an indicator of what lies ahead, 308,000 new jobs in 1 month.

Mr. Speaker, we have 138 million jobs in this Nation, but every single person who needs a job and a career should be able to find it. And with the policies that this administration and this Congress have passed, we are on the road to recovery and providing careers for every person that looks for them.

Mr. Speaker, will the gentleman yield?

Mr. Speaker, I heard the lady that preceded us on the floor say that we needed to do something about OPEC. I am sorry, what are we going to do? It is a free nation.

We did something about Iraq, and the accusation from their side of the aisle was that we went in to take the oil. When that was not proved correct, when it was absolutely proved false, now then they are here saying we should do something about OPEC. I am so sorry. What about the free nations? They can produce what oil they would like to.

I would continue to point out that the reason that the production in this country is decreasing is exactly the policies that our friends on the other side of the aisle insist on, that is, the lack of access to the public lands in this country. It is going to drive the cost of gasoline and electricity up throughout this country because of their restrictionist policies that they have put into place, and those policies live today from the Clinton administration on through this administration from the field level.

It is a question that I recently took to the BLM head, and have asked her what is she going to do to increase access to public lands so that we are not so dependent, she said, frankly, some of the extremists in our country will block every single attempt to drill more on American soil. Even the debates on this floor regarding ANWR say that we do not need that energy, that we do not need the oil; and the other side has persistently blocked every effort to try to drill in ANWR.

Mr. Speaker, also, the energy policy that currently resides in Washington, but unfulfilled, is not something that the administration is blocking. It is not Republicans who are blocking the energy bill in this town.

Mr. Speaker, the energy bill would not only create access to more domestic oil and gas, but it would begin to encourage the alternative sources of solar, wind, hydrogen, biomass, nuclear. If we will begin, Mr. Speaker, to deal with some of the pressures on the demand cycle for our energy with some of our alternative resources, then we can begin to see the prices of gasoline and electricity go down; but I will guarantee my colleagues, the headlines that I cut out from the Denver Post of last year telling the people in August of 2003 that they would be facing 70 percent increases in electrical costs because of the price of natural gas, those are things that we are going to continue to experience in this country until we pass an energy bill.

The energy bill by itself will create 100,000 jobs, and we have been treated by our friends across the aisle to continued talk about the lack of American jobs. We have seen the dramatic report from March where 300,000 new jobs were created. That is 600,000 now in the last 6 months since we passed the jobs and tax bill.

Mr. Speaker, the policies that the administration is submitting to us and that we are carrying out into actual votes and into bills are dramatically changing the environment for investment in this country.

Education in America

Mr. Speaker, when we begin to look at the growth of jobs, we have to understand the importance of education in this country. No Child Left Behind is one of the dramatic things, dramatic policies that have been issued. It is a reform into the education system which literally says we are not going to leave any child behind. The President has dramatically increased funding, regardless of what our friends across the aisle say.

Under President Clinton, the spending on education through the Federal Education Department was about $27 billion. Under President Bush, the funding has increased to $60 billion, over a 100 percent increase, and yet somehow we get on the floor day after day that we are underfunding education.

Our friends especially like to talk about the way that we are not funding IDEA, our individuals with disabilities; and that has such a dramatic difference in previous funding levels under this President, that it is important to talk about funding levels.

The bill was passed in the 1970s, and historically throughout its tenure has had about $1 billion funding. It could never get up, and keep in mind, that was under 40 years of Democrats ruling in this House. It stayed at the $1 billion level. Finally, under President Clinton, it went up to $2 billion.

Now, what would my colleagues estimate that the actual spending on IDEA, the individuals with disabilities, is actually today under President Bush? If you were to listen to the rhetoric that is thrown out day after day, you would say, well, obviously it is much, much less. Actually, it is much, much greater.

The funding this year under IDEA will exceed $10 billion. That is a five-time, a 500 percent increase in the 3 years under President Bush; and yet we hear the shibboleth on the floor of the House that tries to put a truth out, put a falsehood out in the guise of truth.

The truth is that President Bush understands that if we are going to have careers for our young people, if our young people are to have expectations and hope into the future, they need more than jobs. They need educations. They need careers. They need a progression of learning throughout their lives.

No Child Left Behind is guaranteed to put those young people in a position to where they can continue the lifelong learning process.

We have moved from a time in our history when we could just learn one single task and do that our whole lives. For us to access the technology, the innovations, the creativity that is at move in the world today, our young people absolutely must be given every tool during their 12 years of public schools on into the junior college and

college years; but then throughout their entire life, we must continue to have on-the-job training. We must continue to have training when people are displaced.

Recently, this last week, I went into my district into Belen, New Mexico, and met with a group of employers there. We met at Cisneros Machine Shop. The Cisneros brothers really are one of the small businesses that characterize the desire on the part of our employers right now to be training their employees every day to a higher level, understanding that they cannot produce the same things yesterday that they produce tomorrow. Otherwise they will not continue to fight off the tremendous international competition that faces us.

I think the recognition of people like the Cisneros brothers will bring us all, in this Nation, if we will continue these training programs, no matter what stage of development our employees are in, if we will recognize that and continue to train, then we are going to be in good shape. But we have to ask the question, when jobs are moving offshore, when jobs are moving overseas, we have to ask ourselves why; and the education system is, at base, a root cause of the problem.

Under No Child Left Behind, one of the most important things we are striving to do is to put a competent teacher in every single classroom and especially those classrooms that teach math and reading. Those two basic skills are the foundations for the education process; and without them, our students simply do not have the tools to compete when they graduate.

We have seen dramatic changes even in my district in the education process. About 2 weeks ago, I recognized Roswell High School on this floor as being one of the 12 breakthrough schools in the Nation. That principal believes in No Child Left Behind. He has seen it work in his classrooms, turning around a population in his high school that is both high minority and then also lower-income status students, and he has turned that around into one of the 12 breakthrough schools in the Nation. It is the kind of example that No Child Left Behind is supposed to be creating in our schools.

I see the gentleman from Iowa standing.

Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for yielding.

In addition to our energy bill, which would create jobs, we begin to defuse the increasing price of natural gas and fuel at the pump for our cars. In addition to those two important elements of the legislative agenda that we have passed in this House last year, this transportation bill that just was passed out of the House today is poised to create another 700,000 jobs.

Mr. Speaker, when I look at the continued bills that we are passing out of the House, I see responsibility. I see a patient attempt to cure the many problems that we are facing in this country; and keep in mind that we are facing the problems through no fault of our own, but 9/11 changed everything.

The first thing that happened in our economy that cost us jobs was the collapse of the dot-com industry. You all remember in the late 1990s that dot-com ramp-up where stocks were selling at an inflated price, sometimes $200 per share of a stock that really had no product, had no cash flow, had no sales, no revenue, no net profit; and yet enthusiasm was that these stocks are going to be great value. Well, that enthusiasm eventually will have to come home. A corporation either had to build a product or create a revenue of some sort; and when they did not and could not, the dot-com stock market price of those stocks collapsed down, and we found that it shocked our economy pretty drastically.

The second thing that shocked our economy, of course, was 9/11. The estimates are as high as a $2 trillion shock in one day, over 2,000 lives lost. I will tell you that businesses are still paying the cost for 9/11 today, and we cannot forget that the economy and the culture in this Nation changed so dramatically on that day when the unprovoked attack of terrorists, who would kill innocent lives in order to destabilize an economy, in order to destabilize a political system, after they made their attack, we in this country have got to deal with the results.

Now, the President has been very patient. He has worked very hard at going and taking away the root causes of terrorism. He has taken the Taliban out of Afghanistan. Al Qaeda is on the run. The training camp that used to crank out terrorists every month, who would spew hatred and anger toward the United States and try to sow destruction throughout our economy and throughout our Nation, that training camp has been closed down and the terrorists are on the run.

We continue to capture and to kill the terrorists who are here to kill us. This is not a police action. This is not something we can take into the courts and deal with there. This is an action where it is either their ideology or ours.

The insistence of terrorists to destabilize the entire world is one of the most looming threats that any of us face here.

It affects our ability to raise our children safely on the streets. It affects our ability to conduct just everyday commerce throughout our land. Terrorism seeks to destabilize. The paradigms of security and stability cannot exist coincidentally with terrorism and instability. The world is going to make a choice, and the United States is making a tremendous decision here to take on the fight.

It is like the Prime Minister of Britain said when he spoke on this House floor: You, as Americans, should ask, why us? Why would we be in this role? It is a fair question. His answer to us on the floor of this House, Mr. Speaker, I will remind you, was simply that destiny has placed the United States in a position where it can act and it must. That means that we have the resources, we have the will, we have the leadership, and if we do not respond, the world will suffer for it.

Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the leadership of our President as he pushes forward the concept of No Child Left Behind, as he pushes forward the idea of the tax cuts that are creating this economy which is growing at a tremendous pace, and the job growth is exactly what we were hoping for.

Mr. Speaker, as he has encouraged us to pass the energy bill, I would simply say to our friends, do your part to see that the energy bill is passed, because it is not the Republican side which is holding it hostage.

Mr. Speaker, I now yield back to the gentleman from Iowa.

Mr. Speaker, some of our friends on the other side of the aisle really do, when we are talking off the floor, ask us, can we do this in an environmentally sensitive manner, this drilling for oil on American soil? The case on the North Slope of Alaska is a really good case example.

When we first went there, we were building pads out of gravel or rock or stone. But we have stopped that now, and we build paths to put the equipment on out of ice. We build the roads into the pads out of ice, so that the equipment that goes into the location and then when it sits there to drill the hole in the ground, they are on ice roads and on ice paths.

When spring comes, the ice thaws and there is actually just the pipe sticking out of the hole that is causing the production to come to the surface. We have showed that we can dramatically change the way that we do our drilling and our exploration. We have the necessity in this country to find the balance, to balance our environmental concerns with our need for jobs and with the need for affordable electricity, with the need for affordable gasoline to put into our cars.

I think as we see gasoline approaching $3, we are going to find that the consumers in this Nation demand that we begin to produce in some of the areas where we can do so without destroying the environment. My friend from Colorado adequately pointed out that we have got a trillion cubic feet of natural gas available under his State. That gas, as he said, is not under national parks. It is not under environmentally sensitive areas. In fact, much of the gas is located in fields that have already been drilled. It is not like it is a pristine area there.

