Floor Statements

Mr. Speaker, I stand today to defend President Trump in one of his initial requests for next year's budget.

One of the goals of the Biden administration, of course, could destroy the country by having unfettered immigration, but also to divide America by groups. Part of that was when he passed one of his big bills, and he put in there an American Hispanic museum. This is consistent with the Democratic policy of trying to divide America.

Our motto put in place in 1782 was E Pluribus Unum, Out of Many, One. The Democrats are trying to teach people they should always walk around hanging on to where their ancestors came from.

President Trump is right not to fund a national Hispanic museum. The wonderful accomplishments of the Hispanic Americans can be placed in other museums, including the National Museum of American History, without having every group having their own separate museum.

Madam Speaker, in a vital meeting--quick gavel. Had I been present, I would have voted NAY on Roll Call No. 152.

Mr. Speaker, first of all, due to when I was pushed back to start this, my speech will go a little less than 10 minutes, if anybody is planning around it.

Mr. Speaker, I would like to talk a little bit about the big bill that we just passed and some provisions that should be monitored as we work our way not only through the big reconciliation bill but through the appropriations bills, as well.

First of all, I think it is important that the public and the press corps pay attention to what becomes of the low-income housing tax credits in this bill.

Currently, the low-income tax credits were brought to my attention when I attended part of a seminar in which the speaker was bragging about how much money developers could make off of these low-income housing tax credits. The credits give a developer 10 percent of their value of their project over a 9-year period.

There is a time value of money. Even taking into account the time value of money, it means the government pays for 70 percent of the cost of a project. If we felt there was a shortage of anything else in this society, we would never say the answer is to give a business 70 percent of the cost of their

product so that they would produce more.

In a related comment on the low-income tax credit, once you say the government is going to pay for 70 percent of these housing projects, it results in overspending on the part of the developer. These projects in California have sometimes cost $800,000 or almost $900,000 per unit.

That is not the norm, but think of it. The government pays somebody 70 percent of the cost of a building. Is it surprising that these people don't put marble countertops in? Is it even surprising that it costs $800,000 or $900,000 per unit?

How in the world under any circumstances in a budget in which the government is borrowing 26 percent of the amount of Federal spending could we, under any circumstances, allow this program to continue?

Nevertheless, it not only continues, but the House of Representatives for some reason decided to increase the amount of money in these credits.

I also think it encourages a little bit of questionable behavior there because, of course, there is always going to be more demand for these credits because so much money can be made off them. Because there is so much demand, I think sometimes, on a State level, when they dole out these credits, the credits go to a politically favored class. It obviously encourages developers to curry favor with politicians who may directly or indirectly determine who gets these projects.

I hope our sleeping press corps pays attention as to what becomes of this program as it works its way through the process. Right now, we are spending about $12.5 billion a year on low-income housing tax credits.

I want to point out that low income is in the title, but well over half the people who live in these buildings are not meeting sub- to low-income qualifications. Even if one is technically low-income, they could have unlimited assets, as well.

In any event, I really think, in all of my years in public life, the most questionable program I have ever come across is the low-income housing tax credit.

The press corps likes to run down politicians. Here is something they ought to be run down for, so I hope they pay a little more attention.

The next thing I would like to point out is what the Republicans do with the SALT deduction. There are a variety of changes in the tax code that we could make that would affect people's behavior. Because tax rates are so high, any change in the tax code affects people's behavior.

Some people feel we ought to make reductions to encourage more research and development. Other people feel that we ought to--I feel we ought to increase the personal exemption to give a special benefit to people who have more children. Some people feel we should have an across-the-board cut and not influence one behavior or another.

There is a small group of people in this building who apparently feel the number one problem we have is that State and local taxes are not high enough, and they want to bring back a deduction for State and local taxes. Right now, we have a low deduction in there, so they are aiming things at not the poor or middle class. They are really aiming things at the well-off people and encouraging governments, like California and especially New York, to raise their taxes.

Recently, on the radio, I was listening to a guy who, I believe, is running for Governor there. He wants to raise the income tax in New York to 11 percent. It is not surprising, then, that I am sure people, like this person, who want to dramatically increase the income taxes in New York would want those taxes to be tax deductible.

Why a Republican would want to do that, I am not sure. I think it is something we ought to talk a little bit more about.

The next area that is going to be working its way that is affected indirectly by the great big, beautiful bill but will be more directly impacted by the appropriations bills that follow is what happens with the Department of Defense.

