Veterans Missing in America Act of 2009

It's an honor and a privilege to be recognized to address you here on the floor of the United States House of Representatives. It's interesting and intriguing for me to listen to the dialog that flows forth from earlier this evening, the gentleman from Texas, and now the voices of the Congressional Progressive Caucus as they put their poster up on the floor that directs people to their Web site and make their argument as to the things that are in this stimulus package that they believe should stay and the things that are not in and may have been taken out that they believe should have stayed in or be put back in.

I think, Mr. Speaker, that this debate that we have is much deeper and much more profound than the components that have been discussed here in the previous hour. I think it goes to our vision of America itself. And the question that is before this country is, in some sense, What will we do in the middle of this economic crisis, this one that came tumbling down upon us on September 19, the date that Secretary of the Treasury Paulson came to the Capitol and very intensely insisted that we provide $700 billion for him to spend at his discretion, without a lot of oversight, perhaps with no oversight,

and provided that bailout money in two different increments, $350 billion in the first increment, and then congressional disapproval would have been required in order to block the second $350 billion.

So the entire $700 billion of the bailout money has been advanced into the hands of the Secretary of the Treasury who has some problems of his own. Those would be of his own intent to pay his taxes, et cetera, Mr. Speaker.

This discussion that we are in, this discussion that is being led by the President of the United States and his position that we must do something, we must do it fast, we can't do it halfway, we must do it all the way, and his insistence that we not flag and that we not fail, and that we come forward and support this stimulus plan has galvanized its support in the House of Representatives and in the Senate behind a single simple philosophy that seems to justify the capitulation of the responsibility to each of us Members to draw a reason and informed judgment and do the right thing for our country, for our State, for our district.

And this decision is this. Pulling back in behind this logic, which is, President Obama has called for a stimulus plan. It shall spend $800 billion, or more, plus the interest, which will be about $350 billion in addition to that, and it will have a mix that has some small business stimulation in it, some infrastructure in it, and a lot of other things, which are the bells and whistles and wish list to the left, Mr. Speaker. It's all packed in there.

And the Members, especially the Members on the Democrat side of the aisle here, and the U.S. Senators of the same political party, they will argue and defend component by component. But the rationale that's going on in the minds of the Members and the caucus is this: Well, we must do something. We know we have an economic crisis. This is the only thing that we can choose from because that is what has been served up to this Congress by the Speaker of the House, by the majority leader in the United States Senate, and by the President of the United States, who happened to be, not coincidentally, the three people in the United States that could come together in one room and set the direction for this entire country and not have to go outside that room and ask anybody for their input, for their knowledge, their wisdom base, that of their constituents.

A lesson from history, a look through the looking glass into the future? Sometimes it feels like we have gone through the looking glass here, Mr. Speaker.

But here's the question that is before us. In an economic crisis, with a crisis of confidence in our financial institutions, a crisis of capital that arises more out of that lack of confidence than it does out of a slowdown of production or slowdown in the markets--it's the other way around. It's the crisis in the capital that is backing up and causing these slowdowns.

But to look through the history of the economy of the United States, or the free world, for that matter, and for an economist to ask themselves, and all of us should be at least amateur economists here. We're making decisions for the people of the United States of America.

But they ask themselves, What has happened historically and economically that we have addressed from this Congress that has been improved, and how did we do so? So, we take ourselves back through this history, and I can think of the economic crisis we had in the eighties. I saw the charts, Mr. Speaker, that were put up here on the floor that show--well, what shall I call them? Bush 41's recession and then Bush 43's recession. That seems that's how it was presented by the Congressional Progressive Caucus.

No. We have had some real economic crises in our past. One of them was what we called in the Midwest the farm crisis, which was not limited to the farm crisis but it also was a real estate and an energy crisis. And during those years of the eighties, when things were very tough economically and statistically worse than they are today, although I won't argue that things today will not get that bad, Mr. Speaker.

But in the eighties we lost 3,000 banks. Many, many farms went under. We lost a lot of oil rigs out there that they were producing and tapping into our energy. The crisis in the real estate was a big piece of it too. Three thousand banks. The FDIC came in and closed a lot of them. In fact, they shut my bank down on April 26, Friday afternoon, three o'clock, 1985. I remember the red tag on the door. Closed by order of the banking commissioner. Highway patrol guarding the door, Mr. Speaker.

Those were some tough times. And what did we do then? Well, we didn't do a lot of the things that are being proposed today. There was some plans that came out. One of the things we did was we provided net worth certificates to shore up some of the banks that needed some collateral. They accepted a look over their shoulder from the FDIC and asked them to shore up their operations. Those banks that received that kind of collateralization, all came out of it. Every one of them was part of that. All succeeded.

We found a way through this, and we sold some real estate down to the value of the real estate. New buyers came in that could borrow the money or had the cash to make the purchases because there were some bargains out there. When those bargains got picked up, the markets came up. Real estate prices stabilized. Banks became stable again. The confidence was back in our economy again.

That was a long decades of the eighties. A lot was wrong. A lot was more wrong going into the eighties than we are seeing today. We had high unemployment then. We had high inflation then--inflation that ran up towards 20 percent. And I personally paid 22 percent interest for operating capital to keep my business running through a tough, tough decade of economic times.

We are not seeing 22 percent interest today, Mr. Speaker. And our employment rates, yes, they are going up, and we have over 10 million people in America that are at least statistically looking for jobs. It is not as bad as it was then, yet. And the eighties were not as bad as they were in the thirties. And when we look at the thirties, there should be some lessons there for us. And I sat in classroom after classroom getting my classical education; and one historian, government teacher, economist after another would fill our little brains full of the knowledge base that has been learned from history, that we had an economic calamity in 1929 and the stock market crashed and people jumped out of the windows to their death because they couldn't sustain the grief of watching their net worth go down. Well, if you look historically, it is pretty hard to find anybody that jumped out of the window. It wasn't as bad as they said, from that standpoint of Wall Street suicides, at least.

Then, through those times Herbert Hoover was President, and he had great confidence in his ability to manage. And so he came forward with the Smoot-Hawley Act, which was trade protectionism, and there was global retaliation. And then our industry and our manufacturing and our exports lost a lot of their markets because of the trade protectionism. Each country around the world did a lot of the same thing; they pulled back within themselves, and the economies began to shut down in that fashion. They opened up the legislation so that unions had a little more powerful leverage when it came to striking. They passed the Davis- Bacon Wage Act; that followed.

But as this economy went down, Herbert Hoover believed that he could manage his way through that. He didn't trust the marketplaces like Calvin Coolidge did, but he trusted his ability to manage, and he lost his reelect. My only Iowa President lost his reelect in 1932 to Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt came in, and he had been influenced by the famous economist Keynes, who advocated that if government just spends enough money, it will create an economy that will have apparently its own inertia, and it will bring us out of this great depression.

So FDR's programs came in one after another, the WTPA, the PWA, the CCC, on and on and on, the TVA. And each time that the Federal Government stepped in and started another program, they competed with the private sector; they competed with the private sector for capital and they competed with the private sector for labor.

Now, if you go back and look at wealthy nations and see what Adam

Smith has to say about the value of any product, he will say and he has written there very extensively that the value of any product is the sum total of the capital and the labor that it takes to produce it, deliver it, market it, and get it into the hands of the consumer. So if you buy a gallon of milk, you add up so many ounces of milk is for the capital that it took, and the balance of it is for the labor that it took for it to deliver. And that is how Adam Smith analyzed it.

But the capital and the labor in the United States was being swallowed up in government. And capital, when it comes in significant quantities in the private sector, the productive sector of the economy, smart money goes to the sidelines rather than compete with government. And that is what happened in the thirties during the great depression: The smart money went to the sidelines, our economy stagnated, and we had soup lines and we had make-work projects and we had hand labor, stoop labor building dams and roads and parks. We commissioned and paid people to go out into the cemeteries and write down everything that they could read off of the stones in the cemeteries so there would be a record. We paid writers to write; we paid painters to paint, because we wanted to pay people to do something, or nothing, so that the borrowed money and those tax dollars could flow out into the economy, into the hands of the people that would spend it.

Sounding pretty familiar right now, Mr. Speaker, this idea of taking dollars and putting it into the hands of people so that they spend it to stimulate the economy. In fact, Keynes himself had I think some fairly radical ideas: Spending money would stimulate the economy. In fact, his approach was that the worse utility that a project had, the more useful it was from a government perspective, from the standpoint that if the government spent money on something that was completely ridiculous, at least they weren't competing with the private sector. So Keynes understood some of the argument that I have just made. He went so far to make the argument that he could solve the unemployment problem during the thirties if we would just take those good old Treasury notes or Federal bills, greenbacks, U.S. cash, put them in jars and take them out to a big old abandoned coal mine and bury those jars around there in that old abandoned coal mine--this is Keynes talking--and then fill the old coal mine up with garbage and turn the laissez fair loose, the free enterprise loose. Let the entrepreneurs go out and dig through the garbage to dig up the money, and that would solve, through the competition of digging up this money that had been buried by the Federal Government, that would solve unemployment.

