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“WORKING FAMILIES OF AMERICA BEING MISTREATED BY 106TH CONGRESS” mentioning the U.S. Dept of Labor was published in the House of Representatives section on pages H3831-H3837 on June 8, 1999.
The publication is reproduced in full below:
WORKING FAMILIES OF AMERICA BEING MISTREATED BY 106TH CONGRESS
The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. Fletcher). Under the Speaker's announced policy of January 6, 1999, the gentleman from New York (Mr. Owens) is recognized for 60 minutes as the designee of the minority leader.
Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, the working families of this Nation are still being trampled on by this 106th Congress. They are being grossly mistreated in two basic ways: One is indifference and neglect on certain key issues, and the other is active oppression in certain ways.
Indifference and neglect is reflected in the fact that we are not concerned about a minimum wage increase. There is a rumor that the leadership of the majority party has decided that it will agree to a minimum wage vote and that it will take place sometime later rather than sooner, and they are delaying because they want to make sure we get close to the election and be able to say, well, we voted for a minimum wage, or we allowed it on the floor and let the Democrats vote for it, so we did our job.
And, of course, there is a rumor also that the minimum wage being proposed by the majority is 25 cents a year for the next 4 years. An increase of 25 cents per year for the next 4 years means in 4 years the American worker would have a dollar increase instead of the two-step increase being proposed by the Democrats.
But there is no hurry. We have an unprecedented prosperity in the Nation. We have a situation where the value of the stock market in 10 years has grown by $10 trillion. We had the assets and the value of the stock market in 1989 at $3 trillion. Now it is $13 trillion. With a $10 trillion increase in the value of the stock market, we can see that there is a great increase in the wealth and prosperity in America at certain levels. Why not share that with the working families? Why not in the most basic way make certain that the wealth of the Nation in some small way benefits the entire Nation?
A minimum wage is just one tiny part of that effort. Being willing to finance or support more generous health care is another. The President is proposing soon a new benefit in Medicare, should be in Medicaid also, a new benefit which would cover prescription drugs. In this time of great prosperity, the least we could do is to make the miracles of science available at a cheaper cost to all the people who need them in terms of health care. Prescription drugs ought to be covered by Medicare and Medicaid.
We talk a lot about Medicare and we forget that Medicaid is designed to serve the very poorest and they deserve to have the same kind of increase. We should not have two tiers of health care in America. Second class health care is inadequate health care. There should only be one class of health care. But we are refusing to deal with that in a forthright manner on a timetable that is meaningful because we just do not seem to care.
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There is an indifference, an indifference to the poor, an indifference to the plight of the working families who are not sharing the great boost in our wealth. That great jump from $3 trillion in 1989 to $13 trillion in 1999 is not felt by a lot of people who are still out there struggling to make it. So jobs, health care, investment in education are all obvious kinds of actions that should be taken by the government. This Congress, acting in concert with the President, should make certain that we take advantage of this boom in prosperity to take care of some of our problems.
But there exists in this Congress an attitude which goes in the opposite direction. It is stubborn, it is unyielding, it is wrongheaded, but it keeps going on. Take, for example, what happened in the vote on the supplemental budget, or the development of a long-
awaited supplemental budget, which included the President's request for
$6 billion for the Kosovo war, a war which I think is very necessary, a war which I think we could not afford to have not conducted or been a part of. I do not think we could have walked away from the genocide being committed by the Yugoslavia regime and held up our heads. We have seen it happen too many times already in this century.
What Hitler did was on a grander, more massive scale. They had gas chambers and ovens and millions died, but the numbers are not as important as the action and the kind of thing happening in Kosovo. Certainly if it only means thousands dying, it is still significant and it is happening over and over again. We have seen it happen in Cambodia, we have seen it happen in Rwanda. It is about time that we did something to send a message to the dictators and the sovereign predators that exist throughout the world that somewhere the civilized nations of the world are willing to take a stand against this kind of murderous activity against human beings.
We have done that in Kosovo. So we needed our participation in that effort. The $6 billion was requested by the President. But instead of that bill moving ahead with $6 billion plus the emergency aid requested for South America, for Central America as a result of the floods and the extra aid that was needed for the weather disasters that took place in the Midwest, we had a whole lot of other things piled on top of it and a $6 billion request became a $15 billion request, a $15 billion request most of which came out of the surplus. It was deemed emergency funding and the surplus which is around $100 billion, I think, about the same, a little more maybe in the coming fiscal year, it is going to be about the same amount; the surplus was used for most of it. They could have used the surplus to cover it all, but to make a point the majority decided to offset $2 billion, take away from other programs $2 billion worth of money to cover part of the spending.
Now, the emergency in Central America, the emergency in the Midwest with the tornadoes and storms, et cetera, those were emergencies. They clearly rank as emergencies. Why did we have to make the point that they have to be offset? The point that I want to make is that in the process of the offset, who did they go after? The poorest people in America. The bulk of the cuts for the offset came from domestic accounts, including $1.25 billion from the food stamp program, and $350 million from Section 8 low-income housing programs as well as $22.4 million from the Labor Department contingency fund related to unemployment insurance.