Right now, we have close to 900,000 employees who are not uniformed in the Department of Defense. I think one of the great things DOGE did is expose how hard or not hard some of those employees are working. We will see what happens with the overall defense budget and whether Congress is willing to take the step forward and say that maybe we don't need 900,000 employees in the Department of Defense who are not uniformed.

The other thing in the Department of Defense we can look at is what Pete Hegseth, who I think is going to be a great Secretary of Defense, has pointed out. He feels, in today's world, aircraft carriers are maybe not entirely obsolete but are not as valuable as they were 30 years ago. That should be obvious from what happened over the weekend when Ukraine used drones to wipe out some aircraft thousands of miles away in the Soviet Union, showing that the nature of warfare is changing rapidly. Our defense budget should change rapidly with it.

Mr. Hegseth has said we are going to use less combat troops. We certainly need a lot less noncombat troops. He has implied that he feels aircraft carriers are becoming a little bit obsolete. Right now, we have 11 aircraft carriers. We have three more under construction to replace the current aircraft carriers.

I think we have to protect our electric grid. I think we have to protect ourselves against hypersonic missiles. I think Israel is doing a good job at that.

We have to prepare for the next war, not prepare to refight World War

Mr. Speaker, I feel I must address one of the key issues that we are going to be dealing with in the next 2 days, and that is: What type of new tax cuts are we going to put into the Internal Revenue Code?

Some people think that if I had my choice, I would bring back the personal exemption and put $1,000, or $2,000, or $3,000 per child on that return because there is no time in life in which you need money more than when you are just starting out with children and have a big mortgage. We should look out for the average guy at a time when they are most desperate.

Some people would say my second pick would be to reduce the marginal tax rate on the most technical manufactured goods because we want those goods to be made here in America, and it would be great to have those manufactured in America.

Some people, however, think the most important thing is to encourage States to increase their taxes and have higher property taxes from the local units of government and higher income taxes for the State government. They want to increase the exemption for those to encourage State governments and local governments to spend more money.

No, we should be helping out the young people with children just starting out.

Madam Speaker, I think it is important that the Chair and the public know that there are always debates going on in this building that will determine how the big, beautiful bill is sent to President Trump.

One of those debates involves the State and local tax deduction.

Another of the debates, which hasn't been as highlighted, involves President Trump's proposal to reduce the marginal rate on manufacturing to 15 percent. President Trump is, rightly, obsessed with America being the world leader in manufacturing.

Another one of the debates is what we should do to encourage Americans to have more children, and President Trump has proposed a $5,000 credit for people having children. I think that might not be quite right. I personally prefer a new $5,000 exemption. Nevertheless, there is no time in life when people are more financially strapped than when they have young children.

I am strongly opposed to the so-called SALT Caucus of people who desperately want to have a greater deduction for State and local taxes. These people are, as a practical matter, looking to encourage their Governors, their school boards, and their county boards to raise local taxes.

Last weekend, when I was home, a conservative county executive in my district begged me not to increase the deduction for property taxes. He is a conservative and does not want to have the liberals on his county board make the case that it would be great if all of our property taxes and income taxes were tax deductible so we could raise taxes.

I am sure right now, particularly in the more liberal States--places like California with Governor Newsom, places like New York--the Governors and State legislators are waiting to see if they can increase the deduction for State income taxes and for local property taxes, so they can spend more money.

We have to realize that if the SALT Caucus succeeds, there will be less money available here to lower the income tax on manufacturing, as President Trump tries to bring back American manufacturing jobs from China, Korea, and Mexico.

We will not have the money available to do eventually what I would like to do, and that is have a $5,000 personal exemption to help out young couples who are just starting out, so they have more income at a time in their lives when they need it more than anybody else.

I strongly encourage our negotiators to turn back the people who want a big State and local tax deduction, even though Wisconsin is a mildly high tax State.

Madam Speaker, I think encouraging any more taxes anywhere in the country hurts us all as it slowly takes away the freedoms of people in America and makes America more of a country that you would not want to move to start new manufacturing. That is one of the things that is going on in this building.

The next topic to take up--and I am kind of disappointed we didn't deal with it like we should have in our proposed big, beautiful bill, but I know President Trump's team is concerned about this. It is the degree to which so many of our welfare programs are designed to discourage people from getting married.

We know that people who get married and have children--well, all types of families have successful children. I personally know many people who, on their own, both men and women, have done a very good job of raising children we would be proud of. In the long run, it is not fair to the next generation to discourage people from getting married and having children.

Right now, there are many Federal programs. They used to be called food stamps, low-income housing, Medicaid, which is healthcare for the poor, and Pell grants. All of these programs are designed to penalize young couples who get married.