Now, he may have been a little facetious in that description, I don't know his personality, so I can only speculate that. I hope he was a little facetious. But I think his point that he wanted to make, that it didn't need to be useful work, it didn't need to be productive work.

President Obama said, ``Well, we are not just going to pay people to dig a hole and fill it back up.'' I thought that was my vernacular; I am the person who spent my life in that business of moving dirt, and on one occasion actually did dig a hole and fill it back up with nothing in it, only one occasion. The man changed his mind in the middle of that operation. But for the President to say we are not just going to dig a hole and fill it back up, but he is modeling his economic model, the President's ``new'' new deal off of Franklin Delano Roosevelt's ``old'' new deal, which really was dig a hole and fill it back up sometimes.

And here is the point that I intend to make, Mr. Speaker; and that is, however one would analyze the ``old'' new deal in the thirties, it is not possible to look at the numbers and come to the conclusion that the new deal solved the depression, the great depression for America. In fact, the best conclusion that one can come to, the most charitable conclusion is that it may have, may have, Mr. Speaker, diminished the depths to which we might have fallen without the new deal in place. Maybe the economy would have gone into a complete straightjacket and tanked and gone forever downward and waited another decade or two to get its confidence back. Maybe. Maybe. I don't believe it would have, but that is the best that one can say. And the trade-off is, if a new deal, a huge massive spending gets poured into the economy for make- work projects, if that diminishes the depths to which we might otherwise fall, the trade-off is certainly it delays the recovery as well. It delays the recovery, because smart money sits on the sidelines. Entrepreneurs have been hired by the government to dig a hole and fill it back up, and smart money always goes where there is some profit, and right now smart money is pulled back to the sidelines. That is why we had some bonds that actually went into the red for just a little bit, for a little while.

There are two sectors of this economy, Mr. Speaker, that we don't talk about very often. The one that is being stimulated and is attempted to be stimulated by the President's proposal, by the components of it that are the Speaker's proposal, or the Senate's proposal, in its aggregate, that one seeks to spend money for the sake of getting it in the hands of consumers. We did that with the rebate program not quite a year ago; and you can look back on the charts for that, Mr. Speaker, and you will not see a blip that that money was spent and injected as stimulus into the economy. $150 billion in the hands of the American people, and about 30 percent of it actually got spent on new goods and about 70 percent of it went to pay off credit card bills or went into savings. So only 30 percent of the overall proposal, less than $50 billion, actually went into the economy. It doesn't even show up as a little tick on the line.

Now, $150 billion I understand, Mr. Speaker, is chump change compared to this massive piece that the Senate has now passed that we expect will be before us very soon. And this piece, when you add it all together, is over $1 trillion, but it is not much of it money spent that is going into the productive sector of the economy.

The productive sector of the economy is the private sector of the economy; it is the sector that actually produces goods and services that have value. And I have said from this microphone many times, Mr. Speaker, all new wealth comes from the land. You either raise it out of the soil, or you mine it out of the earth. You can seine some fish out of the ocean. That is about the end of it. Otherwise, it comes out of the land. And it has to start there. And out of it comes food and fiber, and from the food and fiber comes the thing we need to live. And as we add on to that, the services that come from the food and the fiber, then you get your insurance man and your doctors and your lawyers and your teachers, and all of the facets of our economy flow from the new wealth that comes from the land. But the things that we need in order to live, the housing, the clothing, the food, the necessities of life and then the niceties of life, they come from the productive sector of the economy.

Then, we have this nonproductive sector of the economy that I sometimes call the parasitic of the economy; and that is the sector that looks over the shoulder of the productive sector and decides: Well, I am going to regulate you and I am going to tax you, and I am going to justify my existence by making it harder for the productive sector to produce. That is what government often does. Government overdoes the overseeing, the overregulating, the taxation, and inhibits production.

So, on the one hand we have the productive sector of the economy that has to carry the entire burden of government, the entire burden of, let me say, the nonproductive sector of the economy in my charitable moments, and we are loading up on the nonproductive sector of the economy and we are not giving enough relief to the productive sector of the economy.

That is what this argument is about: Are you going to have an economy that is stimulated by producing more things that have value, and building the kind of infrastructure that supports commerce and trade, and reducing the kind of taxes that allow smart money to make investments with the confidence that they won't be punished for their success by a Congress or a President that has the idea that a windfall profits tax, for example, is a good way to punish someone who turns a resource

into value and puts it into our economy and pays their share of taxes as it is.

We are heading down this wrong road, this road that the President has identified as: We have to construct the leg of a stool. He didn't say how many legs, but generally, if it is a three-legged stool, they will say so. If it is a two-legged stool, they will say so. It is not a milking stool, I wish it were, Mr. Speaker. But this single leg of this multi-legged stool that the President announces we have to construct and we are going to do it one leg at a time without an idea of what the stool looks like or what the other legs look like or what they are made out of except money. We have one leg that may be back to the floor of this Congress tomorrow and likely this week that cost $150 billion for a rebate plan not quite a year ago, $700 billion-plus for the bailout last fall, and 830 or so billion dollars plus $350 billion in interest on that that is sitting here now waiting to land on the floor of this House. Just add it up in round terms, Mr. Speaker, let's just call it $2 trillion: $2 trillion to construct a single leg, and I am tracking the President's words, of a stool that is supposedly going to get us out of this mess that we are in; $2 trillion. And no one will stand up and say: Here is the effect of this money? Here is what you can expect with the economic indicators? Here is how you will see jobs in the productive sector of the economy grow or investment increase or capital be freed up for entrepreneurs? None of that is there, except to say that we are going to create or save, well, 2.5 million, 3 million, then 4 million jobs. And sometimes they get a little lazy and forget to say create or save, and they just say create 4 million jobs, but in their lucid moments they revert back to the create or save.

Now, I would like to be the one who would announce that I am here, Mr. Speaker, and I am going to create or save 10 million jobs. And 10 years from now you can go back and look, and even if I didn't point to a single job that I created, I can easily point to 10 million jobs that have been saved.

A saved job is not a measurable, quantifiable means of determining any level of success. But it's a word that lets you slip away from being held accountable for a policy that is utterly destined to fail. The New Deal failed. It was a mistake. Historians looking back on it and economists looking back on it can only point to high employment numbers, low economic activity and a stock market that crashed in October of 1929. And in spite of all of the billions of dollars in new Federal spending in the New Deal program, the stock market still didn't reach the peak that it was at in 1929 until 1954.

Now, Mr. Speaker, the President says that World War II was the best, the largest economic stimulus plan ever. Now I don't exactly quibble with those words on their face. I would just add to that, that it makes it clear that the New Deal didn't solve the Great Depression. He understands that. He argues that FDR should have spent more money, not less, that he lost his nerve, he shouldn't have worried about a balanced budget, and if he had just done enough, if he had just doubled down two or three more times, he would have come out of there as a winner. But World War II came along as the largest economic stimulus plan ever. I won't disagree with that statement.

But I will say this: It didn't quite solve our economic problems. But I believe it did start us on the path to recovery. And by the end of World War II, we hadn't yet recovered. The stock market was still 9 years away from reaching its former apex that it was at in 1929. But I believe that the post-World War II industrial might of the United States, because we were the only industrialized nation in the world that hadn't seen our industry devastated in World War II, gave us a comparative advantage. The greenback was good currency all over the world. We built products for everybody because we could. And many of them had to put back their entire infrastructure in order to be up and running again.

So, yes, World War II was a stimulus plan. But the aftermath of World War II gave a marketplace for America's industrial might to continue, to switch from making tanks to making cars and making other products and exporting them around the world. So a quarter of a century later, after the stock market crashed in 1929, we reached the previous apex and Dow Jones Industrial Average, if that is our measure of recovery, in 25 years.

So here we are today, Mr. Speaker, with an economy that has had its ups and downs. And I could take you back through the short-term history of this. We have created a lot of capital, trillions of dollars worth of capital. Some of it was false. Some of it didn't represent the actual, real value of the assets underneath it. Some of it was because Wall Street had run amok, and they were betting on a long run of a bull market. And the checks and balances weren't in place. And AIG was not calculating the risk and didn't have the capital underneath them in order to back up the insurance that they were providing.

So this has tumbled. But in the end, we need to come back to what is the real estate worth that is underneath this? What are the businesses worth that are part of the shares that are there in our stock market? Let's get down to some real values. And the $2 trillion leg on a multi- legged stool and not knowing what the stool looks like or how many legs there are, but we just know the idea is spend money, spend money, spend money, and spend it over here, and spending brings us back out of this economic situation that we are in. Production will do that.

Mr. Speaker, I submit that we need to suspend capital gains taxes and do so for 2 years. Let that smart money find a place to go without being penalized for coming back into this economy. The smart money that is on the sidelines, the $13 trillion or so that are overseas that are invested in the economy in other parts of the world that are faced with a capital gains tax, if it is corporate, if it comes back into the United States, we can free that up, Mr. Speaker. And that $13 trillion is a number as of last September. So chances are that today it's not quite $13 trillion any more. And we won't get it all back. But we will get back 1 or 2 or $3 trillion. We will get back more money that is stranded outside the U.S. economy because of the impediment of facing capital gains tax that we're going to be able to put into this economy with this so-called stimulus plan that is before us, this Congress, as we speak. We will get more money into the economy.