Yet we have extremists in this society who are willing to bring lawsuits. Every time an application for a permit to drill is issued by the BLM, they bring a lawsuit to stop that production. We must decide if we are going to have affordable energy in this country, keeping in mind that affordable energy is what drives this economy. We see that it is used in the production of fertilizers. Fertilizers are used in agriculture. Natural gas is used in the production of electricity because it is the cleanest fuel. We must begin to drill for more fuel, or we must begin to accept the fact that our utility bills are going to be double and triple, that our gasoline is going to actually cost three or more dollars per gallon.

Again on the subject of jobs, I have got friends on the other side of the aisle who maybe have not run a business. The gentleman from Iowa and myself and the gentleman from Colorado all come here as previous business owners. My friends on the other side of the field who maybe have not had a business, they really do have a curiosity. Why do we have this growth in our economy, why do we have an economy pushing upward at 8.2 percent in the third quarter, at 4 percent in the first quarter of this year? Alan Greenspan said it looks like we are on a sustained growth period for 4 percent through this year, probably next year. Why are the jobs not coming around?

If you will simply think about it, Mr. Speaker, in terms of when you had your first job, many companies are afraid to add people on for fear that they will have to lay them back off if the economy is still dipping up and down. We find that, as business owners, we do not hire immediately when we have a need. We begin to expand our capacity by increasing overtime hours. Maybe we just stay late and work every evening and have everybody work on the weekends. But you cannot sustain that, you cannot wear your people out, you cannot treat people like a commodity. You cannot do that indefinitely. In my perception, I have never expected to see the jobs react immediately when the growth in the economy came because I, as a businessperson, would not hire people right away.

But now we are seeing that our businesses are sustaining this growth, they are sustaining increased demand, they cannot continue to take care of the demand for labor with overtime hours, with temporary workers; and so it is not surprising that this job growth has lagged behind the growth in the economy. I would expect, Mr. Speaker, that we have such a volatility in the world economy that we will probably peak out and we will stabilize and level off here on job creation, and then we will see another ramp-up a couple of months down the road. It is just the way that I think businesses are very careful in these times to not hire too soon.

When we talk about the number of jobs being created and the number of jobs lost, a lot of times our friends on the other side of the aisle are talking about the number of jobs lost in the last couple of years and they make the numbers sound very good. It is important to remember, Mr. Speaker, that America has about 138 million jobs. While we hate to see any worker displaced, we have to keep it in perspective. We have to understand the balance that is there between 138 million jobs and even the creation of these 300,000 jobs, no matter how important it is, is still just a very small change, that most Americans are finding great stability and they are seeing in their daily lives the stability that this economy is bringing in.

We have to understand that the changes that occurred on 9/11 really were systemic changes. For a narrow period of time, people began to stay home. They did not travel. They did not go to the bowling alley at night. They did not go out to eat quite as much. The spending in this economy after 9/11 changed dramatically and shocked our economy into a recession that we are just now coming out of. It is not possible for an economy just to change itself and to grow out of its recession.

I think the stimulating effect of the President's tax cut is one of the most important things that we did. When people on the other side of the aisle are saying that we should give tax increases back to a certain piece of the population, we have to keep an element in mind, that when government spending increases beyond a certain level, and in general economists think that within the 20 to 24 percent level, if government spending increases beyond that, then the economy does not have the capital to reinvest in growth, to reinvest in new jobs and in new factories and in new equipment. What a tax cut

does is it lowers the amount that the government is actually spending as a piece of the gross domestic product.

If we want a good example of what high government spending will do to an economy, we look at Europe and especially we look at our friends in Germany. Their government spends approximately 40 to 44 percent of every dollar spent in Germany. Because of that, they have a sluggish economy that cannot create jobs, and they have been wrestling with that for some time. I visited in Germany on my way back from Iraq in early November. The Germans were telling us that maybe if you get your economy going in America that we can get our economy going here. They are unwilling, though, to give the tax cuts or to cut spending. Either one would cause a lessening of the percent of gross domestic product. Because of their unwillingness, their economy stays mired and stagnant.

Mr. Speaker, I am proud to be a part of the Republican Party, which has cast a pro-growth initiative in this entire 2 years that I have been in Congress. I am proud as a freshman to have participated in creating policies that will educate our young people, creating the opportunities for them for a lifetime, giving them hope and access to the potential that this great Nation has. I am proud that the President has created an initiative to continue that lifetime training for those young people as they prepare for technical careers. I am proud to have passed this transportation bill which will create many, many new jobs. I am proud to have voted for an energy bill that will create more domestic sources of energy, less dependence on international sources of energy. That bill needs to be passed. There are people in this town who are blocking it from being passed and it needs to be passed.

Southern New Mexico, Mr. Speaker, I border on the Mexico border, and my district is about as large as the State of Iowa.

I would like to go back to the cost of lawsuits to American business and what it costs each individual. Basically, the frivolous lawsuits in America cost each one of us 5 percent off of our wages. That is an approximate cost of $807 per U.S. citizen. That is across the board. Litigation costs increase insurance premiums, create higher medical costs. They cause less disposable income in our homes. They raise prices on goods and services. Businesses have to charge a higher price in order to cover the cost of litigation. This slows job growth and expansion of the economy.

The U.S. Chamber last year in my district ran ads. They were telling the New Mexico citizens that for every new car they buy, they pay over $500 for the costs of litigation that are acquiring on that car manufacturer somewhere.

One of my friends from Ohio said that we must stop making policy based on the contributions to campaigns. I would like to hold him to that statement. The single largest contributor to our friends on the other side of the aisle are the personal injury lawyers. They are the ones who are buying influence, and they are the ones who are blocking the reforms of lawsuit litigation abuses in this country.

This House has passed medical liability reform, it has passed asbestos liability reform, it has passed class action lawsuit reform, and they sit stalled out because of the special interests who are buying influence here exactly like my friend from Ohio from the other side of the aisle was talking about. I hope that he will join me with as much enthusiasm as he was displaying on the floor of the House to talk about the special interests purchasing the system here in Washington, and that special interest group being the personal injury lawyers of America.

Mr. Speaker, if we are going to consider the environmental cost, the environmental tax on each product in America, we also need to consider the lawsuit cost, the litigation cost, on every product in America. Because it comes from each one of us every time a lawsuit is filed. No one of us would block access to the courts for people who have a serious, legitimate legal claim, but the frivolous lawsuits are designed never to go to court but instead to extract a payment from a company without going to court for a perceived injustice.

Very rarely do the members of the class, those people, the class of the class action, the hundreds and hundreds of thousands of people who are put on the class action lawsuit by the lawyers, very rarely do they get anything. I have heard payments as low as 25 cents for each claimant in a class action lawsuit, while the lawyers get millions and sometimes billions of dollars.

If we are going to improve the business climate in America, if we are going to stop the outflow of jobs from this country, we will deal with the frivolous lawsuits that really affect the ability of any company in this country to continue to produce goods and services and produce jobs for the people who want to live here and to raise their children in just a peaceful, quiet neighborhood, knowing that they have the security of a job for tomorrow. Lawsuit abuse is one of the greatest penalties in our system, both personal and corporate, that we face.

I yield back to the gentleman to conclude. This is all of my statement, and I do thank the gentleman for bringing this conversation to the floor of the House on this day when it is announced that, under the President's policies, under President Bush's policies, 308,000 new jobs have been created in March. I thank the gentleman for his leadership on this issue.

Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman, and I appreciate him bringing this very critical issue to the American public tonight.

Our friends on the other side of the aisle continue to complain about the jobs being driven out of this country as if it is the President's fault. The gentleman from Colorado, my friend, has adequately described the problems of a failure to pass the energy policy through the entire House as a source of great difficulty in this Nation. There are two things, Mr. Speaker, that we must provide to keep our way of life, to keep our standard of living in this country. Those two things are food and energy. If we ever ship all of those requirements overseas, this Nation will find itself undergoing a change in the lifestyles and the abundance which we have been treated to and which we have become accustomed to.

This Nation has been blessed with abundant natural resources, including natural gas and other fossil fuels. Almost all of the natural gas used in the United States comes from inside the United States, comes from domestic sources. Natural gas provides a cheap and plentiful source of fuel for home heating and, more importantly, manufacturing facilities, particularly the chemical industry. The chemical industry uses natural gas as a fuel and also as a raw material in the production of its products. Those products include plastics, fertilizers, and many of the other products that we find and use daily. Today, the United States has the highest natural gas price of any industrialized nation. It costs the equivalent of $10 per gallon of gasoline. Most people do not know what they pay per thousand cubic feet of gas, but it equates to $10 per gallon in gasoline, and one can imagine the stress that industries are undergoing.

Sadly, this increase in price has contributed to higher home-heating costs and the loss of thousands of American jobs, including jobs in my home district in New Mexico. Throughout the United States, chemical manufacturers have lost an estimated 78,000 jobs since natural gas prices began to rise in 2000. These 78,000 jobs lost in one industry, the chemical industry, the chemical manufacturers, have been lost to manufacturing facilities in the Middle East, Asia, Europe, and South America. Why do those jobs move overseas? Because our domestic supplies have been interrupted to the point that our prices in this country for natural gas are in the $5 to $8 range. Typically in this country, $2 is the range for natural gas.

We had a briefing in the Committee on Transportation last year which showed us that the price of natural gas here in this country is between $5 and $8. Overseas in Russia and overseas in Africa, the price is 50 cents and 70 cents respectively. When we are paying 10 to 20 times more for natural gas in this country as other countries, the economics will eventually take hold and companies will move infrastructure out of this country.

What happened to cause the gas prices to increase so dramatically? First, there are two conflicting domestic policies. Number one, the U.S. adopted a policy in the 1990s encouraging the use of natural gas as the fuel of choice to burn in power plants to generate electrical power, even though we have abundant domestic coal resources. Natural gas was the clean fuel, the fuel of choice; and it was mandated by the Federal Government. The increased U.S. restrictions on oil and gas, however, the restrictions to production of natural gas on public lands has caused the supply to decrease, while the demand is increasing. Those two conflicting domestic policies have combined to force jobs offshore into other countries.

