David Minge

The Fairness Caucus is committed to ending the regional disparities that exist with respect to Medicare today. The fact that seniors in some parts of the country are already receiving prescription drugs as a part of Medicare, at no premium…

If my colleague would allow me to interrupt for a moment, he referred to the energy costs and tax cuts. I had a very interesting experience just this last week. I visited a small trucking company, and the founder of the trucking company…

It has been calculated that if we can reduce the publicly held debt from $3.7 trillion down to $1.3 trillion, which is possible if we show the type of discipline we have been talking about, that interest rates on homes are projected to…

So it sounds like the discrimination that we have suffered from in our rural areas in the State of Washington would perhaps have just been flipped and we would have had discrimination in the other direction, and instead of solving a…

Returning to the crop insurance subject, I certainly am pleased that the Republican budget does allow $6 billion for the first 5 years of the budget cycle, but I would point out that it is a 10-year budget and there is nothing for crop…

I know that all of us have worked with the USDA, and we know that it has scores of programs. And we have heard from our constituents that they want increases in all of these programs. I do not understand how we can both maintain the…

There is a fair amount of cynicism and I would say even despair among young people. They feel they are paying in, it is about 12.4 percent in payroll tax for Social Security and that this is a benefit that is for their parents, their…

I would simply like to emphasize that here we are in the 24th year of a process in which we have required of ourselves a concurrent budget resolution, and this is the first time in 24 years that we do not have one. That is why we have a…

We should not be squandering our time on bills that we know are not going anywhere. The trade bill, which I voted for last night, is not going anywhere, unfortunately. This tax cut bill is not going anywhere, on the other side of this…

When I ran for this office, it was because of that very concern for our working families and our small business owners. We realize that in States like mine, in North Carolina, we are required to balance the budget and we meet that mandate…

Manipulation of the conference committee process and deadlines to take moneys from general funds from all States to finance specifically named projects for a select few for their political advantage is wrong. It is reprehensible. The Pork…

Going back to my question, the effect of deleting these lines in the bill would mean that these projects identified in the report language would at that point compete with projects from other districts, other States throughout the country…

So the fact that these eight projects are listed in the report language does not, as to the gentleman's understanding of the situation, after the amendment is adopted, provide these eight projects with some type of special status?

I appreciate that greatly, and I would like to again compliment the distinguished chairman of the committee and the ranking member for the work that they have done in bringing to the floor of his House a substantive measure which truly…

First I notice there was a discrepancy. The gentleman said it was 95 percent and now he says it was 99 percent.

And it would be correct to say that in the 104th Congress some of the rules changed, and we no longer had demonstration projects, so that we were not subject to this type of request from our constituents and, as a consequence, the process…

We would like to deal with transit as well, but as we understand the process within the Department of Transportation, the transit trust fund is handled in quite a different fashion.

But something that would happen with respect to transit funds would not be a highway project, unless it was a specific highway project. Therefore, it would not trigger the reaction that the gentleman is attributing to the amendment.

There were two amendments printed in the Record. One of them was broader. I would like to make sure we are talking about the same amendment. There is nothing in this one that deals with transit funds.

130 years ago, President Lincoln, in addressing a troubled nation, said, ``The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate for the stormy present. As our problems are new, we must think anew.'' The unprecedented deficits that this government…