Pete Hoekstra

So with the process the gentleman from North Carolina has outlined, fraudulent data coming in is what can lead to excessive costs for further Federal projects.

The report was sent in, so on the report they outlined the wage scales that are paid or were paid to these workers on this project and for any Federal project or any project that had Federal dollars on it, these were going to be the wages…

I am not sure that we are even talking about the lowest possible cost. I think everybody here is willing to take a look. If we were getting exemplary results, we would not go through a cost reduction effort, and that is not the focus here…

I find it interesting. It has been one of the most exciting projects I have worked on because we have been able to go around the country. We have been in California, we have been in Arizona, we were in Georgia, we are going to New York, we…

Does the gentleman mean 39 agencies dealing with education is too many in Washington?

The gentlewoman actually believes school reform can happen at the local and the State level better than at the Federal level.

Is that 21 weeks before they may ever get an answer from the Education Department as to whether they are going to receive a grant?

We are operating at least 760 programs through 39 different agencies. They are not all in the Department of Education. They are in 39 different, distinct agencies, and they spend $120 billion per year.

We estimate that for the dollar that goes for K through 12, about 65 cents gets to the children, gets to the classroom. Thirty-five cents gets eaten up in the bureaucracy and the paperwork. Those are not impressive numbers. We can do…

When this President gets done, if he gets this approved, he will be building our schools, he will be teaching our teachers, certifying our teachers, putting in the technology, feeding them lunch, feeding them breakfast.

Mr. Speaker, I want to continue a series now that I have been doing for my colleagues that outlines a project which we call lessons in education. This is the fifth in a series. This is the fifth lesson, and it is about new spending and…

We need to prepare this country, which means I think that we have to carry forward on our vision toward getting a surplus budget and a government that can be funded by a one-wage-earner family, that a two-wage-earner family is an option…

And I think, you know, as we really take a look at how we help young people for those that select and believe that they want to go to higher education, I think that article points out that before we throw a lot more money and programs at…

The debate will be if we are only getting 65 cents of the dollar to the child, are we going to increase spending to $1.20 to get up to 70 cents or 75 cents to the child, or are we going to take a look at that 30 to 35 cents and say that is…

We are going to be coming to your States. What we are doing is we are working on a project which we call Education at a Crossroads: What's Working and What's Wasted. We have evidence that there are problems in education around the country…

Going back to the Tale of Two Visions, we all know how complex our Tax Code is. It is so complex that the IRS has spent in the neighborhood of $8 billion trying to design and automate and computerize the system. They now acknowledge that…

The key to this is, it is not that these rules or regulations are good or bad, I think they go too far. This is taxpayer dollars. This is why we have too many families in America today that are two-wage-earner families as a requirement…

But it is time to reintroduce the bill that allows public citizens, it allows the citizens of this country to hold their elected officials accountable for the promises and the commitments that they make during an election. Over the last…

You got to pay taxes on the hummingbird feeder. If you go to the grocery store and you buy suet and you put it in this little mesh thing, I am sorry, that is now taxed. You have to pay.

Well, if it is a pet and it is wild, then it cannot be your pet. But I bet we would have a regulation on defining when a pet is a pet and when it is wild it is not.

Yes, and I would guess that if you took your seed that was packaged for pet feed and you ran out of wild bird feed but you took your seeds for pet feed and you used it outside for a wild bird, you know, you would be breaking the law.

For those of you that have bird feeders in your backyard you will now know that we are going to have the Clinton-Babbitt backyard and wildlife products tax.

This amendment includes the Presidio Training Center but also includes significant other funds used by the corporation in training, including contracts with the AFL-CIO and a number of other agencies.

We have a tremendous number of dollars that should be intended to educate kids that are never making it down to the local classroom.

The problem is, I think, as we have talked about it, we have asked administrators and bureaucrats to look to Washington for their direction. When you take a look, I have oversight on the Education Department. The Education Department, they…