And then the groan goes up on this side of the aisle because if we suspended capital gains tax, we will be giving up an opportunity to tax one of these greedy capitalists. How could you live with yourself if you passed up a chance to tax somebody and you let their money come in and get invested in our economy? Well, I can live with myself to do that. If you have a good argument, I will be happy to yield and hear that argument. But I don't think you have one. We need to bring this capital back into the United States and get it into this economy. But the lost revenue for an immediate suspension of capital gains if we did so for the year 2009 would be, Mr. Speaker, $68 billion. Now I'm going to say this: Only $68 billion as compared to a couple of trillion dollars in bailout money, $68 billion in lost revenue for suspending capital gains taxes to bring in $1 or $2 or $3 trillion from overseas, maybe more, into this economy to find its way to where it would do the most good, because smart investors will do that. If we suspend capital gains tax on picking up the toxic debt that is there, those were Secretary Paulson's words, suspend capital gains tax on the income off of those investments, smart money would go pick up these mortgage- backed securities. They would take them off the marketplace. Smart money would then go out into the communities and work with the people that have been evicted, or I should say about to be evicted, from their homes, find a way to renegotiate some of those terms or sell the home, turn around and remarket it to somebody that can make some reasonable payments.

But we've got to go through this. We've got to bite the bullet. We've got to take the pain. We've got to make the adjustments. And it is not going to work for us to borrow from our children, our grandchildren and our grandchildren's children trillions of dollars with no idea of how to pay them back and no way to even move towards a balanced budget, but to put all that demand out there in the world market for capital, borrowed money from the United States Government.

And where will we borrow that money from, Mr. Speaker? Do we borrow that money, then, from China with their economy going south? Because when we catch a cold, the Chinese get sick, as well. They're tied to our economy. Are the Saudis going to have that kind of cash that they will loan to us? Perhaps. But the interest rates are going to go up. To borrow that kind of money and put it into the economy in that fashion is irresponsible. It denies the very values of the economic lessons that we know. It denies that we need to produce something that has value.

Now, if Keynes is right and we can go out, borrow the money and then bury it in the coal mine, cover it up with garbage and turn people loose to dig it up and that would solve the unemployment problem, then I think he is way off, Mr. Speaker. I'm of the other side, of the supply side of this economy.

Let me take this to another step. Immediately, I would suspend capital gains tax for 2 years. I would lock it in in stone so smart money would know they had 2 years to find a place to settle it. And maybe I would back it up even and look at the numbers, perhaps even 1 year. But if it's 2 years, we will be giving up $68 billion worth of revenue for not collecting any capital gains tax for 2009, $61 billion for 2010, that's it, $129 billion, that would be the total cost of putting 3 to 5 or more trillion dollars into this U.S. economy in the right place where smart money would go.

Now that is one of the things we could do. We can go down through the list. We ought to be talking about reform. We ought to be talking about repealing the Community Reinvestment Act and about privatizing Fannie and Freddie and requiring them to be capitalized and regulated like the other banks are. And we need to be talking about amending the mark-to- market accounting rules, the credit-default-swap rules, putting these trades up on the Internet so that there is sunlight on all of them so they can be tracked and they can have oversight.

All of those things need to happen, Mr. Speaker, and all of those things are things that should be done immediately, along with having a commission to examine the situation of the finances in this country and the economy in this country to come to a conclusion as to where we went wrong and to make some more of those changes. I have listed some. What we need to do is build a structure so it doesn't happen again. It's unlikely to happen, Mr. Speaker, when we have the chairs of the committees that have been part of the problem in the first place. Albert Einstein once said that you never solve a problem with the same mindset that created it. And we're dealing with people that have gavels that have the same mindset that created this problem.

All of these things I have talked about need to be done in the short term and in the temporary. There is a broader solution that needs to come, Mr. Speaker, and that is to set up our taxes so that we can be free of these kind of burdens for all time. I have many times come to this floor and spoken about the need to eliminate the IRS, to move to a national sales tax and to understand a principle which is this, that what you tax you get less of. The Federal Government and the United States has the first lien on all productivity in America. If you're going to earn, Mr. Speaker, Uncle Sam is there with his hand out to tax. If you're going to save, he taxes the earnings off the savings. He taxes your proceeds off your investment. Uncle Sam is there with his hand out to tax it, earnings, savings and investment. If you're a producer, you're punished by being taxed. If you're a consumer, that's fine. Some of the States, many of the States have a sales tax. Beyond that, consumers consume without being taxed except for an additional excise tax that exists in some places as well.

What you tax you get less of. But we tax all of the productivity in America. And taxing all the productivity in America virtually ensures that there won't be as much productivity in this country as there would be if we passed a national sales tax. The Fair Tax, Mr. Speaker, took the tax off of our production and put it over on consumption. If we do that, we will allow the American producers an unlimited amount that they can produce, they can earn, save and invest all they want to earn, save and invest.

When I think about people that are working a job and they're working the angles on that job and they're thinking, well, let me see, I have got my 40 hours in this week, now when I start working overtime, I go into a different bracket, my withholding is a little different, I don't know, my payroll per hour isn't as good as I would like to have it, I'm going to limit the overtime hours I'm going to work. Or it might be somebody in sales that gets paid on commission. And they do a calculation on the taxes that they would pay the IRS. And they reach a certain point, and they realize how big a chunk Uncle Sam is taking out of them, and they decide, I'm just not going to produce any more than that. I can live comfortably enough down here without having to work twice as hard to get half again more out of that labor because the tax rate swallows up that much.

Now that is just an individual working sometimes on commission or on overtime. But think about the calculus when it's an investment for a small business, maybe a small business that employs six or eight or ten people, and a business that gets to the point where it's kind of comfortable. They can see some new market opportunities. But the owner of the business understands that the tax burden is such that it's not worth the risk. And so they don't invest the capital. They don't create that extra three or four or five or 10 new jobs. And the business sits there and stagnates. And the real estate that is there that perhaps is paid for gets tied up because there is a capital tax gains tax that will be paid if he sells his real estate and he hands that over so that maybe a new entrepreneur can take that location and take it up to the next level.

We have all kinds of property in America that is tied up because of tax reasons, not business reasons. Every single business calculation that you make in the United States of America is impacted by Federal taxes. And every calculation has to take into account the tax ramifications. When that happens, then our smart people are using their brains to figure out how to minimize or avoid their income taxes rather than figure out how to maximize their productions and their profits to create more wealth in this country.

Mr. Speaker, believe me, if we had more wealth in this country and that wealth doesn't fear the government, that wealth will create more jobs and there will be more wealthy people. You cannot help the poor by punishing the rich. Moving to a national sales tax just totally revolutionizes this economy. It opens up our production and makes unlimited production. Unlimited wealth can be created, and then the taxes are paid voluntarily by the people when they decide that they're going to consume. So we have voluntary taxpayers. We have voluntary producers. We have an economy that is virtually unleashed.

And here is one of the ways to draw a comparison. We have to rebuild U.S. manufacturing in the United States. We have watched a lot of our manufacturing go overseas because the price of labor has gotten low enough in comparison to U.S. labor that those factories would shut down and relocate overseas. The difference is also the taxes that are embedded. Now we tax corporations. We tax payroll taxes. When you add up the embedded taxes in a retail product in the United States, say on this ink pen, on average it is 22 percent. Let's say it's a $1 ink pen. Twenty-two percent of that would be built into the price, embedded taxes, so that the company that is producing them can pay their business income tax, likely their corporate income tax and their payroll tax. That puts us at a competitive disadvantage, Mr. Speaker.

And so here is an example. If we pass the Fair Tax, then the embedded Federal income tax comes right out of that price. Competition will drive it out of the price. So here would be an example. If there is a Mazda that is made 100 percent in Japan, and there are at least $800 million dollars worth of those Mazdas coming into the United States every year, and it's sitting on the dealers' lot at $30 thousand sticker price, that price is set by competition, what you can market at. And across the street on the other dealers' lot is a

Chevy, or a Ford, but let's say a Chevy. That would happen to be built 100 percent of it in the United States.

It has also a $30,000 price tag on it. And that's because competition now, two comparatively valued vehicles, selling for identical price, competing directly against each other, $30,000 each. Now, we pass the FAIR tax and over time, and not a very long period of time, perhaps some would be immediate, some would be longer, but about 18 months we'd see most of these adjustments. You pass the FAIR tax and your $30,000 Chevy price will go down to $24,600. That's the 22 percent embedded Federal tax. It's part of that price that General Motors has to have in order to recover the taxes that they're paying. Your $30,000 Mazda stays at $30,000 because the embedded Federal tax isn't part of their price. That machine, that car is made in Japan. So now you pull into the dealer's lot and here's a Chevy for $24,600 and a Mazda for $30,000 and they're of comparable value.

What do you buy, Mr. Speaker?

