Floor Statements

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

The motion was agreed to; accordingly (at 8 o'clock and 20 minutes p.m.), under its previous order, the House adjourned until tomorrow, Thursday, April 14, 2011, at 10 a.m. for morning-hour debate.

Mr. Speaker, this past week, I had the opportunity to read a book called ``Lone Survivor,'' a tale about four Navy SEALs that were inserted into Afghanistan territory, Lieutenant Mike Murphy, Petty Officer Matthew Axelson, Petty Officer Danny Dietz, and Marcus Luttrell. Marcus Luttrell, the lone survivor, writes the book and says, ``If they built a mountain as high as the Empire State Building for Lieutenant Murphy, it would not be high enough.''

These four young men--physical specimens, men of valor, men of courage--were inserted into the dark on top of an Afghanistan mountain. Shortly after arrival, daylight hit. Three goat herders came upon them. They easily subdued them. Then the choice was to kill--if they represented a clear and present danger--or to let them go. One voted to abstain. There was a tie vote between the other two. Finally, Marcus Luttrell voted to let them go. He knew what the consequences would be. Twenty minutes later, the Taliban that they were after, over 100 came rushing over the top of the mountain firing their AK-47s and RPGs.

The four young SEALs moved to the back of the precipice. They were forced back by the fire and finally jumped off the edge of the mountain, 200 to 300 yards, the equivalent of three football fields straight down.

Lieutenant Mike Murphy had already been shot through the stomach. They were facing odds of 35 to 1, at least. They were worried about being tried for murder in this country because of their actions. They fell back off the mountain doing back flips headlong. Enemies swarmed after them. They were pushing through trees, grabbing limbs, trying to stop. Danny Dietz is shot. No SEAL is ever left behind. Mikey, bleeding out of his stomach, and Marcus move into the open and drag Danny back to cover. The enemy keeps closing in.

They are forced back a second time to another precipice and jump off a sheer cliff, the equivalent of four stories, straight down. Danny was shot again in the lower back. It blew out his stomach. He was still firing. Grenades are now pouring in on them. The Taliban reinforcements are coming closer, yards away, 20, 30 away. Danny is shot again. This time he slumps over, drops his rifle. He props himself up miraculously and continues to fire.

They have fallen over 900 feet down the mountain now. They fall back to the edge again and go over the edge. The SEALs had taken a heavy toll. Eighty Taliban are rushing after them, firing. Danny is shot again, this time in the neck. He slumps over. No SEAL is left behind. Marcus Luttrell steps out into the hail of gunfire to rescue him, props him up, and starts pulling him back by the pack. Danny is still firing his weapon.

Again they have to go over the edge. This time, Lieutenant Murphy understands they've got one choice. He casually walks out with his severe wounds into the opening to where he can get his cell phone open and get a call for help. He sits there with thousands of rounds of AK- 47 rounds hitting near him. He makes a call and says, sir, taking heavy fire. Need help.

A round hits him in the back, blood spurts out his chest. Marcus Luttrell listens to him saying, ``Yes, sir.'' He drops his rifle, he picks up his cell phone from the ground and says, ``Yes, sir, I'll tell the men, sir.''

Mortally wounded, he sits there, rounds continuing to come in. Lieutenant Mike Murphy falls on the ground and says, ``Marcus, help me. Marcus, help me.'' Axelson, the third soldier to die that day, is dying on the other side. Miraculously, Marcus Luttrell survives.

We made this, yesterday, a discussion that was academic about supporting our troops. We have friends on the other side of the aisle saying it's a

trick. We have the President saying he would veto it immediately. And for us to not give the pay to men and women like this who are putting their life in harm's way causes great shame on this Nation.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

It is a pleasure to address the House tonight and to talk about the issues that are burning across the country. Before I get into the economic discussions, my colleagues from across the aisle, my good friends, have brought up many things that are worthy of discussion. Before I get into that, I'd like to talk a bit about our Constitution.

I think that, if we as a Republic are not aware of the importance of the Constitution, then we tend to diminish it; we tend to walk away from it; we tend to not give it the credibility that it deserves, and that is highly risky for every one of us but especially for those people with very little or no status.

The Constitution is basically the agreement, the contract, between our government and the people. The Constitution is the only thing that limits the power of government. It is the instrument by which we, the people, have our rights guaranteed to us, and any time we begin to diminish or to say that the Constitution is not valid, then we put at risk our own freedoms.

One of the ideas of the Constitution is that it was replacing something previous to it. The Articles of Confederation were what our Founding Fathers originally came up with. Very soon, they realized it had great, deep flaws. One of the flaws that they found is that interstate commerce, going from one State to the next, did not act like it was inside the same country at all. Instead, the commerce was stopped at one State line, taxed as it went through that State, stopped at the next State line, and products became so expensive that they could not move to market because of the taxation, because of the accumulated taxation from one State to the next.

The Founding Fathers recognized that to be a problem. Almost immediately, they convened the Constitutional Convention, and one of the prime articles that they were talking about in that Constitution was the Commerce Clause. They felt it was necessary to address that in order for the country to be prosperous, for it to move forward.

James Madison later wrote in his Federalist Paper No. 56 what were to be the objects of Federal legislation. He was addressing that question of ``where are we to go with legislation?'' He said that those which are of most importance and which seem to require local knowledge are commerce, taxation and the militia. So he was visualizing a very limited role for government, a very strict role for the Constitution. One of the elements of that Constitution was to be the commerce between States. In article I, section 8, clause 3 of the Constitution, it is delineating the powers of the government, and one of those was to regulate. Clause 3 states that the Congress shall have the power ``to regulate commerce with foreign nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian tribes.''

So that's the limit of the Commerce Clause. Early on, our Founding Fathers had actually had a very limited definition of that, but that Commerce Clause definition has been expanded over time so that, if you will Google ``commerce/U.S. law abuse,'' you will begin to see the ways that our government has begun to extend its reach over our lives by redefining what the Commerce Clause was actually about.

Now, one of the cases that has been mentioned is that some criminal with a gun somewhere was within a couple hundred feet of a school, and that's something that should not be tolerated and shouldn't be allowed; but the government's attacking of that used the Commerce Clause to go through a circuitous route to say that the presence of that guy with a gun in his pocket, while at or near a school, affected the education of the young people and that ending the lives of the young students would affect the commerce of the United States.

So we're trying to get a guy who can't carry a gun on school property, and we're going through this tortuous explanation that somewhere down the line it's going to affect commerce. Now, there are many reasons for not allowing someone to have a gun on school grounds, but to use that sort of convoluted reasoning is one of the threats that we all face, because if the government can go through convoluted reasoning on one thing, it can go through convoluted reasoning on anything.

As we research the Constitution and as we talk to people back in our States, we begin to realize that we in Congress have been extending the powers of the different clauses. We're using them in ways that were not designated initially. We're basically doing a rewrite of the Constitution.

I submitted from my office a bill, H.R. 346, the Health Care Choice Act of 2011. In that, we visualized that it would be good for people to be able to shop for insurance across State lines. New Mexico has significantly higher-priced insurance than does Texas. I live in Hobbs, New Mexico. That's 3 miles from the Texas border. It seemed practical that we would allow people to drive to the State line and buy insurance across that State line, but it is currently prohibited, so I put a bill in that said, simply, we can go across State lines. On the surface, that seems to be good and noble. It seems to fit the parameters of competition--and competition is always good for consumers--but in closer looking, we realized that what we are doing is the same extension with our bill that we are complaining about in others, saying that the Federal Government can declare that a State's right to regulate its own insurance is improper. So it is my full intent not to pursue our bill because, after looking, I, myself, believe that it does not fit the constitutional requirement that we have.

So that is one issue that I wanted to speak about today. Next, I'd like to talk about the bill that we just passed off the floor today, which funds our troops in the face of a government shutdown.

I served in Vietnam in 1971, -2 and -3. I was there at the choice of my government. I was not a volunteer. I drew a very low draft number; ended up going through flight training, and was flying combat missions in Vietnam at a time when our Nation began to choke off the funds to the troops in combat. I can remember that the missions here in the U.S. were being choked and starved for fuel so that training could not be accomplished in the full curriculum that was established before us. Instead, we were having to divert money to fund the troops overseas because there wasn't enough money going there.

I have a real problem with our using our soldiers as pawns in this particular case, so I voted against the last continuing resolution. I was one of 54 Republicans who voted ``no.'' Yet, in this case, this continuing resolution said: Let's take the troops off the table. Let's have this discussion about where we're going to fund and what we're going to fund, but let's not leave soldiers in combat while we're discussing how much we're going to fund or not fund the government. That, to me, is the only thing that we should be doing.

Of all the people we should not hold as political pawns, the troops who are facing very difficult circumstances in Afghanistan, Iraq, and now Libya should not be asked to put their lives at risk and face declining amounts of fuel, declining amounts of ammunition, body armor or whatever.

And so the suggestion today, even though I voted against the last continuing resolution, I gladly voted for this one because I do think our negotiations here should not include them, our troops, our soldiers in combat, young men and women who are there doing the same thing that I did in 1971, 1972 and 1973.

It's my belief that the comments from the other side from the Senate, from Senator Reid, who's the leader of the Senate, that they're going to summarily dismiss this bill, that they're not going to consider it, and from the White House that he wouldn't sign it if it got to his desk, is in my mind reflective of people who have not been in harm's way themselves facing declining funding. If we don't want the troops there, then get them out. But don't hold them hostage to this funding battle that we're having here on Capitol Hill.

So I voted for the continuing resolution today that would remove the troops, remove our soldiers from this discussion. I'm saddened to hear that the White House says they're not going to sign it, that they don't care. I'm sad to hear that our Senate says it does not care. If the government shuts down, then those young men and women--they're not going to be able to get out of the combat zone. It's not like we're going to withdraw them. But we're going to leave them there without being able to even pay their paycheck. And I think that's the wrong thing for us to do.

One of the things that I heard from our friends across the aisle just now was that there are many corrections for the problems that face us. And I keep this chart handy and I use it frequently to show the depth of the problems that we face.

This is basically the economic situation facing our country. We spend $3.5 trillion in the revenues to the government, that is, the accumulated taxes that each one of us pays, or $2.2 trillion. Now, your household could not

function like that. But there are greater and worse stories.

We're spending in excess of $1.3 trillion this year, $1.3 trillion more than we bring in, each year that we do that--I just draw this as a schematic where you show the deficit running over and it runs into the debt barrel. The accumulated debt of the Nation is $15 trillion, and if you think about if we could devote all of our revenues to paying off the debt in the debt barrel, it would take 7 years to do that.

But beyond the debt barrel, we now have debt that is running over. And you see that green sludge that we've depicted on our chart, running over the edge. It's reached the top of it. And that's debt that we really owe, but we are afraid to admit to the American people. That's Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. Those three programs have an accumulated cost facing us of $202 trillion, but we don't include that in our debt calculations. If you look on any government Web site and ask about the debt, it will acknowledge the $15 trillion, but will not acknowledge the $202 trillion.

