I want to briefly respond actually to some of the comments that we heard in the previous hour, and then talk about the new economy and how we can adopt our government to address the issues that it brings to the fore. 

I was interested to hear for an hour, the 2000 campaign is still a ways away, and for any of those who are wondering whether or not it is going to be positive, I guess the gentlemen who preceded me have answered that question in the negative. It is going to be relentlessly negative. 

Amongst the charges that we heard tonight, I understand now that Vice President GORE wants to get rid of ambulances and fire trucks. If the other people are to be believed, that is a core of his policy. Those who were not listening to the comments, what they were saying is Mr. GORE has concerns about the internal combustion engine and would like to replace it. They implied that since these engines are now in ambulances and fire trucks, for him to oppose the internal combustion engine must mean he wants to get rid of ambulances and fire trucks. 

I think this sort of extreme negative campaigning is bad for our entire system of government. I think my colleagues on the other side of the aisle, many of their issues I actually agree with. I think we can get up and talk about what we stand for and move the country forward, instead of relentlessly trying to pummel whoever emerges as the leader of the party we are opposed to. 

I do not think that serves democracy and I am somewhat saddened to see that, as I said, 20-some months before the campaign even starts we are full bore on the ripping apart of the person who we think is going to lead the opposite party. Let us talk about a few positive issues, what we stand for and the direction we want to take the country in. 

Towards that end, that is what I want to talk about today. I talk as a member of the New Democratic Caucus. We try to each week as new Democrats to present a message, an issue that we want to talk about, that we think the country needs to address and that our government needs to address. 

New Democrats are essentially moderate, pro-business, pro-growth Democrats within our caucus, and the issue that I want to talk about today has to do with the new economy and how our government can institute policies that address the changes that that new economy brings to our country. 

First of all I want to talk about what I mean by the new economy. Everyone has heard about the Information Age, about the global economy. It has almost become a cliche to say that we live in a global economy that is based far more on technology, but just because it is a cliche does not make it any less true. It is the dominant feature of the last few years of the 20th century and will be the dominant feature as we move into the 21st century, as our economy changes. 

We must adjust to it. We must understand what moves and motivates this new economy and adopt the policies that adjust to those changes to best serve the people of this country. 

It is a good news/bad news situation. The good news is it creates so much opportunity, the advances that we have had in the technology from computers to telecommunications to all points in between, to software, have created tremendous amounts of choices and tremendous amounts of opportunities in a wide variety of fields. 

It also creates challenges. The central challenge that it creates is adjusting to change. The world simply changes more rapidly today than it did previously. Therefore, we have to be ready to make the adjustments as new technologies come on board, as the world changes. 

I am 100 percent confident that we can do this; no question about it. We can benefit from the dramatic increase in productivity, in growth, that high tech industries give us and adjust to the changes, but not if we do not think about the issues in a new light, think about what the Information Age, what the global economy means to the policies that we need to adopt. 

To strip this to its core, what I am talking about is people. The reason I care about technology issues is because of the district I represent. The Ninth District of the State of Washington, it is a blue collar district, and one of the most important things that the leaders in our community, whether they be government or business, can do is ensure that a strong economy exists so that the people of districts like mine and throughout the country can get good jobs, make enough money to take care of their family and pursue their dreams and their interests as they see fit. 

Maintaining that economy is what is going to bring it home to everybody. Not just the top 5 percent, not just the Bill Gateses of the world, but every single person in the country who needs to have a good job to support their family or just support themselves can benefit from policies that embrace the high tech new economy. It is going to be important to real people from one end of this country to the other. 

I think when we talk about the high tech new economy it is important to break it down. There are really five areas of the new economy. First of all we have computers, and in that I include software and hardware. We have the Internet. We have telecommunications; biotech, which is primarily health care products that are developed; and lastly we have all of the products that those first four things help create. 

I think there is a mistake sometimes that people make, that technology is just a certain sector of our economy; there are certain, quote, high, unquote companies and then there are low tech companies. Every company is affected by technology. Obviously, some are more affected by it. 

Intel, Cisco Systems, Microsoft, these are companies directly in high tech. But even a company, even a retail store that sells clothing apparel is affected by the quality of the software that they have, that can track their inventory and track their customers and find out new opportunities. 

