November 14, 1979
Page 32290
Mr. MUSKIE. Mr. President, I yield to my friend, the sponsor of the Boschwitz-Muskie amendment, without losing my right to the floor.
Mr. BOSCHWITZ. Mr. President, I certainly join in the remarks of the distinguished chairman of the Budget Committee. I would also point out the enormous increase that will have to be made next year just to keep the Northern States at the level where they are this year, not even considering the increases in costs that will undoubtedly come with fuel.
I would just like to say, in response to the distinguished Senator from New Jersey, the chairman of the Labor and Human Resources Committee, that it was unclear to me exactly which amendment was going to be introduced. And in the process of considering which to introduce, together with Senator MUSKIE, a live quorum call came on, which further complicated the decision of which one to introduce.
But most importantly, this Dole amendment, which was not considered in any way during the last 1½ days, would vastly change the whole approach that is reflected, as Senator MUSKIE pointed out, in the Interior appropriations bill that was just passed. In that bill, the Southern States received somewhat in excess of 7 percent of the appropriation of $1.6 billion. In this new bill, S. 1724, with Senator DOLE's formula, they will receive well over 20 percent, close to 21 percent — practically a tripling — with the result that States such as Maine will have a loss next year of 38 percent of their allotment at the same time that fuel costs are going up.
States such as Texas will have a 400-percent gain; Florida will have a 700-percent gain.
Mr. President, I refer back to the committee report, which talks about the intent of the act being to "offset high heating costs (and cooling where medically necessary) and that assistance not be simply a supplement of all utilities and their use to run appliances, etc." That is a quotation, Mr. President, from the committee report.
It is very clear that it is the intent of the Senate to help keep people warm. Certainly, all of us have received phone calls and mail, when it became known that there were going to also be subsidies for air-conditioning. At least the folks up in my neck of the woods thought that that should not be the purpose of the bill. North Dakota, our neighboring State, will be cut by 40 percent, virtually in half, next year, and it is the second coldest State in the country.
The coldest State in the country, Alaska, in heating degree days, will have a lower amount of money to help in financing their fuel costs next year than they do this year by about 20 percent. As I have stated, Maine will receive 38 percent less. And Minnesota this year will receive $72.9 million to help in offsetting the cold weather bills. As Senator MUSKIE has said, fuel bills in his State are approximately $925 per household. We figure $950 per household in our State; so that, indeed, we do need the $72.9 million that we are receiving this year, while next year it will go down to $53 million. Certainly that should not be the intent of the Senate.
If you look at the Interior appropriations bill that was just passed, once again you will see that it is very close, indeed, to the Muskie-Boschwitz amendment. And the Muskie-Boschwitz amendment was also considered with a floor. We would be happy to consider the Muskie-Boschwitz amendment with that floor once again. I certainly would be very much agreeable to the idea of further negotiations in compromise.
It simply should not happen in our body that cold weather States, where one has to pay practically $1,000 a month to keep warm in the average household in Minnesota or in Maine, should be penalized next year.
Indeed, as our distinguished colleague from Wisconsin knows, this year his State will receive, under the Interior appropriations bill, a total of $63.2 million and next year, according to the formula, would receive somewhere around $50 million, so that there will be quite a decrease in the appropriation available to our neighboring State of Wisconsin.
I do not think that this is the intent of the Senate. I do not think that the Senate wants to take away the funding for heating the homes of the poor and the elderly, particularly in the rural areas of the country where so many of them live. I think it is just a misunderstanding, frankly, on the part of some of the Senators from these States who have voted against this.
I will join Senator MUSKIE in speaking as long as necessary to gain some form of compromise, to gain some form of understanding that will not penalize the cold States, which I do not think is the intent of the Senate, the intent my friend from Wisconsin, nor the intent of any of the other Senators here.
Some of the Southern States, under our formula, do not do as well as under the committee's formula. None of those States, however, do worse than they do under the present Interior appropriations bill. All of them, in fact, do better.
I see our distinguished colleague from Oklahoma in the Chamber. Under the Interior appropriations bill just passed, his State receives fifty-eight one-hundredths of 1 percent of the total appropriations, while under the Muskie-Boschwitz amendment, they would receive eighty-eight one-hundredths of 1 percent. And so it goes that in every instance, in every State, whether it be North or South, as under the Interior appropriations bill, the Muskie-Boschwitz amendment is far closer to the actual allocation that we made barely a week ago.
I think that now for the Senator to come up with yet another type of amendment, with yet another type of formula, is really creating an inconsistent fact. And that certainly is the point that I make and the point that the distinguished Senator from Maine also makes.