Madam Speaker, if you are a single parent, then you may be eligible for all of these programs. If you are married, then you may be eligible for none of the programs.

I think the most generous of the group is low-income housing, or Section 8 vouchers, whatever. In any event, it is not unusual to look up a hypothetical in which if a woman marries say the father of her children, she will lose $25,000 to $30,000 a year.

This is why since the Great Society in the 1960s we have gone from a situation in which in the fifties, 4 percent of the children in this country were born out of wedlock. Now we are in a position in which we have over 40 percent of the children in the country who are born out of wedlock. It did not happen by accident. It happened because the Great Society programs in the 1960s were designed to encourage this sort of behavior.

Madam Speaker, you may say, who wants to discourage people who are married from having children?

In fact, Karl Marx, of course, was very opposed to the traditional family. We have known since I have been here.

Black Lives Matter made it clear that they were opposed to what they referred to as ``the Western-prescribed nuclear family.'' Of course, even after Black Lives Matter came out for that, it did not prevent many of our Members, particularly on the Democrat side of the aisle, from standing with Black Lives Matter, a group opposed to the nuclear family.

We know that many of the feminists in the sixties, I think Kate Millett, who was described as the mother of women's studies classes, which are all over our universities, were outright opposed to the nuclear family.

It is disappointing they are not doing more in this budget to address that problem, to stop encouraging young people not to be married. We all by now have run into young couples who may even want to be married, but they won't get married because they lose $20,000 or $25,000 a year.

Indeed, in this program, we are expanding the Pell Grant program. It is a program that was one of these things that has a marriage penalty associated with it.

We are expanding the low-income housing tax credits. While some of those credits do not come with a marriage penalty, particularly when coupled up with State programs that do have a marriage penalty, it is another program we are expanding and it is going in the wrong direction.

In any event, I encourage President Trump to do what is already going on behind the scenes, and that is to work towards, perhaps in our next reconciliation bill, a program to stop the hatred of the traditional family that is the marker of the Democratic Party today.

Again, I emphasize we have to look at every one of these programs: the earned income tax program, the Pell Grant program, the low-income housing program, and the Section 8 program. In general, all of the housing authorities have this hostility.

If America is ever going to truly become a great society again, then we have to work our way back up to where we were in the sixties and the fifties where we had 4 percent or 5 percent of the children born out of wedlock.

By the way, Madam Speaker, if you read historic experts on this topic, and I am talking about people like George Gilder, who is a very bright guy, a lot of times the person who is penalized the most when you set up a society without couples having children is, in fact, the man in the society who has no purpose in life.

As an Indian immigrant in my district told me: In America they have the woman marry the government.

Of course, I think society is better off if we have the woman marry the father of the children, not the government, like so many members of this conference want to do.

The next thing I want to look at, which we are going to be doing in the next few days, is we have a proposed reconciliation bill in front of us. I was under the impression that this bill would be an opportunity to decrease the amount of government programs, decrease the degree to which we have government programs controlling or directing Americans' lives.

One of those programs that I really don't like the more I talk to experts on the topic is something called low-income tax credits.

These low-income tax credits are given to property developers that are equal to 10 percent of the value of what they spend on new apartments for 9 years in a row. Now, there is a time value of money, but even given the time value of money, it means that the government is paying for 70 percent of some people's projects.

There are some requirements as to whom they rent these to, but the requirements are not stringent. Some people point out that they can almost take people at random in the street, and that would be enough to fill their housing units. It really doesn't do a lot to help the so- called low-income people.

It does help, however, because the government is giving so much money, it does encourage developers to spend far more than they would otherwise on their projects.

Why not make Cadillac projects if the government is going to spend or pay for 70 percent of those projects?

Furthermore, as we spend more on the projects, it is going to turn around and result in greater depreciation expense for the wealthiest banks in the country who frequently wind up buying the credits.

For something that should be a relatively simple transaction, once the States gets ahold of it, Madam Speaker, you can wind up with regulations of hundreds of pages that have to be negotiated when you begin running the projects, which obviously means a lot more money for the lawyers and much more difficulty for the politicians to understand exactly what is going on.

You would think, Madam Speaker, that of all the government programs this would be the easiest to get rid of because we are supposed to be broke. In fact, under our big, beautiful bill, and I know President Trump wants the most beautiful bill he can get on his desk, in this bill we are, in fact, expanding the number of tax credits, which is to say expanding the amount of money that the property developers on these projects are going to make.