Does this lower the price of the Mazda too? Maybe. But the consumer is going to look and say I'm going to go for the $24,600 Chevy. I like that that much better. I like it 28 percent better than the $30,000 Mazda. And then we have to add back in the sales tax on these cars and that's an embedded tax of 23 percent that covers your corporate income tax, a rebate, so that we untax everybody to the poverty level, and the payroll tax that's associated with the labor that goes in. So your $24,600 Chevy goes up to $30,400. That's with the sales tax added on. You would write the check to drive the Chevy off the lot for $30,400. But to drive the Mazda off the lot you'd have to write the check for $39,000. That's the difference. It is a 28 percent marketing advantage, $8,600 advantage, American car over Japanese-made car or Korean or any other car.

What's that tell us, Mr. Speaker? I'll submit that it tells us that there would be many more American automobiles built and sold here in the United States because they would be competitive again. Imagine being able to take 28 percent off the price of every American-made vehicle today, at least for the components of them that are made in the United States. That's what the FAIR tax would do. Our auto manufacturers in Detroit can't seem to get to this conclusion, and neither can they carry a cogent argument against it. But they're stuck in their ways. They're negotiating with the unions who haven't made any concessions that I can see at this point. And we have a simple solution to a complex problem, that, like a Rubik's cube, and I've turned this over and looked at it every way I can for 29 years, Mr. Speaker, and every time I turn the Rubik's cube of a national sales tax again and look at it another way it looks better and better and better, not worse, not weaker, not something that has a flaw, better and better and better. And it always wins the debate, it always wins the argument if given an opportunity to match up against any other idea out there on tax reform. In fact, the FAIR tax, the national sales tax does everything good that anybody's tax proposal does, it does all of them and it does them better. And I'd put it up against anybody else's tax proposal. If you take the tax off of production and you put on it consumption, you also provide an incentive for savings and an incentive for investment. But you have more production. You will have a slight diminishment in consumption because there's a tax there, but over time there's more money in a person's pocket, a worker will get 56 percent more take home pay, and then they decide when they pay those taxes. This is where America needs to go, and in a short period of time, if we suspend the capital gains taxes and do that on a 2-year period and pass the FAIR tax, even just suspending the capital gains tax, we will see the Dow Jones industrial average jump up 30 percent or more, and it will be in a matter of weeks or months, not a long term, a short-term, you see immediate reaction and this thing would start to come around. If we pass the FAIR tax and on the night that the ball drops in Times Square, I'd set it up for December 31, 2009, midnight, and end the IRS as we know it. Abolish them and the Federal income Tax Code, set it over up as a national sales tax and we will see a dynamic economy role again, Mr. Speaker.

We have the solutions here. Republicans have the solutions here. Spending trillions of dollars for a leg of a stool that we have no idea what it looks like or what kind of results we're going to get is folly. And it's the kind of folly that Einstein was talking about when he said you can't solve a problem with the same mindset that created it.

So, I'll be opposed, Mr. Speaker, to this stimulus package because I think it has an oxymoronic name. I don't think it's a stimulus at all. I think it's a burden, an albatross that's hung around the neck. I think it is, as Michelle Malkin says, intergenerational theft, to put the burden up against our children and grandchildren and great grandchildren. We can't balance the budget today. We couldn't balance the budget 5 years ago, and if we can't do that in the environment that we were in, how in the world do we think that we're going to pay off a debt that's multiple trillions of dollars and a national debt that maybe ends up doubling during the Obama term? No, that's folly, Mr. Speaker.

And let me just cap off one more thing here, before I close, and that is that there has been a significant achievement that's been reached in the nation of Iraq. I've made six trips over there. I know our leader just arrived back from there over the weekend. The reports I get from that delegation that visited Iraq and Afghanistan is that things look pretty good in Iraq. I had a long conversation with Ambassador Crocker last week on Wednesday morning, and we talked about many of the accomplishments that have been reached there; and how though, it is still delicate and there are political solutions that need to be provided, and there still are some military tactical things that have to happen, specially up in the Mosul region.

But here are some things that we know. The Iraqi people have had three successful elections. They have ratified a constitution. They are distributing their oil wealth from Baghdad out into the provinces and into the cities. They are producing more sewer, water and lights than they have ever have. The hours of electricity across the country are significantly greater than there's ever been. There are girls that have gone to school in the last 6 years for the first time. More Iraqi kids in school as well. The stability and the safety in the streets is significant. I've gone shopping in Ramadi, it's a place that a year earlier I couldn't even set foot because it was too dangerous. And I met with the mayor of Fallujah who said Fallujah is a city of peace and we're going to rebuild this city to where there's not a sign of war in this entire city. And I believe him and they're working on it and they're working on it hard.

This Congress imposed a series of benchmarks on Iraq and the President of the United States, 18 different benchmarks, Mr. Speaker. I've gone back and reviewed those benchmarks. And of those benchmarks, 17 of the 18 benchmarks have been wholly or substantially completed.

I thought it was inappropriate for this Congress to set those standards because that was definition of victory in Iraq, and those who voted for those standards believed that they were unachievable. They believed that the war was lost. They argued that it was a civil war that couldn't be won, that it was sectarian violence that could never be controlled, that al Qaeda was uncontrollable in Iraq. And sometimes they argued that al Qaeda didn't exist in Iraq until we attracted them there. I think that was the bug light theory.

But what's been accomplished in Iraq today is phenomenal. Three successful elections, the ratification of a constitution, Iraqi military forces that have been stood up and trained and deployed, 613,000 strong, Mr. Speaker, and a security and a stability to the point where they pulled off an election a weekend ago in Iraq without a single significant security incident, with the Iraqi people taking their children to the polls so they could experience with them what it's like to go and vote and be a free people. It's been phenomenal progress. 17 of 18 benchmarks reached. The 18th benchmark, by the way, that is not wholly or substantially reached

is the one that requires the Iraqi security forces to be completely independent of American forces, and that would mean logistics, intelligence, communication, supply, training, all of those things would have to be Iraqi. They're not going to be that independent, not this year or next year or the year after. You don't stand up a military like that in no time. It takes years to do that. But 17 of 18 benchmarks have been reached. The casualties in Iraq, and we had a tough time in Iraq here a little over a day ago. We lost four soldiers up by Mosul in a bombing. Regardless, as precious as those lives are and all of them that have been lost, since the first day of July, we've lost more Americans to accidents than we have to the enemy. Another measure of a definable victory in Iraq, achieved, Mr. Speaker, by our noble military under the leadership of Commander in Chief, President Bush, who had the clarity of vision and the courage and the leadership skills to order a surge when his advisors told him don't go there, Mr. President, this war can't be won. It's a definable victory today, by all of the metrics that I can identify, including a more than 90 percent reduction in civilian violence and sectarian deaths, so that they're almost immeasurable. The list goes on and on and on of the accomplishments in Iraq. And I charge and I challenge our current President of the United States to sustain the achievements of his predecessor or be judged by history as to have failed. That, Mr. Speaker, is an important message for the American people to understand tonight, that level of success in Iraq.

We need to also understand what made this a great country; that's the free enterprise system and the accountability that's in. There has to be successes and failures for our system to adjust itself. That will not happen with trillions of dollars of borrowed money and this huge debt to resolve itself.

And I would point out, as a matter of an example, that when Bill Clinton was elected President in 1992, he came to this Congress in 1993 and he said, I want a $30 billion economic stimulus plan because we have this recession that was brought about by Bush 41. I notice these new Democrat presidents always have a Bush recession to blame their economy on. But in any case, he asked for $30 billion. And that $30 billion was negotiated down to $17 billion. I think that ended up over in the Senate, and finally they decided well that's not enough money to make any difference so we're just not going to do a $17 billion economic stimulus plan. But $30 billion was a lot of money to this Congress then. And that's why they debated it. And $17 billion wasn't enough to make a difference. But today $17 billion isn't even loose change in a $2 trillion bailout/stimulus plan. That's how far we have come in a matter of two presidential terms, two different presidents, Mr. Speaker, to the point where $17 billion, $30 billion is loose change in the maw of it all. And it will swallow us up.

And then, reverting back, Mr. Speaker, to the subject matter of Iraq, I'm a little disturbed that there's such a standard that has been raised that we should honor our troops and we should honor their families for the price that they paid, and a moment of silence on this floor is appropriate, an hour of silence would be appropriate, a long and enduring prayer every day for what they have done for our freedom and all of us would also be appropriate, Mr. Speaker. But that, brought out today by the same person that brought 45 different votes to the floor of the House of Representatives, those votes designed to underfund, unfund or undermine our troops is disturbing to me.

In the 110th Congress, we had brought by the Speaker of the House, these 45 votes to the floor that I said, underfunded, undermined or unfunded our troops. Some of those that I have in mind, supplemental appropriations H.R. 2642 that would prohibit establishing a permanent base in Iraq, among other things and reduce some funding.

We have another one, which is H.R. 5658, require the President to submit a report within 90 days of the bill's enactment for the long- term costs in Iraq and Afghanistan, including the cost of operations, reconstruction and health care benefits for how long, Mr. Speaker? Through at least fiscal year 2068 is what this report says.

That can't be constructive to tie the Commander in Chief up to produce a report that predicts costs until 2068. That undermines our troops, Mr. Speaker.

