Floor Statements

Madam Speaker, I come to the floor today to congratulate a group of students from Blountstown, FL, who have recently won the National Future Farmers of America Forestry Career Development Event at the National FFA Convention in Indianapolis.

The forestry team from Blountstown represented the State of Florida, competing against 37 other teams from around the country in the national forestry event. The competition was part of the 79th National FFA Convention.

I am pleased to recognize all of the members of the Blountstown forestry team who contributed to the victory. The championship team consisted of Blountstown students Nic Stoltzfus, Will Leonard, Max Herndon, and Jennie Fagen. As the winning team, these exceptional students received scholarships to further their educations at a post- secondary institution of their choice. Leading the team of future agricultural professionals was Blountstown FFA sponsor Ron Mears.

These students have demonstrated impressive knowledge in the area of forest management, and I'm so proud of their hard work and their dedication to this important field. On behalf of my fellow Floridians, I applaud the Blountstown Future Farmers of America on their victory and national recognition.

Mr. Speaker, I want to thank my friend Mr. Ross from Arkansas for leading this discussion.

Mr. Speaker, for 10 years now I have been in the Congress, and for all of those years, and specifically the last 6 years, the Blue Dogs have been taking to this very floor almost on a weekly basis to discuss this issue of deficit spending. For those last 6 years, the Blue Dogs, as Democrats, have been in the minority party and able to do little about the deficit spending in terms of the final legislation that was passed. But things have changed now, Mr. Speaker, and I am not sure that the country realizes how tough this job is going to be.

We have created a horrible fiscal mess over the last 6 years, which has been described by my friend from Arkansas, Mr. Ross, with the deficit spending. Many of the decisions that have been made on this House floor and in the Senate in the last 6 years it seems like were without regard to the long-term economic health of the country and deficit spending.

So I think the task before us is a task that is going to be very, very difficult, and it is going to affect all aspects of what we do here in the next few months as we begin to try to develop a budget and then a spending plan, an appropriations plan, for how this country will organize itself and perform the functions that should be performed as a government.

We know what those are: National security, transportation, education, environmental protection. We have a farm bill coming up that has to be reauthorized this coming year. All of those items are going to run right head on into the red ink that has been displayed here and talked about by Mr. Ross.

There are going to have to be some very, very tough decisions made. It is not going to be easy. There is going to be a lot of sacrifice on the part of the American people, just like we did in the nineties when we found ourselves in a similar situation. So, I just want to tell the American people, viewers, our listeners tonight, that it is going to be tough and it is not going to be easy.

The first thing we need to do, obviously, as Mr. Ross talked about, is make sure that the dollars that we take from the American people to fund the programs that we need are spent wisely and they are accounted for and they are not wasted. He has talked a lot about that, particularly in terms of the Iraq war situation.

We have to put in place accountability standards. But we also have to put in place some tools that we can use to get us into balance in the long run. It is not going to be easy. Many of the things that we want to do, that we are interested in, such as the farm bill, such as education spending, such as environmental protection, that we have neglected over the last 3 to 4 years and that we need to deal with are going to run directly into conflict with these issues.

So I think it behooves us to remind the American people that it is going to be a tough, tough task, but it is one that in terms of the long-term health of this country is extremely critical. It is critical that we don't spend more than we take in.

I remember when I first came here I attended a press conference with some folks who were advocating a balanced budget amendment to the Constitution. A Member of this House showed up who I wouldn't have expected would have been at such a press conference, because he was what we might consider a little bit on the left side of the political spectrum. When I asked him later on why he was there, he said, ``Listen, Allen; unless we get our spending, our deficit spending under control, we don't have money to spend on the priorities that I want to spend them on, education, environmental protection, health care and those issues that make America such a great country.''

So I think that is important to remember and remind our listeners that we are spending a huge percentage, maybe in excess of 15 percent, of every dollar, every tax dollar that we take in, on interest to service the Federal debt that we are carrying, a debt that is approaching, as we have been shown here tonight, $9 trillion. We have to get that number under control. We have to stop the increase in that number.

That is the first step, stop digging, stop making that number bigger. Let's figure out how to balance an annual budget. We know we can't do that in one or two years. It may take a 5-year plan, a 3-year plan or maybe even a 7-year plan. If we get our heads together and work across the aisle in a bipartisan way, and we have a divided government now, we can do that. We can work together, just like we did in 1997 when we stopped the bleeding, so-to-speak.

So, I am here to support my friend from Arkansas, Mr. Ross, in his leading of this discussion, and thank him for his leadership on this issue, and remind my constituents back home and the American people that this is not going to be easy. This is going to come in conflict with many of the things that we feel like we need to do as a country. But it is critically important for the long-term economic health of this country that we do stop this deficit spending, and I am proud to be a part of the Blue Dog Coalition, which has advocated this for so long.

Mr. Speaker, would the gentleman yield?

Mr. Speaker, would the gentleman tell our viewers what that number was 6 years ago when the administration changed, when the new administration came in in 2001.

Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for yielding, and that is the point. Over the last 6 years, we have increased that national debt by over $3 trillion. That is the tune of about a half a trillion dollars, $500 billion per year. That is after we include all of the surpluses that we might collect in the Social Security trust fund or any other Federal employee retirement trust fund, such as our military retirees.

So we have a very serious problem that we have got to deal with. I mean, most of us who have been in business understand that you cannot continually deficit-spend year after year after year without damaging your businesses. Eventually, your banker pulls the plug on you.

The gentleman made reference to the fact that we are borrowing this money

in some nontraditional places, if you will. The bulk of this money is coming from foreign countries such as China and Japan. The bulk of that money has been borrowed from those countries over the last several years, and we think that creates a long-term national security issue.

Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for yielding, and I think the point is not lost on many of us that we are the greatest Nation on the face of the Earth. We have the greatest economy on the face of the Earth. This is a country that, with 5 percent of the world's population, Mr. Speaker, that is one out of every 20 people that exist on the Earth live in the U.S., we control 25 percent of the world's wealth.

So when we have to go borrow money, certainly the countries that may have surpluses, they want to lend it to us, but when they see a country that deficit-spends year after year after year, and I suppose we have been spending in the red now for six consecutive years, at some point in time, they as lenders will begin to question the long-term health of our economy.

I am not a pessimist, Mr. Speaker. I believe that we have the greatest economic model in the world in this country, and I think the American people will make the adjustments as time goes on.

I think the first adjustment was made back on November 7 in which the American people said we want a divided government, we want a more accountable government. We think the way we can have that is to have both parties working side by side in Washington with equal power.

So the gentleman with his charts, I hope that the viewers will study those and understand them because they are very important charts. And if you were on the board of directors running a business whose management brought you a chart like this, it would be somewhat scary and you would know that there would have to be corrective action taken, and taken quickly.

