Economy & Budget

I didn't think it had sufficient protections for workers.  I am worried about additional losses of jobs in my Congressional district, which has suffered enormously from previous trade agreements.

The U.S. trade deficit is far too large and the time has come for Congress to enact common sense initiatives that are going to boost American exports and level the playing field for domestic employers.

Congress must commit to strengthening our domestic trade remedy laws to ensure that our trading partners fully abide by the rules-based global trading system. We must implement a tax structure that includes border adjustability and promotes savings and investment. If Washington moves to embrace these changes now, we will improve the trade playing field for our commerce, end the artificial advantages we’ve dealt our competitors, and finally reverse the trend of our trade deficit.

All the new timetables in the world are not going to correct the mismanagement, fraud and scientific failings that have become a hallmark of the Yucca Mountain Project.  Nuclear waste can safely remain where it was produced for the next 100 years and there is no need to move this waste given the danger of an accident or terrorist attack.

One fact that every member of Congress should know is that the Department of Energy cannot and will not provide Congress with a new estimate of Yucca Mountain's total cost.  The price tag in 2001 was more than $60 billion dollars, and I would not be surprised to see the final cost swell to five times that amount.

For those who think Yucca Mountain is only a Nevada problem, I would remind Members of Congress that President Bush's plan to turn Nevada into a nuclear garbage dump will send thousands of waste shipments across America's roads and highways.  Communities from California to Maine will be impacted and will be potential terrorist targets as decades of waste shipments pass by homes, schools, hospitals and churches.  More than 50 million Americans will be at risk from shipments of nuclear waste headed to Yucca Mountain.

Today during the Ways and Means Committee hearing on Welfare Reforms, the results and outcomes of the 1996 welfare reform law were discussed.  It has been ten years since this legislation was enacted and I am very pleased to bear witness to the significant accomplishments of this legislation.

Essentially, since its inception, this program has brought millions of Americans out of poverty and into the workforce.  Poverty among families led by single mothers, the group most likely to go on welfare, dropped 15 percent from 1996 to 2004.  The overall child poverty rate dropped 13 percent in the same timeframe meaning 1.4 million fewer children living in poverty.  I am confident that these programs will continue to flourish and bring more Americans out of poverty and into employment.

I am confident that this bill will pass through the Senate.  With 80 co-sponsors, it is clear that there is much bipartisan support.  The Upper Mississippi Modernization Act that is included in the Water Resources Development Act is especially important due to growing competition in the agriculture world.  We will find ourselves falling further and further behind if we don’t have the necessary infrastructure to get products down the river for export.  I was in Brazil earlier this year, and I can tell you that Amazon River has facilities that would put the Mississippi River to shame

Today, we are simply failing to enact solutions to some of the most daunting challenges facing the middle class and those striving to get there. Subsidizing college tuition, creating a fair national health care program and a plan for energy efficiency all are ideas that my Republican friends who control Washington are failing to act on.

While declining incomes and skyrocketing costs squeeze the middle class, the tax policies of the recent years have saddled America and New York with an increasingly regressive tax code that has contributed to a even wider gap between the rich and poor. Since President Bush took office, the average millionaire has received $111,549 in annual tax cuts - over two and a half times what the average middle class family makes in one year.

It's time we changed this. It's time we gave the middle class a real tax cut. It's time we restored progressivity and fairness. It's time we created a zero tax bracket for those struggling to make it. And it's time we gave parents a bigger break as they raise their kids.

On Thursday, I introduced H.R. 5807, which gives middle class families earning less than $150,000 per year a 10% tax cut, paid for with a 7% surcharge on incomes over $1 million and a 10% surcharge on incomes over $1 billion. The plan restores progressivity to the nation's tax code, easing the tax burden on over 2.7 million middle class families in New York City, and millions more across the nation.

Currently, half of all our domestic refinery capacity is concentrated in the Gulf States, a region too vulnerable to natural disasters.  That in turn puts the U.S. energy security at risk and causes periodic supply disruptions and price increases. Simply expanding our current refineries fails to address this concentration and indeed makes it worse.  Moreover, such expansion only increases our over reliance on crude oil as a feedstock.  Constructing new refineries in other regions provides needed geographic distribution and also creates the opportunity to utilize locally available biomass and other renewable fuel feedstocks.  Our agricultural and forestry resources are currently sufficient to sustainably displace more than one third of our transportation fuel needs, and we should support domestic supply over protecting the import-dependent status quo.

Law-abiding, tax-paying American workers scored a victory in the long battle for fairness when the House Judiciary Committee on Wednesday passed legislation that would reform Federal Prison Industries.

Inmates paid a fraction of the federal minimum wage in prisons across America are currently given contracts for products and services by the federal government, contracts for which private sector firms are not even allowed to compete.

Inmates would still receive the training in prison that will be necessary for them to successfully reenter the workforce under the bill, only private sector firms will be able to compete with FPI for the contracts that they pay for with their tax dollars.

I look forward to the full House again passing the comprehensive legislation - as it did in 2003 by an overwhelmingly bipartisan vote of 350-36 - and the Senate passing a companion bill so that we can finally send it to the President for his signature.

I’m encouraged that Senate leaders have accepted protections for Florida offered by Sen. Martinez and me.  But I remain concerned that the proposal could be dramatically altered by House and Senate negotiators tasked with approving a final deal.

Incredibly, the Bush Administration has apparently decided to threaten poor countries, particularly those in our own hemisphere, with debilitating trade restrictions unless they support the US negotiating position in World Trade Organization talks.

During testimony at a Ways and Means Committee hearing, the USTR was silent on whether the Congress should extend, as it has in the past, two trade programs for poor countries that expire at year's end: the Andean Trade Promotion Act (ATPA) and the Generalized System of Preferences (GSP). ATPA extends duty-free treatment to imports from Colombia, Peru, Ecuador, and Bolivia.

In silence, the Administration shouted a threat to tilt global trade policy off axis, with harsh ramifications for poor nations struggling to stand on their own. This is not a carrot and stick approach. It is all stick, when a carrot and a conscience would serve us and the world better.

While the Bush Administration has reached free trade agreements with Peru and Colombia, it's not likely either of the agreements can be implemented before ATPA's expiration. Expiration of this program would mean that tariffs on products from the Andean region would immediately climb and close the American market to many legal Andean products, making illicit agricultural production, specifically cocaine, the only viable option in some cases.

GSP provides duty-free treatment to a majority of products from developing nations. Expiration of this program would affect the world's poorest countries and also increase the cost of products imported by American businesses and passed on to American consumers.

A year ago, the world joined together in advance of the G-8 Summit in Scotland to pressure world leaders to make global poverty history. Today, on the eve of another G-8 Summit, the Bush Administration suggests that we will punish poor countries if they don't kowtow to the US trade position within the WTO. What a way to show global leadership.