They reached into the programs that serve the poorest people, programs that may benefit the working families on the very lowest levels, and they took out the money to offset and make the point that they want to make cuts in social programs.
There is a coming need, according to the budget that has been promulgated by the majority, a coming need to cut further, maybe $20 billion out of the domestic budget. Some of it could come from defense if they wanted to, but it will probably come out of the domestic budget; $20 billion will be cut and the preview of coming attractions we have seen already. The way the supplemental budget was handled tells you they are going to get it from the people who are the weakest, the people who have no power, working families, poor families, poor people who are not even working, the elderly, those who need Medicaid as well as Medicare; they will suffer as a result of the coming $20 billion cuts or more that may be proposed.
Certainly they are not proposing investing any more money in education. Education, most of which would go into our public school system, is the place that you benefit working families most. Working families' children need an education. There is no way to survive, there is no way for them to take advantage of the prosperity that keeps growing and growing as a result of high technology. The jobs that are available are jobs that require education. You are not going to be in on it, it gets worse all the time, the demands are greater and greater.
I was at a job training consortium in New York City yesterday and they were telling me about the fact that we just need mechanics. In addition to the known need for information technology people, 300,000 vacancies in information technology, they need mechanics. They could hire 30,000 mechanics in the metropolitan area if they could find them. Why do they not have mechanics who would work on trucks and tractors and some of the machinery that industry needs? Why do they not have them? Because the demands have gone up educationally. There are computers and various devices being employed now in trucks and cars and various vehicles that require a little more education than a mechanic had to have 10 years ago or 5 years ago.
So we have a problem, a creeping problem of people in basic areas, as basic as mechanics, auto mechanics, that cannot survive because they do not have the personnel to do the job because the education system is failing to produce that pool of people which is educated. A broad pool of people educated, you can reach in and pull out all kinds of people. The range of people with various kinds of skills and know-how would be great. You would get the technicians, the mechanics, the theoreticians, the scientists, the geniuses. That certain percentage of people would come out if you have a broad range of people in the pool because we are educating the masses. Mass education is needed more now than ever before.
But working families who need to have free education in the public school system, free but first rate, it cannot be education in facilities that are falling down, it cannot be education in situations where kids are afraid to go to school because of threats to their health and safety. It has to be the kind of education that everybody wants for their child here in this Congress.
I know large numbers of Members of Congress send their children to private school. It is most unfortunate that they have given up on the public education system, but as public officials, whatever choice they choose to make privately, it is disloyal and dangerous to have public officials give up on our education system.
So when you consider what happened in our $15 billion supplemental appropriation, you can see how trampling on working families is a problem. And there is going to be more trampling on working families. It is not just neglect. It is also active oppression to take the money out of the programs that benefit the poor the most. It is even worse than that. The active attack, the oppression which is very aggressive, continues to go on in the Committee on Education and the Workforce. I serve as the ranking Democrat on the Subcommittee on Workforce Protections. As the ranking Democrat on Workforce Protections, I will be the first to tell you that the name of the committee under this majority Republican administration ought to be changed. It is not workforce protection that they are concerned about. It is workforce persecution. It is workforce oppression. Because every bill that is introduced by the majority on that committee is an attempt to make life more difficult for working families.
We have three coming up very soon we have just passed recently in the Subcommittee on Workforce Protections, and now it is going to go to the full committee, and they are a continuation of what was started in the 104th Congress and continued in the 105th Congress, and now it is done on a sort of a guerrilla warfare basis. It is not talked about as much but it is still the same agenda. They are attempting to take away rights that workers have won over the last 50 years.
There is a bill, H.R. 987. It is an attempt to block the implementation of any ergonomic standards, standards which relate to the fact that there are jobs which require repetitive motions that end up in injuries and debilitation of people's muscular faculties; they cannot function. Carpal tunnel syndrome is one of them. Back injuries are a large part of it, people who have repetitive kinds of activities that strain certain parts of their bodies. That is the broad topic of ergonomics the majority on the committee do not even want to have discussed. They do not want to allow the Department of Labor, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration under the Department of Labor to do what they have been doing for years, establish a set of standards to relate to these workplace injuries, workplace dangers.
So they have H.R. 987 which ironically the Republican majority on the committee calls the Workplace Preservation Act. It is an attempt to make the workplace more dangerous by blocking an effort to deal with a clear and present form of injuries that we have been discussing for the last 15 years. So H.R. 987 is one of those examples of an attack on working families through a reduction in the safety provisions in the workplace. There are more than 6,000 people who die every year in our workplace situation, and then many, many others who are injured. This attack on the workers continues by the Republican majority.
They have another one, H.R. 1381. It is an attempt to sabotage overtime payment rates by excluding bonus income. H.R. 1381 is ironically called Rewarding Performance in Compensation Act. But they have a way of reaching in to take out the income that is figured in the bonus in order to reduce the rate of hourly pay so that that is not included when you pay a person overtime. It is a little guerrilla trick, it is almost something you would not see or not respond to if you were not very alert. But it is an attempt to sabotage overtime payment rates by excluding bonus income. H.R. 1381, another attempt to reduce the benefits of working families.