Mr. Speaker, we cannot long sustain the loss of these jobs because of conflicting policies and because of the special interests who would drive our jobs overseas.

In 2000, Americans consumed about 23 trillion cubic feet of natural gas, almost 23 percent of the energy used. The U.S. Energy Information Agency forecasts that by 2020 domestic natural gas demand will increase by more than 60 percent, to between 32 and 35 trillion cubic feet.

Much of the U.S. current production is coming from mature fields. Gas supplies from these fields are declining at about 29 percent per year. A mature field is one where the gas has been produced out of oil to the point that the down-hold pressures do not force the gas to the surface in the same quantities as used to occur. It is a naturally occurring phenomenon that you are able to gather in so much gas from one well before you have to drill another well.

We find these declining production curves to be a major threat to the price of natural gas in America and, therefore, a continued impediment to creating jobs in this country.

We often hear from our friends about the failure to create jobs, and they themselves are standing arm in arm with the groups who would limit the production of our natural gas which would get the cost of the natural gas to a point where our industries would become competitive again. Most of the promising new oil fields and gas fields in the U.S. are on public lands: the Rocky Mountains, Alaska, and the outer continental shelf. These areas are in the Rocky Mountain regions and Colorado and New Mexico.

Mr. Speaker, if we as a Nation choose not to access our own natural resources, with our high standards for compliance with our environmental laws and regulations, we deliberately reduce our economic security and reduce the opportunities for continued leadership in resource development, manufacturing, and technological advancement; and, at the same time, we deny our fellow citizens the opportunity for high-paying, family-wage jobs with good benefits.

We do not even bring up in this discussion the additional risk to national security. It is time my colleagues and I take the bull by the horns and fix our Federal land use policies so we can access our abundant natural resources for the benefit of all Americans. Why do we need to do this? People in the southern district of New Mexico understand why.

Mr. Speaker, the reason we need to do that is that our standard of living is at stake. Also, the number of jobs that are created in this country are at stake. But even more importantly, the ability to pay for our utilities is at stake.

People on fixed incomes are facing the price increases that my colleague from Colorado has mentioned to us already. We are facing tremendous increases in the price of gas, in the price of electricity, in the price of heating our homes and cooling our homes. Lest we forget, last year in the heat wave in Europe more than 10,000 people died from that. This is a matter of life and death as well as the future of our economic engine that powers this country.

Mr. Speaker, families spend about 5 percent of income on energy, but for many low income and minority families nearly half of everything they earn is spent on energy. Price increases will be a crushing blow for many, Mr. Speaker. Many people in my district are forced to choose between essentials of heat and food. While we have soaring natural gas prices, the cost is carried by the consumer.

Consumers pay more for goods that are produced with natural gas. These goods, I have mentioned before, include fertilizer, which is a key component in the food production.

We get to the unhappy state where the supply of natural gas can scarcely meet demand in two ways: First, it is an effort to make our air cleaner, which is an admirable condition. Many electricity producers and factories have switched to natural gas. But this switch has caused the demand to increase to such a point that the prices are now making our industries non-competitive with overseas markets.

Mr. Speaker, if we are to do anything about the loss of jobs and the failure to create jobs, we must begin to have a balanced approach to our policy of accessing public lands. Our balanced approach would say that, yes, we can be environmentally friendly while we develop our resources.

It has been proven in Alaska, that State we saw the concerns about the tundra there in Alaska along Prudhoe Bay. We found that what producing companies did was drilled in the wintertime. They built ice pads and ice roads. When the well was drilled, they did no damage. Then when the spring came, the thaw came, those ice pads and ice roads disappeared to leave just the hole in the ground and the producing wellhead.

Since our way of life is at stake, since our entire economic engine is

powered by affordable energy, Mr. Speaker, it is past time for us to begin to discuss and begin to solve the ways that we access our public lands.

Mr. Speaker, I have more comments, but I will yield back to the gentleman from Colorado (Mr. Beauprez). I thank him for bringing this important discussion to the floor of the House.

Mr. Speaker, I think my friend from Colorado (Mr. Beauprez) is like I am, a business owner. He understands that you just do not create jobs out of thin air, and you do not do it without good thoughts and good resources.

The gentleman from Illinois adequately pointed out that it is hypocritical of our friends on the other side of the aisle to talk night after night about the failure to pass an energy policy when it is the other side of the aisle that is blocking that energy bill from being passed.

The environmental extremists who stop production of oil and natural gas are the ones who are responsible. The process for drilling a natural gas well on public land is to file an application for permit to drill, an APD, and that process simply goes in for review, and when it is reviewed, the application is either given or denied.

What happens is that the extremists will file a lawsuit, and many times that application simply dies right there without ever even a hearing, and by the way, they have limited access. The extremists have limited access to over a trillion cubic feet of natural gas in the Rocky Mountain regions.

Now, then, sometimes the cooperation between the extremists and the government groups has gotten just a little bit too close and friendly. In a recent case that the media has not done a very good job of covering, three BLM employees in Wisconsin were convicted of racketeering, conspiring to keep people from drilling on public property. It is going to be very interesting to see how other employees in the Federal Government begin to respond to that conviction, understanding that their actions sometimes are simply extortion.

I have constituents of mine who report that Federal employees will tell them no, no, you really do not have a problem, but your case would go much easier if you would contribute to, say, this archaeological study that our office is doing. If you gave a check of

$25,000, maybe things will go easier. When I was out flying over the Salt River project, one group held hostage that project for a $25 million contribution into this extremist environmental fund.

Mr. Speaker, those are the things that are driving jobs offshore, that hostility to business and the development of energy. The most heartbreaking story, Mr. Speaker, that I have seen here in Congress occurred in the Committee on Resources about a month ago. Members of the union came in, the union that deals with workers who cut timber and who create the pulp wood and paper. Those union employees were talking about the loss of their jobs in that industry and were heartbroken by the fact that they were going to lose the wages that their families depended on, and they are good, good living-wage jobs.

The Members on the other side of the aisle said, oh, but you do not understand, you can get a job in the hospitality business. I am sorry, but the unions and Republicans do not often match up. The unions and the other side of the aisle do the most, and it was their friends telling them you could lose these high-paying jobs in the timber industry and you can get a job working at the hotels. The union representatives literally spit back at them across the table the words, We do not want your hospitality jobs; we want our jobs in the timber industry.

What a heartbreaking thing. I began to do research on that, and I am pleased to show a chart tonight. I am not pleased to show the chart tonight. I am horrified to show the chart tonight that describes the loss of pulp and paper mills and plants throughout this country.

The dots on this chart represent the mill closures and employee layoffs from 1989 through 2003. The blue dots with Xs are mills that have been closed, and the red dots list the number of employees that have been laid off during the past 16 years. The small blue dots represent the remaining operating U.S. mills and plants.

Since 1997, the forest products industry has lost more than 120,000 family-wage jobs and closed more than 220 plants. While there are many factors that contribute to these mill closures and the loss of family- wage jobs, several issues stand out.

Number one is the lack of access to timber resources on the Federal lands that have been brought about through the Endangered Species Act, the roadless rule, and the lawsuits filed by the anti-development environmental extremists. Access to timber resources results in lack of raw materials needed by the mills to produce their products.

High natural gas prices, and we have discussed why we have high natural gas prices, are also driven by misguided environmental policies. During the 1990s, the U.S. environmental policy encouraged the use of natural gas for the generation of electricity as a clean alternative to the coal-fired plants. However, during this same time and continuing through the present, area prospectives for oil and gas production have been put off limits to exploration and development. This includes almost all of the outer continental shelf offshore gas production, portions of the gulf, and a significant part of the Rocky Mountain natural gas resources.

America gets more than 85 percent of the natural gas we use from domestic production. These conflicting policies have driven natural gas prices to historic highs, above $5.50 per thousand cubic feet, the highest natural gas prices of all the industrialized nations. This makes the United States less competitive and is outsourcing our manufacturing industries, including the production of forest products.

Our misguided environmental policies are directly responsible for the loss of the majority of family-wage jobs in the forest products industry. In 1990, almost 12 billion board feet of timber were harvested from the Federal estate. That is 12 billion in 1990. Today, we harvest 2 billion board feet of timber from the Federal estate. Our national forest resources are allowed to lie fallow, to build up excessive fuels. They are subject to overgrowth, they are subject to disease, and they are subject to fire.

We are finding that the wildfires are going to destroy our forests before we ever cut them. When the fire races across the top of our forests, killing these mature trees, it only makes sense to go in and harvest the charred timber. But, instead, the extremists will file injunctions, they will file lawsuits to slow the process down.

Recently, in my district, we had a large forest fire. Before the timber could be cut, the value of the timber had lost 60 percent of its value because of delays created by the extremists who said it is better not to ever touch one tree than to cut these charred stumps that were left and had valuable timber in them.

Mr. Speaker, our watersheds are completely dependent on the quality and the character of our healthy forests, but also an entire industry is dependent on the way that we manage those resources. In this landscape, my constituents are asked to forego a development project that would provide family-wage employment so that a passerby's view is not spoiled. The same passerby expects my constituents to live with the charred remains of timber that could have provided feedstock for a local mill, that could be made into 2-by-4s for a neighbor's home, that could be paper used by a local school or business, a lovely piece of furniture to be passed into the next generation, or it could be used to make a young woman's high school prom dress.

If we as a Nation choose not to access our own natural resources, with our high standards for compliance and with our environmental laws and regulations, we deliberately reduce our economic security and reduce the opportunities for continued leadership in resource development, manufacturing, and technology. We deny our Federal citizens the opportunity for high-paying, family-wage jobs with good benefits. We also risk our national security.

Mr. Speaker, on the second chart, and I would show it briefly, it has a picture of a mill that is being closed; and much like the Vietnam wall, the names of the casualties are listed down below in black. Those names go on and on, 220 of those that have closed. I have got the closings here in a document that is 25 pages, with 35 mill closures on each page.