Mr. MUSKIE. I thank my good friend from Minnesota for those contributions to the dialog.
There is another point that I think needs to be made with respect to the differences, the real differences, that exist in the circumstances of different areas of the country and different States.
For example, New England, more than any other region of the country, is dependent upon oil; as a matter of fact, imported oil. New England's energy problem is both price and supply.
When I was growing up, as a boy, our principal fuel was coal; soft coal and hard coal. This was true until, really, after World War II, when we converted on a massive scale in New England to oil.
As our consumption of oil climbed, because we had no indigenous sources of oil, our dependence on foreign sources grew. So, having abandoned coal because oil became the fashionable and more convenient and cleaner fuel, we then became reliant upon imported oil.
As a result of this, New England's energy costs are 26 percent higher than the national average. Eighty percent of all our energy sources in New England are oil. The national average is 47 percent. Seventy-nine percent of all of our oil is imported, as against 39 percent as a national average. Sixty-three percent of all of our energy source is imported oil, as against 18 percent which is the national average. And 40 percent of all of our energy sources is OPEC oil, as against 13 percent as the national average.
The result of all these statistics, each of which tells the same story from a different perspective, is that we are using the highest cost energy source to a much greater degree than any other region of the country. So when you distribute funds under a fuel assistance program to New England and the rest of the country, and if the per capita distribution is based upon some national average cost of energy, that formula is bound to discriminate against New England, because the dollars that we get will go only half as far as they will go in regions of the country where the basic energy source is cheaper.
The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. Will the Senator suspend? May we have order in the Chamber?
Mr. MUSKIE. Natural gas at this point is cheaper than other resources, and, as a result, energy cost in regions that are able to use natural gas is cheaper. The average household heating cost will be less and. other energy costs will be less than in New England. We have no natural gas. Our market is not big enough to have made it profitable for any company to pipe natural gas into our State. So we do not have the advantage of that cheap energy source.
We do have a lot of wood. Ninety percent of our land area is forest covered. So a lot of Maine people are turning to wood stoves and to wood. But because the competing energy source is oil, and our oil is the most expensive in the Nation, the cost of oil in Maine is driving up the cost of wood.
A cord of wood in Maine today will cost up to $100. In Btu equivalents, that is at least as expensive as the oil we import. So we cannot even go out in our backyard and get energy cheaper for our elderly and for our poor because the cost of that indigenous energy source has been driven up by the cost of the imported oil that we have to bring in.
I repeat, Mr. President, the result of this is that when you use a national per capita formula to distribute these fuel assistance funds they go only half as far in Maine as they do in areas of the country which are served by basically cheaper energy sources than Maine.
This is true not only of my State but it is true also of other New England States.
There is another respect in which we are deficient. That is hydroelectric energy. There have been 175 major hydroelectric projects funded by Uncle Sam out of the U.S. Treasury in those areas south of the Mason-Dixon line and west of the Mississippi. Not one has ever been built in the areas northeast of those lines.
I have been in the State of Washington. The entire Columbia River has been harnessed with the help of the Federal Treasury.
I have been in the areas served by the Tennessee Valley Authority, whose hydroelectric energy sources have been harnessed with the help of the Federal Treasury. For years, that cheap hydroelectric energy kept the cost of energy down in those blessed areas of the country.
But not in New England. The one project we have developed over the years in New England, authorized by the Congress in 1965, we still have not been able to get the Congress to approve funding for. Measured against the same criteria of eligibility that have been used to build 175 projects in the rest of the country, Dickey Lincoln School was better than 75 percent of them and we have not been able to get that project funded because we do not have the political clout and have not had the political clout.
Here again, with this bill, we obviously do not have the political clout in order to get appropriate, sensitive attention to the nature of our energy problems.
So we do not get any help at the hydroelectric energy level and we get no help on oil prices. Even our indigenous wood supplies rise to the equivalent price of our imported oil, which is as high as anything in the country. Then Senators may wonder why this is only the second occasion in my Senate career I have to undertake to delay the Senate from proceeding with its business until I see some evidence of movement in the direction of equity and justice in this pending bill.
I understand that there is some consideration being given to a possible compromise. I welcome the effort. I hope that that effort springs not out of my intransigence but out of a real feeling of compassion and understanding for the problems of my area. But whatever the motivation, I would respond to any suggestion of compromise if it is offered at some point so that we can get on with the business of dealing with this amendment.