If the gentleman would yield. When you said 49 States require that, many of them constitutionally, I was in the State legislature in Florida and under the constitution you could not deficit spend. And I think that is the point that my friend Mr. Ross from Arkansas is making, is that we don't seem to have the will to get a balanced budget without putting in place a constitutional amendment, and that is why many of us have supported that. As a matter of fact, I know when I first came to the House after the 1996 election, we had many votes on a balanced budget amendment that we took, but those votes stopped after January 2001.

We really need to consider a balanced budget amendment, and I think it is something that you obviously have to understand that if you get a national emergency situation you have triggers to override it that can be done. But all that can be worked out constitutionally if you are willing to abide by fiscal responsibility.

There are 12 points to this plan that the Blue Dogs have adopted and advanced to the Congress for its consideration. The second item after the balanced budget requirement is don't let Congress buy on credit. Don't let Congress buy on credit. In other words, if we are going to have a new spending program, then you have got to find a place to pay for it. And the good news is that we have made great strides in the last 2 weeks since Congress reconvened after the election and put in place a PAYGO rule in the House rules package, and we have a promise from the leadership of this House of Representatives that they will consider and put up for a vote a PAYGO statute. That would be a critical part to putting us back on the road to fiscal responsibility.

I think the gentleman has ripped off the first four, and actually number 5 is have Congress tell taxpayers how much they are spending. That seems like a novel idea, that we would let the public know how much of their taxpayer dollars we are spending and when a bill comes to the floor how much it is going to cost, and that is a pretty simple thing to do. Many are the times in the years I have been here that a few bills have come sliding through the process without any debate and without any disclosure about how much they might cost, and Members are forced to vote up or down on that bill. So we think that transparency is a great tool. We think that if the sunshine can shine on something, that is the greatest purifier to have people understand what really is going on.

The sixth point of the 12-point plan by the Blue Dogs is one that Mr. Wilson already alluded to, and that is a rainy day fund, a contingency fund. Most businesses and most homes have a rainy day fund set aside so if there is some emergency like we have in this country on a regular basis, hurricanes, floods, earthquakes, anything that is maybe unexpected that we might have to respond to as a nation, there should be a rainy day fund there to draw from. So that concludes the first six.

Mr. Speaker, I rise today to express my support for H.R. 4, the Medicare Prescription Drug Price Negotiation Act of 2007. I commend the Leadership's efforts to curb prescription drug costs for the neediest in our country. As a Representative from the state of Florida, I represent a large number of seniors who rely on Medicare to help with medical costs, I am proud to be a supporter of this bill.

In 2003, when Congress passed the Medicare Part D Prescription Drug Bill Act, I was one of the few Democrats who voted for it. Many of us who supported the bill also supported giving the Secretary of Health and Human Services the power to negotiate drug prices. I believe that by allowing the Secretary to negotiate drug prices with biotech and pharmaceutical companies, we will lower prices for seniors who find themselves in the gap between stages of coverage when they have to pay the full price for the medications they need.

Not only do seniors need help coping with rising healthcare costs, but they greatly benefit from the development of treatments, from research and development, and from biologics. It is my intention as the Representative of the people of North Florida to see that people get

the medical treatment they need, while also ensuring that this change in the Medicare Part D program is not the first step toward government price controls, stifling innovation, or corrupting the core design of our free market system.

We need to ensure that Congress is striking a balance between providing the aid that seniors need, and providing an environment where a healthy market can flourish. Madam Speaker, thank you again for allowing me to speak on this issue, and for making our nation's senior citizens a priority in this first week of the new leadership.

Madam Speaker, I rise today to commend the exceptional service of Mr. Larry N. Dantzler on behalf of Bay County military installations.

Mr. Dantzler is stepping down as the president of the Bay Defense Alliance, which is a group of volunteers committed to enhancing and preserving the missions of Tyndall Air Force Base and the Naval Support Activity Panama City.

Larry has served as its leader since the groups formation in 1993, and has spent countless hours in his role to defend these installations as Base Realignment and Closure (BRAC) loomed. Under his leadership, the Bay Defense Alliance helped defend our installations in Bay County against two rounds of BRAC. Members of the Bay Defense Alliance have logged more than 15,000 volunteer hours in their efforts supporting the bases.

Mr. Dantzler has served as an advocate for the more than 11,000 men and women who serve our nation in support of Tyndall AFB, the Naval Support Activity Panama City and the Coast Guard Station Panama City. His hard work has helped build military and Congressional support for important missions in Bay County. He has served tirelessly as a liaison between Bay County, State, and Federal leadership in defense of our local bases.

This has been a job requiring great dedication--which he has done splendidly--despite his additional obligations as a business owner and his many other volunteer efforts. His additional volunteer efforts include work with the Bay County Chamber of Commerce, of which he is a past chairman, Rotary, United Way, Optimist Club, Bay Medical Center Foundation, Gulf Coast Community College Foundation, Panama City-Bay County International Airport Authority, Gulf Coast Community College Board of Trustees, Coastal Operations Institute, Girls Inc., Panama City Music Association, Bay Arts Alliance and others.

I invite my distinguished colleagues to join me in paying special tribute to Larry N. Dantzler for his invaluable service to Bay County, Florida. Through his leadership, he has laid the groundwork for preservation of our military installations for years to come and I would like to personally wish Larry, and his wife Nancy, the very best in their future endeavors.

Mr. Speaker, I want to thank my colleague from Arkansas, my fellow Blue Dog, Mr. Ross, and also Mr. Scott, for being here and sharing in this hour to talk a little bit about the priorities of the Blue Dog Coalition.

Mr. Speaker, we have a unique opportunity here before us that we don't have a whole lot of time to grasp on to and do something with. It is an opportunity that doesn't come along often, maybe once every generation or so, in which the American people say to the United States Congress and to the administration, We don't like the direction the country is heading in, and we would like to put a new team in place and head in a different direction. And, Mr. Speaker, many of us who serve in the Halls of this Congress have not experienced this before, we have not been here when this has happened. More than half of the Members of this Congress were not here in 1994 when this happened before. So we have a unique opportunity to change the way that this Congress operates and to do some things that will help to keep America the greatest country on the face of the Earth.

Mr. Speaker, we all recognize that we live in a very special place. It is not perfect, but it beats the devil out of what is in second place around the world. We have the greatest economy on the face of the Earth; we have the political machine that has been put here over the years that has never been equaled by man before. And with that, we achieve a lot of political clout around the world, and with that comes a lot of responsibility. But we have an underlying economic model, Mr. Speaker, that has allowed us to become really the greatest country on the face of the Earth, and for several years now we have eroded that underlying economic model in a way as we begin and as we try to address, and not very successfully, the issues that face our country.

