Floor Statements

Mr. Speaker, I very much appreciate the privilege to address you. In addressing you, I recognize the American people's ears are tuned as well. It is a precious right we have, our freedom of speech we have in this country, and we exercise it on the floor of this Congress on a regular basis, and I appreciate it on both sides of the aisle.

I came to the floor this evening, Mr. Speaker, to address the energy situation that we have in the United States of America. We have watched our gas prices go up to $3 a gallon and more in the last few weeks. There was a time when it was headed in that direction, and it headed back down again, and now it is back up, and who knows where it is going to stop. We never know where it is going to stop.

The American people are concerned about this, Mr. Speaker, and they should be. We have debated energy on this floor many, many times, and we have kicked back and forth issue after issue that has to do with how we are going to provide an adequate energy supply to keep this economy churning.

This economy is churning, Mr. Speaker. It is churning consistently. It has got some really unprecedented growth. Ten of the last eleven succeeding quarters have had more than 3 percent growth in our gross domestic product. That is a growth rate that one has to go back to the early Reagan years to match.

Yet this growth rate that we have in this environment, this more than 3 percent growth of our gross domestic product for 10 of the last 11 succeeding quarters, or preceding quarters, is matched back to those Reagan years. But in those years, we were under high inflation, high unemployment and high interest rates.

It was a lot harder to make a predictable profit back in those early years than it is in this environment. Today, this is 3 percent growth- plus. It is more than 3 percent growth, but we are doing this in an environment of relatively low interest rates and lower unemployment rates and lower inflation rates. So this economy has had perhaps the longest run and been the healthiest economic environment I have seen in my lifetime.

I am thankful President Bush stood up and took the lead after the bursting of the dot-com bubble, which sent the United States toward a recession. As the dot-com bubble burst, we had speculators that were investing in our new technological ability to store and transfer information faster than ever before without regard to what that value was worth in the marketplace. And so the economy, the dot-com bubble burst, and that sent us towards a recession, and some will say in a recession.

And then right in that recession we saw the September 11 attack on the United States, on our financial centers, on the Pentagon, and of course on the plane that crashed in the field in Pennsylvania. And that was an attack, again, on our financial centers with an attempt to cripple our economy. Well, not only did it hit a difficult hard blow to our economy but, at the same time, this Congress made the decision to spend hundreds of billions of dollars in homeland security, so we also had to spend hundreds of billions of dollars in our Department of Defense funding to carry out this global war on terror.

So we increased our spending in defense, we created a Department of Homeland Security, and we dramatically grew the spending in homeland security all at the time when our economy was being compressed and reduced because of the hit on our financial centers of September 11 and because of the bursting of the dot-com bubble. And the vision of President Bush was that we had to cut taxes to stimulate the economy, and so we did that.

We did that in two rounds here in this Congress, Mr. Speaker. And we said today that last year our revenue increase by 14\1/2\ percent greater than anticipated, and this year it is going to be double digits again, greater than anticipated. These tax cuts have worked. They have brought us out of this recession that was caused by the bursting of the dot-com bubble and the September 11 attacks.

But into the middle of all of this we have the energy issue, the energy issue that has gas prices up to $3 a gallon or more as it becomes closer and closer, potentially, to an energy crisis. Now, someone once asked, what is the solution to $3 gas? All of America is asking that question today. What is the solution to $3 gas? And some wag responded, well, $3 gas is the solution to $3 gas. Now, I am not sure that $3 gas brings us the answer to this, but I do believe $4 or $5 or $6 gas will bring solutions to a lot of our energy problems in this country and energy problems around the world.

We have been, really, beneficiaries of a fairly cheap fuel over the years. We have had good access to resources here in the United States; and our oil companies, especially American oil companies, have gone overseas, developed the oil supplies in the Middle East, for example, the Libyan oil fields and the Iraqi and Iranian oil fields, and the list goes on. Our American companies have been integral to the development of the oil supply that is coming to the United States today, and that oil is coming out of the ground cheap, and it came to the United States cheap.

Not very long ago we had gas at a $1.07. I don't remember anyone in America saying since we have such cheap gas prices, we ought to pay a little extra to these oil companies that have invested their capital to go out and drill and explore around the world so that we have an adequate supply of

energy. No, American consumers did what consumers do: they pumped the $1.07 gas in their cars, they drove a little more, and maybe bought a car that burned a little more gas and got a little less mileage than they might have otherwise and looked at that as something that was going to go on, cheap gas into perpetuity.

But we know that those situations have a way of coming home to roost. We are the beneficiaries of an energy policy that was driven globally by capital investment of American oil companies and the people who invested in those American oil companies. And the import oil that was coming in was coming in to America cheap. But today it is a different environment. That environment has turned.

And as we saw our prices go up during Katrina and Rita, when our refineries were shut down, down in the gulf coast, a good number of our platforms were wiped out in the hurricanes in the gulf coast and a large percentage of America's energy supply was shut down during and in the aftermath of Katrina. It took us a while to get back on line, and it is going to take us a while longer to get our production back up to where it was prior to Katrina. Some of the refineries are not back up to speed yet; and some of the platforms, I understand, are not quite up to speed yet either.

So we don't have the American supply of either oil or natural gas coming that we had prior to Hurricane Katrina, and yet there is work to be done. We passed some energy bills here in the last couple of years. We passed two that I recall. One of them addressed the situation of not having enough refineries. But in the United States we have not built a new oil refinery since 1976. Now, that works out to be 30 years, Mr. Speaker, without building a refinery.

It is true we have expanded some of the ones we had, but we have also shut down a significant number of those that we had. Our ability to refine our oil for our consumption here in the United States has diminished to where we cannot meet that demand of refining all of our own today. And that is an important component. It is important we are able to refine all the oil that we consume in America, that we produce and consume in America. That gives us at least a modicum of independence from the price of foreign oil.

So we took some steps here in this Congress to site some new refinery locations and to provide so that we could build those refineries and get them up on line. It takes a little while to do that. We just initiated that, and along came Rita and Katrina, and it set us back again. So we find ourselves in this situation where our domestic supplies have been reduced at the very time that the threat of violence around the world has slowed down some of the oil supply that is coming through, and it has diminished the optimism of the investor market.

I look at what is going on in Iran, for example, and the nuclear threat that they have become. They have clearly stated to the world over and over again, we are going to enrich our uranium, and they claim that they have. They put on a play where they had dancers dancing around on the stage each with a vile of enriched uranium to demonstrate that their 164 centrifuges are now producing this enriched uranium. And they need dozens and perhaps hundreds more to be able to produce a large enough quantity to produce a bomb.

But if they are telling the truth about their ability to enrich the uranium, and I believe they are; and if they are telling the truth about their conviction to move forward to develop a bomb, and I believe they are, then it is just a matter of time. And the time question is whether it is months or years before they get to that point where they will be able to have a nuclear weapon.

It was just announced this morning that they have purchased the means to deliver it, a means that would give them as much as a 2,000 mile range if they could put a nuclear warhead on top of the missiles that they allege and announced today that they have acquired from North Korea. So this is a serious threat to the world, and not just the peace of the world. It is a threat to the survival of Israel. And that, Mr. Speaker, might be another subject; but it is a threat to the entire energy production and delivery system of the world.

So we have a rogue nation, an evil empire, if they are not quite an empire yet, Iran, which is sitting on those massive supplies of oil and developing nuclear capability because, they claim, at least they used to claim, that they need a nuclear capability to generate electricity in Iran. That an oil-rich nation would develop a nuclear capability to generate electricity never was a believable allegation, especially when you are considered a nation that doesn't have the ability to refine its own crude oil for the gas that goes into the cars they drive around in cities like Tehran.

One would think, if they wanted to move into the future world, they would do so by building refineries so they could refine the crude oil that they pump out of the ground in Iran, burn the gas and the diesel fuel in the nation of Iran, and export a refined product rather than a crude oil product. But, no, Mr. Speaker, their priorities went towards developing a nuclear capability.