Now, if this were your family, and let's say that you made $50,000 a year, and you were believing that if I could devote the full $50,000 a year for a hundred years and not pay off my debt, you would think that it's time to reorganize what you're doing. That's the discussion that's going on in the country: should we or should we not take on significant reform of the government? Should we look and have a forensic audit of our government to consider what things we should do and what things we should not do?

Just the idea that we owe a hundred years' worth of total tax revenues to pay off one piece of what we had promised tells us that we're in a nonsustainable capacity.

Now, the chart in the upper right hand of the poster here is the alarming piece. We all remember when Ronald Reagan was President, he came up with an idea and he was the only one worldwide who described it. I remember at his funeral in the taped presentation by Margaret Thatcher, she said, Ronnie said he could collapse the Soviet Union's economy by escalating their expenditures for defense weapons. And he could get their cost of government so high that they could never pay it, and they would collapse.

So they began to spend more than they brought in, the accumulated debt began to weigh down on their economy, and they actually collapsed.

Now, the opponents of what we're doing, the opponents of reform, say that it's us, as Republicans, making up the charges. This chart says our economy is simply going to quit in 2038--exactly like the Soviet Union did. It's going to collapse for the same purpose, that we're spending far more than we're bringing in. We have an accumulated debt. We have an accumulated unrecognized or undiscussed debt that is $202 trillion, and our economy will cease to function. This is coming from the Office of Management and Budget Web site.

This is the White House. They're the ones saying that what we're doing is not sustainable.

Now, our friends on the other side of the aisle said that we could do something to cure Social Security, that is, we should pass along a tax increase to those people making above $106,000. It's interesting to hear that when our friends on the other side of the aisle had the House in their control, they had the Senate in their control with a majority that would not allow filibuster, and they had the White House, and they did not once bring up or pass a tax increase for Social Security.

I find it amazing that it's so simple now that they're not in charge for them to talk about it; and yet when they were in charge, they couldn't talk about it.

The reason that we're facing the problems that we are today with this continuing resolution is that our friends across the aisle did not last year pass a budget and did not pass the appropriating bills. And so they simply passed a continuing resolution and they could not get that passed through the end of this year. It was within their power to not have this discussion at all on a continuing resolution. All they had to do was fund the government through September 30 and everything would have been fine. We would have had no cause to change anything.

It's because they passed a bill that would only fund the government through March, through the early part of March, that we're in this situation. So I'm curious while they say that the solutions are so easy, that they're so necessary, that they didn't find it necessary before December 31.

And, in fact, as they're talking about the need to increase taxes, out the other side of the mouth they actually decreased taxes. They stopped the tax increase that was going to be automatic for American citizens.

So my feeling is that I'm hearing discussions which are not sincere, which they had within their ability to change but did not.

The idea that we are making draconian cuts in our requests, the Republican request for this continuing resolution, you hear that word often, that they're draconian cuts. I always let people decide for themselves. The cuts that we're talking about, we spend $3.5 trillion. The Republicans have suggested cuts at a maximum of $61 billion. And so what would that decrease $3.5 trillion to? I think it's important to assess that in order to decide if the cuts are draconian.

Our cuts, $61 billion, take $3.5 trillion down to $3.44 trillion, and I always ask people is that draconian. And I've never heard one person in any town hall say that's draconian. They're in fact alarmed that that's all that either party is able or willing to do about the accumulated debt, about a deficit that is $1.3 trillion, about the inflation that is now rushing our way. And they're saying it is enough, stop it, do something about it.

Do a forensic audit of the entire government and begin to defund those things that don't make sense, the things that are no longer effective, the things that are duplicative. We've got duplicative agencies across the spectrum of government. Sometimes more than 100 agencies do the same thing. That's a hundred different overheads doing the same thing.

Now, if our government was a business, it would be broke; and the truth is that our government is broke and is going to be broke worse. And, in fact, we're all seeing the effects on our personal lives.

You hear many times that those oil companies are driving up the price of gasoline to $4 now. It's the evil oil companies. I believe that it's exactly opposite.

In order to fund the $1.3 trillion deficit that we don't have the revenues to produce, we find that our Federal Reserve is printing money. It is in the printing of money that you devalue the money that is in your pockets at the current moment. If we could create Monopoly money out of thin air, then it depreciates the value of what you have in your pocket.

If only oil were going up in price, you could maybe make the argument that it's the evil oil companies. Maybe you could say it's the instability in the Middle East. Maybe you could say whatever. But when we see the price of vegetables skyrocketing, when we see the price of gold skyrocketing, the price of silver has gone up almost 30 percent in the last month, 30 percent, and you would have to say, well, is there a greater demand for silver? Is there some new manufacturing program that is now using silver that didn't before? That is, did demand drive the price up? And you say, no, silver is not used for one thing today that it wasn't used for a month ago.

When you look at all the prices across the spectrum increasing, you have to acknowledge that the problem is not that companies are driving prices up but, instead, the value of the dollar is decreasing. That's because we printed almost $2.6 trillion in money last year. We created it out of thin air. That then depreciates the value of the currency that you have in your pocket, in your bank account. And it's that reason that we're seeing inflation begin to skyrocket. The price of gas, food, oil, everything is going up because the money in your pocket is worth less. That's going to continue as long as we do this.

Another problem with the country's economy when it spends more than it can bring in and when the accumulated debt is so high, our bankers begin to worry. The same as your bankers would worry if you were living this way personally, they would worry that you

could pay your house off. They would begin to call you in and speak with you. Our bankers for the United States Government have been primarily China, Japan, and U.S. companies buying our Treasury bills. That's the process by which we loan money to the U.S. Government.

But because of this accumulated position, the Chinese have begun to say, Wait, we're not going to buy so much of your Treasuries any more. We're going to decrease our holdings. So they have begun to sell Treasury bills rather than buy them. The Japanese have got their own problems, and so now they're not willing to buy much debt from us. This year, the largest single private buyer of U.S. Treasury bills said, No more. We think the risk is too great that we'll never get paid back. We think the risk is too great that this system is not going to work.

So this year, right now, our Federal Reserve, which is an arm of the government, which receives its money from the government, is, in fact, lending money back to the government. So we are giving money to the Federal Reserve. They are turning around and loaning it back to us with the other hand.

Now, if you were doing that, your banker would say you are having to counterfeit, you are creating value where there is no value, and I think I might call your note.

We are in the process of finding that the note is due. We see that the country has a course in front of it that simply discontinues our economy, that simply we fail exactly the way that the Soviet Union economy failed. And we're having discussions on the floor of the House about cutting this from 3.5 to 3.44. This 1.3 would go to 1.24. And we are saying that those cuts are draconian. I will tell you that we are not even approaching the cuts that need to be made.

In these programs alone, Medicare and Medicaid, we are told annually that the fraud--not the waste, but the fraud--is about 20 percent. Yet we can't find it within ourselves here to address that problem. We're afraid of what the ads might look like on TV if we actually began to take this on.

I watched ``60 Minutes'' a couple years ago, and the fraud was discussed by a guy from Florida. He is from Miami. He had been arrested for fraud. He was selling $400,000 worth of medical things to Medicare patients every month. He didn't actually have any inventory. He was just billing the government, and they were paying him $400,000 a month. No inventory. He had a storefront because he said, Oh, yeah, those guys from Medicare drive by, they see if you had a store. So I had a store. And he said, I put my name on the door. I didn't actually have any inventory. I was never open. I never actually did anything.

He said, I actually made it into a little game. He said, I charged the same woman every month for four prosthetics just to see. He said, I don't know if she needed any, or one, or none. He said, They never caught it. He said, I did it month after month. He said, So, yeah, you got me and you are going to put me in jail for 12 years. He said, At 400,000 a month, I can stay there awhile. He said, The main thing is I still have my mailing list, and I am going to rent my list to someone else while I am in jail, so I am going to make a lot of money in jail, too.

So even if he is going to jail, the fraud continues. That's 20 percent. That approaches $90 billion for one program and $60 billion for the other. We are talking about cutting a total of 61 up here.

Americans are fed up. They're afraid of the future. They're afraid of what they see being unleashed here. They're frightened that we are printing so much money to try to make the scheme work. And they're saying enough is enough.

Now, I believe that we can make cuts without cutting programs that are essential to people, and I do not think that we should do things which harm those neediest in society. But there are many, many programs where we can make the cuts and we should. The outcome if we don't is extreme. The outcome if we don't is the loss of the economic status of this Nation.

The Soviet Union broke into small pieces, small countries. You are seeing States right now nervous and anxious about the future of the Federal Government, so they are beginning to say, We are going to take that function on ourself. We are not going to trust that the Federal Government can fix this. They, themselves, are in terrible shape.

The biggest shame of all in this is that, in a time when we're struggling to balance our budget to just make ends meet for our Nation, the government is conducting the greatest war on our jobs. The government is raising taxes high enough to push companies out of this country.

President Obama said in his State of the Union message that we must address the fact that we are overtaxing corporations. He said we are one of two of the highest in the world. And since then, Japan has decreased, so we are left alone in that.

We are overregulated. We are regulating companies out of existence. Every time we kill a job through regulation--I would point to the timber industry, which has been killed by regulation. I would point to the jobs offshore where that rig had its problems this year off the coast of Louisiana. I think that BP should be accountable, and they are paying the bill for what happened, but we should not have killed those jobs. Because every job that we kill lowers the 2.2 and it puts people on welfare and unemployment, and the 3.5 increases.

We cannot cut enough spending to get 3.5 to 2.2. We, instead, must go and re-create the jobs that our government has systematically killed and rebuild our economy, rebuild the manufacturing base so that when we put people to work they begin to pay taxes and we begin to not have their cost in government. In that case, we're growing the economic base. We're growing the revenues of the government and, simultaneously, we're cutting the cost of the government.

The only thing that makes sense for us in rescuing our economy is for us to grow the job base. And at a time when we are alarmed at what we're seeing economically, then we find the government most hostile to new jobs.

Just recently, within the last week, we have been in discussions with the Fish and Wildlife Service, who, out of the blue, decided to list a lizard as endangered in our State. They cannot declare that it has different DNA from the lizards that are not being put on the list. In other words, it's just a variety of a lizard, not all lizards. They can't show a DNA difference. So over some small minute difference they are going to possibly shut down all of the oil and gas wells in southern New Mexico. That means more people on welfare, more people on unemployment. It means fewer people paying taxes.

Up in the northwest part of the State, the EPA recently put out a ruling that would cause three of the five generators in one generating station to shut down.

So at a time when we are facing rising utility costs, we are facing rolling blackouts. We are going to put three generators off-line. Since they are doing that they are going to require less coal, and now then 200 coal miners who live on the Navajo Indian reservation, making $60,000 a year, are going to no longer be working and paying taxes. They are going to be drawing unemployment and be on Medicaid, be on welfare, TANF, and food stamps.

One would say that our government will not and cannot kill industries, and yet they killed the entire timber industry. New Mexico used to have 20,000 jobs in timber, and today it has none because of the spotted owl, a regulation that could have been done differently but instead was used to stop all the logging in every forest in New Mexico.

We believe that's wrong. We believe that we can keep the species from going extinct and create the logging jobs again. So we have submitted a bill that would do that.

I would draw our attention also to the fact that 27,000 farmers in the San Joaquin Valley in California were put out of work because of a 2-inch minnow that could have been kept alive in holding ponds and put over in the river. But an extreme decision said that it's either the jobs or the minnow, and they chose the minnow.