H.R. 1439 is another one. That attempts to undermine the OSHA, Occupational Safety and Health Administration's enforcement by misusing the self-audit process. We have a self-auditing process that we encourage. We want to make a partnership between government and industry. But they want to allow industries to audit themselves and then not allow the result of the audit, which determines whether or not they have certain hazardous conditions in the workplace, in the plant, in the garage, whatever unit of employment this is. After they complete the audit, if they identify things that are wrong, they are allowed to keep it secret and we are saying, ``No, you have to reveal what is there.'' The self-audit process would be misused if you made your survey and audited yourself, identified hazards, and then refused to correct them because, of course, it might cost a great deal, but you keep them secret, nobody else knows about it. Of course you would fire any employee who also knows about it and then would report it. So we have H.R. 1439 which again, an ironical title, is described as the Safety and Health Audit Promotion and Whistleblower Improvement Act of 1999. The Safety and Health Audit Promotion and Whistleblower Improvement Act of 1999 is an attempt to do just the opposite. It is going to make the workplace less safe.
We have another bill, an alternative which we will offer at the final markup of the full committee which is entitled ``The Whistleblower Protection Act.'' That is H.R. 1851 which I introduced as a countervailing force against the phony H.R. 1439.
But I give you examples of concrete bills, the business that is going on here in this place. We are moving at a very slow pace. Things that ought to be done and ought to be on the agenda are not on the agenda. But the guerrilla warfare against working families, against workers in the workplace, the guerrilla warfare goes on. We ought to come to grips with the fact that this is wrongheaded, stubborn, unyielding, and at a time like this very dangerous in America. We should be investing in our workers in every way instead of oppressing them and neglecting them.
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In another area, education, which I talk about often, education reform is still rhetoric. We are talking, always when we talk about education about nickels and dimes and lots of words.
Everybody has adopted some kind of education platform, everybody is in favor of improving and reforming education, but nobody wants to spend significant amounts of dollars. Words instead of dollars is the order of the day with respect to education. Education reform is rhetoric, too much rhetoric in the area of the majority; and in many cases, in the minority, too, there is too much rhetoric and too little commitment to real dollars for education.
School construction is one of the tests of whether or not we are only concerned with rhetoric and only going to play word games with the voters. Or are we really going to do something significant about education?
The voters have given us a mandate. As my colleagues know, it is one of the few times in history where we have the focus groups and polls, everything keeps repeating the message over and over again. The voters of America want the Congress of the United States, and the President and the entire government to significantly take steps to improve education, to give Federal aid to education in the process of trying to improve education.
Now, because the voters are saying that we will get plenty of rhetoric from both sides, but there is contempt for the whole public education process that is expressed in many ways. They express it in ways which relate to neglect and abandonment and indifference, but also it is sometimes expressed in a very active way. As I said before, there are actions taken which are aggressively against working families and things that working families need. Education and investment in education by the government is one of the things that working families would benefit from greatly, and they need it.
We saw on the floor of the House today a vote which demonstrates great contempt for education, a great contempt for the whole research process. It happens to be an agricultural appropriations bill, and the agriculture appropriations bill, in the hassling back and forth for reasons that I do not clearly understand, the majority knows what it is doing; but for reasons that certainly are not noble and reasons that are not reasonable and were not laid out and described to the Members of Congress in any respectful details, a huge across-the-board cut in agricultural research, something like $100 million cut in agricultural research.
Now, agricultural research is at the heart of America's great food production system. As my colleagues know, agricultural research, the research, the educational part of it, the egghead part of it, that draws great contempt obviously from the majority party members. Instead of them dealing with subsidies which may be wasteful or the Farmers Home Loan Mortgage Program, and there are a lot of wasteful programs in agriculture just as there are in some other places in the government, but because they have constituencies and because the ol' boys network demands that they be protected, they are protected. But academia and research, the people who are on the cutting edge of improving agriculture and responsible for the fact that Americans enjoyed the best food production system in the world, we get the best food at the lowest prices, and everything happened by accident.
There is a long history involving education and research starting with the Morrill Act which created the land grant colleges. The model for land grant colleges was Thomas Jefferson, and the University of Virginia was the first State university. It was a very wise move by Thomas Jefferson who made, of course, numerous wise moves and set certain standards for our entire country that we still should be very grateful for and set us on a course that has proven to be very positive.
Jefferson was not in favor of a national university. He did not want one big, huge university in Washington similar to the Sorbonne, to the Oxford chain in London. He wanted each State to have its own university, and Virginia, of course, was the first example, and later the Morrill Act established land grants for every State. The Federal land grant colleges were established, colleges and universities were established; and going beyond just the establishment of land grant colleges, they were given a mandate for practical education, practical education starting with an assumption that agriculture could be improved greatly if it benefited from science and education.
