Mark Sanford

Mr. Speaker, it had been my intention to do a farewell address on the House floor on Thursday. In fact, I had reserved half an hour of floor time and had intended to not only offer a farewell but to talk one last time about the dangers headed to our economy and country, based on the build-up of our national debt and the economic bubble this has brought about. As it turned out, the day got turned upside down, and so as a consequence, I include in the Record the following.

I would have simply risen to say thank you; as it stands, I

write to say thank you.

As a boy, our family would watch the movie ``It's a

Wonderful Life'' each Christmas. It was one of our

traditions, and it's a telling tale of life's real blessings

and the importance of remembering them. It's in that spirit

that I recognize how blessed I have been to have been an

active participant in federal and state political debates

over the last quarter of a century.

It was Teddy Roosevelt who spoke much of the man in the

arena, but what's often times forgotten about those who apply

his speech to politics is the people who put folks in the

arena. And that's where my thanks begin. I ran for Congress

for the first time back in 1994 not really having much of a

clue on the political process but certainly being concerned,

revolted by, and impassioned on the dangers of our federal

debt--and what it could do to our economy and our republic. I

held flip charts in front of Rotary Club gatherings and

walked through rather mind-numbing sets of numbers in

explaining the dangers of our debt. I talked about the fall

of the Byzantine Empire. I talked about the debt-load in

Spain in the sixteen hundreds. I talked about a lot of rather

narrow details, and I look back now at those talks and

cringe. Those who sat in the back row must have thought to

themselves, ``I have no idea what he is talking about, but he

sure is passionate about it--and based on that I'll give him

the benefit of my vote.''

This was the beginning of 25 years of kindness, generosity,

understanding, and more that me, Jenny, and the boys were the

recipients of over the years. I don't know how

to best express my deep appreciation to the people of the 1st

District, and to the people of the State of South Carolina,

for the trust they placed in me and the grace they offered me

and the family. It's well-known that on same days I exceeded

their expectations on duties performed. It is equally well-

known that on other days I fell short. But having seen both

the highs and the lows of politics, and in falling at both

ends of the ``expectation-fulfillment-spectrum,'' I can say

with certainty that I have been blessed to serve a most

grace-filled lot. For that, I am indeed Jimmy Stewart's

character in ``It's a Wonderful Life''--a person only now

beginning to recognize the ways in which I have been blessed

over the years, and for this, I am most thankful.

In short, public trust represents an awesome and sacred

responsibility. It's one that I took most seriously, and

regardless of the days when I got it right or wrong, I have

earnestly tried to do my best. That meant representing the

views, hopes, and dreams of folks at home as I carried their

views to both Columbia and Washington. It also meant keeping

my word on the things I promised in running, and it is for

this reason I think my voting record stands out as it does.

On both counts, I will remain forever grateful for the honor

of the chance to be in the arena.

Politics is made special not only by the ideas that mark

its debates but by the people who give their different

vantage points on those ideas and debates. Over these years,

I have learned a lot from the many that I talked to . . .

whether across the state or on the coast of South Carolina. I

don't even know where to begin in thanking people along the

journey. Linda Riney over in Berkeley County has always made

me laugh with her dry humor. People like Bill and Barbara

Bates, Ray Nash, Joan Peters, or Peggy Bangle have been

remarkable for the ways in which they have helped me remember

that iron sharpens iron. There were another thousand like

them who would gently but clearly express their conviction.

Their voices helped me to better understand my own thinking

on a subject, and I will miss their wisdom. Other friends

like Jerry Scheer, Mark Cumins, or Chad Walldorf were never

particularly loud about their political views, but they were

unbelievably consistent in their friendship. There were also

another thousand just like them, and they were vital to my

surviving the scrapes and bruises that go with political

life. They are friends for life and I look forward to seeing

more of them now that I will be able to spend more time at

home.