We are putting our economic system at risk by systematically killing industries and jobs in this country, and that's the reason you have the frustration that is expressing itself in tea parties across the Nation taking to the

streets and saying our government is too strong, it's too powerful, it's time for us to live within the restraints of the Constitution.

So as I wrap up here tonight, we again talk about the need for the Constitution to limit the government, to limit the government's ability to come in and affect your freedoms and your life.

This country has been, in the past, the destination for anyone who wanted freedom to build their dreams here. They could come and do it. We are beginning to choke off the ability for even our own citizens to find their dreams and make them come true here. We are doing it one business, one industry at a time through taxation, through regulation, but more we are doing it through the unstable currency that we are creating through the printing of money.

It is time for us to get our fiscal house in order. It is time to recognize that the future is at risk, according to the OMB and the CBO both. If we don't act now, then we will not have an economic future any stronger than the Soviet Union.

It's my hope that we will begin to act as Americans today, not as Republicans or Democrats, to look at the challenges that we face, to take them on and to address them in ways that the American people say ``yes.'' That is an appropriate action; that is a correct action.

It's my sincere belief that our best days are ahead of us because I believe the American people are going to insist that we take care of the economic mess that we, that we in Congress, have created over the last 70 and 80 years. We can't make promises that we can't keep with money that we don't have. We must correct it.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

I rise today to address the House on issues that all of us may not be paying attention to but that all of us should feel are extraordinarily important. We have at this time in our Nation's history eased into constitutional concerns for our future. Those constitutional concerns arise in many different areas.

For instance, you might not be aware of it, but there is a policy to establish different things which Congress is supposed to establish. Yet, right now, agencies are taking over those responsibilities, agencies that are taking away the roles and the rights of this Congress. What that means to our citizens who vote is that they will not have a voice any longer in the policies of the United States. If they don't have access to unelected bureaucrats, they are not able to effect policy that comes from agencies because they can't elect or unelect those people. In the House of Representatives and the Senate, we are surrendering that capability to pass legislation.

A good example is that the Forest Service is closing roads in forests across the country. They are declaring these roadless rules that put off limits much of our Nation's forests. If you were to Google the words ``forest'' and ``roadless,'' you would find that all of the articles deal with killing and doing away with timber jobs. The people who are in the agencies have adopted an extreme point of view regarding jobs in this country. They do not want any timber to be harvested, so they declare what sounds to be a friendly policy of roadless rules, but the offshoot is that we have no timber industry. In New Mexico alone, which I represent, we used to have 20,000 jobs in the timber industry, and today we have zero.

As we look at the problems of this Nation, we have to understand that the great pressure economically that we face is that our revenues to the government have diminished. That's because people are out of work. They're no longer receiving income and wages, and they're not paying taxes on those. So we're now at a deficit in our government where we're spending more than we bring in. Simultaneously, we're killing jobs in the forests.

You could say, Well, we like the wilderness. We like roadless rules. Our government has a process by which this body and the Senate are supposed to declare the wilderness areas. Now, instead, the head of the Forest Service can actually just declare that those areas are going to be roadless. They are then made into de facto wildernesses, which shut down jobs. Even more, they shut down near access.

Recently, the Forest Service decided they would simply declare 95 percent of the Gila National Forest off limits because they're closing the roads. If you aren't able to backpack in 35 miles, then you probably will never see parts of this forest. When the law was passed, the forests were created for ``our enjoyment''--those are the words-- and then it was also to use the resources in the forests. So with an agency that is allowed now to establish these rules without congressional oversight, you would say, Aha, that's a constitutional thing that we should be a little bit concerned about.

Simultaneous with that particular endeavor, there has then come along the wildlands. That's a policy just recently announced by Secretary Salazar. Secretary Salazar has created the wildlands policy that allows him to create a de facto wilderness in BLM lands. BLM lands are a source of great production of oil and gas. So for our voters, for the constituents, for the citizens of this country, they are seeing their gas prices now climb to $4, and we are limiting access to lands where that price could be diminished and lowered. We have an agency that is killing the jobs and putting off limits the drilling for oil and gas on American soil.

I saw the President of the United States just recently travel to Brazil and encourage the oil and gas company there that is creating offshore jobs. While he is encouraging the leaders of Brazil to develop their offshore production, he is killing offshore production here. There is a disconnect that is causing great problems in our country. Those great problems in the country are basically this:

Our Nation is faced with a $3.5 trillion budget, and we are bringing in $2.2 trillion. Now, you cannot live that way in your home. You cannot live with this kind of disparity in your home budget, and neither can the Federal Government. It doesn't work. It's not going to work. We are having to borrow the money. When we run a deficit--and you can do the math here--of 3.5 trillion spending and 2.2 revenue, and those are taxes paid by citizens and by corporations--that gives us a deficit of $1.3 trillion. As that deficit then is accumulated and as it goes into our debt barrel, we owe $15 trillion worth of debt. That's the black barrel you can see there.

Since our Nation's inception, since George Washington, we've accumulated $15 trillion in debt. You can see the green sludge running over the barrel because we have actually more debt than we're willing to count in Washington, so we absolutely just quit counting at $15 trillion. Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid are the green sludge that has poured over the sludge of the barrel. We don't declare it as debt anymore. We are going to pay it; we owe it; we've made promises about it, so we just don't talk about it. It's so uncomfortable and it's so large. That's $202 trillion we owe. We call that now the ``fiscal gap.'' That's the difference between what we're bringing in and what we owe, $202 trillion. That's 100 years' worth of revenue. That's 100 years to pay off what we have made promises for.

The U.S. Government is making promises for things that it cannot do. It is paying out money that it does not have, and it's doing it all on credit. The credit, itself, would be alarming enough except now there is a small wrinkle that's developing here. If you were running this sort of deficit and debt in your home, your banker would come to you and knock on the door and say, We need to visit. This is not sustainable. It's not workable.

Our banker is called China and Japan. They buy Treasury bills. Those Treasury bills are the way that our government borrows money to fund this deficit. As you have seen with the recent problems in Japan, Japan will not be buying Treasury bills from us anytime in the near future.

Also, China twice in the last year has knocked on the door and said, We really are alarmed at what you're doing here. We're alarmed at this situation. We're alarmed that you're taking on more debt than you can pay out ever--ever--and we're afraid that your currency is not going to sustain itself. So when the Premier of China recently visited the White House about 3 weeks ago, you might have heard him say--maybe you missed it--that they're concerned about the currency. Since they're concerned about the currency, they do what your banker would do to you. They simply say, We're not going to lend you any more money. We're not going to do this anymore.

Now, then, we're in real trouble. But our government again, working outside the Constitution, is printing money to make up the difference for what we can't borrow overseas. So the Federal Reserve is in the process of buying the debt for the U.S. We here in Washington give the Federal Reserve money, and then they turn around and they lend the money back on this hand. Now, that would be cool if you could do it for long, and we all dream of the situation where we have an unlimited supply of money coming to us where we can lend it here and borrow it here, and that is what we are doing to ourselves.

This entire sequence, then, is made complete if you look at the chart in the upper right-hand corner, and we see that the whole game fails. Just as the Soviet Union collapsed economically, President Reagan viewed that if he could cause them to spend more than they brought in, he could collapse their

economy. President Reagan assisted and helped, with the rest of the world, in the collapsing of the Soviet economy and the ultimate collapse of that entire country, the breakup of the Soviet Union.

And so now, then, we are doing it to ourselves. We are making those promises that we cannot keep. We're killing jobs that should not be killed on behalf of roadless rules and on wilderness, and we are accomplishing the funding of a government by the Federal Reserve which has basically no oversight by Congress. So you, as citizens and taxpayers, contemplate what that means for you.

When the government prints money, it begins to devalue the currency that you have in your pocket. If you have $100 in your pocket and the government prints $2.6 trillion, let's say, then the money in your pocket becomes worthless. That is: We have not created any more wealth in the country; all we created is more paper money. It's like in the Monopoly games when you suddenly start getting more and more properties, you know that is Monopoly. Well, this has become Monopoly money that our government is doing here.

You will notice, if you're watching, that the price of food is going up both in this Nation and worldwide. In fact, many of the disruptions in other countries--Egypt, Libya, other countries in Africa--those disruptions were caused by the shortages of food, and people were suddenly finding that the cost of food was outside their reach. All of us are going to demonstrate in the streets when we are not able to feed our kids, and that's what is happening there. The price of food is escalating because they're doing the same thing. They're living on borrowed money. They're living on money that no longer is available, and so they begin to print it. You're seeing the price of gasoline rise to $4 a gallon. It's not because gasoline is worth more to you today than yesterday. It's that the dollars in your pocket are worth less.

Vegetables to you have no greater value today than yesterday. It's that the dollars in your pocket have less value, so it takes more of them to buy the food. The price of gold and silver are going up, skyrocketing. That's not because silver is used for any more manufacturing today than last week or the week before. It's because the dollars in your pocket have become worth less because we're doing this, because we're spending almost twice what we make, because we have a deficit each year of over $1 trillion. It's going into an accumulated debt that we owe long term, and to solve the problem our government is printing money.

Now, you could object to it, but you can't object to anyone that listens, which takes us right back to the Constitution. The Constitution is very clear on who should create the money and the value of money. The Congress ceded that authority away, and when it ceded that authority away, they gave away the responsibility, then we have no control over it. There is no process by which I can ask Mr. Bernanke, Please, don't keep buying this debt.

This is taking away savings accounts for our seniors. This is taking away the ability for families to make ends meet. This printing of money is sustaining a problem that is not sustainable, and it's making believe that we can make it work and just passing the buck down the road one more week, one more month, one more year.

The real sadness is that if we begin to do the things that are within our reach, if we simply begin to allow the cutting of timber--and I do not diminish the need to protect our environment one bit. I don't think we should clear-cut. I don't think that the spotted owl should be allowed to go extinct, but I do believe that we should create jobs and simultaneously protect our environment and simultaneously protect the species.

It's a false choice that we've been given the last 30 or 40 years that says you've got to give up the jobs in order to protect the species. That's management of our entire country for a single species. I think that's a mistake. That mistake is playing out here as we export jobs overseas that traditionally would have been here in this country. Oil and gas production is one. Timber production is another. If you read the quote above me, Daniel Webster, on the wall above us said, ``Let us develop the resources of our land.'' That's a quote that is here on the wall of this House. They are visualizing, in an earlier period in our history, that our great resources are there to be developed, and that's what will make us jobs. That's what will make us be able to have homes, be able to move into new forms of transportation.

Whatever this country has done has been available because we had jobs and we had economic status in the country. And yet some believe that that economy should be diminished and given away around the world. I don't believe that we should average our standard of living down to the rest of the world. I believe that we should average the rest of the world's standard of living up toward ours.

But if we were simply to create jobs, then a magic thing happens-- it's not magic at all. But every person that comes off of unemployment does not receive these government checks; instead, they're down here making a wage and paying taxes. So every time we hire one more person incrementally, we decrease the amount that our government is spending, and we increase the amount that our government is taking in. So employment, the creation of jobs, is not sort of a random possibility for us. It is an absolute necessity if we're to avoid this breakup of our economy that's projected down the road because of the way that we're living now.