Here is another one. It followed along H.R. 5658, and it said that the United States Defender Act would have to be authorized by Congress in order to enter into any kind of an agreement with Iraq from a military perspective. Congress would have to authorize it. I don't think the Speaker of the House was going to allow the congressional authorization of those kinds of agreements. That undermined our troops again, Mr. Speaker.

Here I have H.R. 2082, which is to authorize funds for the intelligence portion of fiscal year 2008. It defines how we can interrogate prisoners. It's another way to handcuff the President of the United States and our military, whose lives have been in harm's way and remain in harm's way.

Here is another one on the same subject--on interrogation techniques and micromanagement. This Congress should not be trying to operate a war by micromanagement. The Continental Congress tried to do that. It's one of the reasons we have a stronger central government today.

The list of these kinds of transgressions goes on, Mr. Speaker. Here is another one.

The State-Foreign Operations Appropriations--Iraq Study Group establishes that. We know what came out of that. There is another one that reduces the spending, and it identifies the 18 benchmarks which I mentioned. On and on and on.

There were 45 different votes, Mr. Speaker, on the floor of this House of Representatives, 45 of those votes aside from the seven that were brought by Republicans, to recommit, defend or seek to overturn those. They all underfunded, unfunded or undermined our troops.

So a moment of silence is appropriate, but I cannot break from the thought that American lives have been put at risk and that we have lost some lives because of the actions on the floor of this Congress. These actions, Mr. Speaker, encouraged our enemy. In spite of all of this, we have a definable victory in Iraq today, and it is a definable victory that needs to be maintained by the current President of the United States and enhanced with a prudent utilization of the forces that are there and with a prudent transfer as the direction it is going over to the Iraqi security forces with a political, economic and military solution in Iraq so that they can sustain and defend themselves and can remain our ally in the Middle East to inspire the other moderate Muslim nations that are there.

With that, Mr. Speaker, I would yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, I am here to talk about a very critical anniversary before us tonight, the Iraq anniversary. The Iraq war anniversary is tomorrow, Mr. Speaker, and it is critical that we give this moment due attention.

I am here as the person who leads our Progressive Special Order hour, the Progressive Message, and I want to just start off by thanking Mr. Jared Polis of Colorado who is here with me tonight who is a member of the Progressive Caucus and who has some very clear remarks to share with me right now.

Congressman, let me yield to you and can you reflect on this auspicious occasion, the anniversary of the Iraq war.

Will the gentleman from Colorado yield for a moment?

You are fresh off the campaign trail, Congressman. You have been knocking on doors, talking to folks, and you know what people are thinking. You haven't been around here long enough to get jaded, and so your level of enthusiasm for the work

is still very fresh. What are the American people saying about our involvement now on its sixth year in Iraq?

Congressman, if you would yield back for a moment, I would like to ask you again; in the course of your work, you're walking around Colorado, you're walking around your district, you're talking to folks, did you talk to any American families who had loved ones who were stop-loss, who are now on their second, third, fourth deployment? Did you see anything like that as I yield back to you, Congressman?

Congressman, if you would yield back, I can tell you that as a Member of Congress myself--now I'm a sophomore Member, and you and I are closer to not being Congressmen and being long-term veterans--my heart always breaks a little bit whenever I talk to a spouse who says my wife or husband is going to be leaving here for a year or 18 months, or how about the situation where a woman walks up and says, see this baby who is 9 months old? She never met her daddy. Is this the kind of thing that you saw while you were on the campaign trail?

Congressman, as you have done your work, you're fresh off the campaign trail, I wonder, did you ever have any occasion to talk to family members who said, you know, my son came back, but he's kind of different than he was when he left; he used to have a smile, he used to have a joke for everybody, and now it seems like the weight of the world is on this 22-year-old guy, now it seems like my daughter can't find her smile again?

In my great State of Minnesota, we had a young person who sought mental health care, and there wasn't enough room and they couldn't get in right away. And before this person could come back, they took their own life because they couldn't get the helicopters out of their head, they couldn't get the horror, they couldn't get these kind of images out of their mind, and yet, we've learned that suicide is a serious issue for our fighting men and women, particularly in connection with Iraq.

Have you encountered these kind of medical challenges that our veterans are facing in connection with this war?

Congressman, let me tell you, tomorrow marks the beginning of the seventh year of the war in Iraq. Throughout that time, we have lost more than 4,000 of America's bravest men and women. The number, to date, that I have is 4,259, but of course the way this war has been going, it could be 4,260 or 4,270.

We have spent over $600 billion, with long-term cost projections in the trillions, and we have seen Iraqi civilian casualties estimated at the hundreds of thousands. We know that there are over 30,000 Americans who have been injured. And of course the numbers of deaths are easy to count, but the injuries are more difficult because not all the injuries are manifested in terms of a limb or a scar; but of course we've seen those, too. Let me tell you, if you go to Landstuhl Air Force Base, the hospital there in Germany, you see bright-eyed, young people who have suffered catastrophic injuries, and of course we've seen them back home.

We all know, Congressman, that the purported reasons for going to Iraq--you remember what they are. Would you care to tick off a few of the reasons you and I were told, as Americans, that we needed to go into Iraq? Do you remember what some of those reasons were back almost 6 years ago, Congressman?

Weapons of mass destruction. And all we have been found with, Congressman, is weapons of mass distraction, as we have been given misinformation, disinformation due to a combination of political pressure, cherry-picking effects, and poor intelligence. All these assertions ended up being wrong, wrong, wrong and dramatically undermined American credibility around the world.

Congressman, you also would probably have to agree with me that this war has had a corrosive effect on our standing in the world. Whether you're talking about Abu Ghraib, whether you're talking about Bagram, whether you're talking about--whatever you're talking about, our country, which is known as a beacon of civil and human rights, as the rule of law prevails in America, we have seen this conflict sort of eat at what we stand for. I wonder, are these things that you've encountered as you were out there on the campaign trail and as you have been a Member of this body for the last several weeks?

Well, yielding back, Congressman, you and I also know that you are right when you say one of the purported reasons was weapons of mass destruction, which you and I learned was not true. We also know that we were told--we went through sort of this link that was sort of made between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda. What have we learned? The bipartisan--bipartisan, that's Republicans and Democrats--9/11 Commission found that there was ``no operational relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda.'' Claims that 9/11 hijacker Muhammad Atta met with Iraqi agents in Prague turned out to be false. Do remember that one, Congressman?

Well, Congressman, as you yield back, we were told weapons of mass destruction, links with Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda. And some people said, well, at least Saddam Hussein is gone--and of course we're glad he is

gone, but it almost seems like, when the argument was made, that folks acted like it was a cost-free endeavor, that he was just gone and we didn't have to pay dearly as a Nation for it.

But one of the questions that I want to also direct to you, Congressman, is, $8 billion in reconstruction funding disappeared under the Bush administration's watch. According to Iraq's Public Integrity Commission, roughly $8 billion in the country's reconstruction funds were ``wasted or stolen'' between 2007 and the beginning of the invasion. How does that strike you?

When you think about waste, fraud, and abuse, you might have heard that story about that billion dollars in bills sitting on a wooden pallet. How does that strike you? How does that strike your constituents?

Well, Congressman, I think that is a question that we all need to ponder. But Halliburton, after receiving no-bid reconstruction contracts from the Bush White House, wasted hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars. A 2005 report by Senator Byron Dorgan and Congressman Henry Waxman cited internal Pentagon audits that question ``more than a billion dollars in the company's bills for work in Iraq.''

It just boggles the mind. If the American taxpayer, in their generosity, says let's get water going in Baghdad, let's get electricity going in Baghdad, at least if we spent the money, the people there ought to get it; wouldn't you say so, Congressman?

And there have been other costs, those that are less easy to quantify, such as the cost to America's image, which you spoke of very well, Congressman Polis. And though it is difficult to assign numbers, we know the view of our great Nation has suffered--although I'm happy to report we're on the mend now--and the cost is just really very difficult to calculate.

Let me just remind folks that this is the Progressive message. We are talking about the anniversary of the Iraq war, we are talking about what's going on. We are the Progressive Caucus, and we're talking about a vision of peace and a vision of a progressive message in our country.

I want to get to this panel in our slides, Congressman. And I want to say, after 6 years of the Iraq war, here is sort of the cost that I just alluded to. Here is what we've had to pay. Here are some of the hits--flush with cites on the bottom of each one because we're not just up here talking, we back up what we say at the Progressive message. U.S. troops killed in Iraq, 4,259 as of today.

Each one with a family, each one with a story, each one with a future, each one with a patriotic passion for their Nation, each one who wanted to come home. And each one didn't have to ever go to Iraq because the premise for our involvement was, as you and I just mentioned, those reasons were discovered to not be accurate, the weapons of mass destruction and Saddam Hussein in connection with al Qaeda.

U.S. troops wounded in Iraq, 31,102. And again, these are traumatic brain injuries, these are lost limbs, these are severe injuries--some will heal, some are injuries for a lifetime, as you know, Congressman. And I will yield if you want to comment on any of these. Iraqi civilians killed in the war, about 150,000; that's according to the World Health Organization. Please look it up yourself if you have any questions about that number. And you would have to imagine, in a country of about 29 million people, that there is no Iraqi family that has not seen death and destruction, and this has to be extremely traumatizing.