Sustaining this thought of the ways in which no one does

anything of significance alone, I also want to single out my

family. Political life was never a spectator sport for any of

them. I begin first with my former wife, Jenny. The wear and

tear of political life certainly took its toll on our

marriage, but in fairness, I never could have begun my time

in politics without her. Along with being a spectacular mom

to our boys and juggling a whole host of other balls that we

kept up in the air given our busy life together, she was a

great campaign manager. When I first ran for Congress, we ran

a phone line into the kitchen to begin the campaign because

she was trapped there most of the time with two babies. She

put in long hours and made a vital difference in my ability

to pursue political life.

And what worked in one campaign applied to the next

campaign. And the next one after that. And three more after

that. And three more after that. When we moved from

congressional campaigns to state-wide gubernatorial

campaigns, all the experts said that there was no way you can

have your wife managing campaigns of that scale. But we

figured ``if it's not broke, don't fix it'' and moved ahead

with our most unconventional campaign format. Again, there

was wear and tear on the personal front with those many

campaign battles, but she did her part and did it ably and I

want to circle back to publicly thank her again for all of

her time and energy devoted to my time in politics.

The same applies to our sons. They grew up in a very

strange way. When I was first elected governor, I remember

Jenny and I telling the boys of the details of dad's new work

requirements and the move to Columbia. Marshall, our oldest,

was curious and couldn't figure out how early he and his

brothers would have to get up every morning to be able to

make it to school on time in Columbia from Charleston. They

grew up so rooted in the Lowcountry that they couldn't

imagine moving away. Yet they did that and a whole lot more

at a very pivotal point in their lives.

They grew up thinking it was normal to get in the back of a

Suburban every weekend and to go off to a different parade,

festival, or social event across the state. They would come

back each week to live in what Jenny light-heartedly called

``a gated community of one.'' There were certainly privileges

that came with living in the governor's mansion, but there

was also isolation, given you didn't have neighbourhood kids

down the street just dropping by. There were armed guards out

front at the end of the driveway. They had to deal with being

viewed as the ``governor's sons'' as opposed to simply the

great young men that they were as Marshall, Landon, Bolton,

and Blake. They grew up standing in receiving lines with mom

and dad before thousands; they grew up greeting each new crop

of guests to the governor's mansion before they could go up

and do their homework.

The list is endless, but the point here is simple. No one

gets anywhere alone in their lives. It takes collective

effort, and it was as a consequence of not only friends and

political allies that got me to where I am in life--but the

work of my former wife and my sons on the journey.

Let me quickly mention three last thank you's that are

important to me as I close this chapter of life.

One, over the years I have been blessed with an incredible

array of talent that came through staff and team positions in

the governorship. Let me begin with Marie Dupree. We have

worked together for about 30 years. She has been a remarkable

help and steady hand over my different offices and

professional pursuits. It is funny how time flies by with

some people, as over the years, I've watched her and Scott

raise children and now come to be called grandparents. But as

she did all that goes with life, she also was an

incredibly steady hand in helping me organize my life, and

for that, I am most grateful.

The same would apply to people like April Derr who has

worked with me for about 25 years. She, like Marie, was never

political in focus but just cared about politics as a means

toward helping other people. They have both done it very well

and need to be singled out in this regard.

There is an equally long list of folks who have been with

me for chapters of my life in politics, but people with whom

I could not have done what I did without their help, care,

and focus. Scott English and I argued over policy and ideas

for about 20 years. That's a frightening prospect, but we

both love policy and would delve into the details of all

sorts of ideas. Tom Davis is now a state senator, but we went

to college together and he really got his start in politics

in a place called Jurassic Park. In my first run for

governor, we had a slew of people staying at the house. There

was a fraternity-like element to the strangeness of random

people coming up into the kitchen in the morning who may have

arrived the day before or a month before as they took up

residence to help with the campaign. The anchor of that

effort was Tom Davis, who slept downstairs in the boys'

bedroom that had been converted to a dormitory of sorts. It

was filled with bunk beds ladened with the boys' old

dinosaur-covered sheets, pillowcases, and comforters . . .

and accordingly named ``Jurassic Park.''

Martha Morris was another one of those early volunteers

that you never forget. When I began my improbable race to

return to the House in 2013, it began with me, Martha, and

Jon Kohan. It certainly grew from there, but you never forget

the people who were there with you when you are down and who

are there to enthusiastically kick off a new enterprise in

life, however improbable its outcome. Jon certainly fits this

bill as well, and I miss longtime friends like Martha and Jon

today.

I better stop with the naming of names because it is a list

of hundreds over the years, and my mind is right now jumping

back to the great work of people like Catherine Kellahan and

Mary Neil Stroud or Jessica Gonzales and Brent Gibadlo. It is

crazy how many competent professionals I was blessed to work

with over my years in politics.

Speaking of which, I have to mention just two more: Bob

Faith and Joe Taylor. The people of South Carolina are the

beneficiaries of their remarkable work as successive

Secretaries of Commerce. I would argue that they were the two

best Secretaries of Commerce in South Carolina history, given

the businesses that they helped grow and the others that they

brought to our state. This was in the headwind of the largest

economic downturn since the Great Depression, and when you

look at the numbers behind their efforts, they really do

stand out as extraordinary. I know for instance that Boeing,

and the thousands of jobs that have come with it, would not

be in South Carolina were it not for their collective

efforts.

It's also a reminder of how from tiny acorns, mighty oaks

grow. It feels like yesterday that Bob walked in to my office

with an article he had found in Fortune magazine about the

new use of composites in commercial aircraft. It was hardly

yesterday and there is much water under the bridge over the

years that have followed, but I am most appreciative of all

their work.

This is dangerous because each new idea that jumps into my

head connects to yet another one. On this subject of cabinet

members, I had a great conversation just a few weeks ago with

Jim Schweitzer. He had been my Director of Public Safety when

I was governor until I had to fire him as a consequence of

bad actions by a highway patrol officer. It had been most

unpleasant, as there is no way to put a red ribbon on these

kinds of actions--but I had felt I really didn't have a

choice, given my belief in the military model of holding

people at the top of the conmmand structure responsible for

actions taken within the unit. The long story short here is

that I am thankful to people like Jim as well. He, and others

like him, served ably for their chapter of service--and it

was so nice to catch up and talk about the days gone by--and

even tough moments in them.

The point in all of this is that time is a great healer and

brings with it a level of humility in one's actions and

attempts at service. We all do as best we can. Some days are

glorious, others not . . . but it is the melding of all of

them that temper us and give us wisdom as the years roll by.

I am most thankful for the different people that God has

placed in my life and for the wisdom and

perspective that I have gained in our interactions.

Two, I am thankful to my God above. Over the years, I have

grown to hold tightly to what's talked about in Romans 8:28.

It says that God works not some, but all things, toward a

bigger plan. That's a notion that we will all question at

different points in our lives, but I am thankful for a God

that knows how many hairs there are on my head and whether or

not a sparrow falls to the ground. I respect friends who are

reticent about the notion of God and faith but couldn't live

my life without that belief that things are moving toward a

divine end regardless of the daily ups and downs.

Accordingly, I should thank not only the people who have been

brought in to my life over politics but as well the people

who helped raise and define me as a boy. Mom was ever-giving,

creative, loved people, and always there; Dad never gave up.

His big life lesson was on pushing through the inevitable

obstacles that would come in life, and I am most thankful for

all they did that helped wire me for the politics I have seen

over the last 25 years.

Three, and finally, I ask you to remember the power of

ideas--and how they can change the world. We are living in a

weird time on this front right now. It's important that we go

back to our roots as a reason-based republic. We seem to

flirt with populism about every hundred years in this

country, and it seems we are in our latest courtship given

the era of Trump. But a cult of personality is never what our

Founding Fathers intended. We in fact were to be a nation of

laws and not men. Over my 25 years, I have come to revere

what the Founding Fathers created here--along with the

traditions and institutions that they established in support

of this simple but sacred idea of being about laws and ideas

rather than a nation subject to the whims of men.

It's part of the reason I have come to believe so

passionately in limited government. I have seen first hand

government's many inefficiencies, and any look at history

screams the dangers of walking away from the Founding

Fathers' inherent distrust in systems built on men rather

than ideas and the institutions built to protect those ideas.