So applied science in the area of agriculture became the driving force that took our farmers, long before farmers anywhere else in the world, into a whole new realm of production, greatly improving the yield of the land, greatly increasing the kind of production that resulted in our having a tremendous amount of surplus products, as we still do in many areas.
This agriculture research, as my colleagues know, the experimental station, the theoretical base in the universities, the county agents to take it out to the farmers and show them how to apply it, it is one of the great things we should be very proud of, dissemination system for knowledge. As the knowledge was generated in the universities and the experimental stations, it was taken out to the farmers; the farmers applied it, and you got a result.
That is all based on agricultural research. It begins with the research.
So we just walked onto the floor today and found an amendment to wipe out $100 million worth of agriculture research. Is that responsible legislation? Are working families going to benefit from a crippling of our agriculture production system? There are always problems, as my colleagues know, in terms of new kinds of bugs and viruses and various kinds of things that go on and on that can wipe out gains that are made over the years if they are not researched, if they do not keep up with them.
So even in the area of agriculture where we have such a sterling record of performance, today we found the reckless attitude towards the things that matter most to ordinary Americans take hold and in one fell swoop we wiped out some basic parts of our agriculture research system.
Then, as my colleagues know, I think that a lot of this preoccupation with the reduction of programs that benefit working families, that benefit people who are in greatest need in our Nation, a lot of this preoccupation and obsession is based on the fact that eventually we are going to have a proposal on the floor for a huge tax cut, a huge tax cut for the people who are benefiting most from the prosperity that we have generated already.
I said before that the stock market value has gone from $3 trillion in 1989 to $13 trillion in 1999. So do the rich need a tax cut? Do they need some help? As my colleagues know, why are we preoccupied with making the budget safe for a tax cut? Why are we willing to cut food stamps and willing to cut low-income housing in order to make the budget safe for a tax cut? But that is what is coming. The Republican tax cut crouches in the bush like a wounded lion. It is there, it is not going to go away.
One of the problems we have is that the people who represent and care about working families, the great majority of our Nation, of course, made up of working families, those people do not have a tax program for working families. Working families have suffered the biggest tax increase of any group in the last 20 years, the payroll tax, Social Security and Medicare. Those payroll taxes have jumped more percentage-
wise than any other taxes. They hit the people on the very bottom. Nobody is proposing to relieve them. I have a few proposals that I would like to offer, and I will offer them in a few minutes.
As my colleagues know, my point is, you need a whole platform, I guess, for working families, and we do not have it. My friends in organized labor, as my colleagues know, they have things that they care about that they are always telling us about, and those are the right kinds of things that working people need; but it all comes in bits and pieces.
We need a whole platform which lays out the need for working families being given their fair share of the great American prosperity in many ways. The Republican tax cut should be answered by a proposal for a tax cut for working families as well.
Between now and Election Day in November 2000 we must lift up a meaningful platform for working families. The showdown will come sometime in the fall of the year 2000. The pattern has been the same for the last, and it will probably be the same as it has been for the last 4 years in the conflict between a Republican-controlled Congress, a Democratically-controlled White House.
The really important measures are going to come down to a negotiation session at the White House between the majority in the Congress and the White House, the President. The really big decisions are going to be made then. What we do with this surplus is really going to really be determined then. Whether we are going to allow working families to have a share of the wealth of America through programs that benefit them will be determined then.
So we have a scenario. We have time, but we have to start now visiting a platform for working families which has all of these components; and you know we have to come to grips with the fact that there is a mind-set in this Nation maybe among powerful people that they do not have to be concerned with the poor. The poor are poor because they did not make it, they are poor because they deserve to be poor. They are not wealthy, they are not able to take care of themselves without some help because that is the way it is, and that is the way it deserves to be, and why should the Nation care?
As my colleagues know, we have whipped the welfare mothers to death, and they are becoming a nonentity in the political discussion. They have been whipped so often and so much, until they almost just disappeared. They may be still aching out there, there may be situations where we are causing more harm than good because we are putting families in a bind, and the children are suffering, and those suffering children are going to create great problems in the future for our health care system, our education system, our corrections system, prison system. As my colleagues know, we may be generating a lot of problems.
Right now, they are invisible. We beat them to death, and now we are going after working families in the workplace, take their overtime, take away safety provisions, et cetera, because there is no ethic which says we have a responsibility to these people.
Let me just take the conversation in a new direction. Because of the war in Kosovo, I think we ought to stop and think, as my colleagues know, and it certainly brings to mind it is one more situation where we are at war, there is no threat to the United States, and there are a lot of elements there that do not fit the description of the war against Hitler.
As my colleagues know, World War II was a war where there was a real threat to the whole Western world, and it was just a matter of if we stood in line, if we did nothing, our time would come. So between, as my colleagues know, Tojo and Hitler we had to act, and it was a war which definitely was a war to save our own way of life. There may be doubts about other wars, but we had the same rationale in the Korean war and in the Vietnam war, and we always made the assumption that, you know, you had to do this, the domino theory of fighting the Communists; if you do not stop them there, they will keep going.
