The most cruel among us may say, `Well, you have food stamps on top of that.' Food stamps will not pay the electric bill. Food stamps will not pay for a child's medical care, for housing, or for his clothing. I cannot believe how callous and indifferent we are to the least among us.

I started off mentioning de Tocqueville . I never tire of talking about him. He talked about enlightened self-interest. That is a very simple proposition that has governed my entire life. The principles I learned in Sunday school in the Methodist Church and the principle of enlightened self-interest that I learned from reading `Democracy In America' have governed my life, and that is where my values come from.

And what does it mean? It means that when some poor soul is reaching for the first rung on the ladder and you are on the top rung, you do not step on his hands. You reach down and take his hand and you pull him up. You pull him up because it makes him a better citizen, it makes the country a better country, and it makes me a better person.

How could anybody quarrel with those three principles, all of which are unassailable? So that is what is wrong with this bill. We are reaching out and giving a hand to some and we are stepping on the hands of millions who did not have a dog's chance to begin with and will have even less.

Madam President, I could not vote for this bill. I will never vote for a bill that includes so many things I deplore in this country. I might also say I would hate to have to go home and explain to my folks why I voted for a bill that uses their tax dollars and sends back to them only $394 for each poor child at the same time it sends the State of California $1,716. You can use all the sophistry in the world. You can use every kind of convoluted argument in the world to try to defend this. It is indefensible.

So, Madam President, I am honored to join my good friends and colleagues, Senator Graham and Senator Bryan, in trying to bring some sense and sanity to this bill. There are a lot of things about this bill I do not like. I would have a very difficult time voting for this bill even if this amendment was agreed to. I am not terribly worried about that.

But, for the life of me, when you look at that map and you see the States that are helped and the States that are hurt under this amendment--which simply says divide the pot of money by the number of poor children in this country and send it out to them on a per capita basis--you cannot improve on that. So I am hoping when the rollcall is up on this amendment, people will look at that chart and realize we are not talking about State money; we are talking about Federal taxpayers' money. We are distributing it in the most unkind, most unfair way I can imagine.

I yield the floor.