So, along with the many things that I have enumerated

above, my simple parting wisdom is that we remember what

Benjamin Franklin said as he left the Constitutional

Convention--that we had been given a republic, if we could

keep it.

This will require vigilance on all of our parts.

It will mean not spending what we don't have. Math always

works. Professors Reinhart and Rogoff spoke eloquently to

this theme in their book ``This Time Is Different.'' Over the

800 years of financial history that they studied, it never

was different. In every instance, the civilization in

question found itself confronting the same math that our

country now faces, and the politicians inevitably answered

``this time is different'' when talking about the math behind

their debt burden. The political answer brought with it the

seeds of destruction, and if we simply accept the political

answer of more spending--that this administration and past

administrations have proffered, we will face the same fate of

those now extinct civilizations.

I believe that we are marching our way toward the most

predictable financial and economic crisis in the history of

our republic. If we don't change course soon, markets will do

it for us, and the consequences will be damning with regard

to future inflation, the value of the dollar, the worth of

our savings, and ultimately our way of life. More than

anything, these last 25 years have been about trying in some

small way to affect the trajectory of government spending. It

has at times been a most lonely battle, but I am thankful

that people like Justin Amash will still be here in Congress

to carry the flag forward in this eternal battle between

government's growth and liberty, between freedom and

security, and between the soothing promises of populism and

real math.

Hayek warned us of the moment we are now living in America.

In his book ``The Road to Serfdom,'' he talks about how open

political systems become more and more difficult and

cumbersome with the passage of time. This we all know. It's

again part of what makes me believe so strongly in

conservative philosophy and the importance of limiting

government. Part of making government more efficient simply

means reducing its size. Open political systems are never

designed for efficiency, they are designed to give each one

of us a voice--and that process of democracy is hard. It

means we all have to roll up our sleeves and give just a

little to find the compromises necessary to move things

forward.

What's valuable about Hayek's writing is the other half of

the story. Because as open political systems become

cumbersome and inefficient, inevitably a strong man comes

along and offers easy promises. He says that he can take care

of it for us. People desperate for a change accept his offer.

They have to give up a few freedoms in the equation to get

more security. It doesn't work out so well, as Hayek's book

in this instance is about the rise of Hitler in post-WWI

German history.

I want to be clear and explicit that I am not likening

Trump to Hitler, but the forces at play could lead to a

future Hitler-like character if we don't watch out. It must

be remembered that another thing that Benjamin Franklin said

was that he who trades his freedom for security, deserves

neither. Indeed, how true.

So my parting wisdom again is this:

As a country, we have to get back to math that works. We

are riding on the Titanic as it now stands. This will end

tragically for all of us, if we don't turn our spending

habits around. Paul Kennedy wrote an interesting book a few

years ago titled ``The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers,''

and again the dynamics that he talked about were once again

simply tied to math.

We can't throw the baby out with the bathwater with regard

to institutions and traditions that have served our country

well for more than 200 years. If we have no faith in our

institutions and the people that populate them, our system

breaks down.

We must embrace the truth, and it will set us free. Open

political systems cannot survive in a post-truth world. While

none of us are perfect, and there will always be grey around

some areas of truth, we cannot accept chronic streams of

distruth. If everything is subjective, there is nothing to

debate. If, on the other hand, there is objective truth, and

I can approach it from the right while you approach it from a

perspective more to the left, then we can join in debate.

Without truth out in the middle, there is no starting point

and the reasoned debate that an open political system relies

on for its survival is strangled and dissipates.

A corollary to this is that we can't accept the idea of

``fake news.'' I have certainly had more than my share of bad

stories of my time in politics. Some of them were indeed not

designed to bring forward the truth but were rather attempts

discovering the most sensational nugget or line regardless of

its context. And context is key to understanding any new bit

of information before us. But this does not make all news

fake. In the former Soviet Union, they have truly fake news,

and attempts to equate what's happening here with what

happened there is most dangerous. There is a reason that the

Founding Fathers enshrined the idea of a free and open press

in the First Amendment. We should watch this carefully as the

populist waves of today now come ashore.

