Floor Statements

Madam Speaker, I rise today to honor a community activist that touched many lives throughout her 79 years as a resident of Youngstown, Ohio. Thelma Clark, who was born in Youngstown on August 15, 1927, passed away this past October. Mrs. Clark graduated from The Rayen School and later went on to graduate from the Choffin School of Nursing as a licensed practical nurse. She worked at Northside as well as Southside Hospital, but Thelma Clark's career as a nurse is not what her family and friends will think of when reminiscing about her life.

Thelma Clark's most significant and lasting impact on the Youngstown community came through her many organization memberships and dedication to those organizations. Maybe no better example of this was her steadfast faith and love of the Mt. Zion Baptist Church, to which she was a member for 63 years. Thelma served as the secretary for the church for 25 years and also played an important role as the official church historian.

Through her constant commitment to urban development and advancement of African Americans in the community, Thelma Clark was a shining example to her many children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren. Mrs. Clark was a member of the local branch of the NAACP for 52 years and served as 2nd vice president of the organization for many of those years. She was a member of the National Council of Negro Women while also serving as a co-chairperson of the Annual Negro College Fund Banquets.

These are just a few of the many activities that became intrinsically connected to the life of Thelma Clark. In addition, Mrs. Clark was a member of the Pink Carnation Club, treasurer of the McGuffey Football Boosters Club, and a member of the Parent Booster Club of the Boy Scouts.

Learning about people like Thelma Clark and the proactive and selfless life that she led, gives me a great sense of inspiration and optimism for the future of Youngstown and the Mahoning Valley. The scope of Thelma Clark's influence on current and future generations is immeasurable, and I am deeply honored to have represented her.

I appreciate it, Mr. Meek. And I was watching you earlier talk about this, and I appreciate your concern and your passion on the issue. And I just can't help but thank Mr. Murtha and the Speaker for taking such quick action on this.

This is the kind of thing that unfortunately has been going on for a long time, not only in this particular institution due to a lack of oversight, but also this is what has been going on in Iraq. The stories that we hear coming out of some of the oversight committees are absolutely atrocious to hear about the waste of money and some of the situations on the ground in Iraq.

Then to hear the story about Walter Reed, it just seems to consistently be a lack of owning up to what the current situation is on the ground or in the hospitals or wherever the case may be. And that is why you have to have an open process. That is why you have got to have hearings. And if we would have maybe over the past couple of years had more oversight hearings on these situations, maybe we wouldn't be in the situation that we are in today.

I want to share with you, Mr. Meek, and I apologize because I have to leave in a couple minutes but I wanted to come by and support you and add my two cents here, today in the Washington Post regarding the complaints at Walter Reed, and this is what is really damning here as far as the issue goes, on the front page of the Washington Post:

``Top officials at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, including the Army's Surgeon General, have heard complaints about outpatient neglect from family members, veterans groups, and Members of Congress for more than 3 years.

``A procession of Pentagon and Walter Reed officials expressed surprise last week about the living conditions and bureaucratic nightmares faced by wounded soldiers staying at the D.C. medical facility. But as far back as 2003, the commander of Walter Reed, General Kiley, was told that soldiers who were wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan were languishing and lost on the grounds, according to interviews.

``But according to interviews, Kiley, his successive commanders at Walter Reed, and various top noncommissioned officers in charge of soldiers' lives have heard a stream of complaints about outpatient treatment over the past several years. The complaints have surfaced at town hall meetings for staff and soldiers, at commanders' sensing sessions in which soldiers or officers are encouraged to speak freely, and in several Inspector General's reports detailing building conditions, safety issues, and other matters.''

That is what hurts, Mr. Meek, is the fact that people knew about this. And

one of the most prestigious obligations that we have as Members of the United States Congress, as Members of the House of Representatives, being the most closely, directly elected officials for the people of this country to represent them in their Federal Government is that we have oversight responsibilities. And to neglect those duties, as the 109th Congress did, on Iraq, on contracting, on intelligence, on all of these things, blistering accounts that we are learning about, this is what hurts, that these kinds of situations could have been prevented, and if not prevented, immediately fixed.

And when you think about this, just ask, just ask us, is this Congress, whether Republican led or Democratically led, going to say ``no'' to our soldiers? That is not going to happen. But the fact that this administration refuses, talk about a culture which we talked about in the 109th Congress, a culture and a complete culture of an unwillingness to accept the fact that things can go wrong. We are all human beings. Things go wrong; mistakes are made. The key is to fix them. The key is to not make the same mistakes twice, or in this case, many, many, many times over. And the fact that a few soldiers had to go through this is a shame. But when the problem isn't fixed, when the problem continues and we have hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of soldiers go through this same situation, Mr. Meek, when it could have been fixed I think is a tragedy.

So I want to commend you for bringing this up and sharing this with the House of Representatives and the American people. And I want to commend you for your service on the Armed Services Committee in these difficult times and a lot of the tough decisions that you have to make on that committee.

So I yield back to my friend, and I apologize for having to cut out on you early; but you are doing all right on your own.

Madam Speaker, I appreciate the opportunity to be here on the House floor to kick off another segment of the 30-something Working Group Special Order, soon to be joined by a group of 30- somethings in the Democratic Caucus to address issues pertaining to not only young people throughout the country, but citizens of our country and the kind of leadership that the Democratic Congress is providing here. So I appreciate the opportunity to be here.

Several issues that have been discussed prior to this by our friends on the other side that I would like to at least comment on. The first one is: The economy is going great.

I read an article with great interest today out of The New York Times. The title is ``Growth in U.S. Economy is Slower Than Thought.'' This economy is only growing at 2.2 percent, in large measure, due to the fact that we haven't balanced our budget. We are nowhere near balancing our budget because of the Republican leadership in the House since 1994, and in the Senate and also in the White House. For many, many years, the Republican answer to balancing the budget or trying to make our payments is to go off to China and go to the banks in China and borrow money from the Chinese government in order to fund the increase in spending that the Republican House, Republican Senate, and Republican White House were pursuing.

And one friend, Madam Speaker, the gentleman from Texas, said that the economy has created 7.2 million new jobs.

When President Clinton was in and the Democrats balanced the budget in 1993 without one Republican vote, the expansion years under President Clinton, we created 20 million jobs. Welfare rolls were the lowest they had been. So you have to balance your budget, so you stop borrowing money from China.

And we have got a lot of other issues dealing with China as well. They are manipulating their currency, Madam Speaker, and we are starting to generate some support in the Democratic Congress for addressing this issue. China is not giving the proper alignment to their currency, and it gives them a 40-percent advantage to goods that they ship over here. And so if you have a company in the United States of America, like I do in Warren, Ohio, called Wheatland Tube, and Mr. Altmire, who may join us here later, their raw materials cost as much as the product from China when it hits the shores of the United States, final product, because there is a 40-percent advantage that the Chinese have, Madam Speaker.

So because these issues haven't been addressed, Wheatland Tube is laying off 30 or 40 people, white collar jobs. So our friends have not addressed any of the issues.

But they have been talking about an issue that is near and dear to my heart, and that is the Employee Free Choice Act. This is a wonderful piece of legislation that is going to allow members of a workforce to merely sign if they want to start a union or not. And I hope that our friends recognize why. And I am from Youngstown, Ohio; so I find it funny when our friends start talking about these big labor bosses, to try to portray good, hardworking Americans who want to work for a decent wage and have health care, that somehow that is wrong and somehow that is unAmerican.

So this Employee Free Choice Act will allow our folks, our workers, to merely sign a card. And if half sign that they want to start a union, it is basic democracy at the workplace. You will be able to start a union.

Here is the reason why there is so much anxiety in the United States of America: We have had economic growth, but if you are not in the top 1 percent, you are getting squeezed. If you don't have a lot of money in the stock market, you are getting squeezed. And it took us almost 10 years to raise the minimum wage for average workers, and one of the first things the Democratic Congress did under the leadership of the Speaker, Speaker Pelosi, was to raise the minimum wage to try to get everybody in on the game.

But here is what has happened: This is from 2000 to 2004. The red line that is increasing is productivity, the change in productivity, the growth in productivity percentage-wise from 2000 to 2004. You see a tremendous increase in productivity.

Median income is the black line. It has actually gone down. So for the first time in history, increased levels of productivity have led to the decrease in median income. That means that our globalization, although it may benefit certain people and certain sectors of the economy, is leaving a lot of people behind.

So if workers want to join together to say how do we be a part of the solution here, how do we try to increase income? I think we should allow them to do that. We are not saying they have to. There is nobody intimidating anybody.

And my friend from Tennessee made a mistake, Madam Speaker, when she spoke. She was saying that the National Labor Relations Act and the National Labor Relations Board were there so workers didn't intimidate other workers to join unions.

The whole premise of the National Labor Relations Act is because business folks in that time had a tremendous advantage on firing workers and threatening workers. So we don't run from the fact that we want to allow people in the workplace to be empowered, and this is the reason we need to do it.

Now, as we do this, we also need an expansion of our international standards that we have. We have clean air in the United States, and it needs to be a lot cleaner, but we have made great progress. We need clean water in the United States. I am from the State of Ohio where the Cuyahoga River caught on fire because there was so much industry and pollution that it literally caught on fire.

We need to make sure that these standards that we have here in the United States somehow are transferred to the global economy so that when we are dealing with China, when we are dealing with India, when we are dealing with some of the Asian Pacific countries, we try to lift up the standards. It doesn't do us much good to clean the air in the United States of America and have dirty air in China. We are not making progress. So we have a long way to go. And I think what we are doing this week is making sure that our workers in the United States of America are allowed to do what we all do on election day, and that is join together and vote, and they should be allowed to join together and to vote as well.

One of the myths that we have with the Employee Free Choice Act is, well, you are going to have to sign a card and someone is going to know.

If you want to sign a card or a petition to even have an election, you have to sign a card or a petition in order to even have an election to start a union anyway. So we are not doing anything that is not already going on. You are either going to sign a petition to vote on it or you are going to sign a petition to actually create a union. And if you are willing to stick your neck out to have the vote, you are certainly going to be willing to stick your neck out to sign the petition in order to cast a ballot to create a union.

So I think we are dealing with very troubling times. We need to make sure that we are representing all of our country because, quite frankly, Madam Speaker, for the longest time in this country, the last decade or so, at least from this institution here that we represent in the House of Representatives, there has been such a tilt, such an emphasis on cutting taxes for the top 1 percent. And you are not going to see the Democratic Party raise taxes on the middle class at all.

But if we have a choice to make between borrowing the money from the Chinese in order to fund our government or asking people who are billionaires to pay a little bit more in taxes so that we can provide health care for children, we are going to ask the millionaires and the billionaires in the United States to pay a little bit more and to meet their obligation and to meet their responsibility to society. They have benefited from the United States stock market. They have benefited from the protection of the United States military. They have benefited from the infrastructure. They have

benefited from the Internet, which was developed from public research. They benefit from the vaccines. They benefit from the Centers for Disease Control. They benefit from public education. So if we ask the wealthiest to meet their obligation and their responsibility, as a beneficiary of this great society, to put back into our society in order to keep the game going, we are going to need to do that.