It has put the world on notice that we are at great risk today, and that risk is missiles that will soon be aimed at, if not today, aimed at places like Tel Aviv, probably not Jerusalem right away. But the threats to annihilating Israel will force them, I think, to take action if there isn't some other solution.

Well, the energy world is looking at this volatile situation in Iran, and they understand that Israel cannot, if they are going to survive as a nation, sit back and wait and walk through this diplomatic jungle and allow Iran to have a nuclear capability. They cannot wait. And we here in the United States must also take a responsibility to eliminate a nation's ability to conduct a nuclear strike against their neighbors. This cannot be tolerated.

Yet as the world markets look at this, they understand also the risk that there will be some military action someday in Iran. If that action takes place, and some say when that action takes place, there is a high risk that the oil production out of that region between Iran and potentially Iraq could be shut down. If that is shut down, there will be a tremendous impact on the energy prices all over the world.

That tremendous impact will affect the global prices for oil that are now at all-time highs and have gone from, not very long ago, $15 a barrel to, the last I checked, $75 a barrel. And you think how can we have $3 gas? Well, think in terms of $75 a barrel and there is 42 gallons in a barrel. When it gets up to $84 a barrel, if you have 100 percent gas out of a barrel, then you would still be at $2 just to purchase the crude. Then you would have to go through the refinery process and peel out the oil and the diesel fuel and pay for the energy consumption that it takes to crack out a gallon of gas. But $3 gas is not a price gouge if you are buying the oil at $75 a barrel.

I will say, in defense of the oil companies, that they have invested their capital. They have done the research and development. They have done the field exploration. They have identified their reserves of oil. And when they have done so, that has been their capital that was invested. They had to invest on the prospects of being able to find new oil fields and then expand their wells into those and set up a distribution system that could come back to the market. And in this process of doing that, they need to make a profit if they are going to have the capital to do any more exploration.

So I am not one, Mr. Speaker, that would say that we should put a windfall profit tax on the very people that are producing the most oil for us, because they are the ones that are contributing to the overall supply of energy. And those that contribute to the overall supply of energy are the ones doing the most to keep the price down, Mr. Speaker.

So a windfall profits tax acts in the opposite direction. If I am Enron, for example, and I made $10-something billion in a quarter, and if we are making noises from the floor of this Congress like, way to go, Enron, you produced a lot of oil and we know you made some money; we hope you invest that back in oil exploration in places in the world so that there is a supply for us this year, next year, a decade from now, a generation from now, so that oil comes

back to the United States and we can consume it. We need this energy supply. If we just go out there and starve the goose that lays the golden oil, or golden barrel of crude oil, eventually we will find the prices of crude going up higher and higher and higher because there will be less supply.

So we have done some things in this country that were not very smart, and it has been because our hands have been tied here and over in the Senate by environmentalists. It isn't so much that they are concerned something is going to happen to the environment. I have a difficult time looking around the oil fields and finding damage to the environment. It is more, I think, just a belief system, almost a religion, if you will, Mr. Speaker, that if you label it green, more than half the Members of this Congress will vote against oil exploration or oil development or energy development. If you label it something green is against, I should say. If you label it renewable, then they are for it, whether it is practical or whether it isn't.

We need to do a lot of things in this country; and when I look around at the oil exploration in America, it has diminished dramatically. The offshore drilling in America is almost shut down entirely, and that is for both oil and natural gas.

Now, we have developed our natural gas fields in the Gulf Coast, around New Orleans and the coast of Texas. But when you go east and start along the Mississippi and Florida and Alabama, I need to get those people in there, you find that the panhandle of Florida runs along the Gulf Coast quite a ways. But to drill for even natural gas offshore in Florida, even 199.9 miles out offshore has been blocked and banned by a coalition of Democrats and Republicans from Florida, a coalition of Democrats from America, and some people that have jumped on board there that are northeastern Republicans that don't seem to understand that their homes need to be heated, their cars need gas in them, and their factories need natural gas.

If they are going to produce anything from a factory standpoint, they need natural gas to fire that. And the food that they eat is all grown with nitrogen, Mr. Speaker, and our nitrogen fertilizer that is the backbone of our corn-producing industry in America, 90 percent of the cost of our nitrogen fertilizer is the cost of the natural gas that it takes as a feedstock to produce the natural gas.

So as we shut down our exploration and drilling here in the United States under the misguided notion that somehow we are protecting an environment, an environment that, let me say, Mr. Speaker, in the history of the world, of all of the offshore wells that have been drilled or the onshore wells that have been drilled for natural gas, I cannot find a single incident where there has been a pollution caused by that gas that came from the drilling. Not offshore or onshore.

We saw natural gas escaping down off the gulf coast of New Orleans. As it bubbled out of the water, only two things can happen. One is it evaporates into the air and dissipates. And the other is if you strike a match to it, you will burn that gas off. But, Mr. Speaker, that is not a pollution to our environment.

Yet the environmentalists want to block all of the drilling that we can possibly provide here in the United States. They want to block it on land and on sea. And if we could find some natural gas in the air, they would try to block that, too.

There is enough natural gas beneath the nonnational park public lands in America to heat every home in this country for the next 150 years, and yet there is an environmentalist barrier into tapping into that natural gas. There are 38 trillion cubic feet of natural gas up on the North Slope of Alaska, in the oil fields that we have already developed, those oil fields that feed the Alaska pipeline. That is 38 trillion cubic feet already developed oil there. We need to build a pipeline to run that down to the lower 48 States, and there is more undiscovered gas up there without a doubt, and it is right next door to

Mr. Speaker, I rise today to honor one of Iowa's oldest citizens. At 110 years old, Letitia Lawson is the fourth-oldest Iowan and the oldest resident of Iowa's Fifth Congressional District. On April 10, 1896, Letitia was born on a small farm west of Milford, Iowa, to godly parents who,

she says, ``never knew anything but church on Sunday and school on weekdays.''

Having learned the importance of education early in her life, Letitia became a teacher in a one-room schoolhouse in Excelsior Township. Though she left this post to marry, farm, and raise three children, she never gave up her passion for teaching. Since retiring from the farm in 1970, Letitia has continued to pursue her love of teaching. As late as last year, Letitia spoke to students of the Okoboji Elementary School on two different occasions and offers weekly lessons to the students who deliver meals to her in her home.

A reliable champion of family, togetherness, and love, Letitia represents all that is good about the traditional American values that we in Iowa hold dear. On the occasion of Letitia Lawson's 110th birthday, I offer my congratulations and the best wishes from Congress.

Mr. Speaker, I thank you for the privilege of being recognized to address this House this evening, and I would start out with some responses and some answers to these questions that you have been advised you will never hear the answers to. I didn't come prepared to answer these questions, but I actually think I am prepared to answer them.

The remarks with regard to the need to balance the budget. I agree, and I have a plan to balance this budget. I don't want to balance it by raising taxes. I want to balance this budget by controlling our spending. That is the issue. That is what the American people want. That is what I want. That is what we would do if we were a family balancing our budget or a small business balancing our budget or a large business balancing our budget. We would take a look at our spending.

Of course, we would work on the revenue side. Our revenue side has been growing. It grew 14.5 percent more than anticipated last year because we kept the taxes down. So I would suggest my colleagues on the other side of the aisle join with me. I will be introducing a piece of legislation. It is called the CUT legislation, which means cut unnecessary tab. Cut the unnecessary tab of this Federal Government.

It is going to be a new process that has never been offered to this Congress before, Mr. Speaker. It is a process that will allow for a privileged motion to come to the floor under an open rule that would be a rescissions bill once every quarter. Once every quarter, leadership will have the first 10 days of each quarter to offer a recissions bill. If they do not do that, any Member can offer a rescissions bill under a privileged motion. And if the Speaker recognizes them, they can bring forward a shell bill or a bill that has a thousand cuts in it, for that matter, but it will allow every single line item that has been appropriated by this Congress to be brought back before this Congress and removed from the budget under rescissions.

