To repeal the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.

Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the privilege to be recognized here on the floor of the House, and I appreciate my colleague from Texas

holding the ground until I come here to hold a little ground with him. I always stand on the same ground as my friend, Judge Gohmert. In fact, all of the way from wading to shore on a free Cuba to climbing a mountain in the Himalayas, and all that free country in between and a bunch of it that is not.

I came tonight to talk about a couple of subject matters. One of them that is on the front of my mind is the tax situation here in the United States. We are watching and we watched as the two Bush tax cuts were passed over the last 8 or so years, the 2001 and then the 2003 tax cuts. May 28, 2003, is when the effective ones were passed, the reduction in capital gains, dividend taxes and a series of things. And of course the language that is there on the estate taxes which are suspended for this year, and they go on in full force at the end of this year, and nothing has yet been done. Something does need to be done.

I am for a complete abolishment of the estate tax, Mr. Speaker, and I am for the reinstatement or the extension of the Bush tax cuts, if we can get them. But we have watched as the former chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, as he was coming in to be the chair, the gentleman from New York (Mr. Rangel), traveled around through all of the talk radio circuits and the talk television circuits, and they asked him over and over again, Which of the Bush tax cuts would you like to preserve and which ones would you like to see go away or end?

There never was a definitive answer, Mr. Speaker, but the process of elimination brought people to a conclusion over the period of November 2006 until about February of 2007 that there really wasn't a Bush tax cut that soon-to-be Chairman Rangel would support. So we are watching now the eventual sunset of those very effective economic stimulating tax cuts that went in on May 28, 2003.

Capital understands when it gets more expensive and less of it gets invested. When less capital is invested, then there are fewer technological advances and the productivity of the American worker goes down and it makes us less competitive as a Nation. It is awfully hard to measure that, but what we can see from that period of time of November 2006 until mid- to late February of 2007, we saw industrial investment go down and the decline in industrial investment was precipitated, the economic decline that came about, about the time that Speaker Pelosi first took the gavel. We can see the data that indicated that there was less capital investment because in part--not entirely but in part--Chairman Rangel signaled to the investment world that taxes were eventually going to go up, and the cost of capital would go up. There would be less capital invested, and that means with less capital invested, it reduces the productivity of the American worker. Reduction in American worker productivity means we are less competitive as a Nation. That means other cultures, other economies, other civilizations would be ascending and the United States would either slow or diminish its ascent economically or decline. And then we saw the economic crisis.

The calamity that goes back into the seventies with the passage of the Community Reinvestment Act and then on the heels of that came, with the Community Reinvestment Act, the effort to encourage bankers to make bad loans in bad neighborhoods and deal them off on the secondary mortgage market to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac who had underwriting requirements that were a little too stringent for some groups in the country, particularly a group know as ACORN. And so ACORN came to this Congress and lobbied for a couple of things in the early and mid- nineties under the presidency of Bill Clinton. They weren't having a lot of success under Ronald Reagan, but under Bill Clinton they were successful enough that they were able to get the Community Reinvestment Act rewritten that put even more requirements for the lenders to make more bad loans in more bad neighborhoods and prop up real estate whose asset value couldn't support the mortgage on it.

While that was going on, ACORN was also lobbying here in this Congress, by their view successfully, to lower the underwriting standards for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. And they succeeded in doing that. Some in this Congress wanted to tighten the standards and wanted to move them toward complete privatization, which they used to be. And some in this Congress wanted to move Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to complete nationalization. There was a debate here on this floor. There were several debates on this floor. The one that comes to mind for me was October 26, 2005, when at the time Congressman Jim Leach from Iowa had an amendment on the floor to raise the underwriting requirements for Fannie and Freddie, raise the capitalization requirements for Fannie and Freddie so that they would become a more viable economic institution and to move them away from what appeared to be coming, which would be the Federal Government, the taxpayers, eventually having to bail out Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

Well, that amendment that was offered by Mr. Leach and supported by myself and also Mr. Latham of Iowa and others, did fail here on the floor in the face of a very aggressive rebuttal that came to the floor in the form of the current Financial Services Committee chairman Mr. Frank, who said during that debate, if you are going to invest in Fannie and Freddie, don't count on me bailing them out, I will never vote to do a government bailout of Fannie and Freddie.

Well, ``never'' is a word that shouldn't be used by people in this business, Mr. Speaker. And I don't bring it up to be particularly critical of the chairman of the Financial Services Committee, Mr. Frank. I point it out because ``never'' didn't last very long. It lasted maybe 4 years, moving on 5.

But when President Obama signed the executive order that finally swallowed up all of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and we had to go in and bail them out at the end of the Bush administration, that is true. The Executive order before Christmas swallowed up the rest of this, and the Federal Government, the taxpayers of America, took on $5.5 trillion in contingent liabilities with Fannie and Freddie. Now they are completely, no longer a quasi GSE, but they are completely owned entities within the Federal Government and the taxpayers are on the hook for all of it.

Now, let's presume that Fannie and Freddie could be operated at a profit. Gee, that would be nice. But we know how government works when it comes to profit. They don't have the right incentives, and eventually it can't work.

So the Community Reinvestment Act was passed in the seventies, refreshed in the nineties under Clinton which put more pressure on lenders to make bad loans in bad neighborhoods. ACORN lobbied for that. ACORN also lobbied to lower the underwriting standards so that Fannie and Freddie could swallow up the secondary market. Fannie and Freddie did that, and today the Federal Government owns more than 50 percent of all of the home mortgages in the United States and the taxpayers are on the hook for the default of those mortgages in the United States.

We also had mark-to-market accounting which was put in place during that same period of time. Mark-to-market accounting is a system whereby on your balance sheet you have to write down the marks and what the actual bids are for those commodities.

So, Mr. Speaker, I would put it this way. I happen to know a bank in the area, in the Midwest, that had $60 million worth of commercial paper. That commercial paper had always performed, it had always paid and drew a reasonable interest rate. It would be the equivalent of a very effective, well-established company that had an operating loan that they funded through this commercial paper. It had a market and a value to it, and the value was $60 million. And that was on the balance sheet of the lending institution.

But when we saw the downward spiral and the threat that could have been a crisis in credit in America, there was not--temporarily there was not a market for that commercial paper. So that lending institution, even though commercial paper had always performed, even though the company was viable and made their loans, the value of that had to be marked from $60 million down to zero, let me just say, figuratively speaking, overnight; $60 million down to zero. Now there is no asset value. We had lenders that were being pressured by FDIC regulators coming in to turn up the capitalization requirements to the banks and require

them to, let's say, solidify their balance sheets and to make up for the missing $60 million. It was a temporary situation.

And to make sure, Mr. Speaker, that people can understand what mark- to-market accounting is, I would use this example. I think whether you are a city person or whether you are a country person, whether you are a farm or some other type of economics, you can understand this. I come from corn country, and so let's just say that under mark-to-market accounting rules it would work like this: If a farmer had 100,000 bushels of corn in his bin, stored on his farm, dried, 15 percent moisture in good condition, he would look at that, and let's just say the market price for that corn was $4 a bushel. So in those bins on storage in the possession of this farming operation, there would be then $400,000 worth of corn. That is 100,000 bushels at $4 a bushel. That could go on the farmer's balance sheet at that amount, and you may want to mark it down less shrink and less the basis to the marketplace. But for simplicity sake, $400,000 worth of corn on the balance sheet, stored in the bin in good condition.

Now, that's all real fine, but along comes a flood, maybe a flood like we've seen in the tragedy in Tennessee, who the folks down there our hearts go out for, Mr. Speaker. But along comes a flood, and it washes out all the bridges all the way around the farm, and it washes out the bridges in the area. So the grain elevator where the bids were coming from at $4 a bushel is shut down. They're operating. They're in good shape. They've got their generators running, and their grain storage is okay. But no trucks can go to haul any grain. Nothing can move. And so magically, there would be no bids for the corn a day after the flood washed out the bridges, and there would be no bids for corn until the bridges were put back in place. That could take months, or it could take days, depending. Well, let's just say a couple of months before the bridges can be put back together. In that period of time, that corn would sit there. It would be in good condition. It would be worth $400,000 someplace else, but not $400,000 sitting there, because he didn't have a bid where he delivered the corn. He can't get it out. So this farmer that had $400,000 worth of asset value would have to write that down to zero on his balance sheet.

Meanwhile, the bridge is still open to go to the bank. You need to borrow money to operate from so you can pay your bills. But he couldn't borrow the money because his asset value had gone from $400,000 down to zero, even though that corn would have some value when the bridges were put back together. That's what mark-to-market accounting does. It accelerates the downward spiral with market trends going down and distorts them and takes us down into the economic decline, or it accelerates the upward spiral and distorts the markets that way, because when you get temporary upticks in the market, then the assets go up almost immediately in direct proportion, which increases the borrowing capacity of that balance sheet.

We need a better system. The mark-to-market accounting system was abolished in 1938. It came back on us again in the Clinton era, and when it did so, it helped set the foundation for the economic crisis that we have been in. And now here we are with the President having spent a couple of trillion dollars or more, taking over the economy of the private sector in the United States--not all of it, but certainly a majority of the private sector activities have been taken over. It started the end of the Bush administration, accelerated in the Obama administration, and we have three large investment banks--AIG, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac. You've got all of the student loans swallowed up in America, and General Motors and Chrysler were taken over by the Federal Government, with 61 percent of the shares of General Motors owned by the Federal Government. That's the taxpayers' investment.

And when General Motors is running an ad that says they've paid off their loans, yeah, they did that, all right. They paid off a loan. I don't remember the exact amount of that, but it was in the low few billions of dollars. Meanwhile, the taxpayers are still holding 61 percent of the shares. The Canadian Government's holding 12.5 percent of the shares. The unions were gifted 17.5 percent of the shares of General Motors. And we're watching ads that say that General Motors paid us back?

Well, then, why didn't Tim Geithner sell those shares of General Motors into the open market? Why doesn't he divest the Federal Government from their ownership in General Motors? If this administration doesn't believe that they should be in the private sector, why are they running banks, insurance companies? Why have they taken completely over Fannie and Freddie? Why are they running two car companies? Why did they take over the student loans? Why did they nationalize our bodies?