And if you question the priorities of the Democrats, all you need to do is look at what is going to happen in our supplemental, where there is going to be an additional millions of dollars, to the tune of $750 million, for health care for children, Children's Health Insurance Program. Do you want to talk about priorities, Madam Speaker? Under the Republican leadership, 6 million children were eligible for the SCHIP program, but weren't registered.

So all we are saying is we are going to take every opportunity we can possibly get to make sure that those kids get the kind of health care that they need and they deserve in the wealthiest country on the face of this Earth in the entire history of our planet, Mr. Murphy.

And we don't shrink from these. I would be happy to talk about our decisions that we have made here in this Congress since we started several months ago to anybody who wants to listen. We passed the minimum wage increase out of this House with $1.3 billion in tax credits for small businesses so that they can reinvest back into their companies to keep the game going, to keep the economy going.

We reduced and cut in half the interest rates on student loans, which will save the average person who takes out a student loan almost $4,500 over the course of the loan. That is what the Democrats did in the first 100 hours. We increased the minimum wage. We cut student loan interest rates in half. We repealed corporate welfare by about $13 billion. We are going to take that money and we are going to invest it into alternative energy research.

We put PAYGO on because we are signaling that we are going to make a balanced budget a priority in this House. Got to be done. Got to be done. We have implemented some of the recommendations from the 9/11 Commission report to make the country safer, and we allowed the Secretary of Health and Human Services to negotiate down drug prices on behalf of the Medicare recipients.

That is what you call governing. That is what you call moving an agenda forward. And that includes making sure that these workers who work every day, work hard every day, go to work every day, work overtime, lead increases in productivity, that they can at least benefit a little bit from it.

And I would be happy to yield to our fearless leader from Connecticut, the fighting Irishman, Mr. Murphy.

And this is not by any stretch of the imagination are we saying that workers don't need to be flexible, unions don't need to be flexible. We are now competing with the globe. And our workers now, as we have seen in large measure through the suppression of wages and everything else, this is a global workforce where just from 1985, where it was 2.5 billion people, now it is up to almost 6 billion in the global workforce. So that in and of itself increases the level of competition for our own workers, which has led to the wage issue that we have to deal with and everything else.

So we are not saying that unions don't need to be flexible. I come from an area of the country where we had a lot of steel mills. Now there is just one or two left of the integrated variety, and the tremendous, tremendous changes that the steelworkers have gone through. And I have a good friend, Gary Steinbeck, Madam Speaker, a friend back home who is subdistrict director for the United Steelworkers in Ohio, and the tremendous changes in work rules that the steelworkers have made in order to keep the industry

afloat. These folks are ready to sit down and figure this out, and they know that.

But our point is look what has been happening here. This is a chart, ``Change in Share of National Income from 2003 to 2004.'' The bottom 99 percent has had negative 2 percent change in their share of the national income; the top 1 percent has seen almost a 2 percent increase in their share of national income. This is a structure that cannot stand, man. It cannot stand, man. This cannot stay the way it is. This cannot continue.

You can't have this separation where the top 1 percent is increasing their share of the pie and everybody else is getting reduced. You can't have it. And so what we have tried to do here is bring some equity to the system and, since we have been in Congress, increasing the minimum wage; cutting student loan interest rates in half; investing in stem cell research to try to open up another industry where we can create jobs for our kids, the next generation; making sure we repeal the corporate welfare for the oil companies and invest that money in alternative energy sources so we can open up a new sector of our economy with research and health care and biotechnologies and alternative energy sources. We have a long-term agenda here by helping people today and open up these two new sectors. This can't go on. We can't continue like this, Mr. Murphy, and call ourselves the greatest democracy in the world.

And when you go around the world and you are trying to sell democracy and capitalism, that is not a very good argument. You know, that is kind of what a lot of countries in a lot of other parts of the world look like, where the top 1 percent get all the benefits, and the rest of the rest of their country doesn't see the progress.

Can I make one final point, because I am getting worked up. We only have 300 million people in the country. We don't have the luxury of having a billion people like they do in India. We don't have the luxury of 1.3- or 1.4 billion like they do in China. We only have 300 million people. So we need to make sure that everybody is on the field playing for us, educated, skilled, and moving the country forward. This cannot stand, man.

It cannot stand, man. It cannot stand. I totally agree with you.

The fact that our friends, and can you imagine our friends on the other side of the aisle, our Republican friends, who are deficit hawks, and they are still talking about it. It is hilarious to hear, Madam Speaker, the contradictory aspects of their words and their deeds. There is still a lot of talk about, you know, being a deficit hawk and balancing the budget.

It was the Republican party, Madam Speaker, that started the Medicare prescription drug bill. They originally said it was $400 billion, then it was $700 billion, and then it was a trillion. And the night we voted on it at 3 in the morning, it was a $400 billion bill. That was a good deal. Then we find out months later it was actually a trillion dollars, and that the actuaries that knew it was going to cost a trillion dollars, they weren't allowed to tell anybody.

So this Congress voted on legislation without all of the facts, and a major fact was the cost. But the point here is our friends not only passed that bill without telling us all of the information, they also put, as you said, a provision in there that explicitly would not allow the Secretary of Health and Human Services to negotiate down drug prices on behalf of the Medicare recipients. They didn't leave it ambiguous, they stated in the bill you're not allowed to negotiate down drug prices on behalf of all of these millions of seniors who want to participate in this new drug benefit.

Now did it have anything to do with the pharmaceutical lobby being up here so much and donating all kinds of money, I will leave that for the American people to decide. But the fact of the matter is, within the first 100 hours that we got in, we changed that provision. Once we passed it out of here, we need to get it through the Senate and hopefully the President will sign it. But in our legislation we allowed the Secretary of Health and Human Services to negotiate down drug prices.

We hear a lot about the free market, but what is a better representation of the free market than allowing all these consumers to join together and negotiate down drug prices or anything else on behalf of the recipients.

To further our point, this is real median household incomes as to why we need to do this. The Free Choice Act that we are going to pass out of this House tomorrow, it is not for the employers who treat their workers well which most are. It is for a few people that are obviously getting mistreated and they want to join together. Now that seems to me a basic principle of our democratic society.

This is real median incomes from 2000. In 2000, they were $47,500. In 2005, it is $46,300, a decline. This is what we are talking about.

Now you can either be in a position of power and say that is fine and you are not going to do anything about it, or you are going to be in a position of power and say we are going to try to help, we are going to try to fix this. Do we have all the answers, no. But we are going to try to raise the minimum wage so this person may get a pay raise. We are going to pass the Employee Free Choice Act, so maybe if you are having a problem and want to join together and try to affect this situation, you can. We are not saying you have to, we are saying you can.

And if you happen to be this same family who has seen a decline and you have a kid in school and you are taking out loans, we are going to cut the interest rate loan in half to try to close this gap a little bit because we are in a position of responsibility. We are not here to give away the store, but we are here to say there are issues where we can help people.

You know what, if we have to ask somebody who makes a million dollars a year to help us do this, to invest in education, invest in the stem cell research and invest in alternative energy resources, we have to do it.

As a politician, as a Member of Congress, I would love to go to all of my constituents and say you all get a tax cut, and we are going to lower your tuition costs, we are going to provide health care for poor kids, we are going to retrain workers, and we are going to build roads and bridges, we are going to provide for the defense of the country to make all this possible, and we are going to have stable financial markets, but we are also going to give you a tax cut. We are going to put a court system in place so that we have the rule of law.

You know, one of the most expensive things to do is have a justice system with police and sheriff departments and courts and judges and attorneys and public defenders and prosecutors to make this whole thing go, to enforce contract law. That is all expensive stuff. All we are saying is we are trying to keep this thing rolling, man. We have had a pretty good thing going on. We just want to keep it going, and you can't see the top 1 percent do well and the bottom 99 percent, as I was showing in the earlier chart, not do well, actually see a decline in income by 2 percent.

So what we need to do is move forward in a very comprehensive way, not in a radical way, but some of the stuff we have already done.

There was a funny article in, I think it was Roll Call when we first got in how frightened the banks were about the whole student loan deal.

Because we have been talking about possibly doing just direct student loans, here is the government money, here is a student, you give him the money, he takes it and he pays you back with a little bit of interest, boom, done. That sounds pretty efficient to me.

Well, the banks are upset because they were worried that if we changed the system as it was, that they were not going to make money, the banks, thanks to the student loans. And I am sorry, but we are not here to make you money. You want to talk about welfare, you want to talk about getting on the public dole, my God, you go out and compete with everybody else. We are not here to pay you 6 percent or 8 percent on a student loan. We are here to get a kid into college that cannot afford it otherwise. That is our responsibility, and this kid is going to get a degree and then a master's degree, and he is going to help us create this new economy.

Here is what we are talking about with cutting student loan interest rates in half, the stem cell bill for stem cell research, and alternative energy, repealing the corporate welfare.

We have got to create new industries. Whether you vote for the free trade agreements or not, we are in a global economy, and we are competing with China and India and the rest of the world. As we see some of the traditional manufacturing move offshore, some legitimately, some not so legitimately, because of what China's doing with their currency, we have got to come up with what the new industries are. So what we have tried to do is invest in the stem cell research and invest in alternative energies, the future job creators, and then also make sure that college is affordable by increasing the Pell Grant and making sure we cut student loan interest rates in half so kids will go to college and then have these long-term sectors of the economy that are growing that they can move into.

But if we do not have healthy, educated citizens moving in, getting educated, moving into college and helping us create this economy, all this is for naught. We need a lot more people creating a new economy than we did 50 years ago.

My grandfather worked in a steel mill. He went to high school until 10th or 11th grade. That was another world ago, and unfortunately in this institution, if we start playing the same game we have been playing for 50 years, and I think both sides, and I think we have recognized this because the minimum wage bill that we passed had $1.3 billion in tax cuts for small businesses to reinvest back into their companies.

So the idea of if you cut taxes for the rich, they are going to invest back in the United States and create jobs, that is done. We know that. They get a tax cut, and they invest it in Asia, okay. It is your money; do what you want with it. But let us not pretend they are going to somehow build a factory in Niles, Ohio, and hire a thousand people. Not going to happen.

And the Democratic philosophy, old one, not the one as we know from what we have already done here, was if you write a bigger check, somehow the problem is going to go away.

I think the king of leadership that the Speaker is providing, and Steny Hoyer and Blue Dogs and Jim Clyburn and some of the newer members in the 30-something Working Group is there is a middle way here. There is a way where we can raise the minimum wage and give small business tax cuts. We can cut student loan interest rates in half and do stem cell research. We can repeal corporate welfare that is going to energy companies who seem to be doing okay, they do not really need our $13 billion, and put that in alternative energy research.