We are increasing the amount of tax credits, and I am told a very high number will be going to the biggest five banks in the United States, tax credits the banks get.

Furthermore, because there are only so many new rental housing units we need, it expands, or they wind up crowding out the what I call legitimate developers and the legitimate users of low-income housing tax credits.

I would hope, as we put together, hopefully, the final version of the big, beautiful bill sometime in the next couple of weeks, we look at this. It is not something that costs nothing. It is currently costing us even under current law about $13.8 billion a year in tax credits which are going to these well-connected developers.

I think one thing that will also tell us that they are well-connected is it is up to States to distribute which property developers get the credits.

What do you think is going to happen?

It is going to be the same people who know the same bureaucrats, who are connected to the same politicians, who are going to get these credits again and again and again. Again, on the face of it, the idea that in the future in this country the people who build the apartments are going to be determined by State bureaucracies is just an invitation for trouble.

The fact that we are paying 70 percent, therefore, results in a situation given--some areas in California, in particular--we may be paying more than $95,000 a unit.

Does that make any sense at all if our goal is to create lots of new housing units for the so-called poor or working poor?

No. You would never do that, Madam Speaker, except for that is the way the property developers make more money.

In any event, I encourage our leadership team as they are looking for more money to seal the deal on this project, I don't think they have their 217 or 216 votes yet to grab that $13.5 billion.

Another thing I will point out, these credits have been around since the late 1980s, and people might wonder where they came from. I think they probably came from developers who found a way to snooker the poor U.S. Congressmen in the late eighties. At the time Congress felt something had to be done because we had just gotten done with the apparently increasing the depreciation schedules on new residential real estate. So in the early eighties, Madam Speaker, you could depreciate an apartment building in 15 years. When they changed it to 27\1/2\ years, it greatly reduced the number of new apartments that people were building and, therefore, it was easier to sell to Congress that one way to get more apartments online is to have these ridiculously overgenerous credits.

I don't know if I am going to have much of an impact. One of my goals is I would like to have the credits renamed. Instead of the low-income housing tax credits, name them the big banks, big law firms, and especially well-connected developer tax credits, because I think that would more accurately describe the people who benefit from these credits.

In any event, these are some of the issues that I think are going to be debated in the next few days.

I hope the press does a good job of covering what low-income housing tax credits really are.

I hope the press does a good job of setting before the American public, and particularly the Republican volunteers who did so much to get us here, laying out the differences between the tax cuts based on how high the property or sales taxes are, how high the local property taxes or State sales and income taxes are.

We will see how our base feels about who we should reward or what type of behavior we should encourage through the tax code.

Should we encourage people to have more children?

Should we encourage people to work harder?

Should we encourage businesses to make more manufacturing jobs?

Or should we encourage local governments to raise taxes?

Finally, in the future as we determine how we are going to build new apartments, should we encourage the builders of the apartments to go through the government accepting lavish tax credits?

Or should we do it the way we always have in America, and that is let the free market win out?

The idea that we cannot build apartment buildings is, on its face, preposterous. I know everywhere right now, be it single family or multifamily, the costs are way too high.

I would hope that the Speaker would maybe put together a committee or a subcommittee to see what we can do to lower those costs. I am told it is possible to lower the costs, and the answer is not paying developers 70 percent of the cost of their project.

Madam Speaker, I ask unanimous consent to remove the gentleman from New York (Mr. Goldman) as a cosponsor of H.R. 1415.

Mr. Speaker, today in a committee hearing, in which there were probably very few people in the room, the Republican majority voted to expand the low-income housing tax credit.

First of all, the low-income housing tax credit doesn't really benefit a lot of low-income people, but in any event, the way it works, we give 70 percent of the cost of a developer's project to him in tax credits. That seems a strange way to solve the housing crisis in this country for a Democrat. It is even stranger for a Republican.

In any event, I think people should look at this. We are spending $13.5 billion every year on this credit and, like I said, you can get it on all sorts of think tanks. The primary beneficiary is the developer. Probably the number two beneficiary is the biggest banks in the country. It is something that ought to be reviewed.

Mr. Speaker, I was in a meeting. Had I been present, I would have voted AYE on Roll Call No. 122.

Mr. Speaker, we are heading into what many people hope is the finishing stretch of our legislature, putting through what Donald Trump calls the big, beautiful bill.

There are a lot of issues yet to be decided, and I would like to address some of those issues today.

The first issue I have talked about once already, but it seems to be a major holdup, the rumors are, in negotiation.

There are clearly going to be some tax cuts in this budget. Our goal will be to continue with tax cuts that were put in place in 2017 but add some others.