When an appropriation bills leaves the House and goes to the Senate, and the Senate works their will on the appropriation bill and it comes back to conference and we agree and do final passage on an appropriation bill, it then goes to the President for his signature. From the instant that that bill is enacted, and generally from the instant that the President's signature and ink goes on that bill, it will be subject then to rescissions that will happen four times a year in this Congress.

Four times a year Congress will take up a rescissions bill, and it will allow any Member to bring an amendment that will be ruled in order, provided it is in the proper sequence in the structure of the rescissions bill, which will allow actually for rescissions of all appropriations that have gone out that haven't been expended. So every Member then will have that opportunity to have their attempt at a line item veto. And when that budget is done and when the expenditures are spent, then a majority of this Congress will have had their say on every single line item.

If they object to a particular issue, like say, for example the Cowgirls Hall of Fame would be one that comes to mind, they would simply bring an amendment that would be added to the rescissions bill, put it up, debate the amendment, and we would vote that amendment up or down. If the amendment succeeds and it is to strike the funding for the Cowgirls Hall of Fame, then that would become part of the rescissions bill that would come off this floor, presumably pass and go over to the Senate for them to act on it. Now, whether they do or not is an open question as well, Mr. Speaker. But certainly the public would put some pressure on the Senate to do the right thing and do the responsible thing.

That is one way to control earmarks. It would allow Congress to address every single earmark and rescind, if they chose, those earmarks that are not appropriate spending. So the pork and the fat that is in the bill, particularly the appropriations that come in in conference that don't have a vote on the House or the Senate, unless they are part of the overall conference report, those kinds of appropriations then could be singled out in our rescissions bill and we could strike the unnecessary spending.

It would be something that would empower the rank-and-file members of this Congress and help them offset some of the powerful tactics of the appropriations people when they sit down in conference and put these appropriations in the bill. It is appropriate. It is something I believe our Founding Fathers would agree with. It is something that will control, to some degree, the overspending of our budget.

Now, one can argue that it is entitlements that are the big part of this, and I will agree. Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security and interest, those four items, are swallowing up more than half of our budget. Our discretionary portion of the budget is getting smaller and smaller. But we can still address the overspending in our discretionary budget. And this doesn't mean we can't address our entitlements. I am for going down that path of addressing the entitlements too, Mr. Speaker.

Now, my CUT bill will be introduced sometime in the next 2 weeks, and that means Cut the Unnecessary Tab of Congress. It is new. I think it is unique. I do not think anything has ever been offered like this in Congress before. I don't want to go so far as to say that it is revolutionary, but I will go so far as to say that I believe it is necessary. It is necessary for us to shine some sunshine on the things we do here in this Congress and let the people see how we do business, and put people up in this Congress for a vote so we can read their voting record and determine where they really stand.

So these kind of nights when you hear this rhetoric go on over and over and over again, that we are spending too much money and we are irresponsible and the national debt is going up and up and up and up, I would say to the people that have been making

those statements night after night down here, what is your plan? What plan do you propose, other than raising taxes?

You are talking like we don't respond to you. We respond to you. I am responding to you right now and asking you to join me in my CUT bill. We will do something responsible. We will slow down Federal spending and make everybody in this Congress accountable, to have a vote on potentially every single line item in the entire $2.7 trillion budget.

That is a responsible thing for us to do, and I am asking for support on both sides of the aisle. I actually think there will be some significant Democrat support on the other side of the aisle, and I am confident there will be significant support here on the Republican side of the aisle. That is one thing we can do.

Now, this foreign debt issue. Well, foreign debt just comes two ways. One is if we have deficit spending and then we are borrowing to keep this government going. All of that debt isn't foreign debt. A percentage of it is, and I have seen the numbers. It isn't a shocking piece that is foreign debt. But we have foreign countries that invest in U.S. Treasury bills because they believe in our currency. So you can declare that to be foreign debt, and I won't deny it. And I am not comfortable with an ever-growing foreign debt.

Another way we can get foreign debt is to have a negative balance of trade. A year ago it was a minus $617.7 billion in a negative balance of trade. A lot of that is because of oil and another big chunk of it is because of China. Those two things added together, I believe, are nearing about $400 billion between those two categories all together. That was a year ago, minus $617.7 billion. This last year, it was just reported out a month or a little more ago, a minus $725 billion imbalance in trade deficit.

So whenever we come with a trade deficit, that means that there are companies and countries, foreign companies and foreign countries that will hold collateral of the United States. We buy more than we sell, so that deficit becomes collateralized in collateral here in the United States. I know at one point the Japanese owned Rockefeller Plaza. So that would be an example. They have since sold it, but that kind of collateral is held here in this country and it grows: $725 billion.

This kind of growth rate of our trade deficit, we are approaching that point where it will be $1 trillion a year. And if you do $1 trillion a year for 10 years, you have got, miraculously, $10 trillion in debt. These numbers continue to grow. It can't go on forever. We need to reverse that.

Unlike my colleagues on the other side of the aisle, I have a plan to address that as well. And it is not a difficult plan to understand. It is one that serious economists will not disagree with, and it is called the fair tax. The fair tax is a national consumption tax. And what it does is it recognizes that what you tax, you get less of. Well, we're taxing all productivity in America under this policy that we have today under the Internal Revenue Code: The corporate income tax and the individual income tax and all of the taxes we have that roll around that.

I propose under the FAIR Tax, H.R. 25, to take all tax off productivity in America. Ronald Reagan said what you tax you get less of. So I want to take all tax off of all productivity. We will more than double the economy in this country in 10 to 15 years. If we do that and put the tax on consumption, then we are providing the incentive for savings and investment. To take the earnings, put it in savings and investment. People will decide when they will pay the taxes. But the important part is to untax productivity so we get more productivity. When that happens, gross domestic product jumps and doubles. People have 56 percent more money in their pockets because we are not withholding from their paycheck and they go out into the retail businesses and spend money. The tax is collected there, and it comes into the national treasury and that is a wash. We do not collect any more or less taxes than we do under the income tax system, but what we have done is taken this burden of our taxes off. We have gotten rid of a trillion dollars in anchor that we are dragging every year to fund our IRS and force our IRS, and then the disincentives when people will no longer work that overtime or invest that money in their production line.

The FAIR tax is the solution to this economy. It fixes the balance of trade. The way it does that, for example, if you had a Mazda on a dealer's lot with a $30,000 price tag and you had a Chevy or a Ford sitting on a dealer's lot with a $30,000 price tag. Competitively they have matched their prices so the vehicles are built with competitive value and competitive prices; $30,000 is an example.

Then we pass the FAIR tax, and it will remove 22 percent out of that automobile because that is the embedded Federal tax that has to be built into that price so that the corporations can pay taxes: Their corporate income tax, their payroll tax, and a series of other taxes that are built into the burden of running a company. Passing the FAIR tax takes the income tax pricing component out of that automobile, the $30,000 Ford or Chevy or American-made vehicle goes down to $23,400. And the Mazda made in Japan stays at $30,000.

Then we add the embedded tax back in, the 23 percent tax and you write the check for the Chevy or the Ford for $30,420. You write the check for the Mazda for $39,000. That is a 28 percent marketing advantage for the American-made vehicle. That means those $800 million worth of Mazdas coming over from Japan every year do not come in any where as near as great of numbers any more, and some of those Chevies and Fords go to Japan to be sold. And over there, they are priced at 22 percent less because we have taken the Federal tax out of the pricing component and put it on the sales size.

That is how we fix this minus $725 billion imbalance of trade. And when we have revenue coming into the Federal Government, we also have repaired the problem with regard to balancing our budget. We will be able to do this. What we need, though, 44 percent of Americans are not paying taxes at all. They are not filing their returns. They do not have a tax liability.

It was Alexander Tyler who said that when Americans understand that a majority of them can vote themselves benefits from the public treasury, on that day democracy ceases to exist. We are closing in on that 51 percent number that Alexander Tyler was so concerned about. It is 44 percent today, and perhaps the number is larger. We need to turn that around. We need to make taxpayers out of every American. Get them vested in this. We can untax the poor in America at the same time.

