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“SUMMER YOUTH EMPLOYMENT PROGRAM” mentioning the U.S. Dept of Labor was published in the House of Representatives section on pages H2114-H2121 on March 12, 1996.
The publication is reproduced in full below:
SUMMER YOUTH EMPLOYMENT PROGRAM
The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. Metcalf). Under the Speaker's announced policy of May 12, 1995, the gentleman from New York [Mr. Owens] is recognized for 60 minutes.
Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, the hour is late, and I will try to compress my remarks into about 30 minutes.
Mr. Speaker, I think it is very important that we realize also that the hour is late for the funding of the Summer Youth Employment Program, and that is the subject which I feel compelled to talk about tonight. We are going to be talking about it more this week. The members of the Congressional Black Caucus at a meeting on Friday decided we would make this item a priority item this week and try to rally our colleagues, both Democrat and Republican, to come to the aid of the young people in our country.
Most of those young people reside in big cities, and that is where most of the money for the Summer Youth Employment Program has traditionally gone, to big cities. That is where the population is, in big cities. It has gone to big cities because that is where the poor young people are.
There are requirements for the program. It is a means-tested program. You have to be poor. You have to meet certain standards in terms of poverty before you can participate in the program.
So it has gone to the big cities, where the poor youth are. It has gone to a large number of minority youth, Hispanic and African-
American. It has gone to a large number of young people who come from poor neighborhoods that do not have people voting as they should vote, so they do not have much political power.
For all these reasons, the program seems to have become very unpopular, certainly become a cast-off by the leadership perhaps in both parties. But certainly the Republican majority in this Congress seems to delight in going after the Summer Youth Employment Program.
The Republican majority in the rescission process more than a year ago zeroed out the program. It was zeroed out for 1995, the past summer, and zeroed out for 1996 and forevermore.
Why does this Summer Youth Employment Program merit being targeted for the hostility of the Republican majority in this Congress? I do not know. I cannot understand. There are protestations from both sides of the aisle about being concerned about young people, about being concerned about youth. We have heard some eloquent speeches tonight about being concerned about pregnant teenagers.
Well, I think one of the speakers said if you are concerned about pregnant teenagers, that means you have to be concerned about programs that impact on both males and females. So we are talking about male and female youth and being concerned about them.
Here is a program that is targeted to young people in a very direct way. Here is a program that does not have a lot of red tape. Here is a program that does not have a great deal of bureaucracy. The money goes to young people to pay them to do jobs in the summer. The money goes to young people to pay them for about 2 months, I think it is an 8-week program. They work at minimum wage. They work for a limited number, 6 hours a day for 4 or 5 days a week. It is a very short program, about 30 hours, I think, a week.
For a small amount of money, it reaps a great dividend. There are many young people who have never been employed before who are employed for the first time. They learn good work habits. They get a sense of worth, self-worth.
I was surprised the other night as we were talking about the dilemma of the Summer Youth Employment Program that one of my assistants who is a college graduate already, she does a lot of my case work and who voluntarily works with young people, was talking about how upset the young people are about the fact that the summer youth program appears to be lost. Normally at this time of the year, there is notification that there is a program and there are dates already offered as to when you can file your application and the process has already started. But they were told it is a hazy situation at best, and, at worse, we have to recognize the fact that there is zero in the budget for the Summer Youth Employment Program.
Yes, the President did ask, I think, for $900 million for this year's program. I think the budget for the previous was $1 billion. He asked for $900 million-some in his budget. But the Republican majority zeroed that out. They asked for zero. The Senate, the other body, has not made any effort to put the Summer Youth Employment Program back in either.
The Republican majority zeroed it out for 1995, but it was saved by the Senate before. The other body put it back in in the conference process. We regained a program that was of a smaller size, but it was nevertheless a program. I think you had more than 600,000, about 700,000 young people serviced in the 1995 program.
I might add that is a long way from the original Summer Youth Employment Program. They used to serve in New York City, for example, 90,000 young people in the summer. New York City is a big place, with 8 million people and a lot of young people. Our school system has 1 million young people in school. Of that number, teenagers are about 400,000. So of that 400,000, 90,000 received jobs at the height of the program in the late 1960's and the early 1970's. I know, because I was the commissioner of the Community Development Agency, which was the agency responsible for community action programs. Those community action programs were primarily the employers of the summer youth program youngsters.
Community action programs operate all year round. They did various things for the community in the area of housing, education, and cleaning streets and doing all kinds of things. They employed those 90,000 young people. In 1995, the number had dropped from 90,000 to 32,000. So, all we could do is give 32,000 young people jobs.
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They are upset. They have good reason to be upset. So my assistant, Necole Brown, was explaining to me about how upset the young people are about the fact, the prospect that there will be absolutely no jobs this summer, and she said, you know, the first job I ever had was in the Summer Youth Employment Program, the very first job I ever had. The first job my brother ever had was in the Summer Youth Employment Program. The first job my sister ever had was in the Summer Youth Employment Program. For the first time, I felt like I was somebody, that I belonged to the mainstream as a result of having that job during the summer.