Mr. Speaker, that's not a misstatement, and it's one perhaps for those who have not heard of this before, they should pay attention a little to the description. But the most sovereign thing we have, the most valuable thing we have is our health, our physical body. And part of our freedom is to be able to buy a health insurance policy that suits our needs and make the demands of the insurance companies that there's a market for what we want to buy so they produce a policy that meets our demands.

Up until a month ago, there were 1,300 health insurance companies in the United States and approximately 100,000 policy varieties that could be chosen from. So if you're a consumer out there on the market, you could look around at those 1,300 companies and decide which one you'd like to do business with, weigh the merits of their policy, settle on the company, look through the variety of policies, and between all those policies, 100,000 policy varieties, choose your policy. That's a lot of choices. You don't have that many choices in the grocery store on how many different kinds of food you want to buy, but it sure looks like choices when you walk into the grocery store. Health insurance in America has a much, much larger selection--or it was--than you find seeing single individual items in the grocery store, because the markets had demanded those kinds of varieties and the companies were seeking to meet the demand.

But now under ObamaCare--in effect, by the year 2014, every health insurance policy in America will be effectively canceled by this government. They will all have to be refreshed and requalified, and there isn't a single policy that exists today that the President of the United States can point to and say, Joe, Sally, your policy, the one I told you, Don't worry, you get to keep it, you can't say that you get to keep it.

Have you noticed that? Have you noticed, Mr. Speaker, there hasn't been a single policy that's been pointed to by this administration, let alone the President of the United States, that they can say to any consumer out there, This is your policy, and you can keep it. And even if they could find a policy that they could tell you you could keep, they can't tell you that it's going to not cost you any more money. They can't tell you that the premium's not going to go up. And when I make that statement, they will throw up their hands and say, Well, obviously we can't because health care costs are going up. It's a natural thing for them to go up double digits while inflation is going up single digits. But the followup to that is, Yes, you can throw up your hands and say that.

But the other thing that cannot be stated by the President's spokesman or by the President or by this administration or by Speaker Pelosi or Harry Reid or anyone else, no one can make the statement that health insurance policies are not going to be increased because of ObamaCare's passage. Yes, they will be. They certainly will be.

We see a community rating of seven to one today. That means that the cheapest policy is going to be one-seventh the price of the most expensive policy. This pushes it into three to one. That means that that young person that's paying for a health insurance policy that is-- let's say, if it's $100 a month, the most expensive policy out there would be $700 a month by that comparison. But with this new legislation that's there, for the $100 a month, the highest then can only be $300 a month. So we know what happens. The person down on the lower side with the

cheaper premiums that is a lower risk will pay a lot more for their premium because the upside of this thing has got to be ratcheted down some.

We saw some numbers, and I can only go to a generalization now because it's far enough back in my memory. These are numbers that had to do with Indiana. We saw a 23-year-old healthy young man's insurance go up almost triple, and we saw the family of four at age 40, two kids and a mom and a dad, we saw their insurance go up a significant amount, and the only people that had a lower premium would be the couple in their early sixties with marginal health that would see their premiums drop off perhaps 11 percent, which is a number I do have confidence is a correct one. So the people with the highest premiums might see an 11 percent reduction. The people with the lowest premiums might see as much as a 300 percent increase in their premiums, and that's why the President can't point to anybody's policy and say, We're not going to increase your costs.

And he can't, either, guarantee that you're not going to lose your policy, because a lot of companies are going under in this. There will not be 1,300 health insurance companies doing business in the United States 5 years from now or 10 years from now. And if the President had his way, there wouldn't be anybody doing business in health insurance in America except the United States Federal Government. And if you wonder if that's a stretch of the imagination, Mr. Speaker, I can give you two examples. One of them is the Federal flood insurance program.

In the early sixties, all the flood insurance in America was private sector. Property and casualty, if you wanted to insure yourself against a flood, against the river waters coming in and filling up your basement, you went to a private property and casualty insurance company that would write you up a policy and set a premium. But this Congress, ``in its wisdom''--and I say that in quotes that this Congress, ``in its wisdom,'' decided that the premiums were too high and the varieties of policies for flood insurance in the early sixties were not great enough, and so they decided to set up a Federal flood insurance program that would provide one more alternative for the consumers to put some competition into the property and casualty business with regard to flood insurance.

Does that sound familiar, Mr. Speaker? I'll submit that it clearly does, because the President said he wanted one more health insurance company to provide competition for the other health insurance companies. He said we didn't have enough competition in health insurance. I don't know why he's forgotten about that. I have not, and I will not. So when the President of the United States says, We just want to add one more competitor, we don't have enough competition, and that competitor will be the Federal Government, as soon as you inject the Federal Government into the private sector--or what was the private sector in this case--then you have an unfair competitor with a comparative advantage. They don't have to be profitable. The Federal Government doesn't have to be. If they run up short, they just tap into the pockets of the taxpayer, and we run up an IOU that might be raiding the Social Security Trust Fund in Parkersburg, West Virginia, where every single dollar has been raided by this Congress. It might be borrowed money from the Saudis or the Chinese, provided they are willing to loan it to us and jack up the interest rates. They will. But the Federal Government does not have to be profitable. And they wouldn't have to be profitable with health insurance, which is an unfair comparative advantage that would drive some of the health insurance companies out, probably lots of them, and take this where the President wants it to go, single payer.

The President, as a candidate, consistently argued that there should be one entity that paid for all health care in America. That would be the Federal Government taking over all of those 1,300 health insurance companies and those 100,000 policy varieties and those hundreds of millions of Americans that have legitimate health insurance programs. Eventually, the President wanted to take it all over, but he had to fall back on an argument of just providing some competition because the American people rejected that.

So we're supposed to believe that the idea of wanting the Federal Government to sell insurance was just an innocent thing that was designed to provide more competition. Well, we rejected that. And by the way, the United States Senate rejected that. So we didn't end up with an ObamaCare package that has a Federal health insurance component to it other than they're regulating every single policy in America, canceling every policy in America, deciding which ones they want to renew, setting up community ratings that go from seven to one down to three to one and driving up the premiums.

But what comes from all of this, Mr. Speaker? I'm taking you then back to property and casualty insurance. The private sector that used to insure all flood insurance in America saw their competitor come in. I think the year was 1963, plus or minus a year. I'm real close. And 1963 is going to hit it, actually.

In 1963, the Federal Government came in and provided us one more flood insurance company to provide a little more competition to level the playing field for the people who lived in the floodplain that didn't have enough alternatives. That sounds exactly like the argument that we have today. So the Federal Government got into that business. And over a few years, the property and casualty companies, those private sector insurance companies that reflected the risks and the market in the premiums that they charged--and yes, they're in it for a profit. Thank God for profit. It's done more for the world than all the missionaries that went anywhere. As much as I believe in faith and the Lord's hand in everything that goes on on this planet, free enterprise capitalism has been a wonderful contribution to the well-being of all humanity, and it was a contributor in the flood insurance and property casualty insurance.

But the Federal Government got in the business in 1963, and over a period of time--and not a very long period of time--slowly those private sector companies realized they couldn't compete with Uncle Sam because they had to make a profit and they had to charge premiums that reflected the risk. So they dropped out, and for a long time, and certainly today, we cannot--no one in America can go out and buy flood insurance from the private sector. It all is sold by the Federal Government.

The Federal Government has taken over the flood insurance program in America lock, stock and barrel, root and branch, all of it. Every single vestige of flood insurance is all controlled by the Federal Government today. They set the premiums not by risk. They set the premiums by whatever bureaucrats think they ought to be, and they don't have to be profitable.

So that would explain why they are $19.2 billion in the red in the Federal flood insurance program, and it would explain why in my district, FEMA has come out and has a new ruling that broadens the floodplain dramatically. It's just breathtaking to look at the map of the floodplain that was in blue--and, by the way, national banks that are making loans on mortgages that go into these floodplains require flood insurance to be paid and premiums to be paid.

So when they're in the red $19.2 billion and they can't figure out how to charge premiums that reflect the risk and be able to get by with it because people probably can't afford those premiums, but they've expanded and developed their real estate in the floodplain based upon those premiums, having trouble raising the premiums on the people that owe the national banks money that had to buy them, so FEMA puts out a new map, a new map that widens the floodplains dramatically. These tiny little narrow areas become wide areas in the whole river valleys. And in one area, just one area within one of my 32 counties, there are 2,200 individual real estate parcels, most of them rural, that are now in a new floodplain created by FEMA's map and ruling, 1,100 property owners, 2,200 new properties, all of them now in a situation where they're going to have trouble expanding and building.

A lot of them are going to have to pay increased premiums for flood insurance that they didn't even have to buy before because they were out of the

floodplain, and the Federal Government cashes in. If I take this plan that they're trying to implement in my district and if I multiply it across all the real estate in the United States where it is awfully hard to use, the model that they use goes clear back to the early 1970s. It's nearly 40 years old, this model. The technology that they use is nearly 40 years old, so I can only guess.

If I use what they have in one of my counties as a measure, it looks to me like FEMA will be able to collect enough premiums that they can, maybe, recover their $19.2 billion and more. Maybe FEMA will make so much money off of this that they'll be able to help subsidize Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Don't hold your breath, Mr. Speaker, but this is 40-year-old technology.

We know this: anybody who has ever filled any sandbags and who has fought a flood knows, first, that the adrenalin rushes up in your blood. As the water is coming up, your adrenalin boils up in you, too, and you work harder and more feverishly as the water comes up. Many times, those sandbags along there are just, maybe, high enough, an inch or two, because you're stacking them on there as the water comes up. They're maybe 5, maybe a half an inch or a half a foot, maybe 5 inches or a half a foot--or even a foot.

Do you know, Mr. Speaker, that the FEMA model is so imprecise and of such ancient technology that their accuracy is within plus or minus 10 meters? That's 10 meters. Now, I didn't do the precise multiplier on it, but let's just say it's 30 feet, plus or minus. Let's just say they're right on the average. Let's just say I stand on this floor, and they say, Well, the flood might be here or it could be 10 meters up. Well, in looking at the ceiling of this Chamber, they could be that far off. They could be off more than 30 feet on the elevation of the water that they're predicting.