It appears to me that over the last few years that many of the things we did were to maintain power rather than to advance the American cause and make life better for the American people.

We have a unique opportunity, Mr. Speaker, to tear down that wall that exists in the middle of that aisle that has been built over the last 8 or 10 or 12 years. The Blue Dogs want to do that. We want to reach across that aisle as Democrats and take hands with some folks on the Republican side who feel like we do, that we have to preserve that economic model, we have to address these issues that are before us in terms of spending problems and revenue problems, we have to address them all in one context.

You can't come here to this floor and address the spending issue one day without any regard for the revenue side, and then come the next day and address the revenue side without any regard for the spending priorities of this country. So that is what the Blue Dogs are all about. We believe at the end of the day the revenues have to meet the expenditures.

Now, we have some very difficult choices to make before us in the next few months: how do we put this Congress and this country on a path so that we will again come into a fiscal discipline situation where we can see down the road that we are going to have a balanced budget. We have a systemic deficit built in right now into our government activities, and we are going to have to make some tough choices relative to spending and relative to the revenue side, and I am honored that the Blue Dogs are going to be leading the way to bring fiscal sanity back to this government that we are so very proud of.

My friend from Georgia (Mr. Scott) has laid out the agenda items of the first 100 hours, and those we agree with. We think they are items that we heard the American people tell us during the campaign that we need to get done. And we are going to do those things, and we are going to do them in the context of balancing the budget in the long run.

One of the things that the Blue Dogs are going to really push for in the first 100 legislative hours in the 100-hour agenda is to make sure that we pass a PAYGO rule, a PAYGO rule that says that if you are going to have a new program, you have got to find money to pay for it. And we also want to put in place spending caps. We want these in statute. This is what we did in 1997, Mr. Speaker, shortly after you came here a few years ago that got us on the path to fiscal responsibility and fiscal sanity.

So I am very proud to be a part of this group. This group wants to reach across that aisle, tear down that wall that exists, work with the folks on both sides of the aisle, because we all represent about 650,000 or 700,000 people, and those people have a right to be heard. Those people from back in the country have a right to be heard, and we ought to work that way. And I know the new leadership of this Congress has committed that they will work in a bipartisan way, and we will have a Speaker of the House, not the Speaker of a party.

Mr. Speaker, I want to thank you for the time, and I want to especially thank my colleague, Mr. Ross, for putting this together.

Mr. Speaker, I thank my friend, the gentleman from Texas. I won't take 3 minutes. But I will say this, Mr. Speaker, that any time you have a provision, a legislative proposal that saves in performing our legislative duties and our executive duties, saves the taxpayers money and also enables us to better serve those that we are serving in our communities, that is a plus. That is a win-win, as some have said.

That is exactly what this provision we are discussing that is in the Senate bill does. In this case, obviously, it will save Federal taxpayer money. And we all know the issues that exist today in our budgeting process. We have red ink throughout our future budgeting process as far as the eye can see. There is a structural deficit built into the budgeting process, which has been extended by this administration and this Congress.

So, in this case, we are helping those that are our military retirees, those who we have asked to put on the uniform and go into battle, and many of them come back wounded, injured, and then the taxpayer has responsibility for seeing that those folks are cared for the balance of their lives. This is not a new debate about military retirees and how we provide them medical services.

So if we can do a better job of that back home, and the Senate has a better idea in this case, then we should go to it. I think that is what we are asking the folks to do. We are saving money, and we are providing a better service, better quality services to the folks that we have asked to wear the uniform.

I thank the gentleman for bringing the motion to instruct.

Mr. Speaker, I want to thank the gentleman from Arkansas for yielding, and I also want to thank him for his leadership. He has led these special orders for the Blue Dog Coalition now for quite a while on a weekly basis to try to deliver the message to the American people in an honest and straightforward way about the fiscal situation of our Nation's government.

Mr. Speaker, I was glad to hear him talk a little bit about Iraq. Iraq is a situation that we are having a great debate in this country about, and I think that he made the point that we all very strongly support the men and women. Once we established the mission and sent them over there to perform and carry out that mission, it is clear that we support them. It doesn't mean that we can't have an honest and open dialogue and debate about the policy.

Mr. Speaker, is appalling to me as a person who wore the uniform during the Vietnam era to see those Members of the House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate, or anybody that might oppose the policy that the United States Government has, to have them called unpatriotic. So I appreciate the gentleman from Arkansas bringing up that point.

I also, Mr. Speaker, came here today to talk a little bit about fiscal responsibility and to assist my friend from Arkansas in talking about the national debt. Mr. Speaker, I find it appalling to hear the partisan political rhetoric that goes on in these Chambers, rhetoric which celebrates a Federal budget annual deficit of $300 billion.

Now, most of us that have run a business, Mr. Speaker, know that at the end of the day your revenues have to match your expenditures, or else you either have to borrow money with a long-term plan to pay it back, or a short-term plan and show your banker how you can pay it back that year.

Mr. Speaker, this administration and this Republican-led Congress over the last 5 years have run our government into a situation where we have a structural deficit built in. There is not an economist anywhere around that will tell you under the current revenue taxing system and the current spending habits of this Congress and this administration that we will have a balanced budget anywhere in the future. We all know that we have to make some structural changes to the way we are doing business. So when I see somebody celebrating a $300 billion annual deficit, it saddens me in a lot of ways.

What Mr. Ross and the other members of the Blue Dog Coalition want for the American people is an effort by this Congress and this administration to address our fiscal situation honestly. Honestly, Mr. Speaker. What is wrong with telling the American people what the true fiscal situation is as it relates to our Federal Government?

We would like to see the Treasury's financial report that Mr. Ross made mention of earlier in his comments that is published by the Government Accounting Office and accounts for all spending, current and future. Had we seen this report last year, it would

have told us that the Federal budget actually was $760 billion, not $350 billion as reported. And do you know what, ladies and gentlemen? It won't change much this year.

The Blue Dogs would like to see an earnest effort to institute commonsense principles in our budgeting process, just principles which every businessman and businesswoman in this country understands that you have to live by if you are going to have a successful business. In our Federal budgeting process, those would translate into discretionary spending caps, something that in 1997, when I first came to this Congress working together with Republicans and Democrats.

Working together, we had a Democratic President, we had a Republican- controlled House and Senate; they all sat at the table together, and they talked honestly with each other, and they laid the numbers out on the table, ``Here is where we are; here is what it will take to get us back into balance.'' Discretionary spending caps. Put some caps on spending. Use the PAYGO rule.

What does PAYGO mean? A PAYGO rule means that if you are going to spend something over here, that you have to find a place either to cut spending on this side or raise the revenue from some source. If you are going to decrease revenue over here through a tax cut, you are going to have to find a place to raise that revenue someplace else. Those are commonsense PAYGO rules. That way we won't be taking spending more than we are taking in.

Something, Mr. Speaker, that we voted on the first 4 years I was in this Congress, I think we voted on it no less than seven or eight times, and that is a balanced budget amendment to the Constitution, a constitutional balanced budget amendment which requires us, as a Congress and administration, to balance our budget.

It seems that we don't have the political will under the current leadership to make these tough decisions from a legislative or an executive branch, so maybe it is time to consider a constitutional requirement that would force the Congress and the administration to balance this budget. If we don't, we will continue to see that number of $8,413,298,480,959 continue to go up.

Mr. Speaker, Mr. Ross may not know this, but when I came to the Congress in 1997, that number was less than $5.5 trillion. It has gone up over $3 trillion since I came here. It was $5.6 trillion when President Bush was elected and took office in January of 2001. So it has gone up about $2.8 trillion since this President came into office.

Again, Mr. Speaker, I find it appalling that the political rhetoric would cause us to celebrate a $300 billion annual deficit. That is over 10 percent of our Federal budget, over $300 billion, over 10 percent of our Federal budget. We have to go out into the capital markets, and Mr. Ross has done a good job of explaining where those capital markets are, in China and Japan and Mexico and other countries.

In years past, those deficits were financed locally, mostly by war bonds and other bonds that were sold domestically, but not anymore. And I think that would lead us into a situation which could be very dangerous for us from an economic standpoint and a national security standpoint.

In addition to the things that I have talked about that I would like to see, the Blue Dogs would like to see implemented into a budgeting process, and that is discretionary spending caps, PAYGO rules, balanced budget amendment, we would like to see the government act responsibly like most every responsible family in America and save for emergencies.

We are always going to have emergencies, we are always going to have a hurricane or a tornado or an earthquake or a flood, or we are always going to be engaged somewhere around the world in a military action. Why not set up a rainy day fund for future emergencies and put money into it so that we won't have to, on an annual basis and sometimes even more than once a year, come back to the appropriations process and pass an off-book emergency spending bill?

Why do we do that? Well, again, I think it has to do with partisan politics, and that is, if you pass a budget originally which pretends that you can live within your means, but you know you have left off a lot of things, you might fool some people, but you are not going to fool many people for very long.

Mr. Speaker, I spoke earlier about what happened in 1997 shortly after I came to Congress in which we all sat together, Republicans, Democrats, House leaders, Senate leaders, sat together and developed a long-term plan to get us out of our Federal debt or out of annual deficits and put us into a balanced budget. We did that, and guess what. Once we put that plan in place, everybody bought into it, the economy continued to grow.

The economy in America has always grown. I mean, if things are even halfway normal, you are going to have more tax revenues the next year than you had the previous year.

So that is part of the partisan rhetoric that is appalling to me, that the numbers that the White House has thrown out in the last few days in terms of the growth in tax revenues is way below what they projected in 2001 when they presented their economic package, which included the large book of tax cuts.

So I think that it is really important to work together and deal honestly with the American people about what our situation is, and we can't really begin to solve this problem until we recognize in an honest way what the problem is.

Now, Mr. Ross earlier talked about the article in the Los Angeles Times today, which really I would commend to our viewers, to those who are listening to us, to read. And it talks a little bit about this budget deficit and the current economic news. But let me quote from that, if I might, Mr. Speaker.

In that article, the writer says, ``This will be the third year in a row that the administration put forth relatively gloomy deficit forecasts early, only to announce much later that things had turned out better than expected.'' That is what you have here. You see, back in the early spring when we first put the budget on the table, there were some very gloomy reports about what that number would be and now this is the third year that that has happened.

``To some skeptics,'' and I continue to quote, ``it is beginning to look like an economic version of the old expectations game. Even economists who hesitate to accuse the White House of playing games,'' and I am still quoting from this L.A. Times article, ``Even economists who hesitate to accuse the White House of playing games say the claims of good news on the budget are unfortunate because they make people unjustifiably sanguine about the government's current fiscal health.''

``Our problem,'' and this is a quote from Comptroller David Walker who is a man that we all know and respect, those of us who serve here representing our constituents back home. He says, and I quote, ``Our problem is our long-term--our large long-term deficit, and the sooner we deal with that, the better.''

Walker also goes on to say that, and he warns of, quote, ``a false sense of security. We are in much worse shape fiscally today than we were a few years ago.''

This is from a man who is the head accountant representing the United States Government Accounting Office.

Mr. Speaker, I know we have been joined by some other Blue Dog members, and we want to hear from them, but I want to commend the gentleman from Arkansas for leading this discussion tonight. It is important, Mr. Speaker, that we have an honest debate and dialogue on these issues.

A constituent told me one time, he said, ``Mr. Boyd, we used to hear debate and dialogue, but now we hear spin and rhetoric. Can we get back to honesty? Can we get back to everybody at least laying out both sides of the issue so that we can understand better how to fix these problems?''

We can't really fix them until we admit that we have a problem. And for some in this government, they don't seem willing to admit that we have a problem. So I want to commend the gentleman from Arkansas.

Would the gentleman yield?

I just wanted to comment on the presentation, the remarks by

Mr. Tanner, who has been a champion on this accountability effort.

And you remarked or just talked about the audits, that 19 of the 24 agencies couldn't produce clean audits. Actually, the leaders, the worst offender is probably the Department of Defense. FEMA is a bad offender. We have hurricanes in Florida all the time, so we are always dealing with FEMA. I can tell you that I can take you to some folks, many, many folks who are millionaires that were getting generators, that were getting their roofs fixed, and things like that from FEMA.

And this goes back to the accountability issue. What are we doing with the taxpayers, the folks we are taking money from involuntarily, as Mr. Tanner says? We have some responsibility to make sure, and that responsibility belongs to the United States Congress, to make sure the executive agencies are spending it wisely, and we are not doing that. And that is the point we are making here. And I thank you for yielding.

Mr. Speaker, I think it is important for our people back home to understand that Congress appropriates the money for the executive agencies to spend. Of course the President has to sign those appropriations bills and put them into law and then the executive agency spends that money. But it is inherent upon us, and the framers of the Constitution presumed, that Congress would then provide oversight to make sure that the executive agencies were spending the money like it was designed to be spent by Congress or desired to be spent and not wasting it and that is where we have gone wrong with this.

It could have happened maybe with the other side, but you have one party controlling the White House, the House and the Senate; and the House and the Senate seem to have just abdicated their oversight responsibility.

Why couldn't we have hearings to find out about those six Mercedes and over $6 million? Why couldn't we have hearings to find out about the FEMA mismanagement?