There are mills that have been closed in Alabama. Over 300 jobs lost at another plant in Alabama, at Cusa Pines. Here is one where 450 jobs were lost in Mobile, Alabama. Another 500 jobs lost in Mobile, Alabama. Camden, Arkansas, lost 600 jobs to these policies. We go page after page after page, California, Florida. St. Mary's, Georgia, lost 800 jobs in one mill closing. Page after page. Illinois lost many, many jobs to mill closings because of the misguided attempts of environmentalists to block every single tree from being cut. We have Louisiana with mill closings, Massachusetts, Maryland, Maine, and Michigan. State after State, 25 pages, 35 mills per page. When we get to Oregon, we have page after page after page of mill closings in Oregon, 100, 180 jobs.

This information is readily available to those in this body who would want to access it, but the disappointing thing is that our friends do not want reality in the debate about where jobs are lost and why they are lost. They simply are looking for their agenda to be carried out at all cost.

My friend from Illinois adequately characterized it as hypocritical. The job loss, the pain in the States and the rural areas of this country are borne by individuals who have to live with the policies that are implemented in our courts and in our regulations that face our businesses as they try to make a profit in the hostile environment that is created in this country.

Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from Colorado (Mr. Beauprez) for organizing this, and if I have an opportunity, I will have further comments to make. I thank the gentleman.

I thank the gentleman for yielding.

(Mr. PEARCE asked and was given permission to revise and extend his remarks.)

We will do more on this same subject at another time. In the closing minutes, let me talk about the hostility that we find against business in this country. Behre Dolbear publishes an annual survey entitled ``Ranking Countries For Mineral Investments.'' This survey ranks the 25 countries with the largest mining industries and/or the most significant mining industry potential. To establish the annual rankings, the survey considers seven criteria that influence investments by the mining industry in each of those 25 countries. These criteria include economic systems, political systems, social issues, permit issues, corruption, currency stability, and tax regimes. A review of each country relative to each of the above criteria is performed, using the general assumption that a technically viable mining operation is being considered in that country. The countries are then

given a ranking from 1 to 10 in each category, with 10 being the most favorable.

Recently in 2004 the USA scored well in economic systems and currency stability, et cetera; but it had a dismal ranking in the category of permit issues. This ranking is based on the time and expense required to get permits, not on stringency of regulations. In 2004, the U.S. had a numerical score of 4. That score puts the U.S. 19th out of 25 countries. The U.S. ranks below Peru, Ghana, Colombia, South Africa, Argentina, Canada, Brazil, Namibia and Bolivia. Only seven countries rank below the U.S.

Keep in mind that this is an improvement, that the Bush administration has made progress because previously under President Clinton, we had a 2 ranking. The U.S. was tied for 24th out of 25 countries with Indonesia. Just why does the U.S. have to have such a low rank in permit issues?

Mr. Speaker, we have covered tonight the many, many reasons that jobs are moving offshore in America while our industries are being decimated, why manufacturing is being sent overseas and our friends, while talking about it, continue to be a part of the problem. I thank the gentleman from Colorado (Mr. Beauprez) and the gentleman from Illinois (Mr. Shimkus) for allowing me to participate in this Special Order.

Mr. Chairman, I appreciate the gentleman yielding me time.

When I go to the district, I get the very reasoned question, why would we give tax cuts in a time of deficit? I think there are important reasons to understand.

First of all, the governor of New Mexico said it best, tax cuts create jobs. He said that to the Democrat legislature last year just before they passed the tax cuts in New Mexico that had been sought for over 8 years under the Republican governor. They passed those tax cuts. We passed the tax cuts here nationally and jobs began to create. In July, New Mexico was number two in the Nation in job growth because tax cuts do create jobs.

One of the ways they do it is small business. The tax cuts we gave, the small business expensing created tremendous jobs in our local district.

Good friends of mine at Watson Truck & Supply reported to me just before we gave the tax cuts that they were out of back orders. There were no more units to be built. They have a manufacturing facility that builds equipment for the oil fields. They were out of back orders, no more orders for their equipment.

The day after we passed the tax cuts, they got more orders than they had had in their entire history. They have 2 years of back orders now. People were hired, jobs were created, and for each new piece of equipment they put out, four to five new jobs were created additionally.

The accelerated depreciation as one of the most dramatic things that we did for small business in the tax cuts last year. Small businesses began to buy equipment.

My wife is the chairman of our board. She called me the day we passed the tax cuts, especially the one with accelerated depreciation and said, we should buy new equipment. So we ordered a large new pump that we had been waiting on to order. That is the way that tax cuts create jobs.

If we want to stop the outflow of jobs in America, we will continue to cut the taxes for American business, but also, Mr. Chairman, we will have a continued action on the part of the other house to pass the tort reform that we passed out of this House.

Frivolous lawsuits will drive all major corporations out of America if we do not do something about them.

We have heard a lot about what we should do as far as the deficits. My friend from New Jersey (Mr. Garrett) said it best, we do not have a problem with the amount of money that Washington collects from its people. We tax enough. The problem that we have is that we spend too much.

Much has been made out of the deficits that we are facing right now, but very little response is made that actually tells the beginning of those deficits. If we think back to the end of 1999 and 2000, in the last years of President Clinton's term, we remember that the dot-com industry collapsed. We were seeing tremendous capital gains from that industry where stocks escalated to a tremendous height without any product, without any revenue, without any net profit. Those stocks were emotionally driven to a high rate. They were not driven by practicality.

It was a necessity that the dot-com boom would collapse to a certain extent, and when it did, it took all of the capital gains and thrust that surplus that extended as far as the eye could see into a nonsurplus. It was an imaginary ramp up in the economy that could not and would not be sustained.

That was the beginning of a recession that was followed on by 9/11, shocking the economy into a deeper recession and followed still by Global Crossing, Enron, WorldCom and others who drove investor confidence to new lows.

Our economy has had several deep shocks to it. We felt that the tax cuts would create a rate of growth that should create new tax revenues from a higher economy. Those expectations were met in the third quarter of last year with an 8.2 percent rate of growth and 4 percent in the fourth quarter. That is exactly what the tax cuts were intended to do, and I thank the gentleman for yielding me the time.

Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent to claim the time of the gentleman from Florida (Mr. Mario Diaz-Balart).

Mr. Speaker, the images of 9-11 are very vivid in my mind. That unsolicited, unprovoked attack on the American population is one of the most heinous things that this generation will see.

Mr. Speaker, we are given two choices when we are struck like that. We can choose appeasement. That was the policy of the preceding 10 years.

Appeasement where we do not respond or we can respond to try to stop the threat. Under President Bush we have responded. President Clinton chose appeasement. If you watch the graduation of the attacks under the appeasement policy of President Clinton, you will see that the attacks began to escalate. The severity of the attacks began to take a greater toll.

The terrorists have one thing in mind when they attack innocent civilians and countries that have not provoked them. They desire to create instability, understanding that if they create economic instability, they will create political instability.

That was the mode of operation for the terrorists as they graduated through the 1990s. We recall that the World Trade Center was struck previous to 9/11. It was struck 10 years previous. On 9/11 we lost over 2,000 lives and it cost our economy $2 trillion, and it is still costing today as businesses face increased insurance premiums to cover the losses of that 1 day.

When I hear critics talk about the war and the cost on the war, and it is an expensive war, make no doubt about it, the costs are up around $200 billion now. $200 billion though is not yet 10 percent of the cost of that 1-day strike.

The President has boldly fought back. Dramatic things have been done since 9/11. The President has caused Saudi Arabia to dismantle the funding mechanism for the terrorists, the funding network that was established in Saudi Arabia, a worldwide network marketing nuclear components for nuclear weapons that was created by A.Q. Khan, a Pakistani. That network in a marketed nuclear armament has been dismantled. We are now in the process of collecting back the things, Mr. Speaker, that he sold to nations.

In Afghanistan the Taliban has been uprooted. They are out. Al Qaeda is on the run. That training camp where they trained 20,000 terrorists during the 1990s no longer exists, Mr. Speaker. And it is because of the bold action under this President. Libya has admitted to their participation in the weapons of mass destruction and they voluntarily have given up their weapons after the President took his bold action in Iraq.

Mr. Speaker, Iran is acknowledging their problems and their willingness to create weapons of mass destruction. Pakistan now is helping us fight the war on terror and just days ago was involved in a tremendous fire fight along the Afghanistan-Pakistani border.

Mr. Speaker, those are the responses of strength. And I will tell you that we are going to fight the war on terror; 9/11 declared it to be that way. If we are going to fight the war on terror, I choose to fight it in their country rather than in this country.

I traveled to Iraq at the end of October and the first of November. I visited our troops there, wanting to express my appreciation for what they were doing. As a soldier in Vietnam, I never received one communication from my Congressman, but I did want to communicate to these young men and women how much I valued what they do because they are changing the tide of world history.

If we were to sit and always choose appeasement, if we were to sit and not respond, I would guarantee you that our economy would not survive another 9/11. On 9/11 I was in Paris, France, on a vacation. We were delayed 10 days in getting home. When we arrived, we arrived at Dallas-Ft. Worth Regional Airport, an airport that today when I travel through it has thousands of people every day. That airport was essentially shut down. There were no taxis. The hotels were empty.

We will see our economy completely collapse if we continue to let strikes like 9/11 happen without response.

The President has given bold response. Our soldiers are acting responsibly. They understand the value of what they are doing. They tell me they have pride in their accomplishments. I see the reconstruction is having dramatic effects. The Iraqis themselves believe they can create liberty.

Mr. Speaker, the President's responses of strength are a tribute to the great leadership that he is bringing to this time of great stress; and I would like to support him in that.

Mr. Speaker, will the gentleman yield?

Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for yielding, and I would note that even when President Clinton was making the allegations about the strength of the effort in Iraq and about the threat that Iraq posed to the world, he was systematically dismantling the information- gathering network that the United States had in place. He began to pull the operatives out of our spy networks so that we had no information on the ground. The Clinton administration was saying that we will gather that information electronically, we will use satellites and we will use monitoring of phones.

The truth is you cannot know actions until you understand the heart of the individuals who are planning actions,

until you can assess the threat by listening to the rhetoric; but President Clinton dismantled that at the same time he was acknowledging the threat, and President Bush was faced with a situation in the world where we did not have information and we were struck without warning, without provocation.

I think that before we consider all the ramifications, if we are to listen to the left, talk to America today, about retreating away from the war, about coming back home, about the mistakes they are claiming that we made, we have to understand the risk of retreat.