Mr. President, may I say with respect to the pending bill I do like the approach of using the budget as against using the Tax Code for the purpose of creating and distributing funds for fuel assistance. I like that part of the bill and I said that to the distinguished floor manager of the bill a week ago before this present parliamentary strategy was agreed to by the Human Resources Committee and the Finance Committee. I am glad they found it possible to accommodate their different approaches to the windfall profits tax bill so that we would not face the possibility in this body of approving both a spending bill and a tax bill, both directed to the same problem.
I was worried, as chairman of the Budget Committee, that we might find ourselves in that fix. So the fact that Senator WILLIAMS and Senator LONG agreed on parliamentary strategy for combining the two into one bill is a tactic to which I am not opposed. That is parliamentary wisdom. My one concern is this one provision of the bill, and I would hope that we can work it out.
Maybe we can work it out better if I stand here talking on the Senate floor while others are talking privately. Maybe my aggressive personality got in the way of reaching an agreement in private negotiations.
I am not practiced in lengthy debate, certainly not as practiced as the distinguished Senator from Louisiana, and I could use some of his experience at this point to stretch this discussion out. Also, I suspect before I get through I might be able to use some of the physical resources which have sustained him on the many occasions on which he has held the attention of the Senate at great length.
I envy my southern colleagues who now serve by silence, whereas I have to serve by the unaccustomed tool of talk. In any case, I would hope that I might be as effective as my Senate colleagues have been in the past in dealing with problems about which they felt very intensely and very strongly as they affected and impacted upon their regions.
I am sure they felt they often had lost a battle but continued to fight the war. I do not know how, with respect to history, they view the results in their regions and States the national policy which has developed out of those confrontations and those battles in my early years in the Senate.
I suspect that accommodation useful to their areas of the country has been reached and that the whole country is healthier for those accommodations. I seek a similar accommodation but in a shorter time frame. I should like to see an accommodation reached this evening or even possibly, if we have to, tomorrow. In any case, I hope that we can move toward an accommodation.
Mr. DOLE. Will the Senator yield?
Mr. MUSKIE. I yield to my good friend from Kansas.
Mr. DOLE. Mr. President, I am not sure we might not be able to work out something if we could all get away from the floor and look at it. I am not certain any formula is going to satisfy anyone. The Senator from Kansas does not want to obstruct progress, whatever that is. I certainly agree with the Senator from Maine. I think he is totally within his rights and if we can help accommodate the views of every Senator, I would certainly be willing. As the ranking Republican on the Committee on Finance, my only purpose is to try to arrive at some consensus that we can have a general agreement on.
It might be better if we meet early in the morning or yet tonight, unless something is going on that I do not know about now on the floor.
Mr. MUSKIE. Mr. President, I say to the Senator, I am most appreciative of his sympathetic attitude on reaching an accommodation. Frankly, we are in the process of doing two things. No. 1, I understand that there is work being done toward developing a compromise that we could all embrace and bring the matter to a conclusion by some kind of consensus of that sort. I am perfectly willing, indeed eager, to pursue that route.
In addition, we are pursuing the parliamentary options that may or may not be available to us in the event the Dole amendment is adopted. We simply cannot drop the fight with the adoption of the Dole amendment.
I know that my good friend from Kansas is willing to move aside for a compromise, if one can be developed. He has told me that. He has said so himself. So maybe in one of these two ways we can reach an accommodation and a firm result. I have no desire to delay the Senate unduly if we can get some movement in that direction.
At this point, Mr. President, I am happy to yield to my good friend from Minnesota, who, I understand, has been seeking the floor in his own right.
Mr. BOSCHWITZ. Mr. President, I, too, hope that we shall find a means of compromise. I hope the Senator from Kansas will meet with my distinguished friend from Maine so that a compromise can be sought. We are going to be faced in the coming year with many choices to make that are budgetary in nature, many choices that are going to require the dollars of our Government that are often in such short supply. As we look forward, we certainly can see those kinds of demands, whether they come from the military or whether they come from various programs that are already underway.
The formula that has been introduced by my colleague from Kansas and that is before us now, and upon which a motion to table failed, would require a large outpouring of funds in this program, despite the fact that the program is already many billions of dollars and is a new program. Certainly, we must move forward to help those who are in need, those who are unable to keep warm in the depth of winter.