The Department of Defense is the worst. There is an article that was published in Vanity Fair this month that I could commend that talks about some of the corruption going on in this government. And the reason for that it basically says is because Congress has abdicated its oversight responsibility, and in many cases the Department of Defense has been complicit in just allowing these things to go on without asking the tough questions.

Mr. Chairman, I thank the gentleman for yielding.

There are some provisions in the underlying Pombo bill that are very onerous, and one of them in particular is the opt-in/opt-out language, particularly opt-out, which most of us that have served in the State legislature understand that there are a thousand ways to kill legislation which you would have to opt out.

The opt-in language is much better. So if you are opposed to the legislation, I would strongly request that you support the Bilirakis amendment which will fix the onerous language that is in the Pombo bill which requires an opt-out by the State legislature.

Mr. Speaker, I rise to honor and pay tribute to Mr. Albert Hill Odom, a good friend and a loving husband and father, who passed away on June 6, 2006, at the age of 87.

Mr. Odom was a great man who positively impacted many young lives, including my own. Mr. Odom was a 4-H extension agent for 30 years in Jefferson County, Florida. He taught me and many others so much, not only about the principles of 4-H, but also how to conduct ourselves in a respectful and professional way. We were all young farm boys whom he carried to places we had never been before.

I am often asked who the most influential people in my life have been, and my answer is always, first, my father, then Albert Odom, my 4-H agent. A lifelong mentor and role model, Albert Odom was a wonderful man who left the world a better place than he found it.

Mr. Speaker, I ask my colleagues to join me in honoring Albert Odom for his many achievements in life and the legacy that he leaves. I extend my deepest sympathy to the Odom family, including his wife, Dot, and his children, Carol and Martha. He will be greatly missed by his family and all who knew him.

Mr. Chairman, I thank Mr. Gutknecht and Mr. Stupak for their work on behalf of this amendment. I want to tell you that the Universal Service Fund is designed to ensure telecommunications services to all Americans, no matter where they live, what kind of rural area.

This amendment preserves the authority for the FCC to require the VoIP providers to pay into the USF. I strongly support and encourage the adoption of the amendment.

Mr. Chairman, I yield myself 1\1/2\ minutes.

Mr. Chairman, I want to thank my friend, Mr. Everett, and also Chairman Hobson and Ranking Member Visclosky for including this language in there.

Just to try to give the Members a brief history: In the 1990s, this Congress set up a compact that existed between Alabama, Georgia and Florida to try to resolve this water usage issue, and those negotiations were guided by the Army Corps of Engineers. Those States were unable to come together with their leadership to resolve this issue, and so matters reverted back into the courts.

It would be completely inappropriate, Mr. Chairman, for the Army Corps of Engineers to take this step,

and it would disadvantage Florida and Alabama significantly in this litigation.

Now, the bottom of that system, that ACF system, is Apalachicola Bay, and our interests are purely the life and health of that bay and the life and health of the environmental system up in that Apalachicola Basin. If these rulings come out wrong and are disadvantaged by the Army Corps of Engineers' intervention, then you would have a situation where there would be some extremely harmful environmental damage done. So I would respectfully submit to the Members of this body that we reject the Deal amendment.

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

Mr. Chairman, I yield 1 minute to the gentleman from Alabama (Mr. Davis).

Mr. Chairman, I yield 1\1/2\ minutes to the gentleman from Alabama (Mr. Cramer).

Mr. Chairman, I yield my time back to the gentleman from Alabama (Mr. Everett).

Mr. Chairman, ladies and gentlemen, this provision in this bill, if it goes into law, will have the effect obviously of lifting the prohibition on drilling in the Gulf of Mexico, which is of interest to many of those of us from Florida. And if that provision were to be lifted, I think there is a very significant impact on the military training mission that exists along the gulf coast.

As many of you may know, Tyndall Air Force Base is the home of the training for the F-22 and the F-15. The Joint Strike Fighter is going to be based up in that area, and if that prohibition were to be lifted, obviously, that would seriously impact, according to the military, the officials in the Pentagon, the Chief of Staff of the Air Force, the Secretary of Defense, all have said that the critical nature of that Gulf of Mexico training range will be seriously impacted and our military as a result will be impacted.

Mr. Speaker, I come tonight before the country to discuss the state of our Nation and to talk about a few of the things that I think that we can do to improve the state of the Nation. This hour that we will have tonight, there will be some other members of the Blue Dog Coalition that will join me, I am sure.

Mr. Speaker, as you know, the Blue Dog Coalition is a group of 37 men and women from all over the country, Democratic Members that believe that there are certain things that we should do as a government, certain functions that we should perform to make the economic model work well, and we should try to perform those functions well, and we should be willing to pay for it.

I was very interested in the previous speaker and actually agree with what some of the previous speaker said, and I think he wound up by saying that we ought to balance the budget.

The Blue Dogs, Mr. Speaker, could not agree more that that is a very important step, and I think most Members, most folks out in the country would understand the concept or the notion of balancing the budget, whether it is our individual home budgets or whether it is our business budget, whether it is our local governments. Eventually, you have to have revenues meet expenditures, or you do not stay in business too long. Most of us understand that. Except in the Federal Government, we have a difficult time understanding it sometimes, and I think we have not done very well on that front in the last 6 years certainly.

I was also interested in some of the comments made by the previous speaker. You would have thought that the Democrats were in control of the Congress of the United States. I would remind the Speaker that the White House, the House and the Senate are all controlled by the Republican party. When it comes to doing budgets and

programs and balancing those budget and programs, that is certainly within the control of the majority party to do that.

There also was a good bit of talk about the welfare program. Mr. Speaker, the welfare program was something that this Nation worked together on back in the 1990s under a Democratic President and Republican-led Congress, worked very hard, sat down in a bipartisan way and came up with a good solution to find ways to move people off of welfare and get them into the workplace.

The previous speaker is absolutely right in that we need people in the workplace, getting paychecks, being productive, paying taxes into a society, and that way our economy works best and our lives are better.

Mr. Speaker, I want to talk about three specific issues, three broad areas, basically, where I believe this administration and this Republican-led Congress have failed us in being responsible.

Number one is they have failed to balance the budget. For 5 consecutive years now, we have had a budget that is out of balance.

Number two, they have failed to manage our Federal Government and its functions effectively and efficiently. Let me say that again. They have failed to manage the Federal Government and its functions effectively and efficiently, and I want to talk specifically about that a little more.

Thirdly, I believe that this administration and this Congress has failed to uphold the standards of honesty and accountability when it comes to perform their functions.

Now, I want to start with the second of those particular bullet points and talk about the management of the Federal Government and point out some of the things that have been going on the last 5 to 6 years.

