Floor Statements

Madam Speaker, I thank the gentleman from New York for yielding me this time. As always, the devil is in the details. Ladies and gentlemen, this law guts the countervailing duties provisions that we have been living by.

Check this out: traditionally, the data that we use to determine whether or not a subsidy takes place is used by basing that data on comparable market economies. So we want to trust, but we want to verify. This bill requires the administration to use data from China. We are going to be basing our decisions on data that is gathered by the People's Republic of China. If China's data says there is no subsidy, well, then, there is no subsidy, regardless of what the other comparable economies might say. We are going to trust an administration that has brought one WTO case since 2001, and we want to try to compete with the Chinese?

Last week in the Education Committee, we cut $11 billion from Pell grants. No Child Left Behind is underfunded. We have millions of kids living in poverty. Meanwhile, the Chinese graduated 700,000 engineers last year. We graduated 35,000. Healthy, educated children and enforce international law, that is how you compete with the Chinese.

Will the gentleman yield?

I just want to kind of expound on that point a little bit. It is not like there were not people in the country saying we know you are going to go to Baghdad. We know you are going to win the war. We know you are going to defeat the enemy. A lot of us were saying then what? Then what are you going to do? And there was never any hard answer on what this administration was going to do. So, you know it is not like they went in blind. You are preparing for a war. Sit down and figure out all the options. What if they do not hand us flowers and Hershey bars? You know, then what do we do? And if that does not work and something else, then what do we do. You should have four or five plans. This is just a lack of preparation, and it was that rush to war that I think caused all the problems that I think you already stated.

I am stumped as well. I have no good answer for the gentleman. What I would like to do is the gentleman from Hawaii (Mr. Abercrombie) was throwing out some pretty large numbers to the tune of $1 trillion, if not more. In Ohio alone only $240 million is being spent on homeland security and $700 million on No Child Left Behind which is underfunded by $1.5 billion. We are talking trillions. And I think it speaks to the fact that we are not meeting the needs here at home while we are spending a tremendous amount of money abroad.

Madam Speaker, it is good to be back. And I cannot help but thank the gentleman from Florida for all his leadership on this issue and a variety of other issues not only in the State of Florida but around the country.

We had our friends here on the other side of the aisle, good people, good Members of Congress, but a little flawed in their data. They were talking about how the President's tax cuts accounted for a 22 percent drop in the budget deficit, 22 percent from the prediction that they had had. And what I would like to say is, all of a sudden, the tax cuts are working now. All of a sudden, they are working. What they forget to tell people is that the decrease in the deficit, and I have news reports here from five or six different news organizations, is the President said that this 22 percent drop vindicates his tax-cutting policies, and I just want to read several accounts here. This is from NBC News: ``An independent budget analyst said that the improvements are almost all the result of one-time events, including the expiration of a 1-year corporate tax holiday. There was also an increase in taxes paid on investment gains from last year's stock market run-up.''

The Wall Street Journal said: ``private- and public-sector analysts remained unimpressed given the fiscal pressures just ahead . . . Private-sector analysts reiterated that the promise was calculated from the administration's 2004 deficit projection, a number widely considered inflated.''

The Washington Times, not exactly a liberal newspaper, reports, the new forecast would ``leave a deficit that is still the third largest in history.''

Goldman Sachs ``in a research note on Wednesday, said it agreed with the administration forecast for this year but not for the longer term.'' The main reasons? ``The jump in tax revenues stemmed largely from one-time gains in the stock market and the elimination of a temporary tax break last year for business to invest in new equipment.''

So we had the stock market, the expiration of a bonus depreciation rule that reduced business tax collections

until the end of 2004, and a 1-year tax holiday for corporations. This is a one-time bonus for the government, and it was based on a number that was inflated from last year.

And the fact of the matter is this: There are people all over the country who do not benefit from that. They do not benefit from the corporate tax bonus that this Congress passed. And the money that is getting invested is not getting invested in Ohio. It is getting invested in Beijing and Shanghai and all over the world while people are struggling, going out to get a second job and a third job. This is not having the kind of impact we wanted to have here in the United States of America. And that is why the tax cut has not worked. The deficit is going to go back up next year. We do not even factor in the cost of the war, which is at $300 billion. And I am not arguing that a lot of our systems do not need reform because I believe that they do. But to say that we do not need to make investments in education, that we do not need to invest; like today in the Committee on Education and the Workforce, we wanted to increase funding for Pell grant. We could not get it done. We wanted to get it up to, I think, $8,200 by 2013. We could not get it passed through committee. And how are we going to compete with the Chinese? How are we going to compete with the Indians if we are not willing to make the proper investments in the education system in this country? Barriers are being put up, and kids will not go to college because they cannot afford it. Those that do go, the next thing, they owe more money when they get out, $15,000, $20,000 just for a bachelor's degree. So to say that we do not need to make the proper investments, that there is enough money in the system, and to say that those people who pay the lowest corporate tax rates in the history of our country somehow are making the kind of contribution and meeting their obligation to society, I think is wrong.

I did not mean to divert from the Social Security debate, but one of the issues that we always talk about during the 30-something hour, Madam Speaker, is that we are running these annual deficits, and the long-term debt, as shown here on this chart, is $7.8 trillion we owe. That is our national debt. Each person who is alive and breathing in the United States of America owes $26,436.

Madam Speaker, $26,436.78, and counting.

Madam Speaker, $26,436.78. So to every citizen that can hear me, this is what they owe, and to every citizen that cannot hear me, this is what they owe. And to run the country, the Republicans, a few months ago, had to lift the cap on the debt. They had to lift the debt ceiling because they are running high deficits. And to come down here in 2005 and tout supply-side economics, which the first President George Bush called ``voodoo economics,'' is hilarious, absolutely hilarious, when we have kids going to school all over the country that live in poverty; 50 to 60 percent of the kids in Youngstown City School District live in poverty; 85 percent qualify for free and reduced lunch. And we are talking about how great the economy is going? I would like to live in some of these places.

And I think it is offensive, quite frankly, in many ways to somehow suggest that, by a slight decrease in the budget deficits because a loophole was closed and the stock market had a halfway decent run for a few months, that that somehow suggests that everyone is doing well is just out of touch really, out of touch with reality.

This is the reality: $7.8 trillion this country owes. I love how the President says, well, if Congress would just rein in spending. The Congress is Republican. A Republican House, Republican Senate, Republican President; and they are blaming each other about who has got to rein in spending; $26,000 you owe to the Federal Government. And they play this game, well, the President says Congress has got to restrain spending; the Congress says, well, the President has got to do his thing. They are all Republicans. This whole Chamber is controlled by the Republican Party. The Senate is controlled by the Republican Party. The White House is occupied by a Republican. And one of the issues we talk about all the time here is at the same time they are passing all of these corporate tax breaks and they tell everybody how great everything is going, veterans are underfunded by almost $3 billion. We have enough money to give tax cuts, but we do not have enough money to fund our veterans.

Why?

Wait a minute. You are contradicting a statement here. The majority leader said, veterans need to know that no veteran will be without their health care in 2005 and no veteran will be without their health care in 2006. Is the gentleman saying that that is not the case?

Mr. Speaker, he was not only removed from the chairmanship, he was removed from the Committee on Veterans Affairs altogether.

Trying to stand up.

People want us to solve problems. They do not want us to sit here and be partisan. The fact of the matter is this. These are facts. The Democrats are not in power. It hurts me to say it. I do not like saying it, but when you are analyzing the direction of the country and both Chambers and the executive branch are all run by one party, and they come out with privatization schemes, tax cuts, primarily for people who make over $400,000 a year, corporate tax rates are the lowest they have been in the history of the country, all of these things, and then we are here trying to say, well, wait a minute. You are not funding veterans. Wait a minute. The American people do not want to privatize Social Security.

In fact, we have the poll here of the rural voters: Are President Bush's proposed changes to Social Security mainly consistent with the values of the people in your community or out of step? Mr. Speaker, 61 percent of rural voters say that the privatization scheme is out of step with their values, because we have guaranteed benefits. We have a system that works, has worked, will continue to work with minor adjustments, not a privatization scheme. That is not the right way to go.

If you look at the decisions that have been made over the past few years, they have not been good for the country: losing hundreds of thousands of jobs in Ohio alone, millions of jobs throughout the country, and the jobs replacing the jobs that are leaving are $10,000 less, $11,000 less a year, without health care benefits. Wal-Mart is basically getting corporate welfare because so many of their employees are on Medicaid. So they think, why should we give our people health care, they could go on Medicaid. Who pays for Medicaid? We pay for Medicaid. The country. The public pays for Medicaid. Why is the public subsidizing the wealthiest company in the country? It just does not make any sense.

And the decisions that are being made, the lack of attention to the issue of China and what is going on with the manipulation of their currency and the lack of trying to implement democratic reforms in China, all of these things add up to say, we are going in the wrong direction.

Now, I would like to bring up one point, I say to the gentleman from Florida, if I can, because we started talking a little bit about the veterans. I just want to kind of lay out, and the gentleman knows I like my charts.

I love my charts, because I think they lay it out for us.

Now, I want to just talk about for a couple of minutes exactly what the scenario was. We have been talking about, and I was on the Committee on Veterans' Affairs last Congress, how underfunded the VA was and is.

On the VA committee, the gentleman from Ohio (Mr. Strickland) was always down here talking about these issues, the gentleman from California (Mr. Filner), we had a great committee.

The gentleman from Illinois (Mr. Evans) has done a great job as the ranking member, talking about how the veterans are not getting the proper funding for health care. They are raising user fees. They are raising their copay. It went from $2 to $7 to $15. More veterans are moving into the VA system, especially in places like northeast Ohio where people are losing their health care benefits, so veterans go into the VA system.

So we were complaining about this and arguing that we need more funding. So was the gentleman from New Jersey (Mr. Smith), the chairman of the committee. He tried and tried and tried to get more founding in there. Bang, leadership knocked him out, stripped him of his chairmanship and of his committee assignment on Veterans.

So, on June 23, the Bush Administration acknowledged a 2005 shortfall for the VA of a billion dollars. Now, they knew in April, but they announced it in June. So what did the Democrats do? Why are we different? We are different because 1 day later, the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Edwards) offered an amendment to eliminate the billion dollar shortfall in the VA health care for 2005 and put another billion dollars in through the Labor, Health and Human Services Bill and in the Education Appropriations Bill.

The Republican majority refused to allow that amendment. Let me repeat that. The Republican majority refused to allow us to offer an amendment that would put $1 billion more back into the veterans system. On June 28, the President and the Bush administration acknowledged, in fiscal year 2006, the shortfall would be $2.7 billion.

The Secretary also acknowledged that there will be a shortfall of $1.5 billion in 2006, which would reach $2.7 in the fiscal year of 2006, way too many details.

The bottom line is, there is going to be a shortage of money in the out years as well. So on that same day, the Democrats tried again, the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Edwards), tried again to add a billion dollars in. The Republicans refused to allow us to do it.

So there, on a couple of different occasions, we had tried to fix the billion dollar shortfall in veterans health care, and we were not allowed to bring it up for a vote here in the House of Representatives.

It is not brain surgery. And the way this body works, you do not have to be a Philadelphia lawyer to figure it out. But that is how things transpired. The Democrats wanted to offer a billion dollars to close the gap in veterans spending, and we were not allowed to do it.

So my point is that if we were in charge, these are the things that we would be doing. These are the kinds of initiatives that we would try to implement in the country. And, you know, we come here, and we come to the floor, and we try to do as much as we can to try to talk about veterans and a lot of other issues. But quite frankly, we continue to run into stone walls.

As I said, the Majority Leader said there would not be a shortfall. That is just simply not what the numbers tell us. So I appreciate it. This is great. But I think this veterans component fits into the kinds of decisions that are being made, the kind of leadership that we are getting here out of this body, out of this chamber.

There is no doubt about it. You have been down to Guantanamo. I was down to Guantanamo last week. You know, we have soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan. These are the people who are going to come back and use the VA system.

And just to wrap up the VA portion of our program, some people may be sitting at home and may be saying, well, maybe we just do not have enough money, maybe we just do not have the resources to provide for the veterans. And I want to show this graph, which the last graph was just too jammed up; there were a lot of words on there.

But I think this is just where we are at. Permanent tax cuts way on the left. What is the cost in trillions of dollars over the next 10 years? We are going to spend $1.8 trillion over the next 10 years to make the tax cuts permanent.

We are going to spend $800 billion to make the tax cuts permanent for the top 1 percent; $800 billion for people who make $400,000; $500,000; $600,000; $700,000; $800,000; $900,000 a year, over a million dollars a year, not begrudging people who make a lot of money, God bless you, but we are going to spend $800 billion giving them their tax break, and we are only going to spend $300 billion on veterans.

And all we are asking for here is a billion dollars for the next year, or $2.7 billion for 2006, and $3 billion or $4 billion maybe for 2007. We are giving $800 billion away to the top 1 percent of the people who live in the country. We cannot come up with $3 billion for our veterans? Almost 2,000 already over in Iraq and Afghanistan who have been killed.