Iraqi civilians forced from their homes, according to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, about 4.7 million persons who have been homeless as a result of this conflict. That's a big deal. U.S. troops deployed in Iraq, right now we have got about 138,000 people there and, again, a conflict that, according to the reasons offered to us by the Bush administration, not one should have been there based on the reasons they offered to us.

Impact of war on the U.S. economy, $1.3 trillion. That's the Congressional Joint Economic Committee Report. I hope folks who might be seeing this, Mr. Speaker, will be willing to look at the Congressional Joint Economic Committee Report, which will cite the impact of this war on our economy as $1.3 trillion. That's a lot of money. That's a whole lot of money.

Cost of the Iraq War to the average American family, according again to the Congressional Joint Economic Committee Report, that's about $16,500 per American family. We have paid dearly, too dearly for our involvement in this conflict. And in my view, Mr. Speaker, the cost of even one life is too dear, even $1 is too dear, but we have made much, much more than that.

Yes, sir.

Congressman, I have just got to tell you that 1 more minute is too much. Our President has said that 16 months is our out date, and I think it's incumbent upon all of us to make sure that it is that or less because, quite frankly, I don't look forward to coming up here another year from now saying that we're still present in Iraq in the way that we are now. We need to out of there. We need to wind our way out. Iraq needs to go back to the people of Iraq. Iraqis need to get ahold of their country and govern their own affairs.

Sometimes we talk about the Iraq War and even here I've used the word ``war,'' but really at this point we are not talking about a war. We are talking about an occupation. And when I say that, I don't mean that in any sort of a derisive way. It's the legal word that is appropriate for this situation. In a war you can win or lose, but in an occupation you can only stay longer than you should or you can leave sooner than you should, but eventually you've got to go; right? So with this America involvement in Iraq, it is time to say to the Iraqi people, ``This is your country. We will not abandon you. We will not leave you because, of course, we're deeply implicated in your country at this time, but the reality is the military engagement needs to come to a close.''

Let me ask you this, Congressman Polis: When you think about this statistic, Iraqi civilians forced from their homes and the number of about 4.7 million, how does that strike you when you consider Iraqi boys and girls who used to live one place but now can't because of this military conflict? How does that impact their development? How does that impact their ability to grow up to be strong citizens of the world in, say, 5, 10, 15 years?

Well, Congressman, I just want to point out to you and to everyone watching, Mr. Speaker, that when one child is forced from their home or one adult, for that matter--a

home is like a bowl. Can you imagine making a cake without a bowl? Where are you going to put the eggs? Where are you going to put the milk? Where are you going to put all the ingredients for that cake so that you can make that cake and put it in the oven? Try to imagine raising a family. You don't know where you're going to be. You don't know where your school is going to be. No familiar places. You're a stranger everywhere. This kind of displacement has an impact on a child's ability to learn, a child's ability to embrace the environment that they're in. The child begins to sense that maybe their parents can't really protect them, that maybe they're vulnerable and perhaps that anything could happen to them at any time.

This does not bode well for the future. We're talking about a region of the world that has known way too much conflict, and this conflict is one that we surely need to end. And this idea of displacement, I think, is another thing that we need to talk about in terms of the impact on the development of this society as we talk in this Progressive message this hour and the anniversary of the war in Iraq.

Congressman, let's turn for a moment, then, to veterans' care, if you will. We must begin to take seriously the promise to care for our veterans. Our veterans, prominent men and women, you have them in Colorado and I've got them in Minnesota. Actually, they are from all over this country. And the fact is with tens of thousands of injured troops returning home, we must work diligently to ensure that they do not fall through the cracks and that every soldier receives care and benefits that they have earned and deserve.

During the 110th Congress, when I was a freshman Member, I was proud to have voted for the largest increase in funding for Veterans Affairs in history, upon passage of H.R. 2642, the Fiscal Year 2008 Military Construction, Veterans Affairs and Related Agencies appropriations bill. We made a real commitment to military hospital construction, improving the quality of care for veterans, improving the lives of veterans, making sure that we shorten the period of time and that their veterans' benefits got to them in a quick way. We not only talked patriotism, we did patriotism as we passed this largest Veterans Affairs funding bill in the history of our country.

In the fall of 2007, I worked closely with the Minnesota congressional delegation to ensure that members of the Minnesota National Guard Unit, the 1/34th Brigade Combat Team receive their full active component GI Bill entitlements. That particular unit, that particular brigade combat team, returned to Minnesota after a 22-month mobilization and deployment to Iraq, the longest tour of any ground combat unit during Operation Iraqi Freedom. Unfortunately, members of the unit were informed after they returned home, Congressman and Mr. Speaker, that they were not eligible for their full GI benefits because their orders to return home cut them a few days short of the eligibility for these benefits. After my office was informed of this decision, I and Mr. Tim Walz, my congressman and the highest-ranking enlisted Member ever to come to Congress, wrote a letter to the Department of Defense to appeal the decision. The Army responded positively, and most of the soldiers of this very brave, courageous, and successful combat unit were granted waivers to access those educational benefits.

And I just wanted to share that with you, Mr. Speaker and Congressman, because I think it's important that the world know that Members of Congress are fighting for their constituents who have served our country bravely.

And I just want to ask you, Congressman Polis, if you have any thoughts you want to share with us about our veterans at this time and about our Nation's commitment to this group of Americans. Whether or not we agree on the war, we all agree that the warrior needs to be supported. Any comments as I yield to you?

Well, Congressman, I just want to congratulate you and all the delegation of Colorado on this wonderful news. I believe that Mr. Shinseki is one of the best Veterans Affairs Secretaries our country has ever seen, and I expect that we will be able to work closely with him to not only help the constituents of your great State but probably many others around our country.

I also just want to mention that I'm proud to have the Minneapolis VA hospital in my district, and Minneapolis VA is one of the facilities in our country that I feel very proud to be able to represent. The Minneapolis VA Medical Center has been awarded the 2008 Robert W. Carey Trophy Award for performance and excellence. If I sound like I'm a little proud of them, you're right, I am. The annual Carey Trophy Award, the most prestigious national quality award that the VA bestows, recognizes a VA organization that implements management approaches resulting in high levels of performance and service to our veterans. So I am just real happy to mention that. And I am proud, along with you, as we see veterans in Colorado, Minnesota, all over the country being able to benefit from a responsive Congress, a grateful Congress, for the great service that these brave men and women have given to our country.

Congressman, great point. The fact is that our veterans are Americans, of course, some of the finest Americans. They come back to their country; they expect a country that's working. So they can come back and maybe get a green job that will help them build our country on the civilian side. They can help weatherize our neighborhoods. They can help build senior housing, low-income housing. They can do so many things our country needs and help build us a renewable future.

So I think you're absolutely right to introduce the broader economic context that we're in. One thing we don't want to see is to have these veterans who have given so much for so many come back to a country where we're not building, where we're not preparing for the future. So you're right. I'm glad you mentioned the American Economic Recovery and Reinvestment Act. I'm glad you mentioned our efforts to build a health care system that everyone can benefit from. I'm glad you mentioned these important things because, of course, veterans are folks who come into a broader context, and it's not only veterans' benefits that benefit veterans. It's a working, functioning America in which everybody has a slice of the pie.

So, Congressman, as we are wrapping up today, I just want to thank you again for being here with us this afternoon. The Progressive message has to always come week in, week out. Whether or not Members are on a Thursday night jumping on a plane trying to get back home or not, the Progressive message has to be part of what we do every week. And I just want to yield to you to sort of offer some final thoughts as we begin to wrap up our comments tonight.

Let me join with you in that hope and in that wish. I think I can speak for the members of the Progressive Caucus, Mr. Speaker, when I say that we will be working hard to make that dream a reality.

I also want to point out that there have been a great many Americans, I'm sure Minnesotans and I'm sure Coloradans as well, who have been calling for, working for, pushing for America to assert its soft power in the world and to help make peace in this world and be a source of peace in this world.

You can bet there is a committed group of Americans who are in the United States Congress who are people who call themselves the Progressive Caucus, and you can find out what we are doing on this Web site, it's cpc.grijalva.house.gov. We are going to be here giving this progressive message every week, and we are the Progressive Caucus.

As I wrap it up, and I just want to thank you for joining me tonight, we are going to be here week in, week out, through rain, shine, winter, summer, talking about a progressive message, a progressive message for America, for the world.

Congressman Polis, let me thank you again for joining me tonight.

I yield back.

Mr. Speaker, I move to suspend the rules and agree to the resolution (H. Res. 309) expressing the sense of the House of Representatives that North Korea should immediately stop any hostile rhetoric and activity towards the Republic of Korea and engage in mutual dialogue to enhance inter-Korean relations, as amended.

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

Mr. Speaker, I rise in strong support of this resolution expressing the sense of the House of Representatives that North Korea should immediately stop its hostile activities and instead return to dialogue.