But I want to point out an anecdote that I think illustrates how the face of America gradually would be changed. That is I have often said that little Johnny would have to put a couple dimes up on the counter when he bought his baseball cards or little Sally on her Barbie doll clothes, and they would understand that they had to fund the expensive Federal Government. That would change the politics of America one transaction at a time, one child at a time, growing to adulthood. Every time they make a transaction, they would realize they had to pay for this expensive Federal Government. That has been the story I have used and created because it illustrated something I wanted to express.

Well, last Friday night I was at a dinner in Iowa. A young candidate for Congress stepped forward and he told about his son, Michael, who was buying a package of Skittles for 85 cents. I believe Michael is 8 years old. He put the Skittles on the counter and the checkout lady said that will be 91 cents. And Michael said the Skittles are 85 cents, why do you want 91 cents?

You have to pay the tax.

I have to pay tax on Skittles, he said.

Yes. The answer is you have to pay tax on the Skittles, the baseball cards, the automobile, the Barbie doll clothes, the prom dress, the pampers and the limousine service if it is for personal service, all of those things. And every time we dug into our pocket and put that cash out for Uncle Sam, all of us would be reminded we have an expensive Federal Government and we would ask, can we get along without some of these services. Can we be a little more personally responsible? Could we get a little more efficiency out of our churches because we do not get much efficiency out of our Federal

Government? Those kinds of questions would go on one at a time by the tens and hundreds of millions over the generations, and the face of America and attitude of America toward government would change.

So two things, fix the problems which have been laid out here tonight by the people on the other side of the aisle, and one of those things is the CUT bill, the Cut the Unnecessary Tab that America has so we can do a rescissions bill under an open rule so we can cut the earmarks that are unnecessary, the pork that is unnecessary, and put a final stamp of approval on a budget and all of us be proud that we voted our conscience and our needs.

The other side is let us reform our taxes. Serious economists will not argue with the position I have taken here tonight. But what I do recognize is we have had a long, strong economy. This long, strong economy, we had ten quarters in a row where we had 3 percent or more growth in our gross domestic product. Unemployment has been ratcheting down. It is about 4.7 percent right now. When you get that kind of smooth sailing for 10 quarters, and now the 11th quarter was the last one and I think that settled in around 1.6 or 1.7. You cannot carry that run on forever, but no one can find a better run in this economy at least going back to the early Reagan years and perhaps well before that because even before a similar kind of 3 percent run of growth for 10 consecutive quarters did exist in the early 1980s, it existed in an environment of 22 percent interest and high unemployment and high inflation rates. We had to get that under control.

A strong growth and economy was not doing as much as the strong growth we have had over the last 11 quarters here in the United States of America. So this solid economy that we have really works against us in a way because I do not believe we will find the political will to reform our taxes under this kind of an economic environment.

So I will say there are only two ways we can pass H.R. 25, the FAIR tax bill, and one of those ways is if we had an economic collapse or a dramatic economic downturn. That would cause us to look for solutions to bring our economy out of the potential doldrums.

That is not something I anticipate nor do I desire. I do not want to do business and get tax reform under that kind of an environment, although I think it would be better for us to go through that kind of pain and come out the other side with the FAIR tax as a policy.

I want to avoid an economic collapse or a downturn, so the other alternative is if we had a Presidential candidate who runs for the candidacy on the FAIR tax and wins the Presidency and receives a mandate from the American people. That kind of mandate from the American people would bring it to this Congress, good economy or not, and we could hammer out a good fair tax policy that would be a reform. That fixes our balance of trade and our deficit spending and it fixes the borrowing from foreign governments and lets us pay all of that back. It makes the United States of America the destination Nation of choice for the capital in the world. It brings back $11 trillion in stranded American capital that is in foreign economies.

All of those things happened good out of this. These are solutions, Mr. Speaker, to the problems that were raised over here on the other side of the aisle tonight. I ask again, what is your plan? I have laid out my plan and there are clear solutions. There are well thought out solutions, and I present them to this Congress, Mr. Speaker, and ask for endorsement and support of those clear and logical and rational and, in fact, with regard to the FAIR tax, irrefutably solid economic plan, one that serious economists will not challenge.

Now, Mr. Speaker, I didn't come here to the floor to talk about taxes. I came here and listened to the statements made by my colleagues and that, Mr. Speaker, is my rebuttal for their remarks.

I came here to talk about immigration because I think it is important for us to look ahead to the future of this Nation. And I have watched people marching in the streets across this country. It sounds to me as though they have a series of marches that are planned in the near future.

I recall in my mind's eye the television shots of a half a million people in the streets of Los Angeles, a half a million pouring into the streets to march and march under the Mexican flag in a big way. And as I looked across there and tried to do my count, my judgment was that perhaps there were 10 Mexican flags for every American flag in the streets of Los Angeles.

These protests went on in other cities around the country as well. Students walked out of school in places like Marshalltown, Iowa, for example, and marched with Mexican flags. I don't know how many of them actually knew what they were doing or understood the issue at all. Part of it might have just been a reason to get out of school. And I don't know how many of them salute our American flag, put their hand over their heart and pledge allegiance to the flag. Perhaps most of them do.

But I also saw anger in the streets of Los Angeles, and it reminds me that was the place where the American soccer team some years ago played the Mexican soccer team, and the American soccer team, when they came through the tunnel, were pummeled with garbage and trash and food wrappers and anything that the people in the stands in Los Angeles could throw at our American soccer team.

There is a friction there, Mr. Speaker. And the people that are marching under Mexican flags aren't marching with a request that we accept them underneath the American flag. If they were, they would be marching under an American flag. I think that is a simple piece of logic.

The questions that are not asked on this immigration issue, it is much rhetoric. It has been an intense effort to repeat over and over again certain fallacies, and those fallacies seem to be, they seem to believe if they repeat them enough, soon or later people will accept them and regard them to be true.

For example, we can't deport 12 million people. Yes, we can. We could do that if we mobilized our Nation. We could deport 12 million people. It would be the largest human deportation ever in the history of the world. We don't have the will to do that. I don't propose that we do that, but I don't accept the idea that we could not deport 12 million people if we chose to do so.

But I will submit instead, Mr. Speaker, that we set policies in place that shut off the jobs magnet. The 12 million people and, in fact, I believe that number is significantly larger than 12 million people. But the 12 million number that the Pew Foundation has put out within the last couple of weeks, and now we have adjusted our 11 million to 12 million, they came here on their own. They got here on their own dime, so to speak and maybe on $1,500 or so to a coyote to get them across the border and up into the United States. But they came here on their own. They found their own resources to get here on their own, and we can set up policies that shut off this jobs magnet and they can find a way to go back home on their own. That's the right kind of policy to have.

We don't want to go out and pull people out of houses and load them up in buses and haul them back down to south of the border. We want to set a policy that we should have had in place a long time ago, and we want to enforce the policy that we should have had in place a long time ago.

I sit on the Immigration Subcommittee of the House Judiciary Committee. I sit on immigration hearings, sometimes two, three, perhaps even more per week. I have done that for more than 3 years, listening in these hearings, and you get educated about immigration policy if you are listening in that fashion and asking questions and reading and probing.

And I will say the part that is missing is this: Employer sanctions. I cannot determine that the Federal Government has sanctioned a single employer in the last 2 years. I did get a report that they have sanctioned three employers in the last year. But then I got a report that there were none in the year before. And when I drill down into that information I tend to find out they were civil actions that were brought, not other actions from our Department of Justice. And so I would ask the Department of Justice demonstrate what employers have been

sanctioned, how many and for how much and what are the violations, Mr. Speaker.

I am going to live with the belief though that there are no effective employer sanctions. That is probably the most accurate way to state at least the last 2 years, and the years prior to that there have been a few sanctions but they get less and less as the years go on, and it demonstrates the administration has no will to enforce these laws in the workplace. So I submit that we need to enforce employer sanctions to the fullest extent the law. I support enhancing those employer sanctions.

