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“VARIOUS ISSUES OF THE DAY” mentioning the U.S. Dept of State was published in the House of Representatives section on pages H3909-H3913 on June 6, 2000.
The publication is reproduced in full below:
VARIOUS ISSUES OF THE DAY
The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. Walden of Oregon). Under the Speaker's announced policy of January 6, 1999, the gentleman from California (Mr. Sherman) is recognized for 60 minutes.
Mr. SHERMAN. Mr. Speaker, a few minutes ago I became aware that this hour of time to speak before this House was available. I thought about it for a moment. I am confident that my presence here will not adversely affect the ratings of other cable television shows, many of which are made in our area. And so I figured I would take this opportunity even though I have not had the chance to prepare and my remarks may not be quite as crisp as I would like.
I would like to address a number of different topics that I have been thinking about, particularly over this last district work period. The first is an odd attempt by those who claim to love Ronald Reagan to rewrite the history of the fall of the Soviet Union.
We know what the real history was. The Soviet Union looked powerful. We spent on our defense, fearful of Soviet aggression and expansion, and Ronald Reagan led us in those efforts.
Our deficit grew. We tightened our belts domestically. We did so because we were told that the Soviet Union could expand, that it was powerful, that it could emerge as the most powerful nation on Earth.
In 1991, to the surprise of just about everyone both inside and outside the Soviet Union, the Soviet Union began to collapse. That is what really happened.
It is kind of disconcerting to think that all the experts in all the capitals did not foresee such an enormously important event. And experts are reluctant to admit that they cannot always see the future. But what is worse is that those who have come to idolize Ronald Reagan have started to rewrite history.
In their rewriting of history, Ronald Reagan foresaw as early as the early 1980s that, within a decade, the Soviet Union could be pushed into the dust bin of history, that Reagan knew that the Soviet Union had begun to corrode from the inside and far from being a challenge to the United States, in fact, it was a nation that could not survive.
These supposed supporters of Ronald Reagan ascribe to him an omniscience and all-knowingness, that they think is complimentary.
In fact, what these supporters of Reagan are doing are besmirching Ronald Reagan's character, attacking his honesty, and telling us that our former President is a liar to the American people.
Time and again, President Reagan came before us in this hall, I was not here, stood and delivered the State of the Union address and rallied America to spend more and more on our defense.
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He never told us it was offense. He said it was necessary to prevent Soviet expansion, not some secret plan to force the Soviet Union into collapse. Ronald Reagan came before the American people and told us the Soviet Union was a powerful threat and would remain so for quite some time. He urged us to embark upon military expenditure projects, some of which would last a decade or 2 decades because, he told us, the Soviet Union was a threat. Now, those who claim to be Ronald Reagan's ideological descendants, some who claim to be his friends, tell us it was all a lie, that Ronald Reagan knew that the Soviet Union had corroded from the inside, that he knew that these expenditures were not necessary to defend us but rather were part of a secret plan to force the Soviet Union to spend more and more on its defense in a dangerous game in which the Soviet Union would be faced either with the prospect of launching a nuclear strike or consenting to an arms race that it could not win, an arms race launched against it by a Reagan administration with a secret plan to drive it into destruction. Ronald Reagan never told us that we were engaged in such an effort. Ronald Reagan never told us that we were trying to push the Soviet Union to destruction, that they would face a moment at which they would blame us and would realize that either they would launch a military strike or go into the dustbin of history.
He never told us this, because he never believed it; and the Soviet Union in its dying hours did not believe it, either. The Soviets knew that their system collapsed of its own weight. Only retroactive American arrogance would say that the other superpower collapsed because of something we did here in Washington, D.C.
The fact of the matter is Communism does not work, and in the last decade or two, both Communist giants have ceased to embrace their ideology; and without that ideology they have ceased to be exporters of Communism, ceased to have confidence in Communism, and it has shaken them to their roots. Are we going to say that Communism lost favor in the Soviet Union because of American hostility and Communist ideology lost favor in China because of American friendship? That either friendship or hostility from America creates the same result? I think not. Communism does not work. Russia and China realized it. This forced a crisis of confidence in both places. The Soviet Union not being one nation but rather an amalgam of nations held together by a failed ideology collapsed, and China has moved from the ideology of Communism to the ideology of nationalism overseen by a relatively small group of oligarchs and local potentates that control the economy. To say that it all happened according to a plan is to dangerously rewrite history.