Meanwhile, we have the Corps of Engineers, which has hydraulic models that can tell us whether we can build in a floodplain and what the flow is and how we might have to construct our structures so that we don't constrict the flow when we have a flood. They can tell us where the 100-year flood event is and where the 500-year flood event is.

Yet who should be surprised that FEMA and the Corps of Engineers can't get together on this and use modern technology? I'm wondering if they have the will or if it happens to be that someone decided that they could just use this 40-year-old model that is plus or minus within 10 meters and impose flood insurance premiums on a whole bunch of Americans, who are unsuspecting and who are probably unable to pay these premiums, to make up for the $19.2 billion in loss that they've got in flood insurance.

Now, I tell this long story to describe what is in store for us if ObamaCare is not repealed 100 percent--every single bit of it--and done in the shortest order possible at the will of the American people. Though, before I get to how ObamaCare will transform out, it is really worthwhile for us to look back and see how the Federal Government swallows up other formerly private entities.

Back during that period of time when the Federal flood insurance was passed, it was also true that education loans were private sector. If you wanted to go off to college, you went and borrowed the money from the private sector. Then they set up the student loan plan as a means to provide other alternatives so that private lenders weren't handling all of the student loans. The Federal Government came in and did that, by my recollection, at about that same period of time.

What is predictable about this? What is predictable is, if the Federal Government gets into a business to compete, they have an unfair advantage, an illegitimate comparative advantage. They don't have to have profit. They don't have to balance their books. They don't have to be good at it. They just have to drive the competition out. They do what a monopolist would do. If somebody is trying to become a monopoly, they try to drive all of their competition out by underpricing, and they distort it to the point where nobody else can stay in the business. Then they're the only one in the business. Then they start to jack the prices up again.

Well, it took the Federal Government a long time, but in the dark of the night, in the heat of the ObamaCare battle--in the recision legislation that slipped through this Congress without an opportunity to evaluate it--there was the sneaky piece of legislation that converted what was left of the student loan plans from the private sector into completely the maw of government, itself.

So, in this period of time that I have described, we have seen the transformation of a completely private, independent-standing property and casualty flood insurance that faced a Federal Government that wanted to provide just one more competitor into the marketplace so that people had more choices and a Federal Government that swallowed it all up and that drove everybody out of business and a Federal Government that has done so, the same thing, with the student loan program in the United States. They had to hitch it onto ObamaCare to do it.

What a bunch of cynics that they couldn't do something like that in broad daylight in front of all of America. No. They had to stick it in when they had the major diversionary tactic of another swallow-up of the private sector--remember, a month ago or 6 weeks ago, whatever that date was--of all of the health insurance in America.

Some will say that there are exceptions--Medicare, for example. Medicaid would be another. Then you can argue whether those are insurance policies or government programs to pick people up when they're destitute and to take care of them when they reach retirement age. But for those folks who are under Medicare eligibility or who have incomes outside of Medicaid, we didn't see a Federal health insurance program except for SCHIP, which is the State Children's Health Insurance Program. This was another effort to try to close this gap.

There has been effort after effort for the liberals, for the progressives--for the people who just simply deny the liberty of the American people--to take over the health care in America.

Bill Clinton stood here, I believe, on September 13 in about 1993, and he gave his health care speech. He wanted to take it all over then. He turned Hillary loose with HillaryCare, and Hillary began meeting in private and in public. She actually had more public meetings, I think, than we had this time around. Although, we were quite critical of the private meetings she had, too. She wrote a bill, and that bill was the government takeover of health care. Well, they couldn't get that done. Bill Clinton came back, and he said, You know, we can't get this done, but we're going to do it incrementally.

I believe in that September 13 speech he actually made the proposal-- and I know I can find it in his speeches during that era--when he wanted to lower the Medicare eligibility from 65 to 55. That's when they brought the idea of SCHIP, the State Children's Health Insurance Program, which is set up to buy very, very cheap health insurance for kids. They put that out through the States. In Iowa, it is known as Hawkeye with a little better than a 2 to 1 Federal match.

So, when you're sitting in a State legislature, the Federal Government says, You know, help out with some of these cheap health insurance premiums for these kids who can't afford them. Otherwise, here's what we'll do. If you'll put $1 down out of your State tax coffers, we'll put $2 and change down. Let's see. I think it's 70 percent funding by the Federal Government and 30 percent by the States.

The States adopted it because it was--do you remember the phrase?-- free money, Mr. Speaker. Well, nothing is free. We know that, but it was viewed as free money by the State legislatures. They adopted SCHIP. In Iowa, it was Hawkeye.

Then at the same time that Bill Clinton would have liked to have dialed the Medicare eligibility age down to 55, you can see what's happening. If you reduce the age of eligibility for Medicare and if they're seeking to expand Medicaid--and they've been doing that and have been lowering the standards for eligibility to Medicaid from the lower income side of the scale--and if you make these kids eligible for SCHIP, you're squeezing this from the outside, from the middle. You're lowering the senior age to 55, and you're making sure you're insuring the kids--pick your age--well into their 20s.

We had States that had as high a percentage as 66 percent of people who were not kids but adults who were on the SCHIP program. Wisconsin would be one of those States. There was another State that went higher than that. It may have been Minnesota. They had a number that went up into the 80s. I think it was 87 percent. So they were using SCHIP to expand it where they could provide health insurance premiums for people because they wanted to have a single-payer plan eventually. That's what was going on with the strategy of trying to establish this single-payer plan.

In the middle of all of this, you know, the Republicans came in, and we fought some of that back. Then Nancy Pelosi was finally elected as Speaker of the House. What did she bring to us here on this floor but an SCHIP program, which had been set at 200 percent of poverty so that a family of four at 200 percent of poverty in my State would be set at about $52,000, in order to turn it up to 400 percent of poverty. It passed the House at the insistence of the Speaker, and I was the only member of the Iowa delegation to oppose it. It would have gone to 400 percent of poverty, which would have meant that a family of four in Iowa who was making $103,000 a year would have had the health insurance for their kids paid for by some taxpayer who would probably not be making that much.

While that was going on, there would be people who would have to pay the rich man's tax, the Alternative Minimum Tax. There would be 70,000 families in America who would be paying the rich man's tax, the Alternative Minimum Tax. I have trouble saying ``AMT'' these days. It's the Alternative Minimum Tax. There would be 70,000 families who would be paying the Alternative Minimum Tax who would still be eligible for the SCHIP funding for health insurance for their children.

Do you see where this goes? If you have the subsidy at the means testing side of this where lower income people are multiplied from 100 percent of poverty, to 200 percent, to 300 percent, to 400 percent--and by the way, we ratcheted it back down to 300 percent--and allowed $3 billion or more worth of Medicaid funding to go in and fund illegals into the market of all of that, it squeezes it against the middle.

Can you imagine, Mr. Speaker, someone who would be about 45 years old who would watch the eligibility of the Medicare age drop down to 55, who would watch somebody who is collecting SCHIP who is now 35 years old and who would watch those at 400 percent of poverty--families with $103,000, families of four--having their health insurance premiums paid while they would still be paying the Alternative Minimum Tax? People are looking at this, thinking, Well, the people 10 years older than I get free health care, and the people 10 years younger than I get free health care. I'm the one who's working, who's paying for my own premiums and raising my own family, and everybody else is, too. Why do I try? Do I do that because I'll have higher quality health care?

Yes, that would be a good answer. The people who are responsible should live a little better than those who don't in this country. We have got to leave incentives in place.

That was the strategy--to squeeze the middle, to put such a load on the people who were still paying for their own or who were earning their own health care, their own health insurance at their workplace or wherever their deal might be, that they would just capitulate, throw up their hands and say, Give me the European model. I've got it anyway. I'm paying for it for everybody else. Why am I buying my own with after-tax dollars? That is the strategy.

It is so cynical to crush the spirit of people, to take away their constitutional rights and to impose upon them a national health care act. It was rejected during the Hillary era. They called it HillaryCare. They rejected it in Massachusetts, Mr. Speaker. The people in Massachusetts rejected ObamaCare. Still their hearts were hardened, and still they were determined to come down here and impose the policy on the American people.

Well, I'm not letting it go. I will not let it go for a whole series of reasons, but the constitutional reasons are the most important ones.

It is unconstitutional to require any American to buy a product that is either produced or approved by the Federal Government under penalty of law. It has never happened in the history of this country. It is a violation of a series of components within our Constitution--and don't think I can't come up with them, Mr. Speaker. Certainly, I know what they are. They are four places.

It is a violation of the Commerce Clause because there will be and always have been babies born in States who didn't advantage themselves of any kind of health care whatsoever. They didn't participate in any commerce when it came to health care, and they maybe didn't travel outside of their States at all, so there wasn't even the risk of their going out to be eventually, potentially, picked up by ambulances in other States. The risk didn't exist, so they didn't use health care in the States they lived in. They didn't go outside the States they lived in. They lived lives long or short, healthy or not, and passed away into the next life never having engaged in interstate commerce that had anything to do with ObamaCare, which means it's a violation of the Commerce Clause, swift and certain, without a lot of hard analysis required.

If the Commerce Clause doesn't apply to say that the passage of ObamaCare is verboten under the Constitution, if the Commerce Clause doesn't apply on ObamaCare, then it doesn't apply whatsoever for anything imaginable, and it's no restraint whatsoever. You would believe that if you were an activist judge. I reject that.

The second part is that it's not in the enumerated powers. There is nothing there in the Constitution that defines any power to impose an obligation by any citizen or any person in the United States to buy a product that is produced by the Federal Government or approved by the Federal Government. That's the second thing.

The third thing is that it violates the Equal Protection Clause of the Constitution.

We're going to go to four here, Mr. Speaker.

The Equal Protection Clause of the Constitution says that all citizens whatsoever shall be treated the same regardless of race, ethnicity, national origin or the color of their skin, which is the whole list of the things that are there within title VII of the Civil Rights Act.

Well, people are treated differently in the States. The Cornhusker kickback notwithstanding, still the legislation treats people differently in Louisiana than it does in the rest of the country, Florida than it does in the rest of the country, several other jurisdictions or something like eight to 11 different areas in ObamaCare that treat people differently depending upon the geography of where they live. That's forbidden under the equal protection clause of the Constitution.