I do not know how to get the administration to do their job and enforce the law. And so since Americans know that there is no enforcement of employer sanctions, employers know that they can hire illegals with impunity. They are not accountable.

Now if you are an employer and you are competing against other businesses, perhaps in foreign countries or maybe across town, and those other businesses have a cheaper labor supply than you have, if they are across town they might be hiring illegal labor.

Say, perhaps you are a landscape company and you go out and cut grass and spray lawns and fertilize them and trim trees and lay sod and do yards for new houses and those kind of things where it takes a lot of labor, labor that can go out and be effective in their work. If you do that, Mr. Speaker, and you are competing against someone who is paying half the price for labor that you are, you have got to get twice the work out of your employees in order to be able to compete with that. And you can only push people so hard.

And I have spent my life in the construction business and hired a lot of men and we have done a lot of work. And I met payroll for over 28 years, over 1,400 some consecutive weeks, signed pay checks, met the cash flow, hired people, took on all the liability, the Worker's Comp, the Unemployment, the health insurance, the retirement fund and the liability insurance that goes with that, the H.R. issues that go with hiring personnel when you know you want to keep them there. I put my people in a seasonal business, giving them 12 months out of the year work with vacation pay and benefits because I wanted to keep those employees and have them on hand when I needed them.

Now, some of my competition looked at it the other way and decided, well, if Steve King has to pay $17 an hour to start out an unskilled employee, we can go out here and get ourselves one for 7 or $8 an hour, and we will put them on the job and we can have twice as many. Actually they could have three times as many because the illegals don't carry with them those burdens of health insurance, unemployment benefits, you know, I gave you the list. So smart money will go for the cheap help.

And they don't have to maintain that help throughout the winter, the non working season. They can just simply work them when they need them, cut them loose when they don't need them. And I won't say that is necessarily abuse because these people are willing to accept that wage. They are glad to. It is the opportunity that they have. But it puts the worker who is working legally at a disadvantage. It puts the employer who wants to hire legal employees at a disadvantage. And we are doing a tremendous disservice against the people who are complying with our laws. And I don't hear anything coming out of the United States Senate these days that would change that, Mr. Speaker. I don't hear a word that would change that with regard to the guest worker/ temporary worker policies that are coming.

There are those who stand with me on this issue certainly. And those I applaud for standing for American sovereignty.

Borders. If there is any institution that has survived and thrived in the 20th century, it is the nation state. The nation state has come through all of the chaos of two world wars and a Cold War and numerous other battles and economic collapse that we saw in 1929 and other blips in our economic bubble that we have had, and throughout all of that and through all the strife and the stress that goes on, the nation state survives.

A nation state must have borders. And you can't call them borders if you don't enforce them. If you simply draw a line on a map but people cross that border at will, if they haul goods and services across the border at will, if they haul contraband across the border at will, you don't have a border, and pretty soon you don't have a nation.

I made a point before a group in Texas last weekend on Saturday night down in Dallas, and I asked them to forgive me if my precision on Texas history wasn't exactly right. But I am going to make another attempt here tonight on the floor of the Congress, Mr. Speaker, and it is going to be close, if not precisely correct.

I would take us all back to 1821 in Texas. Texas was a territory of Mexico at the time. And one of the earliest Anglo settlers in Texas was the father of the famous Steven F. Austin. His name was Moses Austin.

He negotiated with the king of Spain for a permit to establish an Anglo colony in Texas, the first nonHispanic, I guess we could call it, or they all called it the Anglo colony in Texas. In 1821 he negotiated to establish that settlement. He began to establish that settlement, and then there was a revolution in Mexico. Spain lost control of Mexico later that same year, in 1821, and the successor then to the king of Spain was the new king of Mexico, King Augustin de Iturbide. And that new king of Mexico honored the agreement with Moses Austin and allowed them to continue with their colony that they were establishing, I believe, near Nacogdoches, Texas.

So as these years unfolded and there was a contest and a battle for who could be the leader of Mexico, in 1825, Texas still being a territory of Mexico, they issued an offer out to the rest of the continent, and the offer was this: If you are married and you will come to Texas and promise to pay $30 over the next 6 years to the government of Mexico, we will give you a league of land. A league of land being 4,428 acres. Well, that is a pretty good offer even back in those days when $30 was really $30.

So that started a vast land stampede, and people came from the United States, all over the United States, but, of course, we always think of Davy Crockett from Tennessee and Colonel Travis and Jim Bowie. Those folks poured into Texas. They came in to seek their fortune. They came in to claim that league of land. I do not know how many of those guys were actually married so they could do that, but a lot of Anglos poured into Texas. That was 1825 when that offer came, and Texas was well on its way to independence by 1836, 11 years later. Only 11 years after an open borders plan that was offered by the territory of Texas, which was a territory of Mexico, they said, Come down here. We will give you some land. We need some folks to settle here. It will be good for our economy. We cannot get along in Texas unless we have some settlers down here; so we are going to take them from wherever we can get them, and it does not matter if they do not culturally match the people that are there. Well, it was clear that that was the clash that came at Goliad, the clash that came at the Alamo, the clash that culminated down at San Jacinto.

So I posed that question in Dallas Saturday night. Texas is not part of Mexico anymore, is it? Or is it yet, Mr. Speaker? That is the question that is before this Congress. That is the question that is before the Senate today. It makes a difference when you open borders up. It makes a difference when you allow in perhaps 4 million people a year that have contempt for our laws.

Their very first act upon setting foot in the United States of America is to violate our laws, and we think they are going to respect our laws if we grant them a free pass?

Thomas Sowell wrote some words. He said, What if bank robbers who were caught were simply told to give the money back and not to do it again? What if murderers who were caught were turned loose and warned not to kill again? Would that be proof that it is futile to take action when no action was taken? Could it be that it is impossible to enforce our border laws when no one has tried? That is Thomas Sowell, Mr. Speaker.

And I think I have quite a lot of material here, but I am not so unique in my presentation that I would not love to concede some of this time to the gentleman from Texas, my good friend Mr. Gohmert.

I yield to the gentleman.

Well, thank you, Mr. Gohmert. I have got to speak to naturalized citizens in the courthouse. Sioux City is a location where we have the most activity there in my district, and I look forward to those events and take that very seriously.

In fact, I bring a Constitution to every one of those new students, and this will be an example of it. And I will sign that and date that and present that to them as a cherished document.

And in the Constitution, of course, we have also the Declaration of Independence as part of that. And I talk to them about the immigrant heritage of my family and how we had opportunities here and how my ancestors and myself and my children and then my grandchildren, hopefully, will remain grateful for the privilege that this country has offered.

And I know that my grandmother came from Germany, and she reared six sons. She sent one to the South Pacific. That was my father. And one was physically unable to serve in the military, and the other four went back to Europe to fight against the old country.

They put their roots down in this country solid and hard from the beginning. And my father went his first day to kindergarten speaking only German. And when he came home from school that day, he said ``hello'' to his mother in German. And she turned to him and said ``Speaking German in this household is for you from now on verboten. I came here to become an American, and you will go to school and learn English, and you will bring it home and you will teach it to me. That is the only way that I can learn.''

She never really came away from her German accent, but she spoke English well, and I could always understand her.

I yield back to you, Mr. Gohmert, if you have other comments.

I might point out that in one of my travels around Iowa, I pulled down around in Keokuk, and there used to be an old Federal hospital there that was built and put in place during the Civil War. They would bring the wounded up the river and then offload them there at the hospital in Keokuk and take care of them.

So one of the monuments there, down in the river bottom near the Mississippi River, is a big stone, a great big heavy stone, and there is a big brass plate in there, and it is mounted in there by the daughters of the American Revolution. And it says ``One Nation, One Flag, One Language.'' That was established just after the Civil War.