The story can be told by numerous others. The numbers are very large. I meet lots of young people, because I started my career in the community action program in a local community action agency in Brownsville, which was a front-line employer. So I saw the faces of the young people who were employed by the hundreds summer after summer, and I still meet them on the street 20 years later. I meet them and they remind me that they were employed. They think it was my Summer Youth Employment Program, and they tell me about what they are doing. Not all of them have made good in life, and I have not done a case study to tell you exactly what the longitudinal effect of it has been, but most of them have been greatly helped by that program. And if you do a longitudinal study, careful study of youth who went through the Summer Youth Employment Program, I am sure you will find a great positive benefit between the difference of among poor youths who when through the program and those poor youths who never had the opportunity.
We have had longitudinal studies done of Head Start. Head Start is a program for poor youngsters starting in preschool, and they followed youngsters who went into the program 20 and 25 years ago, and those longitudinal studies always show great benefits when you compare the youngsters in the Head Start Program with a control group that they used of youngsters who did not go into the Head Start Program who came from the same kind of backgrounds.
These programs do benefit young people. We do not know a lot about how to handle our present crisis with youth, but we do know that some things work, some things work and they work very well. We cannot solve all the problems. Nobody is going to stand here, I am certainly not going to stand here and pretend I can tell you what the prescription is for handling teenagers in 1996.
There are some teenagers, I just wrote a letter for one recently, who have all the benefits in the world, came from a very good family, you know, good income in the family, they took good care of him and put him through the best schools, and still he is in trouble with the law, facing 3 or 4 years in jail because of drugs. Not only did he have drugs, but when the police approached the car, he tried to drive off, so the situation is worse. Here is a good youngster from a good family, and I am writing a letter to try to get some kind of leniency and get the judge to look at the situation in total. He has a good opportunity to be rehabilitated because he has the support of a family.
I do not know why he went wrong, though. I cannot explain the phenomenon of young people who have all the advantages in the world going wrong, but there are many of them. They come from all neighborhoods, and Members of Congress certainly know some of them. They have relatives and they have friends who are confronted with this situation. But there are situations where youngsters in poverty, when you apply some kind of assistance, you get a result. There are some things that we know do work, that large numbers, the greatest, overwhelming majority will rise to the occasion if they get some help.
One of the things that Necole Brown told me about the young people she is working with. My office is not equipped to work with young people. I do not have a grant for that.
I have what you call a youth advisory committee where I wanted to get involved a little bit, have youngsters tell me what is going on, but we get more and more involved, because once you show them attention, teenagers want more attention, and they respond in such a way that it inspires you to get more involved, you want to do more for them. So we found ourselves trying to do more and more all the time. But right now the rock bottom thing is to get them access to summer youth employment, those minimum wage jobs, about 30 hours a week can mean all the difference in the world.
We say we care. We say we care as a nation. We say we care as a Congress. But we do things which are quite the opposite. In fact, it is kind of an evil situation that we confront when we have people who are knowledgeable about exactly what is going on and they stand here and tell us that we do not have the money to fund a Summer Youth Employment Program where youngsters all across the country can get same jobs this summer. It will bust the budget. We do not have the money in the budget. What are we talking about? We are talking about probably $600 or $700 million out of a trillion-dollar budget, $600 or $700 million. The same people who stand here and tell us that we do not have the money to fund a program for youth, which will employ more than 600,000 young in the cities, give them hope and help us to deal with some of these problems that cost so much more money. It costs $20,000 to keep a young person in jail for a year, and yet here is a Summer Youth Employment Program, we are going to pay minimum wage for 2 months, 10 weeks, 8 weeks, I am sorry. That tiny amount of money we cannot invest. It is some kind of distorted, evil kind of thinking that comes out with a conclusion that we cannot afford it.
The same people who say we cannot afford it will do nothing about the fact that the CIA just discovered the fact that it has $2 billion in its petty cash fund that it did not know it had. Two billion dollars, the auditors have discovered $2 billion. That is what has been made public. When the CIA makes something public, we always have to sort of look at it and add something to it because we know they do not tell the truth. They are in the business of not telling the truth, so it is probably more than $2 billion, $2 billion.
So we have written a letter to the President saying that, you know, you can solve the problem of the Summer Youth Employment Program. It is the same letter we intend to distribute to the whole Congress and certainly the Republican leadership of this House, which started the problem. The Republican majority instituted this attack on the Summer Youth Employment Program, this irrational attack, this evil attack, this attack which runs counter to the purposes of any sane group of people who want to help young people. We hope that they will also read the letter and respond.
We wrote to Bill Clinton, the members of the House Committee on Economic and Educational Opportunities. The gentleman from Michigan
[Mr. Kildee] and I initiated the letter. We will be asking other people to join us:
Dear Mr. President: We respectfully and urgently request that the $2 billion in unspent funds recently discovered by auditors of the CIA be reprogrammed to eliminate the cuts in title I Head Start and the Summer Youth Employment Program. We have noted with great shock and indignation the revelation that the CIA has $2 billion in unspent funds that no one in the government was aware of, $2 billion that no one in the government was aware of. It is our understanding that these funds are not on any budget schedule and therefore are available to be utilized for more positive purposes. More specifically, Mr. President, we propose that the following budget actions be initiated by your administration:
Transfer $1.1 billion to title I, the education programs that go to the elementary and secondary schools, title one. Transfer $300 million to Head Start; $300 million is that amount that Head Start has been cut in the budget initiated by the Republican majority in the House of Representatives. And transfer $600 million to summer youth employment programs, $600 million.