I mean, this is just a priority. It should be a priority for the country. So it is not that we do not have the money, it is an issue of choice. It is an issue of priority. And right now, it is obvious that we are not making the veterans a priority.

You know, quite frankly, I know the gentleman from Florida (Mr. Meek) has and I have, many Members in this chamber have been to the funerals of our soldiers who have been killed. And I think the least we can do is make sure those who get injured or those who serve this country can come back and know that their veterans health care is going to be there for them.

So the money is there; it is just not a priority. Again, the Democrats tried on several different occasions to put amendments on to spending bills. The gentleman from Texas (Mr. Edwards) has taken the lead on this. The gentleman from Wisconsin (Mr. Obey) has taken the lead on this, to try to put that billion dollars in there to make sure that everybody is covered.

And it was clearly rejected. So it is an issue of priority. The money is there. We have chosen not to do it.

Madam Speaker, I think it is important, the gentleman makes a tremendous point. We have to ask ourselves, not only in this body but around the country, why? Why would Karl Rove do that? Why would he out a CIA agent? We know why. Because her husband was the ambassador that went to Niger that basically blew up the whole idea that the Iraqis had a nuclear weapons program. He eliminated that from the argument of why we should go to war with Iraq.

So he had information that was going to blow it out of the war. They stuck it back into the State of the Union address that the President gave from right up here, and so the response was to try to destroy these people. Is that what we want? Is that how this operation is supposed to run, who can destroy who? And now this woman cannot work in the same capacity that she used to work in.

But the reason goes back to the war and the build-up and the drum beats that were going for us to go to war in Iraq. And here we were trying to say, wait a minute, all of the sudden Iraq is North Korea. All of the sudden Iraq is Iran. All of the sudden Iraq has all of these nuclear capabilities. No, they did not. And the administration manipulated the data and then tried to destroy any person or couple that tried to prove otherwise. That is the bottom line and that is not a Democrat or Republican issue. That is the fact of the matter.

Send us an e-mail if you would like to-- www.30something [email protected]. That is [email protected] or you can get us at [email protected]/ 30Something.

Send us your e-mails. Let us know what you think. One of the things you need to send us is what you think the priorities in your family are or your friends or the people that you hang out with. What are your priorities? What should we be doing here? Let us know. We would love to hear it.

Mr. Chairman, I rise today in recognition of House Amendment 343 to House Resolution 3010, to restore full funding to the Corporation of Public Broadcasting.

The passage of this amendment preserves public broadcasting, a longstanding American tradition. This amendment enables the Corporation of Public Broadcasting to continue providing countless benefits to our society, including unbiased and nonpartisan information and news, educational and developmental programming and services, and arts and entertainment to the American public.

I would like to commend my fellow colleagues on their cooperation and nonpartisanship in voting to preserve the American institution of public broadcasting. I was unable to vote on the amendment because I was paying my respects to the family of a brave soldier who made the ultimate sacrifice for his country in Operation Iraqi Freedom.

I am strongly against the cuts proposed by House Republicans that were even more severe than the President's suggested budget cuts. While the President recommended a cut of approximately ten million dollars in funding to the Corporation of Public Broadcasting, the House Appropriations Committee and other subcommittees recommended a total cut of $246.2 million, or 44.9 percent of the current funding. While I recognize the importance of fiscal responsibility, especially in the midst of a severe budget deficit, I believe that we must properly prioritize funding provided by taxpayer dollars. The majority of Americans, according to a recent poll, rank public broadcasting as the second most important publicly provided service, after military defense; additionally the majority of Americans believe not only that their tax dollars are well spent on public broadcasting, but actually support an increase in its funding.

The proposed cuts to public broadcasting are clearly contrary to public opinion. Moreover, these cuts would result in the loss of invaluable services that Americans trust and rely upon, and would harm local economies in the form of closed local stations and lost jobs. For these reasons, I celebrate the passage of this amendment, and pledge my support to continuing funding the Corporation of Public Broadcasting.

Mr. Speaker, I rise today in recognition of The Reverend Monsignor Peter M. Polando, who celebrates the twenty-fifth anniversary of his ordination this year.

Monsignor Polando was born in Youngstown, Ohio in 1954, and was ordained in 1980 at Youngstown's Cathedral of St. Columba. He has led a distinguished life, marked by numerous degrees of higher education, an array of honors and awards, and a variety of career positions that have impacted many throughout Ohio. His impressive educational background includes a Bachelor of Arts degree from St. Gregory Seminary, Masters of Arts degrees from Mount St. Mary Seminary of the West, Notre Dame University, and Ursuline College, and a licentiate in Cannon Law from Catholic University of America.

Monsignor Polando is a Chaplain of His Holiness, a high honor that was bestowed upon him by Pope John Paul II in 1997. Bishop Tobin, former head of the Youngstown Diocese, appointed him to the position of Adjutant Judicial Vicar of the Diocese of Youngstown in 2003. Monsignor Polando has served as Supreme Chaplain, Vice President and National Chaplain for the First Catholic Slovak Union of the United States and Canada, and as a Chaplain and Pastor for various churches, parishes, and organizations throughout Ohio. He has worked as an instructor at Walsh University, Ursuline College, and Cardinal Mooney High School, where he also served as principal and a cross country and track coach.

Monsignor Polando is also an active member of many organizations and societies including alumni associations, Knights of Columbus, Youngstown Council of Catholic Nurses and several Catholic Slovak organizations, including Slovak Catholic Sokol Wreaths 54 and 108, First Catholic Slovak Ladies Association Branch 169, and Ladies Pennsylvania Slovak Catholic Union.

Monsignor Polando has touched the lives of many with his dedication and faith, and I would like to honor and congratulate him on his twenty-fifth anniversary of his ordination.

Mr. Speaker, I think it is important as we start tonight and get things rolling here we talk a little bit about what the new proposal is. The 30-Something Working Group has taken a step in another direction as far as our billboards. We are going to go with hand-drawn charts. It is like we are in the locker room during half- time of the football game.

I think it is important to know where we end up after the second proposal that is circulating around Congress. Democrats have not seen one plan yet, but the important thing for the American people to understand is the second proposal that is now circulating around Congress ends up at the same exact place that the first proposal put us.

So here we have on our little chart here everything broken down. The original Bush proposal is on the right, and the new proposal that is circulating in Congress is on the left.

Mr. Speaker, the gentleman from Florida (Mr. Meek) may remember that the first proposal was out of the 12-plus percent, 12.4 percent you pay into Social Security, half by the employer and half by the employee, the Bush proposal was saying that the employee could take up to 4 percent of that and put it in this side private account. Right out of your paycheck, you could give 4 percent and put it into a private account. The rest of yours, the 2.2 left from yours and I think the 2.2 left from the employer, would go into the Social Security trust fund. The employer was actually getting a break. They would not have to match. So the Wal-Marts of the world would not have to match their employees' 4 percent that they put in the private account. So the diversion into the side account is what led to the whole shortfall.

In the second proposal that is now being circulated around Congress, it is just a shell game. All they do, instead of allowing someone to divert the money right away from their paycheck, you send the whole thing to Social Security and then Social Security takes a portion of it and puts it into a private account with your name on it. So it is just a typical Potomac two-step.

It is a typical shell game in Washington. All of a sudden we have a new proposal. It is all different. The end result is the same thing. There is money not going into a trust fund that is being diverted into a private account. Here is the kicker. There is going to be a tremendous increase in administrative costs for people to have to handle this money, and there is going to be a reduction in the benefits that people get. That is why we are here every week talking about the same issue over and over because we are not going to allow any privatization scheme to come through this body that is going to reduce the benefits.

In the first proposal from the paycheck to the private account, the rest goes in Social Security. The second proposal, here is the paycheck, and everything goes to Social Security and then Social Security will then divert it to a private account with your name on it. It is just a shell game to try to sell the new proposal. You can put lipstick on a pig, but it is still a pig.

Mr. Speaker, will the gentleman yield?

Mr. Speaker, the gentlewoman just said in a State like Florida that the President won in the last election is not getting the kind of support. Here is an interesting statistic, group of statistics, asking rural voters: ``Are Bush's proposed changes to Social Security mainly consistent with the values of the people in your community or out of step?'' And here is the pie chart. All rural voters, consistent with rural voters' values, 27 percent; out of step with our values, 61 percent. And Bush cleaned Senator Kerry's clock in rural areas, and 61 percent of rural America believe that the President's proposed changes to Social Security are out of step with their values. And when we look at white fundamentalists, 55 percent; conservatives, 47 percent; white women, 65 percent; Bush voters, 44 percent; and Southerners, 58 percent.

Why are we having this debate? Why are we having this argument when we have all these other issues that need to be addressed in Congress and the President keeps running against the wall, hitting his head, bouncing back, and thinking if he keeps running and keeps hitting his head that somehow it is going to change. And when this President in particular, who has done so well in rural areas, is losing support on this issue, it is mindboggling to me.

Right. And if the gentleman from Florida will continue to yield, the new system, the new plan that they have where they give the money to Social Security and they put it in side accounts, they are going to invest it in T bills just like Social Security is. So there is no real advantage.

The argument in the first proposal was that we are going to put it in a private account and they are going to be able to gain all this extra interest. Now the new proposal is saying they are going to take it and put it in a private account and they are only going to be able to invest it in T bills just like Social Security is now. So it is just getting more and more ridiculous. It is like a comedy of errors. Every single new proposal is worse than the last proposal. And I think they need to just work with us, work with our side, let us get a solution, make it more solvent, move forward, and start addressing poverty and health care and all the other issues here.

Or that they just want to win, Mr. Speaker. If the gentleman will continue to yield, this sometimes is not even about policy. It is about winning the argument, and they are losing; so they are trying to find a new way to win it, and it is just not working out.

Mr. Speaker, if the gentleman will yield, 70 percent of those currently in Iraq and Afghanistan are under 30, so they are going to need to access this system because they are going to have a lot of years in it.

Mr. Speaker, we are wrapping up here; I think we just have a few minutes left. If you have any e-mails you want to send to us, the address is as follows: [email protected]. Again, the address is [email protected].

I received a letter today from a local veteran in Ohio. Korean War veteran Bob Brothers wrote and sent me a copy of a letter to the editor that he was sending. He wrote this after the flag burning amendment that we voted on last week. He calls it, ``Conundrum: Congress of the United States is voting on a flag desecration amendment to the Constitution of the United States of America. The riddle is, this allows Congressmen to stand under the American flag and declare, I am patriotic. The pun is these same Congressmen vote against mandatory funding for the Veterans Affairs Department. This demonstrates to me the true hypocrisy of Congressmen and women who vote against mandatory funding for the Veterans Affairs Department. Why are these two items not attached so that courage, honor, and valor become necessary when they enter the Chamber to vote?

``A veteran is a veteran is a veteran. When as a young kid I hit the beach in Korea, I did not see any Congressmen or Congresswomen, and I was not asked my income before going ashore. I will not vote for anyone who tries to show they are patriotic by voting for the flag desecration amendment and voting against mandatory funding for the Veteran Affairs Department. Iraqi Freedom veterans take note: as soon as you are discharged, you will begin a lifelong battle with your government. A vote for the flag desecration amendment coupled with a vote against mandatory funding for the Veterans Affairs Department brings shame on the very symbol of liberty and freedom that my comrades gave life and limb and more since it all began over 200 years ago. Not giving the care veterans earned and deserved is burning the flag.''

That was from Bob Brothers, a Korean War veteran from my district who is at every Memorial Day, at every Veterans' Day event that there is. They are committed to the community. So I just wanted to share that.

We have a long way to go here, and I think the point tonight is, the argument nationally is about Social Security and how we are going to fix a problem that does not exist for 40 years, or are we going to address the veterans issues that we face today.

Mr. Speaker, it is good to be back. I am sorry I am late, but I agree wholeheartedly with the portion I heard that the gentleman was saying.

I think the focus that the 30-Something Group has zoned in on is the issue of this borrowing, this raiding the trust fund, this taking away from investments that can be made in the next generation.

The President came out with a plan that said $5 trillion would have to be borrowed over the next 20 years, 1.5 to $2 trillion over the next 10 years. So imagine $5 trillion being borrowed, taken out of the economy, borrowing it from the Japanese and Chinese in order to fund this scheme that the President was pushing.

Now, all of a sudden, we have a new privatization plan that is a little bit different, and we will get into the details in a minute. I think the principle is the same: We are taking money out of the trust fund. I think any time we do that, we are putting ourselves in a very, very difficult position.

The key principle for the Democrats is to make sure that we maintain the benefit we have now, make sure that we maintain the guaranteed benefit that our parents and grandparents have, and then make the system more solvent.

There are very few details. Unless there is new information, there are very few details to this plan.

This is so eerily familiar to what has been going on with all these other different programs. I do not know if you got a chance to talk at all about this, but remember the Medicare program? Remember how they had this great program that was going to move the country forward and, God almighty, it was only $400 billion.