Fourth thing, and this is where we get to, it's a violation of the 10th Amendment. Not only is it not in the enumerated powers to impose this ObamaCare on Americans, but those powers that are not specified in the enumerated powers of the Constitution are reserved for the States or to the people respectively. And this is a violation of the separation of powers doctrine, which is in the 10th Amendment.

Four places, Mr. Speaker. It's not in the enumerated powers; it's a violation of the commerce clause; it's a violation of the equal protection clause; and it's a violation of the 10th Amendment. This Supreme Court will see these cases eventually, and when they do, an honest reading of the Constitution compels the Supreme Court to overturn the ObamaCare legislation. And I understand, and I have not read every word in there, that there's not a severability clause in that. And if that's the case, any component most likely that's found unconstitutional throws the whole business out.

I wish we had a provision that would put all of that paper back in the tree, Mr. Speaker, and give people back their liberty because that's what this bill does. It violates the Constitution and it takes people's liberty.

It takes our freedom to buy a policy that we want. It nationalizes our body. It takes over the most sovereign thing that we have, that's our skin and everything inside it; and the Federal

Government manages when we get the tests, what policies we will be able to buy, what the premiums will be. They'll regulate the premiums. They will decide what's offered in the policies, and the Federal Government will impose mandates on those policies that we don't even see in the legislation.

There will be mandates there for contraceptives. There will be mandates there for mental health. There will be mandates there for drug treatment. There will be mandates there probably for physical therapy. And we see also an effort to tax your pop if it's not diet pop, tax your soda if it's not diet soda. They want to tell you what you can eat and what you can drink. The next thing they'll be doing in this super- uber nanny state is run us across the scales and tax our fat. That will actually be the simplest way. If they're going to tax our diet, I wish they would just let me alone, run me across the scales and tax me by the pound.

But I want the freedom to eat what I want to eat, buy what I want to buy, live the way I want to live. And I want to be able to make my own decisions on whether I am going to exercise or whether I am going to go to a health club. And if my insurance company wants to set up an incentive for that because it's cost effective and they can offer me a lower premium, I'm quite likely to take advantage of that, and I think many Americans would do the same.

But this Federal Government cannot be allowed to continue on becoming even more of a nanny state than it already is. We've got to reject that, Mr. Speaker. We've got to abolish ObamaCare. We've got to pull it out root and branch so that there's not one vestige of it left behind, not one particle, not one cell, not one DNA particle of ObamaCare left in this Federal code because if we leave it, it's the equivalent of going in and removing a malignant tumor and leaving part of it there. It still is at great risk of metastasizing; and when that happens, it's the death knell to freedom and liberty in the United States of America.

We are not some other people. We are not the mirror of Europe with the stirring in of the later generations of more newly arriving immigrants, legal and illegal. We are a unique people. We have a unique character and a unique quality about us where we stand alone, apart from the rest of the world, for a lot of reasons, Mr. Speaker. Some of those reasons are self-evident, and some of those reasons are in the Declaration, and some of them are in the Bill of Rights. Some of them are actually in the Constitution in a broader sense.

But just to enumerate some of those reasons for American exceptionalism, and it's not politically correct to remind people but it's necessary that we do this, that we talk American exceptionalism, a number of them are these: we have the rule of law. The foundation for that is the Constitution. The philosophy for the Constitution is in the Declaration. We have the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. And life is the paramount right, and it is paramount to liberty, which is more important than the pursuit of happiness.

So working from the bottom of the scale up, Mr. Speaker, it works like this: someone in the pursuit of their happiness cannot infringe on someone else's liberty because liberty trumps pursuit of happiness. And, by the way, pursuit of happiness, it was understood by our Founding Fathers to go back to the Greek meaning, which the Greek word for pursuit of happiness is eudaimonia, which in its definition speaks to a search for knowledge, a search for truth, and it implies both the physical and the mental. So to be sound in body and mind and in a search for truth and a search for knowledge, that's the pursuit of happiness because they believed that out on the other end of that scale that ultimate knowledge would provide that ultimate level of happiness. And there's some wisdom in that philosophy. It's Godless, but there's some wisdom in the philosophy of achieving ultimate knowledge. Pursuit of happiness was eudaimonia, that search for knowledge.

But someone in their search for knowledge, in their pursuit of happiness/knowledge, cannot travel on someone else's liberty. Liberty is more important than the pursuit of happiness. And someone in the search for their liberty cannot use that liberty to take someone else's life. Individual life is too precious. It cannot be taken by someone because they say they have a liberty. Neither can someone who is in pursuit of their happiness take someone else's liberty because it makes them happy. Our liberties are guaranteed here, and the infringement upon them is that we have to respect life more than liberty. We have to respect liberty more than the pursuit of happiness. Those are prioritized rights that are self-evident that come from God, endowed by our creator.

And here we sit in the United States with that philosophical foundation in the Declaration that was basis for our Constitution and the rights that are there that made America a great country--freedom of speech, religion, press, the right to peaceably assemble and petition government for redress of grievances, the right to keep and bear arms. Moving up the line, the right to be free from double jeopardy and to be tried by a jury of your peers.

And the right to property in the Fifth Amendment, which has been amended now in the Supreme Court of the United States in the Kelo decision where they struck the words ``for public use'' out of the Fifth Amendment, which says ``nor shall private property be taken for public use without just compensation.'' Now the effect of the Kelo decision was that Fifth Amendment has been usurped by the last nine people that should be amending the Constitution, the Supreme Court Justices--it wasn't nine, by the way, and I applaud those that opposed it. But now the Fifth Amendment reads: ``Nor shall private property be taken without just compensation.''

Mr. Speaker, I know mentally you put ``for public use'' in there, but they took it out. Local governments now occasionally, and I hope not routinely, confiscate private property, individual private property, and they give it over to other private property owners because they think they will get more tax dollars out of it.

But property rights are a foundation of the success in America. And along the way, free enterprise capitalism is another foundation for the success in America.

So you can buy a piece of property and it's yours. As long as you pay for it and pay the property tax on it, you get to keep it. And that can be the basis for your equity that you engage in starting businesses, setting up factories, building homes, expanding farms. Those things that have been the basis of our prosperity are rooted in the rule of law, the right to property, free enterprise capitalism. Also the moral foundation that came over for the freedom of religion rooted in our Judeo-Christian values, which are the thread of our culture today. All of those are reasons why America is a great country.

Another reason is because we have skimmed the cream of the crop off of every donor civilization that has sent legal immigrants to the United States. The cream of the crop, the people with the vigor and the vitality and the dream. And they found a way to get onboard a ship or whatever means they could to come here and enter into the United States through a legal port of entry to chase their dreams.

And some of them came with a significant amount of capital to give it a go. And a lot of them came with the clothes on their back and the possessions they had in their bag, like my grandmother. And as they arrived here, they began to carve out their American Dream with the kind of vision and the kind of vigor that gave them the idea to come here in the first place. This America, this land of almost unlimited natural resources, a land that has the very foundation of liberty and freedom as the essence and the core of its being, welcomed legal immigrants here who were called by that clarion call of liberty and freedom and property rights and unlimited natural resources and unlimited opportunity in a moral society that was rooted in Judeo- Christian values. And they came here and built a Nation in the blink of a historical eye, settled the North American continent, expanded manifest destiny from sea to shining sea. And all of this has attracted people to come to America.

Now, we are either the first generation immigrants that came here, hopefully legally, with that vigor of that dream or the second, third, fourth,

fifth, or multiple generations, the descendants of that same dream, imbued with American self-confidence and American can-do spirit and a confidence that we can face any challenge, we can bear any burden. That's the American spirit.

And we cannot be capitulating to the European utopian version that's going to have a social program to fix any ill. We can't be trapped into this idea that we can sit down and produce some kind of a policy that will solve every problem. All we need to do is have our default system come back to the Constitution, come back to free enterprise, come back to individual responsibility. If we do all of those things and adhere to the Constitution itself, free enterprise capitalism, maintain our moral foundation, nurture the family unit as the means through which we pour all of our values, if we do all of that, America will be just fine.

But Jimmy Carter, when he was running for President and as he was exploring the first-in-the-nation caucus and establishing that as a viable route to the Presidency in Iowa, I read in an interview back in those years in the mid-1970s where Jimmy Carter said the people that work should live better than those that don't. Now, I don't know that Jimmy Carter ever actually acted on that, but that's what he said, and it caught my attention. It was a very simple way of describing this. The people that work should live better than those that don't.

Well, that's not the prevailing philosophy in this Congress any longer. It is the people that don't work need to live as well as anybody. So we have 72 different welfare programs, according to Robert Rector of the Heritage Foundation. In the mid-1990s when we reformed welfare--I wasn't here--but when this Congress reformed welfare in the mid-1990s, there wasn't the dramatic drop in the cost in welfare. It reduced it a little bit and then it stayed on a plateau and then it climbed again. The welfare has been climbing at a rate that's comparable to or greater than the rate that it was climbing going into the mid-1990s. And we have accepted this. I don't accept it but this society has.

This society has also accepted rampant drug abuse so that there's a huge demand for illegal drugs coming out of Mexico, from or through Mexico. That is the core of the problem that we have with the border today and the violence on the border today, and whatever we do to help the Mexicans and seal our border, we need to do that. We need to stop the bleeding, but as long as there is a powerful demand in the United States for tens of billions of dollars in illegal drugs, then there will always be the illegal traffic coming across the border.

Mr. Speaker, this is a bit of a rendition on where America is today, a little bit on how we got here, a little bit about the economics of it, a little about the history, a fair amount about what's going on with ObamaCare.

This is my statement and my commitment, that I will not rest. I will continue to turn the pressure up to get the passage of the repeal for ObamaCare that I have introduced in this Congress and now should have, if I can add this up, 66 cosponsors on this legislation today.

Mr. Speaker, the number of the legislation, should you choose to look it up and sign on is H.R. 4972. That's the legislation that will one day, at least the language of it if not that particular bill number, arrive at the President's desk, where this President would veto it. But with a new majority in 2011, we will have the votes in here to shut off any funding of ObamaCare so that it cannot be enacted.