Lest I turn what would have been my talk here into a book,

I will mercifully call it quits to my thoughts for the day.

In doing so, I want to again express my thanks to all who

have helped me on this journey and to once again encourage

your embrace of free markets, limited government, and the

institutional forces so vital to perpetuating this remarkably

fragile gift of individual liberty. As you consider my

charge, I would ask that you have the courage to walk humbly

in advancing the ideas that we might share. Indeed, Micah 6:8

said it best in suggesting that we are to do justice, love

mercy, and walk humbly. Godspeed in the journey.

Mr. Speaker, with due respect to my colleague from Oklahoma who has been kind enough to yield me a bit of time, what I am going to do is yield to him, ultimately, and he will take the bulk of this time.

I just was thinking the other night about the larger issue of government spending, and I would just like to walk through a couple of numbers here in a few minutes on its importance, because we have a big tax vote tomorrow. We had one today, and we had a vote before that, I guess the day before that, tied to spending and what the trajectory looks like on that front here at the Federal level.

But I want us to step back for one second and look at the bigger picture on why containing spending is so important and why it is not so important in our kids' or grandkids' time, but why it is so important right now.

I think it is interesting, if you were to look at the words of Erskine Bowles, the words of Sir Alex Fraser Tytler, the words of Paul Kennedy, and the words of your local fifth grade elementary school teacher, what you would find is an amazing correlation between all four of them.

It was Erskine Bowles, who was, I guess, former President Clinton's former Chief of Staff who said that we are walking toward the most predictable financial crisis in the history of man.

As we remember, they put together the Bowles-Simpson Commission of 2010. That ultimately led to the sequestration that we are in the process of getting rid of, but it was a ``nuclear weapon'' that said we have got to do something, yet we haven't.

If you look at the words of Sir Alex Fraser Tytler, he was a Scottish historian who lived in the 1800s, and his words, after looking at world history over the whole of his life, were that a democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote for themselves largesse from the public treasury, with the result that a democracy always fails under loose fiscal policy and is generally followed by a dictatorship.

The average age of the world's great civilizations has been 200 years. These nations have progressed through this sequence: from bondage to spiritual faith, spiritual faith to great courage, great courage to liberty, liberty to abundance, abundance to selfishness, selfishness to complacency, complacency to apathy, apathy to dependency, and dependency back again into bondage.

And indeed, if you look at the timeline of civilizations across the annals of history, what you see is that up and down of the way that civilizations have come and gone.

And it was Paul Kennedy, in his book ``The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers,'' who talked about how, traditionally, open political systems have basically spent their way into oblivion and that the largest thing that you used to be able to buy was a standing army--nowadays, the largest thing that you can buy is entitlement spending--but that in every instance, a civilization came to a tipping point wherein they had to decide: Do we go back to what made us competitive and, perhaps, a world power in the first place or not?

And that dovetails, actually, with another book that was written, entitled, ``This Time It's Different,'' by professors from Harvard and University of Maryland. They looked at the last 800 years of financial history and they found, in every instance, civilizations got to this same point, which brings me back to the local fifth grade math teacher.

One plus one equals two, period. Numbers always work. Can they be manipulated? Yes. But at the end of the day, in the same way that gravity works, numbers work.

So I think that we just need to acknowledge that we are living in a weird

time. Debt, deficit, and government spending are not things that are talked about in Washington, D.C., as they should be, and what we are doing is we are hoping that things will get better. We are hoping that economic growth will take care of the problem.

Well, it might, but it was Gordon Sullivan, former Chief of Staff of the United States Army, who wrote a book entitled, ``Hope Is Not a Method.'' Hope, indeed, is not a method. It may work out that way, but it may not, and, therefore, we have got to be really prudent with the way that we budget and spend going forward, given the implications of what history has said will come our way if we don't get the numbers right.

So that leads me to a few numbers I would just like to share with you, and these numbers are interesting in what they point to. They point to the fact that this is not a problem for our grandchildren or for our children. This is a problem that is coming down the pike really fast.