Mr. Speaker, as I said earlier of my strong support of H. Res. 309, it is a

thoughtful, timely, and relevant resolution offered by my dear friend and colleague, the gentleman from New York (Mr. King). I also wish to recognize the contributions and efforts of my colleague, Mr. Meeks, also from New York. He was the principal Democratic lead cosponsor and is a member of my Subcommittee on Asia, the Pacific and the Global Environment.

Mr. Speaker, this important and bipartisan resolution shares, at its substantive core, three key principles. First, it expresses a unified sense of the Congress that North Korea should cease all hostile and destabilizing activity on the Korean Peninsula. Second, it calls on North Korea to reengage in dialogue with South Korea, as well as with the Six-Party Talks. And, third, it reaffirms our unconditional and unwavering commitment to our alliance partnership with the Republic of Korea.

As we are all aware, North Korea's recent hostile activities have once again brought world attention to the fragile peace and tenuous security framework on the Korean Peninsula. In a span of less than 3 months, North Korea conducted another nuclear test, launched several intercontinental ballistic missiles, and suspended or nullified all major inter-Korean agreements, including the armistice that has maintained peace between North and South Korea since 1953.

Even more alarming, Mr. Speaker, North Korea removed IAEA inspectors at Yongbyon and announced that it was restarting its plutonium production program with the ultimate aim of weaponizing its nuclear material. Meanwhile, amid the hostile brinksmanship, two American journalists, Euna Lee and Laura Ling, were captured, tried, and sentenced to 12 years in prison for reform by hard labor.

North Korea's leader, Kim Jong Il, has let it be known that his 26- year-old son, Kim Jong Un, will succeed him as he succeeded his own father. North Korea's communist leadership regime is being solidified into a totalitarian, hereditary, authoritarian regime.

These startling events have unquestionably precipitated the necessity of a unified congressional response to North Korea's hostile acts, while also sending a message of strong solidarity and support for our close friend and ally, the Republic of Korea.

Just last Friday, the United Nations Security Council unanimously adopted a resolution condemning ``in the strongest terms possible'' North Korea's nuclear test, imposing new sanctions, demanding that the Democratic People's Republic of Korea not conduct any further nuclear test or any launch using ballistic missile technology, and urging Pyongyang to come back to the Six-Party Talks without preconditions.

House Resolution 309 before us today will reinforce the Security Council's message that Pyongyang's recent actions are unacceptable, and it will also reinforce a message President Obama and Secretary of State Clinton both underscored regarding the strength of our alliance with South Korea.

The administration and the international community have sent clear messages to North Korea about its provocations, and it is time that Congress also follows suit.

Mr. Speaker, our consideration of House Resolution 309 today is rendered all the more relevant by the visit of President Lee Myung-bak to Washington. I understand that his incredibly busy schedule will include a summit with President Obama and meetings with Cabinet officials and the House and Senate leadership. I was also made aware that President Lee will receive the honorary doctorate degree from George Washington University, where he was a visiting scholar 10 years ago.

Mr. Speaker, it is always a special occasion when Korea's President visits the United States, and I certainly would like to extend a sincere welcome and best wishes to President Lee, whom I had the honor of meeting with last year in Seoul.

Mr. Speaker, for almost 1\1/2\ years now, since his inauguration last February, President Lee has continually emphasized the importance of a strategic alliance with the United States, and this has been manifested through several notable achievements. Most recently, South Korea joined the Proliferation Security Initiative aimed at preventing the spread of weapons of mass destruction. In November of last year, Korea formally acceded to the Visa Waiver Program. In October, a currency swap agreement was signed between our two countries to stem the liquidity issues in the global financial markets. And through legislation passed by our Congress last September, Korea's Foreign Military Sales status was officially upgraded to the level of NATO plus three.

President Lee was also instrumental in arranging for the resumption of the importation of beef imports from the U.S. to Korea after diffusing a sensitive political situation that temporarily halted our imports of beef to South Korea. His determination to settle the beef issue underscores the important commercial ties between Korea and the United States.

Mr. Speaker, I wish to close my remarks by offering a few thoughts on the importance of reaffirming our alliance partnership with Korea. The history of relations between our two countries, which can be tracked back to a treaty of friendship more than 25 years ago, has been marked by consistency and mutual solidarity between our two nations.

Mr. Speaker, I ask my colleagues to support this resolution.

Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

I want to commend and thank my good friend, the gentleman from New York for his sponsorship, again, of this important resolution and certainly thank him for his insights and understanding of the current situation that we're faced with as far as dealing with North Korea.

Mr. Speaker, the geopolitical situation now, the realities and the development as a result of North Korea's latest activities now, makes it absolutely necessary for the United States to strengthen our alliance and partnership with South Korea.

The security alliance between the United States and Korea has been pivotal ever since it was forged through much shedding of blood during the Korean War some 60 years ago. As I recall, over 33,000 of our men and women in military uniform died as a result of that terrible conflict known as the Korean War.

Without question, South Korea has remained a steadfast U.S. ally, especially in our time of need, whether it be the horrific conflict of Vietnam, where I personally served at the time, where some 50,000 South Korean soldiers were right there fighting alongside the members of our Armed Forces there at that time. When we needed assistance in Iraq, Afghanistan, Lebanon, and other global hotspots, South Korea responded affirmatively and dependably as our ally. The foundation of our friendship and alliance is unshakeable. Through our shared values and common history, we are able to meet global challenges together, ranging from terrorism to the current crisis in North Korea.

Mr. Speaker, our economic and trade relationship with South Korea is one of the strongest in Asia, and currently South Korea is our seventh- largest trading partner in the world. In 2007 our two countries concluded a free trade agreement that now awaits approval by our Congress as well as the Korean National Assembly.

In my opinion, Mr. Speaker, the U.S.-Korea Free Trade Agreement will bring tremendous benefits to both of our countries. The International Trade Commission has forecast that the elimination of tariffs on U.S. goods under the agreement would increase our GDP by about $11 billion a year. The agreement will also eliminate regulatory and other nontariff barriers that have historically restricted access by farmers, manufacturers, and service providers. And to the South Korean market, with growing difficulties and the health of our economy, in my opinion, this proposed agreement will be a win-win situation: a win for our workers, a win for our businesses, and a win for our consumers.

But perhaps the most compelling argument supporting a free trade agreement with this important ally of ours is the very reason that we are gathered here in support of House Resolution 309. The geopolitical factors in East Asia and North Korea's recent destabilizing actions necessitates a firm and tangible U.S. commitment in the region. And realizing that the free trade agreement would send the right message to both North and South Korea that we seek an even stronger and more comprehensive economic and trade relationship with our important ally, the Republic of Korea.

Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

I want to thank my good friend and colleague the gentleman from California for his comments, certainly one of the most recognized experts that we have in the House as far as issues dealing with the Korean Peninsula. I do thank him for his thoughts and sentiments on this important issue.

Once again, Mr. Speaker, I wish to thank my good friend the gentleman from New York (Mr. King) and also Mr. Meeks for offering this important resolution and especially also the chairman of our committee, Mr. Berman, and also our senior ranking member, Ms. Ros-Lehtinen, for their leadership and their support in bringing this bill before the floor.

I ask my colleagues to join me in supporting this resolution and offering President Lee our best wishes for a pleasant visit to Washington and a successful summit with President Obama sometime this week.

Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, I also yield back the balance of my time.

Thank you, Mr. Ellison. I would like to read briefly from warnewstoday.blogspot.com. Frequently in our mainstream media, it seems as if everything is wonderful in Iraq. That couldn't be further from the truth. Every day, Mr. Speaker, there are casualties and deaths of Iraqis. And yes, our American men and women continue to lose their lives overseas.

Today alone, Mr. Speaker, a leading politician from the Iraqi Islamic Party has been assassinated west of Baghdad.

Incident number two, a magnetic bomb targeted a police officer's car in the Shaab neighborhood of eastern Baghdad. It went off at 7:15 p.m. The officer was injured and taken to a hospital.

Incident number three, from today, Mr. Speaker, gunmen shot and wounded two Interior Ministry personnel when they attacked their vehicle in central Baghdad on Wednesday.

Incident number four from today in Kut, police forces found an unknown civilian body, as they do many days, hard to identify, happens often, on the outskirts of town.

In Kirkuk, gunmen killed a landlord and his wife when they stormed their house.

In Mosul, again, today, Mr. Speaker, an employee from the Displacement and Migration Department on Wednesday was shot by an unknown gunman in northern Mosul.

Also in Mosul, a gunman killed a civilian in a drive-by shooting 390 miles north of Baghdad. A roadside bomb killed two civilians when it struck a U.S. patrol in eastern Mosul. And again today, unknown gunman on Thursday killed the Mayor of Dober Dan Village. Again today in Iraq, police found the body of a man shot in the head and chest in a town near Mosul.

When I had the opportunity to go to Iraq last year, Mr. Speaker, and talk to people who served on town councils, mayors--these were in the city of Baghdad, autonomous zones, they had their own city council--it was a high-risk occupation. I was informed that nearly a quarter of the people that serve in those capacities on those local city councils have been assassinated, Mr. Speaker.