While I talk about the Reagan administration and the collapse of the Soviet Union, it leads naturally to a discussion of Star Wars, an issue that is still before us. Just because the Soviet Union is no longer intact does not mean that we are safe. In fact, the world is more complicated and more dangerous. There are those who have come before this House and suggested that the world does not have to be a dangerous place if only we developed a missile defense system.
Now, Mr. Speaker, I would like to see us continue to research in this area, and when our technology has advanced to the point where we can provide some reasonable defense at reasonable cost, deployment is certainly called for. But let us not fool the American people. Those that cannot hit us with an ICBM, those who cannot hit us with an intercontinental ballistic missile will be able to smuggle nuclear weapons into our cities no matter how effective our missile shield. A nuclear weapon is about the size of a person, some smaller than a child. And anyone who has been in Southern California or probably just about any major city in this country is aware that every year hundreds of thousands, every day thousands of illegal immigrants are snuck across our border not just from the southern border but the northern as well; that illegal drugs are smuggled into America with relative ease, and this is by people being paid a few hundred dollars to sneak a person into the United States, marijuana importers or smugglers, criminals bringing in bales of marijuana for a few thousand dollars in compensation.
How difficult would it be to sneak a nuclear weapon into an American city? A nuclear weapon smaller than a child does not need ventilation, does not need to be fed. Children who are smuggled into America scream and cry. Nuclear weapons would not. So imagine that we had a perfect defense against Iranian or Iraqi or North Korean missiles. What would those countries do? They would smuggle a weapon or two into an American city, hire or kidnap an American scientist to come look at it, detain that American scientist until it could be moved to another apartment or another city, and inform our government that in some apartment, in some city, in some State in this country, there was a nuclear weapon in the custody of someone reporting to Baghdad or to Tehran.
I would like to see a defensive shield shielding us from intercontinental ballistic missiles. But let us not fool the American people. That is just one small element of our defense. And if we spend a trillion dollars building a roof over a building that has no walls, we will have been misallocating resources. I am not sure that we can police our borders well enough to prevent nuclear weapons from being smuggled here, but I do know that a missile defense shield is of only modest use as long as our borders remain porous.
We need to focus our attention on the rogue states that are currently developing nuclear weapons and might be willing to use them even if they faced the threat of annihilation from our nuclear weapons. And we need to cut off money, investment funds, from going to the regimes of North Korea, Iran and Iraq, because all three of those countries are trying to develop nuclear weapons.
North Korea has agreed to stop its program, and I leave them aside. We can discuss them separately at a different time. But let us focus for a while on the two great enemies or rivals that we face in Southwest Asia. We do need to prevent the government in Baghdad and the government in Tehran from getting their hands on money. When investment capital flows into those two countries, when money is loaned to them, money is given to them, export markets are given to them, when Iraq is allowed to sell its oil and not spend the money on food for its people, then money is in the hands of those who would wish to develop nuclear weapons and whom as I have pointed out will face little difficulty in smuggling them into the United States. Unfortunately, our efforts to stem the flow of money to Tehran and Baghdad have been set back in several different ways.
Today, Mr. Speaker, it was revealed that Iran, having suffered hundreds of thousands of casualties in a war of aggression launched by Iraq 2 decades ago, now is allowing Iraq to use its coastal waters to evade the U.N. blockade, evade U.N. sanctions, sell a billion dollars perhaps every year of oil, and this would not be money in the oil-for-
food program controlled by the United Nations. This is money directly into the hands of the Iraqi military.
Mr. Speaker, we could spend a trillion dollars on a missile defense system, but if we do not stop those oil tankers from leaving the Strait of Hormuz, if we do not prevent that oil from being exported, we are literally allowing Saddam Hussein to build nuclear weapons and then we can worry about how to keep them out of the United States. What concerns me, Mr. Speaker, is that our policy toward Iran has been ineffective. The ineffectiveness is shown today by Iran allowing that Iraqi oil to be exported.