We have now Pakistan who is engaged with us, but it would guarantee instability and overwhelm the President of Pakistan if we were to retreat. The fundamentalists, the extremists in Iraq would overwhelm the growing government process there. Our friends who have helped us get there, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, would face certain instability if we were not there to offer the moral support and the troop strength which we are offering today.

It was well-known through the 1990s the threat that Iraq and many of the terrorist states, the risks that they posed to the United States; but in treating these not as acts of war but as a crime, like my colleague has said, we have to understand that the person who perpetrated the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center was actually in prison. He was only a criminal. It was his uncle who conducted and led the 2001 attacks with the certainty that they had communicated frequently.

The failed policies of appeasement simply are not going to work in this war on terror; and if we understand that the instability of the world is the goal of the terrorists, that through the instability they represent a very small percent of the population but they will gain tremendous power in instability, we begin to understand why they are doing what they are doing.

Mr. Speaker, the gentleman brought up a personality trait of the President. When he inherited a bad problem, the President did not whine about it, did not take it to the American public, did not point fingers. He just set to work to solve the problem. There are many things that the President could have talked about that existed in the military at the point that he took over. Raises had been ignored for the 8 years under President Clinton; the inventory of our weapons were depleted seriously through many actions taken under President Clinton. Spare parts for vehicles and tanks were depleted, and the maintenance readiness status of our equipment was sadly lacking; but the President has not said one word about that during this war. He simply went to work, asked for the money to take care of the problems, and began to take care of the problems.

Today, I heard a speaker who described leadership as seeing a need, then taking a personal responsibility to take care of that need. As I look back on the President's performance since 9/11 in a situation that was tremendously challenging for any person, I see a person who saw a need and took a personal responsibility to begin to address the problems. He has addressed them well. If we look at the changes since 9/11, we see the dramatic changes in the situation in the world today. He talked to our friends in Saudi Arabia and said there were networks financing terrorism there, and that has changed. He compelled them to make a change in that.

Today Saddam Hussein is not in power, but instead is in prison. Who can forget the image of that leader who had killed a half a million people, his own people, and here was that leader, that vicious, violent leader crawling out of a hole in the ground where he had been hiding, whipped and beaten by the steadfast determination of American forces to rid the world of that evil and to keep him from doing more destruction, either in the world or to his own people.

Afghanistan this summer has already had elections. They are looking at a Constitution that is offering new freedoms in that country. Iraq has approved the temporary Constitution, the one that for the first time gives women rights in that Middle Eastern country, one that recognizes private property rights.

Children are back in school in Iraq today because of the President's actions. As my colleague has mentioned, Libya has given up their chemical and nuclear weapons. Iran is acknowledging their participation in this dramatic build up of weapons of mass destruction. The Pakistani President has vowed to fight terrorism in his country with his troops and is doing a dramatic job of that.

These are significant changes in the history of the world. And make no mistake about it, if the changes were not made to the better, toward the more stable governments, the changes will be made in the world to more unstable governments. That is the choice in the world today, stability versus instability. It is not so much a question of those countries that are democrat or not democrat. The question is stability and the protection of humans and human rights in those countries.

So the President inherited a military that was depleted, one that seemed to be on its heels. I would point out that when I went to Iraq in October and early November, I talked with many of the soldiers there. For 3 days we had lunch and dinner with American soldiers, both men and women fighting the fight. Every day I would walk through the large dining halls of 800 or 900 people, and I had a chance to visit with a lot of young men and women. In unison and one by one they said please tell the President we love him. That was prior to when the President went there on Thanksgiving morning. When I saw him about to come around that curtain, I realized what the American troops would say to him because they had said the same thing to me a month earlier.

Mr. Speaker, as the gentleman was talking about the soldiers in the streets, there were three young men from New Mexico, and they brought me a picture from their patrol that morning. These young men were in their early 20s. They graduated from New Mexico high schools. I had watched one play in the State championship ball game. We talked about that game, but their greatest pride came from the recognition that was given to them by the Iraqis in the streets over a period of time. They said when they got there, people were peeking out of the curtains. They were unsure because they had been told for 35 years that the Americans had only one intent, and that was to kill when they came.

Yet through the weeks families became familiar with them being in the same streets and in the same alleyways, and protecting and guarding, and gradually they began to open their doors. On that morning, the morning they took the picture in the street, they brought it to me to put into my office here. One of the families brought out their young kids and held them up to see them eye to eye. He said it brought tears to his eyes to see the changes in the Iraqi people in just a few short weeks.

The greatest question that our solders ask us is, why don't Americans hear this in the American press? Why don't my mom and dad hear about the good things that we're doing on the streets? I could not give them an answer but when I was there in my 3 days I took 5\1/2\ hours of video. I have consolidated that onto a CD that I take into the schools in my districts and I talk over and over and over about the good things that American soldiers are doing there in the reconstruction, not only in the reconstruction of the facilities in Iraq, but in the reconstruction of the hope and the dreams and the human spirit that we see taking place right now.

Our young men and women are recognizing the very valuable thing they are creating in the human spirit in Iraqis, and both the young men and women got tears in their eyes when they were telling me about it.

I thank the gentleman for yielding for that brief story.

I thank the gentleman for yielding. He is bringing up a very compelling story that occurred when I was in Iraq. We went to Kirkuk. At that town, we visited the police station. I am understanding that it is the same police station that was bombed several weeks ago in Iraq causing great damage.

But when we were there the police captain began to address this concept of liberty. He likened it to growing a garden. He said in his words that for the roses to grow in Iraq, the roses would have to be watered with Iraqi blood. He said, We're willing to do that. We're willing to shed Iraqi blood for Iraqi freedom. When I heard those words, I knew that Iraq, no matter what the trials, no matter what the troubles, would be in good shape as long as we are there to help, as long as we are there to help until they get their strength.

The only thing that can cause Iraq to suffer worse is for America to lose its resolve, because the Iraqi police at that station in Kirkuk said two things, Don't leave Iraq too early and do not leave Saddam Hussein loose. That was before we captured Saddam Hussein. We have taken care of the second piece but America cannot lose its resolve. Otherwise, the Iraqi people will pay dearly for the terrorists and the extremists who would go in and punish anyone who has cooperated with the United States or with the Coalition forces.

Again, I thank the gentleman for yielding.

Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from Arizona (Mr. Shadegg) for bringing this important subject up because I have asked the President because many people asked me, Why does the President not fight back? Why does he not explain? And his simple answer to me was he cannot take the Presidency down into those baseless claims of people that are coming from everywhere. He stays focused on the job of fighting the war on terror. He has made tremendous accomplishments in the war on terror as we look across the history of the changes in just the last 3 years and even the recent incident along the Pakistani- Afghanistan border where U.S. troops are on the Afghanistan side and Pakistani troops were pinching in together al Qaeda troops in the middle. I think that indicates some of the most dramatic changes going on in the region, and this President, in spurning a policy of appeasement but choosing instead to respond in strength and remaining dignified and not dipping the Presidency into the baseless accusations that have been hurled from every direction during the last 8 or 9 months, indicates a steadfastness, a commitment to duty that this President brings that makes me proud.

I thank both of the gentlemen for bringing these conversations in front of the American people.

I think this is the right place to refute the lies that are being thrown about.

I thank both gentlemen for allowing me to participate this evening.

Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the gentleman yielding me this time. This subject of exactly why we did take up the Medicare and prescription drug bill comes up frequently, and it is a question that people really do concern themselves with.

For me as a business owner, when I came to this body and looked at the budget and realized that almost all economists agreed that within 4 to 10 years Medicare would put such deep stress on the budget, we may not have solutions to it.

As a business owner, if I see that kind of problem 5 to 10 years down the road, I know I must do something today to begin to defuse the demand, defuse the problem well before it arrives.

As we began to develop the program, the Medicare prescription drug bill, I began to ask questions and to make requests of my own. One of the things that several Members did was sign a letter saying if you do not give equal reimbursement to the rural areas, we will not vote for any bill.

Mr. Speaker, I campaigned saying we should treat the rural areas of America fairly, that they needed to be compensated the same way because that is not the case in the past. We got 100 percent equality for rural hospitals in this bill, and it is one thing that affects my district tremendously. It was not just affordability of care that was at stake in my district; it was the access to care, even having hospitals that would operate and be in the district, and so this one component of equalizing the reimbursement rate in our rural hospitals was key.

Another element that caused me to think there were good elements of the bill and it deserved support was the way border hospitals are treated. Border hospitals have a mandate by the immigration service that if an immigrant comes to a hospital with a medical problem, that hospital at its own expense or the expense of the county in which it is located, will transfer the person to the nearest facility where treatment can be given. Hospitals in my district are severely burdened. My district is on the border of Mexico, and the hospitals complain about the unfunded mandates to transport and to treat many medical conditions. Then the immigrants are taken back to the border and deposited there to return to their homes.

Mr. Speaker, that was another element that I campaigned on saying that we should get reimbursement for those costs mandated by the Federal Government. In this bill there is $1 billion to begin to help border hospitals pay for the costs that they face through an unfunded mandate by the Federal Government in the immigration department.

Those two things really began to convince me that for rural New Mexico, the Medicare bill had a good beginning, but it did not stop there. The disproportionate share hospitals also received an increase in funding level. Again, that affects most of the hospitals in my district. We also dealt with the reimbursement for rural physicians in this bill. Again, a win for New Mexico. So it began to look to me like we had the elements to build a successful bill on, that we had some long-term cures that were a long time in coming, and I was proud to be a part of those.

As we got into the philosophy of the bill, I think that is where we really began to see the need for change, the need for systemic change. One example of how we do things upside down in Medicare and in providing government coverage for Medicare is that we cause incentives to go to the most high-priced objective. We all know that for a small copay you can get any pharmaceutical that you would like to have. Once you reach the copay, you might as well get the expensive as the generic because there is no difference.

If we turned the incentive upside down and were to provide coverage for the generic, and if you want then the expensive version of the same drug,

you would have to provide the difference, that was a compelling way to me that we could change behavior and change buying patterns throughout the country.