$350 billion, it started, at the very beginning. Then it became $400 billion. Then you and I sat in this Chamber until 3 in the morning and watched the arms get twisted, the eyes start to bulge, the chicken wings were coming in, they had the arms behind people's backs. A $400 billion Medicare prescription drug bill passed this Chamber by just a few votes, with a lot of arm twisting.

Then we find out a couple of months later that the $400 billion prescription drug bill that was $350 billion became $700 billion. And then we found out that the $700 billion prescription drug bill that was a $400 billion prescription drug bill that was actually a $350 billion prescription drug bill became over $1 trillion when you start factoring in some of the out-years with absolutely no cost containment through reimportation or giving the Secretary the power to negotiate down the drug prices.

So now all of a sudden we go with the Social Security program, and let us not even talk about the war and all the nonsense that was given to us prior to the war and what ended up playing out, we will keep it on domestic programs, now we are in the Social Security and now they are telling us that, well, we had these private accounts and they were going to not cost too much and they were going to save us money in the long run; and we started the crunching the numbers, and we got to the fact that it was going to be $2 trillion over 10 years, $5 trillion over 20 years. Our national debt now is $7.8 trillion, and we are going to add an additional 5 over the next 20 years.

But now that did not work so now we are going to go back to the drawing board, and we are going to start playing a shell game with the Treasury bonds, but the bottom line in this is that they are still taking surplus money that is being used right now going into domestic programs, going to reduce the amount of the debt. They are going to put this in some kind of private account somewhere that nobody really seems to know what it is and have no way of balancing the budget or making investments for the American people.

Say it one more time.

This is not the Kendrick Meek-Tim Ryan quote.

That is a great point. Because here we are today, we are passing an amendment to the Constitution today that has not gone anywhere for 12 years, never goes anywhere. At the same time we are cutting benefits for our veterans, and here we go. All of a sudden we have got another Social Security plan. Let us fight about this one for 6 months. Let us have the 30-something Working Group come here and fight about this one and pick this one apart for 6 months.

When is this administration and this Congress going to start addressing the real problems in the country? That is the real issue. You go back to your district and you are in south Florida. No one is worried about their Social Security check coming to their mailbox. Look at this thing. We are good until 2047, 100 percent of your benefits, if we do not do a stinking thing here. Then for the next 20 years, you still get 80 percent of the benefits if we do not do a thing in this Chamber.

And we consistently have this debate on this plan and that plan, and we do not have a problem. We have got a challenge, but we do not have a big problem with the Social Security plan. I go back home and young kids have lead poisoning, thousands of kids in thousands of school districts around this country have lead poisoning. Kids do not have enough money to eat. Eighty-five percent of students in some of these school districts qualify for free and reduced lunch, and we are talking about 2047.

We are running a $600 billion-plus deficit that is offset by the Social Security surplus. It is irresponsible to sit here and try to pretend that 2047 is somehow a crisis in the country. It is irresponsible that we are going to consistently come up with new plans that we are going to argue over. Where is the new plan to make sure young kids have enough food? Where is the new plan to make sure we build new schools? Where is the new plan to make sure everybody in the country has health care?

This is a farce. This whole debate has become a farce and we are ignoring the real problems of the people in the country. All you have to do is check one of the polls that come out. This body here has a 30 percent approval rating in the whole United States of America. What are we doing? It is obvious that we are not addressing the needs of the problems. This is my third year, this is your third year, this is the President's fifth year, sixth year. The Congress has been in control of one party since 1994. Come on. We have not addressed the health care issue in the country. Forty-some million Americans do not have health care. I get calls from General Motors, Goodyear, small mom-and-pop businesses, food chains. No one can afford health care for their workers anymore.

Look at Wal-Mart. They have gamed the system. They pay their employees just enough for them to qualify for Medicaid, so they do not pay them any more. They do not give them health care benefits and they qualify for Medicaid. That is corporate welfare. Everyone is worried about cutting welfare checks for poor people. How about the rich people that get at the public trough and pig out?

We are subsidizing Wal-Mart while they are forcing their suppliers to go to China.

Mr. Speaker, I appreciate that. But on and on and on this goes, and we are sitting here having a debate, a curious intellectual debate, about whether the new Social Security plan is going to work or not. It diverts $600 billion from the surplus. This is not working. The President's plan is not working. We really do not have a crisis for another 40 years, and meanwhile we are getting our clocks cleaned by the Chinese while they are taking the money and they are buying military equipment from the Russians. We are sitting here thinking who can come up with the next great Social Security plan.

I know the gentleman goes back to his district every weekend, and I do

too, and I know that people are not interested in our having intellectual debates about a problem that really does not even exist. That is left for the ivory towers. We are here to get the job done.

Mr. Speaker, if the gentleman will further yield, that is a beautiful point. It is a beautiful point. The Republicans control the House, the Senate, and the White House. So obviously some agenda is getting implemented. Their agenda is getting implemented because they control all three Chambers. And when we look at what it is, it is obviously not an agenda that is helping Middle America, small businesses, addressing the health care issue, education issue, and all of the things we have talked about.

The gentleman mentioned earlier business not being able to cover health care and all this, and forced to go to these other countries. And I even think the Democrats in many ways, Mr. Speaker, have not addressed this issue in the proper way. Small businesses and big businesses, they are not out to screw their employees. And sometimes many workers may feel that way, but they are not out to hurt people. If they could provide health care and they had the resources to do it, they would, especially the small businesses. Especially the small businesses.

So the question is, What have we done here? We cannot blame a big company for not providing health care to their workers if they are trying to compete with people coming and shipping goods in from China with low cost, with low overhead, because of all the situations that we have talked about here. The finger should be pointed at this Chamber. The finger should be pointed at the U.S. Senate and at the White House. We are the ones not addressing the health care issue in the country. We have not done anything.

I cannot tell the Members how many small business people I meet on a daily basis when I go back home that talk to me about health care, and they run a business of 100 to 200 people. They care about their workers. When someone in a worker's family gets sick, they know about it. When a worker gets sick, they know about it. They know the name of everybody on the floor in the machine shop. And to say that somehow they do not care, I think is wrong. I think it misrepresents what is going on.

And my point here, as scattered as it may be, is that the finger should be pointed to us. We swear an oath to the Constitution, and part of that means helping people, coming together in a democratic fashion to move society forward. And we are not doing it. We are leaving people behind left and right, whether it is health care or whether it is education or anything else.

So I know we are wrapping up here and we are running out of time, but I wanted to make that final point and let the gentleman make a point, and we will get our little chart up here and wrap things up.

Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for yielding to me, and I think he is exactly right. We have got to step up and pose the vision, an alternative to what is going on here. Give us an e-mail: [email protected]. Send us an e-mail and we will possibly read it here. We have brought in a lot of e-mail the last few weeks. We have been swamped with e-mail the last few weeks.

So I thank the gentleman for yielding, and we will be back again next week.

Mr. Speaker, I rise today to share with you an article written by Scott Lilly, the former Democratic Staff Director to my distinguished colleague and Ranking Member of the Committee on Appropriations, David Obey. Scott, a longtime friend and valued resource to Members and staff on both sides of the aisle, left Capitol Hill last year after 32 years of distinguished service. His departure was and continues to be deeply felt by many of us, but as the article below reveals, Scott remains a tremendous resource for this institution as we work to deal with serious policy issues that impact our constituents, our communities and our nation.

In this article, How Much to Feed a Dragon, Mr. Lilly discusses the extremely important issue of the threat of China to the United States as an economic and world power. As Scott articulates so well, the time to act

against China and its currency undervaluation is now I urge my colleagues in the House to heed the warnings detailed in this article and to stop the rhetoric. We must act immediately and decisively to address the serious risk China poses to the American way of life--our nation's future depends on it.

How Much To Feed a Dragon

A few weeks ago the Bush administration took action to cap

the growth of Chinese textile imports to no more than 7.5

percent a year, professing grave concern for what is left of

America's textile industry. The controversy generated by that

move largely obscured a far more profound decision by the

administration only a week earlier. In a formal report to

Congress, Treasury Secretary John Snow refused to designate

China as a currency manipulator despite massive evidence of

China's continuous intervention in global currency markets-

keeping the yuan at levels far below what most economists

believe is its true value. Snow stated that Chinese officials

``have repeatedly vowed'' to move toward ``a more flexible''

currency. When they will move or how far they will move is an

issue that Snow will apparently continue to leave to the

discretion of China's central planners.

While this issue sounds arcane, it may also rate as one of

the most important economic issues of this generation. The

intense manipulation of the Chinese yuan impacts greatly on

numerous problems facing American households, ranging from

high gas prices to weak job growth and stagnant wages. It has

materially contributed to the problem of our growing foreign

debt, the weakness of the dollar and a potential worldwide

currency crisis that could lead to global depression. In

addition, it has serious implications for the balance of

global power in the decades ahead.

How has China impacted U.S. gasoline prices? World demand

for energy grew by more than 3.4 percent last year-the

largest yearly increase since the gas lines of the 1970s and

more than twice the average yearly growth over the past two

decades. Furthermore, it is clear that the big players in

world energy markets see this spike in demand as anything but

temporary. They are not only buying up oil futures and the

shares of companies that own and sell oil but companies that

explore and drill for oil as well.

The reason for this rapid growth in oil demand is

attributable to one single fact: Oil consumption in China is

growing at astronomical rates. During 2004 Chinese

consumption of oil averaged more than one million barrels a

day above the previous year, an increase of 19.3 percent, or

eight times faster than the growth of energy consumption in

the rest of the world. Without China, the global growth in

oil consumption during 2004 would have been just 2.2

percent--a rate that the normal expansion of world oil

exploration and production can accommodate without

significant upward pressure on oil prices. Even in per capita

terms, China's oil consumption is growing three times faster

than the rest of the world.

Why is China guzzling so much petroleum? China's

skyrocketing demand for energy is largely a function of the

nation's skyrocketing rate of economic growth. For several

years China has been growing at a rate of more than 9 percent

per annum even after accounting for inflation. Some experts

expect growth in the 8 to 10 percent range for the indefinite

future. This rate of growth drove China last year to consume

40 percent of the globe's increased demand for crude oil in

2004--more than the rest of the developing world combined.

How can China maintain such a rapid pace of growth? The

answer to that is also relatively simple. According to a

report released in Beijing last month by the State

Information Center, foreign trade is the major driving force

of China's economy. In particular, China's net exports, or

trade surplus with the rest of the world, are credited with

bringing strong growth to the nation. The report discloses

that Chinese exports totaled $156 billion in the first

quarter of 2005 while imports totaled only $143 billion. More

than 60 percent of Chinese surplus came at the expense of

the United States. Last year, the U.S; bilateral trade

deficit with China exceeded $162 billion, while the rest

of the world actually ran a trade surplus with China. As a

result, it is almost entirely the Chinese trade surplus

with the United States that is providing the country with

this extraordinary pace of expansion.

What makes China so competitive with U.S. and other foreign

producers? It is important to remember that China is not a

market economy. Prices in a particular sector can easily be

manipulated by central economic planners. This goes for all

inputs: labor, land, capital and energy. If China wants to

compete and be the low price producer for a particular

product, no other producers functioning in a market economy

with fixed prices can match the price at which China will be

able to sell.

But even more important has been China's manipulation of

its currency, the yuan. The central government has gone to

extraordinary lengths to cap the value of the yuan to no more

than 8.3 to the dollar. As Secretary Snow points out, leaders

in Beijing have talked at great lengths about future plans to

allow the yuan to trade more freely on world currency

markets.

But they have taken no such action and the rapid export-led

growth of the Chinese economy would drop back to more normal

levels if they did. Since rapid growth is seen by the

leadership in Beijing as central to the nation's economic,

political and geopolitical goals, it is hard to imagine that

significant change will occur without strong external

pressure. Since the United States alone represents nearly all

of China's net trade surplus, the lever to force revaluation

of the yuan is almost entirely in the hands of the United

States.

Isn't China's growth good for the world? It depends on what

part of the world you are talking about. Oil producing

countries are having a bonanza. Saudi Arabia, a country in

danger of not being able to make payments on its foreign

debts just a few years ago, is now raking in revenues at a

rate that dwarfs even the oil price boom of the 1970s.

Oil executives in this country are also prospering. The 3

million shares of Exxon Mobil held by Board Chairman and CEO

Lee R. Raymond are now worth about $170 million, up more than

$62 million or about 59 percent from the level such shares

would have sold for only 18 months ago. Raymond is only one

of thousands of oil company executives enjoying the new

prosperity that China's demand for petroleum has created for

the industry.

There are also other domestic winners in the unbalanced

trade relationship between the U.S. and China--at least over

the short term. Companies ranging from Mattel to Boeing have

increasingly moved production operations from the U.S. to

China in recent years. They reap two benefits in such

transactions. First, the lower wages paid in the Chinese

factories provide savings that go largely to the bottom line

on corporate balance sheets. Chinese workers make about one-

twentieth of what U.S. workers make.

But secondly, the mere threat of moving more production to

China keeps downward pressure on wages paid to U.S. workers.