There is a middle way here that we are trying to negotiate that I think is 21st century government.

I agree, and there are so many fields that we need to explore. It is nice to say, well, everyone is going to go to college and do this and do that, has my boy not done well, but there are a lot of other things that I think have great dignity and great contributions to our economy.

By the year 2010, we are going to need 200,000 welders that pay pretty well, and in my community I met with a vocational school. They are starting at 13, 14, 15 bucks an hour. People told me a story of a guy making 30 bucks an hour as a welder with full health care benefits.

So as we pursue this college, we also have to remember the community college pipeline, the vocational school pipeline for truck drivers and welders and a lot of these other industries that we continue to figure out how does this company, as China is expanding, how do we export and sell them something and grow our employment base here.

So there are a lot of different things that I think we need to talk about that the approach is so much different from what we are doing than our friends on the other side.

A good Irish story.

There is no question, and the more you get into this, the more you see, and again it is not that government is the only answer, but I will give you an example.

We had today in our Health Appropriations Committee, there is a tremendous nursing shortage, health care shortage, and there are some programs that will help nurses with low-interest loans. If you are going to go into nursing, you get these low-interest loans to try to get minority and low-income nurses and health care workers into the field. So there is another program that will go in and try to recruit and get people in and help them pay for it in order for us to get nurses and health care workers in the underserved areas.

That program, I think this is the one that was zeroed out by the President in his budget. Now, does that make any sense at all? We have a nursing shortage, and we have tremendous health issues for our kids and poor families that we need. As I said earlier, we have only got 300 million people. We need them all on the field playing against China and India, that we are not going to make this little bit of investment into making sure that we get health care workers in underserved areas?

The health care system is already getting skewed to the suburbs where a lot of these health care systems can make money in the suburbs, and the level of charity care in the cities are going through the roof.

So it does not make any sense not to make those investments because the yield that we are going to get is going to be tremendous. Not only are you getting someone that otherwise would be less productive to be more productive, they are in a field of nursing. They are going to make decent bucks, going to pay taxes. Their kids are probably going to go to college. I mean, this cycle continues.

Let us get it going in a positive way, not dissimilar to what is happening, like you mentioned, with the college tuition costs. Four hundred thousand kids in this country qualify and have the grades to go to college but do not because they feel they cannot afford it or they can afford it, one or the other, but either way it is an impediment for 400,000 Americans going into college. Now, would that not be great?

These are the kind of issues that I think we need to fix, and to ask a millionaire to pay a little bit more, I think, is a lot better than borrowing it from China, which is what we are doing now, and there is a real decision that we need to make.

We are talking about in our committee about streamlining the SCHIP program, you know, like when you qualify for free and reduced lunch, you just sign your name, how many members of your family and what your income is, and you qualify for free and reduced lunch. Well, we want to do that for SCHIP so we make sure we are covering all our kids, that they have health care.

You can argue about the situation of parents and everything else, but you do not blame the kids for that, and you make sure they have got the kind of health care that they need. And how do we make sure that my goal, and I do not know how long this is going to last, but my goal is to make sure we have nurses and doctors and clinics in some of these schools. You have some of these schools where 80, 90 percent of the kids qualify for free and reduced lunch, qualify for SCHIP. Let us put a clinic in there and tie it to the health care program, tie it to the wellness program, make sure these kids are getting the kind of attention that they need, and in all the while, make sure that we demand as elected leaders and leaders in our community, demand from the parents to send your kids to school ready to learn, and you as a parent do your share, too.

This is not a one-way ticket where we are going to do everything, or the teachers are somehow going to have to do everything, but both sides. We need to be innovative. We need to create these new ideas and implement them and reform government and make proper investments in a balanced way, but the parents and the schools need to also step up, and the parents especially. The basic fundamental structure of our society is the family. They need to step up, send their kids ready to learn, and provide their own personal leadership.

So I yield to my friend for some closing remarks.

I agree with you. One more, with the SCHIP thing, I get excited about this stuff because it is really cool, but with the SCHIP thing you will fill out your form, you do your free and reduced lunch, you will do your SCHIP deal and also start to get letters from the Department of Education at third, fourth grade as to what Pell Grant number you will get as far as how much you will be able to receive from Pell Grant based on your income. So these kids, this is the new way of doing things. This is you do not just spend the money. You change the psychology of the kid and the family.

If a kid in third grade who would never think of going to college starts getting this Pell Grant, you qualify for $4,000 or $5,000 a year in a Pell Grant when you go to college, not if, when, you know that kind of kid all of a sudden is now thinking about college or trade or something.

So we are trying to do this all in the same way. And I hope that we recognize, I think as Nancy Pelosi has, Madam Speaker, that America was great because we were the ones who wanted to be the best at everything. So why don't we have the best health

care? Why don't we have the best education? And let's get down to business and start doing it.

Any questions for Members who are listening, www.speaker.gov/ 30something is our Web site. E-mail is 30SomethingDems@mail.house.gov. And I have got to confess, I did not know your mom is Polish. I just figured you were 100 percent Irish.

It is now public.

And we yield back the balance of our time.

Mr. Speaker, as we approach the final day of the debate on this resolution, I have enjoyed the debate thoroughly. I have found it humorous at times. Our friends on the other side have tried every argument they could possibly muster. They have talked about President Clinton, they have talked about Vietnam, they are trying to bring up Israel, and my friend from Indiana also mentioned the issue of consistency. And I find it funny that the pro-life, self-proclaimed pro-life party is the party that wants to keep extending the war. I find it ironic that all of the great budget hawks in the Republican Party want to throw $8 billion a month to keep going and going and going as we borrow the money from China.

But I have also found the debate, at times, disappointing, where Members of the other side have questioned our side and they have said, whose side are we on? And how can we say that we support the troops, and that we are, somehow, unpatriotic.

And I would just like to say that when the Republican Party and this President didn't send enough troops, we didn't call you unpatriotic. And when you sent our young soldiers over there without the body armor, we never called you unpatriotic.

Announcement by the Speaker Pro Tempore

Mr. Speaker, we never called the other side unpatriotic when they sent our soldiers over without enough body armor. And when they didn't send enough up-armored Humvees, we never called anybody unpatriotic. And now, when the next batch goes over without the proper jammers or up-armored kits, we don't call you unpatriotic.

Now we have called you incompetent. We said you are incapable, and we said you are derelict of your oversight responsibility. But never, Mr. Speaker, have we called anyone in this House unpatriotic.

Now let me speak to the resolution. This is very simple. It says two things: We support our troops and we do not support the escalation. It is very simple and here is why. We have already done this, Mr. Speaker. We have already done this. We have already tried the escalation and it has not worked. From November to January of 2005, we escalated by 18,000 troops, boots on the ground, and the number of daily attacks increased by 17 percent. From June to October of 2005, we increased by 21,000 boots on the ground, and the number of daily attacks increased by 29 percent. And from May to November of 2006, 17,000 more boots on the ground, and the number of daily attacks increased by 80 percent.

This escalation has not worked and it will not work. The number of insurgents have increased from 5,000 in 2003 to between 20,000 and 30,000 to October of 2006. So this is very simple.

And I want to make just a few more points, Mr. Speaker. One is this. With the last vote for the war, regardless of what party you were in or how you voted, we assumed that the President and the Secretary of Defense would send our troops over there with the proper equipment. But with this escalation, Mr. Speaker, we know that the 21,500 troops that are going to go over there will not have the proper Humvee kits, the up-armor for their HUMVEES. They won't have the proper jamming devices or enough of them, and they won't have the number of trucks that they need.

You now know it. So if you vote against this resolution, you are voting to send our troops over there without the proper equipment before it could be excused because we trusted the President, assumed, but now we know.

And, finally, Mr. Speaker, we have heard a lot over the last couple of days about the American Revolution and the Civil War and World War II. Well, Mr. Speaker, our President today is not Washington, he is not Lincoln, and he is not Roosevelt. So I think our Republican colleagues should take the advice of the Secretary of Defense, and that is you go to war with the President you have. You don't go to war with the President you wish you had.

Announcement by the Speaker Pro Tempore

Would the gentleman yield?

As I was watching the debate prior to my speech, I wrote down a quote that was stated by the gentleman from Indiana looking at the Democrats saying, How can we say we support the troops? Question mark.

Now, if that is not questioning the patriotism of our side, I don't know what is.

Mr. Speaker, it is entirely possible and welcomed under the Constitution of the United States to have disagreements about how we need to handle troops deployments, how we need to handle our situation in different wars. And it is not to be said that because one party or one group of people have a different philosophy and a different strategy, that somehow they are not supporting the troops.

Now, your party and your President, the Republican Party, Mr. Speaker, and the Republican President are the ones who sent our kids to battle without armor, without body armor. And it took Jack Murtha months to uncover it, and then to finally get it paid for and distributed. It was the Republican Party, Mr. Speaker, who sent kids into battle without up-armored Humvees.

Now, nobody questioned the Republican Party's patriotism, and nobody asked them if they supported the troops. Again, we called you incompetent, we said you were incapable, we said you were derelict in your duty, we said you should have provided oversight and you didn't. But we never called you unpatriotic.

Madam Speaker, on Thursday, February 8, 2007, I was attending the funeral of the father of a member of my staff and missed rollcall votes No. 81-92. Had I been present, I would have voted ``aye'' on rollcall votes No. 81, 82, 83, 85, 86, 87, 88, 89, 90 and ``aye'' on final passage of H.R. 547, the Advanced Fuels Infrastructure Research and Development Act (rollcall vote No. 92). I would have voted ``nay'' on rollcall votes No. 84 and 91.

It is an honor to be with you, Mr. Meek. And I appreciate that you were on the floor today passing legislation commemorating a fine citizen down in Florida, a leader in that community. And I want to thank you for taking the time to come out.

There are so many issues that we need to discuss today, Mr. Meek. The President submitted his budget this week to the Congress, and we are going to have to go through that with a fine-tooth comb and recognize some of the mistakes that are in there and correct them.

And as I said the other night here, Madam Speaker, the only thing that stands between President Bush's budget, which would have been passed post the election, is Speaker Pelosi. And so we have got a real opportunity here to make things right and to make some real progress.

A couple of things that we want to talk about that are in President Bush's budget that we need to fix immediately as we go through the hearing process is the tax increase that is going to be placed on middle-class families. The President's entire budget is balanced on the backs of 33 million American families who will be forced to pay higher taxes through the alternative minimum tax. This was a tax that was put on years and years ago to make sure that wealthy Americans had to at least pay a base level, the minimum level, of taxes. Regardless of how much you make, you had to pay this much. And through that process over the years, that AMT started creeping and creeping and creeping into middle-class families now to the point where it may go past the $100,000 point, meaning that if you make $100,000 or possibly even less, you will be forced to pay this alternative minimum tax. The President did not deal with that. We are going to have to fix that because the alternative is it means a tax increase on 33 million Americans.