One of the things that we did in this bill was we began to limit the powers of the drug companies. I appreciate what the pharmaceutical companies have done in this country. They have created pharmaceuticals that are extending lives beyond belief. The fastest population group in America is over 100 years old. The second fastest growing age group is 85 to 100. These extensions of life and the quality of life that is experienced is because of the good work that the pharmaceutical companies do; but the pharmaceutical companies are just like the rest of us. They will take advantage when advantage given.

There was a practice of extending patents indefinitely. At the end of the patent period, they would change a few words and change the patent again. It was legal, but it was something which many felt was not right. In this bill, we limited the extensions to one. You get your original patent period, and then one extension. That will bring generic drugs to the market sooner. Just to make sure that the generic drugs come to the market sooner and we get competition sooner, we went ahead and put provisions in that would encourage the generics to be brought to market sooner.

We just wanted the drug companies to know that we appreciate what they do, but we also wanted to give them a small wake-up call that there were practices that we felt like were not in the best interest of all Americans. And so those changes were made here. Again, a very positive component that I felt began to justify this particular bill to be voted for.

Another thing that we did were health savings accounts. My colleagues have talked about that tonight, but I will give my brief summary. Health savings accounts are really medical IRAs. Americans can put in money tax free at any age, and at any age you can take money out tax free. That makes the health dollar worth 30 to 40 percent more, depending where you are in the income spectrum.

So you have a medical IRA that you put money into tax free at any age, about $5,000 a year, and you can take money out at any age if you use it to pay for medical benefits. You can pay for your premiums out of this health savings account; you can pay for your deductibles out of the health savings accounts, as well as prescription drugs or any other medical expense.

The nice thing about health savings accounts are they are a part of your estate. If you do not use it for your medical needs, you are able to pass it on to the next generation and to the next generation so that your children and grandchildren have a head start on paying for their medical needs.

I will tell Members, as a small business owner, the way that I would have dealt with this, and my wife and I sold our business in October of last year so I no longer have employees that would qualify for this, but the way I would deal with this particular situation is I would begin to give pay and bonuses into that account. So instead of giving pay increases, I would pay the increase into the health savings account. I would try to put $5,000 a year for every employee into the account, where the money was worth 30 to 40 percent more, and also where they could begin to use it to pay out of an account that has been put into their name, and they can pay out of that account to pay for premiums and deductibles.

I think as we build the size of the account, we can all see that we can begin to shop for higher deductible insurance. Right now most of the time when I shopped for health insurance, it was either a $500 or $1,000 deductible. But if a small business has helped pay in $5,000 to $20,000 into a health savings account, and knows that no one is going to be disadvantaged, then we begin to shop for maybe $5,000 deductibles. It is at that point the health insurance costs begin to collapse tremendously and we put the health care, the health insurance costs back within the reach of the average wage earner.

Ten percent of my employees had insurance costs of more than $1,000 a month. With 20 and 30 percent increases, you could look at 3 years from now having $2,000 a month. There is a point, Mr. Speaker, at which no one can afford health insurance. The health savings account, this medical IRA, begins to change the way that we think about health insurance. It begins to change buying patterns so that long term we begin to affect the price of medical services themselves. One of the most important things that we did in this bill is began to understand that if we will catch problems at the front, at their initiation, they are far easier and cheaper to take care of.

One of the reasons that Medicare has been so expensive, one of the reasons it stands to break the budget of the United States, is that we have no preventive medicine. At least we did not until we passed this bill. In other words, we would not do screenings but Medicare would pay for the full cost of operations, heart surgeries, cancer treatments after they were full-blown.

In this bill with screenings, physical exams and preventive medicines guaranteed, I think that we are going to begin to collapse the cost of this Medicare bill overall down below what it has been, rather than the astronomical increases that we are seeing projected; because I think, as the good doctor has pointed out, that there are applications in this bill which will save us money, not cost us money.

The gentleman from Texas explained adequately that the benefit programs were one of the main questions that he faces in his district. Benefit programs are a concern to all of us. Many companies have employees who have retired and are using that company benefit for their health insurance. I have experienced the same concerns in my district that the gentleman from Texas has experienced, of people wondering, well, if you put this in place, then my company is going to drop it, they are going to drop the coverage that I currently have. That disappointed them. It concerned them.

I will tell you that we did something in this bill that to me made sense. We have our opponents, those people who want to criticize the bill, saying that we are giving corporate welfare. Mr. Speaker, what they are talking about is that we are giving an incentive, we are helping these companies that pay retirees' health benefits, we are giving those companies incentives to keep the benefits in place. We are saying that if the Federal Government can pay 20 or 25 percent and cause them to keep that health benefit in place for the retirees, that that is going to be far preferable to having the company drop the coverage and having Medicare pick up 100 percent of the coverage. And so those opponents of this bill who claim that it is corporate welfare can do so; but when they do so, they have to not be telling the full truth that we did it in order to encourage companies to keep those benefit plans open for retirees who really think they have got good plans.

One of the most important parts of this bill, Mr. Speaker, was the concept of choice, the ability to choose whether you like the current plan you are under, the traditional Medicare, or whether you want to opt out and move into the new plans that will be offered as competing plans for this program.

Mr. Speaker, I do not see anyone complaining about the right to choose. I see a lot of people complaining about the potential of being mandated to move into a complete private sector but not one person has said, don't give me a choice. I will tell you that the right to choose is one of the most fundamental parts of our American society and I am proud that in this bill we have given our seniors the right to stay where they are, to use Medicare completely as it is without any changes, but we have also given them a right to choose a different kind of coverage that meets their needs more.

Mr. Speaker, there are many reasons that I voted for this bill but the main ones were I believe that systemically it began to address the long-term changes that are necessary to make Medicare viable for the rest of this generation, for the next generation and the generations beyond. Access to affordable health care in rural parts of the country just cemented my belief that we have done very good work in this particular bill.

Mr. Speaker, I have more things to say but I would like to yield back to the gentleman from Texas and let him

continue and I will wait for the next coverage that he gives to me.

Mr. Speaker, if I could request how much time is remaining.

Mr. Speaker, I would like to discuss even a broader concept in health care costs. One of the most urgent questions that I get when I am in my district, people wonder how are we going to afford health care costs. How can we afford health insurance? What are the components of that? All of us, myself included, would look for easy solutions. We would want a bill that we could pass that would just limit the cost of care. Maybe it is by fixing prices in the pharmaceutical industry or maybe fixing prices that the doctors are able to charge. Some people want to go in and limit the capability of insurance companies to raise their prices to pay for the costs that they have. Mr. Speaker, anything that we attempt is going to be simplistic and will be, without doubt, ineffective. The reasons that our health care is so expensive, is, frankly because we are demanding it. We have more demand than there is supply. When that is the case, you can either increase the supply, which is the number of doctors and the number of hospitals, or you can begin to affect demand.

I would say, Mr. Speaker, that it is imperative, as long as we are going to try to solve the problem, we may address the supply, we may address the numbers of doctors, we may address the numbers of hospitals, but that does not completely deal with the problem that I see, that is, on the demand side. I think that the first step for us all is to begin to live healthier life-styles. There is one study which reports that if we lost nationwide 10 pounds per person that the incidence of diabetes could be cut by 25 percent nationwide. Nationwide diabetes is an exploding phenomenon that is going to affect the health care costs for every single one of us, even though we are not all affected by it. If we look at our young population, we are finding that exercise and healthy choices are so bad that youth diabetes is exploding in the country, also.

I will tell the Speaker and this assembled group that these health problems into the future raise such tremendous concerns on costs for budgets, quality of life, that we need to begin to make healthier choices. We need to make healthier choices in our life regarding smoking, regarding physical exercise, regarding illegal substances that we place into our bodies. All of those are things which affect the demand, the demand which causes health care costs to increase daily.

I think one of the things that we need to be smarter about in this country and which would also begin to lower that demand curve for the medical services and begin to affect the cost shifts upward each year is in regard to preventive medicines. We all need to be doing careful screenings, cholesterol checks. We should be doing the cancer screenings. I heard statistics today about the way that breast cancer is really spreading in this country. Breast cancer is a curable problem and one that is affecting, I think, 1 out of every 3 or 4 women. Mr. Speaker, if we will begin to do the screenings and the preventive medicines, we will find that long-term our costs will begin to deflate also.

The health savings accounts, we have already discussed how that can affect long term the cost of our medical care and the cost of associated insurance.

One of the things that we are wanting to institute in this particular bill is more competition.

If we look at a couple of examples right now in the medical community of competition, I think Lasik eye surgery is one of the examples, also reconstructive surgery, the plastic surgery. Both of those elements have had competition introduced into their sphere in the last couple of years; and we have seen, I think, 30 percent decreases in the cost of those particular services. Competition is one of the important aspects of not only the American way of life but also in any free market enterprise, and we should see that always competition is never forbidden but encouraged, and it should be that way in our medical field.

The gentleman from Texas (Mr. Burgess) mentioned that one of the most important things we can do to begin to lower costs of medical treatment rather than to see the constantly inflating and increasing cost of medical treatment is medical liability. Many physicians in my district talk about the escalating medical liability costs. Each year we face the prospect that more and more doctors are going to just stop practicing medicine. So instead of increasing the supply, we are actually decreasing the supply, which is going to give more incentive for prices to go up higher even. Medical liability is one of the most serious problems in day-to-day costs of health care and needs to be addressed. This House has addressed it. We feel like it is a thing that should be pushed on through the full Congress and sent to the President for signature.

I think, finally, the good doctor mentioned several times, and in good components, the cost of defensive medicine. Defensive medicine is not just in fear of lawsuits. Defensive medicine is when our doctors begin to prescribe more tests than should actually be done because they are afraid that they will be sued if they do not prescribe every single test that is available. Defensive medicine is when doctors begin to order more rather than exactly which tests they believe are the right ones, which procedures they believe to be right. It is in that defensive medicine, that overprescribing, that overtreating that we find, as the good doctor says, $50 billion worth of cost in this country alone and that one single step of changing that parameter in our health care costs could pay for, for instance, this Medicare prescription drug bill.