If you look at the Congressional Budget Office numbers over the next 10 years, what they show is that we are running trillion-plus deficits on a yearly basis and that there is going to be a snowballing effect with regard to debt to GDP, that we are going to get to spaces that we have never been to before in peaceful times. That is what this chart refers to right here.

A lot of people say we don't really need to do something that much because we got into a real problem--if I pull that chart over this way--back at the time of World War II. We were over 100 percent debt to GDP, and we are just not that far right now, 79 percent.

But that doesn't include the social safety net promises that are built into the budget. If you include those off-balance sheet promises that are real-world promises and that do have to be paid, we are actually up around 107 percent, which is not that far from the 106 percent or 119 percent that we saw in the wake of exhausting ourselves after World War II as we fought against the Japanese and Nazi Germany for our very survival.

If you do an apples-to-apples comparison and include, again, the social safety net payments that weren't in place at the time of World War II, we are eerily close to that all-time high that we saw in the wake of World War II. That is just sort of a little bit longer perspective.

Going back to the CBO numbers that I was just referring to, again, we are going to be hitting the trillion-dollar mark year in and year out, year in and year out, and that is without a recession, which is really the point of what I wanted to get to.

Well, before I get to it, actually, let me take one last snapshot.

If you look at sort of blood and turnips, you can only squeeze so much blood out of a turnip is the saying. If you look at the long run, we have taken about 17\1/2\, a little shy of 20 percent of the gross product of everything that we do in this country has gone off to the Federal Government, and we have been consistently spending a little bit more than that 20 percent here over the last 50 years. Those numbers really begin to grow as we have the baby boomers retiring.

So what we have is a math and demographic trap that, unless we get ahead of it, is going to, again, have profound problems and implications in terms of the value of the currency, in terms of, ultimately, the future inflation, in terms of the value of everything that you or I may have saved to date.

We have been on a spending binge and a debt binge not just as a country, but around the world. So if you look at the numbers that we were all troubled by back in 2007, the spike that we saw in 2008, 2009 with the financial crisis, which was the worst crisis that we have seen since the Great Depression, we thought that there would be a deleveraging after that, but, in fact, the reverse has occurred.

There is $68 trillion worth of new debt around the globe, and so we have seen roughly 300 percent increases in China. We have seen that, more than that in the United States. We have seen that in Spain. We have seen well more than that in Japan. Debt has gone up, not down. In other words, we are more susceptible to a financial storm than we were at the time of the financial crisis back in the mid-2000s.

Add to that, if you look at what is happening in most of the developed world, they are actually doing a bit of deleveraging. America is outside of that norm on that front.

But here is the part that I want to get to, and there are a lot of other charts on a different night that I would like to walk through. But if you look at, again, the numbers, those CBO numbers basically anticipate that we are not in for a recession right now. If the recession comes soon, our numbers balloon in terms of debt and deficits going forward, so that makes it that much more relevant if you look at the history of recessions.

The average recession, basically over the last 50 years--excuse me-- the average economic expansion has been about 58 months before a recession came along. We are now in the second longest economic recovery in American history.

Now, when it ends, I don't know. But what I do know is that trees don't grow to the sky, and when you begin to go to the point where you are, in essence, double the average that we have seen since World War II, you know that we have to be not too far from the next recession, which, again, will have incredible implications in terms of debt and deficit going forward.

Let me give you a few other indicators that say that that recession and, again, the spiking of deficits and the spiking of debt that will come with it is not too far.

We are now in the longest bull market in American history. Again, think about that. Think about the wealth effect that comes with that and, again, the multiplier effect that that has in a consumer-driven economy, which is what we have in this country. We have had quite the run on that front.

And not only has there been duration, there has been levity, if you want to call it that, not in terms of humor, but we have seen the numbers really rise. We are now, in terms of PE, our price-to-earnings multiples, up around where we were at the time in 1928 of Black Tuesday, at about 32 times in terms of the average market pricing.