One of the examples that I think shows this is a small company that is actually starting up in my district that is trying to develop, coincidentally, back to the internal combustion engine, a new engine that will generate power. I have not figured out a way to make it drive an automobile, but what it can do is it can generate energy and replace some of the old methods of generating that energy. 

The advantage of this new engine that is based on the ram jet physics, stuff that I do not even begin to understand except to say that it works and it generates energy much more cleanly and much more efficiently than current methods, the person who was able to generate this product had worked on the technology in the defense sector. He had worked on it with jet airplanes but they had never quite made the connection down to the more civilian use of generating energy. 

He was able to generate that because of the rapid advancing in computers and software that enabled him to test theories more rapidly. Stuff that would have taken decades to get through to test, he could literally do in a matter of weeks, and that enabled him to test theories and move forward and get to the point where he actually developed the engine. 

In the biotech sphere, I talked to some folks in the biotech industry just last week, and they said from 1985 to today they have been able, through the use of computers and software, to reduce the time it takes them to analyze data to the point where a project that they did in the mid-1980s took them 5 years to analyze, that data today they could do in an afternoon. 

This application spreads all across our economy. So those five sectors need to be encouraged and fostered to grow because they impact all aspects of our business. 

As we get into an increasingly competitive global economy, we want our companies in the U.S. to be the ones that advance fastest and furthest and do it first so that we can take the advantage and get the economic benefit of that for our country. Therefore, we need to adopt policies that reflect this. We need to look to the future and say, as the world changes, as technology moves forward, what do we need to do to be ready for it? 

Certainly we cannot go with policies that we had 50, 20, even 10 years ago, when technology has changed. Remember 5 years ago the Internet was pretty much a nonfactor. It was an idea. It was out there, certainly, but the explosive growth in the last five years was not foreseen but by the smallest number of people. Now that affects every aspect of our economy. We need to be ready for those sorts of changes. 

Towards that end, I have six main policy areas that I want to make people aware of, that we in government need to address to try to adjust to this high tech economy. The first one has to do with export controls, and this is one that actually applies to more than just the high tech economy. It just becomes more of a factor because of the global nature of our economy that the Information Age makes possible. 

We have a number of policies in this country that restrict the exportation of our products, specifically restrict the exportation of technology products or create unilateral economic sanctions against the export of all products. This creates a problem for one simple fact, and for one simple reason: Ninety-six percent of the people of this world live someplace other than the United States, yet the United States is currently responsible for 20 percent of the world's consumption. 

What that means is that if our companies are going to grow, if markets are going to increase, they are going to have to have access to markets outside of this country. Currently, our policy on unilateral economic sanctions places sanctions on dozens of different countries that limit our ability to export. 

Now, the reason we place those economic sanctions is because we disapprove of something that that country has done, and that makes a certain amount of sense, if our action to place those sanctions would change the action by that other country that we disapprove of. But the reality is it does not. All it means is they go someplace else to buy their products. In essence, what we are doing is we are punishing these other countries by telling them that we will not take their money and that is not much of a punishment. It drives them into the arms of our competitors. 

We need to rethink our unilateral economic sanctions policy. Multilateral sanctions make sense. If we can get enough people together, enough of our allies together to condemn an action, condemn a country and place sanctions on them, then that can work. But taking the action unilaterally does nothing to advance the policy aims and only hurts us economically. 

In the technology realm, we place restrictions on the exportation of encryption technology; that is, technology that is used basically to protect data on a computer, to make sure that people cannot access it who you do not want to access your information. We also place restrictions on the exportation of so-called supercomputers. The problem with that is because computers are leaping ahead so fast and so quickly, a laptop basically could have been, will some day be a supercomputer and is close to getting there under the definition that we have in policy today. 

We need to understand that in trying to restrict the exportation of this technology, the world has changed. I think this is one of the key areas that shows how we need to adjust. In the old days, we did not want this technology to get out there because it had national security implications, and it clearly does. If one has good encryption technology, if one has good computing technology, it affects one's ability to have weapons basically to commit harm, to do a variety of things. It has military significance. 

But the question is, how do we prevent other people from getting that technology. Can we simply as the United States put our arms around it and say we are not going to let it out and nobody else is going to get it? No. Encryption technology in particular. One can download it off the Internet, dozens of other countries sell it. It is going to get out there. In fact, this is going to hurt our national security. Because if we restrict the exportation of encryption technology in this country, our companies will slowly fall behind. They will not be able to get the customers because they will not be providing the best product. As we fall behind and other countries get further ahead of us in this technology, we lose our ability to be the leaders in the technology. 