Mr. Speaker, we are going to make choices in this Nation that are expensive. In this particular case, this particular bill, it was the right thing because we have seniors who are having to choose between food and medicine. There is an immediate impact in this Medicare prescription drug bill which will give to our low-income seniors right now this year a $600 card that is good for any purchase of prescription drugs throughout the rest of the year. Next year the same thing is going to happen. Those people at lower incomes, $18,000 and below for a couple, will receive another $600 card next year, which will be good to help them defray the cost of the prescription drugs.

As we look at the plan itself, we have a lot of critics who are describing the gap and being very critical of the gap in the pharmaceutical coverage. I will tell those people that are assembled here today that the single most important reason we did that was to be able to afford the bill. We did not want to break the next generations because we paid for full coverage for every single person in this Nation.

I have often explained that my mom is one of the people who experienced the gap. Her income and her assets are high enough that she will be faced with seeing that coverage up to a point and then a gap and then the protection for catastrophic coverage. I asked her what she felt about it. She explained to me that she understood why we were doing it. She explained that she had felt blessed in her life, that she would gladly pay more in order to make it where it is affordable for the next generations.

Mr. Speaker, those people who are being so critical of this particular aspect of the bill I think are being disingenuous. They talk about the cost of the bill on the one hand, while complaining about the gap on the other. I am sorry. They simply have to choose one or the other. They have to choose full coverage and the high price above $1 trillion versus the $400 to $500 billion that we are facing in this bill as it stands. Either they choose full coverage and the higher price, or they give the gap in the lower price. We in this House and in the Senate and in the bill that was passed and signed by the President chose to allow those people to pay more who could pay more in order to make this bill more affordable for the next generations.

Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the President's calm and patient leadership on this matter. The President never wavered in his commitment to provide coverage for those seniors who are not able to provide coverage for themselves. And I think that this House chose rightly in passing that bill, and I think that the seniors are finding that it is going to be one of the tremendous changes in the way that we present medical coverage through the Medicare program in this country.

I appreciate, also, the President's leadership in many other issues. We have taken on serious issues in this House, and we have passed them. Not all have made it to the President, but many have made it to the President. We took bold steps to reinvigorate the economy. The economy, as we understand, had suffered from three deep shocks: the collapse of the dot-com industry back in the ending years of President Clinton's term; 9-11 was the second big shock. The third big shock were the corporations that were acting improperly. Global Crossing is a good example. Enron is also an example that has been used. When those companies began to act improperly, people began to suck their money out of the stock market and put it into interest-bearing accounts at the bank. Those three shocks to our economy were ones that were very difficult, and many economies could not have sustained them. The President has patiently built our economy back with a series of tax decreases to the American public. Many of those tax decreases fall on businesses which are able to maintain profitability, increase their employment, grow their capacity, increase the capability of competing with those firms overseas. I will tell the Speaker that we have done magnificent work in many areas; and I appreciate, myself, the calm and principled leadership of the President, who has decided to fight this war on terror, to fix Medicare as he saw the Medicare problems to be, to deal with the forests that were burning up throughout the West, to pass the Partial Birth Abortion bill and sign that, to pass the AMBER alert bill and to get that signed.

Mr. Speaker, we have done magnificent work in this House. The President has signed much of it into law. But one of the most dramatic things we have done is to pass this prescription drug Medicare reform bill, which I think is going to make sure that Medicare is available throughout the rest of this generation and on into the future for my children and my grandchildren.

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

The motion was agreed to; accordingly (at 9 o'clock and 24 minutes p.m.), the House adjourned until tomorrow, Wednesday, March 17, 2004, at 10 a.m.

Mr. Speaker, first of all, I would like to talk about education and an exciting thing that is occurring in my district.

I would also address some of the economic factors that this Nation has faced and will continue to face. We have important things about Medicare that we need to communicate to the American people, and I will do that this afternoon also. If we get a chance, we will talk about the concurrent receipts issue, an issue of fairness for our veterans that this Congress, under Republican control, took care of. It had been a problem since 1892 when the bill was passed that disallowed concurrent receipts. The Democrats continue to say that we have not taken care of our veterans, and yet we took care of that concurrent receipts issue, which was a problem during the entire time of the 40 years of uninterrupted power that the Democrats held in this Congress and they refused to take care of it. They refused to hear the bill, refused to get it out of committee, and now they are claiming that we did not do that. The facts speak differently.

Mr. Speaker, returning to my education issue first, Roswell High School, New Mexico, is in my district. They recently have been named as one of 12 breakthrough high schools in the Nation by the National Association of Secondary School Principals, the NASSP. The breakthrough high schools project identifies and showcases exemplary high schools which have met the challenges of low-income, high-minority student populations, which describes my district. It describes some of the most desperately needy high schools in the Nation. That is the reason No Child Left Behind was put into place. It causes our school systems to acknowledge the difficulties of teaching the low-income, high-minority student populations because they are the ones that are being left behind.

Roswell High School's success is one of the best examples of school turnaround that I personally have seen. No Child Left Behind gives schools the resources, the flexibility and local control to make great changes. I am both excited and proud to talk about Roswell High School and its principal, Mike Kakuska from the floor of this House. Mike Kakuska is my hero. He is the one who deals with young people on a day- to-day basis, encourages them to do better, convincing them that they can do better, all of the while making progress in his school. His comment is that we have a credo here: dinosaurs disappeared because they did not change. If something does not work, we change it. The education system in America has not been working. We were leaving too many children behind, and simply the title of the bill says it best. Let us stop leaving kids behind because it is the poorer and disenfranchised who never will have an opportunity to go to a different school.

No Child Left Behind has channeled tremendously increased resources at education. When President Bush came to office, the expenditure from a Federal level was about $27 billion on education. That number is over $50 billion now and increasing. Yet we are told by the Democrats that we are underfunding education when they know, when they are talking about the fact that we have increased over double what they funded education at during their tenure.

The most egregious example of Democrats misusing facts is when they send our constituents in to say we are not funding IDEA, the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act; and yet the facts tell us that traditionally from the very onset of IDEA, the funding was around $1 billion. Finally after about 30 years, under President Clinton the funding increased from $1 billion to $2 billion; yet in the time that President Bush has been in office, funding has increased from $2 billion to over $11 billion.

Mr. Speaker, I think that we need to tell the American people the truth. The greatest thing that I see No Child Left Behind doing is that it allows local flexibility and local control. Local school districts are given four different income streams where they can move money back and forth between programs. They are given the flexibility to direct money where it belongs.

If a school is failing, increased resources are sent to that school for mentorship, 101 training, or whatever it takes to get each individual student up to par. One of the most important aspects of No Child Left Behind is right now there are over 150 school districts nationwide who have 100 percent control over the education dollars that go to their school from the Federal Government.

We think that if the local school board will make decisions, if the local school board is responsible for the education of their children, if we take education out of the hands of Washington bureaucrats, if we take Washington out of the hands of the State bureaucrats that local school boards and local administrators and teachers will solve the problem.

The No Child Left Behind Act begins that process of giving local autonomy and local control. I think that Michael Kakuska and Roswell High School are the best examples in my district of what No Child Left Behind can do, and I commend them for that.

Mr. Speaker, I will speak later on about taxes, Medicare, and a few other issues.

I thank the gentleman from Texas.

Mr. Speaker, right now we have National Guard members in Iraq who are defending not only the freedom of this Nation in fighting back in the war on terror that began on 9/11 in this country, Mr. Speaker, but those National Guard troops are serving and putting their lives on the line. And that is not new. Our National Guard has been doing that throughout our history.

In World War II at Omaha Beach, some of the greatest casualties occurred in the Virginia National Guard. Members of my own New Mexico National Guard in World War II were in the Pacific. They made a thing called the Bataan Death March. I have known about that event throughout my entire life because I had next-door neighbors who were on the Bataan Death March. It was not until I went to the New Mexico House of Representatives that I began to understand why we had so many of those, and that is because the New Mexico National Guard was activated, sent there, they did their duty and many of them died.

It is with this backdrop that I was profoundly disappointed several weeks ago when Terry McAuliffe, the chairman of the Democratic National Committee, said President Bush served in the National Guard, but never served in our military and our country.

I will tell you, those comments are so demeaning to the people who served in our National Guard that I was offended and asked for an apology. I am now asking that the chairman of that committee would resign over his comments that detract from the service of all of our National Guard Members.

I came to the floor of this House several weeks ago to talk about the rhetoric that was starting in the campaign, and just earlier today we saw a report from the leading Democrat contender for President where he referred to the ``crooks and liars on the other side.'' I will tell you as a Republican, I will say that his comments were unfounded, they were extremist and they have no basis in fact.

He has already turned down a demand for an apology. I do not think he will do that, because I do not think he is a large enough person to do it. But I am profoundly disappointed by the comments from the Democrat candidate for the office of President.

I yield to the gentleman from Texas for the next segment.

Announcement by the Speaker Pro Tempore

I thank the gentleman for yielding. As I look at that picture, I wonder about the person that is taking the picture. That is a stunning shot from high up in the mountains there, taken at the moment of impact, and it just expresses in detail the fine job that our troops are doing.

At the end of October of last year, October 31, November 1 and 2, I was in Iraq. I visited with our troops to find out what their attitudes were. I can tell you that every single troop I visited with, both from New Mexico and from outside New Mexico, they all believed in what they were doing, they were highly motivated, well trained and doing great work.

Their one comment was, ``Why do the people in America not find out the good things we are doing?'' I cannot tell them why the news will not cover the good things that are going on in Iraq, the very positive rebuilding efforts, the winning over of the hearts and minds of the Iraqi people, but I can tell you that those soldiers know about it. They see firsthand that people in the neighborhoods who have been told their entire lives, for 35 years under Saddam Hussein, that Americans are evil and will be coming there to hurt them, and as the Iraqis find that not to be true, they bring their kids out in

the streets and hold them up to see the Americans eyeball-to-eyeball, and that is touching the lives of the young men and women from New Mexico serving there. I compliment our troops for the fine job that they are doing.

But our reconstruction efforts are going well. We have about 75 percent of Iraq is fairly stable. About 25 percent is unstable. But I visited also with General Odierno. That was before we captured Saddam Hussein. He told me, ``My troops have stepped on his tail a couple of times and we missed him.'' He said, ``It is going to be my people to capture him,'' and the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Burgess) pointed out it was the troops under General Odierno that captured Saddam Hussein.