Now, we are told that the ships that come from Iran down into the Persian Gulf pass a checkpoint controlled by the revolutionary guard. We are told the revolutionary guard does not report to the President of Iran, and so we should not get bent out of shape if they allow those oil tankers into their coastal waters. The fact remains that in Iran, the president is not the head of their government or military. The supreme leader is. That leader controls those revolutionary guards, and those guards have allowed those tankers to use Iranian coastal waters.
Iran has said, well, we need help in stopping these ships. All Iran has to do is announce that those countries that are enforcing the U.N. blockade are allowed into Iranian coastal waters, allowed within 12 miles of its coast, and we will be able to shut down these illegal Iraqi oil exports. But instead, Iran lets the tankers go by the checkpoint and claims they cannot do anything to stop it and will not let United Nations ships or, rather, American and British ships detailed to enforce the U.N. blockade, will not allow them in their coastal waters.
Mr. Speaker, this is a dangerous situation; and it shows that our policy toward Iran, especially in the last 2 months, has been mistaken. Two months ago, the Secretary of State announced unilaterally, without really much consultation with Congress at all, certainly without any congressional encouragement or approval, the Secretary of State announced that the United States would allow Iran to export to the United States pistachios, carpets, caviar, dried fruit; and many people joked, how important could that be.
Mr. Speaker, first it is symbolically important, because if America will do business with Iran, business as usual, if America will open its markets to these nonenergy exports of Iran, then how can we turn to Europe and Japan and tell them not to do business as usual with Iran on a bigger scale? How can we today turn to Japan and Germany and tell them to stop buying Iranian oil because Iran is clearly complicit in the illegal export of Iraqi oil? Certainly it weakens our position.
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These exports, these non-energy exports from Iran, are important to Iran. They are its major non-energy exports. They pale into insignificance in dollar amount compared to oil, but reflect on this: Iran will always get the world price for its oil. Nothing we do is going to change by one penny the amount of revenue Iran gets for every barrel that it exports to a world thirsty for its oil.
In contrast, those other exports, the carpets, pistachios, et cetera, those exports need every market they can find to try to push up the price, and by opening up our markets we invigorate the world market for those Iranian exports, exports as to which there is no fixed world price, exports that are important to the Iranian economy. Some 5 million people, it is reported, work in the Iranian carpet industry. That is just one of the four imports.
We would think that today the State Department would react, react to these illegal shipments through Iranian waters and cut off Iran's access to America's markets. My fear is that that will not happen. Every time there is an opportunity to make a unilateral concession to Iran, we seem to do it and do it quickly, unilateral concession after unilateral concession.
The latest pat on the back that Iran has received is a $231 million loan from the World Bank. The U.S. voted against that loan, but we certainly did not tell our European allies that we would take their votes in favor of that loan as a reason to perhaps reexamine other aspects of our foreign policy. We were good losers. We accepted the defeat. This calls into question how we provide foreign aid.
Mr. Speaker, I have come to this floor in the past to support American foreign aid. I think we should do what we can to help the Third World develop, to help the poorest people on this planet survive. But the recent action by the World Bank threatens America's support for foreign aid. That support is not all that deep to begin with, but how do we go back to our districts and explain that America participates in the World Bank, its capital was provided in significant part by the American taxpayer, and the World Bank disbursed $231 million of loans to Iran; money that is fungible, money that allows the Iranians to spend their oil resources and oil revenues on their military programs? This is going to be a hard sell.
Mr. Speaker, sometime this month we will be dealing with the foreign ops appropriations bill. At that point, we will be asked to appropriate hundreds of millions of dollars to the IDA program administered by the World Bank. We have to be aware that money of the United States disbursed to that program could be lent on a concessionary basis, could be lent at very low interest rates, pay-us-when-you-feel-like-it terms, to such countries as North Korea or Sudan, or any other country that claims to have a good project and is very poor.
North Korea and Sudan are very poor because of the evil of their governments, not because of a lack of world aid. How are we going to go back to our constituents and say, these hundreds of millions of dollars were turned over to an international organization free to make loans to some of the most evil nations or evil governments, I want to stress evil governments, on this planet?
Better we appropriate these same funds, and I do not want to see a reduction, I want to see, if anything, an increase in our foreign aid, and provide these same funds to entities under the control of the United States government or entities where we at least have a veto power, so these funds are loaned or given only for projects in countries that have some minimal respect for human rights?