When President Bush took office, he told us and we all knew that he came from a business world and with an MBA and with the charge that the government would be run like a business. Instead, Mr. Speaker, we have seen many of our Federal agencies managed by people with little or no experience. As a result, you find today 19 of the 23 Federal agencies are not in compliance with proper accounting standards. In other words, they cannot give a clean audit of their own actions in how and where they spent the money, the taxpayers' money that was given to them to perform their governmental function. What this means is that we cannot account for all of the government's assets and liability.

The previous speaker talked about the Department of Defense being the biggest offender; and, in actuality, the Department of Defense is the largest offender of this. Of course, the Department of Defense is one of the largest agencies in the Federal Government, the largest agency in the Federal Government, and we all know the high-profile story of the over $3 billion that was allocated, appropriated for Iraq reconstruction that nobody can account for. The Department of Defense cannot account for the over $3 billion that was appropriated for Iraq reconstruction.

The complete lack of management and accountability in our Federal agencies is unacceptable. If you had a manager that operated like that in your local government or in a business, you would replace that manager. So I think that we really should demand more of our executive agencies in terms of management and accountability as it relates to how they spend the money that is appropriated to that particular agency.

In the 1990s, Mr. Speaker, Congress and the President, again a Democratic President, a Republican-led Congress working together in a bipartisan way enacted a series of reforms for the Federal civilian workforce known as the Readmission of Government. These reforms reduced the size of the Federal Government, Mr. Speaker, by over 300,000 employees.

Let me say that again. In the 1990s, the size of the Federal Government was reduced by over 300,000 employees.

Despite this reduction, many Federal agencies improved their performance substantially; and I want to talk about one of those Federal agencies specifically, I think, which is a good example. Because, Mr. Speaker, I come from Florida, and in Florida we are accustomed to natural disasters, primarily hurricanes that start about this time of year and run all the way through the summer and into the fall. Last year, I think we had so many hurricanes that we ran out of alphabetic names and had to start back through the alphabet a second time to name all the storms. I think there has been a lot of press and a lot of publicity about the storms that we have had.

Florida has created an excellent emergency management system to deal with those storms, but we always work hand in glove with the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which is known as FEMA, and I found in my 18 years of public service in Florida that FEMA was one of the premier Federal agencies, really a professional agency that knew what its role was and knew how to get the job done probably more than any Federal agency I knew in the 1990s. It was the poster child, if you will, of a well-managed Federal agency. FEMA's structure was transformed, and three national response teams were created to quickly react to any national emergency. I guess in the 1990s, FEMA's performance was more notable for the newspaper stories that weren't written about it. Anytime you find an agency that is doing a good job, doing what it is supposed to be doing, then you do not hear much about it. Disaster victims and State officials alike, including myself, gave FEMA grade A marks, unanimous applause, if you will.

Now we fast-forward 5 years, 6 years, we find FEMA in response to Hurricane Katrina an utter failure. Just last week or 2 weeks ago, you had a Senate committee with jurisdiction over FEMA stating that FEMA is so broken that that bipartisan committee, leadership of that committee, believes that it should be completely dismantled.

How did we go in the late 1990s or in the 1990s from an agency that was acclaimed to be the most efficient and effective Federal agency to an agency that is almost dysfunctional today? Why do we have so many problems with FEMA?

Well, maybe it is because the administration dismantled the three national response teams prior to Katrina, so there was no group of folks within FEMA ready to go at a moment's notice. Perhaps it was that FEMA was folded into a brand-new Department of Homeland Security and, by all accounts, became the dumping ground for the Department.

Whatever these reasons are, I think every one of them point back to a management style or scheme or capability. One factor that certainly played a role in the change was that in the 1990s FEMA was run by professionals with strong emergency management experience at the State and local level.

Let me say that again. In 1990, early 1990s, the previous administration brought in emergency management professionals with strong management experience at the State and local level, and they took FEMA and they transformed it into a world-class organization. However, under the current administration, until weeks ago, FEMA was run by political hacks with little or no emergency management experience.

It is clear that on the fiscal and management fronts that this administration is failing the American people; and, as a result, you have agencies which cannot produce clean audits. They cannot tell you where the money was spent, the taxpayers' dollars that we are appropriating, and what was done with it. And that is one of the points that I want to make.

The other point and the one I mentioned earlier was the balancing of the Federal budget. Now, the previous speaker spoke of that; and, actually, as I said earlier, we are in complete agreement, that the Federal budget should be balanced.

I see that we have been joined by one of our fellow Blue Dogs, Representative Jim Cooper from Tennessee. Mr. Cooper serves in a role in the Blue Dogs where he chairs the policy committee and, as a result, has the task of leading us in developing of our policy positions. Mr. Cooper has done a lot of work on these issues, fiscal responsibility.

Madam Speaker, I would like to call on my fellow Blue Dog from Tennessee, Mr. Cooper.

So do I understand it to be Federal law that any business over $5 million has to use that accrual accounting procedure?

Thank you, Mr. Cooper.

A couple of things that you said struck me. One is, unsustainable; and the other is, we have to work together. Those of us who have been in this business, those of us who have any kind of accounting training in our background understand that those sorts of numbers, first of all, that reporting procedures, or those reporting procedures, are wrong; and the trend there of red ink, deficit spending, is unsustainable. It will be, and I think the public will recognize it when the markets begin to react to their fears that someday, if America doesn't turn around its habit or change its habit of deficit spending, that it will have difficulty sustaining itself economically.

The other thing that struck me about what you said is what I call the bipartisanship thing. I want to go to this chart here, and this talks about the budget deficits from 1982 to 2006, a 24, 25-year period, starts with President Reagan back in 1982. And you see the minus numbers here, all the way down through the fourth year of the Clinton administration, or fifth year of the Clinton administration, in which, working together right in here, a Republican-led Congress and a Democratic President worked together for the Balanced Budget Act of 1997, which then produced a positive result that got the country back on the right track, at least in terms of its cash basis deficit issue.

So you see that that was a very positive thing here.

And the biggest issue we had in 2001, when President Bush was sworn into office, was how do we deal with the $5.6 trillion, 10-year projected surplus we had. We had a $5.6 trillion, trillion, now, projected surplus in 2001.

Many of us, especially of those of us in the Blue Dogs said, hey, there are several things we can do. Number one is we ought to address these priorities related to Medicare and Social Security. We know those programs have long-term problems. Let's spend part of the money there. Let's use part of it to give back in tax breaks and let's use part of it to pay down this huge Federal debt that we had.

But this Congress and this administration decided not to follow that sort of three-pronged approach, debt reduction, deal with Medicare and Social Security, and tax relief. Instead, they poured all the money into tax relief. And then immediately you see what happened. You had 9/ 11 come after that and an economic downturn, and then now we have got deficits.