The Constitution is the agreement between the people and the government. Our Founding Fathers came from Europe where they were living under monarchies. Our Founding Fathers came from Europe where they had seen the excesses. They had seen the monarchies rule every single aspect of their lives. When they got to this country, they were fearful of a government that was too strong, so they visualized this contract called our Constitution between the people and the government. The purpose of that contract was to keep the government in check, to keep the government's powers limited and small and to increase the powers of the individual that gave us the liberties that we have so well trumpeted and used as a guiding light for the rest of the world.

Liberty and freedom are the great assets of this country. It's not our wealth. It's not the houses that we live in. It's the ability to choose for ourselves. That is what our Founding Fathers wanted to protect in this contract called the Constitution, and that is what right now in Washington agencies are walking past that Constitution as if it has no meaning. When it has no meaning, the individual, the voter, the person who just goes to work every day begins to have less and less rights and the government begins to take more and more rights away from them.

We see an alarming case in the issue of Libya. Now, I don't support Colonel Qadhafi at all in his reign, in his service, but I do wonder about a nation that will step aside from the rule of law and take the fight to Libya.

We have, in this country, an act called the War Powers Act, which describes circumstances that say there are issues when a President might be able to want to commit troops. But our Constitution doesn't quite give him the right without congressional approval, but we're going to allow it in certain instances and then he can come back to Congress for approval.

Just last week, we heard the administration, Secretary Clinton came and addressed Members of this body, and Secretary Clinton said that they had fully complied with the War Powers Act. Now, that's untrue because there are three very definite requirements for the War Powers Act, and we're not facing any of those. There were no U.S. soldiers that were attacked.

The President said, with all respect, that this country is different. Well, this country is different because we have a rule of law and we have a Constitution, and we abide by it and we transport freedom. And when we begin to walk away from that freedom, then we walk away from the essence of the country.

So he committed troops from the U.S. into actions in Libya with no clear and apparent reason, with no constitutional basis for doing it, and even the rule of law was simply ignored.

If they were using the War Powers agreement, which Secretary Clinton

said that they were, in order to justify this action, then the War Powers Act actually says that they should come to Congress within 60 to 90 days, 60 days under one circumstance, but we could extend it for another 30. She said they have no intention of coming for a 60-day authority, that they are well within their rights to accomplish the actions.

So by itself, it would be alarming, but when you put it into context of agencies who are willing to create de facto wilderness and the roadless rules of our forests, the agencies that are willing to say we are going to create wildlands, that is de facto wilderness, without congressional approval in the BLM, and now we're going to go to war without complying with the Constitution or with the laws that are on the books of the land, now then that should be an alarming trend no matter which party you're in. Now, then, this is about America and that essential agreement between the people and the government called the Constitution.

The rule of law is what differentiates this country from other countries. The rule of law is what protects the rights of citizens. The rule of law is the essence of what made this Nation great because the government can not come in and take private property from individual citizens. They can't just go out on their own and begin to make rules. And yet that's what we're finding is happening at an alarming trend right now.

The downside to all of that is economic. You can say, Well, I'm not much interested in all of that constitutional stuff and the Founding Fathers. That might be possible. But you cannot ignore what is going on in the personal lives of individuals right now struggling with the economic situation that is cast on them by decades of spending in Washington that is beyond our ability to sustain.

If we're to look at this debt, this $15 trillion in the barrel, it's instructive for us to consider how that debt originated. You could take the time from George Washington up to President Bush and we accumulated, you can say that we basically accrued about a $5 trillion debt in that whole period of time from George Washington up until President Bush, II was sworn in.

President Bush, II, with the war in Afghanistan and Iraq and Katrina and those problems, ran up about $5 trillion in his time in office. So almost the equivalent in 8 years to what we had done from the founding of the country. But then in the 2\1/2\ years since President Obama came in, we've now bumped it up almost another $5 trillion.

So we see that this filling of the debt barrel is now accumulating at a much more rapid pace, which simply means that our economy is going to fail at a period closer to us, not one further away from us.

And all the while, Americans are saying, How does the Constitution affect this? The Constitution affects that because we're seeing different industries simply sent to other countries because it's too hard to do business in this country anymore. We make it against the law. We make the regulations too high. We make the circumstances too difficult. People would say, Now, in what ways do we make the circumstances too difficult?

One way that we should be creating jobs right now would be the medical field. Baby boomers are moving to retirement. Retirement is a very expensive age in anyone's life. And retirees are very expensive for governments to attend to. So baby boomers are moving to that area very quickly. They should be demanding tremendous amounts of medical service. And yet we find that those jobs that should be created in the medical field are frozen in place, unable to move forward because of uncertainty. And so rational people would say, What uncertainty?

That then leads us to another chart that shows the ability of government to make life more complex.

This is the medical system now since the passage of ObamaCare, since the passage of that 2,200-page bill. It created new agencies, new institutions. You can consider yourself at one end of the chart and your physician at the other end. And you have to make your way through and touch the appropriate agencies before you get to see your doctor.

Now, this is the reason this chart would cause anyone to sink back in horror and say, That's not what I wanted. I just wanted a checkup to see if I'm okay with my local doctor. It is this chart that has been creating uncertainty in the minds of the health care field, and they're saying, We're not sure how this chart affects us so we're simply not going to get into that new line of work. We're not going to expand and put money into research to create those jobs in the medical field because we have to go through so many pieces of this equation, and we are just going to let itself sort itself out. This is always the problem with government. Government will build in processes that just simply can't be overcome.

And so this country, which has been the source of so many good medical inventions and medical jobs, this country that has been outsourced now is being burdened down with regulatory agencies that simply say we're going to impose this in your life, and companies are saying okay, we're just going to wait it out.

Other companies are saying we're going to have to lay off other people. We've got 9\1/2\ percent unemployment--8 percent, whatever it is today. We've got unemployment, we need people to work, we're running at a deficit because we're spending more than we're bringing in. The last thing we need to do is put more people on welfare and unemployment and put them out of a job. And yet people in New Mexico, I'm hearing employers say, ``Well, we've got to cut employees to get down below the caps required in this bill.'' So people are voluntarily terminating employees in order to comply with some aspect of this bill that says if you have more than this, then you have to jump through different hoops.

So we, in many ways, our government, again, is creating the distress. It is man-created distress. It's government-created distress that is causing this 3.5 and 2.2.

This is the root of the problems that we face economically.

As our government is then spending more than it brings in, as it kills jobs so that we are bringing in even less and driving more people to unemployment and to welfare, the disparity grows greater, the government has to print more money, the money in your pocket becomes worth less, the uncertainty in the Nation increases, and uncertainty again causes business owners to say, ``I don't believe I'll create jobs right now. I'm afraid they're going to go up on my taxes to try to make this balance.

When the government creates that mood on the part of employers, then they simply stop the creation of jobs, and that's what we're finding going on.

You would say, ``Well, uncertainty is not really that big of a deal for a company.'' And I would simply ask you, do you put money in the stock market when you aren't pretty certain you're going to get a return? If you think it is just a roll of the dice to put your savings into the stock market, you would do that very hesitatingly. Well, companies are doing the same thing. They don't want to pour money into a venture and then have something regulated to end on them, to have the taxes go up, to have it made to where they can't get their money back. So companies are making the same decision that you would make personally.

Now, recently the President complained about 6 weeks ago about companies hoarding cash. He said it as an accusation. It is a true thing that companies have tremendous amounts of cash right now, but they're afraid because of the regulatory environment, they're afraid because of the prospect of taxes, they're afraid because of the prospect of new regulations to put money into industries. And so therefore jobs are being frozen again by the actions of our government.

Two things would cause this situation to begin to balance.

Number one is not raising the taxes, but lowering the taxes. There is a truism that says when you increase taxes you kill jobs, and when you decrease taxes you create jobs. So it is counterintuitive that if we want to increase the 2.2 and lower the 3.5, then we need to lower taxes to where there is more certainty that the people can say, ah, I will invest in that. I am pretty sure I have got enough money for next year's tax bill. I'm sure that I have got

enough money in the bank to pay for this new equipment to hire a new person. On the other side, then, the regulations have to match also.

A friend of mine in Artesia, New Mexico, Bill Sweatt, recently said to a group that was asking what does it take to create a job; there is all this speculation in Washington what does it take to create a job if we want to increase the 2.2. Mr. Sweatt says, I will tell you what it takes to create a job. He has a company that runs bulldozers. He said it takes $340,000 for me to create a job. That's what new bulldozers cost. He said, by the way, I have to have a pickup truck because they just frown on me driving the bulldozer down through the main streets of Artesia to get to the location, so I actually have to leave it out there on a truck and drive a pickup through town. So he said, basically $400,000, I can put a new employee on.

As we tax away money from businesses, it takes longer to accumulate the $340,000. It takes longer for jobs to be created when we tax that money away. So our tax policy will cause Mr. Sweatt not to hire a new worker as soon as he would otherwise. That causes our economy to be stagnant. That's happening to businesses across the country.

But then the bigger thing is if the government passes, say, a new regulatory framework that is similar to this, the regulatory framework again alarms him, and he says, I can't make my way through that government regulation. I believe I am just not going to do it. Those two aspects are creating the great imbalance here between jobs and between our economy. Those can be balanced and should be for the sake of our future.

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

Mr. Chairman, I have an amendment at the desk.

Mr. Chairman, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

This amendment is at the request of the local county, Dona Ana County, in New Mexico. They have land which alternates with a private investor. They are simply asking that 7.35 acres be given to them and they would in turn give up 8.41 acres to this private company. Then the private company would also give a road to the airport that they are desiring.

This land swap is by the mutual agreement of all parties concerned. The FAA has no objections to the transaction. The appraised value is somewhat different, but the developing group is offering to pay for a road in an equal amount to where the two amounts would be equal, so there is no effective difference.

I would confirm to the chairman of the committee that this is my last amendment also, if that is what it takes to get people to agree to it.

I yield to the gentleman from Wisconsin.

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

Since there is no money actually changing hands, there is not any value changing hands, it appears that the rule that the gentleman refers to is not invoked.

I am reading clause 9, section (e), which says for purposes of this clause, the term congressional earmark means a provision in the report language included primarily at the request of a Member providing, authorizing, recommending a specific amount of discretionary budget authority, which this does not do, credit authority, which this does not do, or other spending authority, which this does not do, for a contract, which this does not do, a loan, which this does not do, loan guarantee, which this does not do, grant, which this does not do, loan authority, which this does not do, or other expenditure with or to an entity or targeted to a specific State, locality or congressional district.

The amounts that are involved are equivalent. There is no difference. So I think that's just clearing language in the bill. It's not like any value is moving either direction or the other. That has been ascertained by the appraisals. There is an equivalent difference in land but then the company that is giving up land at the request of the local county has agreed to pave a road on the airport for the county that would make up the difference. And that value has been ascertained also to be in the amount of about $143,830 in order to make the two transactions equivalent.