Cuts to health care and to our seniors, Madam Speaker. The President's budget cuts Medicare and Medicaid by over $100 billion over 5 years, $300 billion over the next 10 years. And these are two key components of our health care system in the United States of America that cover about 80 million Americans. There have also been cuts to home energy assistance for poor families. As cold as it is today here in Washington, D.C., and across the country, the President submits a budget that cuts that by about 18 percent.

There are a couple other things I want to talk about here, Mr. Meek, and I am glad you are paying attention and asking me to help you out here today. We have seen this tremendous change in the economy over the past couple of decades where we went from basically a national economy to an immediate global superpower post-World War II. And with that there have been tremendous changes.

Here is one of the key components that have affected us, and as capital moves and globalization occurs, whether we like it or not, Mr. Meek, here is what has happened. This is a chart that indicates the new global workforce. And the increase, from the left side, 1985 to 2000, the increase from about 2 billion people that were considered in the global workforce to almost 6 billion people. That means China has been added to the list. That means India has been added to the list. That means Central American countries have been added to the list. And now all of a sudden we have expanded the global labor supply, which has driven down wages for people here in the United States. This is a major issue that we have to deal with.

And, Mr. Meek, as you know, Speaker Pelosi was kind enough to appoint me to the Appropriations Committee, and today we had a meeting with our chairman Mr. Obey, and he said we

want our committee to be about the future, and we want our committee to solve future problems. And that is really what we need to deal with here.

Here is another issue. As we have had the increase in labor, most Americans have been losing ground, Madam Speaker. And if you look at real median household income, and this comes from the New Democratic Network Web page, this is from the U.S. Census Bureau. Real median household income: In 1999, it was $47,500, real median household income. It was, in 2005, $46,500. That real median household income is dropping, not rising. And so this is an issue that the President's budget does not address, but we are going to have to address this, and we have already made great strides to do this.

Two other charts I want to share with Mr. Meek, Madam Speaker, real quickly is people say, well, if you are productive, you will make more. The top line here in the red is the increase in productivity; the blue line is the median income. As productivity has increased by 15 percent, wages have actually gone down. So the tie between productivity and wages no longer exists because of this new global market that we are in, which is a major public policy issue, Madam Speaker.

And then, finally, the share of national income in 2003 and 2004. This is the change. The change. The bottom 99 percent, their share of national income went down 2 percent. The top 1 percent, they went up 2 percent. And the top .01 percent went up 1 percent. So you can see that the bottom, the 99 percent hasn't benefited from what is going on here, and the top 1 percent has. So the question is what do we do, and what have we already done?

If you look at what the new Democratic majority has already done, Mr. Meek, they have already, in the first 100 hours, made strides to try to rectify this. Passed the minimum wage to try to give the American people a pay raise to $7.25 an hour, and that means thousands of dollars a year depending on how many minimum-wage workers or how many minimum-wage jobs you perform. It could mean a couple thousand dollars a year. In addition to that, we have cut student loan interest rates in half for both parent loans and student loans, which will save the average person taking out a loan about $4,400. So you add the minimum wage. And in addition to that, we were able, in the first 100 hours, through the leadership of Speaker Pelosi, to also repeal corporate welfare and invest that money in new alternative energy sources. We passed the stem cell research bill, and alternative energy and stem cells are going to open up two new sectors of the economy. And then in addition to that, we were able to pass and give permission to the Secretary of Health and Human Services to negotiate down drug prices on behalf of the Medicare recipients.

So this package, the first 100-hour package, has done a lot to try to address some of these problems: Boost the minimum wage, cut student loan interest rates in half, and allow drug prices to be negotiated so that we will actually reduce the burden that is being placed on people.

So, Mr. Meek, I think there has been a lot that has been done. There has been a lot that has been done here on behalf of the American people just in the first 100 hours, and we are going to continue to move on global climate change, global warming. We are going to continue to move on alternative energy. We are going to move on research and development. We are going to continue to provide the kind of oversight that the American people deserve in order to fix some of these problems.

If the gentleman will yield, I think this is very illustrative of your point. Here we said earlier, the share of the national income

went up 2 percent for those people in the top 1 percent of the country. The bottom 99 percent, their share of the national income went down 2 percent.

Add on that what you are saying, okay, what you just said about the devolution of taxation. Okay. So now these are the same people who have to vote on property tax issues. These are the same people who have to vote on libraries. These are the same people that have to vote on the penny sales tax to keep their counties running. So I think they are getting squeezed from all sides.

Then, when you look at what the top 1 percent have benefited from the globalization of America and the ability to be in the stock market and benefit from that, and get tax cuts and the tax loopholes and everything else, the bottom line is, Mr. Meek, the bottom 99 percent have not benefited from all of this.

I appreciate your insight, Mr. Meek. You have talked about this, and we have been talking about this for a long time.

We would love to come in, as the Democrats did in January and swore in Speaker Pelosi, and come in and bump the Pell Grant up two thousand bucks and eliminate student loans altogether as far as paying interest on them and all kinds of other things we would like to do. But we are limited by the kind of budget that we have inherited from the President in a 6-year presidency and a 14-year Republican control of this Chamber.

Here is what they are doing: The 2008 budget authority says that the red on the left, $230 billion or $240 billion a year, is going to be spent just paying the interest on the money that this country has borrowed; not to pay down the debt, but just to pay the interest payments. We are going to have to spend $230 billion because of that. Look how that just dwarfs other priorities in the budget of the United States.

The next one is education. The next one is veterans. The next one is homeland security. All pale in comparison to what we are forced to spend to pay the interest on the money we are borrowing.

As Mr. Meek has said in his previous chart, this money, over $1 trillion, has come from foreign interests. This President and the Republican Congress borrowed more in 4 years from foreign interests than all of the previous Presidents and Congresses combined. Combined. This is the net result, the interest that we have to pay on the debt.

So what has happened is that we have a huge number; $2.102 trillion in 2006 is the amount of foreign held debt, $2 trillion. That is unacceptable in the most powerful, wealthiest country on the face of this Earth.

So we have seen what has happened since the Clinton administration had some sanity. We had a $5.6 trillion projected surplus. It went down $8.4 trillion. Now we are in a $2.8 trillion deficit. We have some real problems.

So when it goes to making the investments that we want to make in education, the investments that we want to make in health care, SCHIP, the COPS Program, making sure young kids are covered, have some form of health care coverage, Madam Speaker, we are limited by the budget that we have been handed.

Unfortunately, we can't start from scratch, but there are some decisions

that need to be made, and I can tell you that it is not acceptable to me, and I know it is not acceptable to my friend from Florida, to continue to allow people who make millions and millions and millions of dollars a year to continue to get a tax cut.

Some may say they earn it. Maybe they do. Some do. And some work hard. Just because you wear a white collar doesn't mean you don't work hard. But what we are saying is, that group of people benefit the most from the lavishness that this country has given them, the roads and the bridges and the safety and the security provided by defense, the stable markets in which to invest money, in which many, many do, into the stock market. This is all provided for by the stability that comes out of this institution, and therefore they owe a little bit back.

Now, even if you don't believe that, our alternative, we have a decision to make: Either we borrow this money from the Chinese, the Japanese and the OPEC countries, which gets us to that chart where there is $2 trillion in foreign-held debt by this country, or we ask those people who are making millions and millions of dollars a year, Mr. Murphy, to pay their fair share, to step up to bat and help us solve this problem that we have so we don't have to put the future of our kids and our grandkids in the hands of Communist China.

And you are right. In years gone by, they would have greased that sucker up, and it would have flown through the House and the Senate, who knows what kind of changes. It wasn't until in the last year or so that the Republican majority at that point couldn't even agree with each other. So we have had to come in and clean up with the continuing resolution, which we made some great advances with veterans and some other issues that we were able to deal with.

But when you look at it, we don't want to get into, and you are exactly right, there is going to be an increase in taxes if the President's budget over the next few years stays, because that alternative minimum tax is going to creep in and is going to creep in to average American families' lives, middle-income families. And so I appreciate you making that point.

We have been joined by a special guest who periodically jumps in and joins with the 30-something Working Group, the gentlewoman from Texas. I would be happy to yield.

We thank the gentlewoman. As we have been saying in the last few weeks here and the last few days especially, that years ago that budget would come and get greased up and come right through this Chamber and on to the other side of Capitol Hill and get signed into law, with the tax cuts for the top 1 percent and cuts to the kids. And now Nancy Pelosi stands between that budget and the American people, and we are going to make sure, and our friend from Florida. So we thank you for joining us. It is always a special treat for our friend to come down from Texas. And I would be happy to yield to our friend from Florida, who is standing to be recognized.

For America.

Will the gentleman yield? I have family members who have Tivo'd, okay.

I appreciate that. As we are wrapping things up, I found it interesting, I saw as we are talking about budget priorities and the kind of investments that we want to make as a country, looking at what the Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke has to say and what he said yesterday and was quoted in the Wall Street Journal and a lot of other media outlets.

Focusing on, and I will say, and I will quote, he said, Ben Bernanke said, The best way to narrow the gap between high-income and low-wage workers in the U.S. would be to strengthen education and training programs.

That is our call, and that is the mission for us, to make sure that average people have the skills and the tools and the opportunity with the increase in the Pell Grants, with what we already did by cutting student loan interest rates in half for both parent and student loans, cutting that in half and giving thousands of dollars back to those families. Those are the kinds of things that we need to continue to do, and No Child Left Behind and everything else.

So we need to make sure that as we reform these systems, we also provide the resources, as we started this, for the local level to make sure they can get the job done.

We are just wrapping up. We only have 1 minute. I want to give out Speaker Pelosi's e-mail, 30-Something Working Group e-mail, 30somethingdems@mail.house.gov, or you can come to our Web site, www.speaker.gov/30something.

Not necessarily together, but on the floor. Not necessarily together.

I appreciate the gentleman's opportunity. Those decisions are made above my pay grade, but I can honestly say that we have numerous debates on this floor, which I think have been significant and monumental, especially in the first 100 hours, as we have talked about here. I don't exactly know how to respond to you. I think we do have adequate debate here, depending on what the issue of the day is, both sides getting an opportunity to do that.

We get our hours and talk about the things that we want to talk about, and you get your hour to talk about what you want to talk about. There can be, I am sure, some discussion. If there is room for us, as we push certain policies, that is what we are here to talk about. That is the issue of the day.

You are welcome to respond to that.

I appreciate the gentleman making the offer. Last year or 2 years ago, we were asking for opportunities to speak on the floor. We weren't given that opportunity, but I will take it to the leadership, and we will take that under consideration.

In spite of your age discrimination, we will take it under consideration.