It doesn't become fully enacted until 2014. So 2011 and '12 this Congress, has to start all spending, by the Constitution. We say, no, there won't be any funding for the implementation of ObamaCare, so we will put it on ice for 2011 and 2012. While that's going, we will put the repeal on President Obama's desk and make him veto it. And when he vetoes it, we can take a look and see if we can override it. That will be very hard, but it's not completely impossible.

But in 2012 we elect a new President and a new Congress. And that new President and new Congress need to take the pledge that I have taken, which is plank number one, full 100 percent abolishment of ObamaCare, all of it, without any hesitation, without any caveats.

And let's put that on the desk of the new President, Mr. Speaker, that will be sworn in January 20 of 2013. And while he stands on the west portico--we will gavel in on January 3, 2013, in here. That's what the Constitution says we do. We will be thy then in a position where we can pass the repeal of ObamaCare, have it sitting there so that when he takes his oath of office January 20, 2013, and puts his hand down as the President of the United States, his first act, Mr. Speaker, can be to put his pen to the bill that repeals ObamaCare and sign that legislation on the spot at the podium on the west portico of this Capitol building and give America back our economic freedom, but more importantly, give us back our human liberty.

That's the goal that we have to follow if we are to achieve the greatness that America has ahead of us. If not, we will be trailing in the dust the golden hopes of men and forever diminishing our opportunities, forever diminishing our potential, taking away human potential, discouraging individual entrepreneurs, people that would never realize their dreams because they would be growing up in a nanny state that has taken over the banks, the investment companies, the insurance companies, the car companies, Fannie and Freddie, the student loans, nationalize our body, our skin and everything inside it, and, by the way, put a 10 percent tax on the outside if you go into a tanning salon. All of this taken over and the financial institutions. I want it all back. I want it back for the American people, the American workers, and the American entrepreneurs. I want our spirit back.

I am going to work to get it back, Mr. Speaker. I appreciate your attention.

Mr. Speaker, I guess I rise at an appropriate time to follow the dialogue that we just heard.

It amazes me, as I'm here now on my 44th day in the House of Representatives, and it seems like on each and every day I've heard the other side of the aisle do nothing but blame a previous administration for the failings of today. It is my hope that at some point they will begin taking responsibility for some of the policy actions.

But what we're here to talk about tonight are positive solutions. We've heard a lot of blaming and name calling here over the past several weeks, and we're here tonight to talk about positive solutions to some of the difficult challenges.

So to the colleagues that were just speaking, we're here to call your bluff. You said come call your bluff, well, here we are, and I've got some good gentlemen that are going to join me. But what I want to start out with today is we're going to talk about the kitchen table solutions.

As you may have heard, we have had a program here where we've been actually going out and seeking solutions from the American people, not from our leadership, not from a political party, but from the American people; and it's called America Speaking Out. And there have been more than 12,000 specific ideas generated from the American people, more than 600,000 votes cast on these ideas as to what is most important.

And so the top concerns from the kitchen table all across America: number one, jobs--and I think we've been saying, where are the jobs? Number two, spending. Why isn't the Federal Government balancing their checkbook? And then health care, ObamaCare itself. So that's what we are going to talk about tonight.

As we move through this, I know we have some colleagues that are going to join me. My good colleague from Georgia (Mr. Gingrey) is going to be with us and also Mr. Thompson from Pennsylvania. But first we're going to talk about the number one issue facing America: jobs, jobs creation.

We have a few quotes here. One--this is, I guess, just from last year, it says: ``Our stimulus plan will likely save''--``likely,'' key word--``save or create 3 to 4 million jobs. Ninety percent of these jobs will be created in the private sector and the remaining 10 percent in the public sector.'' But now the public sector has lost nearly 8 million jobs in the last 2 years; government has gained 656,000 jobs. So when our colleagues from the other side of the aisle stood here a minute ago and said jobs have been created, they were in fact true; but they were created in the public sector, not the private sector.

And then it also says estimated unemployment without the stimulus would be 8.8 percent this year. Well, with all of the stimulus bailouts, buyouts, Cash for Clunkers, you ring it all up, unemployment in May was 9.7; far exceeded their expectations. So obviously the plans are not working.

So what have been the job killers? Excessive taxation, insufficient liquidity, economic uncertainty, and red tape and government mandates. So over the last year we've seen nearly double-digit unemployment, the debt is continuing to grow, we've got a job-killing agenda, and according to the National Federation of Independent Businesses, one in six small businesses are concerned about the uncertainty of the future. Fifteen million people out of jobs, out of work right now, unemployment at its highest rate in 25 years, and the private sector, again, has lost 8 million jobs.

So we heard a minute ago, stimulus: that was creating all the jobs, that was going to take care of America. Well, I think about stimulus and health care and all that we saw last year, and it brought Americans to the National Capital last year. If you will remember, on September 12, Americans from all over this Nation rode on buses here, flew on airplanes to celebrate--was it to celebrate or to speak out against what has been done? And we all know the American people are not happy right now.

So what is coming up next? 2011, 5 months away, under the leadership here in Congress, we will see taxes go up on each and every American. We heard ``middle class tax cuts'' just a few minutes ago. There aren't going to be any middle class tax cuts; in fact, every tax rate goes up for every American all across the country in so many different ways. Every individual tax bracket goes up. We have a marriage penalty, the Child Tax Credit will be cut in half. It doesn't sound like a tax cut to me; it's actually a tax increase. And then farmers, small business owners will see their tax rate go up to 55 percent in the States. And then of course capital gains and dividend taxes will rise as a result of the leadership here in Washington.

So much to do, so much to do. The good thing is that we have positive solutions. That's what we are here to talk about tonight. I know my good friend, Mr. Thompson from Pennsylvania, is a good leader on job creation and is working hard in that area. I would love to have you join us, if you

would like, to share with us some positive solutions here to get Americans back to work. And does that include public sector jobs or private sector jobs?

Well, let's get to some simple facts, because you're right. America has been speaking out. The main thing they've been asking is: Where are the jobs?

Just in the last year, we know there have been 2.5 million jobs lost here in the United States. So, you know, I guess a great admittance to that is the fact that the Democrats were pushing through the expansion or the extension of the unemployment benefits. If, in fact, their policies were to work or were working, there would be no need to extend unemployment benefits. The truth is they had to extend them because their policies aren't working.

Let's get to some simple facts here real quick. I'm a finance major. You know, the problem is not that difficult. The challenges are certainly great, but the facts are simple. There is a commonsense equation here.

We have total employers in the United States of about 24 million. The unemployment rate is 9.5 percent. We have about 14.6 million unemployed Americans right now. So there is a simple equation, which is, if one in three businesses hired just one employee over the next year, the unemployment rate would be 4.4 percent. That gets it to reasonable, sensible, easy-to-understand ideas.

Here is the equation: If one in three businesses adds one new hire in the next 12 months, unemployment is down to 4.4 percent.

So the question is: How do businesses get to this point where they hire that next person? Right now, they're not doing it, and there is a reason for that. It is called ``uncertainty.'' It is the uncertainty of what is about to happen to them next--and I think we know the tax increases that are coming and things like that. It's certainly scaring businesses.

So what are some of the solutions?

I guess the broader solution is getting government out of the way of job creation and fighting the efforts here, you know, that we've seen as they're pushing through the largest tax increase in the history of this country, and it is coming in 5 months.

Yet today, here tonight, right before us, stood Members of the other party, saying, Oh, middle class tax cuts. That's not what is happening.

In 5 months, we will have the largest tax increase in the history of this Nation. We need to return to spending levels that were from the 2008 levels and then roll back taxes. You know, we often hear them say, Oh, those big corporate tax breaks. Well, guess who hires Americans? Businesses. Wouldn't it be sensible to relieve them of some of the tax burdens here in the United States instead of increasing taxes like they're going to do? Then, of course, there's rolling back the regulatory burdens that we see. There is so much to do, so much to do.

We heard them a few minutes ago say, Well, Republicans have voted against these job-creation packages. Well, I don't know that any of those packages have been successful, so it's probably a good thing that Republicans have voted against them.

The fact is they have a majority that is far greater than the Republicans. They can push through anything they want to push through, and they have certainly been doing that against the will of the American people.

Yes, sir.

Thank you for joining us.

I think we'd be going backwards a little bit. You're right.

I mean the fact is we need to empower the business community. We need to embrace the entrepreneurial spirit. We need to equip them with lower burdens of regulation, and we need to lower tax rates. We do not need to be creating jobs as a government. Instead, we need the private sector to be creating jobs. It's a zero sum game. There are only so many employees in the United States, and if more of them are shifting to the public sector, it is only taking intellectual capital and wealth out of the private sector.

I would love to turn it over to my good colleague from Georgia (Mr. Gingrey).

Thank you for joining us on this late evening to talk about getting this country back on track.

Well, let's take a quick glance at where we are from a perspective financially, and then the positive solution of balancing the budget. Imagine that, balancing the budget, balancing the checkbook here at the Federal Government.

Well, here's the truth of where we are. And we heard earlier when our friends from the other side were talking about how good it was since the new administration has taken over. Well, here's some facts. The facts don't lie. I mean, the truth is that the deficit under this current administration and leadership has just blossomed tremendously since they've taken charge.

Now, we've heard a lot. In my 44 days, I've heard so much about President Bush, President Bush, the last 8 years, his administration. But you know what? I think they've had a little bit of amnesia, because they took the majority in 2006, swore in their Speaker in 2007, and look what happened. From that point forward, the deficit bloomed and unemployment increased.

It all works together simultaneously, but yet they want to look back over the full decade and forget that, You know what? They're responsible. They were in a governing position, and yet they don't want to accept the responsibility of governing.

So that leads us to where we are right now, at a point of lack of governing, because for the first time since 1974 no budget has been presented here. And the question is: Where's the budget?

And right here you can read the quote. It says, Skipping a budget resolution this year would be unprecedented. And we've seen a lot of unprecedented things over the last several months, but this, in itself, is unprecedented. The House has never failed to pass an annual budget resolution since the current budget rules were put into place in 1974. And that's reported here back in April.