We have structural deficits. What does a structural deficit mean? It means that even if the economy works, everything works like it is supposed to, you are still going to have a deficit. You are still spending more money than you take in. That is wrong. That is fundamentally wrong. And we ought to, we have to correct it. We just can't afford to let it go on like this.

America is the greatest country on the face of the earth economically, politically, militarily. We won't be that way long if we don't fix this very dangerous structural deficit that we have.

We have been joined by another outstanding member of the Blue Dog Coalition. We come from all over the country. We have with us tonight Congresswoman Loretta Sanchez from California who has joined us now. She has been a leader. She is a member of the Armed Services Committee and a leader there; and I would like to yield at this time to my friend, Loretta Sanchez.

I thank the gentlewoman from California for your leadership on these areas and particularly on the Armed Services Committee.

If the gentleman would yield.

I know the gentleman served in Congress prior to 1994 and is actually on his second trip back and was not here in 1997 when we did the 1997 Balanced Budget Act. But Congresswoman Sanchez and myself were. And one of the keys to that 1997 Balanced Budget Act which led us to balancing the budget here in this era was PAYGO.

Spending caps was another key element of that. You put caps on spending programs, and you leave them there, and you agree upon that. Those are not here anymore, as you know, under this administration, this Republican-led Congress and Republican administration. Back then, it was President Bill Clinton, a Democrat, Speaker Newt Gingrich, a Republican, and Majority Leader of the Senate, Trent Lott, a Republican, sat together and said how do we do this in a bipartisan way. You don't have any of that at work anymore.

I think that is the thing that disappoints me more than anything, is I know that there are people of goodwill that would work in good faith all over this country that serve in this body that don't have that opportunity because we are not allowed to sit down. The majority party in many cases just won't sit down with us and work together to solve these problems. So these are very, very difficult solutions.

I know the chart that showed the accrual accounting and the $2.7 trillion deficit, those are hard numbers to understand. Here is one that is not hard to understand. This is what you actually owe today. We owe as a government today $8.352 trillion. That is trillion with a T. $28,000 for every man, woman and child. That is what our debt is today. And somebody has to pay that back. We also have to pay the interest on that. We have to service that debt on a regular basis. And as the interest rates go up, then, obviously, that is what I call a debt tax which cannot be repealed. It has got to be paid.

Madam Speaker, the fact is that some future Congress and some future President has a lot of hard, tough work to do, a lot of painful decisions to make to get us back in balance. It will be done somewhere down the road. We know that will happen, but it is going to be very painful.

Madam Speaker, the gentlewoman makes a good point. In the past when we had to run up debt, for instance, during World War II and at other times in a national emergency, that debt in large part was bought by Americans. That financing was provided by Americans. That is not the case today. Of this over almost $3 trillion that has been borrowed since January 2001, the great bulk of it, the majority of it, has been lent to us by China and Japan. So in most cases, foreign countries, some not necessarily that are friendly to our cause, are lending us this money.

I appreciate both of you folks being here today.

One last thing that I wanted to talk about, the third point that I wanted to make, was the issue of honesty and accountability by the administration. We have to deal with the American people in all areas, and particularly our financial area, with honesty, and we have to be accountable. On the congressional side, our forefathers designed our system so that the congressional side would have an oversight role, that we would make the laws and appropriate the money, and our job was to make sure that the executive branch, the President and the executive agencies, spent the money and applied the laws in the way that we intended them to be. And I do not think that is happening as well as it should these days. And I want to cite a couple of examples.

An article in Monday's Boston Globe reports that the administration has disregarded more than 750 laws enacted since he took office, adopting the policy that basically the administration has the authority to pick and choose a provision of which laws that they wish to follow. This is a blatant disregard for the way our forefathers set up our Federal Government and has really upset the balance between the branches of government, and it has prevented Congress from carrying out our responsibility of lawmaking and oversight.

Let me cite an example of oversight abdication: from 1994, when President Clinton sat in the White House and the congressional House and the Senate were controlled by Republicans, there were over 1,000 subpoenas issued from 1994 to 2000, over 1,000 subpoenas issued to appear before House committees, under oath, to justify and explain actions of the administration. It is a role that Congress should be playing, an oversight role.

Since January of 2001, there have been virtually no subpoenas issued by this House to this administration to explain their actions. And Congress has basically abdicated its oversight role. And as a result, you see misuse of power and some corruption springing up in places, and I think we will see more of that unless Congress steps up and exercises its role of oversight over the executive branch.

That is a great point, and I thank the gentlewoman for making it.

Madam Speaker, we have been joined by my good friend and fellow Blue Dog from Tennessee, Representative Lincoln Davis, and I yield to my friend now.

Madam Speaker, reclaiming my time, I appreciate the gentleman. He brings a lot of common sense and wisdom.

I know our time has expired, Madam Speaker. I just want to conclude by saying that I hope that you understand that the Blue Dogs are a group of men and women who are ready to work together across the aisle in a bipartisan way to solve these problems. We have some very, very tough problems, and we have a group of folks who are ready and willing to roll up our sleeves and go to work, and let's solve some of these problems.

Madam Chairman, I want to thank the gentleman from Georgia for yielding time to me to enter in a colloquy so that we may clarify certain parts of this.

I, and other Members, would like to be certain that we understand how this bill affects State food safety laws. It is my understanding that the bill contains a list of 10 provisions of Federal food safety laws and that State law dealing with the same subject as the Federal law is required to be identical to the Federal law. Is my understanding correct?

I yield to the gentleman from Georgia.

Madam Chairman, I thank the gentleman for his clarification.

Am I correct in also understanding that virtually all of the State laws that relate to the sections of Federal law listed in the bill are identical to Federal law already?

Madam Chairman, I thank the gentleman.

Is the basic adulteration standard to which the gentleman has referred the standard that the Federal Government or States would rely on to deal with the presence of unsafe levels of contaminants in food? Would that provision permit a State to take action against a terrorist threat to food supply?

Madam Chairman, a lot of us are confused. There have been a lot of allegations coming from all directions. There are folks who oppose the bill, that have produced a list of 77 State laws that would purportedly be nullified under this bill.

If the gentleman would, is that an accurate portrayal of the effects of this bill?

Madam Chairman, I thank the gentleman for that comprehensive and reassuring response. I agree there is a lot of confusion about the bill, and we do not clearly understand the effects on State law and authority. I am satisfied, however, that the bill properly preserves the ability of States to take action to protect consumers, while ensuring that food safety policies will be uniform and scientifically based, and I thank the gentleman for his time.

Mr. Speaker, I want to thank my friend and colleague, Mr. Matheson from Utah, who is our distinguished leader of the Blue Dogs, a group, Mr. Speaker, that I am very proud to be a member of. I joined when I first came to Congress in January of 1997, and I am proud of the work that they do in trying to bring to the attention of the country and of the Congress the importance of the economic model and making sure that the government meets its obligations to the community and is willing to pay for those obligations.