As we see the statistics as they apply to my State, next year we shall have 30 percent less and, I am sure, just as heating costs will expand by 80 percent this year, next year there will be another increase — hopefully, not to that same degree, but obviously at a pace considerably faster than inflation. We shall have to approach this body once again for an expanded appropriation, for an expanded authorization under this act, because people in Maine and people in North Dakota and New Hampshire, New York, Pennsylvania — indeed, the entire belt that crosses the United States on a line not very far north of some of the States that will have large increases next year — will find themselves without adequate funds to exist. They will be without adequate funds to keep the poor and the elderly from suffering the inclemency of winter. In his State, he noted, the temperature often does not rise above zero in the month of January. In my State, that often begins in December and does not end until well into February. As a matter of fact, last year, I believe, we had 56 or 60 consecutive days where the temperature did not rise above freezing. Where the winds come across the prairies. As the wind whips across the prairies, the wind chill temperature often goes to 60º or 70º below zero and sometimes considerably below that.
So we are going to be left, Mr. President, with a situation in this coming year where a number of other Senators from other States will have to come back tothis body, some of whom, paradoxically, voted against the amendment offered by Senator MUSKIE and myself.
That is not the point we want to make. That is not the track that we want to be on. If we are to contain the economic problems of our country, and reduce the inflation that has attacked the very fiber of our being in this country — if we are to do that within our Government, we have to exercise some stability, we have to exercise some reluctance to expand programs such as this — particularly a new program that authorizes many billion dollars.
We have to consider what is coming up in the coming year and not allow the inflationary pattern that has been the subject of so much discussion on this floor to be exacerbated by increased allocations to keep people warm. Certainly, this body will not allow Americans — will not allow the elderly, will not allow the poor, whether they be in Louisiana or New Jersey or Minnesota — to be cold in the wintertime, to be subject to the elements in such a way that they have to make some terrible choices that should not occur in our society.
They have to make choices between food or other necessities of life and keeping warm. They have to make choices that, really, our country should have grown beyond. It is my hope that we are making some progress in coming forth with a compromise that will not make these things necessary, that will not make necessary the adoption later on this year of a supplemental appropriation. That would add further to the budget deficit that we foresee, a budgetary deficit that already is somewhere in the neighborhood of $30 billion.
We see a State like Minnesota or a State like North Dakota being so severely affected by this new formula that, next year, their allotments will be severely cut back. Yet, as I have noted, Mr. President, the price of fuel moves inexorably forward, moves inexorably higher — indeed, the people in those States will be unable to cope with that.
They will be unable to cope with that and we will have to come back to this body for more.
The distinguished cosponsor of my amendment also recognizes this, as the chairman of the Budget Committee. Unless the formula in S. 1724 is changed, we once again would have to increase the budget, we once again would have to expand the debt that has caused us to increase the money supply at such a rate as to bring about the inflation experienced in recent years, or at least contributes very substantially in that regard.
As I see the allotments going down from $73 million to $52 million in a State as cold as Minnesota, I simply must object. I simply must use the privilege of this body for the purpose of objecting in the hope that a compromise will be worked out.
The Senator from Maine says that in his long experience in the Senate this is only the second time he has found it necessary, and felt so strongly that he has found it necessary, to use tactics of delay in order to obtain justice.
I am a newer and younger Member of this body than the distinguished chairman of the Budget Committee and this is the first time I must do this. But, nevertheless, I feel as strongly as he does that we cannot allow this situation to develop, that we cannot, in fairness to the people from the northern climates, we cannot in fairness to our own people whom we represent, allow the deterioration of the funding of moneys to keep our people warm. There is not that kind of option.
One of the interesting aspects of my career here in the Senate came in the first few weeks I was in this body, when the very subject of dilatory procedures, or extended debate — whatever is proper to say — was discussed and discussed. We found ourselves recessing 1 day to the other rather than adjourning, and found ourselves in the position of trying to negotiate the rules in such a way that we would not be unduly delayed.
But Mr. President, I do indeed feel that this is a cause for delay. I do indeed feel that the Senate has not caused justice to come forward in this past vote.
I do hope we are proceeding along toward the idea of compromise, because compromise is certainly the best way to work out this dilemma.
I ask my colleague from Maine if there is any sense of compromise in this body and whether or not we should continue to proceed, which I am certainly prepared to do.
Mr. MUSKIE. Mr. President, there is an effort. Whether we are any more successful than the efforts made earlier today is the question.
There are also some parliamentary options which we are pursuing which would require some time consuming preparation.
So that I am not sure it is going to be possible to get to a quick resolution of the problem. As the Senator can see, there is consultation going on in more than one area of the floor. Precisely what the subject of discussion is, whether or not it is likely to be favorable, I am not sure.