This chart, I think, is really interesting. What it shows is that there have only been two other occasions in the history of our Republic over the last 70 years when we have had the kind of wealth effect that we have right now. One occurred--and this is, again, household net worth as a percentage of disposable income in our country. Once it occurred just prior to the tech bubble bursting. The other time it occurred was just prior to the real estate boom bursting in 2008.

Now we are at a level that is, again, more than 600 percent of household net worth as a percentage of disposable income, again, the highest level that we have ever seen over the last 70 years and a number that has only been prefaced twice: once, just prior to the tech bubble bursting, and the other time, just prior to the real estate bubble of 2008 bursting.

Now, what does that mean?

I don't know exactly what it means, but if I am looking at any kind of trend line, you would say: I don't know that it is good. It says the obvious.

When I drive to Hilton Head Island, South Carolina, and I go into Sea Pines, the mansions of the 1970s are being torn down to make way for big houses now. The mansion of the 1970s is no longer a mansion; it is a little house that is a tear-down. People are wealthier than they have ever been.

But what comes up oftentimes goes down, and I want to go into some of the wealth effect that has taken place here, which is what you have seen with this number right here.

The Fed balance sheet has exploded, from about $800 billion in size to over $4 trillion in size. As we go on the opposite side of the curve, deleveraging, it is going to have an impact on interest rates, which, again, is going to impact this debt and deficit number.

This is yield curve flattening. In every instance over the last 70 years, within 10 months of the yield curve flattening, there has been a recession. Ours happens to be flattening right now.

Finally, I would make this point in these couple of slides that I wanted to show, which is that the unemployment rates are bottoming out right now. In every instance over the last, again, 70 years, when that has occurred, there has been a recession within 9 months.

There are a lot of other indicators for a different night that I would like to

walk through in terms of walking through why, again, the economic challenges that are before us are, again, not in our grandkids' time, not in our kids' time, but in our time, which makes spending restraint that much more important.

I have taken up more than my share of time for my dear colleague from Oklahoma, and I don't want to burn through the entirety of his time, so I thank the gentleman from Oklahoma profusely for allowing me to walk through a couple of slides this evening.

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

Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for his work on this bill. I thank the gentlewoman from Nevada for her work on this bill. It is a bipartisan bill because it makes commonsense. So whether it is DeFazio or Blumenauer or Duffy--go down the list of different people who have worked on it--they have worked on something that makes eminent commonsense, and I want to thank them for their efforts.

The saying is: If it ain't broke, don't fix it.

But the corollary to that is: If it is broken, fix it.

What we have just heard are any number of different conversations about the degree to which the buyout program is not just a little bit broken but a whole lot broken.

First off, just at an individual level, it captures people in a hamster wheel that they can never get out of. If you look at the average buyout time, it is about 5 years. In that 5-year time period, people are stuck there waiting and waiting and waiting as their house, in many cases, refloods.

I have been to Shadowmoss in the West Ashley section of Charleston. I remember going in there after a flood. Those people who had a second story had carried stuff up to the second story. Those who didn't were just dealing with the flooding as it occurred on the first floor. But they had been repeatedly flooded.

So at an individual level, this makes sense for the remedy that it offers an individual, so they are not stuck in a house that is repeatedly flooding, as they are trapped in dealing with that.

It makes sense based on what Mother Nature is telling us.

My colleague from Nevada mentioned this notion of climate change. I don't know exactly what is going on, but I know that in Charleston, South Carolina, if you compare the 1950s with the present day, there is 10 times more flooding in what they call king tides, and it has become regular. Something is going on out there that says this buyout program needs to be adjusted, and it needs to be adjusted now.

The final point I would make is that this makes, as has been registered thus far, a whole lot of sense for the taxpayer, because if you look at the numbers, again, 30,000 homes in America have been flooded five or more times with substantial consequence to the taxpayer. We are talking about $5.5 billion being spent by the taxpayer in rebuilding and repairing. Destroy and repair is the term my colleague from Nevada used. The destroy-and-repair, destroy-and-repair cycle is destructive for the taxpayer.

It is for that reason that everybody from the State floodplain managers to the National Association of Realtors to the Nature Conservancy has supported this measure. I cannot endorse it enough, and I thank the gentleman for his work on it.