Would the gentleman yield briefly? I didn't see where I fit.

Would the gentleman yield?

I thank the gentleman. And part of what you were saying, some of those initiatives, the manufacturing extension program and some of these initiatives that we have had in this country that have really been able to help small businesses kind of retool themselves, where this budget is cutting them we have had to fight over the last few years to get the levels up. These are budgets we need to not only not be cutting, but we need to be probably doubling the size of the budget because of the kind of value that they yield and the kind of businesses that they help.

When you look at what has happened over the past 5 years, we have had economic growth, but wages are down 3.2 percent. We are not arguing that the economy is not growing. We all know it is. We all see the same statistics. What we are saying is that it is not benefiting everybody. And what does our response need to be from the President, from the Congress as to how do we close that gap between the rich and the poor? And some of the initiatives that are being cut are going to further harm and aggravate and exacerbate the problems that we have now that we are trying to fix.

So a couple points that I want to make here, and I want to thank you guys for being down here, that the President just doesn't even address. Here they are: Updated by Tom Manatos, one of the go to guys in the Speaker's office. Here we have the new charts for the budget, 2008 budget authority.

Interest payments on the debt. That in the red is the interest payments. We are talking about $230-some billion of what we are going to spend. That is what this country will spend just on interest on the debt; not paying the debt down, just paying the interest payments from the people we are borrowing the money from.

This is what we are going to pay in education or spend on education, and green what we are going to spend on veterans. This is what we are going to spend on homeland security. So the American people, Mr. Speaker, know quite clearly that we are spending too much of our money on paying down the interest.

Now, it is an important point to be made that this President, Ms. Wasserman Schultz, and the previous Republican Congress borrowed more money from foreign interests in the last 5 years than every President in Congress previous to them combined.

So I find it very interesting that we hear our friends talk about how when they owned a small business they had to balance the budget. We know that. But when you got into this institution, this is what you did. So please spare us the lectures on fiscal responsibility.

So not only is the government not making the investments to keep tuition costs down, not making sure that we try to invest our money to reduce the cost of health care and Medicare and Medicaid, SCHIP, and some of these fundamental programs that we all believe in. We are

not only not making those, but here is the critical components because, as you said, you get the additional burden of the interest rates going up for credit cards and everything else that ripples throughout your own than personal life.

Here is the kicker. Of that red graph there, that red bar of net interest that we are paying interest on the debt, where are we getting the money? That is the question that we ask. Where do we get the money to close the budget deficit? Here it is, ladies and gentlemen: Foreign debt held doubled under the Bush administration to over $2 trillion.

So we are not only spending money we don't have, we are not only giving millionaires tax cuts. But in order to close the gap, we are borrowing the money from the Chinese, OPEC countries, the Japanese in order to close this gap. So our kids are going to be paying the Bank of China and the Bank of Japan and the countries from OPEC, which is totally, totally ridiculous as to what our priorities need to be. So we need to get this budget balanced.

I want to make one final point before I kick it back to you guys. We are going to ask people who make millions of dollars a year to pay more in taxes, because they have benefited from this system. Here is our option: We either go back to the Chinese and we borrow more money from them, or we ask people who have made millions and hundreds of millions if not billions of dollars to help us close this budget gap.

Now what would you do if you were in our position? Do you ask a millionaire to pay a little bit more in taxes or do you go borrow more from the Chinese and ask middle class kids and lower middle class kids to foot the bill?

There is not a decision to be made. We have got to ask the wealthiest in our country to be responsible citizens of the United States of America. You benefit from our military. You benefit from the stability of our markets. You benefit from our public education. You benefit from our public infrastructure. You benefit from the water lines and sewer lines, clean air and clean water. All we are saying is we have to ask you to contribute so that we do not have to borrow money from the Chinese in order to fund it.

We cannot be afraid. We do not want to stymie small business. We do not want to take away tax incentives from small business people to reinvest back into the economy. We want to keep things like that intact, but we do need to ask the wealthiest in the country to pay their fair share.

You know what is interesting, and it just hit me, that if we were not here, if Nancy Pelosi was not Speaker of the House, that budget would get implemented. That budget would become law in the United States of America. The only thing standing between that budget and the American people is Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid, or that stack of paper would become law, and the wealthiest in the country would continue to get tax cuts. We would continue down this road, borrow more money from Japan and China and OPEC countries. There would not be an investment in S-CHIP. There would not be all the stuff that Mr. Altmire listed. It is interesting to just say, hey, the American people did make a point to put us between that budget and their everyday lives.

I think what is important, too, is we are not sitting here saying, and I do not want anyone, Madam Speaker, to misconstrue what we are saying. We are not just saying we are going to write bigger checks and all these problems are going to disappear.

Included in our analysis of that document are going to be hearing upon hearing upon hearing. I have seen the schedule. We are going to get into the nuts and bolts of that to figure out how we can make these programs run better, how we can make S-CHIP with the same amount of money or more money cover more people, how does it get executed, the same with what we need to do with FEMA. Obviously, we saw that in Katrina.

Mr. Murtha's having hearings and Mr. Skelton in the Armed Services Committee about the war, and how do we make that mess go away and make it work better, the execution of war and what we are trying to do, how do we make this thing work better.

So this is not just about writing bigger checks. This is about making this whole system run better and more efficiently and more effectively and serve more people.

I suggest you just let the other Members know exactly who this S-CHIP is supposed to cover, what it is.

We often hear in these debates how, you know, a certain party wants to spend money and waste money on this or that, and we are not saying that there is not waste in government, and we certainly want to address that. Our friends, our Republican friends, have done absolutely nothing to try to improve that. In fact, they borrowed more money from China to help fund the inefficiencies.

But what we are saying here is here is a program that covers poor kids. It gives health care coverage to poor kids. So they don't go to school and cough on your kid and get your kid sick, not to mention the humanity of trying to make sure that they have the proper amount of health care.

Yes, so this is what the President is offering to cut in his budget. And, as we said before, would pass if it was not for Speaker Pelosi.

I find this an appropriate time, as we are wrapping up, I think, we only have a couple of minutes left, to remember what happened here in the first 100 hours that is in contrast to that document there. Of all the things we talked about in the last 55 minutes or so, 45 minutes, we should make note of that in the first 100 hours the Democratic Congress raised the minimum wage to $7.25 an hour. We cut student loan interest rates in half that will save the average family $4,400, so you get a pay raise. If you have a kid in school that is taking out loans, we will save you $4,400.

We allowed the Secretary of Health and Human Services to negotiate down drug prices so our seniors will have less cost to bear for their drug prices, and then we repealed the corporate welfare and invested that money in alternative energy and passed a stem cell research bill to open up two new sectors of the economy for job growth. Compare the first 100 hours and who we helped, and you take that document there that cuts health care for poor kids. That is the difference between what the American people did in the last election, and what we had to deal with within the last, between 6 and 14 years, depending on how you are counting.

Now I get to do this again, show you guys how to do this. If you want to e-mail us, any of the Members, 30SomethingDems@mail.house.gov or you can get on the Web site at www.speaker.gov/30Something and send us your comments. All of these charts that we have here are available on the Web site for other members.

Madam Speaker, I rise today in recognition of Raymond John ``Jack'' Wean, Jr., Chairman of The John Wean Foundation in Warren, OH. The John Wean Foundation was established in 1949 by Raymond John Wean, Sr., an inventive and enterprising industrialist, who was devoted to improving the quality of life and education in the Mahoning Valley. The John Wean Foundation would serve the communities in which he had achieved enormous success.

A native of Warren, OH, Jack was the son of Raymond J. Wean, Sr., who founded Wean Engineering Company in 1929. After graduating from Yale University, Mr. Wean served as a Naval Officer in the South Pacific during World War II. In 1946, he went to work for his father's business in Warren at a time when the steel and aluminum industries were booming.

Jack started in an executive position and was elected president and chief executive in 1966. He became chairman in 1979. Jack retired in 1992, but continued to chair The Foundation. He traveled extensively and was an avid sport fisherman.

Jack Wean was married to the former Adelaide McCracken and they have three sons and a daughter. They also have eight grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.

Since 1949, The John Wean Foundation has raised over $85 million dollars. It was through Jack's generosity that a broad range of nonprofit organizations would benefit. I would like to remember Raymond John ``Jack'' Wean, Jr., for his sense of obligation and commitment to the residents here in the Mahoning Valley.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I appreciate the opportunity to be here once again to continue the discussion of the 30- something Working Group. We want to thank Speaker

Pelosi for the honor to be on the House floor.

We actually had one of our newer Members, Mr. Speaker, make page 3. He is still a freshman, but he made significant advances. This is Jason Altmire, Mr. Speaker, from western Pennsylvania. His district abuts mine. His picture, name, pressing our leadership to make sure that we increase funding in the CR for veterans, to make sure that we did not accept any pay raise until the American people get their pay raise through the minimum wage. So we already have young leaders stepping up to bat contributing in their first term here.

I have got to say, Mr. Speaker, it has just been I actually think in many ways pathetic to listen to the debate here today over the continuing resolution. We all know the political situation over the past, you know, 14 years, Republican control in the Congress, and their inability in the last several years to govern at all. And they have locked out the Democrats for years and years and years.

Votes in the wee hours of the morning on the prescription drug benefit, on the energy bill, on budgets, which raided student aid money for students all across our country; and then, on top of all of that, they leave the new Democratic majority an absolute budget catastrophe for us to deal with.

Over the course of those 14 years, the Republican Congress and the Republican President borrowed more money, more money from foreign interests than all of the previous Presidents combined. So now we are going to get lectures from the Republican majority on how to run the budget process. Now we are going to get lectures from the most incompetent, ineffective Congress in the history of this institution, Mr. Speaker, the history of this institution.

This party will not be lectured about veterans' benefits, we will not be lectured to by the Republican minority about how to balance a budget, and we will not be lectured to about investments in this country.

You look at this CR and you look what we put in. We are not going to be lectured to by anybody. We made promises and accomplished more in the last few hundred hours of this Congress than that Republican majority has in the last 14 years. We implemented PAYGO so we will balance the budget.

We made some difficult decisions with the CR so we can move forward, and we are not going to be lectured to. Because we have made promises, and we have delivered.

Now just look at the first hundred hours, Mr. Speaker, just the first hundred hours. We cut student loan interest rates in half. Once fully implemented, it will save the average person taking out a loan almost $5,000.

We raised the minimum wage. We allowed the Secretary of Health and Human Services to negotiate drug prices on behalf of the Medicare recipients. We repealed the corporate welfare to the energy companies that that majority, Republican majority put in place; and we are taking that money and investing it into alternative energy sources. We are doing things positive for the American people.

And we are going to inherit this budget, which we already have, that has borrowed more money from China, borrowed more money from Japan, borrowed money from OPEC countries, incapable of executing FEMA to address natural disasters and emergency situations in the United States. We know how to run Government.

When the Democrats passed the budget in 1993 with the Democratic President, created 20 million new jobs, we had surpluses as far as the eye can see. So we are cleaning up a mess here that we have inherited, and we are going to move forward and continue with our agenda, and we are proud.

We are going to move forward, and we have an agenda. We have moved on it. We promised it. We acted on it. And we are going to continue to move on it.

I will yield to our young, new rising star from western Pennsylvania, Mr. Altmire.

I appreciate that.

Mr. Speaker, I am going to yield the remainder of the hour to Ms. Wasserman Schultz. I need to step out. I will be back, but I would like to yield the rest of the hour to Ms. Wasserman Schultz.

Put me in, Coach.

I appreciate my good from Miami, Florida yielding to me.

The funny part watching the debate today was that the other side, because they had the opportunity for so long to pass so many of these pieces of legislation and to get them through the Senate and get them signed by the President and they didn't take advantage of it, that they have very little credibility in dealing with the issue of the fact that we are actually doing this stuff.

And so I agree with my friend Mr. Meek; it has been exciting. This is great. This is good stuff. You guys are reading the increases and the different programs. And, as Mr. Obey said, this is a thinking man's document.

The interesting part here is the CR that we passed today was to clean up their mess that they left. They only passed one out of 13 appropriations bills.

So you can only imagine, Mr. Speaker, all of a sudden they leave all of this mess for us to deal with and we try to deal with their mess and they want input. Well, you had your chance. You had 14 years and all kinds of months last year to pass this stuff, and you didn't do it.

I yield to the gentlewoman from Florida.

I find it very interesting as the debate progressed today to hear all the conservatives who have been saying government's too big and then they blew the budget completely out of balance, borrowed money

from China and they are here complaining about all this government is bad stuff, well, you are cutting this program and that program. That is why I think they have lost a lot of credibility with the American people, Mr. Speaker, is because there is no consistency with their argument.

No consistency. What they said last year, they did not do this year. What they did last year, they do not want us to do. There is no consistency to their argument at all. Consistency is the word for today, the lack thereof on the Republican side.

As we close, because I know we just have a few minutes left, and I want to yield back to my friend from Florida, I think it is very interesting what we are seeing happening already. We talked a lot in the last couple of years about oversight and that when the Democrats were in charge, Mr. Speaker, we were going to provide oversight.

Now, we start seeing things open up in Iraq, with all these contracts, from all these big corporations who were getting all these big government contracts, all of the sudden you are starting to see come out of these committee hearings exactly what has been going on. Now you are starting to see maybe the administration was strong arming some scientists to spin global climate change data. You are starting to see this all percolate up.

I think one of the other things we said we are going to do is execute our constitutional obligation to provide oversight, and we are seeing that, and we are seeing the results of that with the global warming, with the war in Iraq, things happening, that didn't happen in Katrina, all starting to rise up.

I want to thank the gentleman from the Pittsburgh area and the gentleman from Connecticut, my two favorite people from Florida. I want to thank you and I yield to Ms. Wasserman Schultz for her closing remarks.

Mr. Speaker, I have given many speeches on the floor of the House, but none do I feel so good about as the one I am about to give about my friend and a great man in Warren, Ohio, Coach Tony Napolet.

Mr. Speaker, I rise today to honor the recently completed season and the still ongoing career of someone who is an institution in Ohio high school football in the community of Warren and the family of Warren John F. Kennedy High School. It is Coach Tony Napolet.

Overall, Coach Napolet has garnered three top 10 AP rankings, five State semifinal appearances, a winning percentage of 71.6 percent during his time at Warren John F. Kennedy High School and an overall coaching record of 191 wins, 84 losses and three ties. All of the records, all of the statistics and all of the awards, Mr. Speaker, cannot speak to the influential and inspirational man that is Tony Napolet.

Mr. Speaker, in short, he is a legend. He is funny, he is passionate, he is loyal, he cares about his kids, and he is the best. Tony Napolet is every part of what a high school football coach should be. He realizes and has always realized that the role he plays is not just that of a football coach, but as someone who is preparing young men for the next step in their lives, whether that involves football or not.

I had an opportunity as a young man to coach for a season with Coach Napolet at Kennedy, and you think about how you try to define, Mr. Speaker, or pick a couple of points that really describe Coach Napolet, and there are a couple that I think of. One is his faith in God, something that he is not afraid to share with his players, the students at Kennedy, and it is not just the prayer before the game, and it is not just the mass that we go to before the game.

It is when you go to a mass during the week or in the morning and you see Coach Napolet at one of the many churches, Catholic churches, in the City of Warren, where he is actually practicing what he is preaching. I remember him telling the kids to have a relationship with God, to make God your best friend. It is that kind of an example that he sets for his kids.

But there is another one, the St. Henry's Division V State championship game several months ago, that I think really sticks with these kids. And it is the situations that Coach Napolet is in and how he responds to them, because life many times is about how you respond to situations in your life.

The Kennedy team was, unfortunately, down 21-7. Then they got the ball, and then they were down 28-7 towards the end of the game and only a few minutes left, and the Kennedy offense got the ball back, and they ran a flee-flicker. They tried to score.

Regardless of how much time was left in the game, Coach Napolet was teaching these kids that you never give up. You persevere, regardless of what the circumstances are. And those are the lessons that he has taught those young men who have graduated from Kennedy and have played football for the Warren John F. Kennedy Eagles.

So, today, Mr. Speaker, I am not honoring a coach and his distinct record but rather a great man who also happens to be a coach.

Coach Napolet, we love you and you really are the best.

Mr. Speaker, I had an interesting weekend, and I am glad to be with you and our new friend from Connecticut. I had a very interesting weekend because everyone in Niles, Ohio, in the Mahoney Valley, was talking about the first 100 hours. So I found it very interesting that so many people were actually paying attention to what was going on here.

I think a lot of it had to do with Speaker Pelosi and the first woman Speaker being here. But there was a genuine excitement that things had changed in Washington, D.C. and I am sure you felt it in Miami. I know you were there. I talked to you last night. You were there. And I am sure they felt it up in New England.

I did, yeah. I actually spoke at the Akron Press Club, which I felt was very important. And then I spoke at Our Lady of Mt. Carmel grade school, my old Catholic grade school. And we had a little alumni affair there.

It was interesting, because there were so many people talking about what had happened down here, the historic nature of the changes. And when you look and you think about all of the political promises that we have probably all heard in our careers at one point or another about, we are going to do this, we are going to do that, and you hear people say that.

But for Speaker Pelosi and the majority here to lead and run campaigns all over the country and make those assertions and make these promises and then to come within the first 100 legislative hours and actually deliver on these issues is impressive. And I think it tries to restore some of that credibility that has been lost, I think, over the past couple of years.

So we immediately stabilized a lot of families. I mean, it is not implemented yet, but our goal: minimum wage, cut student loan interest rates in half and help negotiate down the cost of prescription drugs. And then open up two new sectors of the economy by repealing the corporate welfare and investing that in alternative energy sources, which will lead to more research from the private sector, investment by the private sector, and try to open up this new alternative energy sector of our economy, and then the stem cell research bill, which will allow us in the health care industry to open up and do

further research to move the economy forward.

So we are trying to do some compassionate stuff, some progressive stuff, but at the same time stabilize. It has been interesting. It has been fun to go back home. Mr. Meek, as you remember the last couple of years, you would have to go back home, and you are talking to your constituents, and there is not a whole lot to say.

You know, we were often talking about what we were trying to prevent from happening, or motions to recommit or amendments we offered for PAYGO in all of those committees and Charlie Stenholm and Dennis Moore who offered all of those provisions to try to balance the budget by implementing PAYGO. Well, we implemented PAYGO from the House side.

I think it is very important that we were able to actually go out and do that. So I am excited about what is happening here.

And it is exciting because it is just starting, Mr. Murphy. It is just starting.

And when you meet with the Speaker and you see the intensity in her eyes and the focus about this was really just the beginning and we are not here to say, well, we did our first hundred hours and we are done. We are going to chalk it up and we are done. This is about continuing to move forward. We have got to reauthorize No Child Left Behind.

And when you talk to Chairman Miller, who is the Chair of that committee, you see the look in his eyes about an opportunity to change the face of education in this country, to finally put some resources back behind No Child Left Behind to where it actually will work.

And when you look and you see, and I know, you know, Senator Kennedy is talking about putting money in there to help school districts figure out how they can possibly extend the school day and extend the school year so that we can make sure that our kids are on par with kids from Korea and some of these other countries where they go an extra couple, 3 weeks a year more than us, which equals another year or two over the course of a 12-year education cycle. These are the kind of things that we want to implement here.

And if it wasn't for the, and we got into this, too, a lot back home. You know, a lot of people had an almost unrealistic expectation that we came in, we can come in now, Mr. Murphy, and Ms. Wasserman Schultz and wave a magic wand and all of a sudden there is a lot of money here. Well, we have got a lot of making up to do because of the irresponsible fiscal inadequacies and inability of the Republicans to actually balance the budget. So we have got to go up and clean that mess up. We have got to figure out how to extract ourselves from this morass we are in in Iraq and then finally make the investments that we want to make.

So we have got a lot going on here, Mr. Meek, and we are very excited about the proposition that we have in the future. When you look at the opportunities that we really have in this country, I think they are great. But it is about focusing on the human capital in the United States of America, Mr. Murphy, and making sure that we make the kind of investments into the health care, education in the United states and the stem cells and the alternative energy are going to put us on a strong path to move forward.

And I would be happy to yield to my friend from Connecticut.

Will the gentleman yield?

It was interesting, because one of our friends from the other side gave a 5-minute speech about the values of free trade. I think pretty much everything he said I agree with, and I voted against almost probably every trade agreement that has come before this Congress since I have been here. And I agreed with everything he said. We are trading. It creates value. It invests in our countries. We all understand all that.

The problem is that we are not making the investments into the United States that will help us grow new sectors of the economy that will replenish the jobs that we may be losing.

Now, people in Youngstown, Ohio, obviously, don't like to lose their jobs. But if there was a job there that they could get trained and go into and make the same kind of living and have the same stability for their family and provide for education and health care for their own family, they would be fine with it. So you can't have free trade and then not invest in the stem cell research. You can't have free trade and then not invest in the alternative energy research to help stimulate the economy and create new sectors that will ultimately yield employment for our folks in our communities.

Be happy to yield to Madam Chair of the Legislative Appropriations Subcommittee.

Will the gentleman yield?

What I think is an important point here is that we could have come in and not passed the pay as you go. We could have done the irresponsible thing. And everyone says, well, the Democrats are controlled by all these interest groups. Well, we could have been irresponsible and said this interest group is going to get this and this one is going to get that, and we will borrow the money from China, as Mr. Meek had the chart up, and we would pay everybody back.