In our view, there is no value lost or gained in either direction

No. There's no loss to the county--no loss or no gain to the county. There are 7 acres that are in triangular shapes up against the county. They're not able to do anything with the airport on that side. They're simply asking that these triangular shapes be exchanged out so that there is a strip of land that they can develop.

There is no difference in value to either the county or to the company.

I appreciate the points that the ranking member has brought up. Of course, I share his concern in deep disregard for earmarks. We would never do anything which either compromised his values concerning earmarks, nor mine. We feel like the entire transaction is transparent. It's one which was requested by the local county at the expense of the local company. And so, to me, the Rules Committee has said that this amendment would be made in order; that it did not offend any provision of the rules of this House, nor did it offend any of the germaneness regarding the underlying bill. So we gladly pursue this, and would request a ``yes'' vote.

I yield back the balance of my time.

Will the gentleman yield?

Thank you.

I was going to claim time in opposition and then speak in favor of the amendment, but we can get this wrapped up a lot quicker if we do it this way.

Basically, I am cosponsoring the amendment with the gentleman. In the West the problem is greater, more extensive than the rest of the country, but we've got small parcels of land around everywhere that are owned by the government. And this is a practical, commonsense measure which would help distribute those parcels of land. It requires that the value be accorded to the government, to whatever owning agency there is. You have to receive fair market value for it, but it gets it out of the government's hands and into the hands of either an entity that will develop the land or hold it. So it's a commonsense amendment that makes for smoother operations downstream, and I would gladly support the amendment and urge a ``yes'' vote for the Matheson-Pearce amendment.

Madam Speaker, I appreciate the opportunity to address the assembled body tonight.

As one of the few combat veterans in the U.S. Congress, I rise to express deep concerns about what we are doing in Libya at this moment.

Madam Speaker, we have committed the U.S. taxpayers and we've committed U.S. troops to engagements that have extended almost a decade. Having been involved in one of those long overseas engagements before in Vietnam, I know the strain that these actions place on our families and on our young soldiers, and I don't think that the administration has adequately thought out what we are doing and what we're asking the taxpayers of this country to do and the young people of this country to do, engaging in yet a third front with questionable ideas and questionable values at the heart of why we're engaging in the discussion.

I've been an ardent supporter of the war on terror. I believe that we're going to be committed to the war regardless if it is there in their back yard or in our back yard.

But I rise tonight to say that I'm adamantly opposed to extending our forces any further than what we've already extended them without asking our allies to provide their tax money and to put the lives of their young people on the line.

The entire world is benefiting from the sacrifices that this country is making to establish order and to establish some modicum of peace in regions that are not given naturally to such. And since the world benefits, then the world has a responsibility. So I think the President should be calling on our allies to fund the NATO mission and to provide the people, the personnel, and the weapons.

And, yet, as I look at a breakdown of the missions that have been flown and fought so far, I find a dominance of U.S. cost in lives, in hours, monetary resources and in morale.

As a veteran, I find it disturbing that we're in two wars and now intervening in a third with no end in sight. Our mission is unclear.

Having served in Vietnam at a time when our Nation was beginning to withdraw support for that war, and remembering being there in those countries when funding was made short and gasoline and fuel was taken from stateside missions in order to fly combat missions, I remember with dismay a Nation that was not fully supporting the combat troops.

I find these actions to be questionable on behalf of our Commander in Chief as it regards Libya. Despite his speech last night, President Obama simply raised more questions. He explained that America is different. I'm not certain of exactly how that rationale applies to putting young men and women in harm's way, but I don't think it is a deep enough explanation.

What is the time frame? The President has yet to clarify. Are we there to enforce a no-fly zone? Then let our friends and neighbors in the U.N., the United Nations, enforce the no-fly zone.

If we're there to enforce a no-fly zone, why then are we bombing ground troops? They don't affect the no-fly zone.

If the goal is to protect civilians, why did Secretary Clinton meet with the rebel leader in London? Why is Secretary Clinton calling for Mr. Qadhafi to step down if we're only enforcing the no-fly zone and protecting civilians?

This war is going to go back and forth, and already you see our leaders wondering if we can be out by the end of the year. And I wonder if we can be out by the end of the decade.

Now, make no mistake about it: if Libya had done something to harm us, to put our troops in danger, I would be 100 percent supportive, but I question extending us and our troops to one more war zone.

Why are we fighting a war that Secretary of Defense Robert Gates said bears no strategic interest to the U.S. and does not jeopardize our national security?

Why are we working on the side of the rebels?

Their own commander has stated that al Qaeda members who fought our troops in Iraq are now fighting Mr. Qadhafi. In Libya we're working with the same people we're trying to kill in Afghanistan.

Not only that, but it looks like we're arming those same troops. And I worry that our armaments supplied to troops in Libya will show up in the fight against Americans in Afghanistan and Iraq.

As a combat veteran, I find these concerns to be deeply disappointing in an administration who, for nearly 2 weeks, could not point to whether NATO, the U.S., France or the United Kingdom was in charge. This is poor management, a management I saw during the Vietnam war, with little sense of purpose and always a confusion about exactly why we were there and how long we would stay.

Humanitarian missions are admirable. However, sending troops into combat with no apparent overarching mission is dangerous. Everyone in this room remembers Somalia in 1993.

Why are we singling out Libya? There's a war going on in the Ivory Coast right now. Saudi troops have cracked down on protesters in Bahrain in recent weeks, with civilian deaths reported. Not a whisper of American intervention there.

According to the Genocide Intervention Network, since 2009 almost 1 million people have been displaced in ongoing fighting in the Democratic Republic of the Congo; 5.6 million civilians are estimated killed since 1996. Are we going to intervene there?

Saddam Hussein killed hundreds of thousands of his own people using mustard gas and other weapons. The President was totally opposed, as a Senator, to that war, despite the fact that it had congressional authorization. And, yet, here he is leading us into this new conflict.

The President needs to consider the fact that the mission is unclear, despite his speech last night. He needs to realize that America cannot intervene in wars where we face no threat to our national security and have no strategic interest. He should listen to his Secretary of Defense.

As we engage in this yet third conflict, we're going to continue to put budget pressure on a budget that is straining beyond belief. In this country, the greatest threat that we face right now is a mounting national debt that is almost $15 trillion, almost the equivalent of our entire gross domestic product.

At the time when we're expending more resources and more dollars in a conflict that has to be yet determined as to its scope, purpose and length, we're straining our budget even further. And while we're conducting these outside forces to greater cost to our U.S. Government, we are conducting a war on the West in this country, in choking the West of jobs right now. So at a time when the cost to our government is increasing, we're choking down the tax resources by simply regulating and taxing jobs out of existence.

In the past 10 days, most of us were at home at work in our districts. I, like everyone else, made a lot of miles in the last 10 days. We drove almost 1,300 miles and did 20 and 30 and 40 events, meeting with people and listening to their concerns. And everywhere we heard the same concern: What are you doing about jobs?

And my sad report had to be that this government, instead of creating jobs, is, in fact, choking off jobs. This government is, in fact, making it impossible for employers to bring on new laborers to expand the workforce and create that sense of prosperity that this Nation has always had available to it.

And people would ask why. And they would also ask how, how's our government choking off jobs? They find it incredulous. They don't want to believe me when I say that in our speeches to begin with. How is our government choking off jobs?

So I use as an example the forest service. This Nation used to have a vibrant logging industry, a timber industry that employed hundreds of thousands. Just in New Mexico, a very small State, over 20,000 people made their living in the timber industry in New Mexico.

Today, no one makes their living in the timber industry in New Mexico. Over 20 mills have been idled. The woodcutters and the choppers no longer have work.

Our mountain communities that used to depend on logging now depend on tourism, which is a very distant second as it provides incomes for our families to live and pay their bills on.

Our government put an entire industry out of work in the 1970s with a regulation based around the spotted owl. The theory was that if we wanted to protect the owl, we had to limit all the activity in the forest; and so we simply killed the timber-cutting jobs in our national forests across the country, and nowhere did it hit harder than in New Mexico. Our government said you can no longer go into the forest and cuts trees because we are going to reserve the entire amount of land for the spotted owl, and an industry was killed overnight.

Right now, in New Mexico, the oil and gas industry hires about the same number of people that the timber industry used to hire. About 23,000 people now work for oil and gas. We provide energy for much of the country. And yet those jobs now are at risk because the Fish and Wildlife Service just recently announced that they are going to list a lizard as an endangered species.

Now, keep in mind that this lizard is seen everywhere. But when people ask me what is so significant about this lizard, I tell them, well, you just can't count the lizards out there. You have to stop them, raise their arm, and count the number of scales between the elbow and shoulder underneath their arm. And the endangered lizard has one less scale or one more scale, I'm not sure which, than the other lizards. And people are saying: Wait. Your government would kill our jobs over one scale under a lizard's arm, his front leg? And they are simply aghast that, with 9.5 percent unemployment, that our government would be undertaking such punitive ways of interpreting the Endangered Species Act.

Now, my belief is that we can keep the spotted owl alive in our forests and cut timber, and my belief is it will make healthier forests. And so we have introduced a bill which simply says, yes, we want to keep the spotted owl alive in sanctuaries. We will keep 1,000 acres here, 1,000 acres over here. But in the million acres in between we are going to allow logging for the first time in a couple of decades. For the first time, the mountain communities that used to thrive on timber cutting have the opportunity for jobs.

But even more than that, as we cut trees, New Mexico is a very arid climate, and what used to happen is that fires would burn the trees down to where there were only about 50 per acre. So we were broad savannah lands with our natural forests and scattered trees. You can visualize how many 50 per acre is. That would be widely spaced with grass in between. And when the rains would come, the water would soak in and recharge the aquifers, but also recharge the aquifers around our streams.

Since we have stopped cutting trees in our national forests, they now are crowded from 50 trees per acre to 2,500 trees per acre. And now the streams are running dry because the trees use up so much more water than the grasslands that were native to the region. Instead of percolating down, the water is now soaked up by the trees and transpired into the atmosphere, causing our communities to be running out of water, our rivers to be running dry, and irrigation that used to provide jobs to be gone, all in the name of the spotted owl.

Now, I believe that a reasonable society can protect the spotted owl and create jobs, and that's the purpose of my bill. But before we go and rescue an industry from the past, we have to fight the fight to keep American oil being produced here, because the listing of that lizard has the potential to shut down all of the oil and gas jobs in a three-county region and maybe even across the entire State. That is still unclear.

We have people beginning to show up in large numbers to demonstrate against a government that is becoming too insensitive, too concerned about the hypothetical and not concerned enough about people who are just struggling to make ends meet. We find citizens who are simply aghast that this government would be killing jobs at a time when our economy is struggling so bad. And at the very time that we are struggling to keep our industry alive from some nameless bureaucrat, we find our President going to South America to see what he can do to invigorate an oil industry there. My friends, this is a time for us to produce American jobs and American energy.

Now, I believe that we can produce energy and protect the species. I believe that we can produce energy and keep our environment clean. And I believe that we can produce American jobs while protecting species, the environment, workers. I believe that we can do it all, and I believe that Americans insist that we do it. They don't want to see the species go extinct, but neither do they want jobs to be shipped overseas in the name of some value they don't quite understand.

