The opponents of the President's plan and the special interest groups that stand to gain from continuation of the status quo will try to shift the de… - Ted Kennedy

Then there will be the Jeffords amendment, which is a sense of the Senate that does not impose unfunded mandates, of which we are in strong support. Finally, there will be a Gorton amendment to the school-to-work legislation. The Senator from Washington would provide tax credits for the hiring of summer youth. We are in opposition to the Gorton amendment, and there will be a motion to table the amendment. We have tried to work this issue out. There may be changes in the Summer Youth Program, but this amendment would not really provide any kind of accountability, no assurance that at the end of the summer these young people would continue to work. We do not know how decisions would be made as to which companies would be able to get the approval of the young people. So we recommend tabling the Gorton amendment.

The CBO report specifically confirms that the long-term effect of the President's plan will be to reduce the Federal deficit. While there are differences between the OMB estimates and the CBO estimates, there is broad and welcome agreement by both budget agencies that the President's plan can be paid for by savings in the current system. The differences between the estimates are small, as the CBO analysis itself states. With further refinements in the cost data, the differences will be reduced. Only minor adjustments are needed in the program to assure that there is no increase in the deficit, even in the early years of the program. For example, one significant difference between the OMB and CBO is the CBO believes employers will be able to manipulate the system to achieve greater savings than they are entitled to. By improving the enforcement mechanisms in the bill, that gamesmanship can be reduced or eliminated. On the technical issue of budget treatment, CBO has been careful to describe the premium payments as receipts, not taxes. In asserting that these premiums should be part of the Federal budget, I believe that CBO is wrong. Premiums under the Health Security Act are paid to private insurance companies, not to the Federal Government. Never before has money not paid to the Government and not spent by the Government been included in the budget.

And of course, all of us in Congress quickly learned to host fundraisers the way Tip O'Neill did it--a thousand dollars if you came, and two thousand dollars if you didn't. Tip was scrupulously neutral in the 1980 Democratic primaries between President Carter and myself. But he told me that every night, before he went to sleep, he was secretly getting down on his knees and praying that we would have another Irish President of the United States. The prayer was a little ambiguous--but Tip's friend Ronald Reagan was very grateful. There was never any secret about the genius of Tip O'Neill. In his years as Speaker of the House, the entire Nation came to know him and love him as we did in Massachusetts. He was a Speaker who was never afraid to speak out for the average man and woman--the worker trying to keep a job, the child going hungry in the night, the family struggling to make ends meet, the senior citizen trying to live in dignity in retirement.