I am telling you, Madam Speaker, she is great. We are doing the right thing. We could have done the easy thing, and we could have paid everybody back and made increases that were irresponsible because we would have continued down the charts where we are borrowing the money from China, paying the interest. They are taking that money, investing it back in their economy, buying submarines and everything else. But we did the right thing. So we have got to take the hit now, but the long- term economic interest of the country is going to be much better off.

And if we get an opportunity as we go through the oversight of the war, oversight of FEMA contracts, there are millions and millions and millions, if not billions, of dollars that have been wasted through the war, the contracting, the Halliburtons. You know, story after story we hear off the record, that is all going to come out through the hearings. You know, if Halliburton has a truck and the tire goes out, they just get rid of the truck and they buy a whole new one. Well, that is at the taxpayers' expense. And there are stories after stories after stories of these kinds of things happening.

So part of what we are doing is we are making the tough decisions today, the responsible decisions today, get into the oversight, find out where the waste is; and I really hope that we continue to push Mr. Tanner and Mr. Cardoza's bill that says we audit the whole government, because this government is clearly incapable of functioning in the 21st century economy.

If we are going to have the resources that we need, Mr. Meek, to invest in education, to invest in the health care, to invest into those things that are important, that are going to yield benefits, business incubators and research and development and stem cells like we

did with the corporate welfare to repeal some of that, that was easier to do than getting to the nuts and bolts execution of government, but it is going to be a lot of hard work over the next few years to figure out where we are wasting money, what programs aren't working.

Now we may have and be in agreement that the principle of a program is what we all agree on, end poverty, provide health care for kids, whatever the case may be. But the actual execution of that program may not be yielding the kind of results that we want or at the level we want.

There is still too much poverty. There are still too many kids out there that don't have health care. There are still too many kids that qualify for S-CHIP that aren't signed up for it. So, you know, over the course of the next year or two, as we go through the oversight hearings, we are going to be able to determine what programs work, which don't and which ones we need to fix. That is difficult to do.

We are going to be the Congress. That is right. We are going to be the Congress.

And, you know, it is not government is the problem, government is wrong, government is your enemy; it is going to be, wait a minute. This is something that is supposed to work and we are going to make it work.

If the gentleman would yield, life is about letting go.

You have got to move on. And you are the guy.

Madam Speaker, I rise today to honor the recently completed season and still ongoing career of someone who is an institution in Ohio High School football and the community of Warren, Ohio. Coach Tony Napolet was awarded this year's Coach of the Year award after leading the Warren JFK Eagles to a 14-1 season capped by a berth to the Division 5 State championship game.

Although I never had the opportunity to play for him, Coach Napolet has been a friend and mentor throughout my entire adult life. The year following my graduation from Warren JFK, Tony Napolet was brought on for what he anticipated as being a 1-year stint as JFK head coach. That season, after squeaking into the playoffs, Napolet and the Eagles rattled off an amazing run to win the State Championship. At the conclusion of that season Coach Napolet agreed to come back to coach the Eagles indefinitely. He followed his title winning season with another birth to the State championship game. Although Coach Nap and the Eagles suffered a 1-point loss, the 2nd straight appearance in the State championship game solidified Tony Napolet's niche in the upper echelon of Ohio high school football coaches. And that was hardly the twilight of Coach Nap's career. He has since coached the Eagles to numerous winning seasons and three more State semifinal appearances including this past season's appearance in another State championship game.

Overall Coach Tony Napolet has garnered three top ten AP rankings, five state semi-final appearances, a winning percentage of .716 during his time at Warren JFK, and an overall coaching record of 191 wins, 84 losses and 3 ties.

All of the records, statistics, and awards, however, cannot speak to the influential and inspirational man that is Tony Napolet. One thing that everyone who has ``ever played for Coach Napolet knows is that whether you were the starting quarterback or the third string defensive lineman, you were treated exactly the same. Not only was everyone an equal on the field, but also off the field, mid-season, off-season, and after you had graduated. Tony Napolet is known in the community just as much for what he does for young people after they graduate, as he is for his coaching prowess. Of course there are the typical phone calls to college coaches and recommendation letters, but his involvement in his former players' lives doesn't end there. Coach Napolet is the one who helps you find a summer job when you're home from school, or serves as a reference on an internship application. Since Coach Napolet is such an integral part of the JFK High family, he in turn treats everyone as a member of his family.

Tony Napolet is every part of what a high school football coach should be. He realizes and has always realized that the role he plays is not just that of football coach but as someone who is helping prepare young men for the next step in their lives, whether that involves football or not.

So, today I am not honoring a coach and his distinct record, but rather a great man who also happens to be a fantastic coach.

Mr. Speaker, I appreciate how the gentleman has been focused on bipartisanship over the past several weeks since we have been here.

I agree with my friend from Florida on several issues. Just to go back a few seconds, to talk about what is going on in Iraq and what really the President's plan has been, and I think it is important that we remove this from any kind of partisanship.

As we have shown in the past couple weeks here, I mean, the votes that we have passed here have consistently been passed in a bipartisan way. Minimum wage, student loans, Medicare and negotiations, all of these have been passed in a bipartisan way. So the tone that Speaker Pelosi has set in this House has been a tone of bipartisanship.

The concern that we have in Iraq at this point with the troop surge is that this President does not have the support of the American people. He does not have the support of the Democratic Party. He is losing support among the Republican Party, and the former Chair of the Senate Committee on Armed Services, John Warner, has now come out against the President's proposal. The military, for the most part, is against this proposal. It seems like almost everyone who was in the Bush administration who had been in the military under this Commander in Chief and has left is now against what the President is saying. The Iraqi leadership is against it.

The only people who are for this is the administration, and I think it is important for us to recognize that we need to get out in a way that makes sure that we retain our dignity and that we redeploy. No one's talking about cutting and running, but redeploy in a responsible way and getting our kids out of harm's way, because this has been botched from the get-go.

But I think it is important, and I appreciate you consistently focusing. We have talked for 3\1/2\ or 4 years about if we get in charge we are going to do it in a bipartisan way, and we have been able to maintain that over the past couple of weeks, and I think it is important that we continue to go down that road.

If you look at, and I do not want to talk too long because I know my friend has an interest in joining, I want to look at the, Mr. Speaker, first 100 hours, at what we have been able to.

Okay. This has kind of gone in two different directions. Pass the minimum wage, reduce student loan interest rates, cut them in half, and allow the Secretary of Health and Human Services to negotiate down drug prices. So if you are an average family, those are three major steps forward where you are going to make more money, if you have a minimum- wage worker, where you have less student loans to pay because the interest rate is going to be cut in half, and the prescription drug prices that your parents and grandparents are paying will be a lot less. So

that is going to be significant savings in the short term.

But now we have our long-term program, and if you look at where the Democratic Party and Speaker Pelosi is pushing our agenda, we have investments into stem cell research, which is something that we passed in this Chamber just a few days ago, that we are going to invest into this new and great and vibrant industry and new sector of our economy that is not only going to reap tremendous health care benefits for our citizens but also provide jobs for our scientists and our researchers and funding the research and development and partnering with private sector people.

That is going to create an economic boom in the United States of America because once we pass it, if we can get it past the President, that is going to be a heck of a move on our part. I think it is going to be great for the American people, and it is going to be great for the next generation of people coming out of college and coming out of medical school and getting their Ph.D.s. We are going to have a whole other sector of the economy.

In addition to the repealing of the corporate welfare, which I know you had talked a lot about on this floor the past couple of years, repealing the corporate welfare that we gave to the oil companies and the energy companies and putting that money into research for alternative energy sources, creating and pushing a whole other sector of our economy so that we do not depend on the Middle East for our energy, we got it right in the Midwest in the United States of America.

So we are stabilizing. We are taking care of people today. We are giving the American people a pay raise, cutting student loan interest rates in half, reducing the cost of prescription drugs now, and then in the future moving into these two major growth areas of alternative energy and stem cell research and into the health care industry.

I think Leader Pelosi and Mr. Hoyer and Mr. Clyburn and Mr. Larson and Mr. Emanuel have all set an agenda for the Democrats in the House to do some good in the short term and then to open up these other areas of the economy in the long term.

So with that I would be happy to yield back to my good friend, my dear friend from Florida (Mr. Meek).

Well, I appreciate that. This is something you mentioned about being bipartisan and working in a bipartisan way. I think what has happened here has been very successful, and I think this kind of illustrates it.

A couple of the things that the Democratic leadership and the Democratic Caucus, with some help from the Republicans on the other side, have been very successful. This is what has happened just in the first 100 hours, should this all become law.

You look at the minimum wage being raised. It means $4,400 a year for the average minimum wage worker. So over the next 5 years, the average person will make another $22,000 because of what happened here in this Chamber, led by Speaker Pelosi in a bipartisan way with a handful of Republicans who were able to do that, 80 or 90, I think.

College loan interest rates cut over 5 years will save about $1,473. Total earnings and savings for a family over 5 years will be $23,473.

This is bread and butter stuff. This is what will be implemented if we can get it through the other side and signed by the President. This is good stuff. This is what we can do in a bipartisan way.

So, I think this kind of stuff is important to move the country forward. When we do that, I think we open up a lot of opportunities for a lot of people around the country, and really around the world, because of the opportunity that we would provide here. This is the kind of bipartisan agenda that we want to continue with.

We are joined hereby a rising star already making a name for himself down here in Congress, our good friend from Connecticut, Mr. Murphy.

Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for his remarks. The President only has a couple years left, Mr. Speaker, and I hope he really uses this as an opportunity to try to reengage Congress and reengage the American people and have some bold initiatives too. And not just the rhetoric. Because we went through and our staffs went true and were comparing everything that the President had said in previous State of the Union addresses and then what the reality is, and you can pick an issue, and we will give you the Web site and you can go and check it all out. So a very skeptical Congress will be here listening tonight.

But I hope in regards to health care that we can really focus. Of course, we want everyone covered. But if you think about it, we actually have a universe health care system right now, but it is just run through emergency rooms. It is run in the most inefficient, ineffective way that you could possibly set up a health care system. So it is really not even a system, but it is just health care kind of.

What we need to do is try to get some of this investment on the front end, make sure our kids through SCHIP have access to health care, and that we are reaching out and communicating and pulling in people who may qualify for some of these programs but don't actually sign up for them. What is the outreach going to be? Because as we are competing a global economy, as we have talked 1 million times on this floor, we only have 300 million people in the United States of America. We are now competing against China, who has 1.3 billion, India who has a billion, and everyone else on the globe. We only have 300 million.

So we have to make our best efforts count, because we need all 300 million on the field playing for us, especially these young kids who are coming up through the ranks. That is why I think it is important when we are talking about the minimum wage and we are talking about making sure that student loan rates are cut in half so we can have more kids go to college, and then we pass the stem cell bill, so we are creating not only a compassionate kind of research that is going to go on and save people's lives and improve their quality of life, but that is creating jobs in a whole new sector of the economy that right now we are not doing exactly what we should be doing.