I will tell you that when I look back on the short time that we have been engaged in the war on terror, we have the Taliban completely uprooted and out of Afghanistan. Al Qaeda is on the run. The funds raising mechanism in Saudi Arabia that was funding the war on terror has been eliminated. Under A.Q. Khan, nuclear armament components were being sold on the world market, and that completely marketing network of nuclear armament has been taken down and disassembled. We have gone back and repossessed some of the nuclear things that were sold to countries. Pakistan now is energized and willing to help us in the war on terror. Iran is admitting publicly that they had nuclear weapons and nuclear capability. Syria is beginning to change their attitude. Libya has changed theirs.

We have come so far in this war on terror. It disturbs me when I hear the national campaign from the Democrats saying we should back up, we should bring our troops home, we should rethink it. I will tell you that the worst thing we could do is to stop the war on terror, because that is one of the events that destabilized our country.

People wonder why we are doing the tax cuts. I will tell you, our economy has suffered three deep shocks. The first, of course, was the dot.com collapse. That occurred in the last years of the President Clinton term. We had stocks that were valued at way over their actual dollar value. That occurred because people were euphoric. Some of these companies had no products, they had no net income, they had no sales. They just had a name and a concept, and people were bidding the stock up from nothing to $200 and $300 per share. That euphoria in a market cannot be sustained. What we found is that the dot.com collapse came, as well it should have.

It brought a correction into the market to bring reality into the market, but it also set our economy back on its heels. We were just about out from underneath that recession when the 9-11 attack occurred. That was approximately a $2 trillion shock to our economy and over 2,000 lives in one day. When people worry about the cost of the war, I would just remind them, yes, it is extremely expensive. War is never inexpensive. It is at almost $200 billion right now. But I will tell my colleagues that $2 trillion in one day is over 10 times the total cost up to now of the war.

Mr. Speaker, 9-11 set our economy back yet a second time into a little bit different and deeper recession. Finally, we are just about to come out of that when the Enron, Global Crossing, the WorldCom collapses began to occur and people started taking their money out of the stock market. That was a deeper shock still to the economy, causing an interruption in the confidence of the American people in our system. During those three events, we found that our economy was so resilient that it never got plunged as deeply as it could have into recession, but it was always lingering in the last phases of it.

We gave the tax cut in this institution, we voted for the tax cut because tax cuts create jobs. We had hoped when we offered the tax cut that we could get a 3.5 percent rate of growth in our economy. We were stunned in the third quarter to find out that the rate of growth was actually 8.2 percent instead of the 3.5 percent that we had hoped for. The rate of growth has settled down to a more modest 4 percent, but Alan Greenspan says that he expects that number to remain constant; and I will tell my colleagues, if we can remain at the 4 percent growth level, that this economy is going to be in good, good shape.

There are many reasons that the tax cuts were given, but one of the most important things that occurred is that 75 percent of the people in the higher income brackets that got tax cuts are small business owners. When we give small business owners a tax break, we are affecting over half of the employees of the United States. Small business is one of the most vibrant forms of employment in this country; and the tax breaks, the expensing for small businesses, the accelerated depreciation were two of the most dynamic parts of the equation. They are the things that caused our orders of manufactured goods to increase, the orders of vehicles, of large equipment, of new capability; and it is that expansion that brings on new jobs into this economy.

When our opponents talk about the number of jobs lost, they simply refuse to talk about the number of jobs that are sent overseas by hard policies and too invasive regulation. I was in committee the other day, Mr. Speaker, and the Committee on Resources was talking to the people who cut timber and who process timber into lumber. Those fine union members of that group declared to us that 3 million jobs in that one industry had been sent overseas by policies that refuse to let people cut timber anymore. The Democrats on that committee said, you will be okay, you will be fine. You will have jobs in tourism. The members of those unions in that meeting told the Democrats, we do not want jobs in hotels; we want our good, high-paying jobs in the timber industry back.

Many times we fail to account for the jobs that are sent overseas by the regulations that we impose as a government. I think that it is an important consideration in the job loss for this country, because I know that our companies would rather stay here and compete as long as they can.

Mr. Speaker, I yield back to the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Burgess) before I go into my next discussion. I would ask him to let me know when we would like to yield back the floor.

Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Burgess) for yielding.

As he talked about the Medicare bill I began to remember my own discussions in our offices and also with my family about this. The discussions right now that are critical of this Medicare bill that has been passed and signed into law was that there is this donut hole. I called my mom before we voted on it the first time, I asked her, I said, ``Mom, you are going to fall in the category that they are describing as the gap in coverage or the donut hole.'' She said, ``Why would that be?'' I said, ``Because your assets are high

enough and your yearly income is up. We are targeting the poor and we are targeting the people with catastrophic health care, prescription drugs cost.'' She said, ``Son, we have been very blessed. I do not mind paying more if I can pay more.''

And I feel like that that is the way most Americans are going to approach this, that they do not mind paying more if they can pay more.

Again, I told my mom that. She said, ``Exactly why are you doing that?'' And I said, ``It is so we do not break the country, so we do not tag the next generation with more cost than they could ever pay. So the gap in coverage is there because you are able to do it and we do not want to pass those costs on to the next generation.''

My colleague has adequately pointed out the great work that was done, and I want to commend the gentleman as one of the physicians in this freshman class, I think he was very instrumental in driving many of the components of this bill, and I congratulate him for that.

The health savings account is a thing that I talked from the floor of this House last night. Basically it is a medical IRA. You can put the money in tax free, you can take the money out tax free. The difference between this medical IRA the health savings account and other IRAs is that you can take the money out at any age if you pay for medical expenses. You can pay for your premiums, you can pay for deductibles, you can pay for prescription drugs, or you can pay for your doctor visit, dental, whatever.

Now, the nice thing about this account is that not only is it yours, and it is yours to dispose of the way that you would, but it is the part of your estate and it goes to the next generation, to your sons and your daughters to help them pay for their medical costs if you do not use it.

I think that it is one of the most important pieces of legislation that we passed this year. It is in law. It is a part of the prescription drug Medicare bill and has been signed by the President of the United States and is actually in law at this time.

We recently sent a mailer out to my district talking about Medicare in general, but the health savings account particularly got calls back to the office wondering where can we buy them right now.

One of the most significant things that I found there New Mexico that we did in this Medicare bill is that we began to offer certain reforms. To me it is never made sense why Medicare could not do some of the screening so it would catch the diseases up front, so that we catch them before they get to catastrophic stages.

That is one thing that happened in this Medicare bill is we allow preventative care and screening. We allow physical exams for the first time so that we understand if people have a cholesterol problem or have an impending heart problem because the blood pressure is too high, that we take care of it before it becomes catastrophic. And we all know if you take care of medical problems before they are catastrophic, they are much cheaper to take care of. I think that those components make this bill a very good bill. But in New Mexico in my rural district, it is a 9-hour drive across my district at 75 miles an hour, we have got almost 60,000 square miles, it is a very large district, and we have not too much access to health care, but the access that we do have was reimbursed at a different rate.

As a physician, you understand that the urban areas were given far greater reimbursement for the same treatment that would be received by a rural hospital. I campaigned saying that this inequity needed to be fixed. Much to my surprise, we fixed it in this bill. Rural hospitals receive 100 percent of the reimbursement that the urban hospitals receive because of the actions that we took in this bill.

Another thing that I campaigned about, Mr. Speaker, was that our border hospitals are tagged with an expense to take care of the medical cost of immigrants who come to the border. Our immigration law says if they present themselves at the border with a medical problem, that the local hospital or the local county will take care of the problem.

I am on the Mexico border. My district borders the Mexico border. And yet my rural hospitals tell me they have carried people in an ambulance to Denver, Colorado, had heart surgery for them, and when they were recovered, they had to go up in an ambulance, pick them up and take them back to the border. I will tell you that our country was not reimbursing at all the expenses that our border hospitals were having to be faced with. And this bill adds $1 billion into a pool of money to be shared by those hospitals which are currently being faced with those expenses.

So for those two reasons, for rural areas and especially for my district, it was a good bill. But there are good things beyond that. One of the greatest complaints that I hear among my constituents is they do not like the prescription drug manufacturers. I think that they are just mostly upset with them. I think that they would do more than what we should. But we did ring the bell here in this bill for a prescription drug manufacturers. We did not want to choke all of the profits out from the drug manufacturers because the research and development is creating miracle drugs that are causing the fastest growing population group to be the over-100 population.

The second fastest group that we have, the second fastest growing group is 85 to 100. These changes are brought about by prescription drug makers who make great products, but they were doing some things that we felt like we ought to ring the bell on, maybe bring them back.

So we are in the Medicare bill bringing generics to the market much sooner. We also stopped the process of extending patents almost indefinitely to where now we give them patent protection for one period and we extend it for one period, but not the continual extensions that were being gotten before.

Both of these actions serve to lower in the long run the cost of medications that we find in the country. And, of course, we know that that starting right now, everyone that is 150 percent the rate of poverty and below has access to the two drug cards this year and next year, which provides immediate cash relief.

Mr. Speaker, this Medicare bill combined a lot of elements of reform, it combined elements of change for rural areas, it brought in the health savings account, it brought prescription drug coverage to those who most desperately need it who are having to choose between food and medicine. And I am telling this Chamber that this bill is good for people in this New Mexico.

Mr. Speaker, I yield back to the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Burgess.)

Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for yielding one last time. Again, I want to talk in one sense if possible to say thanks to those people who work in our education establishment, those who are out there on the front lines of the education war, especially those success stories like Roswell High School in New Mexico. That is one of the 12 break-through high schools in the Nation. I think that this kind of outcome is exactly what we had hoped for when No Child Left Behind was passed.

If the administration in any school is dedicated to the changes that are allowed under No Child Left Behind, I believe that the program will be the success that each of our parents wants throughout the Nation.

So thanks again to the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Burgess) for yielding time to me today.

Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent that when the House adjourns today, it adjourn to meet at noon tomorrow.

Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent that when the House adjourns on Friday, March 12, 2004, it adjourn to meet at 12:30 p.m., Tuesday, March 16, 2004, for morning hour debates.

Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent that the business in order under the Calendar Wednesday rule be dispensed with on Wednesday next.