As we hear rumors of what tax cuts will be added, we have to remember that taxes in the United States are so high that every tax provision affects our behavior.

Some people want taxes, and I am one of them, to be lower on manufacturers because manufacturers have to compete with other countries. A good way to make sure we have good manufacturing jobs, as well as to make sure we get more research on manufacturing in this country, is to aim our tax cuts at manufacturers.

Some of them specifically aim at research and development. They feel the most important thing in manufacturing is research and development.

Others are made to encourage savings. In the past year, we have passed tax cuts to encourage people to put more money in their IRAs or 401(k)s.

We have a problem in this country that not enough people are having children, and that is not only a problem for the country; it is a problem for individuals who, I think--I am told, many of which regret when they are 35 or 40, not having children when they were younger.

People want to use the tax code to incentivize people to have more children. There are a variety of ways you can do that. President Trump floated a balloon just to give people a large check. I think that is a big mistake because we do not want to have people having children just to get a large check.

If you want to make it easier to raise children, maybe raising the personal exemption to $5,000 would be a good way to favor parents.

One thing that concerns me. Unlike people who want to encourage more manufacturing, encourage more work, encourage more overtime, encourage more children, there are people who want to change the tax code to encourage local governments and State governments to raise taxes.

There is a provision called the SALT provision in which they want to make tax deductible State and local taxes. They are already, to a degree, tax deductible, but there are people who want to help the wealthier people deduct their State and local income taxes as well.

I have talked to both my State legislators, and last weekend I talked to a county executive, and they both gave me the same story. They are both conservative people. They said they were shocked that there were Republicans who want to increase the tax deduction for State and local taxes because what does that incentivize? It doesn't incentivize more children. It doesn't incentivize more research and development. It doesn't incentivize more manufacturing.

What it does is it incentivizes State and local governments to raise taxes and spend more money. I had to explain to my State legislators these were Republicans who wanted it. They found it hard to believe. It sounds like a tax provision that you would be more likely to hear Democrat legislators want.

In any event, I think we have to follow the negotiations that are going on, and we have to see whether within the Republican Party we wind up with a product to encourage more work, encourage families, or whether we wind up with a bill designed to encourage State governments to raise the income tax or sales tax, or encourage local governments to raise their property tax.

I am going to be very disappointed. It would certainly be a defeat for, I guess what I will call, traditional Republicans, such as myself, but that is one of the negotiations going on behind closed doors.

There is another provision that they are going to use the IRS code in--which concerns me a little because there are rumors that this may be out there as well. Quite frankly, I have a suggestion how we could cut taxes and put ourselves in a stronger position.

Right now there is a provision in the tax code called low-income housing tax credits, and what it means is that if a developer wants to build a new development, they would get a credit equal to 10 percent of the cost of the building over 9 years, which, right off the bat, sounds like the government is paying for 90 percent of the value of the building.

That is not quite right because there is a time value to money, and if you are getting a building that you paid $10 million for, if you get a credit worth $1 million 10 years out, you have got to wait for that credit, and there is a time value to money.

Nevertheless, even taking into account the time value of money, a potential developer has the government, through tax credits, pay for 70 percent of the cost of a building.

Now, this is not open-ended. Usually these credits go to politically well-connected developers picked by State agencies or State organizations.

I think, personally, of all the tax cuts particularly, people complain about tax cuts for the rich. Of all the provisions in the Internal Revenue Code, I can think of no provision more questionable than having the Internal Revenue Service reduce somebody's taxes so that you get 70 percent of the value of your project paid for.

Now, people do not earn enough income to use, say, in the case of $100 million, a building, they don't have enough credits to offset $70 million in taxes. So they have to sell the credits to somebody else. This means getting lawyers and experts from LIHTC involved so that these credits can be transferred.

A significant number of these credits go to some of the largest banks in the country. And, of course, the largest banks in the country, I am sure, would love to have Congress change the provisions so that they were able to use still more tax credits.

Why at a time when we can do so many other good things would we do that? I don't know, but they have been very active in this building, and they are looking to get more tax credits.

The next thing to remember about this is there are some units, but not all units, which have restrictions on the amount of rent that can be charged. Quite frankly, there is no guarantee that any of these rents will be below market rate. In fact, some of the people who live in these projects will be able to use vouchers, what we call Section 8 vouchers.

So the government, first of all, sets aside money for somebody to get free rent, and then the vouchers are given to a property developer or a syndicate that is going to wind up owning the building, and they wind up with a voucher as well. It is kind of hard to believe it is developed that way, but it has developed that way.