They understood how important and powerful it was to have a common, unifying language. That is something that has been recognized by all nations in the world. They all have established an official language, except here in the United States. It becomes more and more important for us to bond each other together by having that common form of communications currency.

``One Nation, One Flag, One Language.'' That was the creed in 1865, and it should be the creed today.

I yield to the gentleman.

Thank you, Mr. Gohmert. I appreciate the gentleman coming to the floor at this hour of the evening to add to the dialogue here.

Mr. Speaker, I want to pick up with that. Certainly assimilation, we are the nation that has been successful in assimilation. The Israelis established their country in 1948, and in 1954 they established Hebrew as their official language. They did that because they needed a common language to tie them together.

I asked them, why did you do that? Where did you get that inspiration? They said, well, we saw the success the United States had with assimilation, so we wanted to adopt a similar policy.

They resurrected a language that wasn't used functionally other than in prayer for 2,000 years and put it in the workplace, and everyone that comes to Israel learns Hebrew, and that is how they tie themselves together as a nation.

But I would like to point out another statement that gets repeated that is not challenged often, and that is we can't replace all these workers, the ones that are here illegally. If we shut off the jobs magnet and they go home, we can't replace them.

Here are some numbers that one might work with to give us an idea on whether we can replace them or not. The Pew Foundation put out some numbers, this is a year ago, so they have raised them a little bit, but at that time they were working with 11 million illegals in America. 6.3 million of them were working. About the same proportion if you want to go to 12 million, but I don't have that factor figured in.

If you are were going to replace the 6.3 million working illegals in the United States, the first place we would go would be the unemployment rolls. That is 17.5 million on unemployment. We are paying them not to work. One would think we could just simply pay them to work and replace the 6.3 million. Maybe they continue to have the skills necessary and you can develop some skills in them, but there would be 7.5 million there in that category.

Then of those who have exhausted their unemployment benefits, that is another 5.2 million that are looking for work but they are not on the unemployment roles. So we are at 12.7 million.

Another 9.3 million teenagers between the ages of 16 and 19 are not in the workforce, even on a part-time basis. We would go to them to help work in our fields, for example, and flip some burgers. Add to that 4.5 million who are the young seniors, ages 65 to 69. Some of those people would go to work if they didn't have a disincentive, Mr. Speaker.

Then of those between the ages of 20 and 64, the really prime work age, there is another 51 million in America that are simply not in the workforce. They could be retired, they could be working on the black market, they maybe are doing some kind of dishonest enterprise, but they are not in the workforce in any meaningful way. They would also become part of that force that we could hire from.

Added up altogether, 77.5 million non-working Americans between the ages of 16 and 69. We could surely tap one out of every 12.3 of those to fill the gap for the 6.3 million illegals that are working in this country. That is before we bring technology to bear. That is before we find other solutions for any kind of gaps we might have in our hiring practices. So there are solutions out here, Mr. Speaker.

And it is not true that there are jobs that Americans won't do. Americans are doing all of these jobs right now today. For example, in the construction business, 12 percent in the construction industry are illegal workers. Thirteen percent is the unemployment rate in the construction industry.

There are the other comparable rates. In those kind of sectors where there is a high concentration of illegals, there is also a high unemployment that corresponds with that. The reason is because those American workers have been displaced by cheaper labor and they can't afford to go do that work for that kind of money.

So, Mr. Speaker, there is piece after piece of this immigration issue that needs to be discussed. It is a very, very complicated issue. It is a very emotional issue. I stand on enforcement first. Let's establish that we can defend and protect our borders. Let's build a fence. Let's eliminate birthright for citizenship. Let's shut off the jobs magnet. Let's pass my New Idea bill, which removes the Federal deductibility for wages and benefits paid to illegals.

If we can do those things and establish that we can enforce the law in this country and respect for the law, then we can have a legitimate debate on what kind of workforce we need and where they need to come from.

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

The motion was agreed to; accordingly (at 11 o'clock and 59 minutes p.m.), the House adjourned until tomorrow, Wednesday, April 5, 2006, at 10 a.m.

Mr. Chairman, I offer an amendment.

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

While the Supreme Court has ruled that using racial and ethnic preferences in higher education admission policies are sometimes permissible under present law, it has also established limits for such policies. For example, Court decisions have asserted that admissions policies using racial preferences must be narrowly tailored to further a compelling interest and that these policies cannot involve the use of quotas.

The Court's also ruled that schools using racial preferences in admissions must consider race neutral alternatives and to limit it in time, for example, Justice O'Connor's remarks to revisit the decision in Michigan cases in perhaps 25 years.

My amendment would require all institutions of higher education who receive Federal funding to fully disclose details regarding their admissions policies. This information would be reported annually to the Department of Education's Office of Civil Rights.

It has several reasons why we should pass this amendment, Mr. Chairman, and the first one is to ensure lawful admission policies are complied with by our institutes of higher learning who are receiving the Federal funds and that there are informed choices out there for the students as they apply to the various students, and as there are students who are beneficiaries of affirmative action programs, they need to have some sense of the performance expectations of those who have gone before them and benefited from affirmative action programs.

So what my amendment does is requires each institute of higher learning who uses Federal funds to report their policy. If they do not use preferences, they simply write a letter that says we do not use preferences. If they do use preferences, then they need to list a number of things, such as, are the preferences weighted? Did they use target goals or quotas? What was the purpose of their policies? And could they evaluate a racially neutral policy effectiveness as to opposed to one that is not racially neutral, a list of factors other than race, color or national origin that they might use such as test scores, sex, legacy status, residency, et cetera, Mr. Chairman?

And, in conclusion, an analysis of their respective progress of appointments under these programs?

So this gets the information back to Congress so we can better evaluate, and it also helps the institutions of higher learning comply with the Supreme Court decision. So I urge support for this.

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

May I inquire as to how much time I have remaining.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

It seems to be the core of the rebuttal argument we heard here is that this is a violation of student privacy and that we would be somehow looking into records that are confidential. I would direct the gentlemen who made those statements to page 4 of my amendment, lines 18 and 19, where it says with the name of the individual student redacted but with appropriate links so it is possible for the Office of Civil Rights to determine the overall statistical data, but not have any individual student data. It is specifically redacted in my bill.

I think it is appropriate and necessary for this Congress to review where our money is being spent and to see what kind of results we are getting from all of our institutions, and also to ensure that they are complying with the Supreme Court decision.

I have laid this out as three points that are important: lawful, conforming with the Supreme Court decisions that are on the two Michigan cases; and informed choices for students so that they can evaluate when they go to an institution.

This information is not available, Mr. Chairman. I don't know how any student would ever have access. And looking at how difficult it was to get some empirical data just out of Michigan on the way to the Supreme Court,

there is no way a high school junior or senior could ever have enough access to make an informed decision without these kinds of reports.

Then, of course, if a student is going to be the beneficiary of an affirmative action program, wouldn't they want to know what kind of results there were for those who have gone before them? Do they have a prospect of graduating? Do they have a prospect of a job afterwards? What is the future for them, or should they maybe take a path that is not quite so difficult? All of this is reasonable and it is logical.

And the paperwork, if a university is not using an affirmative action preference program, they simply send a letter that says we don't do that. But if they do use the information, if they do use it as criteria for admissions, then they simply file a report. Any institution should know this information as a matter of their professionalism. Sharing it with Congress is not a burden.

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

May I inquire as to how much time I have remaining.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

I would point out, again, this information is information that any institution of higher learning should be interested in compiling to determine the effectiveness of their policy. We help them along with this process and ask to share in that process with them.

Additionally, Justice O'Connor's decision said perhaps we should revisit this in 25 years. If we can compile this data for 25 years, perhaps the Supreme Court can make an informed decision on affirmative action preference admission programs within our institutions of higher learning, and I urge support for my amendment.

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

Mr. Speaker, I rise today to recognize the contributions of the on-premise sign industry to our economy and our country. From April 5 to April 8, the International Sign Association, which represents thousands of manufacturers, users and suppliers of on- premise signs and sign products, will be having its 60th Annual International Expo in Orlando, Florida.