Then we also repeal the corporate welfare and we take the 13 or 14 billion and we are going to pump that into alternative energy, create a whole other sector for alternative energy sources.

So you put all this stuff together that we are able to do that, that is bold leadership. These are the kind of initiatives that we really need in the country, and Speaker Pelosi has provided us with that leadership.

So I hope in regards to health care, we get some bold tax credits. How about a bold program where all Americans are going to be covered and where we are going to put the money, instead of managed disease, prevent diseases from happening and investing in these young people so that they are healthy, educated and then create opportunity for us.

I appreciate that, because that is exactly what happens is you don't have the money, there was no pay-as-you-go in the last several Congresses, runaway spending, borrowing money from China. What does that mean? Well, here is our budget priorities for 2007 prior to Democrats taking office, budget into the billions of dollars. This red bar here is just interest on the money that we borrowed. This is not paying it down; this is just paying the interest on it. You know, you get your mortgage and you get your car loan and you open it up and you have got a 5 or $600 payment. You see $300 of it is actually going to the payment and the other stuff is interest, and it breaks your heart.

This is what the country is doing. But compare that to what we are doing, this is education, homeland security and veterans. This is going back to China; this is going back to some of those other countries.

And then you look and you see China says the test they did in space does not signal an intent to militarize space. You can't get the real facts on China's military budget, but they are buying a ton more ships. That is where that money is going.

I think it is important to make that point because it is not just money that just goes and floats out and the Federal Reserve tries to find it somewhere. It is going to China, it is going to the Middle East, it is going to OPEC countries.

And then we are funding both sides of the war on terror because we are buying all the oil, making them money. It gets back to the terrorists. And then we have a war in the Middle East and we pass almost $500 billion already that we are spending from our side already on the war in Iraq.

That is why we are friends, stuff like that.

One of the issues, you know, the more you talk, the more you see how all this just really ties together. This is health care costs and tying in a way to the minimum wage. The average family health care premium in 2005 was $10,880; and the salary of a full-time year-round minimum-wage worker was less than that, $10,700. So you will work as a minimum-wage worker 40 hours a week for an entire year and not even be able to pay for your full health care bill.

Now, in the United States of America, there is something wrong with that. There is something wrong with the wage of the minimum-wage worker, and there is obviously something wrong with the cost of health care in the United States because of this kind of backward system that we now have that just basically treats diseases and is not focusing probably like it should in preventing a lot of these things from happening.

And I think the more we reach out through the SCHIP program to make sure that these families who are qualified for children's health care know that they are qualified, to get them signed up, because at the end of the day it is the right thing to do, it is the compassionate thing to do, but at the end of the day it is going to save everybody a lot more money, too.

If we can get these kids at a young age and make sure they are treated, evaluated, they know the direction that they are going in, they know the medical history of both parents so that they can be treated accordingly.

I appreciate what you are saying and I appreciate you bringing up the issue of health care.

I know we are running down here; the clock is ticking, Mr. Meek. I would be happy to yield to you in order to get us down the road here of wrapping things up. I appreciate all the comments that have been made here, and I appreciate our young friend being here with us, who is probably older than me.

I yield to our fearless leader from Florida.

Mr. Speaker, for any Members who want to, also to their constituents, if they want to look at some of these charts we have, www.speaker.gov/30something, get on the Web site, send us an e- mail at 30somethingdems@mail.house.gov, you will get a chance to look at all these charts.

I appreciate our friend from Connecticut joining us. I look forward to our President's speech tonight and hope it is inspiring and filled with good information and good public policy that we can work on in a bipartisan way.

While we were down here, you were probably running through bingo halls and bowling alleys; and Mr. Altmire, who is just across the border from me in western Pennsylvania, I think the impact that you have already had on Congress, you have all spoken on the floor. You all did and have done numerous press events representing our party, and I think you have done a tremendous job. So it is good to have you here with certain expertise, whether it is health care or labor, whatever the issue may be. We have got a very talented freshman class.

The reason we are still down here and we just did not quit when the elections were over is that this is about more than just the 100 hours, and we are going to hammer this 100 hours home and get it through and do what the American people asked us to do. But kind of the new energy and spirit that you guys bring is going to move us well past that 100 hours into something that is going to be very special.

So I would be happy to yield over to my friend from Pennsylvania right across the border, the same media market.

I just want to make a point, and we try to distinguish our party from what the previous party has done in that we are getting some feedback from the other side, that we are phasing this thing in and it is not immediate, and we are not doing everything that we could possibly be doing. We are doing a heck of a lot more than they have done. We have done more in the last 3 hours today on the House floor than they have done in the previous 14 years in running this place for average students.

So we are not going to take it. We are doing more than they have done, and you know what, if they did not have us at a $400 billion deficit, we would be doing a heck of a lot more. The only constraints we have are the fiscal mess that they left us.

I agree 100 percent with the gentleman, except for the fact that everybody knows Penn State. In Ohio, we do not barely recognize them.

I appreciate you being so gracious with your time. You mentioned the number 356-71. 71 people in this Chamber voted against cutting student loan interest rates in half. That is the extreme of the extreme in politics today, and that is why I guess you two gentlemen are here joining us, part of the reason anyway, is because that is the kind of extremism, Mr. Speaker, that was running this Chamber for 14 years, and we brought just a wee little bit of sanity to this place.

And then a beautiful segue into what we are going to do tomorrow: Tomorrow we are going to start repealing the Big Oil subsidies that have been doled out by the same Congress, and I would guess that you are probably going to get another 70-some Members on the other side that are going to be against repealing these major subsidies tomorrow. Major leases that these folks were getting, one of them gave, Conoco- Phillips gave $106 million back in 2005 as it enjoyed profits totaling $13.5 billion.

So you are voting against cutting student loan interest rates in half. You are the ones who plugged in the super wealthy and the super plugged in into a Tax Code that is going to save you $106 million when you are making $13.5 billion.

So I am excited about what is happening here because this is a great time where the American people are starting to wrestle back the power that the American people have given us, and we are doing it on behalf of them.

I want to yield to the young new Irish Member of Congress.

I think the gentleman's constituents are probably glad to see him back in the district, too. And you would generate a state of euphoria for many folks back home, and yield to our friend from Pennsylvania.

They want it.

They need it.

They asked for it.

I appreciate that, and I welcome Ms. Clarke, the gentlelady from New York. We are going to have some fun. You, gentlemen and lady, have brought some energy and excitement to this Congress. The 100 hours is exciting. It is boom, boom, boom, we passed the ethics. And then we are coming back with the minimum wage, and now we are getting into student loans, real meat-and-potatoes stuff that you all campaigned on, and that we talked about on this floor for hours on end for the last 3\1/2\, 4 years. Now we are actually delivering.

Tomorrow is going to be another stellar performance on behalf of Speaker Pelosi and the leaders of the Democratic Congress. Tomorrow we are going to close tax loopholes for oil companies. We are going to close a loophole that gave ConocoPhillips $106 million in 2005 when it got profits of $13.5 billion.

Profits of $13.5 billion. They didn't, you know, take it in and then have to dish it out. That is their profit.

We stepped up and had the guts to say, and I would like to take more because they are making so much money, but we are going to take $106 million and pay for student loans and health care for young people. We are going to move forward on this agenda.

There are a lot of other things that we are going to be able to do. We will do the tax loophole thing. We will roll back the energy bill tax breaks for geological and geophysical expenditures. These are things that may get too technical, but the bottom line is this: The bottom line is that the American people are going to get the kind of representation they need.

If you know you are going to go and dig, if you know you are going to go and drill and you know you are going to make enough money, no tax incentive is going to make you want to do it, especially when you are drawing down profits of $15.5 billion.

Mr. Speaker, $100 million of public subsidy is not going to make that happen.

And then you get into the five royalty relief provisions, this is beautiful, from the 2005 energy bill. This measure will strike the energy bill provisions, suspending royalty fees from oil and gas companies operating in certain deep waters of the Gulf of Mexico.

The interesting thing about this is, the gentleman from Arizona (Mr. Grijalva), a great Member of this body, offered an amendment to strike this provision on April 21 of 2005, and it was defeated by 203-227. We have been trying to do this, and tomorrow is our day where we get to step up and actually deliver on behalf of the American people.

Thank you. Yes, right over the border from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

As I was listening to you talk, and everyone kind of mentioned some different issues. But if you are the average person sitting home and you have all these politicians, Mr. Speaker, making all these political promises and then actually delivering, that in and of itself is a monumental occasion for many people to celebrate.

But as I was listening and just thinking, if you are home, it is not just that we have accomplished this, but what the actual effects are when these legislative acts get put into law and signed by the President, if the President, in fact, signs them. He said maybe he was going to veto the minimum wage and the Medicare, but just look at what we have done.

We have raised the minimum wage. That is maybe a couple thousand dollars raise for most people. We can talk about the student loan issue, whether it is $2,000 over the course of the loan or $4,000 or $5,000 over the course of the loan, depending on when you get in school. You are talking about maybe $5,000, $6,000, or $7,000 a year that the average family is now going to have at the table that they didn't have a couple years ago when they were trying to

do the math and trying to work out their checkbook.

Then there is the prescription drug bill. Once that gets implemented and we actually reduce the cost of prescription drugs, that is going to have another significant impact. So they may be working a minimum wage job, or someone in the family may be working a minimum wage job to contribute. You are going to have the student loan rate lowered, and then a reduction in the cost of prescription drugs. That is significant.

It is great that we actually did what we said we were going to do, Mr. Meek, and I couldn't agree with your eloquence any more. But the act itself, right down to the kitchen table, Mr. Speaker, this is making a difference.

It is making a difference to average families.

And over the King holiday, the great thing is to go back and start reading some of the old speeches and the letter from the Birmingham jail where he talked about a sense of urgency. You know: Don't ask us to wait. What are we going to wait for? You go wait.

Well, I think that is the attitude Speaker Pelosi and our leadership took, and we didn't wait; we actually implemented this stuff. And when it is all said and done, I think no matter where any of our careers end, whether it is in the next term or retirement or some higher office, we are going to be able to see in our scrapbooks that my Aunt Rita keeps for me, I have a little Aunt Rita who cuts out my clippings and puts them in a little book, but we will be able to look back at all we have done throughout our careers and say, I was here when this all happened. I was in the United States Congress when this all happened. That is special, and that is why we are all so very excited.

So I will be happy to yield to my friend from Connecticut.

And I would yield to our good friend from Connecticut.

I thank the gentlewoman.

Again, raising the minimum wage, cutting student loan interest rates in half, and repealing the corporate subsidies to the oil companies so we can pay for some of this stuff. We are doing some great stuff for the American people, and I want to thank Leader Pelosi.

I will kick it to my friend from Pennsylvania to give us the Web site.