The encryption companies, software companies in this company who produce encryption technology cooperate with the FBI and the NSA to help them, show them the advances in the technology. That helps us be ready to deal with the national security implications. If we lose that leadership role, countries in other parts of the world are not going to share that information with our National Security Agency or the FBI. We need to be sure that we allow the exportation of that encryption technology so that we can continue to be the leaders in that area. 

Another important area is education, and that gets to the change points. In a rapidly changing world, we need to constantly update our skills. We live in a society where all of us are going to need to continually be learning. We need to adjust our education system to understand that. In the good old days when basically all one needed was a high school education and could go out and get a job and probably take care of their family; my father did, he had a high school education, got a job as a ramp serviceman for an airline and ready did not update his skills very much during his 32 years with that airline and was able to take care of his family. 

In today's world, we need to update our skills. We need to make sure that our education system is ready for that, and that our education system is also ready to educate our children in technology issues and to enable them to change as rapidly as they need and update their skills. 

The Internet is the key to all of this. The way the system basically works, what computers and software enable us to do is they enable us to generate and store a large amount of data, and that is very valuable, as in the engine example I cited earlier. By being able to generate that information, they were able to develop a product. That is the start of it. The Internet basically is the step that enables one to transmit that data. 

Back to the example of a retail clothing shop, if it is a chain, if they have 25 or 30 stores spread throughout the country, they can share data. Basically being in any one of those stores is like being in the home office and by being able to share that data enables the company to move forward, or, if they are designing something, they can trade the design back and forth and not have to be in the same place. 

What we need to do is we need to encourage the Internet. Overregulating the Internet would be one of the biggest mistakes our government could make. It would put us in a position of restricting its ability to grow, and it is very important that we allow the Internet to grow and prosper and do the things for our economy that it has already started to do. 

There is also an issue, and this is primarily in the area of biotech, but also in other areas of patents. We need patent reform so that people have the incentives necessary to develop new products, secure in the knowledge that they will be able to keep the patents on those products and benefit from them. Otherwise, they will not get into the field and try to develop them. 

Research and development is also a critical element. We have in this country the research and development tax credit. Unfortunately, it is only good for one year and every year we have to come back and renew it. Well, we need to make that permanent. The reason is because if one is a company planning for the future and deciding how much to put into research, a lot of these products are not developed in one year, and if one does not know if the resources are going to be able to be there for more than one year, it hampers one's ability to make that investment. We have the opportunity to permanently extend the R&D tax credit this year and give companies that incentive to go out there and continue to develop the new products that they need to develop. 

Lastly, and this is tied into the Internet, we have the issue of broad band, basically access to the Internet. The Internet is great, but currently only about 20 percent of households in this country have access to it, and a much smaller number, very minute number, have access to so-called broad band Internet access. 

Put simply, broad band means that the Internet moves more quickly for us. Now, if one is just sending e-mail or simply surfing the net, that may not be such a big issue, but if one is trying to send data, if one is developing that new design, if one is in the automobile industry, one develops a new design for an automobile and one wants to send it out to one's top 25 executives throughout the world, to be able to send that much data over the Internet requires a larger pipe. Otherwise, it will take forever to send the data out and to download it to whoever has received it. 

The most important thing in this area is we need to build the infrastructure. Think of the Internet today in the same way that the railroad was in the 20th century. In the 20th century, the railroad gave us the ability to connect our country, but first, we had to build the track, and it was very expensive to build that track, so we gave incentives to go out there and build it, and it made a lot of sense because it helped grow our economy rapidly. 

We need to do the exact same thing with broad band technology. We need to give companies ever incentive out there to go out there and build the infrastructure. Lay the fiber, lay the cable, put in the phone lines, do whatever is necessary to connect as many people in this country as possible, not just to Internet access, but to fast, broad band Internet access. 

Overregulation can kill this. If we regulate companies too much so that they do not have the proper economic incentives to go out there and build the infrastructure, it will not happen. Because yes, there is a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow if you are the company that best develops Internet access, but you have to make a major investment up front to get there and you may not be willing to do that if the environment is too regulated.