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[Page: H2637]  GPO's PDF
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   The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of January 6, 1999, the gentleman from Illinois (Mr. WELLER) is recognized for 60 minutes as the designee of the majority leader.

   Mr. WELLER. Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the opportunity to address this House today on issues I believe are extremely important to our economy and to working families not only from my State in Illinois, but across this country.

   Mr. Speaker, I represent a very diverse district. I represent the south suburbs of Chicago, as well as the southern part of the city of Chicago. I represent bedroom communities and farm communities, a very, very diverse district of city and suburbs and communities.

   I often find as I travel throughout the district that I have the privilege of representing, whether I am at the Steelworkers Hall in Hegewisch, a neighborhood in Chicago, or at the Legion Post in Joliet, or a grain elevator in Tonica, Illinois, or a coffee shop in my hometown of Morris, I find that there is a pretty common message whether I am in the city, the suburbs, or country; and that is that the folks back home in Illinois and the land of Lincoln, they tell me that they want us to work to find solutions to the challenges that we face.

   Those solutions sometimes require a bipartisan effort. In many cases they do. I am proud that our efforts over the last few years of working together to come up with solutions produced the first balanced budget in 28 years, the first middle class tax cut in 16 years, the first real welfare reform in a generation. We stopped the raid on Social Security, and we began paying down the national debt.

   Those are real accomplishments, and they are producing results. We have seen unprecedented economic growth for 9 years, economic growth that started in 1991 and continues to this day; and clearly, the balanced budget contributes to its continued growth.

   I am proud to say the balanced budget now is producing almost $3 trillion of extra money. And rather than arguing over how to eliminate the deficit, today we are arguing over what to do with that extra money.

   Our welfare reform has resulted in an almost 50 percent reduction in our Nation welfare roles. Seven million former welfare recipients are now working and have joined employment roles, having economic opportunity and a chance to move up the economic ladder.

   I am also proud to say that when we stopped the raid on Social Security and began the process of paying down the national debt that, in the last 3 years, we paid down $350 billion of the national debt. And we are on track with the budget we are going to pass this year to eliminate the national debt by the year 2013. That is progress. That is real results.

   Tonight I wanted to take the opportunity to talk about an area of our economy, an area of American society and, frankly, a part of our global economy, an area that there is greater interest in, for a lot of reasons. And tonight I wanted to talk about the new economy and some of the challenges, as well as some of the solutions, to the new economy of the 21st century.

   Let me start, in talking about the new economy, to talk about some facts, some statistics about the Internet and the new economy.

   Over 100 million United States adults today are using the Internet, and seven new people are on the Internet for the first time every second. Seventy-eight percent of Internet users almost always vote in national, State and local elections, compared with only 64 percent of non-Internet users.

   From a historical standpoint, the Internet began as the Advanced Research Project's Agency Network during the Cold War back in 1969 as a way of trying to determine how our military could communicate in time of nuclear war. Clearly, here is a peacetime conversion of military technology.

   What is hard to believe is that it only took 5 years for the Internet to reach 50 million users, a much faster one compared to the traditional electronic media. It took television 13 years and it took radio 38 years to reach that same audience. In just 5 years, 50 million users were on the Internet.

   The Internet economy today generates an estimated 301 billion U.S. dollars in revenue, and it is responsible for over 1.2 million jobs. And preliminary employment data shows that the technology industry in America employed 4.8 million workers in 1998, making it one of our Nation's largest industries.

   The average high-tech average wage was 77 percent higher than the average U.S. private sector wage. It is also interesting to note that 63 percent of Americans believe that the Internet will be equally or more important than traditional sources of information in the future.

   When it comes to all of our pocketbooks, the Federal Reserve Chairman, Alan Greenspan, points out and says that in the last few years, one third of all the economic growth, one third of all the new jobs that have been created in our economy, result from technology, much of it generated from the Internet.

   I am proud to come from a great State, the great State of Illinois. Illinois, of course, is nicknamed in many cases, we think of it as an industrial State, we think of Illinois as an agricultural State. But Illinois is also a technology State. People often think of Silicon Valley, they think of the Silicon Corridor in Boston, they think of Seattle and Redmond, home to Microsoft and some of our bigger technology corporations; and they often overlook the fact that the Chicago land region ranks fourth today in technology employment, with well over 210,000 technology workers currently working in technology in Illinois.

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   I pointed out that the wages of technology jobs are 77 percent more than other jobs in today's economy. I would also point out that technology trade is extremely important to Illinois, my home State. Illinois exported over $16 billion just a couple years ago, making Illinois the third highest ranking State in our Union when it comes to technology exports. I am pretty proud of that.