Mr. Speaker, we live in the greatest country on the face of the Earth. I like to tell my constituents back home when I speak to Kiwanis Clubs or civic clubs that we have 5 percent of the world's population. That is about one of every 20 people in the world live in America. And we control 25 percent of the world's wealth.

We got into that position in a relatively short period of time. It is less than 230 years this year we have been a Nation, and we have done it by creating an economic model that is unsurpassed in the world.

That economic model really to me, when you break it down, does one thing. It always strives to expand the middle class and move as many people as you can out of the bottom rung and into the middle class where they can be productive members of our society. In the process, you narrow the gap between the very rich and the very poor; and that served us well over the years.

I remember talking to my parents when I got old enough to register to vote and asked them about why they happened to be registered Democrats. And they said, well, they thought that, coming out of the Depression in the 1920s and 1930s, that the Democratic party under the leadership of Franklin Delano Roosevelt really laid the groundwork for making this country the greatest economic and military machine on the face of the Earth.

Expand the middle class, Mr. Speaker, to expand the middle class you have to have a well-educated and healthy population, and those are functions that our government has to be involved in. We have to be providing a good educational system for our children. We have to ensure, if we are going to stay competitive in the world, Mr. Speaker, that each generation is better educated than the previous generation. You have to have a good health retirement system. You have to have a good income retirement system.

Prior to the implementation of Social Security and Medicare in this country, if you reached the age of retirement, age 65 in America, there was a great chance, over a 50 percent chance, that you would be below the poverty level. Less than 10 percent of our folks today live below the poverty level because of this great economic model that we have created which strives to expand the middle class. Social Security and Medicare were important components of that.

Why do I talk about the expansion of the middle class and the economic model? This government has a budget which talks about how it funds its community responsibilities, community obligations, and that budget proposal was just presented by the administration to Congress in the last couple of weeks. And that budget proposal for the coming fiscal year which starts on October 1 proposes to spend $2.47 trillion.

Let me say that again. It proposes to spend $2.47 trillion. But its collections to pay for that $2.47 trillion amount to $2.15 trillion. That is a budget deficit of approximately $318 billion. That is after we spend all of the Social Security surplus masking the much larger deficit.

But the problems do not stop there. The budget does not even address the costs of the war effort in the Middle East, in Iraq and Afghanistan, in the coming year. It does not address some other issues which we know as a Congress and a Nation that we have to address, such as the alternative minimum tax exploration and some other tax issues like that.

So what we have before us as a Congress presented by the administration is a budget that really is not a very useful document for us to start with.

Mr. Speaker, my wife and I own a farm, a family farm that has been in my family for over 175 years. And it is not always easy on the farm. It is a small business. And this past week at home I spent a good part of the week doing a budget.

Why do I do a budget? I do my budget to take to my creditors so they can provide us the funds we need to run our little small business. I spent a good many days on that budget and did the very best I could to present to my creditors just as accurate a picture as possible of what I thought the revenues would be and the expenses would be for the coming year. That is honesty in budgeting. And out there in the country our constituents have to do it in running their own homes. They do it in running their own businesses, and they certainly have to do it in running their own local governments and school boards.

We certainly could expect that the Federal Government could be honest in presenting this budget to the American people. So I would hope, Mr. Speaker, and I would ask my colleagues to join in as we have this discussion about accountability and honesty in budgeting, that we can as a Congress be a little more honest with the American people about what the cost of some of these programs are that we are involved in and how we are going to pay for them.

I do know something for a fact, Mr. Speaker, that you cannot increase spending, cut taxes and cut the deficit all in one lick. The math does not does not work. I learned that in grade school. It is a simple mathematical calculation. You cannot increase spending, cut taxes, and decrease the deficit. It just cannot be done, and that is what evidently this budget pretends to do.

So I hope as we so have this discussion for the next 30 minutes or so that we can delve into some of these issues and have a little straight talk. Let us shoot straight with the American people about what the budget issues are.

Absolutely we do do that. I think most people who run a small business understand that. Most folks who run local governments understand that. But there is something else in this budget that we are looking at that we received from the administration in the last few days that really belies any thought of sensibility.

A couple of examples: the veterans medical portion of the budget, we know those are issues that we have to deal with and we have not dealt with very well in the past. In that budget that we were presented are significant fees, increases in copayments that the veterans will have to pay. The Congress has rejected that soundly over all the years that I have been here. So I would not expect that the Congress would increase the fees on the veterans; but yet that is in the President's proposal that he sent up.

Student loans cut significantly. I do not think Congress is likely to cut student loans. I certainly hope they are not, but that is in the budget. Those are the kinds of things that we ought to be honest with the American people about, what the costs are, and how are we going to raise the money to make sure those costs are paid for.

Mr. Speaker, I know this accountability issue is one that we are all very concerned about. I saw some reports today that in the FEMA response to the Katrina and Rita disasters and other storms of 2005, which were dreadful and particularly dreadful for the people on the gulf coast, but one of the tools they used to help the folks was a $2,000 credit card that FEMA passed out. I read some reports today that many of those, maybe as many as 30 or 40 percent of those credit cards, were received with fraudulent Social Security information; and, also, the expenses on some of those cards were for some very unreasonable items like tattoos and massages and things that we would not think that necessarily the taxpayer ought to be paying for.

So we do need oversight, and one of the things that I am hopeful for is the majority party in this body had an election here a week or so ago, and there is a new majority leader on the Republican side here. It is my hope and I am sure the hope of the Blue Dogs that we can work with him in a way that we have not been able to work with the leaders in the past to try to address some of these issues, because this issue of one-party rule and lack of oversight into the administration's activities is costing the American people greatly. I think it is time that we addressed it and try to do something about it.

Mr. Speaker, you can foresee a situation that would put us in a dependent situation with agriculture and funding like we are with oil. For instance, I think 60 percent or so of our oil consumption in this country comes from another part of the world. Many of those people, like you said earlier, do not necessarily have our best interests at heart. So we have it within our own ability to stay out of that situation with the economics, and we really need to get this turned around and stop this deficit spending to the tune of 400 or $500 billion a year. If we do not, then we can foresee a situation down the road where it could be an economic wreck here.

Mr. Speaker, I think you said it very well. We do have a tendency here to be very selfish, this generation, unlike the Greatest Generation, which came out of World War II and paved the way for us to be a great country.

But the Blue Dogs have a plan. We have a plan that talks about some very basic principles that would put this country back on sound footing in terms of its budgeting for its government and funding its priorities, and would the gentleman from Utah (Mr. Matheson) care to share those points with us?