I had always wondered before hearing about these things why sometimes low-income housing developments look nicer or more elaborate than regular old apartments. Part of that is they are newer, and, of course, newer buildings are usually nicer. A lot of it is we are paying these developers 70 percent of the cost of their building.

And just like if you at home were building a new house and the government said we will give you 70 percent of the cost of that new house, if a developer is building something new and the government says we will pay for 70 percent of the cost of your apartment building, of course the building becomes more lavish, which, of course, makes the property developer wealthy as well.

And you can begin to see, as we work our way through here, that the developer is the big beneficiary here.

Then what happens is the building is sold to a syndicate of a variety of wealthy people who get the tax benefits of depreciation for about 15 years, and then eventually it is returned to the original developer.

So there are many people making money here. Certainly the banks are making money. Above all, the developers are making money. The lawyers are making money, as they have to constantly draft documents between the banks and the syndicate and the developer. And, like I said, the syndicate itself, which is made up of a variety of wealthy individuals or wealthy limited partnerships, is able to get money here as well.

When I think of all the things we can--well, I digress. Again, the developer who gets this is determined by a

State agency. It is naive to think anything other than these developers are politically well-connected people.

I do not know why, if we think it is the Federal Government's business to provide housing to people--which, of course, it is not--we would set up a system in which a private developer gets such a large chunk of money that the Federal Government is laying out.

Right now, as a matter of fact, the money is so great, even though new projects are spread out or the tax credits are spread over nine years, we are spending over $13 billion a year on this method of so- called creating workforce housing or low-income housing.

I will also point out that there are some people who would say this is necessary because nobody builds any housing anymore. Well, I am from Wisconsin, which is not what you normally consider a booming State. It is not like Florida. It is not like Texas. As I go around my district, everywhere I look there is new housing. There is single family housing and new apartments.

For a variety of reasons, it is grotesquely expensive. We can deal with that by working our way towards more of a balanced budget, so interest rates are not so high. As the cost of energy goes down, it will lower the cost of anything and lower inflation on other goods as well. Anybody who remotely believes in the free market believes there will always be a market for new housing.

There are apparently some places around the country where it is hard to build new housing, but that, in general, is because there are State governments and local governments which are hostile to business in general and hostile to developers in particular. People then don't want to do more building in this city or that city.

In any event, as we work our way through the process, I hope the negotiators who are meeting in unknown rooms in this building, if they need to balance the budget, think about getting rid of the low-income housing tax credits and use the $13 billion a year that is primarily benefiting some well-connected and wealthy property developers and use it somewhere else. I think that is one of the things that we have to look at carefully.

There was another topic I wanted to take up. I have been talking to some people who wonder why we have demonstrations in this country hostile to Israel, and even more bizarre, demonstrations favorable to Hamas and people who live in the Gaza Strip.

It has been my belief--and I give this conversation privately to people, but I should make my case more public--that when people take bizarre positions, in other words, when they see Hamas invade Israel and kill over a million people with pride, not even embarrassingly and hiding it, but taking pictures of it, and their sympathy goes towards the people killing the thousand people, including young children, one has to wonder if something psychological is going on here.

My belief is that anybody who is hostile to Israel in this conflict and is demonstrating in favor of Hamas has some sort of psychological problem. I will refer to this psychological problem as--we will name it after the young girl who was obsessed with global warming in Sweden.

We will call it Thunberg syndrome. You all remember the little girl whose father said she was depressed and unhappy, but then she read about global warming and decided to obsess over it. She, all of a sudden, became happy because she could run around and had a purpose in life. Prior to that time, like a lot of wealthy people in the West, she really didn't have a good purpose, but it gave her a purpose. Like I said, she could run around, she would give speeches and feel she was saving the world.

Of course, eventually, Greta Thunberg also wound up siding with the Palestinians, who had killed the Israelis, against the Israelis. I think it was for the same reason. She wanted to adopt a cause to feel she had a purpose in life.

When one particularly has kind of a spoiled life, the people you want to help are people who are kind of opposed to the successful society we have here in the West, be it America, be it Europe.

There is a certain hierarchy of needs that everybody has, right? We need food, we want safety. Once you take care of food and safety, you also need a purpose in life. There are sadly many, many people in America and Western Europe who don't have that purpose.

I think this is particularly a problem for people who may not have a family to devote time to. They may not have children to devote time to. They may be financially well enough off.