I do not want to get into all of the various arguments, pro and con. Let us just accept war as a fact of life. Let us accept the fact also that the most any citizen can do for their country is place their lives at risk in a war. I mean, I do not know of anything greater that any citizen can do for his Nation, whether they are drafted and forced to go or whether they volunteer, that they are in a situation where they are on the firing line, their lives are at risk, than they are offering this supreme price. And of course, if they are injured and become casualties, they pay a great price, and of course, if they are killed in combat, they die. That is the supreme price, as my colleagues know, to have to give your life. So I do not think there will be any disagreement.
Let me just point out the fact that, mind you, and I got these figures on casualties from the Pentagon, from the Archives, which got them, of course, from Pentagon research, so they are sound figures.
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Who dies in the wars? Who dies? There is a lot of contempt always directed at our big cities, our inner-cities, where the poor live mostly. One of the things that is coming out over and over again, and some Democrats are as guilty as Republicans, is they do not want to do anything about the public school system, because if you had legislation which appropriated large amounts of money for school construction and you did it on the basis of need, where the oldest schools are and the needs are and they do not have libraries and laboratories, buildings are more than 75 years old, if you did it on that basis, most of the money would go to the big cities. They have the greatest need in that area.
Just like we have an insane argument now that is being promulgated by the Committee on Transportation, I think in the Senate, in the other body, that need relates to the fact they say Los Angeles and New York are getting too much transit money, too much mass transit money.
Los Angeles and New York are the places where you have most of the mass transit. New York has more than 30 percent of all the mass transit in the country, of the riders, and yet we do not get 30 percent of the funding. The amount we get, however, has aroused the ire of certain people and they want to cut down the amount New York gets or Los Angeles gets in transit money. That is where the people are.
Why do we have large amounts of casualties come out of the big cities in every war. World War I, World War II, the Korean conflict, the Vietnam conflict, where did most of the casualties come from? The big states with the big cities.
New York has always led in casualties, even back to the Gettysburg battle. The largest numbers of casualties at Gettysburg were soldiers from New York State. They did not break it down by city, but I assure you most of them were poor immigrants out of the cities.
But I will not go back to that. I am not interested in discussing the fact that valor and willingness to fight and all kinds of conditions are in motion to generate casualties. But the fact is that the casualties come out of the places where people live, where the population is. That is where you are going to have the people to put their lives at risk, the people who died, who paid the supreme price. They will be the people that come from the areas where the most people are. It is simple arithmetic.
New York in World War I, there were total casualties of 35,100 official casualties. Out of those there were 7,307 combat deaths, those causalities, larger than any other state. For some reason California in World War I was very low. I think maybe because it was not as highly urbanized and the poor were not as concentrated then as they are now. Whatever the reason, New York.
Pennsylvania had 29,576 casualties, 5,996 deaths in World War I. By the way, Pennsylvania has Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, the big cities. Illinois has Chicago, Springfield, big cities: 15,000 casualties, 3,000 combat deaths. Ohio, Cleveland and Cincinnati, big cities, 14,487 casualties, 3,073 deaths. Massachusetts, with Boston and a couple other big cities, 11,455 total casualties, 2,253 deaths. Michigan, with Detroit, 9,000. New Jersey, a small highly urbanized state, 8,776 casualties. There is a pattern.
The pattern is the same in World War II. The casualties went up a great deal. New York, 89,656 total casualties, 27,659 deaths in combat from New York State. Why? Because they were braver than anybody else? Maybe. I do not know. The important thing is that is because that is where the people are. Larger numbers came from New York, because that is where the people are, first of all, and probably that is where the poorest people are who were drafted in larger numbers, and they went off and fought and died for their country.
Why do we treat that class of people with great contempt now? Pennsylvania, 81,000 casualties, 24,000 died in combat. Illinois, where Chicago is located, 54,000 casualties, 17,000 died in combat. Ohio, 49,000 casualties, 15,000 died in combat. They came out of the big cities where the people lived. California in World War II, more urbanized, 47,000 total casualties, 17,000 died in combat.
Korea, New York had 8,780 casualties, 2,249 combat deaths. Pennsylvania, again, second, Illinois, third, Ohio, same pattern.
Vietnam, the same pattern: New York, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Massachusetts, Ohio, Michigan, California. Simple arithmetic.
The point is, the people who die, who pay the supreme price for their country, come out of the big states and the big cities. Therefore, we have every right to treat them with great respect. We should honor the dead from these areas by making certain that the living always are given the fullest possible benefits the government can offer.
Why are we abandoning the big city school systems when so many ancestors of the present children in those systems paid such a high price to create and maintain the America that we have now? Think about it. Think about it.
The people who died, who paid the highest price to keep our Nation going, deserve to be respected at all times, not the present attitude, the wrong-headedness, the unyielding stubbornness toward poor people and working families that has taken hold among decisionmakers, not among the voters.