   And we think of the map here, which shows the top cyber States, the States which generate the most jobs from technology. As I pointed out earlier, Illinois ranks fourth today in technology employment.

   Of course, Texas and California have grown the most in technology employment. In fact, just in the last few years, technology employment in Texas, home to Governor Bush, has seen the greatest growth in technology.

[Time: 20:30]

   As I mentioned earlier, technology employment not only in my State of Illinois but throughout this country is a major contributor to our economy, in jobs in millions, in technology. According to these statistics here, there were 4.8 million jobs in technology in 1998. That is more than the combined jobs in steel, chemicals, auto manufacturing and services.

   Think about that. The traditional industries of steel and chemicals, which of course that is petroleum and, of course, auto, traditional basic jobs of our old economy of the 20th century, those jobs today are outnumbered by the jobs in technology. Clearly our economy is changing.

   We often have to ask, how can we harness that change to benefit the average working American? How can we harness that growth in the new economy so that every American has the opportunity to participate in that economic growth as well as to contribute with their ideas and entrepreneurship? I have listened to many of those who work in technology, many of those who have created; that is, the companies that have done so well, those who have created that new technology, created those jobs and opportunity. It is all about creativity. That is something I have learned when it comes to technology. But the message is clear. If we want to harness the new economy to continue to provide growth and opportunity for the American people, if we want to ensure that, there are some three basic rules that we want to, I think, adopt.

   Some say, what can Congress, what can government do to get involved in the new economy? Of course the government likes to regulate and tax as well as to stick its nose into a lot of things. But clearly this success of the new economy, the fact that high tech job wages are 77 percent higher than other sectors of the economy, the fact that one-third of all these new jobs have been created by the technology economy, the fact that our economy is growing so rapidly because of technology resulted basically because government was not in the way.

   Clearly as we work to build our new economy, the best approach for government basically is to stay out of the way and let the private sector innovate and create with a goal of a tax -free, trade-barrier-free and regulation-free new economy. I am proud to say that House Republicans continue to lead in the effort to build and promote opportunity in the new economy.

   We of course are working to honor what we call the e-contract 2000, a contract that we are committed to, to grow the new economy and to provide digital opportunity for all Americans. Of course, the central tenets, the central goals of our e-contract are to grow the new economy by reducing taxes, limiting regulation, reducing unnecessary lawsuits, promoting free trade and e-commerce and building a high tech future. Those are lofty goals. But if we all work together in Congress and we all work together in the same way that we succeeded in balancing the budget for the first time in 28 years, the way that we cut taxes for the middle class for the first time in 16 years, take the same approach that we succeeded in cutting our welfare rolls in half with the implementation of welfare reform and it all resulted in a growing economy that has seen unprecedented economic growth and the lowest unemployment in 30 years.

   I am proud to say our approach to lowering taxation, minimizing regulation and promoting trade-barrier-free commerce has produced some real accomplishments in this Congress. I am proud that thanks to Republican leadership, we put in place a moratorium on new taxes on Internet sales so that we do not double-tax and increase taxation of the new economy. My hope is that will be extended and we can have a vote on that fairly soon.

   I am proud to say as a Republican Congress that rewarded investment and the creation of new technology and research with what is the longest ever extension of the research and development tax credit, to make it easier to attract new investment in research and development technology, the R&D tax credit, that was one of those that every year was extended maybe for 9 months or 12 months. When you are a private employer considering investing your resources, your dollars in R&D, you always think about the tax consequences. By extending it for 5 years, we made sure that when they invest, they can be confident that that investment will be recognized and treated fairly under our tax code.

   I am also proud to say that this Republican Congress recognizes the importance of protecting intellectual property rights, ensuring those who innovate and create and come up with new ideas get the credit as well as benefit from their hard work and their labors when we passed the Intellectual Property Rights Protection Act in 1998. Soon we are going to be passing the e-sign legislation, legislation that establishes a uniform and legally binding standard for electronic signatures in e-commerce. You often think of legal documents being a piece of paper. Today, so much of the business, so many transactions today are done over the Internet. We have

   to ensure that we can come up with a way to ensure that those business transactions are legally binding even though it is a virtual transaction and that e-sign legislation which has passed the House and Senate, we are now in conference working out differences in our legislation between the House and Senate, moves quickly so that we can continue to grow the new economy.

   I am proud of those accomplishments. We have also passed out of the House more legislation protecting intellectual property rights; the American Inventors Protection Act addressed the issue of cyber-squatting, those folks who would steal names. I am also proud to say that under the leadership of those who want to promote research, which is the Republican majority, that we passed out of the House the Network and Information Technology Research and Development Act, legislation that boosts Federal investment in new technology, in new ideas helping grow the new economy. Those are accomplishments. We have moved that out of the House.

   I have said that one of our other goals of the Republican majority is also to promote barrier-free trade. Coming up in less than 2 weeks is probably going to be the most important technology vote of the year, a vote that will determine what kind of access Americans would like to give themselves into what is the world's largest market. It will be a decision over whether Americans want to sell products to over 1.3 billion customers. That is the issue of whether or not we grant permanent normal trade relations with China.

   China, of course, is the world's most populous nation. China has made a commitment to join the World Trade Organization and live by the rules, to honor intellectual property agreements, to honor trade agreements. As we know right now, they have access to our markets. All we have to do is go to the discount store and shop for some T-shirts to see that China has access to our markets. The question really is, do we want access to China's market? That is why the vote on permanent normal trade relations, the same trade status we give to almost everyone else, if we are going to give ourselves access to that market. To me it is the normal thing to do, to want to be able to sell our products that we make in Illinois in China.

   Now, China is pretty important in technology. I would point out of the top five U.S. exports to China, the top five are electrical machinery as well as office machines, particularly computers. Of course it is expected that by

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   Illinois, of course, is a major exporting State. As I pointed out earlier, Illinois ranks fourth in technology jobs. But Illinois ranks third in export and trade of our technology. It is important to us. We exported over a billion dollars from Illinois to China last year. I think we need more opportunity in that market. That is why I support normal trade relations with China, because it is good for American workers and it is going to create more jobs for American workers. Clearly if we want to grow our technology economy, which I certainly want to do for the State I am proud to represent, Illinois, we need to increase our market.

   I also wanted to talk a little bit as we talk about

   technology not only about trade but about another challenge that we face. That is something that some people call the digital divide, what I call the challenge to provide digital opportunity. What really hit home about the issue of the need to provide digital opportunity is when I talk to educators, teachers, school board members, school administrators, and they tell me that they are beginning to notice a difference in the classroom between the children who have a computer at home and those who do not. That the school kids who have a computer at home to work on their schoolwork, their homework seem to be doing a little better in school than those who do not. That is an issue of concern to our educators.

   Clearly education has been a priority in this Congress. In fact in our budget this year, we increased funding for elementary and secondary education by 10 percent while balancing the budget. So at the same time we are making education a priority, maybe we need to think about what we can do to help those kids who do not have a computer at home so that they can compete in the classroom. That is a big issue here, creating digital opportunity for our kids and for the future. Because those young people, those children that do not have a computer at home, if they are behind in school because they do not have a computer and trying to compete with their classmates, think about what that means for them long-term in competing for jobs and, of course, competing in the new economy of the 21st century.

   There are some interesting statistics out there. People say the digital divide. What really is the digital divide? We hear about it. If the digital divide is out there, is there something that we can do to make that digital divide really something called digital opportunity? If we think about it here, it is interesting that when we look at the digital divide, it is interesting that many cases it is the income level of the family that creates the digital divide. It says here, some statistics I have with me today, that urban households earning more than $75,000 annually are more than 20 times likely to have home Internet access compared to urban families at the lowest income levels. Think about that. In many communities in this State of Illinois as well as in this country, $75,000 is middle class or upper middle class. But they are 20 times as likely to have computers and Internet access as low-income families. I would also point out that those families with persons making less than $25,000 annually generally cite cost as the primary reason for not using the Internet at home, while those making more cite do not want it as the reason.

   Let me repeat that again. Low-income families say the reason they do not have computer at home, the reason they do not have access to the Internet is because of the cost, whereas higher income families just because they do not want to have it. So clearly there is a recognition by those families in many cases who do not have computers and Internet access that if they had a little more money or somehow Internet access could be more affordable that they would want their children to have computers at home, too.

   How can we create digital opportunity recognizing that income disparity on the so-called digital divide? I have also learned that if you look at statistics, that education level creates a digital divide. Those with the higher level of education, higher level of education degrees tend to have computers and Internet access. In fact, those with college degrees are 10 times more likely to have Internet access at work than persons with only some high school education. And that 62 percent of those with college degrees now use the Internet, while those with only a grade school education, only about 7 percent of them use the Internet. And also in rural areas it is interesting that those with college degrees are more likely to have access to the Internet than those without. So how can we ensure that those who are from families where there is not a college degree have computers and Internet access?

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