I look forward to working with Members of the relevant subcommittee and of the Committee on Appropriations to see what we can do to make sure that when we go back to our districts and defend foreign aid, we can say that all U.S. tax dollars are going for projects in countries that we can support.
Mr. Speaker, this is an additional reason why the loan to Iran was not only a poor decision but one that was ill-timed, as well. Not only does Iran today, a few days after the loan, decide to facilitate Iraqi evasion of U.N. sanctions, not only does Iran sponsor terrorism and is on the State Department terrorism list, not only is Iran, along with Iraq, one of the two greatest threats for possible destruction of American cities at such time as they develop nuclear weapons, but Iran a year and a half ago decided to continue its oppression of its small Jewish community, just as it oppresses those of the Baha'i faith.
The Iranian government since its revolution has executed on trumped up charges 17 members of its small Jewish community. Well over half of that community has fled, and now 13 Jews are on trial in the city of Shiraz on the most trumped up charges in trials that would have made Josef Stalin ashamed, trials where the only evidence is the apparently tortured or coerced confessions of the defendants in which the defendants confessed to crimes they could not possibly have committed.
Mr. Speaker, here in the United States we live in a multi-ethnic, multicultural society in which people of any ethnic or religious group may be found in our national security agencies, and yes, may be found among those few who commit espionage.
Mr. Speaker, we have had British-American spies, we have had Jewish-
American spies, we have allegedly had Chinese-American spies. Anybody of any ethnic group could find themselves in a position where they are the custodians of our national secrets. Iran is just the opposite. No one of the Jewish faith is allowed near anything of any military or national security significance whatsoever.
Mr. Speaker, these 13 are accused of spying for the CIA, and I put forward that we could not be the world's only superpower, we could not have emerged in this powerful position, if our CIA went to Iran looking for spies and decided to hire people from the small ethnic group that are prohibited from getting anywhere near any of the information our CIA might be interested in.
These charges are absurd. The World Bank loan to Iran, as this trial continues, was the kind of mistake that imperils American support for foreign aid and American support for the World Bank, and imperils a relationship that has recently been celebrated by the President in his farewell tour, farewell as President tour of Europe, involving ties that are certainly disrupted when European nations say, we will ignore the trial of the 13 Jews in Shiraz, we will ignore Iran's other problems, and when they will force the World Bank to take American capital and money borrowed on the strength of American capital and hijack that money to Tehran.
Mr. Speaker, I would now like to shift my focus to a bill that will come before this House I believe on Friday, and that is a bill to repeal the estate tax.
At the outset, let me stress that 98 percent of all Americans, when their wills become operative, do not pay a penny of estate tax. This is a tax paid by only 1\1/2\ percent of all the families in America. Yet, to read some of the letters, to listen to some of the rhetoric on this floor, we would think that the estate tax was the most burdensome tax on American working families.
Estates of under $2 million will, after the current law becomes hopefully effective, pay absolutely nothing, as long as some law and estate planning documents are drafted in advance. Mr. Speaker, I introduced a bill that made this law I think less burdensome on upper middle class American families, and said that $2 million could be left by a man and wife or a husband and wife, to their children with no estate tax, even if they did not prepare a bunch of estate planning documents in advance.
This bill was designed to liberate widows and widowers from these bypassed trusts, complicated legal documents, almost required of them by our current estate tax law. But that bill did not get a hearing because there is an effort here not to liberate upper middle class families, and of course, those of lesser means are already exempt, but not to liberate upper middle class families from the estate tax and from the burdens of doing estate planning. The plan here is to abolish this estate tax altogether.
The estate tax is a painful tax. It is a bad tax. I hate the tax. I hate all taxes. Every single one of them is painful. There is no way for the Federal government to get money that does not have a bad effect on those who are required to pay.
The question is not whether the estate tax is a bad tax, but whether it is our worst tax. I ask Members, is a tax that 98\1/2\ percent of all Americans are exempt from, is that our worst tax? Or is it an income tax and a FICA tax that falls so heavily on the working poor? Must we first eliminate a tax that falls chiefly on those with estates over $10 million, or must we first eliminate taxes on those who are making $10 an hour or less? Should it be $10 million and more, or $10 an hour or less? Where should we focus our generosity? Where should we focus our tax cuts?