The voters say we want education to be the number one priority of the government. The decisionmakers in Washington say all right, we will play games with you and pretend it is number one, but if you look at the appropriations process, we are not appropriating that kind of money for education.
We had a bill last year which authorized $218 billion for highways and transportation, $218 billion. There was money for mass transit in there. That is part of what is being appropriated this year. They are having a big debate about taking away some of the mass transit funds from New York where the riders live. Where the people are, for some reason, our hearts and our appropriations do not go.
There is some flaw maybe in our whole system. The grand compromise that our forefathers made when they established the Nation, that they had to make because the states existed before the Nation, the grand compromise of giving two representatives to every state created a powerful body which represents a minority, and that body has over the last 20 to 25 years essentially been anti-urban, anti the population centers of the Nation, anti-policies that would benefit the great masses. So we have a reversion kind of thing going here in our great democracy, and our great democracy, one-man, one-vote, is being diluted and distorted in a way which results in policies and power which hurts the great majority. The places where the people live are getting the worst attention or the least attention in terms of their needs.
Education is a clear area of great need. In Kosovo we have had zero casualties, so far have zero casualties, but if ground troops had been needed they would have come from the same places that they always come from, in large quantities they would come out of the big cities.
Go and look at the Vietnam Wall. I love the Vietnam Wall as a monument because it broke the pattern. No more ever will we have tombs of unknown soldiers. Tombs of unknown soldiers mask the great tragedy of war. The fact that the Vietnam memorial lists the names one by one, they are all written there, they are all honored for what they have done in terms of paying the supreme price for their country, they stand out as individuals. I have seen many people cry at that wall because it comes home personally. That is the way war ought to be depicted. It is a very personal kind of set of tragedies.
``Saving Private Ryan'', Spielberg's great movie, starts out and is based on the premise that a whole family has contributed a certain number of sons and the last son ought to be saved. I think that in the beginning of the movie when they drive out to the house to meet the mother, it is a very poor family, relatively speaking, a poor family that has given those sons. That is a pattern of World War I, of World War II. Why do we have contempt in our policies for the people that we expect to die for America?
Madam Speaker, I will submit a little summary that I made called Big State, Big City Casualties, which lists some of the things that I have just said about where the casualties are, in which states, and the statistics are by state, and also indicates the cities located in those states.
I have, of course, a bigger record that is more complicated. It lists all the states. In the case of the war in Vietnam they even list the casualties by race. You find that the black casualties there are greater than the proportion of blacks in the population. In Vietnam certainly, when they kept statistics by race, some of the same people were treated with great contempt as we abandon our school systems and abandon our safety net, health care services, welfare. Those same people paid the supreme price for our country in large numbers. Let us stop and think about the pattern of exploitation, negative, abandonment of working families in America.
We need a tax plan which addresses itself to the needs of working families. Not only are we in a situation where the only targets for cuts, for taking away benefits that have existed for years, are programs that benefit working families and poor families, the poor who do not work, the elderly, the disabled, a lot of people who are not working who benefit from these programs, we are not only targeting the cuts for them, we are targeting the benefits of government policy to the rich.
We have got tax proposals that are going to be brought out and put on the table between now and the end of this appropriations process, and, of course, they will be pursued again next year in the final showdown that takes place in this Congress, this two year span. There are going to be tax cuts on the table and a bargaining process, and we are probably going to end up with some kind of tax cut.
All those people who are benefiting from the great increase in wealth, the jump from $3 trillion to $13 trillion, a large amount of that is what you call unearned income. Unearned income is a term I did not invent, but it is all the money you make that does not come from wages directly.
Wage earners provide the principal support for the Federal Government. Almost two-thirds of Federal revenue comes from income and Social Security taxes that are paid by workers, people who earn wages. They are the ones that provide the taxes. It is taxes on earned income.
By contrast, income taxes on unearned income, stocks and bonds and that kind of thing, produce only about 12 percent of the total Federal revenue. I propose, and I think that the working families platform that ought to be adopted by working families and organizations that are supposed to represent them, I propose a massive shift in the burden of the taxes from the earned income of working people to the unearned income of those who are getting the greatest increases in wealth.
Ten years ago, the early 1989, as I said, the value of all U.S. stocks was about $3 trillion. Now it is about $13 trillion, a $10 trillion increase. That is the opportunity. You can get new revenue from that increase and the people who are continuing to earn without any pain being caused.
The great political position that we need a tax cut is not related to pain and the reduction of pain; it is related to a wrong-headed, unyielding, stubborn policy which defines ``them'' and ``us'' and disregards the fact that there is a place, there ought to be a place, for working families to share the great wealth of America.
I introduced on March 11 of this year H.R. 1090, which I call the Social Security Protection and Tax Relief Act of 1999. It cuts the Social Security tax rate from 7.65 percent to 6.4 percent.
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This will give a tax cut of $15 for every $10,000 of earned income to all working families and to the rich as well as the poor, if the rich are working and earning wages, and whether or not they pay income tax, of course, they will benefit through the various devices in place in the Tax Code.