At that expo, there will be 550 companies displaying nearly 1,700 booths of the most advanced and innovative sign products the industry has to offer. Nearly 25,000 people are expected to attend this event. This includes businesses from across the country and around the world. The expo will feature custom, architectural, digital and national sign companies and their products, giving sign enthusiasts and small businesses a prime opportunity to learn more about this ever-changing industry.

I sit on two committees that deal extensively with sign-related issues, so I am familiar with the issues that concern the industry. For example, on the Committee on Small Business, we are all aware of how important small businesses are to our economy. We know that 90 percent of American businesses are small business, and we know that they create the lion's share of new jobs. And we know that these small businesses thrive in an environment with as little government regulation as possible.

But what many people may not know is that the Small Business Administration, over which our committee has jurisdiction, officially recognizes that effective on-premise signage is a critical component of a business' success and can contribute to the success of all businesses. In fact, as SBA Bulletin No. 101 on signage for businesses states: ``Signs are the most effective, yet least expensive form of advertising for the small business.'' Obviously, the $12 billion on- premise sign industry plays a critical role in the success of small businesses and our economic growth.

Unfortunately, the on-premise sign industry still, like most small businesses, faces a flood of government regulations and needs our support. We need to enact extensive and permanent tax cuts, so that small business owners can keep more of their own money and use it to grow their businesses. We need to give small businesses the freedom to choose to participate in association health care plans, so that employers can give their businesses solid health care coverage. We need to pass serious tort reform, so that small businesses are not bogged down in legal costs and red tape. In other words, Mr. Speaker, the Federal Government needs to get out of the way.

As a member of the Judiciary Committee, I understand that the Federal Government has a role to play in protecting the constitutional rights of on-premise signage, specifically, that the commercial speech represented in on-premise signage has certain guaranteed protections under the first amendment. It is vitally important that small businesses be allowed to communicate their business messages to American consumers, and one of the best ways to do this is with on- premise signage.

Similarly, the sign industry also has trademark concerns and needs protection from arbitrary government regulation that fails to acknowledge the protected status of their registered trade or service mark, slogan, motto, or other key text in their on-premise signage. And of course, small businesses can be adversely affected by the State's power of eminent domain, represented in the Kelo case most recently, especially those businesses whose on-premise signs have been taken by the government for whatever reason or excuse.

So, Mr. Speaker, I appreciate this opportunity to educate my colleagues about the value of on-premise signage and to describe the challenges they face. I congratulate ISA on 60 years of annual expos. I wish them the best of luck with their convention. I thank the thousands of on-premise signage businesses across the country, as well as the men and women who run them, for their invaluable contribution to our economy and our society.

Thank you, Mr. Neugebauer, I appreciate the privilege to address this issue.

And, Mr. Chairman, Katrina funding doesn't belong in this DOD emergency supplemental appropriations bill. We have had now 6 months to debate and discuss and deliberate on Katrina funding, and yet there is still not a plan. This Congress hasn't exerted its will on a plan in New Orleans, in particular, and yet here we have another wave of appropriations that has come in without an accounting of where the money has been spent.

If we continue to do this, Mr. Chairman, we will continue to see more money go down there without a solution in place. And I would submit, and I have been down there three times, that if our Federal agencies function at 100 percent of optimum possible production, and with their hearts and their heads all in the right place, we still don't have a solution for Katrina. There is not a plan.

There are appropriations that are in this. There is $100 million to restore the surrounding wetlands, yet we don't know how we are going to protect New Orleans for a category 3.1 storm or anything greater than that. We appropriated money before Christmas for the Corps of Engineers to produce a study to protect New Orleans for a cat 5 hurricane, but they have 24 months to produce the results of that study, and yet we don't know what kind of protection is going to be there for the capital that would go down in that region, some of it below sea level.

If FEMA, SBA, and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers all do their job at 100 percent, there is still not a solution. We need to have a plan, an ordered plan, that provides for levee construction for protection of, in particular, New Orleans, at some level; whether it is a 3, a 3.5, a 4, or something above. The people that are reconstructing their homes need to know where they can put their dollars.

But this does not do it, Mr. Chairman. This is something that injects Katrina funding into DOD supplemental appropriations emergency spending. It is not emergency spending. It needs to be dealt with under the normal process of our appropriations process.

So I would conclude and ask for a ``yes'' vote on the Neugebauer amendment, and thank him for bringing it to the floor.

Madam Speaker, I would first like to start out by saying that I appreciate the opportunity to listen to the delegation, particularly the representatives from Louisiana and gentlewomen from Texas and California, their remarks on how bad it is down there in the gulf coast.

Madam Speaker, I have made three trips down there myself, two of them on my own and another with a transportation CODEL. And the first one was the September 10 through September 12 when New Orleans was 70 percent underwater.

The second one was October 4 where we saw most of the coastline, all of the way through Biloxi and all of the way

to Alabama. And the third one was the middle part of January, where I went down alone and I wanted to be able to go where my instincts took me and ask questions and get a feel for what is going on down there.

And it is at least as bad as was described on the floor here tonight. It is not possible to understand the scope of the damage and the disaster that is there. I have 3,000 pictures, and can I run those through and look at them. They only bring back the memories that helped me better understand how bad it is down there still today.

And the parts of the community that still do not have water, that do not have electricity, the devastation down in Plaquemines Kerr, all of the way down to the outlet of the Mississippi was the worst, and that is the part I think that has been reported the least.

I want to say that I appreciate the tone of the people that have testified on the floor here tonight. And this is a very difficult question for this Nation. And the degree of certainty that has not been offered to the people that have their homes that have been devastated, you know I visited a home of an individual who had received his insurance check, he had paid for his house, it was a 2-year-old small brick house, and had a drive-in slab for his car.

He had stripped it out down to the 2-by-4s. He was ready to go. He had the money. He had the materials, he had the contractor lined up. But he could not get a building permit to move forward to get it done.

FEMA said we will move you in a trailer house and park it beside your house, but we cannot quite get the red tape out of the way.

The uncertainty of the Corps of Engineers, and to not know that New Orleans is going to be protected to the level that it was prior to the storm by June 1, which I think they will make it, maybe the quality of that work, some of that could be in question, I think they will make that.

But what about the next level? When you go to invest capital, and that capital might be invested for 30 years or more, than I think there needs to be a degree of certainty as to whether there is going to be protection for a category 4, 4.5 if there is one, a 5 so that people can make their only financial judgments.

We appropriated out of this Congress before Christmas funding for the Corps of Engineers to produce a category 5 study. And that is the right path to go down to some degree, but it is only going to give us one option, that is category 5. It is 24 months to produce the study.

And so 24 months of indecision, added upon these months of agony, I think, add to the pain of the people that are trying to work their way out of this. I have empathy. I have sympathy. I have initiated my own trips down there for that reason.

I have been a victim of the floods in 1993 in Iowa, and I did not realize how much that had scarred me until I saw what happened to the people down there.

And yet the other side of this is, we do not know, we do not know where FEMA has spent the money or we do not know where they would spend the money. I do think they need to come to this Congress with an accounting of it and with a plan.

And the worst tragedy is not to have the plan to lay out in front of the people. And I would say that I think the coastline, east and west of New Orleans, will probably get themselves rebuilt with the structure that is there and the funding and the insurance that is there.

But I do not think New Orleans can come out of this without some better solution. I have pointed out that I think hard times invariably produce strong leaders. There was Winston Churchill, Rudy Giuliani. This scenario, for one reason or another, has not produced a strong leader that helps add clarity to this plan.

I am hopeful that there will be a strong leader emerge. If that can happen, it would help us all to be able to follow a path and get behind this. I do not think that there is a political struggle here. I do not think it is a partisan struggle.

My sense is that there is a sense of fiscal responsibility on the one side of this argument, and a sense of frustration that we have not been delivered the accounting or where the funding has been spent nor the plans on where it would go.