Since 2001, the hourly output of U.S. workers has increased

by more than 16 percent, but the average wage production and

non-supervisory worker wage remained virtually flat after

adjusting for inflation. Corporate profits, on the other

hand, have jumped by about 58 percent since the beginning of

2001 despite slower than normal economic growth. Not since

the 1920s have workers' wages fallen so far behind their

increases in productivity and at no time in the post-World

War II era have corporate profits accounted for such a large

portion of the growth in national output.

So while American corporations have at least thus far been

winners in U.S. acceptance of China's trade and currency

policies, U.S. workers have been major losers. Not only have

wages been stagnant, but so have the number of jobs. The

number of Americans with manufacturing jobs has dropped by

2.8 million, or 16 percent, since January of 2001. At the

same time, the U.S. population has continued to grow. About

12 million more individuals are now being supported with

paychecks that are no bigger in either size or number.

Whether or not U.S. corporations--outside the oil patch--

will be long-term winners in this arrangement is a matter of

increasing concern on Wall Street. Many on the street are

expressing concerns that U.S. corporate profits cannot grow

over the long term if American families have less and less

income with which to make purchases. Since production and

non-supervisory workers make up about 80 percent of the total

workforce, the long-term health of the U.S. consumer is

inextricably linked to the earning power of the U.S. worker.

There are also losers in other countries around the world.

Underdeveloped countries with large pools of low-wage and

underutilized labor are among those who suffer the most.

Their dreams of development have been stymied by China's

export gluttony and they have not only lost out in the

struggle to attract industry and earn hard currency, but they

now live in a world where the winner has driven the cost of

energy they need for their own development to prices they can

no longer afford.

But there are implications to our unbalanced trading

relationship with China that may be grimmer than the impact

it is having on the U.S. and world economy. Those

implications involve China's geopolitical ambitions, which

are clearly less benign than proponents of unbridled U.S.-

Chinese trade would want us to believe.

While the CIA may have overestimated Iraq's military

capabilities, it has consistently underestimated (at least

until recently) the pace of Chinese military modernization.

China has taken the politically painful steps of slimming

down its uniform forces to levels compatible with high-tech,

modern, Western military doctrine. It has invested heavily in

the development of highly capable fighter planes, air-to-air

missiles, radars, landing craft and other military resources

needed to confront U.S. forces in the Formosa Straits and

eventually in other parts of Asia.

China now has hundreds of nuclear weapons which are both

strategic and tactical in type. It maintains at least twenty

intercontinental ballistic missiles capable of hitting

targets in the western United States and is believed to have

recently recommissioned a submarine capable of launching

nuclear missiles from waters off U.S. coasts. China is

working on the DR-41 missile, believed to have greater range,

accuracy and a shorter launch time than existing Chinese

ICBMs. They are believed to be working on between four to six

new submarines capable of launching nuclear armed missiles.

As Thomas Kane wrote last year in Parameters, a publication

of the U.S. Army War

College, ``Nuclear weapons allow the People's Republic of

China to take diplomatic and military positions with a much

greater level of confidence.''

China's booming economy also has geopolitical implications

beyond the mere contribution it makes to military

modernization. If China's economy continues to experience

real growth in the 9 percent range, it could surpass the

United States as the world's largest economy within a single

decade, even if GDP growth in the United States remains

relaively strong. As the magnitude of China's economy grows,

so will its geopolitical will. One does not need to go to

Asia to find examples. Brazil has become a major source for

Chinese raw materials and in turn China is discussing

financing the construction of a long sought after road from

the Amazon basin across the Andes to ports on the Pacific.

Korea is becoming something of a ``Silicon Valley'' for

Chinese industry, and even old adversaries such as India and

Japan have to rethink how to accommodate the new reality that

a rapidly growing China presents.

Some of these changes are inevitable. China needs to grow

and will grow almost regardless of U.S. policy. But does

China have the political maturity to absorb such a rapid

increase in economic, political and military power and use it

wisely? Its record on human rights, democratic reform and the

treatment of its own citizens should raise serious doubts. We

should want a growing economy and rising prosperity for the

world's most populous nation, but we should question whether

the current torrential rate of growth--growth driven almost

entirely by huge net export surpluses with the United

States--is a positive for the economic well-being of our own

citizens or the prospects for world peace over the coming

decades.

Mr. Speaker, will the gentleman yield?

Mr. Speaker, the gentleman from Florida is saying there is a lot of support against the President's Social Security plan.

Mr. Speaker, I yield back.

Mr. Speaker, if the gentleman would yield.

Mr. Speaker, what has been great, really, is to watch that debate kind of evolve since early January since the President came to this Chamber and talked to the American people and basically said he had an idea for how to fix Social Security; stated that the Social Security program is in crisis, which we have refuted many times here in this Chamber through the 30-something Working Group. And it has been interesting to watch the evolution of the debate and the support for the President's proposal in January not only among many Americans, but among young people, and as the young citizens of the country became more and more educated on exactly what the President's plan would do through some of the groups that you mentioned, through Rock the Vote and a variety of other groups, became educated on, you know, basically what the President's proposal would be.

And the issue that the gentleman from Florida (Mr. Meek) and I and the gentlewoman from Florida (Ms. Wasserman Schultz), the gentleman from Alabama (Mr. Davis), other members of the 30-something Working Group here have focused on that we think is the most poignant argument to make is this issue right here, the national debt. The President's proposal would add $5 trillion to the national debt over the next 20 years.

Now, as you can see here, and this is actually not updated, and we will have the new numbers next week. It is actually now $7.8 trillion this country is in debt that we owe; 7.8 trillion. The President's proposal over the next 20 years would add an additional $5 trillion to this number here and almost doubling the national debt. And if we keep going at the rate we are spending money here, we will double it in the next 20 years if we do not get our house in order.

But this is the main issue, and I think young people, when they saw the President's proposal, when they saw that his proposal would add $5 trillion, increase their taxes, push the responsibility of paying the bills off on the next generation, I think that is when you began to see the rug come out from underneath the President's proposal. And so we have got to keep focused on the national debt and the annual deficits that are costing each taxpayer that is in the country, or each citizen in the country, almost $27,000.

Will the gentleman yield?

This is exactly what you were talking about just before I arrived here. This is the chart of the deficits over the past probably 40 some years, since the Johnson administration. We ran a pretty tight budget for a good many years. And into the Reagan administration you see a deep, deep dip, and into the Bush administration, and we were running $300 billion deficits every year.

And then when President Clinton came in with a Democratic House, with a Democratic Senate, in 1993 passed a budget without one Republican vote. Al Gore came to the Senate to break the tie to vote for it. And it led to record surpluses in the United States of America. This is where we were in the late 1990s; and back with the current President, back into an era of deficits, of borrowing money from the Chinese, borrowing money from Asian countries, putting in jeopardy the future of many of the young people who live in this country today.

The gentleman is exactly right. And I think when you look at the number that we are going to spend in Iraq, probably by the end of this year it is going to be over $300 billion that we are going to spend in Iraq with absolutely no end in sight. No one has any idea of how much longer we are going to be there and what the cost in human life and U.S. treasure is going to be.

Now, imagine, 435 Members in this Chamber, $300 billion. You are talking about $6- to $700 million per Member of Congress. Now, the American people need to ask themselves, would you have rather given that money to your congressional Representative in the House of Representatives to spend in your community on building schools, on building clinics, on making sure everyone has health care, or on this mess that we have in the Middle East?

And I know people in Youngstown, Ohio, and Niles, Ohio, and Warren, Ohio, and Akron, Ohio, and Ravenna, Ohio, and Kent, Ohio, they would rather have the money spent in their districts. Because you are getting the same kind of calls that I am getting. No money for police and fire. No money for mental health levies. No money for their schools. And we have a boondoggle going on in the Middle East right now that no one even knows where the money is being spent. And money is being lost. U.S. taxpayer money is being lost.

Now, you mention how we have bills that come to the floor to fund education, fund veterans and fund some programs that we believe in and we support and how underfunded they are, and how many thousands of kids. We had a study in Ohio that said No Child Left Behind was underfunded in the State of Ohio by over $1 billion.

Mr. Speaker, what happened, what we had done here is we have a chart that we broke down and basically puts in the perspective, what has been happening down here. As you can see, on the left, it is the red chart. It is the cost in trillions of dollars over the next 10 years to make President Bush's tax cuts permanent, of which a majority went to people who make over $500,000 a year, $1.8 trillion is what we are going to spend over the next 10 years. This is our priority. Tax cuts for rich people.

The next is of that tax cuts for the top 1 percent, $800 million. Now, the top 1 percent in this country make a lot of money. So we are going to take $800 million from education and health and all these other programs, and we are going to give that $800 million back to the top 1 percent of the people in the country.

Now look at this. This is the bar for how much we are going to spend over the next 10 years for veterans budget authority, $300 million. $300 million. Why would we choose permanent tax cuts for people who make over four, five, six, seven, $800,000 a year? Warren Buffett, Bill Gates, they are going to get the big tax cuts. Our friends at Enron, Tyco, all the big dogs are going to get a tremendous amount of money, and yet, we are shutting out veterans.

We have thousands of veterans who are now in our hospitals in Bethesda and Walter Reed who are coming back single, double, triple amputees. This is a real problem, and I think this sends a message to the country that we just do not have the priorities that I think a lot of people in America have, and if you look at the polling, if you look at what the American people are saying, the approval rating, 33 percent for Congress, the President's approval rating is not much better.

The ultimate question is, does Congress or does the President or the administration represent your values? Do you think they are fighting on behalf of what you want and what you need? The answer is becoming more and more apparent that this Congress is out of touch with the American people, that this President's agenda is out of touch with the American people.

I think when you brought up priorities earlier, in a recent bill that was passed, big oil got a $2 billion subsidy. Can you imagine with the price of gas now and oil by the barrel going over $50, that we are going to take money from middle class Americans, take their tax dollars and give $2 billion of it for big oil companies to go explore and find more areas to get more oil? Is that not what they say, when the price increases, they need that money because it is expensive to go dig for oil, it is expensive to go drill? We are going to take taxpayer money to go do this, and I think that is a perfect example of how this Congress does not represent the values that many people in this country have.

Would you not rather have $2 billion spent on your schools? We have got to compete with 1.3 billion Chinese workers, over 1 billion Indian workers over the next couple of decades. We need to be investing into our kids. We need to be investing into our schools, making sure our kids are healthy with programs in their communities, in their schools, that they can learn Chinese and they can learn a different foreign language of the countries they are going to be competing with.

Why do the rich schools have two swimming pools and art programs? God bless them, we want schools to have them, but why do all schools not have a liberal education and liberal in the sense of speech and debate, art, visual arts, music, dance, all these things that provide for a well-rounded education?

Those are the first programs that end up getting cut, and it is because, back here, we are cutting taxes for the top 1 percent and cutting benefits for veterans and the No Child Left Behind program and the health and welfare of our average citizens.

Absolutely.

Mr. Speaker, I was talking to a young person in my district a couple of days ago, and he is so talented on the organ. He is a great singer, and he is a great song writer, and I go to his church in Youngstown, Ohio, frequently. He is the head musician and head of the choir.

And I talked to him, and he is going through a difficult situation. So I asked him, well, why not go to school? Why not sign up at Youngstown State and get a degree in music and teach music? You know what the initial thing he said was? I cannot afford it. I cannot afford it. There is no way I am going to be able to do it.

Part of this that we talk about here is nuts and bolts. We need money for this program, and we are going to reduce or increase the Pell Grant scholarship by $1,000 per student. And I know if the Democrats were in charge, we would do that. But it is not just about reducing the debt, it is about communicating to that person. And there are millions of people just like this young man who are talented and skilled and want to do better, but do not think anybody is on their side.

What we are trying to say is that if you put us in charge, if you give us a chance, we are going to be on your side. We are going to be your partner in this. We cannot do it for you. We cannot make this kid go to school. We cannot make him study. But there are millions of people out there who want to live a better life, and what the Democratic Party wants to do is help them do that; help them achieve their goals; help them move forward.

Whether it is with education or health care or clinics or whatever it is, we are offering solutions here to create incentives for people to be able to go and experience their dreams and to move on. We are in the hopes and dreams business here. That is what the Democrats are all about. And we want to be in charge because we believe that we have a better program, better solutions than just saying everybody gets a tax cut, especially the top 1 percent, because that clearly has not worked.

President Bush's dad called it voodoo economics. It has not worked yet. We are still waiting for what is going to happen here. Job creation is low and slow. People are taking up jobs that pay $10,000 less than the job they lost, without health care benefits. That is not progress.

Mr. Speaker, if the gentleman will yield once again, I might just comment that we should just look at the way it is set up. Everyone screams, let us have universal health care, and America needs universal health care. America has universal health care. Unfortunately, it is through the emergency room. It is the most expensive, inefficient way to run a health care system, because hospitals who run emergency rooms, especially in cities that have high concentrations of crime and people accessing health care through the emergency room, they get charitable funds. The taxpayer is still paying.

So the question is are we going to pay for it up front and take care of someone when they have a cold, or are we going to wait until they go to the emergency room with pneumonia and it costs you 10 times more?