Mr. Speaker, there is an earned income tax credit, but it is not available to many of the working poor, and is not available to any that do not have children in their homes. So we have a situation where we are told that the estate tax diminishes the incentive to work because somebody working at age 40 or age 50 or age 60 is thinking ahead to the point when their estate plan would become effective, in their eighties or nineties, thinking ahead to what the estate tax law might be at that point, knocking off work early and going to the golf course.
Maybe it is happening, maybe it is not. But let us talk also about the effect that our current taxes have on the working poor, people who are called upon to work the second job to support a family, people who are called upon to get off of welfare and to enter the work force, and we tell them, we are going to take a chunk of your money, of your paycheck, to support the social security system, and I support the social security system. We are going to impose an income tax. We are not going to give you a tax credit for the social security tax you pay, and we will give you no tax credit for the State sales tax that you pay.
People who make less than $10 an hour are paying a lot of tax. What about them? Are they affected by incentives? Are we to say that the ability to leave the second $10 million to your kids 20 or 30 years from now is what is uppermost on the minds of somebody building a business, but that the size of today's paycheck is irrelevant to a person who is working two jobs? I do not think so.
Yes, all taxes have an adverse impact on incentive, the incentive to work, the incentive to participate in the economy. But I venture that there is a far worse effect on our economy from taxing those who make less than $10 an hour than taxing those who have more than $10 million.
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I would also point out that before we cut the estate tax, before we eliminate the estate tax, we ought to make sure that we are not endangering Social Security, that we are not putting ourselves in a position when we will not be able to provide any pharmaceuticals to those who are on Medicare, some who need $1,000, $5,000, $10,000 a year of pharmaceuticals to survive.
Mr. Speaker, they retired believing they had Social Security and now find that they are insecure, find that they do not have the wherewithal to pay for the pharmaceuticals that they need to survive.
Mr. Speaker, what will come before this House on Friday is a bill to repeal the estate tax before we have made Social Security secure, before we have made Medicare recipients secure. Every Medicare recipient today knows that tomorrow they could be diagnosed with a disease requiring $5,000 or $10,000 a year of pharmaceuticals for which they will get no Federal aid; and we are told that the most important thing we can do with the available Federal funds is to deal with a tax that falls most significantly on those with more than $10 million.
Mr. Speaker, I suggest that we need to explore a number of avenues. Now, I do not want to ignore the adverse effects of the estate tax. It does make it more difficult to leave a business or a family farm to the next generation. And we hear statistics about how businesses are not always left intact to the next generation and we are told that it is the estate tax.
It is not always the estate tax. The son or daughter of a farmer does not necessarily want to farm. The owner who builds a business from nothing to a $50 million business may find that his sons and daughters feel themselves unqualified or just disinterested in continuing to own that business. There is no proof that family businesses will stay in families if only we reduce taxes on those with assets of over $10 million.
Finally, Mr. Speaker, one little secret about the estate tax. No one will tell it to us. That is that at every major hospital complex, nonprofit hospital, at every major university in this country, if we abolish the estate tax, the buildings will not have names. I am not saying that we will not be able to find our way around campus. That is not the problem. The problem is that gifts, major gifts to our universities and hospitals will slow to a trickle.
If we go to any campus today, we see this building is named after the Smith family and that building is named after the Cohen family and we wonder why. The answer is simple. The families involved made huge gifts to the university, huge gifts to the hospital, motivated in part by the fact that those gifts will not be subject to the estate tax.
Charitable giving at the low end, the $5 and $10 put in the collection plate, would not be affected by a repeal of the estate tax. But at the high end, when people are bequeathing millions of dollars to universities that in their graciousness choose to name buildings after the donors, at the high end where people make gifts that are income tax deductible in their 80s, knowing that not only do they get an income tax deduction today but perhaps if they die in their 90s they get estate tax relief as well, those gifts are motivated by the fact that 60 or 70 percent of the gift's value is represented by a tax deduction. That $5 million Smith building cost the Smith family only 30 percent of
$5 million.
What is going to happen when we repeal the estate tax? The universities and hospitals will be here saying: now, Congress, you have to appropriate some special money for us. But how will we do that? We will cut our own revenues by $17 billion a year. The colleges, the universities, the hospitals will not come here and tell us about this because essentially they do not want to bite the hand that feeds them.