Now, the truth is that where we have stopped logging, the trees are too dense for the spotted owl now. The habitat, instead of getting better, has gotten worse. And right across the street in the Mescalero Indian reservation, where they can log at their own will and they have been logging, the spotted owl prefers that habitat because they need to sit on the branches, they jump off the trees, they get flying speed, and they are able to overtake the rodents or whatever it is they live off of.

And so the habitat we are trying to protect actually is simply not suitable now for the spotted owl and they are moving over next-door, and we have done this in the name of some science that has never been made clear to us and it is very similar to what is going on with the lizard. They are going to list some species that I suspect there is no DNA difference between the five-scaled lizard and the six-scaled lizard. I suspect that is a mutation rather than a DNA difference. I suspect that there is no science on it.

And so we joined with people in our district this week to begin to say publicly to the government: Enough is enough. You are making promises with our money that you can't keep. You are committing us to more wars. You are committing us to more social payments. You are committing the taxpayer to a higher burden. At the same time, you are causing dwindling taxation into the government coffers by killing our jobs, and people are saying it is enough.

We saw in the last election a turnout of incredible magnitude of people saying: The government is not listening, and we don't care about what the government is doing anymore. The frustration is deeper and deeper. And, frankly, I encourage that, because I believe that the only hope in turning back a government that is too strong, a government that does not care, a government that is willing to take jobs from its people, a government that is willing to commit our troops anywhere in the world in the name of whatever vague policy they have is a government that is out of control. This needs to return to be a government of the people, by the people, and for the people.

We have set up on our Web page places where you can go and make comment to the government. You can call our office here and make those comments, and we will relay those comments for you.

So understand that we are in a fight for the future of this Nation, in a fight for our economy, and the greatest enemy is the government itself. The government intervenes in ways that it has no constitutional authority. The government intervenes with increasing tax policies so that even our President said in his State of the Union message that we are too highly taxed in our corporations and we need to get that in control. Let our President get that in control. We will vote gladly for such tax decreases here on the floor of this House in order to ensure that jobs are created.

The greatest reason that our jobs are going overseas are two: taxation policy and regulation policy. Regulations like the spotted owl. Regulations like the listing of the lizard. Regulations like the choking down of our financial system by the regulators now who are going into banks and scaring them by threats of fines. We are choking our economy down in the name of safety and security and achieving neither.

The sad thing is that we could cure most of our economic ills if we simply grow the economy.

Actuarial tables tell us that if we had a 3.5 percent rate of growth, that our economic problems in the States and in this government begin to disappear. And you would ask, is 3.5 percent possible? Well, that is exactly the rate we have averaged for the last 75 years. But, today, because of our policies of overtaxation, overregulation, our unfriendliness to business in general, we find ourselves stuck at about a 1 to 1.5 percent rate of growth.

Thus, we are finding the pressure on Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. We are finding the pressure of the $15 trillion debt. We are finding the pressure of $1.5 trillion deficits. In order to meet those pressures, our Federal Reserve is beginning to print more and more money, so we are seeing prices skyrocket.

So at a time when jobs are scarce and people worry for the future, we are seeing the price of gasoline go up, the price of vegetables going up, the price of gold, silver, iron, everything is going up; not because their value has increased since last year or last month, but because the value of your dollar is decreasing because we are printing so many.

And even then we still are having increased pressure. We find the Japanese are not going to be able to lend us money. They typically were large buyers of our Treasury Bills, meaning they were loaning the government money. Not for a long time. China is beginning to decrease its holdings of Treasury Bills. And we are hearing these vague messages that our bankers, Chinese, Japanese, our own citizens, think our economy is out of control, our debt and our deficits are out of control, so they are saying no more, we are not going to lend you any more. That then drives the Federal Reserve to make up the difference by printing money.

That is an avenue that some of the worst economies in the world have pursued. In Argentina last year, Argentina had a rate of inflation of 1,500 percent. That means if you began the year with $1.5 million in the bank, at the end of that year you had about $100,000. At the end of next year it is going to be under $10,000. So in just 2 years, if you had a nest egg in retirement, it will become of no value.

That is the path that Argentina chose, and it is the path now that we are beginning to choose; endless deficits, endless debt, wars that bankrupt us with no reasonable explanation of why we are in those wars. It is that situation that the American taxpayer faces today. It is that situation that causes me to stand and say America has done enough, American soldiers have done enough, American taxpayers have done enough. Let our friends come to the table. Let our friends begin to shoulder their share of the burdens.

Meanwhile, let us begin to cut the spending here in Washington. We can cut many ways without cutting the actual outcomes to people. We have duplicate agencies. We have waste, we have fraud, we have abuse. Cut those, but, on the other hand, begin to grow our economy and create jobs in industries that used to be here, industries that would start up overnight.

These are not 10- and 20-year plans. These are ideas that can begin immediately. The people would begin to work in the forest immediately if we would let them. They would begin to drill wells again. Offshore we could get our deepwater platforms working once again. Those have been idled by a government that is too powerful and has shut down over 100,000 jobs offshore.

These are the reasons that we are having the economic difficulties that we do. And when we have difficulties, as the world's largest economy, the Germans said it best: When you sneeze, you--the U.S.-- sneeze economically, you give the rest of the world the flu.

If we will begin to set about creating American jobs, producing American energy, American timber, American manufactured goods up and down the economic spectrum, then we can cure not only our economy, but we can cure the world's economy. And I believe that we are going to do that. I believe that because the American people are beginning to stand and insist on it. Their insistence is patient, their insistence is respectful, but it is insistent nonetheless, and it has no waver and no quiver to it.

It says fix the problems. Come to this city of Washington and vote not like Republicans, not like Democrats, but like Americans. And when we begin to do that in this body, I believe that the American people will come together and support us in rekindling that greatness that lies within this country, that American exceptionalism that people for generations have come here to find, leaving everything behind, leaving families, a culture behind, leaving their own language behind, and they have come here for generations to find those words ``opportunity'' and ``hope'' which have been so deeply ingrained into the fabric of this Nation. And that is what I believe that we should be engaged in at this moment in this body.

Madam Speaker, I would yield back the balance of my time.

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

The motion was agreed to; accordingly (at 9 o'clock and 46 minutes p.m.), under its previous order, the House adjourned until tomorrow, Wednesday, March 30, 2011, at 10 a.m. for morning-hour debate.

Mr. Chairman, I rise today in support of H.R. 861, the Neighborhood Stabilization Program Termination Act. The program has been ill-fated from the start. It has been plagued with problems. We have given almost $7 billion into a program that has yet to work. HUD was slow in getting the money out the door. Poor reporting has hampered our ability to even measure what has been happening on the program.

Further, the NSP simply acts as a taxpayer bailout for risky lenders, servicers and real estate speculators who bet on the housing market and now can't sell their properties. It has become an even bigger example of those people who believe that the government is the solution to the problems. Government is not the solution to the problem; government is the problem.

We are spending $3.5 trillion in our annual government spending, and we are bringing in $2.2 trillion. Next year we are going to have a deficit of $1.6 trillion; and it is composed of programs exactly like this, programs that do no good, that don't really cause the market to cure itself, and instead taxpayers pay the bill for people who have been speculating and people who just want out.

I had a friend in the office today who talked about his situation with a house in Tucson where he got in at a higher price than it should have been. He was willing to settle for a lesser amount. He was willing to pay. But because the bank could go to the government and make up the difference, they did not have to negotiate with this individual homeowner. Instead, this program causes lenders to say, the taxpayer will make us whole and we are not going to take our losses.

The market will cure the problems we face if we allow the markets to work, but this government program does not allow the market to work. This Nation is dying for jobs, and it is government spending, government regulation and government taxation that are causing the jobs to be killed and to be sent out of this country.

If we will get our focus correct on lowering taxes, lowering the regulatory environment, especially to lenders who would be out lending now except they are afraid to because of the regulatory environment, we would begin to create jobs for the first time in a long time.

With 9 percent unemployment, it is time for us to cure the problems of the economy, to quit spending on wasteful programs, and to give this country a leg up on prosperity. That is the thing we are missing right now.

The hope of prosperity for the middle class is gone, and it is because of programs like this soaking the taxpayer and giving money to people who probably could do something different. It is not fixing up any neighborhood. I don't see the reports in any magazine or newspaper telling us of the flock of people moving to these rehabilitated neighborhoods.

With that, Mr. Chairman, I rise to express support for H.R. 861.

Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the opportunity to address the House this afternoon.

Mr. Speaker, there are many people who are wondering in the Nation exactly what it was we were doing up here a couple of weeks ago as we were talking about amendments to cut the budget, amendments to increase the budget. And for myself, I like to keep it in very narrow terms and like to get it as simple as possible.

So we went across the district last week, had town hall meetings trying to explain to people exactly the situation that we're facing here in the country. And I've got a chart here which is very instrumental in helping me to visualize what's going on. And basically, this chart is one which shows that we're spending $3.5 trillion at the current moment and we're taking in $2.2 trillion, and that begins to give the basic understanding of where we are.

Now, if a local family were in this position, they would be maybe spending $3,500 a month and bringing in $2,200 a month, and their banker would not be pleased with that. Their banker would say, well, we probably need to do better, especially if they were borrowing money every month. And we are borrowing money every month to work here. And so our government is just as stressed with the debt and with this imbalance in spending and imbalance in revenues as a family would be.

Now, our banker in this country is used to Americans saved and they bought Treasury bills. That's how we would finance our government. But Americans across the country basically don't save anymore, and so we have to find other people who will buy our Treasury bills. And that's the Chinese Government. So China is our borrower of record, our lender of record.

And so we would watch what the Chinese have said in the past couple of months, in the past couple of years, and a couple of times China has said, We're not going to buy any more of the Treasury bills from the United States Government. At one point they said, We'll buy South Korean treasury bills, meaning the South Korean Government was a better bet than the U.S. Government. And so our banker has been giving us signs that, We're concerned. We're concerned about the economic health of your country, because they see that we cannot long continue.

Now, for myself, I've gone ahead and done the mathematics that, if you are spending 3.5, you are bringing in 2.2, well, you are running a deficit of $1.3 trillion every year. Now, that's a deficit as long as it's unaccounted for, as long as it hasn't been spent. But the moment that the money spends, then it goes into the debt barrel, and that's the top small barrel. And then we have a debt of approximately $15 trillion. Might be a little bit less.

To put that in perspective, that debt barrel began to build in the early days of our history, and we accumulated up to $5 trillion worth of debt to the second President Bush, George W. Bush. And during his term, we increased that debt from 5 to basically 10. So, a very rapid escalation of debt accumulation during the second Bush years.

But then, under President Obama, then we have seen an acceleration even faster so that we have already added almost another $5 trillion in debt in 2\1/2\ years under President Obama, and we are on track to maybe add another 6 or 7, maybe 8 in the next 2 years. This 1.3 deficit for this coming year, that was last year. This coming year, that number becomes 1.6 trillion. So you can see that the gap between what we are bringing in and what we are spending is absolutely increasing rather than decreasing.

Now, to put this in a bigger perspective the last year of President Bush, the deficit was about $200 billion so. Instead of 1.3, it was about 0.2, if we round it off to 0.3. You could see that almost immediately under President Obama that we increased our deficit. That is, we increased these outlays by almost a trillion dollars so that our economic condition is worsening very rapidly.