What we are saying is restructure, reform the health care system and have the courage to take on the big donors with all the nice cufflinks and the Cadillacs; take them on and say, we are going to act on behalf of the American people, not on behalf of specific interest groups that are making a ton of money.

Now, we cannot take on the pharmaceutical industry because they donate so much money to this body. So you either pick them, or you pick the people you represent back in your district. In the path of $400 billion, then $700 billion, then a $1 trillion prescription drug bill you do not do one thing about reimportation to help drive the cost down, or not do something as simple as giving the Secretary of Health and Human Services the ability to negotiate down the cost of the drugs?

Why not say to Pfizer and Merck, you want the contract for Medicare? Well, we are going to sit down and we are going to talk price. But no one had the courage to do that, because they get too much money from that industry.

But there is a choice. And what we are saying is we are going to make a choice to represent the people of the country who need help, your grandparents, your parents who cannot afford prescription drugs, instead of the pharmaceutical companies. People elect us to come down here and do this. They want us to say, we do not want to bankrupt the pharmaceutical companies, we want you to keep doing your research and doing what you do, but you have to play fair.

The bottom line is that a lot of the patents that the pharmaceutical companies get are researched out at the National Institutes of Health. They are publicly funded institutions. The taxpayers are paying for a good portion of this. Merck comes in and picks up a patent and only has to pay NIH .5 percent of their profits, and they go out and make billions of dollars at the expense of our grandparents, the 30- somethings' grandparents, or our parents.

There is a certain unfairness there. And what we are saying and communicating with these charts, and what we are talking about is we want a chance to lead this Chamber. We have ideas, and we will implement them, and we will help partner with the American people to make their lives better and improve their lives and give them opportunities that they do not have or have not had in many, many years.

Let our kids pay for it.

Nowhere to go.

That is right. They raise them at the local level, and in many instances those people at that level vote ``no'' on the school board levy. Some States, like Ohio, it is elected. It just cannot be assessed. So in Ohio, the average person who lost their job and are making $10,000 less, and their kids' college tuition is up, and here comes the school board levy and they vote ``no,'' who is hurt then?

We are all hurt then, because how are we going to compete with other countries who are focusing on educating their kids? How are we going to compete with an engineer in China who makes $5 an hour?

Going on 11.

Mr. Speaker, we are not against deficits for the sake of being against deficits. Many would like to borrow and spend as much as they can, and that is what this Congress has been doing. But when you borrow, you have to pay the interest payments.

Here is a very interesting statistic. Here is 2004, here is 2014, 10 years from now. The red is the interest on the debt that we pay every year, $7.8 trillion. That is the red. The light blue is education, the purple environment, and this last one here, a bluish-green is veterans. This red gets bigger because the interest payments that we have to pay every single year are getting huge. We do not like deficits because it diverts money from education, from the environment, from veterans, from health, Medicare, Medicaid, investments in which we will see a good return by having healthy, educated citizens who will create wealth and keep the system running.

With deficits, that money is going down the toilet. A bigger and bigger portion of the budget goes to pay deficits. It is a waste of money. For this Chamber to be run by a group of fellows who said in 1994 that they wanted to pass a balanced budget amendment and make it a Constitutional amendment to have to balance the budget, to give us this, I think, begs the question why do we not turn the Chamber over to the other party. That is what we are asking for.

The money we are borrowing is coming from outside of the United States. The turquoise here is domestically held debt, 2000 to 2004. The purple is debt held by foreigners. As we start to borrow more and more money, out in California it was not so much held by foreign interests, and as we move, we are borrowing more from the Chinese, Japanese, we are turning high deficits, high debt over to our children, and who do we owe? Asian countries we are competing directly against. Bad news, bad leadership, and we need a change. That is what this is all about here.

Mr. Speaker, as we are starting to wind things down here, I just wanted to mention we had a tragedy in my district. On June 13, we lost a soldier in Iraq from Austintown, Ohio, Sergeant Larry Kuhns, Jr., who was 24 years old. He was 3 weeks from coming home.

I wanted to take this opportunity to pass on condolences from this Congress to his family, to his wife, Courtney, their 23-month-old daughter, McKenzie, his mom, Kelly, and his mom's fiance, Jerry. We sometimes think we are important, but moments like this I think wake us all up and kind of allow us to recognize the gravity of some of the decisions we make. Whether it is sending kids off to war or putting the burden on them in the future, I wanted to mention Sergeant Kuhns and thank him and his family for his sacrifice to the country.

Mr. Speaker, to send us an e-mail, tell us what the challenges in your life are, [email protected]. Drop us an e-mail, and we will possibly read it here on the floor.

Mr. Speaker, I rise today in recognition of the Bar Mitzvah of Charlie Dann, on June 4, 2005. Here is Charlie's speech entitled ``Memory is Powerful.''

There were many, especially some of my former Hebrew

teachers, who would have doubted my commitment to Judaic and

Hebrew studies.

At times, to be honest, I've doubted myself.

But I stand here today honored to join in a tradition that

has meant something to so many in our world, our community

and our family. And means so much to me. I am still not sure

of exactly who I am in a large context, but I continue

working on that with the help of so many.

Thank you Rabbi Schonberger. And thank you Mrs. Kessler.

And thank you Mr. Zevor and thank you Mr. Zaltsman and yes,

thank you Mr. Grabiner and thank you Mrs. Schonberger. More

thank you's later.

Now I want to talk about why I decided to go ahead with a

Bar Mitzvah.

For those of you who know my parents, you probably realize

that they did not force me to go through with this Bar

Mitzvah. It was my choice.

I chose to do this for many reasons. But many of them

center around five men and five women. Four of the men aren't

here in a physical sense. And two of the women aren't here

either. So, now before I explain more, I'd like to ask my

grandfather Bentley Lenhoff to stand. Next, I'd like my

great-grandmother, Eva Dann to stand. Now my grandmothers,

Hope Ellis, Michelle Dann, and Nancy Lenhoff and even though

she denies it, I'd also like Barbie Hodros to stand as she

too has been a grandmother to me. Thank you for everything

that you've taught me and thank you for loving me and

believing in me.

Now I will explain more.

The men that can't be here today--those that I knew and one

that I never met--have given me an incredible legacy. Phil

Arian, Stuart Dann, Julie Dann, Dean Cribbs and the men after

whom I'm named, Charlie Lenhoff and Phil Oxman, valued

tradition and doing the right things in life. None of them

led a conventional life. But their lives have taught me the

importance of being connected to a larger community and of

making contributions to the family.

And my great-grandmothers--Jessie Gorsline and Bess

Lawrence Oxman--you were real pioneers in life. From you, I

have been given drive and determination. I sometimes wish I

had more of your scholarly dedication. But perhaps that will

come in time. Like my grandfathers and great-grandfathers,

you also valued community and being connected to larger goals

that extended beyond your own universes.

I stand up here today to pay tribute to my family, of

course. And to Rabbi Schonberger who suffered through my

occasional--OK frequent--obstinence and poor study habits.

And I would be remiss not to thank my mom and dad, Alyssa

Lenhoff and Marc Dann. And my aunts and uncles, Frank and

Maddy Joseph, Ken and Marilyn Steinback, Kathy and Robert

Leb, Scott and Priscilla Dann, Dan and Nan Arian, Mark and

Ellen Arian and Lyndean and Myron Brick and my wonderful

cousins--all of you--the little ones and the big ones--Big

Emily, Meg, Robin, Amanda, Sylvie, Benji, Molly, Harte,

little Emily, Mickey, Jillian, Jordan, and Jackson.

And there are two others who I must mention--my sisters.

Mavilya, Mia--who is studying somewhere in Italy or at least

that's what she told her mom. Dr. Gulnara Tarpe who is a lot

like a second mom to me as well. And of course my younger

sister, Jessie--Pishur to me. I love you.

But I also stand up her to talk about my thoughts about our

community--the Mahoning Valley.

I'm a politician's son. You didn't expect me to be brief,

did you?

I believe our community is at a crossroads and I further

believe that we--as individuals--have the power to determine

its future.

As a graduate of Akiva Academy, it is painful for me to see

the school suffer enrollment declines year after year after

year. It is even more painful to drive to downtown Youngstown

or over to Girard and see the remnants of what once was. It

makes me sad to think of how we--as a community--have allowed

our economy and our population to decline.

Of course I realize that the steel mills can't come back.

And I realize that there is no magic bullet for the economic

development problems that plague our community.

But I truly believe that some of our problems could be

cured with a little bit of the ideas that are presented in

today's Torah portion.

Today's Torah portion talks about a census--counting

people.

Counting people involves more than just lining them up and

ticking off numbers.

Surveying the population of a town, a community, a state or

a nation is something that is critically important as the

Torah portion explains. But when you count them, it is

important to realize the value inherent in every human being.

We are more than numbers. I think this message is extremely

important to us as a community and can help us better address

the problems that we face.

For too long, we have been intimidated by the declining

census. We have allowed ourselves to believe that we are on a

slippery slope down because our population has fallen.

If we do what the Torah portion seems to advise and count

people as more than just numbers, our census will swell to

incredible proportions. We will see that among us are people

of immense talent and incredible energy and great values. We

will see that our census is among the best in the Nation.

I am ready to join the community and to help so many of you

who have been working so diligently to preserve what's left

and to try to recapture what once was. I will join as a

person of a lot of energy, a lot of creativity and a great

deal of dedication to the values and morals that we as Jews

have inherited from the prophets. I believe in honesty. I

believe in hard work. I believe in compassion. I believe in

solving and not creating problems. I am sure of all of this.

But other questions still linger for me. What will I be? A

politician? Perhaps. A football player? Doubtful. A

journalist? Maybe. What I do know for certain is that--guided

by my faith as a Jew--I will be a good person. I will be a

person who knows right from wrong and who practices it. And,

I will be a person who thinks and who cares and who draws on

faith, memory and tradition in daily life.

We can't forget who we are. We can't forget what we were.

We can't lose sight of what we could be.

Memory is powerful.

And they say, past can be prologue. It is up to us to

decide which past we choose.

Mr. Speaker, I want to commend the gentleman from Missouri (Mr. Skelton) for his leadership on the Armed Services Committee on the Democratic side, and his poignant remarks here this morning.

Not only are we dealing with the situation, Mr. Speaker, in Iraq, we are also dealing with a major forgotten situation in Afghanistan. And as we began the war in Iraq, many, many, many months ago, we began to shift our focus from Afghanistan to Iraq.

And we must remember that it was the Taliban who was harboring Osama bin Laden. And it was Osama bin Laden who funded and coordinated the attacks on September 11 on the World Trade Towers in New York, on the Pentagon in Washington, D.C.

So it is important for us to remember where this all started. And now, today, several years later, we have 19,000 troops in Afghanistan, and 140,000 troops in Iraq. We have forgotten and taken our eye off the ball. And one of the major concerns I have, Mr. Speaker, with the situation in Afghanistan is the issue of opium, the poppy cultivation in Afghanistan.

Two-and-a-half billion dollars, one-half of the GDP of Afghanistan is poppy, 70 percent of that sold in Europe as opium, funding through the black market, the terrorists cells not only in this country but all across the world. And it is very difficult for us to trace that underground economy. And I believe it was 5 or 6 months ago when the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs was before our Armed Services Committee. I asked him, what are we going to do

about the drug production and the farming going on in Afghanistan, and about this year's crop, and what are we going to do?

And General Myers said, ``Well, we have a little problem this year. The harvest came in early. The harvest came in early. So we missed it.''

Now, can you imagine, and it is the same as Mr. Skeleton has been saying, and many others in this chamber have been saying, we do not have enough troops in Afghanistan, and we did not have enough troops to get the job done in Iraq. That goes all of the way back to what was the planning, what was the end game, what was the exit strategy for both of these wars?

It is like our foreign policy has attention deficit disorder. We start a war in Afghanistan, it is not finished. We have not eradicated the poppy cultivation, $2 and a half billion. And then all of a sudden, before the job is finished we go off and we start something else. And now we are in Iraq with no end in sight. And that goes back to basic planning, basic military philosophy. You need an exit strategy. You need a game plan. And we have not been able to do it in Iraq, and we have not been able to do it in Afghanistan.

Just some statistics on what is going on in Afghanistan. 3 years after the fall of the Taliban, Afghanistan remains the world's sixth least developed country, 173rd out of 179 ranked by the United Nations. Miserable health and education systems, based on UN calculations, three-quarters of adult Afghanis are illiterate. Fewer than one in five girls go to school in many of the provinces in Afghanistan, and half of the Afghanis are poor. The average life expectancy for an Afghani is 45 and a half years, 20 years less than any neighboring country.

One Afghani woman dies in pregnancy every 30 minutes. We have been there for 3 years and we cannot set up basic health facilities so women could deliver a baby in safety? And it is because we have diverted our attention.

Four were injured yesterday in a car bombing, 20 were killed on June 1. Human Rights Watch is calling for NATO to send in more security forces to Afghanistan, following a marked deterioration of the security situation throughout May.

