Pete Hoekstra

I applaud the gentleman for bringing forward this amendment... This amendment preserves that.

Creating a Government That Works Better and Costs Less, Report of the National Performance Review. We can speak from experience that the redesign or the reinvention of the Education Department has been a failure. Al Gore dropped the ball…

What we see here in front of us is one that is a Washington-based plan versus one that says we are going to take care of business here in Washington, which is paying down the debt. But other than that, we are going to give the money back…

The fastest growing program on our college campuses today is remedial education. It means that our young people who are graduating from high school are entering college without the basic skills necessary to complete the work in their…

I think this really builds off of the discussion that our colleague from Wisconsin was just leading in that when we take a look at the Vice President's plans to significantly increase spending, before we significantly increase spending…

I am not sure they are all Cabinet, but we have nine significant agencies that cannot receive a clean audit.

For our colleagues, the information is clear on international testing. The U.S. comes out somewhere between 17th to 19th out of 21 industrialized countries. That is not good enough. That is not good enough for my kids. That is not good…

Who for 8 years has been in charge now. I think he is the longest serving member of the President's cabinet and has been there since day 1 almost and in 3 weeks will deliver the third set of unauditable books, or a failed audit, to the…

Currently a W-2 form does not require the employer's share to be reported, so the W-2 form only lists the employee's share. What this legislation will require is that on the W-2 form, both the employer and the employee's share of the FICA…

In one of these initial hearings, the deans came in and said, you know, one of the programs that we need more funding for is for remedial education. And we kind of get a startled look on our face, and these are from some prestigious…

Again, it was fascinating. The school in Arkansas that gets some of the highest test scores, we asked them the question, Why are you getting such high test scores? Because they were the lowest funded school in the State? The answer was, We…

I think the best example today was we know that most States or many States, I think it is over 30, 33, 35 States, have embarked on a charter school initiative. We have gone around and we have heard and we recognize each State is different…

Again I would like to express my appreciation to my two colleagues for sponsoring it and moving this bill forward. I think the reason we had such a great debate on the floor today is that Members on both sides of the aisle recognized that…

Yes, they sent it back. But these were examples and they were only telling us about a couple. So, again, this is another thing that we have asked for is, give us a listing of all the duplicate payments that were made under this old…

This is I think maybe perhaps one of the sadder moments when we were sitting down with the leadership of the Department of Education and we asked about duplicate payments and they said, we are aware of one. And we kind of pushed them on it…

Going back to the letter my colleague was reading, the Department clearly knows that their financial controls were lacking, when they say the Department has worked closely with their Inspector General. It is obvious they have not done a…

If we go to take a look at that report, I believe that is also the report that says of the $712 million that were in that account at the end of 1996, only $12 to $13 million were actually in the account based on what the account was set up…

We are talking about the money that Washington believes we ought to spend, instead of the American people spending, on a variety of programs and services.

There are five of us, so our share of the national debt is $100,000, and next year it is going to be $103,000. It is going the wrong way.

If we really think about it, a debt of $20,000 per person, and I am a family of five, meaning that my share of the national debt is greater than my mortgage.

What the top chart enables us to do, if we stick to the spending caps and we pass our budget, is to really focus on what our colleague here has been working on, which is to seriously take a look at Social Security reform. Because we have…

All the stuff below the line on the President's proposal is new debt for our children.

What does the gentleman mean ``obviously?'' It is all the money that they have made. It is all the money that is excluded that is taken out of their check by taxes. Would not it all be covered?

But when we take a look at the FICA taxes or the Social Security taxes when an employee at the end of the year gets their W-2 which shows how much income they have made, and it shows how much they have paid in tax, is the full Social…

The false deficit. Mr. Speaker, that is right. But we still are facing this crisis. So we, with the plan now to wall off the Social Security dollars, say, number one, we are getting a handle on it. But it does not take care of these…