Now, the unsettling pieces, I mean, if you look at the 15 trillion in the top debt barrel and then you look at the revenues that we are bringing in from the government, you say, well, we could pay off 7 or 8 years. If we weren't spending a thing, we could pay off for 7 or 8 years and still not have quite all of our debt paid off.

But then the alarming piece is this fiscal gap at the bottom, that is Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. And when we consider those elements, then we are looking at a $202 trillion deficit, a debt, a debt that we owe. Those are mandated spending programs that we are not going to turn off.

So we can already understand that we would pay almost 100 years if we were only getting $2.2 trillion into paying off this fiscal gap that we experience here.

Now, over in the far right corner of the chart, we see now a graph. The thing about graphs is they go on in time, this bottom line, the horizontal line is actually years and then the vertical line then is representative of the average income, per capita income that we as Americans have had through our history.

So I ask our listeners always, are you doing better than your parents did? And almost always the answer is yes, I make more money than my parents did and I, I myself, made more money than my parents did. That's shown on this chart that every year the chart has been increasing as we go through time, the numbers increase and so it shows that.

But then we see that the chart levels off and starts down. So when I ask people right now, are your children going to live better than you, are your children going to have more income than you did, very few people in a room will raise their hand. That's because they see that the economic condition of the world is getting worse, not better. That worsening condition is based simply on these factors right here.

There is nothing in the world economies that would not improve if we didn't solve these problems. It does not have to be--we could continue that growth curve forever. So we are right now at the point where the curve flattens off and moves down into a lower category.

But at the very tip of that curve is a red dot. Then the curve stops and discerning people would say, well, I thought graphs just continue. You draw them on out through infinity.

Well, you do except this chart stops. This chart stops because our economy literally shows both Office of Management and Budget, the White House, and the CBO, that's the congressional arm. So both the White House and the Congress both show the same chart that our economy simply ceases to function about 2037.

Now for people who are younger than myself, that's in your lifetimes. I may not see that, but my children and grandchildren will see this point where our economy quits. That's what happened in the Soviet Union.

President Reagan believed that if he simply increased our spending enough on arms that he could cause them to continue to invest more spending on arms. They would not be able to increase the revenues. They would have this gap right here. Their deficits would increase, their debt would increase and eventually the system would implode. It would collapse on itself. That's what's happening in our economy in 2037.

So at this particular point in our time, we have to stop and say we can't continue this. We must begin to do differently, and that is what the House was doing last week.

Now many in the country have said, oh, they are draconian cuts. We should not have done that. You shouldn't have cut that deeply and others are saying you should have cut more.

So let's evaluate that briefly. We cut, basically, about $60 billion out of the budget. We cut it out of the continuing resolution a couple of weeks ago when we passed that bill.

So what does 60 billion mean in this chart? Sixty billion would mean that you would change this number from 3.5 to 3.44. We are still faced with only the 2.2 here in revenues to the country.

I would ask every listener in the audience, is that significant, is it draconian? If you think it's draconian, would your banker think it's draconian? Almost everyone laughs if I ask them, if you were spending $3,500 a month, bringing in $2,200 a month and went to your banker, would your banker think that you made significant cuts if you cut from $3,500 to $3,440? Most people would laugh and say my banker wouldn't talk to me if I only cut that much. So I put it into that context that we did not do significant cuts.

Yet many of the people here in Washington are wailing and weeping and gnashing of teeth, those sorts of things, that catastrophe just awaits us because we cut spending by .06.

Myself, I don't think so. I think that the looming economic crisis in 2037 is the more compelling point that our economy simply will cease to function out in that range. Again, you can go online and look at CBO or OMB to find that chart. That's where we pulled it out. So take a look at it.

But the important thing is to understand that no company--my wife and I ran a small company--and no company ever found itself in fiscal straits like this and cured it simply by cutting spending. I don't think that it's possible for us to cut spending from 3.5 to 2.2. As a business person, it does not ring true. It doesn't seem like that we can cut that much.

So if we can't cut that much spending you have to say, well, then how do we get the 2.2 to move toward the 3.5? If we can't cut spending enough then how do we grow the revenues? Now some people will say well, we should raise taxes. They would say we should raise taxes. And then you shouldn't have to ask, well, what's the outcome of raising taxes?

The first thing is to understand that there is a basic economic truth that tax increases will kill jobs. And so if we want to make this number smaller, just increase taxes and we actually increased the difference. We increased our deficit because this number actually gets smaller at that point.

If we want to solve the problem that we are facing now, there is only one way to go, and that is economic growth. We need to create jobs. If we have to create jobs, then we must evaluate the ways that we are not creating jobs today.

We resume our discussion talking about how we would create these two numbers to come together. That would be a balanced budget. And, again, I would repeat that it is very difficult for us to cut enough spending to reach bottom, that my idea is that we must increase the number of jobs.

As we bring people into the workforce, we are simultaneously encompassing two things. We are causing this number to go up as people pay taxes that were previously unemployed, but then we are also bringing people off of unemployment, welfare and government assistance. So we are lowering their number toward this one as we increase that one.

The actuarial tables show us at about 3.5 percent rate of growth that we can actually begin to move towards balance. These long-term numbers begin to clear up significantly just by creating jobs in the growth rate of about 3.5 percent.

Well, then the next question would be, can we create jobs in 3.5 percent? Well, that's exactly what we have averaged for over 70 years. It's well established that we can do it.

Right now, our economic growth is in the 1 to 2 percent range, so that means that we almost have to double our rate of growth, and that would be possible if we did two basic things.

Number one, we can lower taxes. Tax breaks create jobs. Tax decreases create jobs. Tax increases kill jobs. And so then the second aspect of creating jobs would be to lower the regulations.

Now, I have many people that react in horror when I say we should lower regulations. They immediately claim you would go to zero regulation. I don't mean that at all. I simply mean that we are regulating our jobs out of existence. Companies are finding it easier to go to another country and operate rather than operate here because the regulations are so extreme.

One way that we're regulating companies out of existence is through our lending right now. We passed the Dodd-Frank bill which puts new requirements on banks. And so the bankers in my district in southern New Mexico have been calling recently saying that under the previous accounting methods and the previous reporting methods, we used to simply get written up if we made a mistake on a loan package. Today we're told that we could get a $50,000 fine. So they then are skeptical and reticent to lend money to small businesses and to people buying homes because they stand to lose more on the loan by one typographical error, one exception, than they can make.

And that, then, has a formal process so that a young family, a young couple in Socorro, New Mexico, recently graduated from New Mexico Tech, they both are employed, both have degrees, both have good-paying jobs, and yet the bank says, well, we just don't want to lend money because it might turn out to be a bad loan and we could lose our bank over one bad loan or we could get a $50,000 penalty over a mistake on the loan application. It's just too tough.

That means the regulations have been so high that businesses are saying, well, we would rather stay on the sidelines, which is what's happening nationwide. So we're being told that if the banks would simply loan money that everything would be fixed, and it's a lot true. Construction would start back. Houses would start back. Real estate agents would start back, and everyone would start, except it is regulated down into a low, just stagnant position because of these regulations that are, in many people's eyes, too high.

Another way that we regulate jobs out of existence is through environmental concerns. We are saying to ourselves that we should protect species at

all costs, that is, even the human cost. And I'm saying that that's too extreme. I would not let a species go extinct, but I would say that we should create jobs and protect the species at the same time. So in order to cure this problem, to raise this 2.2 toward the 3.5 and simultaneously lowering the 3.5 toward 2.2, I have actually put three bills in so that we could have test cases of this discussion for America.

The first one would be that, yes, we should keep the spotted owl alive, but we should not kill every timber job in America, which is basically what happened in New Mexico. We used to have 20,000 jobs in timber and today we have, more or less, none. Sometimes, one guy says, I've got eight people, and sometimes he says, well, I laid them off this week. And so we're up and down. The meaning of all that is that we've lowered, because of the spotted owl, from about 20,000 jobs basically to zero in New Mexico. And nationwide, that has caused this number to get smaller as people go on welfare, and it has caused this number to get bigger.

And as people get less-paying jobs, then that means this number gets smaller because they don't pay as much in taxes. They don't have as much to spend, so retail merchants don't make as much, and then they pay less in taxes. Meanwhile, more families are struggling. They get some sort of aid even when they're working, and the 3.5 number gets larger as we get jobs that pay less.

So, again, my bill simply says, let's have a discussion as Americans. Let's discuss whether or not we have to make the species the last determinant of everything in the forest or if we can't keep the spotted owl alive in sanctuaries, 1,000 acres here, 1,000 acres there, and go back to cutting in the forest.

Well, the first thing that some alarmist will do is say, well, you're going to clear-cut the forest; we shouldn't clear-cut the forest. We don't need to do that. We don't need to do that. And I'm saying, no, we don't have to clear-cut the forest. Land management companies commonly have a balanced thinning program. They go through and cut some trees of all sizes. And they're constantly working their way through their acreage so that good small companies exist on very small acreages.

We've got 225 million acres of forestland in this country, and yet it is being logged at almost zero rates. We've got forests in New Mexico: 3 million acres in one, 2 million acres in another. We've got very large forests, and yet they haven't had significant thousand-acre timber sales in forever, and it's been maybe 20 years since they've had significant timber sales. And even then they are restricted from harvesting the large-diameter trees that are economically profitable.

And so we've driven out most of the timber mills. We've driven out most of the people that would make a living doing that, all in the name of the environment. And all of us would want the environment clean. We would like the species to not be extinct. But I do not think that we have to completely ignore the job situation at hand.

The second bill we put in was the 27,000 farmers in the San Joaquin Valley. They were put out of work about 2 years ago by a silvery minnow. A judge said that all the water in the river has to stay there and cannot be used for agriculture. So those 27,000 people who used to be paying income tax here moved, as a cost to the government, to the 3.5. They are on welfare and unemployment, and so our revenues go down and our expenses go up. And that's a toxic case for a government, for a business, or for a family. And yet we're encouraging it through our policies.

So my bill, again, is very simple. Keep the 2-inch minnow alive in holding ponds. Put them in the river in the millions when we need them, but in the meantime, let's use that water for the irrigation in the San Joaquin Valley. The worst thing about shutting that farmland down in the San Joaquin Valley is that that area used to produce most of the vegetables for this country. Now, then, with them idle, we are importing vegetables from Central and South America, and they spray pesticides that we're not allowed to. So we hurt our revenues, we accelerated the cost of government, and we get an unsafe food supply all at the same time. It does not have to be that way. We can accomplish both jobs and the species.

The last bill that we introduced was offshore. Every one of us saw the BP situation. Again, I believe that BP should be accountable. I understand the process that they went through. They made bad some decisions. They are being held accountable. They are actually paying 100 percent of the cost. And that is not the question.

The question is whether the President should have ordered for the 100,000-plus jobs to be killed. You see right now the Governor of Louisiana and you see the people in Louisiana are really suffering because those rigs that used to be offshore working, thousands of people out there working every day at very high-paying salaries now are drawing unemployment. So we, again, lowered our 2.2 figure down lower. We increased the 3.5. So we made our budget situation much worse by policies that threaten or stop job growth.