Speaking of the hand that feeds them, I have had a lot of town halls in my district. I have heard hundreds of questions, hundreds of complaints. I am out in the community almost every day that I am in California. Mr. Speaker, at these public gatherings, I cannot remember a single occasion when someone has come up and said: let us abolish the estate tax.
Mr. Speaker, I hate to admit it, but it is a sin of which virtually everyone in this House suffers or is guilty. I also spend time raising money for my campaign and for the campaigns of my colleagues. Not a day goes by, or not even a couple hours go by. If a couple of hours are spent talking to those who might make major contributions, the estate tax comes up every time. Not with every person, but certainly in every hour or two.
The reason for that is that this tax does fall upon those who can most afford to come to fundraisers. I think that we in this House need to pass campaign finance reform for a lot of reasons, but one of them is that we spend too much time at fundraisers, and we hear too often too repeatedly from that 1\1/2\ percent of Americans who pay the estate tax, who happen to be the same 1\1/2\ percent of Americans who donate the most money for political campaigns.
Mr. Speaker, if we do not stop and think about it, if we do not filter it out, we are going to come to the conclusion if one serves in this House that the whole country is concerned about the estate tax, because in the average month we hear about it five, 10, 20 times. We have to remember that every one of those times was not out at the community Little League, was not at a visitation to a senior center, was not at a widely publicized town hall, but in nine out of 10 cases, or maybe 10 out of 10 cases, it was through a friend that is a supporter of either us or our colleagues here.
Yes, if we serve in this House, we need to keep in touch with people, and sometimes that is thrown askew when the fundraising burdens and the time commitments of that are imposed upon us.
Mr. Speaker, I would like to comment just briefly on Governor Bush's Social Security plan and some of the rhetoric surrounding that plan. Governor Bush has turned to young people and said that they only get a 1 or 2 percent return for the money they put in Social Security. What he has not said is that the first two generations to participate in Social Security did incredibly well. Social Security brought us out of the Depression as much as any program. And the first two generations to participate in that program contributed for only a portion of their working lives and received the benefits, benefits that many are still receiving today in their 80s and 90s.
So what does this mean? It means that today's Social Security tax is paying for our grandparents' retirement. This was never a pension system where our money is saved exclusively for us. Rather, our money is being used to fund the retirement of those who went before, just as their money went to fund the retirement of those who went before, and we can trace it back to the Depression generation.
Now, we are told that the new generation does not have to contribute to pay for the previous generation's retirement. We are going to have their money diverted into separate individual accounts and that anything else would be unfair. Mr. Speaker, we cannot simultaneously take all the funds that are coming into Social Security and say that is the money of the people who put the money in and continue to fund the Social Security payments to those who are receiving checks today, people whose tax dollars, FICA contributions were used to pay the prior generation's benefits.
The proposal that the governor has put forward is to take one-sixth of the money, virtually, that is now going into the regular Social Security Trust Fund and divert it into special assets owned by those who contribute the funds. I wish we could promise that. I wish we could do that. But before we start bestowing multitrillion dollar benefits, new benefits, why do we not make sure that the program can continue to pay the existing benefits?
Another huge benefit promised by the governor of Texas is that if one were to die before reaching 65, their family gets a huge check from Social Security. Or if they were to die at age 68 or 69 or 70, before they have received their actuarial expected benefit, the family receives a giant benefit.
That is a wonderful promise. I wish I could make that promise. I would be a lot more popular if I made that promise. But what do we do to those who live to 90 or 100? Do we say that those who live less than their average life span get their money back and those that live longer than the average life span stop receiving benefits? There is no solution offered by the governor of Texas. Two huge benefits promised; no source of revenue to pay for them. A sixth roughly of the money diverted. Let us make Social Security secure, and then we can focus on whether we can do better.
Mr. Speaker, I have talked about a number of topics. Topics that are complex topics that I do not get enough time to study about, read about; and it leaves me longing for a greater level of intelligence. Mr. Speaker, there are those working on greater levels of intelligence today. There are those engaged in silicon chip engineering who are creating more intelligent machines all the time. And there will come a time when the silicon chip-driven machines rival humans in intelligence.
There are genetic engineers mapping the human genome and within a few decades they may be in a position to create a more intelligent human being, perhaps one that could have dealt with all of the topics confronting this Congress with greater wisdom than I have been able to muster.