You very rarely see Thunberg syndrome on somebody who has three jobs. They are busy with their life. They are going from job to job and working all the time. You would rarely see Thunberg syndrome in, say, somebody with four kids, because four kids is very time-consuming. You have to earn money to take care of the kids, spend time with the kids. That is a purpose in life.

I think, as we have more and more young, single people not having children in the West, you have more and more people looking for a purpose in life. For whatever psychological reason, they want that purpose to be hostile to the West in general.

If they are in the United States, they frequently want that purpose to be anti-American. Of course, when Greta Thunberg wants to get involved in foreign affairs, it is not surprising that she picks global warming because then her enemy is the West and the factories and the cars.

It is interesting that when people have Thunberg syndrome, they do not get mad at things done by what used to be called Third World countries, right? People who have Thunberg syndrome, well, they may object to a new, clean power plant in the United States. They never worry about the plethora of new coal plants going up in Red China or going up in India, and that is because those aren't Western countries. There, miraculously, they don't care.

When it comes to the attacks on the Jews in Israel put out there by the Palestinians, they will purport to care about the Palestinians who lose their life when the Israeli Army inevitably had to go back into Gaza, but they don't care about Muslims who are dying in other wars. They don't care that many, many Muslims are dying in Syria.

That is because those people are being killed by other Syrians, and it doesn't fit the narrative of, I want to hate the West. They don't care about a civil war going on in Ethiopia, they don't care about the conflicts currently going on in Iraq.

They don't care at all about all the suffering of the Muslims in Western China, the Uyghurs. Why doesn't the left or why don't these demonstrators care about all the Uyghurs being killed or persecuted in the western part of China? It doesn't solve their psychological need to hate the West.

I think more research should be done on Thunberg syndrome to see how we can prevent it from growing because inevitably the United States and the West will fall if a significant number of their populous winds up for some psychological reason adopting causes that are hostile to the West.

That is what is going on right now, be it in global warming, be it in the Palestinian situation, be it the bizarre opinions that President Biden had about the United States being such a racist community.

I mean, here you have a country, the wealthiest people are Indian Americans, the second wealthiest are Filipino Americans. People come here from Cuba and do fantastically well.

Another cause adopted by these people with Thunberg syndrome, despite the fact that anybody could open their eyes and see the wild success of people from all around the world coming to the United States, these people have decided to adopt an ideology in which they have to fight this imaginary racism in the United States with people like Joe Biden or other opportunistic politicians egging them on.

I strongly encourage this body, or if not this body, some universities to look at people who have these bizarre opinions that will inevitably destroy this country. They hate wealth production, they certainly hate energy production even when it is new energy that is fantastically clean, so much cleaner than it was when I was a child.

They hate it when Western countries wind up in armed conflict with horrific opponents like Hamas, but for psychological reasons they side with Hamas.

Those are some of the issues that I think we ought to be paying attention to over the weekend. I think I have used up enough of my time.

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

Mr. Speaker, I move that the House do now adjourn.

The motion was agreed to; accordingly (at 2 o'clock and 12 minutes p.m.), under its previous order, the House adjourned until tomorrow, Friday, May 9, 2025, at 1 p.m.

Mr. Speaker, I was attending a vital meeting. Had I been present, I would have voted YEA on Roll Call No. 119.

Mr. Speaker, we are on the final couple of weeks, the home stretch, with regard to our big, beautiful bill. There are going to be a lot of debates as to what we should do. Some people actually want to expand programs which, in our current crisis, is unbelievable for a Republican to do.

However, I am going to address which tax cuts we have. Different tax cuts do different things. We have tax credits to encourage manufacturing. We have tax credits to encourage more work. We have tax credits to encourage more research. We have tax cuts to encourage more children.

However, there are some people who want tax cuts to encourage State and local governments to spend more money and raise taxes.

When I was home over the weekend, I talked to one of my county executives. He said: Glenn, don't let it happen.

He is a conservative county executive, and he is trying to hold down the spending on the county level, and here the people in Washington are talking about encouraging more State and local taxes.

Please, Mr. Speaker, stand up and fight. Do not encourage our State and local governments to raise taxes.

Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentlewoman for yielding. I am honored to be able to speak here and that Congresswoman Miller has yielded me time to talk about Faith Month here.

When our country was founded, John Adams said that our country was made for a moral and religious people and totally unfit for every other kind.

We, therefore, must be especially concerned--and I realize there are many good people who do not go to church--that church attendance has fallen so overwhelmingly in the last 40 years, particularly in the last 20 years. I believe it has fallen 25 percent in a very short period of time.

I think we should be very concerned that the number of people who say that they don't believe in God of any sort has, from the statistics that I have seen in the Gallup poll, gone up by about 9 to 1 over the last 40 years.

Our country will be protected if we turn to God and ask for forgiveness. We will be given the wisdom and the good fortune to make our country the Bible-believing country that it has been through most of our history. We will get back to the moral country that we all envision the United States to be.

However, if we continue to go down the path of rejecting God and just thinking that all the wonderful blessings that we have are going to show up automatically, we will be in deep trouble.

I, like the other speakers tonight, ask the American people to ask for forgiveness and ask for God's wisdom and ask us to make the appropriate decisions that America again become the moral and religious country that John Adams wanted us to be.

Madam Speaker, we had an interesting 2 weeks out of this building, and sadly my home State of Wisconsin made the news again, in an effort to remove not just any person here illegally but somebody who had broken the law, an abuser, somebody who under normal circumstances would not be viewed favorably.

We had a judge in Wisconsin stop the hearing. Oh, let's not worry about putting this guy in jail. Let's let him sneak out the back door so he is not removed from this country.

This was after about a month ago, our Governor, Tony Evers, nice guy, came out with a directive implying that State employees ought not be that gung ho when it came to removing State employees from this country if they were here illegally.

We have two examples in Wisconsin alone in which elected officials aren't on the page of addressing the immigration laws.

I think it is important that we all be articulate enough to explain to people back home why these immigration laws are necessary and be articulate enough to explain we are not being mean to immigrants.

I do not hear enough people talk about the fact that in the prior 3 years--it goes up and down by year--but if you take a rolling average, in the last 3 years, we have over 800,000 people every year sworn in as new citizens legally in this country. How often do you hear about that? There are 850,000 people who did it right. It is not impossible to make your way here.

By the way, that is historically a very high number. If you go back to the fifties and sixties, frequently that number was only a little over 100,000. The number of people being sworn in as new citizens is already eight times what they were in the sixties and fifties.

Nobody should apologize or say that we are being mean or not letting people in here. When we let in people who came here illegally, what we are doing is kicking anybody who did it the right way in the face.

We know we have a housing crisis in this country. When you begin to flood this country with another 10 million people, as happened during the Biden administration, given the law of supply and demand, we know it is driving up rents, making it more difficult all the time for the average American to attain the American Dream.

I also point out that we have significant numbers of visas which allow people to come here, as well. We have about 900,000 temporary workers or trainees at any time. We have well over 5 million people here on visas for temporary visitors for business and pleasure. As far as college students are concerned, we allow another over 400,000 people into this country on student visas.

It is incredibly easy to get into this country. Rather, it is not always easy, but millions of people come into this country legally and are able to do so. We do not have to have sympathy for people who came here illegally.

I think it is important that we educate the American public on that because we are soon going to have to start the next phase where we not only get rid of the criminal element that came in here, but we have to get rid of the 10 million people who may not have broken a horrible law but broke the law just by coming here.

It is a complete kick in the teeth to anybody who wants to come here legally to allow the 10 million people who Joe Biden let in during the last 4 years stay here.

There is one more thing I will address as we begin to work on Donald Trump's big, beautiful bill. I remind people in this Chamber that we have a system of benefits right now whereby, if you are a single parent and you marry the father of your children or mother of your children, you can easily lose over $25,000 a year. In other words, the U.S. Government spends $25,000 a year bribing single parents not to get married.

I thought we were supposed to treat people equally in this country, but we don't treat people equally. We have an overwhelming bias in favor of keeping parents from being married. I hope Members in this Chamber remember that as we put together Donald Trump's big, beautiful bill. We should not pass that bill unless we do something first about the massive marriage hatred that we have.

Mr. Speaker, during a committee hearing I attended yesterday, immigration was a topic that was brought up and it seemed apparent to me that the party on the other side of the aisle didn't understand why we have immigration laws.

First of all, it is a complete insult to the over 800,000 people who are sworn in as new citizens in this country annually. Secondly, we have to make sure the next generation of Americans here think like Americans and fit in our culture, which means they are law-abiding.

Just in general, the idea of having a million people breaking the law to come here, saying they need asylum when they don't, means they are not going to fit in with our culture.

Finally, I will share a word from Mark Reihl, back from my State legislative days, of the carpenters union. Again and again, he would come into my office saying that his guys, his union carpenters, were being undercut by people coming here illegally, and he demanded that we crack down on that. Illegal immigration drives down wages of Americans who are already here.

We heard that yesterday as the Democrats were claiming that if you kicked out the illegals the cost of things will go up, as they will.