But budgets are necessary, according to the leadership here. Steny Hoyer, our current majority leader, said, enacting a budget was the most basic responsibility of governing. That was the year they took over, the year they took over. And since then, look what's happened.

And then, of course, from the House Budget Committee chairman, if you can't budget, you can't govern. Right there it is.

Well, that leads us to today. I believe it's time to let the American people know that we have solutions to balance the budget and actually have a proposal in place, and that, I can tell the American people, hasn't got a hearing. I wonder why. I wonder why.

H. Con. Res. 281, which I know many of the colleagues here have signed on to it--I'm not sure if one would want to speak to it in its specifics, but it provides tax relief, returns to 2008 spending levels, makes no changes to the Social Security laws as they currently are, provides spending increases equivalent to the inflation growth in Medicare and Medicaid, requires each committee in this House to find savings equal to 1 percent of the mandatory spending, repeals the Troubled Asset Relief Program, TARP, repeals TARP, repeals ObamaCare, and then also provides medical liability reform, freedom to purchase health care across State lines, repeals Davis-Bacon, so many other things, great concepts there. And I'm sure you'd like to speak to some of those and the need, the importance of balancing the budget here in the United States Congress.

You know what's so exciting about this America Speaking Out program is that we're getting ideas from Americans that are sitting around the kitchen table and they're talking about what would they do if they were in charge. What would they do if they were making these decisions. As they're watching the TV, and oftentimes in disgust seeing what comes out of Washington, D.C. The ideas that they have proposed and the thousands of connections that have been made.

And I took that to my district and somewhat implemented a program much like that and developed an economic advisory council of business and community leaders from each and every county in my district to seek input from them to tear down that wall. Because for far too long Washington has not been listening. And so we just took that wall down and said, hey, we want your ideas so we can push them up and present them here to the full House as the ideas from Main Street itself, not from Capitol Hill. But we need the ideas from the hills of north Georgia, are where the ideas come from, and the hills from all over this great Nation.

But you know, balancing the budget is a great start. Every American family has to balance their checkbook. But yet right now, here, leading by example, a terrible example is a Federal Government that is so far outside of its bounds with deficit spending and increasing its debt, it's unsustainable.

So I guess the Republicans have a solution right here. House Concurrent Resolution 281 balances the budget, cuts taxes, and cuts spending, something that's unheard of here in Washington, D.C. When every State and local government all around this Nation's cutting spending right now, every family's cutting spending out of their personal budget, here on the Federal level we just keep spending, spending, spending.

Mr. Thompson, you looked like you had something good to add to the conversation here.

Let's stop there for a second. You're talking about the marriage tax. Now, those are the people, the wealthy married people or is that all married people? That's everyone, right?

And now the individuals with children are the ones getting the penalty here, the ones who are the wealthy, or is it everyone who has children?

It is everyone. So the fact that they stood over here, what, 40 minutes ago and said, oh, these are tax cuts for the middle class, that's not the case. The largest tax increase in the history of this Nation will occur in 5 months. But we have a bill that we've introduced, and I am sure y'all have cosponsored it, I cosponsored it, to block that, to block that tax increase, and to allow the taxes to remain at the level they are today. And of course we would want to see them lowered. But it's not a tax cut. We're just saying, hey, keep it at the level it is. Don't raise them. Because that's what they are doing. They're raising taxes.

Let me finish this balance the checkbook thing real quick, and we'll talk about confidence in a minute. So balance the checkbook. Republicans, we're saying let's cut spending. Let's stop this excessive spending that's going on here in Washington. We can do that by repealing the unused portions of the stimulus bill. They talk about how great it's been, the grand fanfare of the stimulus, when in fact a third of it hasn't even been spent, which means, again, it's not working.

We need to end the bailouts. And then of course the big one, repeal ObamaCare, which is a nearly $600 billion tax increase on all Americans and businesses all over the United States.

Billion, right, that's nine zeroes.

This is what Americans are saying right here. Americans did not go to AmericaSpeakingOut.com--and this is nonpartisan, it's confidential--Americans did not go to that Web site and say increase spending. They did not say increase the stimulus and do another one. They did not say continue the bailouts or keep ObamaCare. They actually said stop all this stuff. Stop it. That was America speaking out right here.

Thank you, Dr. Gingrey. You are absolutely right.

Now, let me summarize. We've been talking about solutions here tonight. First one we were talking about was job creation. Certainty was mentioned by Mr. Thompson there. Uncertainty being the problem; certainty being the solution. So some certainty would be let's pass this legislation that blocks the largest tax increase in the history of our Nation. Let's get some of this regulation out of the way. Let's empower the small business owners and just embrace and ignite that entrepreneurial spirit. The solutions to job creation.

The second component we were talking about is the spending and balancing the budget. It's time to cut spending. Let's say enough is enough here in Washington. All of America, all businesses, all State, all local governments are cutting spending, whereas here we are, we're raising spending. But we've even gone a step further, taken a bold step and said, we've got a plan to balance the budget here for the Federal Government.

And now the third category, which I think really involved the American people last year, not in a positive way because they weren't engaged in the process, because it was a process that was behind closed doors, but it raised the awareness of the abuse of the process and the abuse of the rules and abuse of the system right here, and that was health care.

As we've talked about America Speaking Out, repealing ObamaCare was one of the top items mentioned or indicated out of the--what did we say, nearly 12,000 respondents, 12,000 specific ideas and 600,000 votes cast for different ideas. We've got an interesting chart here, and this will be the debut I believe of it publicly to show the health care plan as passed, the health care plan as passed.

It was approached or presented as a plan that was patient friendly, right? Isn't that what it's called, the Patient Protection Act? This is the ObamaCare health care plan in a schematic of what occurred out of the 2,000 pages of legislation. They're still today figuring out that portions of it were in there that they never expected or knew were in there, including new additional taxes.

But let me point out as we discuss this, and I know, Doctor, you've probably got a lot of insight into it because we do have an alternative plan. We had one then, it was presented then, but it's still in committee right now.

But let me point out to those watching. Here's the physician at this point. Here's the patient down here at this point, and all of this government is in between. How is that better for the American patient, for the young boy

that's needing care? How is this better for that young single mom who's just trying to get care for her child? This is not better. This is a mess, a governmental nightmare right here, and this is as it's passed and has been signed into law, the Obama health care plan.

You're right. This is the doctor. There's the patient. You would think the patient and doctor would be in the center, right? That should be the center of this diagram, but it is not. It is this newly empowered Secretary of the Health and Human Services that is in the center of which all of this spirals off of, and all of this is documented and all the code sections are outlined on here how it was created, and it indicates new mandates, new taxes, new programs, new processes. All of this is in this new health care plan that is going to be a mess for Americans right here.

The great thing is, though, that as we stand before America tonight, we don't stand here without an alternative, without another idea. We come before America boldly with another alternative, and the first step, in my opinion, is we have to defund this mess. Let's just put the brakes on it. We don't need another, what, $600 billion in new taxes. We need to defund this, and we have introduced legislation that is H.R. 5882, which each of you are probably cosponsors of and I'm the sponsor of the legislation to just defund it altogether, and let's start over because the process was broken. The policy is flawed.

Let's get a patient-centered, patient-driven health care plan in place of which we've got good alternatives. Would you like to share a little bit about the proposal that's out there, or do you have some ideas yourself?

You are absolutely right. So you presented a solution. H.R. 3400 would be the Empowering Patients First Act. We have talked about deauthorizing the funding for this mess here, and you talk about surgically removing some items here. I mean, this is a mess.

You wonder why this component would be in a health care proposal. The IRS, the Internal Revenue Service, is part of a health care plan; although, I think we all know that the American people do not want to have to go through this maze in order to get their health care taken care of here in the United States.

We have a couple of opportunities. One, H.R. 5882, for those whom are viewing this tonight, could encourage their Members to sign on to, and that would not allow any funds to be authorized or spent towards this here. Then there is the Repeal It proposal that repeals this altogether, and there are two of those out there. There is a letter or petition to have one voted on here on the floor, and that's H.R. 4972, by Mr. King. That's the Repeal It legislation.

Then you have spoken about the alternative, the replacement. So you have defund it, repeal it, and then replace it with H.R. 3400, which is a free market, capitalistic solution to health care for Americans to allow them to be empowered, empowering them.

Would you like to add some more to this? I know we are getting close here before we need to stop sharing the truth here.

Last August, the American people were pretty upset about that. They were fired up 1 year ago as the leadership of this Hall went out all across America and avoided town hall meetings because they could not defend this 2,000-page spaghetti plate here of mess, because the American people know that the government taking over their health care is not the best option. The best option is the patient, the individual that is being empowered.

Mr. Speaker and my colleagues, I want to thank you for joining me tonight, because here at this late hour here on the east coast, we are standing before the American people presenting alternatives, solutions to these challenging days.

We started off by talking about the economy and jobs and job creation, and that's empowering the private sector, not empowering government, creating certainty in the marketplace as opposed to the uncertainty that is out there today by standing in the way of the largest tax increase in the history of this Nation, which is about to be unfolded here in the next 5 months. And then also the reduction of capital gains. The reduction of the corporate tax rate and just igniting that entrepreneurial spirit once again to allow that entrepreneur, the American business owner, to dream, and to dream big and to go work hard.

Then next we talked about spending and spending cuts, balancing the budget. Very difficult items here on the Federal level, it would seem by the majority party. But, instead, we have proposed positive solutions to balance the budget like has never been seen before.

Then lastly, the health care. And all of this comes as a result of America Speaking Out, the Web site in which 12,000 responses were given and over 600,000 votes were cast on different ideas and concepts. Listening to the American people about jobs and the economy, about spending, about balancing the budget and the health care proposal, which leads us to defunding it, repealing it and then replacing it with a patient center, patient-driven concept that provides affordability, portability, and accessibility to Americans.

But this is not a time in which we stand and point fingers as we have heard over the past several weeks. My 44 days being here, the other side has pointed fingers back, back in time. But we are not here to do that. This is not about Republican and Democrat. This is about America right now and this is about getting our economy back on track. It's about creating the confidence once again in the marketplace and then providing true health care solutions.