There are those dealing with nanotechnology, technology where things are manipulated at the atomic and molecular levels, technologies that offer a chance to engineer either from biological materials or from electronic materials or from a combination of the two a level of intelligence way beyond today's computers, way beyond today's animals, and perhaps way beyond today's humans.
Speaking of intelligent humans, on August 7, 1939, Albert Einstein wrote to President Roosevelt and brought to his attention clearly and crisply the importance that nuclear technology might have for the future of the world. In just a few years, that nuclear technology literally exploded. What was the high and unusual science of 1939 became the public policy issue of 1945 and beyond.
We today are still wrestling with the political, the international, and the ethical issues of nuclear power and, of course, nuclear weapons.
Would it not have been great if we had gotten a bit more of a head start? Would it not have been good for humankind if the scientists had come to us 20 or 30 years before the nuclear weapons were created and told the world's political leaders that the genie will soon be leaving the bottle and it is time to develop a code of ethics and central understandings that will fit the new technology?
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Now, some more than 50 years after nuclear weapons, we are still struggling with the ethical issues that they create. Well, I do not know how many years we have before what I refer to as remembered intelligence poses even more severe ethical issues for us than nuclear weapons do.
Let me bring a few of them to our attention. I know this may sound like science fiction today, but I do not think anyone familiar with science would say that these are not real possibilities. I am not saying this decade, maybe not next decade, maybe not in the lifetime of those of us who have lost our hair, but certainly within the lifetime of some of the younger folks in the back of the room.
First, we will see genetic engineering that will either create or offer to create our slaves or our masters. Today dogs are a man's and woman's best friend. They are great pets, and a few of them are engaged in work, shepherding sheep, for example. Today's dogs have been bred, not genetically engineered, just bred to be friendly, docile, and obedient.
There are a few who think it raises ethical issues, but most of us view a dog's intelligence as below that of self-awareness and consciousness and are quite happy to have dogs that are obedient, docile.
But what happens when the genetic engineers start developing more intelligent canines? What happens when we start having dogs as intelligent or more intelligence than apes? Fortunately, I do not think we are going to face this issue in the next decade. But we are going to face it this century, and we are probably going to face it before we figure out what to do with it.
At what point must we recognize other life forms as being protected by our Constitution? How intelligent must a genetically engineered animal be to be worthy of our protection and respect? I do not know.
Likewise, we have seen many science fiction shows where scientists start with human DNA and deliberately try to create a being that is less intelligent or simply more docile than the average human form, and we are told to imagine a race invented for slavery. I think all of us recoil at the ethics of that.
But will we recoil with the same level of revulsion if the nearly as intelligent as human or perhaps as intelligent as human docile race is engineered from canine DNA or simian DNA, perhaps someday if we are not careful, human DNA? But not only may there be genetic engineering that invents those entities which some would wish to enslave, genetic engineering, whether it starts with simian DNA or human DNA, could very well invent a level of intelligence well beyond that of any of us here, perhaps even beyond that of the Albert Einstein I quoted earlier. Then how should human kind react?
That which can be done with genetic engineering may also be done with silicon chip engineering. A book I have not had a chance to read bears the interesting title the Age of Spiritual Machines. How many decades is it before the computer screen lights up with the question, am I alive? Why am I here? Should there be any ethical limitations on creating computers with intelligence, not just to balance our checkbooks or to figure the trajectory of the rocket, but computers intelligent enough to ask the spiritual questions? I do not know. I do know that it will take a panel of Einsteins to give us some guidance as to what our laws should be. This is going to be a tough issue.
I am going to propose probably next Congress, if I am fortunate enough to be here, if there is interest by some of my colleagues, perhaps we could work on it this month or next month, that we create a national commission on the ethics of engineered intelligence to try to give some guidance to those lawmakers that will come after us in dealing with the issues of silicon or carbon-based intelligence that approach or exceed that of today's human being.
I do not know how to deal with these issues. It is a tradition in this town that, when one does not know what to do, one creates a commission. There is also a tradition in this town to wait till the last minute, to wait till some development is going to impair jobs in our own districts before we get serious about the issue. I would say that these are issues, and there are others as well that we ought to try to tackle at least at the thinking stage at the earliest possible time.
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