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…

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…

I said, ``We've got a problem. I think we have a problem. We've taken a look at the Labor Department. We've taken a look at their discretionary spending. We have met with the Labor Department. We can't account for about 3 to $4 billion.''…

The money makes a difference when it is in the hands of a teacher in a classroom directly benefiting a child. The bureaucrats do not help the child one bit. So when a dollar comes from Wisconsin or a dollar comes from Michigan for…

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.

And, as we go through this audit, I just want to let the gentleman from Wisconsin know that for the last year and a half we have gone through this process at the education department, we have gone through this process at the Labor…

I hope that in the coming months and the coming years we can build on this bipartisanship and seriously take a look at America's labor laws, labor laws that were developed in the 1930s and the 1940s. And now, as we take a look at entering…

For the last 18 months we have had the opportunity to go around America and we have had hearings in 17 States about what works and what does not work in education. We have also had an opportunity to take a look at education and what…

When I first came here in 1993, the deficit as Washington counted it for 1998 was projected to be $300 billion per year. We are on the path now to have a $40 billion to $50 billion surplus. This is a switch of $350 billion to the positive.

We know that, since 1979, with the Education Department, we have been bringing more power and more funding, more rules and regulations to Washington and saying we need to improve education in America, and the way to do that is to move more…

I always get beat up at my town meetings between getting the deficit and the debt confused.

Is this the same Washington that is going to stop our kids from smoking but we are going to give them free needles? Somewhere in here there is a contradiction. We can stop our kids from smoking through Washington programs, but we cannot…

I can understand why the gentleman from Colorado might be reluctant to yield to the gentleman from Michigan only because we have talked about the oasis in the west, but Michigan in many respects is the oasis of the Midwest. Under our…

What we are finding is at the State level Governors are aggressively slaying the dragons of big State government, whether it is South Dakota, whether it is Colorado or Michigan. They are trimming back on bureaucracy. They are lowering…

I cannot tell you the excitement that I feel to see first term Member, a second term Member, and it is my third term, and just reflecting back on when I came to Washington in 1993, if we had projected in 1993 that we would be approaching…

They have to fill out some papers. So they send fill out papers, and send them where?

And I would propose that the same kind of focus and enthusiasm and energy that we have put behind the problem in 1995 of addressing this deficit and addressing the debt, we have come a long way and we got a long way to go, but we are on…

That makes me senior, that is right. But you know we came here in 1993, and within, I think, you know, the first 6, 8 months, the deficits were projected to be $200-$250 billion per year as far as the eye could see. The only way that we…

Well, I do not think so. We, you know, what I have been involved in and almost all of 1997, I think we have had 22 different hearings around the country. We have been in 14 different States taking a look at what works and what does not…

That costs money. We know you are probably not going to tell us the truth, so that means we have to send auditors into Wisconsin.

I do not think the gentleman needs to worry about that, because we are fairly efficient here in Washington, because when you send that dollar to Washington and we figure out how to send it back to you, remember, also when you get the…

It costs money, but it is not that much. Really, we have taken a look at it. When you sends a dollar and we send it back, for every dollar you send us, we only take 30 to 40 cents, to make sure you spend the 60 cents left in the way we…

Well, let me give you another couple of statistics, and we can maybe reach a conclusion today. That was a question that we asked earlier in the process. We went out and we went to local schools and we talked to parents, we talked to…

I can tell you as we have gone around the country, it is not an issue of spending more money. We have gone, and the best example is taking a look at what is going on outside of this building in this city where we in Congress really have…

Back to Washington. We go through them and say whoa, you might have been lucky and got it all through the first time. We say, it looks like Wisconsin is qualified to get X amount of dollars, so we send the dollars back to you and you can…