Mr. Speaker, I am very pleased … We will have a chance to debate housing. I think it is a very important debate. We have had this debate going on now for several weeks in the Subcommittee on Housing and Community Opportunity. Unfortunately, as far as I am concerned, the debate has not keyed in on the real important issue of whether or not public housing is a good idea.

This particular piece of legislation does very little more than juggle the bureaucrats in hopes that it will do some good. Public housing started in 1937 with the U.S. Housing Act, and we have been living with public housing ever since. In 1965 HUD was created, and since that time, we have spent literally hundreds of billions of dollars.

We have no evidence of any sort to show that public housing is a good idea. It causes a great deal of problems and actually takes housing away from many, many poor people. But it costs a lot of money and costs a lot of hardship to a lot of people. The principle of public housing is what needs to be debated. Hopefully, in the general debate and in the debate over the amendments, we will be able to direct a debate in that area.

One thing that I think our side, the side that I represent, that is the free market and the constitutional approach to housing, we have, I would grant you, done a very poor job in presenting the views on how poor people get houses in a free society. Since we have had 30 years of experience and there is proof now that it leads to corruption and drug-ridden public housing projects that do not last very long and it costs too much money, we ourselves who present the market view have not done a good job, emphasizing lower tax, less regulation and growth economy, sound monetary policy, low interest rates; this is what will eventually give housing to the poor people.

But I think it is very important that we not construe anybody who opposes this bill as being one that has endorsed the notion or rejects the idea.

Mr. Speaker, the one other point that I would like to make is one of the arguments in favor of this bill is that it is going to be saving some money in the bureaucratic process. But if this is the case, one must look very closely at the CBO figures, because last year the HUD budget took $25-plus billion. This year, with this wonderful new program, we will be asking, according to CBO, $30.4 billion, an increase of about $5 billion. And this is not the end, it is just the beginning. So this is an expansion of the spending on public housing.

By the year 2002, it goes up to $36 billion. So the best I can tell is we were working on the fringes, we are not dealing with the real issues, we are not dealing with the principle of whether or not public housing is a good program.

I, for one, think we can do a lot more for the poor people. There are more homeless now, after spending nearly $600 billion over these last 20 years, than we had before. So I am on record for saying we must do more but we can do more by looking more carefully at the market.

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