So cuts of the social security tax, payroll taxes, where the biggest increases have taken place over the last 20 years, and where the people on the bottom are taxed at the same rate as the people on the top, those cuts would be a great benefit for working families.
My H.R. 1099 imposes a new 12 percent social security tax on all taxable unearned income to offset what you would lose from reducing the taxes on people at the lowest levels. We propose social security taxes on all taxable unearned income.
I also on April 12 introduced another bill, H.R. 1390, the Income Tax Fairness Act of 1999. That cuts all income tax brackets by 3 percentage points, all income tax brackets, from the highest to the lowest. The present rates in the 5 brackets are 15 percent, 28 percent, 31 percent, 36 percent, and 39.6 percent. The new rates would be 12 percent, 25 percent, 28 percent, 33 percent, and 36.6 percent.
I am not on the Committee on Ways and Means, and I know most people would consider it inappropriate that I should be here talking about taxes and changes in the tax policy.
The Committee on Ways and Means is an exclusive committee. For the benefit of people who are not close to Washington, we have a caste system in the Congress. There are exclusive committees and there are other committees for the peasants. I am not on an exclusive committee. The Committee on Appropriations is exclusive, the Committee on Ways and Means is exclusive, the Committee on Commerce and the Committee on Energy are exclusive.
Some of the wrongheadedness and anti-democratic attitudes that are generated come out of the structure itself. It is all wrong to say that education is a lesser committee. The Committee on Education and the Work Force is not an exclusive committee. However, what is more important to the Nation at this point than the education system which brought us to where we are and will take us into the future?
At any rate, I am not on the Committee on Ways and Means, but I think every Member of Congress has a right to speak out and offer the best wisdom that they can offer to stimulate the discussion. Hopefully we will develop a platform which all the people who consider themselves advocates for the average American, the average taxpayer out there, the working families, will also get involved in the debate.
Steve Forbes and the various other conservatives should not be the only ones who are concerned about tax reform. There ought to be a tax reform program that comes from working families and their advocates.
H.R. 1390 cuts deductible depreciation on nonresidential buildings from 2.6 percent per year, and it is based on an estimated useful life of 39 years, et cetera, et cetera, some other details that I think we need not go into.
The estimate is that this tax program that I offer will be either revenue-neutral or a revenue-plus. Total Federal revenue, income and social security taxes, will be reduced by between $190 to $200 billion per year and increased by the same amount or more, $200 to $250 billion a year by the mechanisms in these bills.
I am also convinced that the great social security problem we all talk about, and we have good reason to worry about, the great social security problem could be dealt with if we were to place a social security tax on all unearned income. In addition to the tax on earned income, let us put it on all unearned income. That is the area of greatest growth. That is the area where the ratio of people in the workplace does not determine what goes into the social security coffers.
Let us have a social security tax on unearned income for the first time, and that will save the social security system for at least two generations, and I suspect will go even beyond that and solve the problem once and for all.
In other words, I think working families deserve a platform, a program of their own. I hope the candidates, certainly the candidates in the Democratic Party for president, will break out of the mold, will break out of the conventional wisdom, and move forward and talk in more direct and affirmative terms about programs which benefit the great masses in America.
Finally, I want to conclude on the program that I think benefits the most people, and all of us, but certainly working families in dire need of the public education system that is able to deliver the kind of education that is needed as we go into the new millennium.
As we go into the 21st century, we need the best schools in the world. We are not going to be able to maintain our lead economically if we do not have the best educated populace in the world. We are not going to be able to maintain our strong military if we don't have the best educated populace in the world.
Already we have great shortages in the Navy. I understand the last great super aircraft carrier that was launched was short of personnel by 300 people. They could not find 300 people to staff it. There are other shortages throughout the Navy and other services, shortages of appropriate personnel.
Are there shortages of bodies in a Nation with more than 250 million residents? There is never a shortage of bodies. They are talking about a shortage of people who have the capacity and the prerequisite training to be able to deal with a high-tech military. The Navy needs people who have some kind of education which prepares them to learn how to operate high-tech weapons. The Air Force needs the same kind of people. The Army needs the same kind of people.
Even in the military, we need the best security effort that we can launch, which would be a better educated population through a revamped public education system, everywhere we go, economics, foreign policy, globalization, military, and even social security.
If we are worried about social security, what is the great worry about social security? The number of people who are going to be on social security as we progress into the 21st century, the ratio of people who are earning or drawing money from social security will be far greater than the number of people who are in the work force paying into social security. That is a simple understanding that is correct. We are going to have fewer people paying into social security than are getting benefits from social security. Then we have a situation where if we do not find new sources of revenue, it is going to run out of money.
I have just indicated part of the solution may be to look for other revenue sources for social security. But even if we stay with the primary revenue source of wage-earners paying into the social security fund, if we have an education system which guarantees that the jobs that are created in this Nation will be there and the people who are in the Nation can qualify for them and earn wages and pay into the social security system, we are helping social security.
So education helps to keep us strong militarily, it helps to keep us strong economically. Education is the best investment we can make in social security.
