Joe Cunningham: “AmeriCorps is one of the President's pet programs that allows people to go out and help in other areas; for example…”

“AmeriCorps is one of the President's pet programs that allows people to go out and help in other areas; for example, painting a fence or cleaning a yard for a senior citizen or doing different kinds of work, and that is supposed to be voluntary, but they also receive an average of $27,000 for that activity, which we think is wrong. Part of that is used as direct pay, part of it is used for child care, part of it is used for administration costs. But we can spend our dollars better at that. The other area in which we waste money, if we are getting so little return out of Federal Government dollars that taxpayers pay, and a State bureaucracy is just as bad as a Federal bureaucracy if it takes the money from getting down to the teachers and the students and the parents where they can direct it, but if we cannot pass school bond issues at the local level because people are only getting 45 percent of their paycheck because of high taxes and big government, how are we going to build up the infrastructure? Well, one of the ways in which we are proposing is to take private enterprise, let the IBM's, let the Baby Bells, let the AT&T's, Alcoa put in the fiberoptics, let Apple put in the computer system so that they are not archaic within a year, and give them a tax break for investing in our taxes. We have less, Mr. Speaker, than 12 percent of our classrooms in this Nation that have even a single phone jack.”