The Public Record
Dutch-American politician and diplomat (born 1953)
In 1998 the Congressional Budget Office projected a deficit of somewhere in the neighborhood of $225 billion, the President's plan. In 1999, that number would have been about $250 billion. In the year 2000, it would be about $290 billion…
I thank the Chairman. If this amendment and the other amendments do not deal about flexibility, do not deal about the degree of latitude that a local school district has, I am not sure what the debate is about. But what we have done in…
What we have found is that as we go to the local school districts, we find that they have lots of needs. Some have needs for professional development in the area of science and training; some have needs for special education dollars; some…
If they are on Social Security and they are getting a check today, we are not messing with that. What we are doing is we are talking about how we are going to save Social Security for our kids and for our grandkids, and it will be a…
I do not think there are any proposals here that are saying take all of the Social Security money and do that with all of the Social Security funds. It is most of the proposals, if not all of them, are very modest proposals to take…
As my colleagues know, at the Federal level, at the State level and at the local level we are going to working Americans and saying: The first 40 cents you own of every dollar is ours. So, Mr. Speaker, we have got an awesome responsibility…
I think it is about time to wrap up this debate, although we have not had much of a debate. But we ought to also remember and say, you know, why did we do this discussion tonight? We did this discussion tonight, number one, to prepare our…
Just a couple of points, because as we have gone through education with the Crossroads Project, our subcommittee, we have gone to 15 States, we have had 22 different hearings and we have heard this over and over and over from I think over…
I go through all of these reports in Washington, all the reports that go into this building, and people read them, they do not really know where your district is in Colorado, they do not know why my district is in Michigan, but they read…
I collect the taxes so the taxpayer who is over there has sent the dollars to Washington and I now work with the Congress or I am instructed by the Congress and I have created these 760 programs. So I need to communicate this to the local…
This letter that you showed me tonight as we were preparing is unbelievable. It clearly points out the difference between a bureaucratic vision of America, where control is moved to Washington, where we believe that this little bureaucrat…
I think the real focus here is on controlling spending. Even the gentleman was using the term reducing spending. We are not reducing spending. The best we can hope for is to slow the growth of spending. If we can slow the growth of…
I do not remember the exact amount of money, but the gentleman looked at it and said, is this really what we need the federal government doing is paying for someone to study the cow gas.
What happens through this process is what you outline. We get to a surplus in 1998, or we get to a balance or close to a balance without taking into account Social Security, which is a very, very positive step. When I first came here in…
Yes. We invited the gentleman to participate at our hearing and he indicated that if he came to the committee, he would invoke his rights under the Fifth Amendment and he would refuse to reply; going to your chart, he would refuse to reply…
The reason they do not believe that government should grow at the rate of inflation is that, when they get their paycheck at the end of every week, they find that 40 percent of it is going to government at one level or another, and if we…
It only took them 15 months to update the web page of trend setter companies. I just want to know how much money we are spending on a program like that. The gentleman and I both know there are tremendous opportunities here in Washington to…
They want it to go down significantly. We can make it happen just by making government more efficient.
So they are serving two masters. Really the school administrators should be not serving a master but should be working with the parents and the community leaders and their community designing school programs that are most appropriate for…
If you take a look at spending growth, I just want to point out we are still, I think, growing faster than what you and I might think is necessary.
We find out that it goes through 39 different agencies, hundreds of different programs, and we find out that we lose about 30 to 40 cents of every dollar. We lose it because of the bureaucracy here in Washington.
That is about $40 to $50 a week that this family is going to have in increased disposable income. Somebody can say, maybe I will work a few less hours, but it is a choice they can now make that they did not have before.
The bank will go and they will verify, they will want to be able to verify your income, they will want to verify the balances on the other loans that you have outstanding, they will want to verify that what you want to buy is actually…
Yes, only $3 billion out of, you know, the $40 to $50 billion that the Education Department spends every year, but, you know, we are starting, and we are going to take it and we are going to put it into opportunity grants, which says we…
The company I used to work for, it was always the fifth year of our annual plan, we would be a billion-dollar company. They finally reached it a couple of years after I left there. But a billion-dollar company makes the Fortune 500 list…
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