The problem now is that because already we have not been able to fill many of the jobs in the high-tech industries, corporations are contracting out to other nations. Bangalore, India, is called the computer capital of the world because in Bangalore, India, they have numerous contractors from this Nation who are contracting with firms in Bangalore to provide computing services. And because of our high-tech communications facilities, we can do that kind of thing.
In addition to large numbers of corporations contracting to firms located in Bangalore, and the people in Bangalore, of course, pay their social security into the Indian system, not the American system, we have also large numbers who come to this country as foreign workers and improve their skills because they are hired in the jobs that cannot be filled by our corporations. They go back and make the computer and other high-tech industries of their Nation even more efficient and effective as competitors. So wherever we look, we find the need for greater investment in education.
There are many ways we can invest in education. We have talked about a lot of them. I do not think that I would rank reducing the classroom size over construction or construction over reducing the size of the elementary classes, but I would like to say that a school construction initiative which is meaningful would send a message to the whole Nation and the whole public education system.
If we believe in a religion, then the first visible commitment of that religion is manifested in the kind of church they build or temple they have or synagogue they have. The physical facility is not at the heart of what the religion is all about, but the physical facility is a visible manifestation of a commitment.
If we abandon the public schools of this Nation, and we have a situation similar to the one we have now, where we are spending only 23 cents per child on physical infrastructure in the elementary and secondary schools, the Federal commitment, the Federal portion of the commitment to the physical infrastructure right now is about 23 cents per child. We have 53 million children in school. When we look at the amount of money the Federal Government is spending, it is about 23 cents per child.
I propose a bill, H.R. 1820, which I have already introduced and am seeking cosponsors, where we would spend $417 per year per child instead of 23 cents per year per child. For $417 per year per child, we could deal with the crumbling, dilapidated schools, schools that endanger the health of youngsters because they have coal-burning furnaces, lead pipes, some have serious problems in terms of the roof. No matter how many times you repair it, the water seeps into the walls at the top and it keeps coming down. Lead paint, lead is in the paint. There are all kinds of dangers.
Many buildings are just so old. We have a lot of buildings in New York City that are 75 years or older, many that are 50 years old. This is not unique to New York City. All of the big cities have the same problem. Many rural areas, of course, have even worse problems. They never had sound buildings. We need a construction effort.
I conclude by saying that investment in the public education system is one of many of the steps we need to take to end the oppression of working families and provide benefits, and have them share in the wealth, instead of being objects of our contempt.
Madam Speaker, I include for the Record the following information on World War II:
BIG STATE, BIG CITY CASUALTIES
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Total Combat Three big
State casualties deaths cities
------------------------------------------------------------------------
World War I
New York..................... 35,100 7,307 New York,
Buffalo,
Albany
Pennsylvania................. 29,576 5,996 Philadelphia,
Pittsburgh,
Harrisburg
Illinois..................... 15,984 3,016 Chicago,
Springfield,
Peoria
Ohio......................... 14,487 3,073 Cleveland,
Cincinnati,
Dayton
Massachusetts................ 11,455 2,153 Boston,
Amherst,
Burlington
Michigan..................... 9,702 2,213 Detroit, Ann
Arbor, Lansing
New Jersey................... 8,766 1,761 Newark, Jersey
City, Hoboken
California................... 6,153 1,352 San Francisco,
Oakland, Los
Angeles
World War II
New York..................... 89,656 27,659 New York,
Buffalo,
Albany
Pennsylvania................. 81,917 24,302 Philadelphia,
Pittsburgh,
Harrisburg
Illinois..................... 54,686 17,338 Chicago,
Springfield,
Peoria
Ohio......................... 49,989 15,636 Cleveland,
Cincinnati,
Dayton
Massachusetts................ 31,910 9,991 Boston,
Amherst,
Burlington
New Jersey................... 31,544 9,742 Newark, Jersey
City, Hoboken
California................... 47,073 17,048 San Francisco,
Oakland, Los
Angeles
Korean Conflict
New York..................... 8,780 2,249 New York,
Buffalo,
Albany
Pennsylvania................. 8,251 2,327 Philadelphia,
Pittsburgh,
Harrisburg
Illinois..................... 6,435 1,744 Chicago,
Springfield,
Peoria
Ohio......................... 6,614 1,777 Cleveland,
Cincinnati,
Dayton
Michigan..................... 5,181 1,447 Detroit, Ann
Arbor, Lansing
Vietnam
New York..................... N/A 4,108 New York,
Buffalo,
Albany
Pennsylvania................. N/A 3,133 Philadelphia,
Pittsburgh,
Harrisburg
Illinois..................... N/A 2,926 Chicago,
Springfield,
Peoria
Ohio......................... N/A 3,082 Cleveland,
Cincinnati,
Dayton
Massachusetts................ N/A 1,317 Boston,
Amherst,
Burlington
Michigan..................... N/A 2,641 Detroit, Ann
Arbor, Lansing
California................... N/A 5,563 San Francisco,
Oakland, Los
Angeles
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