In the past month, Afghanistan has seen a series of political killings, violent protests, attacks on humanitarian workers, and bombings targeting foreign civilians and troops. Let us get it right. Let us focus on Afghanistan and make sure that the underground black market drug economy does not continue to fund terrorism.

Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from Ohio (Mr. Brown) and the gentlewoman from Ohio (Ms. Kaptur) for their leadership on this issue. For years and years you guys have been at the forefront of this issue, and now it is becoming a little more trendy, a little more popular, to be against some of these trade agreements. I would like to thank you as a new Member, second term. I am a lucky guy to have two Members in the Ohio delegation with such strong leadership on this issue.

As we talked about the trade deficits, whether they are with one country or the overall trade deficit, I think it is important, and this is the real disconnect that I think the administration and many of the people who are supporting CAFTA are missing. The disconnect is with those people who are in our district, those people who lose manufacturing jobs, those people who lose textile jobs, whether in the Southern States, those are the people we are here to represent.

If the trade agreements that we have been signing, whether it was NAFTA or PNTR or Most Favored Nation with China over years and years and years, if they are not working for everyone, then they are not good trade agreements for the United States of America.

I am sure both of you represent counties that probably have the same kind of situations that the counties in my districts have. They cannot pass a sales tax; they cannot pass police and fire levies, library levies, school levies. I think two-thirds of the school levies that were on the ballot in Ohio last year failed, two-thirds.

So years ago we were promised when we had the debate, we are going to pass NAFTA, but we are going to invest in education. We are going to trade with the Chinese, but we are going to make sure that our workers are the most skilled, educated and healthiest workers on the planet. We failed to do that on this end, and at the same time we sign agreements that do not have the labor standards, do not have the environmental standards to help lift these people up.

As the gentleman from Ohio (Mr. Brown) pointed out earlier, with the average wage of a Nicaraguan worker, what are they going to buy here? What are they going to buy that comes out of the United States? Not a Jeep from Toledo, not a Cobalt from Lordstown, Ohio. They cannot afford it. It would take them 10, 15, 20 years to come up with the kind of money that they would need to just buy a car coming out of the United States of America.

I think it is important, because it is not just about CAFTA. If we take a step back and we try to look at how the world is going to look in the next 10 or 20 years, we have high-tech jobs making their way to India and China, and we have a lot of our manufacturing going to China that has come from Mexico, first it went down to Mexico and then over to China, and everyone keeps talking about this new economy and what is it going to be.

Well, we do not really know what it is going to be. Nobody seems to know what this new economy is going to be like. We are going to have the high-tech jobs, and our people are going to work, and it is going to be great. It will be like America is going to be one big country club. Everybody is white collar, everybody gets to golf and go to the swimming pool, and it is going to be great. That was the idea they were trying to pitch to us in the 1990s, and it did not work out that way.

So it is important for us, I think, not only those of us against the trade agreements, but as Democrats, to say this train is so far down the track, we do not even know how much we are going to be able to stop it. I think it starts with CAFTA would be a good place for putting our stake in the ground and trying to go in another direction.

But at the same time, we have got to invest in education, we have got to make sure we have healthy citizens. Eighty-five percent of the students that go to Youngstown city schools qualify for free and reduced lunch. That is probably the same, if not higher, in Cleveland and Toledo. Fifty or sixty percent of those kids live in poverty.

So even if we just, for the sake of argument, say these trade agreements are great, let us all compete; let us educate our kids; let us do what we have to do to compete with them, free markets, which we do not always buy, but let us for the sake of argument say that. How are we going to have the kids in Youngstown able to compete against these workers in the other countries if we are not investing in education and not making sure they are healthy, lifted out of poverty and on the playing field?

I will say this before I yield back: We are going on the global field of competition with less than half a team because these kids are not getting the kind of education, the kind of health care that they need.

So here we are trying to compete with the Chinese, now we want to do it with some other countries, and we just are not making the proper investments to even come to the point where we are going to be able to lift all of our citizens up to compete with over a billion Indians and 1.3 billion Chinese. And until we do that, fix these trade agreements and make those investments, we are going to see these trade deficits continue, we are going to see other countries like the Chinese and the Indians outpace us with engineers, computer scientists, and all of these other high-tech workers and, eventually, every community is going to be like some of the communities we represent, struggling to fund their schools, struggling to fund basic police and fire, libraries, the basic services that government needs to provide.

So I am happy to join my colleagues here tonight, and I thank the gentleman again for his leadership, and I yield back.

Mr. Speaker, the gentleman makes a great point. The whole idea of us representing the whole country is that these agreements are benefiting the very few people who are doing really well, and they are the same people who are qualified for the tax cut that goes to the top one percent. So there is a philosophical debate here: is the legislation and the trade deals that come out of this Chamber going to represent everyone, going to be good for everyone, or are they going to be good for the very few.

That is the kind of philosophy. It has been divide and conquer down here for the last few years, and hey, if you get screwed out of your job, then so be it, that is where you are; my friends are doing good and they get to donate to my campaign, so we are just going to ignore you.

Mr. Speaker, we hear the word ``freedom'' come out of this Chamber a lot. Is that young girl free? She is trapped. She is an indentured servant just like there has been throughout the history of, many times in this country, and many others. She is not free.

So we use freedom when it is convenient for us, but in the instance where it may hurt some corporation to reduce their profits, freedom does not mean anything.

Mr. Speaker, we may have developed a new word or new phrase. We are advocating for value-centered trade, trade that represents our values and, hopefully, what we are trying to spread around the world, value-centered trade.

If the gentleman from Michigan (Mr. Stupak) would yield, we left Ann Arbor in Michigan.

Mr. Speaker, it is good to be back.

Memorial Day is one of the special days. Memorial Day, the 4th of July, Veterans' Day, those are some of the great moments to be a Member of Congress, because you get to go to all the different parades and all the different events and meet some of the great heroes from communities in Florida and Ohio, those people who were just from average homes, average families, and just went and did their duty. I think it is good that several times a year we remind ourselves.

One of the things that I think that generation of soldiers from World War II gave us was a real spirit of what it is like and what it means to be an American. It was great over the past week to have these experiences, because I think in many ways we are losing that, that sense of community, that sense of we are all in this together.

During the war, and I am sure the gentleman has heard stories, as I have, of the kind of sacrifices that each community made, each family made. Some would send soldiers off to fight, some would send soldiers off to be a part of support units, some would serve here at home. But then the women and the mothers had their own roles to play back here at home. Whether it was going to the factory or working in the house or working on the farm or wherever it was, everyone in the country made that sacrifice to have the kind of success we had.

I think if there is one governmental program that is indicative of that spirit, it is the Social Security program. We have been focusing on this for many, many months now, really since the beginning of this Congress, and just trying to hammer away at this issue and trying to get our arms around it.

I think we have come to grips with the fact that this program is not in a crisis state. It is the greatest program that this country runs. It runs at a 1 percent administrative cost. Ninety-nine percent of the money that goes into the system gets back out into the pockets of beneficiaries. Only 1 percent is administrative costs. Even those folks out there that may say government does not run efficiently, and I would agree that there are cases throughout government where programs do not run as efficiently as they should, would say this is efficient.

I think part of what we need to talk about from the Democratic side is about reforming government, about making it run efficiently, about how it should run in an age based on information, with technology and knowledge and communication abilities that we have today. How do we make this government run more efficiently? There is no question that we need to address that problem. Social Security is not one of those programs. Ninety-nine percent of what goes in comes back out and goes to the beneficiary.

One of the kind of myths that we are trying to fight here with our 30-something Working Group is that this program is not in a crisis state. We kind of just want to start the debate from there. We are kind of reacquainting ourselves with this.

Here is a chart for the folks at home to look at. It starts in 2005 and continues to 2070. It basically in the navy blue here, from 2005 to about 2047, 2048, if we do not do anything with Social Security at all, we will still be able to pay 100 percent of the benefits, 100 percent of the benefits. If we do not touch this program, if we do not implement anybody's reform package, we will still be okay until 2047.

Then even after that, to the late 2040s, until 2075 where the light blue is, we are still able to pay 80 percent of the benefits that beneficiaries should be receiving. If we do not touch it, we are 100 percent until 2047 and then still good until 2075.

For the people at home, you make the judgment. Is that a crisis? Is this program being solvent until 2047, 2048, a crisis? That is the real question.

In 1993, a Democratic House, Democratic Senate and Democratic President passed a bill that balanced the budget; and we began to pay down the debt in the country because we were running at the surplus level.

Mr. Speaker, if the gentleman will yield further, as the gentleman is saying that, this survey that the gentleman was just talking about, the Washington Post-ABC News poll said that 58 percent of those interviewed said that the President is concentrating mainly in his second term on problems and partisan squabbles that these respondents said were unimportant to them. Four in ten, 41 percent, said the President was focused on important problems, a double-digit drop from 3 years ago.

The people are speaking. They are saying that, as the gentleman said, like this chart that we went over a few weeks ago showed, giving our debt over to these foreign countries, reducing the independence of this country, pushing the burden off on our children and grandchildren, the next generation, and asking them to foot the bill, that is the issue.

Health care. We have had a health care crisis in this country for how many years now? How many years? And now we are talking about an issue that does not present itself for another 40 years?

These are the issues that we need to begin to talk about. We need to begin to talk about the escalating costs of health care, year in and year out, 15 percent, 20 percent; the rising, skyrocketing costs of prescription drugs, 10, 15, 20, 30, 40 percent. The most profitable industry in the world, and we are not talking about it?

These are the issues that we need to focus on. And to have this charade going on on the side, this dog-and-pony show about an issue that does not present itself for another 40 years I think is misleading and not the proper execution of I think the top leader in the country. I just really believe that.

It is time for some real leadership in the country, and we just do not seem to be getting it now. The poll is absolutely right. We get into these partisan squabbles. We want to work. We want to solve some of these problems. We know there are different philosophies, and it is okay to have a fight about it, but at the end of the day, do what is best for the country.

Mr. Speaker, we went over this a few weeks ago, and this is a portion of foreign-owned debt. It rose to 41 percent under the Bush administration. In the far left corner here, we have the year 2000 and over here, 2004. The purple is the debt held by foreigners. The aqua, turquoise, either/or, is domestically held debt and the billions of dollars, which comes to about the trillions. And in the blue, as my colleagues can see, the portion of the debt held by domestic banks, domestic concerns, domestic interests, has flat-lined. The purple is the foreign-held debt, and it begins to increase; it is starting to move up into the main and starting to even break through the border here.

We can see that increase right there, and that is what worries us. It is that increase right there that says we are losing a portion of our independence, because when the Chinese, for example, own a higher and higher and higher portion of our debt, then we have to begin to factor that concern in when we are dealing with North Korea, when we are dealing with the situation in Iraq, when we are dealing with the way they are manipulating their currency.

Right now, the Chinese are manipulating their currency, some say up to 40 percent. And why is the U.S. not taking a stronger stand? Why are we not being firm with the Chinese? Well, it is tough to play hardball with the bank when they are funding your debt; and that is really what is happening right now, is that the bank is becoming China and they are funding our debt, so we have less leverage over them as they begin to wipe out the manufacturing.

So here we go, here is our debt, here is the chart that we are becoming way too familiar with, the national debt of $7.79 trillion, and each person shares $26,000. This is the issue. This is the crisis in this Chamber, and this is the crisis that the country needs to come to grips with.

Mr. Speaker, I think the gentleman is absolutely right. When we check and verify our own statistics here that we are using, again, the poll that we had mentioned talking about really what the main issues facing the people of the country are, a strong majority of self-described political Independents, and this is the ABC News Washington Post poll, 68 percent of self-described Independents say they disagree with the President's priorities. Sixty-eight percent. The hard-core numbers on Social Security and the President's priorities are 30, 35, maybe 40 percent in the grand scheme of things. So we are talking about 60 percent of the country not agreeing with the priorities of the President.

As we talk about what the crises are in the country, one thing that I think ties into what we are talking about, the national debt, the annual deficits, the $26,349 that each citizen owes to that debt, the $500 billion annual deficit that we are running, plus, it kind of feeds into a notion in the whole country about debt. So what the 30-something Group wants to talk about a little bit tonight is the issue of young Americans dealing with debt. Because we are really, by the decisions we are making, putting a $26,000 bounty on the heads of young people, tax bounty on the heads of young people, the minute they are born; and they owe the government that much. Then we begin to look at, project that $26,000 out for another 22 years from the day they were born, and then we begin to deal with young Americans in college. And this was a very interesting statistic that we were able to find in an article last week.

According to a survey released by Sallie Mae, the Nation's largest provider of student loans, college seniors expected to graduate this year, probably right around now, with $28,953 in debt; basically $29,000; $26,000 of it is going to be student loans, and another $2,800 of it is going to be credit card debt. So if you are graduating from college today, you owe the 26 grand already from the debt that we need to pay off, which each citizen owes, and then they owe another $28,000, $29,000 basically in student loans and credit card debt.

And that feeds into a real problem that we have in this country. It is a disincentive to go to school, it is a disincentive for college, and really it traps a young man or a young woman coming out of college with a good education, and all this debt. That is not freedom. And we hear freedom, freedom, freedom, freedom in this Chamber time and time and time again.