Back on taxes. Again, we have mentioned that that's one reason that companies choose to live and operate elsewhere. Now, the people say, well, why do taxes create jobs more slowly? Mr. Swett, who is in the Second District of New Mexico in Artesia, said it best. He said, For me to create one job takes $340,000. He said, That's what a bulldozer costs, and I run bulldozers. He said, So when the government taxes my money away from me, it takes me longer to get my $340,000. He said, By the way, I've got to buy a $60,000 pickup because they won't let me drive the bulldozer to work down through the main streets of Artesia. And so we have to have a pickup and the truck. So he said, Actually it takes a little bit more than $340,000 to create a job. But every time the government taxes me more, it takes longer to get the $340,000 in the bank.

That's the reason that under higher and higher tax rates our economy stagnates and jobs are not produced as quickly, because we're taking that money away from businesses who would create it and putting it into the government that simply then spends it here in this 3.5 without really making more jobs.

So we are faced with a question in this country: Are we caring about the long-time survival of our economy or are we going to continue down the same path?

Now, that's the greatest discussion that we should be having. That's the discussion they're having right now in Wisconsin. In Wisconsin, basically the union employees are saying, We want more. We want more pay and we want more benefits, that is, more retirement.

Right now, basically across the country, our union employees--and I think they should get every penny that they are wanting, that they are deserving, but we have to understand that our union employees working for the government are making basically twice what our people in the private sector are making. So we down here are paying taxes in order for people that are costing the government to make twice what we are. And they are asking for more, meaning that we should charge the public, the private sector workers more taxes in order to pay higher salaries.

But then the real rub comes in on the retirements. Many of our government employees have an option to retire at 20 years, and many of those can retire at 75 percent of their pay. If you are making $40,000 a year, then you can retire at $30,000 a year. I have a document in my office that has New Mexico retirees' salaries, and this is from 10 years ago when I was in the State legislature, and the highest paid worker in our retirement system in New Mexico is making about $5,600 a month.

Now, that contrasts with about $3,000 a month. So he is making almost double in retirement what the average New Mexican is making working 40 hours a week. What it has caused is this imbalance here, this cost that is doubling above what we can take in in revenues.

So the discussion that is going on in Wisconsin is the same discussion we should be having here on the floor of the House, and it is the same discussion we should be having in every State capitol because almost every State, I think 48 of the 50, is now running in deficit conditions because the cost of government, the cost of their employees, the cost of education has risen so

dramatically. And in the private sector, we are sitting out here basically with flat wages, maybe declining wages. And so our discussion nationwide has to be: How do we cure the problem?

Now, if we begin to get our tax policy and our regulatory policy under control, I think that the manufacturing jobs would come back. So it is not just that we want jobs. McDonald's and such would create service-level jobs, but we are interested in careers, not just jobs. We are interested in being able to plan for your future and being able to pay for college for your kids or plan for your retirement. Those are the careers that we want to draw back, and those come from the good manufacturing jobs that left in droves during the last 30-40 years as we increased regulations and as we increased taxation.

Those jobs would come flooding back to us if we simply lowered the taxes. And you heard President Obama say in his State of the Union message that we now have one of the two highest corporate tax rates in the world. A couple of days after his speech, Japan actually lowered their tax rate, leaving us at the top level.

So the President recognizes that we make ourselves uncompetitive with our tax rate and we should do something about it. He is exactly right. We should cut taxes; and yet when you bring that up on the floor of the House, you get one-half of the body that grabs their chest and falls backward, pulling the flag across their face and saying we can't do that because Old Glory might just wither away. And the other side says it is the only way to economic growth.

If we are going to fix this imbalance of spending and revenue, we absolutely have to have growth, and job creation should be the primary focus of this Congress. But unless we focus on taxes and regulations, we cannot cure the job problem in the country.

A few years ago, Ireland was looking at itself and said, Ireland is a pretty smart country. We are smart people; we are hardworking people. We are struggling under a bad economy. What can we do to make it better?

So they thought a lot about it, they had studies, and they decided they should lower their corporate tax rate. So they lowered their corporate tax rate. It was equal to ours at that point, about 36 percent, and they lowered it down to 12 percent. Companies began to flock into Ireland because the tax rate was changed from 36 down to 12 percent. That is what lowering the tax rate does; it draws the great jobs to you, the manufacturing jobs.

Well, in the intervening years, Ireland began to do what we did. They began to say with all this money, we are awash with money, the revenues were exceeding the outflows, they began to say, we are going to spend more. And so they began to develop programs to give away, and they began to raise taxes.

Now, my brother-in-law works for Hughes Tools, and he just got back from Ireland. They just dismantled their last plant in Ireland that they had taken over when they were given the lower taxes. Because of the higher tax rate now, they are now evacuating out of Ireland. So Ireland is faced with this exact same problem, and Ireland is at the point of economic collapse, along with Greece, along with Spain, along with other countries in Europe because all of us have been living beyond our means.

Each country in the world right now is faced with its own set of problems that basically originate from the fact that we are spending more than we are bringing in. We are spending more for government than what the private sector can make, and we all face the same catastrophe that the Soviet Union faced, that their economy is simply going to implode.

Now I, for one, do not want to be on the watch and not be saying something as we're going down the track, and so I give this presentation everywhere I go. And to the people who are saying we absolutely have to have more government spending, I simply say: show me how it is going to work. The way we have been making this work is we have been printing money. As we print money, we take money away from you because printing money makes the dollars in your pocket worth less. And so as your money in your pocket is worth less, then the prices go up. So we see gasoline prices now escalate to $4, and some people are saying it is the evil oil companies. The truth is your dollar is worth less.

If it was only going up, then you could say: yes, the oil companies are taking more profit. But your vegetables are going up. Your gold is going up. Silver is going up. Big metals are going up. In the oil fields in southeast New Mexico, we use a lot of drill pipe. I got word last week when I was traveling around that the people who own drill pipes to sell it right now don't want to sell it.

They would rather have their pipe than dollars because they see that we have printed this $2.6 trillion. They see their dollar is worth less. They see the prices escalating, so they simply have shut off selling their drill pipe. It is worth more than the cash that they could get for it. That is going to be another sign that our economy has really begun to struggle under the inflation as we see shortages-- shortages of vegetables, shortages of anything.

Now, the price of silver and gold have been escalating. The price of silver a week ago Friday went up 10 percent in one day. Then 2 or 3 days later it went up another 8 or 9 percent. It is not that we are using that much more silver 2 or 3 days later; it is that people are saying I would rather hold silver than dollars, and they have been flooding across from dollars to silver. You are seeing that people are choosing this object of silver that maybe is very difficult to store, very difficult to handle, is actually more valuable to them than holding the cash in the bank. This is because we are living like that.

So either we begin to discipline ourselves both nationally and as individuals because we individually have been running up debt that is sort of the equivalent of this, either we begin to discipline or the ultimate consequences is within 25 years we are going to see catastrophic economic situations arise for families.

I do not think that any of us want that. I think that the economic explanations of exactly why we are having the difficulties in our economy that we are having are very simple. They are very transparent. We are spending $3.5 trillion every year, and we are bringing in $2.2 trillion. That number is actually going to escalate next year so that this deficit, instead of being $1.3 trillion in the next year, according to the President's budget, is going to be $1.6 trillion. That $1.6 trillion at the end of the year will be added to the $15 trillion of debt so at the end of the year we will owe $16.5 trillion. The $202 trillion stays out here as obligations that are currently due because retirees are flooding into the market. The baby boomers are moving into retirement in record numbers now, and that is going to continue for another 15 or 20 years.

We have serious problems facing us, but the problems are fairly easily solved if we simply lower the tax rates, especially if we lower them on the job producers. And, secondly, if we get our regulations under control, not to no regulations, but to simply find a balance point that will allow us to protect the workers, protect the environment, and protect the species while at the same time creating jobs.

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

The motion was agreed to; accordingly (at 5 o'clock and 8 minutes p.m.),

under its previous order, the House adjourned until tomorrow, Friday, March 4, 2011, at 2 p.m.

Mr. Speaker, on rollcall No. 83, I was unexpectedly engaged and missed rollcall No. 83.

Had I been present, I would have voted ``yes.''

Mr. Chairman, I move to strike the last word.

It is, indeed, interesting to listen to the arguments that are coming on this particular amendment, Mr. Chairman, as I have been on the receiving end for a third cycle in a row of about $1.5 million in ads that have been run against me by a group that is protected, by a group whose secrecy is protected under the DISCLOSE Act that was passed under the last Congress. So the people who are here, proclaiming that transparency is the ultimate aim of this legislation, themselves are protected through this legislation of the last Congress, certain organizations if they fall within their parameters, which these groups do.

So I do find it amazing that we are sitting here talking about the transparency of some of the people who will enter into discussions of campaigns, but not all of them. We want some of those entire lists over there prohibited from disclosure. I find it refreshing to hear the comments about transparency and about the American system coming from the floor of the House, which decided it did not want that transparency for certain groups. I suspect those certain groups are still allowed to be fully clothed in secrecy even under the guise of this particular amendment.

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

Madam Chair, I have an amendment at the desk.

Madam Chair, I ask unanimous consent to modify my amendment in the form at the desk.

Madam Chair, whenever a family is running behind on its obligations, the family begins to stop its investments and its purchases.

Madam Chair, I would draw the attention of our body to the chart in front of me. We're spending $3.5 trillion a year, and we bring in $2.2 trillion a year. That means that we have $1.3 trillion a year in deficit that goes into our debt barrel. Currently, our debt is around $15 trillion a year. That's on top of the $89 trillion unobligated funds that we have to pay in the future for Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.

Madam Chair, it is time for us to live within our means as a Nation. So my amendment simply strikes the ability for BLM to purchase new land and buildings. It removes $15 million from fish and wildlife for land acquisitions.

It removes $14-plus million from national parks for land acquisitions. It removes $9 million from the Forest Service for land acquisitions. It removes $2.5 million from the OMB for new construction. It removes $23 million from the Fish and Wildlife Service for construction funds, and it removes $171 million from the National Park Service for construction funds.

As we look at the picture here of us as a Nation--and we are seeing that literally we are in the process of wrecking our economy, the same as a family would be wrecking its economy--it is time for us to not stop the purchases of land, but to simply put them off to a future time when we can get our economic house in order. We are not talking about stopping these programs forever, just for the rest of this fiscal year.

It is not the time for us to be spending money in this way. Our future is at risk. We are having to look at cutting significant funds from programs that matter. We are running a $1.3 trillion deficit this year. The President says in next year's budget he wants to run a $1.6 trillion deficit. CBO and OMB both have a chart here that shows our economy as simply discontinuous in the 2030 range.

When we are talking about the fiscal instability of our economy, when we are talking about this picture for our ability to pay our debts, when we are talking about this picture for the Nation, then it only makes sense for us to look and to prioritize our funding and to prioritize our expenditures the same way any family would.

I yield back the balance of my time.

Offered By: Mr. Pearce

Amendment No. 462: At the end of the bill (before the short

title), insert the following:

Offered By: Mr. Pearce

Amendment No. 463: At the end of the bill (before the short

title), insert the following: