When he travelled through America more than 100 years ago, the great French observer Alexis de Tocqueville was struck by how caring Americans were for each other. `The Americans, . . . regard for themselves,' he wrote, `constantly prompts them to assist one another and inclines them willingly to sacrifice a portion of their time and property to the welfare of [others].' What this act seeks to undo is 30 years of Washington discouraging that very basic American instinct to help one another.
These ideas are not new ideas. They are, in fact, ideas that have been tried, tested, and found successful. About a hundred years ago in cities like New York, alcoholics and addicts littered the sidewalks. Orphaned children roamed the streets. And if all New York City's liquor shops, houses of prostitution, gambling houses, and other low-life establishments would have been placed on a single street, they would have extended from Manhattan's city hall to the city of White Plains more than 30 miles away. On that street, there would have been a robbery every 165 yards and a murder every half mile. And in Brooklyn, 1 out of every 10 people got food from public storehouses.
These pathologies met their match through society's intermediary, nongovernmental, organizations. Their warm-hearted and hard-headed approaches helped save women and children and men. As the historian Marvin Olasky notes, `The solutions these reforms came up with forestalled an epidemic of illegitimacy and saved thousands of children from misery.'
I believe that as we confront our own social pathologies, we must, we must do it the same way--with new ideas for the 1990's that were the standard fare of the 1890's. We must meet our challenges with a greater role for States and a greater role for intermediary organizations--both larger ones like the Salvation Army and the Goodwill and smaller ones like Best Friends and the Sunshine Mission.
So while the CIVIC Act begins the process of moving welfare from Washington to the States, it also begins the vital task of reinvigorating our intermediary organizations--organizations which can help meet people's deepest needs, organizations that we know will help solve our welfare problems.
The change that we want to see will not occur overnight. Neither will it come without hard work and thorough debate. The end of colonialism was not an easy process either. For independence means risk, the sacrifice of security. Economic mobility means work, hard work. But no nation and no people who have ever tasted the sweet fruits of freedom has called for the return of its colonial rulers.
[Page: S7247]
By Mr. GREGG (for himself, Mr. Reid, Mr. Coats, Mr. Bradley, Mr. Kyl, Mr. Cohen and Mr. Lautenberg):
S. 847. A bill to terminate the agricultural price support and production adjustment programs for sugar, and for other purposes; to the Committee on Agriculture, Nutrition, and Forestry.
Mr. GREGG. Mr. President, I rise today with Senators Reid, Bradley, Coats, Cohen, Lautenberg, and Kyl to announce the introduction of legislation to repeal the sugar program. This legislation will eliminate the U.S. Department of Agriculture's [USDA] price support, subsidized loans, producer assessments, and marketing allotments for sugar.
The sugar program is big government at its worst. At a time when the American people are demanding that the Federal Government assume a more limited role in society, this program goes in the opposite direction. Instead of leaving the sugar industry to market forces, the USDA wields the heavy hand of government intervention.
Why should Congress repeal the sugar program? That is a good question, and I will give you but a few examples: