Madam Speaker, it is good to be here with Mr. Klein and Congressman Braley. Before I talk about Iraq, I have to respond to a couple of things that were said a few minutes ago by our friends from the other side of the aisle who used the…
Madam Speaker, it is good to be here with Mr. Klein and Congressman Braley.
Before I talk about Iraq, I have to respond to a couple of things that were said a few minutes ago by our friends from the other side of the aisle who used the word ``truth'' frequently and talked about their children and grandchildren. And I am sure they are sincere, but to those of you Americans out there listening, I am sure you can remember that when President Bush took over with Republicans controlling both Houses of Congress in the year 2001, he had a surplus delivered to him by the Clinton administration.
In the years since then, these folks you just heard talking, who profess to know what is best for our economy, have delivered to the United States, from a surplus when we were paying down the national debt, now the biggest deficit in the history of our country, the biggest balance of trade deficit, the biggest individual debt by Americans that is held, whether it is credit card debt or home second mortgage debt, and now we have the housing crisis, the subprime crisis, and various big box stores I was reading today are getting ready to file for or have already filed for bankruptcy, including some that we have seen proliferating around the country and have assumed that they were on solid ground.
So I would take all the proclamations you just heard and the fancy charts that you just saw from the Republican hour before us with a grain of salt.
The tax increase that they claim we are voting for is actually something that they, when they installed their tax cuts early in the Bush years, they installed it by putting in a sunset provision that is their creation, not ours. So I stand here and say that we have not in fact voted for anything like this biggest tax increase in history. It is a theatrical and dramatic presentation,
well acted, and possibly even believed by them, but it is not the truth.
As far as Iraq goes, we are spending $12 billion a week in Iraq, and I have started to look at the needs of our country and my district in particular in terms of how that money could be used here because we are basically running on fumes financially. I just visited 13 bridges that are on the dangerous faulty bridge list that came out after the I-35 bridge collapse in Minnesota, and the estimate of the New York State Department of Transportation is that it will cost about $60 billion to fix all of the deficient bridges in the State of New York. That is 5 months in Iraq.
I just came back 2 weeks ago from visiting a Nogales, Arizona, checkpoint on the Mexican border. Congressman Braley was on that trip, along with Congressman Arcuri. And we asked at every step of the way the Customs and Border protection officials what they need from Congress and what would their wish list be.
They said basically if it was Christmas and they could have everything that they wanted in terms of infrastructure, primarily what they need is more loading docks to unload the bales of marijuana that are stacked in front of an 18-wheeler behind a load of watermelons, or more bandwidth for more computers so they can get 10 fingerprints processed faster to establish somebody's identity. All of it, northern border, southern border, all ports on both coasts, $500 million a year for 10 years. That is $5 billion.
That's a little bit less than 2 weeks in Iraq to secure both of our borders and all of our ports. That sounds to me like it would actually make our country more secure; not that we want to shut the borders down, but we'd like to know who's coming and who's going, what's coming in and what's going out in terms of drugs, in terms of agricultural products that might be infested, in terms of currency smuggling. So anyway, there's a real cost to all these things.
And I would just say, after hearing General Petraeus and Ambassador Crocker for the second time, it's clear that the goals in Iraq that we're spending this $12 billion a month on have been changing, that the goal posts have been moving, that 5 years after the initiation of this war and the death of 4,017 of our mothers, fathers, sons and daughters, brothers and sisters, I have a figure of 29,676 wounded, the estimate before the VA, Veterans Affairs Committee, last summer was that if the war stopped at that point we'd be looking at $1 trillion for the lifetime care of grievously wounded soldiers returning from Iraq. That's four injuries primarily, traumatic brain injury, PTSD, spinal cord injuries that cause paralysis, and amputations.
And these are, fortunately, men and women who we're able to save today in the battlefield because our battlefield medicine is so much better than it was in Vietnam, for instance. The ratio is about 16:1 wounded to killed where in Vietnam it was about 2\1/2\:1. That's the good news is that we're saving more of these mostly young lives of brave Americans who've gone over there and fought and carried out their mission.
But the bad news is that the American public has not been told yet that, on top of the figures you mentioned, there's at least $1 trillion lifetime care for the wounded from this war that we're already looking at being responsible for. And we have to take care of these wounded warriors. You can't pay for the war and forget about the warriors.
So I would just say that we need to look at this in terms of a broad view of national security and a realistic, clear-eyed view of where we are financially and whether we can afford it.
And with that, I yield back to Mr. Klein.
Well, in fact I do. And I thank the gentleman. You know, I saw 60 Minutes, I think this last Sunday, and they had an interview about the topic you just mentioned, the Iraqi windfall due to the price of oil, and how those tens of billions dollars are sitting in accounts. And the Iraqi officials interviewed on the TV show said they can't get at them to pay for their own reconstruction; and the American taxpayer has to keep paying the way we are because they don't yet have the systems in place or the infrastructure or the banking technology to be able to transfer the money.
Now, either that's a really lame excuse, or we've been missing the boat by not helping them set that up. Or both.
But you know, I have to just, not to be, not to carp on an old topic, but to hearken back to the previous hour and the other side of the aisle, our friends' presentation about budgetary truth. I would point out that the President's budget that he sent down to us this year shows no money for Iraq after the first of the year. So that's obviously not an honest document.
It also assumes the AMT, the Alternative Minimum Tax which was supposed to be a tax on the richest of the rich and has become instead a tax that's been digging deeper and deeper into the middle class, and we've been working to change that. Our budget does change that and pushes it back up to the wealthiest 4 percent or so of Americans.
But the President's budget assumes all the money that will be scooped out of the middle class, if nothing is done, will be available. So I just had to say those couple of things about that.
Yes, please.
Not only do they know, but the President, as we speak, is negotiating, or his representatives are negotiating a status of forces agreement to keep our troops in Iraq for some unknown time. So they obviously are planning on it. They're just not putting it in the budget.
And I agree with you that the first year you could call it an emergency, but after that, this should be on budget. We're building up enough debt that we're passing on to our children and
grandchildren with interest anyway, and in order for the public to know what is really being done in their name, this should not be a supplemental; this should be in the budget.
I would also like to comment about my trip to Iraq last October. When I slept in the Green Zone in one of Saddam's pool houses next to one of his mansions, which, by the way, I think we should give back to the Iraqi people at this point. He was a tyrant, but he was their tyrant, and he built the mansion with their money and it might help us lose that image that some of them have of us as occupiers if we gave them back their property.
But at any rate, when I slept in the Green Zone, we were told, use the bottled water, don't drink the water out of the tap; if you hear a siren, there's a concrete bunker over there; go jump in it because we've had a few mortar rounds coming in. But that was basically all the warning we got.
Last week when the fighting was going at a higher level of intensity when the battle of Basra was on and the Green Zone took so many mortar and rocket rounds that we lost two soldiers dead and 17 wounded in the Green Zone, they were telling people then and since then to sleep in your body armor and your helmet. So October, we were not told that. Last week and the week before, they were telling our diplomats and our traveling Members of Congress that. That's not progress; that's back- sliding.
And Albert Einstein, I think, was the guy who once defined insanity as trying the same thing over and over again expecting a different result. That's where we're at now.
There's a friend of mine who's a sheriff in one of the Upstate counties of New York who is a West Point graduate and a classmate of my brother-in-law, 1969 West Point grad, who told me a couple years back that one of the first things they learned at West Point in officer training class is never send a military force to do a job that is not militarily achievable.
And this is to say nothing critical or to overshadow the accomplishments of our forces. Our men and women in uniform have done an extraordinary job and we should all be extremely proud of them. They have been creative. They have been extremely loyal not just to our country but loyal to each other. They have been energetic and committed. They will do anything we ask of them and anything their commanders ask of them.
But our responsibility as a civilian government, the kind of government that our Constitution sets up where the civilian government and the President, ultimately, is Commander in Chief, but Congress as well has the right to not only declare war but also to fund Armies. And we need to be careful that we use them responsibly. These are not chattel. Our men and women in uniform are human beings that are stressed out with record rates right now of suicide, divorce, and bankruptcy among veterans that have returned from this war, as well as among veterans of previous conflicts.
And I think that it's time for us to reevaluate whether this is really making our Nation more secure and whether it is worth the $12 billion for nation building that we might better use for rebuilding the Nation of the United States.
Well, yes. I would just tell you that we are way behind on our infrastructure in this country in terms of keeping it maintained to a level of safety or efficiency just to keep traffic moving.
I had a construction worker tell me yesterday that he was working with some of his compatriots on the Tappan Zee Bridge which, as you know, crosses the Hudson River just north of New York and carries the New York State thruway and millions of cars a day commuting to and from the New York metro area.
Twelve years ago they were replacing and welding plates to repair potholes and damage that has been done by the salt and acid rain, and pigeon droppings, if you can believe it, are a major cause of corrosion on bridges. And at that time 12 years ago, he and his men that were working on the bridge said if they did not have to drive across it to go to work to feed their families, they would not drive across it because they felt it wasn't safe then. And they told their kids if they could help it, please don't drive across that bridge. 12 years ago.
Now we're finally getting down to the point where the thruway authority and the State of New York are looking at building a new Tappan Zee Bridge because the support pilings of the bridge are either being undercut by the tide or eaten by aquatic worms, if you can believe that, or both. There are so many kinds of damage that has happened in a bridge that only had a 30-year life span, and it was built more than 30 years ago, and nothing's been done to get ready to build its successor.
As I'm sure you both do, I'm approached in the district every week by town supervisors or mayors or what have you asking for help with a sewage treatment plant, for instance, in the town of New Windsor, New York, that's 60 years old. It's well beyond its design life, and when it breaks down, if there's a heavy storm rain event and it becomes overtaxed with capacity from the storm run-off, you get raw sewage running into the Hudson River, which we've been trying and pretty much succeeding in trying to clean up in terms of sewage. The river is much better. It's actually swimmable, and to some extent, some people eat fish out of it, but I think that disregards the PCBs, which is another issue.
But every one of these water treatments for drinking water, sewage treatment for disposing of wastewater, bridges, tunnels, roads, rail, which we are so far behind the rest of the world in, Japan, the European Nations in the EU have a so much more advanced rail system that it actually substitutes for a short hop air travel in this country, what we would consider to be flying from New York to Washington or New York to Boston. They do that by train on a high-speed train that takes virtually the same time or less because it delivers them from inner city to inner city. It eliminates the taxi ride out to the airport and back in from the airport at the other end.
It eliminates the taxi ride out to the airport and back in from the airport at the other end. These are all things that cost money.
And you know what else? They hire people. They hire construction workers, they hire sheet metal workers, they hire engineers, they hire electrical workers, they hire plumbers. And just as FDR did back when we had the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl, and the incredible unemployment and deprivation when schools were closed across the country for lack of money to pay teachers, we saw really desperate times in this country which I hope we don't see again. And I hope we move fast enough to try to take the steps, not just to build assets here at home, but at the same time, to put money back into the economy by hiring people to build this infrastructure. That's the first place that I would start.
And I think that there's a lot of agreement, when I talk to Members on both sides of the aisle, and certainly when I talk to my constituents, that that's a good use of the money that we're--whether we're borrowing the money or not, and hopefully we will be able to pay as we go, as in this Congress, this House of Representatives, under PAYGO, we've been trying to do it, but wherever we come up with the money, putting it into our own infrastructure here at home is a really good place to jump-start the economy.
I thank the gentleman from Florida.
And I am happy to tell you that there is a solution to the problem of what to do with that power while the battery is being developed, it's called ``net metering.'' And most States, New York being one of them, I believe have net metering which enables you to, if you're a homeowner or a business and you put solar panels on your property or on your roof and you don't use all that power, it winds the meter backwards and puts the power back into the grid and uses the grid as a battery. So that's what most people are doing today who have solar panels.
In fact, I helped the Action Club at the Arlington High School in Dutchess County, New York recently acquire a grant from the Dyson Foundation of New York, who were very generous and came up with funding for them to put solar panels on the roof of the high school. This is leadership by high school students who went first. And NYSERDA, the New York State Energy and Research Development Authority, I got part of the funding from them, developed a design to produce a certain number of kilowatts from, I think it's 123 kilowatts or so, anyway, it's a substantial amount of power toward what their school uses.
And then they came to us. And knowing how the appropriation process here in Congress can take so long and it's not a sure thing--last year our appropriations were finally signed into law by the President in December--I didn't want them to have to wait that long, so I was able to find a private source of funding for them.
But the point is that, it not only works, but the school kids know about it and they want their school to be solar. And I told them after they get that installed, they should go get the school bus fleet to use 20 percent biodiesel.
I'm burning heating oil in my home in the northeast, where heating oil is a major expense, especially this last winter, the cost rising the way it has has been very harmful to many people, especially those on fixed incomes. And I just called up the local dealer for heating oil and said, do you have a biodiesel blend? And the guy on the other end of the phone said, sure, it's a 20 percent soy/biodiesel blend, and I own the company, I burn it at home myself. It burns cleaner than regular oil. And so I said, send it on over. And for the last two winters now my wife and I have been heating our home with a biodiesel blend. And that's 20 percent less that has to come from Saudi Arabia or some other unstable part of the world where we're funding governments that don't like us, that use that money to buy weapons or to fund madrassas that teach young people who don't have much opportunity in their country, by the way, to advance economically or educationally, they teach them to hate Americans or hate Israelis and to do harm to us. And then, as Tom Friedman likes to write in the New York Times, we have to pay for the other side of the war on terror by sending our troops over there to stabilize these unstable parts of the world.
So that's a lose-lose policy, the old policy that we've been stuck on of oil dependency. The win-win-win policy is the one that we're talking about, where we use wind, we use biofuels. I mean, Brazil did this 20 years ago. They decided that they were going to use sugar cane ethanol. And they converted their vehicle fleet in the entire country over so that now when they drill offshore for oil in Brazil, they sell it on the world market and make money off of it, but they don't use it in their own vehicles. I think they're a few steps ahead of us. But we can get there. We're the nation that put a man on the moon. We're the nation that has been able to lead the way in many areas of medicine and technology, and certainly computer and software and Internet technology. This is something we can do. And we, in government, can incentivize it and try to encourage private industry and encourage individuals to do it. And make it patriotic, make people know that it's patriotic to drive the most efficient vehicle you can in the most efficient way that you can. It's patriotic to carpool, it's patriotic to use mass transit when you can, and it's certainly patriotic to let your elected officials know at every level of government, whether it's snowplows in the winter, school buses or UPS fleets or the thruway trucks that drive up and down all the time from Albany to New York, governmental fleets of vehicles, if we can buy hybrids, as West Chester County has done with their bus fleet, they're running not just hybrids, but biodiesel hybrids, they're already pyramiding in West Chester County on the B line, as they call it, the county bus route, they're pyramiding one new technology on top of another. And the next step would be plug-in biodiesel hybrids.
But we can do this. The technologies are here and available. And the sooner
we start getting on the program and using them, the sooner we will be able to tell some of the countries that we've, unfortunately, been beholden to, whether it's the Saudis to get the oil or whether it's the Chinese to borrow the money to pay for the oil, we will soon be able to tell them, we don't need you quite so badly, and by the way, we'd like to talk to you about human rights and some other things that right now we can't be honest about because, in effect, we've lost our sovereignty because of this dependency.
But at any rate, it's a lose-lose-lose policy on one hand and a win- win-win policy on the other, and I want to see us go for the win-win.
Quickly I would just add about Iraq two quotes, one from Ambassador Ryan Crocker. When I was over there with our Republican colleagues Tom Cole, Ric Keller, Dave Loebsack of Iowa, the four Members of Congress sat with the Ambassador, and he was asked by one of us, ``What's the state of reconciliation and peace and resolving the conflicts between the tribes and the different religious sects?''
And I was sitting right next to him; so I wrote down his response to be sure I had it right. His response was, ``The Maliki Government is somewhere between challenged and dysfunctional.'' Now, that was October.
In March General Petraeus stated on March 13, ``No one feels that there has been sufficient progress by any means in the area of national reconciliation.''
So it's my contention that not only do the Iraqis need to start paying for their own reconstruction, I think they need to take responsibility for their own security as well because as long as we are putting our men and women in a police role to try to police their civil war and their ethnic and tribal and religious differences, it's just going to let them continue to be dysfunctional. And when we phase out or pull out or whatever you want to call it and get back to the real business that this country faces, the real dangers that we face, which, as you said before, I believe, are Afghanistan and Pakistan certainly more in terms of terrorism, that they will be forced to come to terms with whether they want to be a country or whether they want to be three separate groups of Kurds and Sunnis and Shia or whatever it is. But that's one thing.
And the other thing is I am a firm believer that after 5 years and a least $600 billion spent and over $1 trillion in veterans' benefits that we have incurred that we will have to pay out of responsibility and the debt that we owe to the men and women who fought in this conflict that it's time for us to start looking at what those dollars could do at home for the things that we really need to take care of, not just for national security but for economic security, education security, health security, and all the other meanings of the word.
So I thank my friends both, and I thank the gentleman from Florida for chairing this session.