It all adds up to $2 billion; $2 billion is a lot of money but look at the great good you can do if you put it to positive purposes. We are certain the Democratic Members of both the House and the Senate would enthusiastically support these actions. We are also certain that the Republican opposition would find it very difficult to show cause why these recently discovered funds that are free and available cannot be used to guarantee the same level of funding for these vital education programs.
Mr. President, we look forward to working closely with you and to achieve this very practical goals.
I would like for the Republican majority of this House to show cause, tell us why you have attacked the Summer Youth Employment Program and, if your reason is that there is no money in the budget and it is impossible to make room for the program now, then tell us why you cannot join with us in reprogramming $2 million that the Central Intelligence Agency has that it did not know it had, that nobody knew it had. So it certainly is not on anybody's budget schedule. Tell us.
This is a challenge and this is a moral challenge. If you care about morality, if you care about family values, if you care about pregnant teenagers, we have heard some eloquent speeches about pregnant teenagers and people who want to take steps to deal with the problem of pregnant teenagers in any way possible, and I applaud every suggestion that was made. I applaud those speeches on both sides of the aisle. We need to come to grips with the problem. But you certainly do not care about the problem of pregnant teenagers if you are going to wipe out a program like the Summer Youth Employment Program which is quite simply, a direct way of giving hope to young people. It gives hope.
I heard the people who talked before me about teenage pregnancy use the phrase over and over again about hope, hope for young people. I heard the gentleman from Connecticut [Mr. Shays] on the other side of the aisle talk about dreams and the fact that as a young person his parents guaranteed he had the opportunity to dream and how you wreck the dreams of young people when their dysfunctional lives lead to pregnancy and you throw them into a quagmire that they can never get out of. I heard this with great sympathy.
I hope that we as intelligent people, we as intelligent people also act as honest people, because we are not honest, it is not honest to look at the situation and see the $600 million will solve the problem,
$600 million will take us a long way toward giving some of those teenagers hope, the males and the females because they are both part of the problem; $600 million will save us a great deal of money by keeping young people out of trouble, out of jail.
Jail always costs $20,000 or more per year for young people. All of these are so obvious, so self-evident until only some kinds of evil force can be at work to not make decisionmakers in Washington see it and act on it. What is going on? I really do not know what is going on.
Mr. Speaker, I think the gentleman from New Jersey wants to join me here. And before I go any further, I want to give him an opportunity to join us. I think we will take our entire hour at this point. The gentleman from New Jersey [Mr. Payne] is welcome to join this discussion. Mr. Payne is the chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus, which had a retreat last week on Friday. On Friday, we looked at all the priorities and all the problems. We concluded that the problem facing us more right now, the problem that has a deadline on it, the problem that has a time clock, a time bomb ticking away is the problem of summer youth employment. Summer youth employment, the program, decisions need to be made now. They need to be made soon. The process needs to be engaged.
We have a lot of talk about AmeriCorps, and we are all for AmeriCorps. Both of us serve on the committee, the Committee on Economic and Educational Opportunities, which is responsible for AmeriCorps. It used to be called the Education and Labor Committee when we passed the bill that created AmeriCorps. Nobody ever said to us, when you create AmeriCorps you have to get rid of the Summer Youth Employment Program.
I want everybody to hear me carefully. If you bring AmeriCorps into our neighborhoods this summer and there is no Summer Youth Employment Program, I fear for the safety of the AmeriCorps youth. It would not be just to wipe out the Summer Youth Employment Program and then send in middle-class youngsters from the AmeriCorps program and expect there not to be a reaction. It is wrong. It is unjust. And I hope you understand how explosive that could be.
Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from New Jersey [Mr. Payne].
Mr. PAYNE of New Jersey. Mr. Speaker, let me first of all commend my friend and colleague, the gentleman from New York [Mr. Owens], for calling this special order tonight. I appreciate having the opportunity to participate in this with him. Through our service together on the House Committee on Economic and Educational Opportunities, we have worked together many years on issues and projects, on educational issues, on issues of jobs, and I have always admired the gentleman's strong stand and his conviction and his willingness to stand up for what he believes in.
So it is with that pleasure that I participate in this special order tonight and also to reiterate, as he said, that the Congressional Black Caucus held a retreat where we talked about the state of black America where we discussed issues that confront us as a people and this Nation as a country. One of the issues that continually came up and the issue that we overridingly talk about was the fact that the summer youth employment is an extremely important, critical and key issue to us in our communities.
Tonight I am proud to join with him in standing up for young people in our communities.
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There is one concept now which all Members of Congress from both sides of the aisle can agree. It is the importance of instilling in our young people a strong work ethic. That is what made this country great; that is what made America what it is today. And a sense of personal responsibility. We hear so much about personal responsibility in the new majority's rhetoric. Personal responsibility also includes the opportunity to feel that personal responsibility by virtue of being able to have concrete, tangible goals that people can see and do, and that is where employment comes in.
That is what the summer youth employment program is all about.