We have freedom french fries down in the House diner. We do not have French fries, we have freedom fries. Freedom. Is this freedom? Is owing $29,000 when you get out of college freedom? Is owing the government $27,000 freedom? Is that freedom? That is not freedom. So we cannot really just apply freedom to little areas that are convenient. And freedom is economics too, and I believe that we are beginning to get into a situation by letting the credit cards run rampant through this Chamber, letting the spending get out of control in this Chamber, and it takes away the freedom for our young men and women.

Ready. Let us do it.

Another part of the Democratic platform, one that we will be issuing in the next few months, is financial literacy. Combat this at a young age, combat this. These kids are in grade school and high school and teach them about the stock market and compounding interest and all of the different aspects to managing money and being debt free, if you save now, and what it turns into 30 years from now. That is another part of the Democratic proposal. We need to teach these kids how not to get in this position here. We need to teach many leaders in the Congress here how not to get ourselves in this position here as well.

One of the comments that a previous speaker made here not too long ago was that we do not have many options. You can raise taxes or you cut spending or you grow the economy. Well, you cannot grow the economy if you are putting this tremendous burden on students, the next generation of people who are going to go out and create things and not making the proper investment into education as we have talked about before. A lot of our urban areas and a lot of our rural areas, where many of those kids go to school in poverty, do not have health care, are not getting the kind of education that they get in some of the suburban areas.

Those are the kids that we need to fund, educate, and let them go out and create and grow the economy. But you cannot do that by tying a ball and chain around their neck and throwing them over the river, because they sink, and at the same time not make the kind of investments.

And patriotic. Quite frankly, tell the wealthiest people in the country, we would love to give you a tax cut. Who would not? Who in politics would not like to tell a really rich person I want to give you a tax cut? I mean, that would be great.

But you have to do the right thing, and you have to say, you have to meet your responsibility to society. We cannot afford to give you a tax cut right now, because we have a $7.79 trillion debt. Now you can be selfish and still want one. Why not give the middle-class guy the tax cut, who has all of this debt burden, who is trying to send their kids to school? We cannot afford to give Warren Buffet a tax cut. I am sorry, Warren.

I remember last year as well, we did the same thing for veterans benefits. It was an increase of, I do not remember how many billions of dollars, but it basically made it full funding. But it had to reduce in kind dollar for dollar what would be needed for the veterans from the tax cut that went to the top 1 percent. Voted right down, party line.

Look at the numbers here. The reason the gentleman is upset here in trillions of dollars over 10 years, we have a graph. We have to have a graph for everything. Permanent tax cuts, 1.18 trillion over 10 years. Tax cuts for top 1 percent 800 million; VA budget, .3, 300 million. When we need to fully fund this everyone says we do not have the money, but we have the money for this, and we have the money for that. So this is the question.

The gentleman from Mississippi (Mr. Taylor) offered a motion here to recommit a couple of weeks ago.

A party-line vote went down. And that was on the health care side of it. That was on making sure our Guards and Reservists have coverage regardless. And the gentleman brought out the numbers and it was maybe a billion dollars, but these men and women are picking up and they are in all our districts, and they pick up and they leave their families and come back and leave and come back.

Exactly. And we have the money if we wanted it, if we wanted to ask the top 1 percent to make a sacrifice to help fund this. That money will work its way back into the economy anyway. The fact that that is bad for the economy is an argument that I have never bought into. It is the voodoo economics, the trickle-down economics theory. I would rather have it in the hands of people who are making 50, 60, 70, $80,000 a year that go out and invest in their kids and those kinds of things. But to say we do not have the money, I think, is shameful.

These are good people. These are not bad people. But to choose them when you have to make decisions based on the whole society right now over this group, I think, is shameful.

I have a couple of e-mails that I would like to share from last week. We asked everyone 2 weeks ago to e-mail us in what they thought their priorities were in the country. If it was Social Security, they could say it was Social Security. If not, tell us what you think the real crises are in the country.

We have Jim Munroe and Nancy Grover from Albuquerque, New Mexico: ``The number one priority has to be turning the deficit around while making the tax system fair and equitable.''

Mari Howells from Erie, Pennsylvania, a 30-something Dem who saw us a couple of weeks ago: ``Health Insurance! Our health care system is awful. It is bringing the whole country down. Number 2: the war. What a mess. Number 3: poorly funded schools.''

I am going to take a minute here to read a beautiful e-mail that we received a couple of weeks ago from a man who saw us three on C-SPAN. He was laid off on September 11, 2002, from

a Fortune 500 company in Dallas, Texas. Informed that his position had been dissolved, ``and since I was one of the highest paid, 38,000 a year, on their help desk, that I had to be one of the first ones to go. I was given 2 weeks severance pay and found out through my network that the company had outsourced the help desk to an overseas vendor. I am a proud veteran of the U.S. Air Force where I served 8 years and received an honorable discharge. Before being unemployed I had great health insurance and I am in fact a cancer survivor, but after losing my job and not being able to afford the $340 monthly payment to COBRA to keep my health insurance, I had no other choice but to go to the Dallas VA hospital to register for my health care.

``I am 41 years young and I have now been unemployed for almost 3 years. My father was forced into early retirement because of his heart and my mother just recently lost her job of many years at a local bank. They could barely make it on their mediocre salary and his Social Security. I do not know what they are going to do now and now I have nothing to help them with because I do no have a savings, checking account or 401(K).

``When I was working, I used to send my mother $250 a month to help her and my father out a little bit, but I cannot do that any more. He has a temporary job at the bank that pays $13 an hour with no benefits, a lot less than I used to make but I am very happy just to be working again. God bless you.''

So these are the real people that I think we need to begin helping.

The e-mail is [email protected]. That is [email protected]. Send us an e-mail. Tell us what you believe to be the main crises facing this country.

Mr. Speaker, I rise today in support of H. Con. Res. 89, and I thank the gentleman from New York (Mr. Engel) and offer very warm thanks to the gentleman from Illinois (Chairman Hyde) and to the ranking member, the gentleman from California (Mr. Lantos), for their leadership and support on this resolution which honors the life and the work of Sister Dorothy Stang.

I would also like to acknowledge Sister Dorothy's family, her sister, Marguerite, and her family from Fairfax, Virginia, and her brother, David Stang from Denver, Colorado.

Sister Dorothy was an American Catholic nun with the Order of Sisters of Notre Dame de Namur. She was originally from Ohio, but had moved to Brazil nearly 40 years ago with four other sisters of Notre Dame in response to a request from then-Pope John XXIII who asked religious communities around the world to serve in Latin America.

She worked in earnest to profess the order's mission, to educate and stand with the poor. Sister Dorothy also worked with the Pastoral Land Commission, an organization of the Catholic Church that fights for the rights of rural workers and peasants. Sister Dorothy's selfless way of life brought comfort and hope to an area of the world wrought with corruption and despair. She was committed to social justice, and worked tirelessly to help poor farmers with sustainable development techniques, minister and teach the men of the village to be faith leaders, and help in the building of houses and school rooms.

Sister Dorothy taught the women of Brazil to sew and to sell clothing to finance the building of a dam to provide electricity to their community. She pioneered 21 community centers. These centers taught agriculture, health care, education, and spirituality.

Although she was a profound leader and was loved by many, her fate did not parallel her life's work. Sister Dorothy was brutally murdered on February 12 of this year after receiving several death threats from loggers and landowners. Knowing of this grave danger, Sister Dorothy wrote, ``I do not want to flee, nor do I want to abandon the battle of these farmers who live without any protection in the forest. They have the sacrosanct right to aspire to a better life on land where they can live and work with dignity while respecting the environment.''

She then went on to say, ``I am grateful to Notre Dame for not asking me to leave. This shows we are aware of the needs of the poor. The Sisters have said they are worried about any safety. It is not my safety, but that of the people which matters.''

At the time of her death, Sister Dorothy had just traveled to drop off cloth and food to families whose homes had been burned by ranchers and loggers. She was approached by two gunmen, and knowing her fate, reached into her cloth bag, took out her Bible and began reading the Beatitudes, ``Blessed are the peacemakers for they shall be called the children of God.''

Sister Dorothy Stang is a true martyr. She lived and died teaching and fighting for peace and justice among a people who were poor and disenfranchised. She lifted up the oppressed and taught people about their rights as human beings. She was named ``Woman of the Year'' by the state of Para for her work in the Amazon, and in 2004 she received the Humanitarian of the Year award from the Brazilian Bar Association for her work in the region.

Sister Dorothy's dream was to have an area of land set aside by the federal government of Brazil as a federal reserve where the poor families and landless peasants would be safe, where they could farm their land, build their own income-producing businesses, and above all, where they could live in peace and dignity without threats to their lives.

Sister Dorothy reminds us all to be courageous and to work for what we believe in. We must all be champions of our principles and causes, and that our religion is not merely a set of beliefs, but a series of actions. She gave her life to protect the downtrodden and forgotten. While her brutal murder shows the great challenges we face in the pursuit of social justice, her life shows the awesome power one human being has to change the world.

I hope that this simple act of commemoration will not be the end of Sister Stang's story, but the very beginning. That Congress will use this opportunity to demonstrate its concern for inequality and poverty all over the world by making available the resources needed to combat these social ills.

Finally, Mr. Speaker, President Kennedy once said in a speech at Amherst College, honoring Robert Frost, that ``A nation reveals itself not only by the men it produces, but also by the men it honors, the men it remembers.''

Today we honor a fearless, selfless defender of peace, a champion in sustainable development, a person affectionately known as ``Irma Doroty,'' and ``Angel of the Amazon,'' a brave martyr, Sister Dorothy Stang.

Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for the opportunity too.

In the past several months, really since the beginning of the year, the President initiated a Social Security plan that he wanted to promote to the country, to say that privatization, these private accounts were going to be the answer to the Social Security solvency problem. We have been, just about every week since the beginning of the year that we are in session here in Washington, we have been talking about why the President's privatization scheme really is not the answer for the country.

The President, when he initiated this discussion after the election, began to say that it was a crisis and it was a crisis for the country that we all needed to address. What we want to do tonight is, we want to begin by saying that Social Security is a solvent program. There is no crisis within the Social Security program. Do we need to make some minor adjustments? Of course, we do. Do we need to tinker with the program? Yes, we do. But is there a crisis there? We really do not think so.

So tonight we are going to begin to talk a little bit about why Social Security is a solvent program and show a few numbers that we have shared with the American public every week that we have been on, but also to get into some of the areas where we believe a crisis does exist in this country that needs immediate attention.

So we have this graph here that basically shows that Social Security is secure for many, many decades to come. These are facts. These are the Congressional Budget Office numbers that they have given us.

The CBO is a nonpartisan organization, a nonpartisan group, and if they would lean one way or the other, the Republicans control the House, the Senate, and the White House, so if they are going to lean any one way, which I do not believe that they do, they would certainly lean in favor of making it look like Social Security is less secure than it actually is.

So this graph here, we can see it starts in 2005, and it goes to 2075, so it gives us a 70-year span. And from 2005 to about 2047, 2048, 2049, right in there, if we do absolutely nothing with Social Security, Social Security recipients will still receive 100 percent of their benefits. And all in the blue here. So from 2005 to the late 2040s, if we do absolutely nothing with the program, if we do not touch it at all, we are still going to get 100 percent of our benefits up to the late 2040s, 2047, 2048. So at 32 years old, after 40 years, I will be 72 years old, just about 72, on Social Security. So I will be guaranteed, if we do nothing, to at least get 100 percent of what I would earn right in here, or someone else who is 32 years old. Then, after that, from the late 2040s into 2075, one would still receive 80 percent of one's benefits if we did nothing.

So what we are saying on this side of the aisle is, is there a problem? Yes, of course. From 2047 to 2075 and beyond a recipient would only get 80 percent of what they should be getting now. So that is a problem.

Is that a crisis? No, that is not a crisis. Something that happens 40 years from now is not a crisis. What we want to do is just show tonight that this is not a crisis; 100 percent of the benefits will be paid until the late 2040s and, beyond, still get 80 percent.

So if the President wants to sit down and work out a program, we are going to be able to deal with this 80 percent issue here coming 40-some years from now, and we will sit down and talk with the President.

But, unfortunately, the plans that are floating around Congress cut into the 100 percent benefits here and begin to reduce some of the 100 percent benefits there.

There is no money.

Nothing to be sorry about.

And I thank the gentleman. And let us take the definition and apply it to this chart. A crisis is an unstable situation of extreme danger, or difficulty. Unstable situation.

Now, how could you call this, 100 percent of the benefits for the next 40 some years, how is that an unstable situation? It is a very stable situation. And I would even argue that 80 percent, without doing anything, 45 years from now is not unstable. That is a stable situation. It needs to be dealt with. But extreme danger or difficulty? How could you call from 2005 to the late 2040s extreme danger or difficulty? It does not apply here. And using the word ``crisis'' is extreme, and it is trying to scare the American public. And you see it in the poll results. The American people are beginning not to buy it.