So I appreciate my colleagues in joining me tonight on this late hour. I know it means a lot to your constituents that you would do that and that you would be working at this late hour in the evening because you know how important it is.

Mr. Speaker, I yield back.

I thank my good friend for coordinating this hour tonight, very important hour. This is about real solutions, not the types of policies we've seen over these past 19 months which has grown the size of government--bloated the size of government, actually. We have increased the deficit to the point that what we have is a legacy of debt. There is not a generation, I don't think, that ever wants to have it so that--we always want to leave this country better than what we found it, to pass it on to our children and our grandchildren. Yet with the trend that we have been on from the leadership, or the lack of leadership, from my colleagues across the aisle in terms of the taxing, the spending, the borrowing, what we have today for the generations to follow us is just a tremendous legacy of debt.

I think the data that just recently came out showed the deficit pushing $14 trillion, $14 trillion. But you know what? There are better ways. We've been working on these. These are not new ideas. We've had bills that we have introduced. Unfortunately, the Speaker has control over what bills get to the floor. We have many solutions. What I call is, as opposed to Big Government solutions which we've been seeing, we've been working on smart government solutions, those that truly stimulate the economy--or would stimulate the economy if we were able to get moving on those.

Many of those have to do with who the true economic engine is in this country, and frankly that economic engine is small business. There are over 20 million small businesses in this country. These are the folks who take risk. They're the ones that work 6, 7 days a week; they're putting in those 16- and 17-hour days. Many times they do that without taking a dollar back for themselves. They keep reinvesting in their companies. They're growing jobs. They've got that American Dream, and they are trying to live that dream. Unfortunately, what we've seen in the past 19 months is this government, the Obama administration and Speaker Pelosi, just crushing those dreams.

On back home, I describe it as, if the economy is a football game, there are yellow flags flying everywhere for piling on the backs of small businesses. Actually, a former colleague here, Dick Armey, I understand once described it--it was a great description, I repeat it often--that if the economy is a horse race, and of course the economy is the horse and government is the jockey, at whatever point the jockey becomes larger than the horse, you know you've got problems. And that's what we have today.

We've been working on things and looking at trying to reduce the costs for small businesses, and it has been very challenging to do in the 111th Congress with the folks that we have here.

To start out with, I'll share one bill that I have that I've been working on, which I introduced some time ago. It was to allow individuals--entrepreneurs--who have this vision, who have this American dream, to be able to take some money and to be able to put that money into a tax-deferred savings account. It allows them to do that on a regular basis and to build that amount of money up. You know, they've got the dream. They've got the idea. They know what they want to do. When they've accumulated enough of the tax-deferred savings, they can use that money to purchase maybe physical property, maybe the resources, equipment or capital they need to start that business and to be able to stimulate a new business that grows jobs.

That is just one of, obviously, I think, thousands of ideas that we've been working on as Republicans. You know, we are often accused of being the party of ``no,'' N-O. Well, that's a partial truth, actually. There are a lot of half-truths around Capitol Hill. The fact is we are the party of ``know,'' K-N-O-W. More importantly than that, we are listening to the American people.

I thank my colleague for really emphasizing tonight America Speaking Out and the fact that we are here as public servants.

We are here to work for the American people. That means we want to have a dialogue. That means we want to be communicating with the people we work for. So America Speaking Out is just a great program that has allowed Americans from coast to coast to be able to do that. That, to me, is so important. I look forward to it.

Well, I thank my good friend. And I want to come back to one word I think that really describes what is suppressing jobs, what is killing jobs, what is keeping jobs from being created. And that is uncertainty. Uncertainty is the direct result of all the policies we've seen piled upon the American economy in the past 19 months. And you know, as I travel around in my district, just like you do, you talk with the job creators, you talk with the people who take the risks, that every year take their profits--and no, that's not a bad word, that's a good word. That's how we've grown and built this wonderful Nation, on the backs of entrepreneurs and small business men and women.

And they take their profits and they reinvest them back in their company. And they add a product line or they build a new site. They hire people. Well, they're not doing that right now. They're sitting on the sidelines. And that's a direct result of just all the terrible policies that have been crushing our small businesses.

When I think over this past 19 months, and I'm in my first term here, you know how many times taxes have been raised? Now, we're looking at the largest tax increase ever that's looming. And we should talk more about that. But we should not lose sight of the fact that taxes have already been raised tremendously on these job creators, these small businesses.

Now, my colleagues across the other side will say, well, we only taxed the wealthy, those folks who made somewhere around $200,000 or more a year. And you know, where I come from, yeah, that's a lot of money. Absolutely. But when you really drill down and you look at who those people are, 60 percent of those folks are small business owners whose small businesses are organized as a limited liability corporation or an S corporation. They pay their taxes as individuals. And out of that maybe $200,000, if they are lucky, that they generate, they're paying a payroll, they're employing people, they're providing family- sustaining jobs. And, you know, I've lost count of how many times they've raised taxes on those folks since January 2009. It's crushing.

And you talked about the largest tax increase ever. And this has been my fear all along, that 2009 was a really tough year. 2010's a tough year. But it's been--you know, there's almost like an anesthesia that, Doc, that's been applied. You know, all this government money's been thrown at people so it makes folks feel a little bit better because unemployment went down. But as my good friend from Texas noted, a lot of those were temporary government sector jobs that drove down unemployment nationally for a short time. Never went down much less than 10 percent, but it took the edge off.

Well, my greatest fear is in January 2011 we're going right off the cliff. Because that's when these new taxes,

these new regulations--we've tripled the size of the Environmental Protection Agency, although around home I refer to them as the Excessive Punishment Agency. You know, all that takes effect beginning January of 2011. And then you put on top of that the things that you've talked about, the largest tax increase ever, $3.8 trillion. What will that be? Well, we are going to see the marriage penalty is going to return. The child tax credit's going to be halved. The death tax, which I think is just double taxation at the least. We put a tax on somebody's death.

That's everybody.

It's everyone.

Thank you so much for looking at this. What a nightmare this is. I spent 28 years managing a rural hospital, and what I see there, when I look at that chart is not the periodic table. I see bankruptcy for hospitals, physicians, health care providers.

I mean, my health care career goes back to the beginning of the 1980s, and I am a proud survivor of the first prospective payment system, diagnostic related groups that were rolled into hospitals all across the Nation. I was there in the 1980s. I was there in the 1990s for the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, HIPAA.

HIPAA would just be one of those circles on that chart, but let me tell you the experience of health care, and it's health care everywhere, but it really hits hard in rural health care and underserved urban areas.

The bureaucracy that was required to implement HIPAA in the 1990s was tremendous. It took dollars from actually providing what I thought was compassionate and cost-effective care, and you had to hire clerical staff, you had to hire compliance individuals, you had to hire people that never saw a patient, never did anything to directly touch that life of somebody that was facing life-changing disease and disability in the health care work that I was privileged to participate in for 30 years.

You take that experience of HIPAA in the 1990s and now multiply that by the complexity of that chart. You know we have worked hard, I know Dr. Gingrey has, all health care professionals work very hard to make sure that health care is patient-centered. It's about the patient. And this is not about the patient. This obviously is government. This is not patient-centered health care. This is government-centered health care, and there's many different proposals out there.

Let me just touch on two of those because I think it's very important that as we show the negative impacts of this, that we show the alternatives, the things we are working on that are better solutions, what I like to call smart government solutions.

Going back to July of 2009 when we introduced the Putting Patients First Act. That's an act that addresses people with preexisting conditions and makes sure they're able to purchase affordable health care insurance. It's about providing greater access to care. It was about bringing down the cost of health care for all Americans. It was about preserving and even increasing the innovation quality of health care that comes out of this country and certainly about preserving that important decisionmaking relationship between the patient and physician, not allowing the government or bureaucrat to do that.

Putting Patients First Act, I encourage people to check that act out. You know what, it doesn't raise taxes a dollar. No cuts to Medicare, and yet it achieves all the things it needs to achieve.

You know that's the kind of thing, when we repeal this, that's what we need to replace it with. And I would tell you there are things we need to surgically repair right now, because I don't expect that President Obama--I would expect a veto on any general repeal any time soon, so we need to surgically repair, certainly working with an eye to repeal.

And I am sure all my colleagues on the floor here are also cosponsors of H.R. 5141. It goes right back and it deals with the health care bill, but the impact's directly on small businesses.

Under the ObamaCare plan, every small business, for every exchange of business, a vendor, a contractor, just buying resources, anything more than $600, they are required to file a 1099 form today under the ObamaCare plan. For some businesses, that's thousands of 1099 forms. We are talking more clerical staff. We are talking more overhead cost. We are talking about complying with bureaucracy that is just raising the cost on small businesses.

I am proud to be a cosponsor of H.R. 5141. It puts an end to what I call death by a thousand paper cuts. And that is where health care buries small businesses, in paperwork.

That's another example of a Republican, smart government solution that we have put forward and it has been introduced. It's out there and, frankly, it would be good for America.

It's going to be a whole lot of surgery, though.

Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from Ranger in Gordon County. It's almost my district. We have contiguous congressional districts, and we have the privilege, actually, of sharing Gordon County.

The gentleman from Ranger, Representative Graves, has done a great job in a short period of time, Mr. Speaker, in the House of Representatives, and he knows of what he speaks. I mean this is the kind of work that he did in the Georgia House of Representatives, and he represented us extremely well at the State level. It is really interesting to see him on the floor of the House of Representatives now, here to explain to the American people and to our colleagues, Mr. Speaker, what truly is going on here.

He and I had the privilege, I guess you could say, of watching the previous hour, of watching our colleagues from the Democratic majority. It seems, Mr. Speaker, that they spent an hour whining about competition from other countries, particularly from China. They wanted to focus in on China and talk about, you know, all of these unfair trade practices and what China is doing in regard to their currency and dumping and all of these things. You'd think there were, indeed, no World Trade Organization to police anything. Yet it was, you know, a whole hour of blaming other countries for the woes that we have in our country.

As Representative Graves pointed out, the fact is that we have an unemployment rate of 10 percent, and 16 million people are out of work.