There are many who would have us believe that the situation in Iraq is rosy. While it might be pleasant to believe that, Mr. Speaker, today, on the sixth anniversary of the war, we need to face reality. This war will end when we choose for this war to end, Mr. Speaker.

Along with several of my colleagues, and yourself, Mr. Speaker, we signed the Responsible Plan to End the War in Iraq almost 2 years ago. Joined by our colleagues, Representative Edwards, Representative Massa, Representative Pingree, Representative Perriello, and myself, as well as a number of retired military personnel, we put forth a plan not only to end the war, but to ensure that this sort of travesty never occurs in our country again, to restore our Constitution and our liberties.

I will.

There are a lot of distractions here at home. We have the most severe recession since the Great Depression. We have scandalous uses of public money that our colleagues on the other side of the aisle talked about that we addressed today with regard to bonuses paid to AIG executives. But there are many Americans who, even today, have their sons and daughters, their brothers and sisters, the mothers and fathers of young Americans in school serving overseas in Iraq today, putting their lives in jeopardy every day and, yes, losing their loved ones every day. And you can bet that for those families that are affected by that, that is one of the most important issues to them.

Absolutely. And not only does that divide families, does that compromise the ability of families to provide the kind of family life for their kids that they want to, to support themselves at the level that they want to, not only does it do that, but it divides these families, it compromises our competitiveness as a country, and it weakens our national defense to have men and women serving who would, in many cases, rather be almost anywhere else.

I saw many families across our district that were directly affected by this. And as you know, with that duration of service--well beyond what many of our men and women thought they were signing up for--the psychological toll when they return is terrible. To serve under those conditions for several years in a row, continually being re-upped, that becomes your reality, the existence in that war zone. It is very hard, when you finally do return, to rejoin this reality we have here in this country.

I have held hands with veterans and their families and borne witness to the tremendous stresses. It is a difficult topic for any of us to talk about without getting emotional. These are men and women who have served our country proudly. We need to make sure that we have the right mental and physical health support services when they return, but most importantly, to bring them out of harm's way.

It is hard to adjust. I talk to many who are living at home, who are depressed, who are living in a basement. They had their whole lives ahead of them, have had to serve several years overseas, have become part of that reality of seeing the cost of war, their coworkers and people in their unit blown up in front of their eyes, sometimes receiving physical injuries, sometimes only mental injuries, but turning back, having a very difficult time reintegrating and getting back to work.

We were misinformed and led to believe there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

There is great frustration that this war continues to compromise our very important war on terror. One of the most important fronts on the war on terror is the diplomatic front. This war has undermined our ability to engage other nations on the diplomatic front and continues to this day.

I remember those insinuations that were made by the administration at the time. Many people were led to believe that somehow, in some way, shape or form, Iraq and Saddam Hussein were aligned with al Qaeda, and it couldn't have been further from the truth.

You know, our colleagues today from the other side were here holding forth about accountability for this $160 million, where did this $160 million go? Who knew and when? And those are questions that we need to answer, but let me say that that pales--$160 million wrongfully paid to AIG executives, $8 billion unaccounted for, where is the outrage and where is the investigation?

Each one with a family.

Will the gentleman yield?

At top of the chart, it says after 6 years of war in Iraq. I ask you how many more anniversaries must we observe? Is five enough? Is six enough? We have been in this war longer than our Nation was involved in World War II. After 6 years how many more? There was a young boy 12 years old playing video games when this war started who is serving and being injured in Iraq today. How many more years, Mr. Ellison?

As you know, Mr. Ellison, close to a million of them have been forced from their country and reside in Jordan, reside in Syria, reside in Lebanon in everything ranging from refugee camps to short- term rental housing. It has been an issue in the greater Amman area, do we let them in the school with our Jordanian kids? They're out of school for a while. Sometimes they're in; sometimes they're out. It's spotty. Many of them might never be able to go back. The areas they lived in might be controlled by competing tribes, their houses taken over, forced away at gunpoint.

This dislocation is historical in scope. We are talking about a sizable amount of people within Iraq who have been displaced, some to other countries, some to other parts of Iraq.

Thank you, Mr. Ellison. We have some fortunate news for Colorado veterans. Yesterday morning several of my colleagues from the Colorado delegation and I met with Secretary Shinseki, and he announced that they are moving forward with a new VA hospital at Fitzsimmons to serve our veterans in Colorado. Due to the hard work of your classmate and our colleague Congressman Perlmutter and my predecessor who is now on the other side, Senator Udall, who have for years fighting to improve it. And I have toured the old VA hospital in Colorado. And this new one is going to have a spinal trauma unit. It's going to be state of the art, and it's what we needed.

But there are too many places in our country, as you know, Mr. Ellison, where veterans don't have the quality of health care that they have earned by serving our country so proudly.

Will you yield for a moment?

Let me also add how important it is that the rest of our agenda, the Recovery Act, health care have passed so that our returning veterans are returning to an economy that's growing, that has jobs, that has health care if they were not injured in combat. They deal with the very real issue of health care sometimes for the first time in their lives, if they've been in the military for some period of time right out of college or even before college, and the importance of the Recovery Act, creating over 3 million jobs, hopefully many of which will go to our returning veterans.

I would just say that let us hope that next year we are celebrating an anniversary of the end of the Iraq War and not the seventh anniversary of this unjust war in the wrong place.

Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from Florida for yielding.

At the outset, let me thank Chairman Berman and Ranking Member Ros- Lehtinen for the support they have given me on this resolution and for bringing it to the House floor. Also, let me thank my colleague from New York (Mr. Meeks) for being the prime cosponsor of the bill and for his support in pushing it forward. And of course Mr. Faleomavaega, who does a truly outstanding job as chairman of the subcommittee, I want to thank him as well.

Mr. Speaker, when I first introduced this resolution back in March, it was clear then, obviously, that Korea was a major threat to world stability and a major threat to the national security of the United States, and of course also to its Asian neighbors. Well, since then, the situation has only gotten worse. As Mr. Bilirakis pointed out, it has been step after step of aggressive action, provocative action, action defying world opinion, defying resolutions of the United Nations, and absolutely defying agreements that have been made with the Six Parties over the previous years.

Mr. Speaker, President Clinton reached out and tried to engage North Korea, President Bush obviously reached out and tried to engage North Korea, began the Six-Party Talks, made China a part of that process; and yet at every stage, when it comes to weaponizing uranium, plutonium and moving forward, North Korea has refused to respond in good faith. And when they do make a feeble attempt at good faith, it is obviously a ploy, and they renege as soon as any concession is made by the United States or any of our allies. So, Mr. Speaker, I think it is important that we send a message to the North Korean Government.

And let's be clear about this. When we are talking about the North Korean Government, we're really talking about an organized crime family masquerading as a state. Kim Jong Il defies every standard of decency that is built up in the community of nations. I think it is important to realize that, especially when North Korea is contrasted with the Republic of Korea, which has become a model democracy and it is such a strong and staunch ally of the United States.

So as we go forward, Mr. Speaker, I think it is important for the President and the Secretary of State to know that Congress will stand behind them if they have to take stronger action, if they have to really lean back and push back against North Korea. I think everything should be on the table. The fact is that we now have a situation where, with going forward with its nuclear program, North Korea really puts its neighbors in jeopardy, and perhaps soon after that Europe and the United States, with their missile system, with the delivery system, with the nuclear relationships. And I think everything should be on the table, including a very strong missile defense system. And we should have an open debate, put partisanship aside and stand together as Americans to confront what could be a mortal danger to our allies and also causing the situation in Asia to spiral out of control. I certainly think when Japan sees what North Korea is doing, as far as advancing its nuclear program, we could well see Japan considering a nuclear program. We have strong friends, such as Taiwan, who now will be in danger.

Also, it is time for China to realize that they have a major role to play in solving this crisis. The fact is, North Korea could not survive if it did not receive its energy and its food supplies from China. And China should realize that this game can only go on for so long where they somehow take a certain delight in North Korea antagonizing the United States. And also, they feel they can buy off North Korea with their food and energy, and they don't want refugees streaming across their border. But this has now gone beyond the stage where we are just talking and sitting down; we are talking about the very security of the United States being in danger here.

So, Mr. Speaker, I urge the adoption of this resolution. Yes, we have to continue constructive dialogue, we have to engage, to the extent we can, with North Korea; but the fact is that, as Mr. Bilirakis said, when the President reached out in good faith--President Clinton, President Bush, and now President Obama have reached out in good faith--the response to them has been an iron fist, it's been missiles, it's been rockets, and it's been weaponizing of nuclear fissile material.

So rather than be caught short, rather than our being victims of something which we should anticipate now, let us stand together, and I certainly reach out across the aisle so that all of us, as Republicans and Democrats and as Americans, can stand with the President as he goes forward, and hopefully he will, to stand up to this really blatant aggression, I believe, by North Korea and send a message to Kim Jong Il, whether it's him or his son, no matter who ends up controlling or calling the shots in North Korea, that it will be met by concerted action from the United States. And also call on countries such as China to start doing what they should be doing, and to reassure our allies such as Japan and Taiwan that the United States will do all it can to prevent and stop North Korea from becoming a nuclear power.

I urge adoption of the resolution.