Now, we could even try to go to the second definition of what a crisis is, a crucial stage or turning point in the course of something. There is no crucial stage or turning point that needs to happen here. We are not on a brink here that we have got to change something immediately. There is no crisis here. And as the gentleman from Florida (Mr. Meek) stated very eloquently, there are many more issues that I think we need to deal with.

And there was one other thing, and we are kind of moving things around a little bit here, that I want to share just briefly.

Well, I thank the gentleman. And after this we are going to move on to what we believe that the real issues are that need to be dealt with immediately, issues that we think are causing unstable situations, issues that we think are providing extreme danger or extreme difficulty for families here and issues, quite frankly, that we think the country is at a crucial stage or at a turning point on. We want to talk about what we believe those issues really are.

Now, last week we asked Americans who were watching to write in and to e-mail us with what they thought were the immediate issues that needed to be dealt with, what was the crisis that they believed the country needed to address. And I am just going to share a couple of these because we want to get into some other issues. Mrs. Richard from Kansas said she had been watching and listening to our program on C- SPAN. Our country now has so many needs. And we asked her to give them to us and she said, I will write them to you.

To me, the number one need is to get out of Iraq. Stop losing lives and spending money. That may be a crisis. Probably is. After that, health care, fixing our national deficit, which we are definitely going to get into tonight, and many more things that need to be fixed. She appreciates the concern.

Christie Fox, from the gentleman's great State of Florida, she is a second generation American. And on C-SPAN you asked for our comments or suggestions on what we think is important to America. Safety, the environment, the oceans heating and rising, need for solar power, recycling, windmills, fuel efficient vehicles, terrorism, which is a major issue that we are not really dealing with here, and to keep God in America. Great issues that we think may be or will have more of a profound effect if we address them immediately.

So, again, we ask the citizens who are out there tonight to give us an e-mail, what you believe to be your crisis of choice, that is, something that we need to deal with immediately in the United States of America. Send us something, [email protected]. That is the number 30, the word ``something,'' and then dems, D-E-M-S @ mail.house.gov. Send us what you think, because, quite frankly, we do not believe that Social Security that is solvent for the next 45 years and will pay 100 percent of the benefits and then for the next 20-some years and into the future will still provide 80 percent is not a crisis.

Mr. Speaker, I had a Social Security town hall meeting last night at Warren G. Harding High School in Warren, Ohio; and we were having a discussion about these kinds of issues. And one of the gentlemen, as we were talking about him as a small business owner, self-employed, he had to pay his own Social Security tax. He had to pay the whole amount, the employer's share and the employee's share for himself. And he was struggling because he had health care issues that he had to deal with. The health care costs were going through the roof. He had two kids in college. And tuition costs in Ohio have doubled over the past few years. And when we get back after the break we are going to get into a little more about the cost of college tuition.

But the point is, the Social Security privatization scheme sounds like a good idea to some employers, because the way that the blueprint has it set up is that the employee will be able to take 4 percent and divert it to an account, and the employer will not have to match that 4 percent; and so it is basically a tax break for the business person, which may be okay for small business folks and help them a great deal.

But what we are saying as Democrats is, why are we not dealing with the real issue, the health care costs that are going through the roof? And if we want to help small business people, then we need to use the Democratic proposal that we have that is going to help small business people contain health care costs and contain tuition costs and give them aid and assistance and grants and lower tuition costs with block grants to different universities. We have a plan to do that. And what we are saying is, let us stick together on the greatest social program in the history of mankind, and let us fix these other programs that have been causing a great deal of economic pain to the small businessperson. We want to be there, and we have a plan to do it.

Absolutely.

We have a discharge petition too that will allow Members of Congress to sign it and discharge it out of the committee process and bring it right to the floor. We have had this debate. We can bring it to the floor and let us vote on it.

Mr. Speaker, I think this is the issue for me, that this is the crisis. This is just the issue that how can we say that a problem 40 years out from now is the crisis when you look at the numbers here. This is the crisis here. This is the manufacturing jobs loss, and I will go through some quick charts here.

Manufacturing jobs lost. In Ohio we lost 216,000. In Florida, the gentleman's home State, they lost almost 73,000. All the red States here have lost more than 20 percent of jobs in their States: Ohio, Pennsylvania, New York, Michigan, Illinois, all of these. And all throughout the country, the only two States with any kind of net gain are North Dakota and Nevada. That is the crisis and that is the issue that we need to be dealing with here in the United States.

This is the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, so it is nonpartisan. It is from June 1998 to February 2005. This is the United States Bureau of Labor Statistics controlled by a Republican, so it is not any lies that we are just trying to stoke up propaganda here.

These States that are purple have lost between 15 and 20 percent. The green States have lost between 10 and 15 percent. The yellow States between 5 and 10 percent. We are getting decimated in our manufacturing base, and these are the jobs that pay well. These jobs are going to China. The high-tech jobs are going to India.

Now, another crisis, our overall U.S. trade deficit which led to the enormous job loss right here, overall trade deficit over $600 billion last year. We are buying $600 billion more worth of products than we are selling. And look at the growth. This is the startling thing. This is not just a kind of a temporary blip in the screen.

In 1991 we were a little over $50 billion, or not quite $50 billion; and look at this, the steady growth. And these have been the trade agreements that we have been signing, and especially when we cranked up trade with China, bang, right down at the bottom, bingo, in 2004 over $600 billion in trade deficit. Of that the main culprit in this whole deal has been with China, another crisis that we need to deal with.

I mean, how we can say Social Security is the main issue is beyond me. Again, trade deficits from 1991 to 2004. Again, a slow gradual, this is what we call in economic terms, and I am not an economist, this is what you call a trend. This is a trend that is going on in the country and has been for a good many years now, U.S. trade deficit with China over 160-some billion dollars a year. And we can see it just continue to decline. It will probably be worse next year. And when we see the job loss in Ohio, in the Midwest, all over the country except for Nevada and North Dakota, this is what is causing it.

Companies are moving from the United States, not making the investment here in the country, making it in China; and we are getting walloped.

Now, the most important issue as we are running these huge trade deficits and we are also running a national deficit, and let me just show one, before we show that one and then I will let the gentleman talk about the other, not only are we running huge trade deficits; we are also running a record national, domestic deficit on our own budget here.

This red line starts with President Johnson where we pretty much were balancing our budgets all the way along, and we pretty much stayed steady up and down throughout the 70s. And into the 80s we got into the pretty high deficit through the Reagan and Bush era. That is the red line coming down close to $300 billion in our national deficit. That means the budget money that we spend out of here, we were spending $300 billion more than we were taking in. And then the Clinton era, the balanced budget passed in 1993. Not one Republican vote, Democrat House, Senate, White House; Al Gore broke the tie in the Senate as Vice President. That led to booming surpluses in the United States. And then when the next administration came in here, we are again with record deficits.

Now, will a real fiscal conservative please stand up, because we do not have anymore here. And this is the kind of deficit that you are passing on to your kids and your grandkids and the scary thing that the gentleman will talk about right now.

Absolutely. The source is CBO, the Congressional Budget Office, nonpartisan. The most scary aspect of all of this is if we are spending 400-some billion dollars more than we are taking in, we are borrowing that from somewhere because we do not have it. Tax revenues bring us to this line here, and we are spending that much more, up to $400 billion more than we have in the kitty that we are taking in every year. So we have to go out and borrow it. This is the scary part. Who are we borrowing the money from?

That is the ultimate question, and I know the gentleman wants to talk about it.

I will explain the chart, but I want the gentleman to lend his voice to it.

Mr. Speaker, the gentleman is absolutely right because

you can have, and Mitt Romney was in front of the Committee on Education and the Workforce last week, the Republican governor from Massachusetts, and he said you cannot have a tier two economy and a tier one military. And, unfortunately, we are moving into a tier two economy.

We were talking about the trade deficits and then our national deficit and the debt. The deficit is what we accrue every year. We are $400 billion last year. The debt is the overall debt of the whole country, which is almost $8 trillion, but last year was over $400 billion.

Here is the portion of foreign-owned debt in our country that rose to 41 percent under this administration. So this is the bottom line here in the blue. Of all of our debt, that portion is held by domestic interests, from this here, the turquoise, a nice shade of turquoise, I must say.

The next level is the percentage of our marketable U.S. Treasury debt held by foreign interests, and this goes back to 2000. So over in California, 2000. Over here on the East Coast, it is 2004. Here we have domestic-held debt up to $2.5 trillion. The rest here in purple was foreign owned.

As we move in 2001 and 2002 and 2003, you can see that the purple gets bigger. It gets up into Maine from the Carolinas. This purple is foreign-held debt. Basically what this chart says, and it is continuing to increase as the years go on, as we run these deficits that we had in the last chart, that we have been running as we are borrowing that money; more and more of that money is coming from foreign interests. This is a dangerous situation that we are putting the country in.

As the gentleman from Florida (Mr. Meek) stated, we are on the Committee on Armed Services. We see this in the committee hearings and with the poppy in Afghanistan. We see this dealing with the Chinese in their increase in military spending and the issue of Taiwan, and North Korea is beginning to test nuclear weapons.

The more power we cede to foreign interests dealing with our own personal monetary situation, the more dangerous a situation we are going to be in. It is a bad political move, it is a bad economic move, and it threatens our country as well.

Mr. Speaker, we have a plan. We know what could fix the problem. The American people understand what is going on right now. If we review poll results, this Chamber is not one of the most popular institutions in the country. I think there is a 33, 34 percent approval rating for the Congress. I think some of the issues that the gentleman touched on are why that kind of sense around America is what it is.

I want to share one final chart here that we have. The gentleman from Florida (Mr. Meek) mentioned the $7.7 trillion debt and the $26,000 that everybody owes, and the general theme tonight is, what are the real crises in the country. We explained that Social Security is solvent for another 45 years, and then we got into our over $160 billion trade deficit with China, a $400 billion deficit here at home. We are spending more money, we are borrowing it from the Chinese. We are not participating in a sound fiscal policy.

One final thing that kind of sums everything up, if Members look at it, and this is in trillions of dollars here, how much tax cuts for primarily millionaires are taking away from funding priorities that we have in this country. If we make the tax cuts permanent over the next 10 years, it will cost $1.8 trillion. The tax cuts for the top 1 percent, people making 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, over a million dollars a year, well above half a million dollars a year, will be $800 billion we are going to spend or not take in because of tax cuts primarily for the top 1 percent.

Look at what we are spending on veterans. This is $800 billion, this is $3 billion, over the next 10 years. So we are basically saying in this country that our priority is the top 1 percent, not the veterans of the United States of America. The other side would say, well, we have increased spending for veterans over the past few years. The answer to that is, yes, but thousands and thousands of more veterans are beginning to enter the VA system now. They are losing their pensions; they are losing their health care in places like Ohio. When I was on the Committee on Veterans' Affairs last session, Secretary Principi was in front of us and I asked him, is the reason more people are going into the health care system in places like Ohio, West Virginia, Pennsylvania because of the massive job loss and companies are going bankrupt? And he said, yes.

We have people in Ohio that were veterans, that never accessed the VA system, who lost their jobs, lost their pensions, lost their health care, they had nothing, and they entered into the VA system because they were veterans. So, yes, you may be increasing the number of what we are spending on veterans; but when you have thousands of more veterans going in and nursing homes being closed down and nursing home beds being closed down, it is time to reevaluate what the policy is. We could go on and on and on with this on what we are going to spend on education, health care, which you so eloquently mentioned, all these great issues that we need to invest in.

I want to make a point. We are not saying that some of these programs do not need reform. We are not saying that at all. These programs do need reform. We need to move into more preventative health care than we are doing now. You talked about CVS and Rite Aid and the emergency room. Why would we want people to go if they were sick into an emergency room? Because we are paying for that, anyway. The hospitals get charity aid that comes out of Federal money. Why would we wait until someone got pneumonia and went to the emergency room when we could have a clinic that provided them with basic antibiotics that would allow them to address their issue when they had a cold? But we wait. So the system does need reform.

We need to put more emphasis on early childhood education. There is no question about it. We did a study in Ohio, and I mentioned it several times here before. The University of Akron did this study. For every dollar that the State of Ohio spent on higher education, the State received $2 back in tax money because you are educating someone and they are going to be worth more, they are going to create more value, and they are going to pay more in taxes over the long run.

These systems need reform to where we are making good investments and saving the taxpayer money in the long run. These tax cuts are not having the economic impact they thought they would have. We have given trillions of dollars in tax cuts and the whole reason was to stimulate the economy. We are still in a recession or just modest, very modest, economic growth, if that. Some signs are saying we are going to go back into a recession. This is not having the impact, because these people who make this money are not investing it in the United States. I will pull out the China graphs again if you want me to, but these people are taking their tax cuts and investing it in Asia. The economic impact again is not being felt in the United States. It is being felt abroad. The old theory that tax cuts will stimulate your national economy no longer work. It is an outdated method; it is voodoo economics as President Bush, I, said; and it is not working here today.

Again, send us an e-mail, tell us what you believe the real crises are in the country, [email protected], and possibly we will read your e-mail next week.