I even heard from the other side of the aisle, Mr. Speaker, the Representative from Wisconsin, the distinguished Dr. Kagen, say that the problem is that the economic stimulus package of February 2009 of $862 billion--that's right, with a ``b''--was not enough, that they just simply didn't pour enough money into this problem.

Of course, we all know on this side of the aisle that we conservative Republicans are going to continue to fight this plan the Democratic majority has of just spending more money. You cannot spend your way out of debt. Every family in this country understands that and understands that very clearly. We'll talk about this in the ensuing hour as we proceed with the colloquy.

As Representative Graves points out, Mr. Speaker, the problem is not them. The problem is us. We can blame other countries all we want for our own woes. We can blame Greece. We can blame Spain. They spent an hour blaming China. How about blaming our tax policy that has a corporate tax rate of 35 percent? It is one of the highest rates of any industrialized country. While all of the other countries in Western Europe are lowering their corporate tax rates, we just leave it alone. We don't do anything about it.

As the gentleman from Calhoun and from Gordon County just said, we are about to let--not ``we,'' but you, Mr. Speaker, and the Democratic majority--the Bush tax cuts expire.

Representatives Graves talks about marginal rates. He didn't have a chance yet--and I'm sure he will--to get into the estate tax and, instead of there being a 15 percent tax on dividends, letting it go up to the marginal rate, indeed up to 39.6 percent, and letting capital gains go back up from 10 or 15 percent to 20 percent.

These are the job killers. All of these regulations, union wages, kowtowing to them, giving them special deals, paying them, in many instances far more, and, indeed, even letting them work Federal jobs and negotiate union activities while they're supposed to be working for the taxpayer.

I could go on and on, but I want to yield back to the gentleman controlling the time and look forward to my colleagues as we go through this hour.

If the gentleman will yield.

In regard to America Speaking Out, the poster--if you don't mind, Mr. Speaker, have the gentleman put that America Speaking Out poster back up so our colleagues can take a good look at it. I was just, as I stood here, thinking about our colleagues from the majority side of the aisle who had the previous hour. There was a Member from Ohio, there was a Member from Wisconsin, and there was a Member from California.

And I will just bet you, Mr. Speaker, if the folks in those great States will take the opportunity of going on that Web site, www.AmericaSpeakingOut .com, and input what their concerns are, it would probably mirror what is on that poster that Representative Graves has presented to our colleagues this evening in regard to balance the checkbook, cut spending, repeal the stimulus, $862 billion. Indeed, the Representative from Wisconsin said that wasn't enough spending; we need to spend more.

If the gentleman will yield, I would say that the gentleman is absolute, Mr. Speaker, right on target. And he said a key word. And that is that this is a nonpartisan Web site. Yes, it is created by the Republican minority for all of America to let us know, whether they be Democrats, Republicans, independents, libertarians, whatever. Let them have the opportunity to tell us, and let's have a bubble-up-from-the-bottom contract with America, not a top-down driven government-knows-better-than-anybody-else kind of plan that it seems the Democratic majority is heck bent and determined to force on the American people, just as they tried to force a year-and-a-half ago cap- and-trade, an energy policy that was run amok, that would result in probably $1,500 minimum a year per family in increased energy costs.

And then of course they come right back after that with this ObamaCare that Representative Graves is talking about. He mentioned the $600 billion worth of increased taxes to pay for it.

What he didn't mention was the additional $525 billion cut to the Medicare program, which we all know, all four of us know, is $75 trillion of unfunded liability over the next 50 years, and you're going to gut it 12 percent a year and then have the unmitigated gall, Mr. Speaker, to spend taxpayer money and send out these brochures, these glossy, fancy Medicare brochures assuring seniors that it's going to be better for them to cut their programs 12 percent a year and Medicare Advantage 18 percent a year.

I think the American people know better, and I think that the folks in Wisconsin, the folks in Ohio, and the folks in California are going to let those three Representatives know and give them a sure earful when they get back to their districts come August recess.

If the gentleman will yield, Mr. Speaker, this is absolutely astounding. I have seen that chart before, not maybe in quite such a vivid highlight and outline, but Mr. Speaker, my degree is in chemistry. And when I first saw Representative Graves put that chart up for all of our colleagues to see, I thought that was the periodic table. Really, it took me back to my chemistry days and the periodic table of the elements. It's probably changed some now because it has been a long time since I attended Georgia Tech and got that BS in chemistry, but this is more complex than the periodic table.

And I'm sure the gentleman from Ranger will agree with me, it's something like 130 new Federal agencies that were created by this mess, all between the doctor and the patient. Maybe my colleague will point out where the doctor is on that chart and where the patient is.

You know, you talk about there is a temptation to try to surgically repair. But, Mr. Speaker, when you look at that chart that Representative Graves is presenting and you realize the complexity and there is so much wrong with this bill, I am afraid that by the time that you tried to surgically repair, there would be very little left to say grace over. That's why so many of our colleagues on this side of the aisle feel like that we need to repeal this bill, this monstrosity, this omnibus of 2,400 pages, government takeover of one-sixth of our economy, 16 percent, and start over, and start over.

Just this past week in the Energy and Commerce Committee--but we deal with a lot of health care issues, and this monstrosity, indeed, started over a year ago. We passed, this week, eight separate health care- related bills, none of which were more than five pages long, and we did it in a bipartisan way.

We can certainly come back and, with four or five really good solid ideas, and maybe we can present those in a subsequent town hall meeting or Special Order hour here on the House floor, but that's what we really need to do. I think it's important that people understand that.

I thank the gentleman for having us here and this colloquy so that our colleagues, Mr. Speaker, and the American people can better understand what we truly need to do to repair this.

Will the gentleman yield for a question?

I love having a new Congressman here who's so good at math.

The question is: We have heard repeatedly that the majority wants to have a green economy like that in Spain. Now we've heard from Spain, and it turns out they're having to abandon their green effort at a green economy because they have determined that, every time they created one green job, they lost two regular jobs in the economy.

I was just wondering if the gentleman from Georgia would make a

calculation and figure out how long it would take us to get to the 4 percent unemployment rate if we were to lose two jobs for every one job the majority were to create under their green plan.

I appreciate my new friend for yielding.

And going back to a comment from good Dr. Gingrey from Georgia about the $862 billion stimulus package, because I know he recalls and others recall that CBO told us that it was a $787 billion stimulus package. And lo and behold, we get here a year later, and they say, Oh, you know what? We blew it by about 15 percent. We just blew it.

Most statistical analysts say, you know, it's within the margin of error, 2

to 4 percent. Not with CBO here. You know, maybe we can blow it 25 percent, in this case, 15 percent or so. Whoops.

In a year's time, we were $100 billion off the mark. Really, to be fair, $80 billion off the mark. But still, that points out just how irresponsible things have gotten.

And when you look at the numbers, too, you find out that CBO really has been a bit of a willing ally, an accomplice, complicit in what's been going on. They told the country, okay, this ridiculous health care bill that's going to bankrupt the country, we're already finding, they're already starting to tell people we're going to have to ration your care. And, by the way, it's going to cost about $250 billion more than we thought it would. We just misplaced some numbers somehow, because if we had found them before the bill came for a vote, people had said they wouldn't vote for it if it was more than $1 trillion.

Well, what difference does another $250 billion make when you're putting us in debt $1 trillion? But the CBO just magically forgot, misplaced, you know, 200, $250 billion or so until after it passed, and then within a matter of a couple of months they found it.

We're in trouble here and we need to get rid of CBO. We need to get some kind of independent group, whether it's Moody's or some other, that can do an adequate statistical analysis.

But the games that are being played with jobs would be comical if it weren't representing real people hurting, real people hurting. And I proposed a year and a half ago that instead of spending $1 trillion, and we were told that we may be spending $3 to $9 trillion just to try to get the economy going. Hey, spend $1.21 trillion and you would let everybody in America forego paying any income tax for the year. You let people keep their own money and they would jump-start this economy.

Yet, what our friends across the aisle are saying, ``No, no, no. Our friends across the aisle want to give tax cuts and allow the lower rates only to go to the wealthy.'' Because the way they identify it, the 53 percent of adult Americans that will pay all of the income tax this year they consider to be the wealthy. And so what they're, in effect, saying is the Republicans want to give tax relief to the only people paying the taxes.

``We, on our side of the aisle, we want to give tax relief to all the people that aren't paying any tax.'' Well, there's another name for that. It's called redistribution of the wealth. It means those who have not been able to earn anything will have money taken away from those that earned it and given to those who didn't.

We need to help those that can't help themselves, no question. But we do not need to become a government that did what I saw as a judge, where the government lures people into a rut they can never get out of and gives them no hope, no way out, just still feeding them a little unemployment check, feeding them a little check here and there just to keep them in a rut with no help getting out.

It's time to blow the lid off this thing and get an economy going where small businesses create the jobs. Yes, the small businesses are the ones that need the tax cuts. They certainly don't need the biggest tax increase in American history that's coming in January. They're the ones that are going to provide the hope for creating the jobs.

And so I hope and pray we'll be able to help the small businesses create the jobs instead of just doling out these little temporary census worker jobs, which, as my friends know, was all that happened in June. 411,000 out of 431,000 jobs created in America were temporary census jobs.

I yield back to my friend from Georgia.

It should be noted in all those little areas, you talk about all the new parts of government that are created and brought together in this--it's not a health care bill. It's a GRE--government running everything--bill. But they all have little references to the specific areas within the law that created them and created the relationship. That's one thing.

Another thing is, you know, all of the records, the medical records that people consider so personal and so dear will be in the Federal Government control. I think they are contracting out to their dear benefactors and contributors at General Electric, but they will have all that information, and the IRS could have access to your most personal information.

Can you imagine the debt collectors of America being able to have your most personal medical records? Well, that's what will occur here, and there's a great quote from Patrick Henry. People remember, ``Is life so dear and peace so sweet as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery?''

He had one quote where he said, ``The Constitution is not an instrument for the government to restrain the people; it is an instrument for the people to restrain the government--lest it come to dominate our lives and interests.'' When I look at that board and I look at all the new government that is just going to be overwhelming people, they don't need the doctor after they start dealing with all this stuff.

Is that quote ever more appropriate that the Constitution should restrain the government lest it come to dominate our lives and interests? Will it ever?