More of us can remember what it was like when we got our first summer job. We can all remember that; my colleague mentioned that, too. Many times it was during elementary school or high school, and no matter how menial the job was, how unimportant it seemed to other people, we felt a sense of accomplishment, we felt a sense of pride, and we worked to live up to our employer's expectation as we collected our first paycheck. Many of us began saving for college. Some of us dreamed of one day owning our own businesses. My brother was very successful in having a business for 20 years that he ran, where he was involved with high technology in manufacturing computer forms. And so it was a dream that started when we had an opportunity to have a summer job.
Today in too many of our economically deprived communities there is a serious shortage of summer jobs, despite the eagerness of thousands and thousands and thousands of young people who want to become gainfully employed. In the past, the summer job program has enjoyed strong bipartisan support for all the years. There has been a wide recognition of the value of providing low-income youngsters with valuable work experience at a critical time in their life were they learn these work ethics, work experience, the whole value of work.
Young people need an alternative to hanging out on the streets, for drifting out in the community, and they will see this opportunity to be productive, to hold a job, if we will extend it to them, if we would reach out and say there is a job, because many times as I walked down my boulevards and my streets in my districts, sometimes late a night just to encounter the young people, they say, ``Mr. Congressman, won't you come on over here,'' and I will go over, and we will talk, and they will say, ``I'll stop hanging on this corner doing things that I'm doing that is not right if I could find a job..'' And they challenge:
``Mr. Congressman, can I come down to your office tomorrow and get a job?''
And it is a very shallow feeling when you say, ``Well, come down, and we'll work at it,'' but knowing that there are very few jobs available.
I have been working with young people most of my adult life as a school teacher, as president of the YMCA of the USA before coming to Congress, and I have seen how positively young men and women respond when they are given an opportunity to hold a job, to earn a paycheck, that pride.
I believe the new majority in Congress have made a big mistake in targeting summer youth employment programs for elimination, a big mistake. It would be abundantly unfair to pull the rug out from under so many deserving young men and woman.
There is much emphasis today on dealing with the crime problem in our Nation, especially in our urban centers where crime is rampant. Congress sees to have no problem with spending billions of taxpayer dollars on new prisons to warehouse offenders. The majority of Congress voted to increase the expenditures for prisons from $7.9 billion to
$10.5 billion, an increase, money taken away from prevention and put into more prison construction. When they talk about the costs per inmate, the costs of construction is not even built in. Any other kind of business, you build in the cost of construction, and it is $20,000 plus just for correction officers, food, health, and all of the things that go along with having 24-hour, 7 days a week, 360 days a year custodial care over a person. And so it certainly would be a much better investment in an employment program if we took the money and put young people back on the right track.
So I hope my colleagues will join with us in restoring the $635 million for this summer program. In keeping with our efforts to compromise on the budget, it actually will bring down the figure from last year. It is only 75 percent of the 800 million that was appropriated last year, and so it is in keeping with gradual decrease.
Let me just say once again that years ago, when I was employed in the downtown business community, there were jobs available at the utilities firm, at the insurance companies, at the transit company, and young people would come and get summer jobs, and so the necessity for government to be the employer of last resort was not even necessary at that time.
Today in my community those companies no longer have summer jobs available. Those companies no longer have the work force they had in my city of northern New Jersey. At one time 500,000 people lived there, just about 1 million people were there during the day. Today we have a city of 275,000 where during the day the numbers do not swell much because the employment opportunities are not there. So if the full-time employment opportunities are not there, then the summer job opportunities are not there.
And so I just appeal to the President, when he sends back his veto message, and I personally mentioned this to him on yesterday when he was in New Jersey, that young people must not, must not, be sacrificed, that when this CR comes back, it must have in it the money to restore summer youth employment, which was not in either bill, and it must be in the bill when it comes back.
I had the opportunity to work as a waiter, a truck driver, a lumber handler, a warehouse man. I worked as a longshoreman. I did just about--postal employee. I was a teacher. I did it all, and it gave me the whole sense of feeling empowered because of earning my way.
As a matter of fact, as I conclude, I was a newspaper boy. I remember at the young age of 9 starting my job. I think you were supposed to be 12, but I just told them I was old enough. But I started a job, and at that time it was just delivering of 3-cent newspapers. This was back in the forties, and I made three-eighths of a cent a paper, and I only had 30 customers, so I had to build my route up. I built it up to over 125 customers because then in order to make a dime, I had to deliver 30 papers. And so that was slow. And so it just gave me the opportunity to have my own business, to move, to earn, and actually made about maybe
$3 a week, and had 50 cents taken out on a payroll deduction at that time to put down when I decided that I was going to go to Seton Hall and that it was not enough of a scholarship money in order for me to go.
And so I can remember very clearly those days, and it instilled a pride.
We do a disservice to young people today when we take away the opportunity for them to achieve. It is unfair that they do not have the opportunity to be successful. It is just like in some school districts that the young people do not have the opportunity to learn, and then they fail standardized tests. It is unfair. We have to stop being unfair to young people. We have to start treating them with dignity, self-respect, the total person, the mind, the body and the spirit, the triangle which makes the full person.
This Nation is taking away from our future a major ingredient and the opportunity to earn a living, an opportunity to learn, and we need to talk about that at some other time. But the gentleman was kind enough to yield, and so I will conclude by urging my colleagues on both sides of the aisle to join with us in restoring these very, very crucial and important funds.
Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague from New Jersey. He is from the great city of Newark, and he mentioned the fact that Newark used to have a bustling downtown area filled with people, you know, not too many years ago, and that has declined greatly now.
I am going to talk a little bit about that. That is part of the problem. And we have had a situation develop where our cities have been drained of resources. Money has flowed from our cities to the rest of the country, and we have lost a great deal of the resources that we need to keep our own cities going. And it is not through mismanagement, it is not that our cities are not still, our cities and our States, are not still very wealthy States.
New York State is a State in the Nation which provides the greatest amount of surplus over in terms of the Treasury, and when you compare what New York State receives from the Federal Government, what it receives from the Federal Government in terms of aid is much less than it pays in, and that has been true for the last 20 years. In 1994, the last year that they have figures available, New York State paid into the Federal Treasury $18.9 billion more than it got back from the Federal Treasury in terms, in Federal aid. New York State was the, you know, most generous of the States, but New Jersey also paid far more into the Treasury than it got back from the Federal Government.
And this has been a pattern. Michigan, many of the Northeastern States, have consistently paid more into the Treasury. The States with the large cities like Chicago and Detroit, Philadelphia, those States are being discriminated against in many ways by the Federal Government policies.
One way we would get our money back in terms of Federal aid would be through programs like the summer youth employment program. New York City, for example, over the last 20 years has lost $10 billion in Federal aid, and we hear on this floor a lot of criticism about New York State and New York City spending too much money on Medicare and Medicaid. Medicare and Medicaid, we have the highest expenditures in the country. But even with the highest expenditures in the country in Medicare and Medicaid, New York State is still putting in, paying out to the Federal Government, $18.9 billion more than it is getting back. We do not have any big defense plants, we do not have any disasters like hurricanes or earthquakes or floods. There are a number of ways that we do not receive money back from the Federal Government that other areas do. Highway funding; we have a great need for mass transit funds, and they are being cut.
Now I want to focus on the summer youth employment program. But you cannot tell the whole story and you cannot show how vicious, how vicious the process is here in Washington, unless you look at the total picture.
And at this point I want to pause and make certain that everybody understands that for the next few days we are going to be talking about this problem. The summer youth employment program will be on our agenda, and a lot of people say, well, the situation is not so bad because the continuing resolution says that all programs will be funded at 75 percent of their last year's funding level. Well, you know that is not true of the summer youth employment program. The last year was zeroed out. There is no authorization, there is no--the rescission process killed the program. So it would be 75 percent of zero that you are talking about.
Let me read from the latest statement on it that appeared just a few days ago in the House action reports. The Congressional Quarterly's House action report reads that the bill that the House has put forth, H.R. 1944, has no funds for the summer youth employment program. Yes, the President had requested $958 million for this program, but since the fiscal year 1995 rescissions and disaster supplement appropriations bill--I am sorry that was H.R. 1944. The bill that we are talking about is the appropriations bill for the Labor, Education and Health. That is the bill we are talking about, H.R. 2127. H.R. 2127 for this year is the bill that has this language in it--I mean that has no funds for the summer youth employment program.
Since the fiscal year 1995 rescissions and disaster supplemental appropriations bill, which was H.R. 1944, rescinds all funds that were appropriated in advance for the summer of 1996, the summer of 1995 will be the last year for the operation of this program. The last year, gone; 1995 is the last year that there are funds available.
So they have been clear that let every member of Congress understand when you talk to your constituency, understand that there is no amount in the budget for which we can take 75 percent of. It is zero at this point.
Now the Senate, I do not know why the Senate has abandoned the program also, because it did take the initiative last year, and in the conference process put back the money for the 1995 summer youth employment program. This year the Senate majority has done nothing, and the Senate Democrats have an amendment that they are using to try to get back the funds for the summer youth employment program. They have an amendment which includes a number of things, Senate Democratic education--this is as of March 12. I am reading from the day's national journal, Congress Daily. Senate democratic education amendment would provide $1.28 billion for the title I compensatory education program,
$208 million for school improvement programs, $91 million for school-
to-work programs, and $60 million for the Goals 2000 program.
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In addition, the Democratic amendment would provide $136 million for Head Start, as well as $635 million for the Labor Department's Summer Jobs Program and $333 million for aid to dislocated workers. The Democratic amendment is being proposed but there is no guarantee that that is going to be passed. We are in a situation where the summer youth employment program has zero in the budget for it at this point, and a lot of work has to be done to save the situation.
Why the hostility toward the summer youth employment program? Why are we in a situation in a Congress where family values are touted by everybody on both sides of the aisle, in a Congress where young people are said to be of great concern by both sides of the aisle, and I have heard the Republican majority speak again and again about being concerned about the future. Children are the future, should not be made to pay for the debts that we make today. They are very concerned about drastic budget cuts, draconian cuts in order to guarantee that our children will not have to pay for the debts we make today.
I am glad they are so concerned about children. I am, also. There is a lot of concern about unborn children, children in the womb. I am concerned about them, too. I think every mother who has a child has to think twice about it, because of this cruel backward world we live in where we will propose to pay $20,000 to keep a juvenile delinquent in jail but we are not willing to pay 2 months' salary to a youngster who wants a job during the summer. There is something radically wrong with our thinking.
We have a lot of arrogant sophomores who think they are philosopher kings, and they spout off about saving money and the need to downsize the Federal Government while they are completely blind to the fact that the CIA has a $2 billion slush fund.
They are blind to the fact that today's New York Times talks about a new set of jet fighters we are going to build that eventually will cost
$1 trillion, a whole system of jet fighters that we are going to be building, all the manufacturing companies are gearing up, and that cost is going to be $1 trillion. do you want to saddle your children with $1 trillion in costs for a new jet fighter plane when we have the most modern sophisticated jet fighter planes already?
One is being manufactured at Marietta, GA, in Speaker Gingrich's district. That one, the F-22, is already the most sophisticated thing you can imagine. Why do we need another set?
We say we are going to downsize Government, the era of big Government is over, but the defense spending continues to go on at the same pace. The CIA is the same size that it was 10 years ago. Yet we say we are downsizing Government.
We also insist that places like New York State and New York City get their house in order in order to qualify for the largesse that the Federal Government confers upon them. I have just told you, the Federal Government does not do New York State any favors.
If New York State stood alone, it would be in receipt of $18.9 billion that it does not have now. If you gave us back the $18.9 billion in 1994 that we paid into the Federal Government, which was greater than the amount we got back in terms of aid, we could solve our budget problems.
In fact, just give us back half that amount. If we had $9 billion, the New York State budget could be balanced, we could increase the budget for education, we could take care of our own youth this summer. We could have a New York State summer youth employment program, if you give us back the great amount of money we pay in that we do not get back in terms of aid.
I mention this because last Thursday, March 7, the Washington Post, and I think it is very significant that the Washington Post did this and not the New York Times. I would like to know where is the New York Times on this issue. I have never seen them do an article of this magnitude. The Washington Post, last Thursday, had a front page article which talked about this very situation.
It is entitled, ``U.S. to New York: It's Still Dutch Treat. Balance of Taxes to Services Favors Washington--So Does the Rhetoric.'' It was written by a reporter, a Washington Post staff writer, named Malcolm Gladwell. Mr. Gladwell makes some very interesting statements here, and I commend him on his research here but I marvel at his naivete. I am going to read some of this. We have a little time left.
Quoting from Mr. Gladwell's article on the front page of the Washington Post:
In a memorable outburst late last year, Representative Newt Gingrich declared that New York City was saddled with ``a culture of waste for which they want us to send a check.'' The rest of the country, the House Speaker said, in a blunt summation of Federal urban policy, `` is not going to bail out the habits that have made New York so extraordinarily expensive.''
I guess one of those programs that have made us extraordinarily expensive is the summer youth employment program. We get more than anybody else in terms of young people because we have more poor young people in our city than anybody else.
To repeat the quote, Newt Gingrich says, ``We will not be saddled with a culture of waste for which they want us to send a check. The Federal Government is not going to bail out the habits that have made New York so extraordinarily expensive.''
Continuing to read Mr. Gladwell's article:
As Republicans campaign in the New York primary, no one is talking about aid to the cities, mass transit and urban renewal. And the prevailing assumption in Washington, as Gingrich put it, is that places like New York City are financial sinkholes, inefficient, wasteful, and a drain on the public purse. It is a powerful new idea, central to the fate of American urban life. But it has one problem, economists say: It isn't true.
According to statistics complied by economists at Harvard University, Illinois, Massachusetts, Ohio, New Jersey and Michigan--in other words, those States powered by the metropolitan economies of older cities such as Chicago, Boston, Cincinnati and Detroit--all send billions of dollars more to Washington each year in Federal taxes than they get back in social programs, defense spending or public works projects. And the biggest contributor of all to the Federal budget--the cash cow of the United States Treasury--is the place Gingrich derided as a dead weight on the rest of the country: New York City.
New York State in 1994 contributed $18.9 billion more to the Federal Government than it received in return. It ran a surplus of that amount in 1994.
The Speaker's home State of Georgia, meanwhile, is one of a large number of southern, largely Republican States that receive far more from the Federal Government than they send out in taxes.
Quoting Mr. Moynihan:
I told Mr. Gingrich, what are you talking about, my friend? In Atlanta, 59 percent of the children are on AFDC, Aid to Families with Dependent Children, in a single year. Where do you think that money from from?
By the way, Atlanta is in Georgia, in case somebody does not have their geography straight. Atlanta is in Georgia. Georgia is the Speaker's home State.
The idea that cities like New York run huge surpluses with Washington is, according to urban experts and economists, one of the best-kept secrets in American politics, an idea that--if it ever gained currency--could force a fundamental transformation in the relationship between the Federal Government and the States.
Here is where I applaud Mr. Gladwell's naivete. It is a beautiful purity. He thinks that if we really understood the facts, if we really had the information, it would change our behavior. But, of course, most of the people on the Budget Committee here, Republicans and Democrats, understand this fact very well. Most of the people on the Appropriations Committee understand this fact. They are not dumb. The idea that Congressmen are dumb and do not understand statistics and do not understand the complexities of the modern world is a ridiculous idea. Congressmen are some of the smartest people in the world. They understand. They have the knowledge. But where is the morality? Where is the integrity which says that this is not just? I am going to read Mr. Gladwell's statement again.
The idea that cities like New York run huge surpluses with Washington is, according to urban experts and economists, one of the best-kept secrets in American politics, an idea that--if it ever gained currency--could force a fundamental transformation in the relationship between the Federal Government and the States.
I hope that by ``currency'' he means that the American people, ordinary people with common sense out there, are going to learn more and more about this injustice and begin to pressure to have something done about it. I hope that that is what he means, because it is understood by the people who are making policy here. They are bullying the situation. Power, the power to harass the cities, the power to neglect the cities, the power to swindle the cities.
We had a big swindle in the private sector. Money flowed from the depositors in New York City, Detroit, Philadelphia. The big cities of the Northeast poured money into their banks and the banks would not invest in the big cities, very little investment in the infrastructure, very little investment in shopping malls, in stores there. They said that the cities were a bad risk, so the money flowed out to the Midwest, the South, the West, into the savings and loan associations, into the banks, and they used the money to invest in shopping malls and condominiums and all kinds of programs which were supposed to be not risks but good buys, good investments.
Then came the savings and loan scandal, which up to $300 billion was found to be bad investments or crooked investments, stupid investments, and the taxpayers of the whole country were saddled with a bill which they do not even know about yet because nobody talks honestly about it in the Government here, of about $300 billion it has amounted to, the savings and loan swindle, money we have to pay back to depositors, plus the administration of the process of getting all this straightened out. It is still going on. They put out reports that are not very clear, but at least $300 billion of public money has gone down the drain.
That is the private sector taking the money out of the cities, refusing to invest in the cities, and putting it into so-called better investments in the South, the West, the Midwest, and losing the money. Now we have the Federal Government, and this has been going on for some time. It was started really by the New Deal, and I am going to read on quickly because he talks about that.
The New Deal was an altruistic action, where Franklin Roosevelt and the people who conceived the New Deal were not dumb, either. They understood that the wealth was in the Northeast. They understood that the States in the Northeast had more money, and they wanted to help the rest of the country by having programs which spread the money across the rest of the country. They wanted to.
They did not talk about States rights. If New York had talked about States rights 50 years ago, then you would have never had the money to have the agricultural subsidy program across the rural areas of the country. You would not have the money to rebuild the infrastructure in the cities. The WPA would have been limited to those States that could pay for it.
But they did not have States rights and block grants and all this nonsense about States being able to administer programs better. Fortunately, that was not around, and the beneficiaries of that are mainly the southern States. Southern States get more than anybody else. When you add up all the figures in this same Harvard report, $65 billion more go into the southern States than they pay out to the Federal Government; $65 billion.
One of the biggest recipients is Mississippi. It gets $6 billion more from the Government than it pays in. But Virginia, Georgia, a number of others, Georgia gets $2 billion more from the Federal Government than it pays in. The county where the Speaker resides is the county that gets the most money from the Federal Government per capita than any other county in the country, in the whole country. Speaker Gingrich's district gets more money from the Federal Government per capita, per person, than any other.
Let me read on from the Washington Post article of Tuesday, March 7, by Mr. Malcolm Gladwell:
It strongly suggests, for example, that the decline of many northeastern American cities may be due not just to mismanagement--as is now popularly imagined--but to the emptying of their coffers by the Federal Government.
{time} 2330
It also suggests that keeping cities healthy should not be seen by Congress as an act of charity so much as a prudent step to protect one of the Treasury's real moneymakers.
Let me repeat that.
The cities should not be treated as an act of charity,
Aid to cities:
So much as a prudent step to protect one of the Treasury's greatest moneymakers. Money has been drained steadily from the cities. The policies of the Federal Government the last 20 years have been draining money away from the cities, but the cities are the moneymakers.
Cities are still, despite this great drain and despite the stress on their infrastructures, they are still producing more tax money than any other part of the country:
Manhattan sends an awful lot of money to Washington, says Sigurd Grava who teaches urban planning at Columbia University. But Manhattan is beginning to suffer from problems that require very heavy capital investment, and that is where we should expect the money to be coming back. And if the money does not come back from the Federal Government, then we have a serious dislocation. The cow is being milked in the city, and that is fine because that is what cows are for. But you have to feed the cow, too.
There are two reasons why States in the Northeast tend to pay much more to Washington than they get back. The first is that the northeast is still, as it has been since colonial days, the seat of much of the country's wealth. As a result, the region pays the lion's share of the country's taxes.
I heard somebody here before talking about the terrible amount of taxes the pay, and I think the American people really deserve as individuals and families to be relieved of some of the tax burden. We should have corporations paying a greater share of the taxes, because corporations are making great amounts of money. We should do something about the great tax burden on the families. But let us understand where the taxes are coming from. They are still coming from the Northeast in great amounts.
In New York State, for example, the per capita income in 1994 was
$25,999, which means, according to the Harvard study, on average every New Yorker paid just about $5,000 in Federal taxes. In Connecticut, the same statistics are $29,402, and $6,281 for every individual family.
But in a much poorer State, such as South Carolina, for example, where the per capita income is $17,695 the average Federal tax bill was just $3,816. The other side of the equation is that what States get back from Washington, and here the Northeast is an exception as well, New York State, New Jersey, and Connecticut each have over the years gotten a big chunk of Federal funds for Medicaid programs. We have been criticized for spending money on Medicaid and Medicare. I say if you are going to spend money, and I can think of no more noble way to spend it than to help people, if they are spending it for the health of people, to take care of people, the elderly, the sick, the injured, children, their health, then that is a great way to spend money.
Let us get rid of the corruption in health care programs. Let us get rid of the waste, but if you are spending it on health care instead of on weapons systems that are not needed, then you are certainly a few steps higher on the moral plane than those people who are spending it for weapons systems.
They go on to say:
By national standards, our Medicaid programs tend to be quite lavish. But if all the payments the Federal government makes to the States are totaled, the Northeast's share of money for welfare, salaries of military personnel, public works projects, social security checks, highway construction, and other federally funded programs lags well behind the rest of the country. New York State got
$3,948 per capita from Washington in 1994, while New Jersey received less, $3,648. Both were well below the national average of $4,732 and far behind North Dakota at
$6,001, or New Mexico at $6,734, both of which received large Federal agricultural and land management subsidies.
You want to know where the money is going in this country? You want to know where the great injustice is, where those people who are really on corporate welfare because many of these agricultural subsidies are not going to individuals and families, they are going to agricultural businesses, and it is going to States that receive Federal agricultural and land management subsidies. The biggest winner of all in terms, and economists say there is nothing wrong with this kind of income redistribution. In an open economy such as ours, it is not necessary, even desirable, that Federal expenditures of taxes always be in balance in every State.
Harvard economists Monica Friar and Herman Leonard wrote in a 1995 balance of payments report, an annual study initiated 20 years ago by Senator Moynihan, indeed one of the main purposes of a progressive income tax is that the more well-to-do, wherever they may reside, pay a higher share for the services provided by the government.
They go on to talk about the New Deal and how the people who concocted the New Deal knew that they were spreading the wealth throughout the entire country, what would they say if they heard people talk about block grants now and the States having the right to do what they want to do.
New Yorkers ought to wake up. Maybe they ought to get on board block grants, States' rights, and have New Yorkers have the right to take the money back. If New York had control of the $18.9 billion, the State, half of that is the city, $9 billion, we could have a summer youth program without begging anyone. We have been begging, begging; we begged last year. I have a set of letters here written by the Congressional Black Caucus, where we begged the Honorable Mark Hatfield, Senate Committee on Appropriations, we begged Honorable Bob Livingston, chairman of the Committee on Appropriations, we begged David Obey to help us, we begged Robert Byrd, the ranking member on the Senate Committee on Appropriations, we begged for a summer youth employment program in 1995.
Now we are on our knees again begging. We are begging to help young people, begging to do something which makes a great deal of sense. We are begging to do something which anybody with common sense knows is right and is productive. We are begging.
Let me just conclude by saying that I appreciate the eloquent statements made by the persons who were concerned about teenage pregnancy. But I am very sorry that the hypocrisy is so thick in this Chamber. I am very sorry there is so much hypocrisy that we can talk in
``hifalutin'' terms about helping teenagers with the problem of teenage pregnancy, helping teenagers with their lives, sense of self-worth, and then we turn down a program which is directly aimed to help teenagers.
Let me tell you about the teenage problem where it first originated in America. Let me tell you about the teenage pregnancy, where it happened, overwhelming in moral terms. America's greatest teenage pregnancy problem existed for 232 years, when Africans were enslaved in this country. For 232 years, African girls who were enslaved were required in this country to become pregnant in order to be able to keep eating.
Let me read you just in closing from ``Bull Whip Days: The Slaves Remembered,'' an oral history, where the slaves during the Federal rightist project told their stories, and they were recorded and here is a slave named Hilliard Yellerday, who says, and this is teenage pregnancy on a massive scale, when a girl became a woman, she was required to go to a man and become a mother. There was generally a form of marriage. The master read a paper to them telling them they were man and wife. Some were married by the master laying down a broom and the two slaves, man and woman, would jump over it. The master would then tell them they were man and wife, and they could go to bed together.
Master would sometimes go and get a large hale, hearty Negro man from some other plantation to go to his Negro woman. He would ask the other master to let this man come over to his place to go to his slave girls. A slave girl was expected to have children as soon as she became a woman. Some of them had children at the age of 12 and 13 years old. Negro men 6 feet tall went to some of these children.
This is a testimony by Hilliard Yellerday, an ex-slave woman.
Here is a system that oppressed teenagers, and we have a system that neglects teenagers, plays games with teenagers, and refuses to offer the simplest form of health at the lowest cost, the summer youth employment program. We are in a moral dilemma as great as those slave masters who made their slave girls become pregnant as soon as they were old enough to become pregnant.
LEAVE OF ABSENCE
By unanimous consent, leave of absence was granted to:
Mrs. Collins of Illinois (at the request of Mr. Gephardt) for today and the balance of the week, on account of medical reasons.
Mrs. Chenoweth (at the request of Mr. Armey) for today and March 13, on account of medical reasons.
Mr. Christensen (at the request of Mr. Armey) for today, on account of a death in the family.
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