I know that when they came to us for the $50 billion FEMA funding, in that was altogether 300,000 trailers, which now we have a clearer view, I think, of how much of a debacle that was; 270,000 of them were back ordered. There was $650 million in that funding that was for mitigation of future disasters.

So some of this jumped the gun, and it has not served the people well that are suffering down there. I hope we can find a way through this. It saddens me to listen to you all tonight. This message needed to come out here before this Congress.

I just wanted to let you know that my ears heard it, and I think that there were thousands of Americans that heard it. And I hope that we can find a way to bring some solution there; and it will be a long time, I think we all know that. This is the worst natural disaster for this country ever to face in loss of lives, in loss of treasure, and the degree of difficulty in reconstructing the region, and in the planning difficulty, and how to put levees back in place, how to give people some sense of certainty.

And then on top of that the difficulty in finding reliable engineering on the settlement rates that are going on, some of them below sea level, some of them above sea level that are there. I struggled for months to get my hands on some. I think now I have maybe all that is available in the world in my office. One rolled-up, nice- looking document.

I want to let you know that I will pay attention with you on this, and I will be working for a plan and for a solution. We may or may not agree as this process goes forward, but I wanted to express my heartfelt sympathy for the people in the gulf coast of America. I appreciate you staying on the floor to hear that message because I mean it from my heart, Mr. Melacon and all of us to you.

So however we move forward on this, hopefully the first thing and the most important thing I would think would be to get a core plan out here in front of the American people so they can start to plan. If we cannot get resources to them, at least they can move ahead on their own if they know what they can count on for protection from a flood.

We have to have a New Orleans. Thomas Jefferson saw the vision in that. If he had not bought anything except that southern part of Louisiana for the money he paid for the entire Louisiana Purchase, it would have been a good deal. Part of where I live is part of that purchase as well, but that port down there is essential to America. It must be viable again. I thank you for your words. I came to talk about another subject matter, but I appreciate the privilege to say a few words about it, and I thank you for your contribution here tonight.

Madam Speaker, I came to the floor to talk about another subject matter, and that is the subject matter that America is talking about in virtually every stop I make across the Midwest and other parts across the country, that is the subject matter of illegal immigration.

I would point out that most everyone I meet is supportive of legal immigration. I am one who is supportive of legal immigration. I have argued many times that we need to design an immigration policy that is for the enhancement of the economic, the social, and the cultural well- being of the United States of America. It needs to be a plan that is somewhat selfish, if you will: one that is designed to grow our economy; one that is designed to develop our society; one that is designed to help us continue to be the beacon of liberty for the world. That has been the charge that has fallen upon this Congress. In fact, it is the constitutional charge that the Founding Fathers wrote into our Constitution. That design and that plan have fluctuated over the years, but we have always corrected and when we have overdone things, we have always corrected.

So today we are faced with this debate, and it is a debate that is profound and it is complicated. As I listen to this debate across the Midwest especially, but around here, inside the beltway, in Washington, D.C., Madam Speaker, and around the country, I

hear two things, two things on different sides. One of them is that business cannot get along without illegal labor and that if we pull that illegal labor out of the marketplace that our economy would collapse. And the other side of that equation is that because we are all sons and daughters of immigrants, therefore we should not deny access to America to anyone because, after all, we either came here as immigrants ourselves or we descended from immigrants. That actually includes the Native Americans who, according to anthropologists, came over here about 12,000 years ago across the Bering Strait. So they were the first to arrive, but immigrants the same.

As I pose some of those questions in hearings, as I listen to the testimony, one of the questions, Madam Speaker, I posed was to the witnesses: Name a nation that was not built by immigration. And I add no one on the panel could answer that question as to any nation that had not been built by immigrants. In fact, all nations in the world have been built by immigration. There is no police in the world where there is an indigenous people that just sprouted up there and lived there and they did not leave and no one else came. We have all been the beneficiaries of fresh blood that comes in from new regions, new ethnicities with new advancements to their culture, new vigor that comes from the fresh blood of immigration. That has taken place in the United States of America in a more effective way than any place in the world.

We have done a better job of assimilation than any other place in the world. But any nation you want to look at, including Iraq, which many will say is the cradle of civilization, but there has still been immigration that has flowed back and forth there for millennia.

If you look at Europe, we know the history of the Normans and the Celts that came across that part of the world and they vied for who was going to be the rulers in that region. As the Huns came down from the north and the Romans came in from the southeast, they mixed their culture, and today we have some of that vigor. We have the legacy of that. The same here for the United States of America, only we did it under unique circumstances, Madam Speaker. We did it under these circumstances where this entire continent, in fact, the Native Americans did not view land as an ownership. And so because of that, the land had not been fought over, had not been struggled over. There had not been wars that were fought over the land itself. Yes, some of the hunting grounds, but not the lands itself.

As opposed to Europe, Madam Speaker, where for centuries the ownership of land, occupying the land, was a reason for war. So they had fought over that land and the very deep-seated grudges were rooted in that land. But as we received the beneficiaries of Western Civilization, they came over here to the United States for their different reasons, for freedom to worship, freedom of religion, freedom of press, freedom of speech, free of enterprise, Madam Speaker, and the opportunity to invest some capital or some sweat equity or both and be able to pull themselves up by their boot straps and succeed and go clear to the top of the heap, an environment of low or no taxation and low or no regulation. But the benefit of this country was that we had an entire continent to settle, and it needed people to live on it, Madam Speaker.

So the new circumstance turned out to be good people, hardworking, God-fearing, aggressive people to settle this land, could homestead much of this land. And the legacy of the grudge, the blood that was on the land they left did not get imprinted here on the land in the United States of America. So we were able to under that kind of environment, where there were not grudge matches over the ownership of the land, bring people from different walks of life, from different nationalities, different ethnicities, different languages, different religions and bring them together on this land called America where they assimilated with each other on a common value system, began to understand and learn a common history that bound them together. They learned a common language called English that tied them together. They had a religion that was predominantly Christianity. They had Judeo- Christian values that bound them together and they had a sense of destiny. They had a clarion call for manifest destiny. And they settled this continent from the Atlantic to the Pacific in a very, very short period of time.

But that was a legacy of the circumstances of history, the hand of providence, the values that they brought with them, Madam Speaker, unique in the world. And so we have this unique privilege and this unique opportunity in the United States of America. We have a sacred covenant with our Founding Fathers that we must preserve and protect and defend. We have an obligation to look down-range, to look beyond the horizon and ask questions of all of us.

What has America been? What is America today? And what is America to be tomorrow, next year, next decade, next generation, next half a century, next century?

Madam Speaker, I do not hear a lot of that discussion in this immigration discussion that we have. I hear short-term discussions that have to do with I need to have these people come in here, the illegals, because we count them in the census and therefore we apportion congressional districts. They have a representation in Congress, and they do, Madam Speaker. In fact, there will be nine to 11 congressional seats in America that exist because the illegals that live in that district are counted right the same as an American citizen. And at least two of those seats in a State that I can think of, it only takes 30,000 votes to win a seat in Congress.

My district, the Fifth District of Iowa, takes 120,000 votes to win a seat in Congress because we have very few illegals in my district. So the people who come to the polls are about 240,000 strong out of 600,000 people altogether. That would be the registered voters. But in a couple of seats out west, there are only 60,000 registered voters to come to the polls because the rest of them are either not registered or they are here in the United States illegally and they cannot vote.

So 30,000 votes wins the seat in Congress that has the same voice, the same vote that my 120,000 people that come to the polls to vote have. That is wrong, Madam Speaker. The people who are citizens of the United States deserve representation here. They do not deserve to have their representation diluted by counting people who came into this country illegally. But that is the political power of illegal immigration that is aligned mostly with the left.

So they have a powerful political motive to support massive supplies of illegals to come into this country in the first place because they guarantee congressional seats in Congress, nine, 10 or 11 of them, depending on whose study you want to follow.

In the second place because they believe that if they keep the pressure up there will be a path to citizenship so that those people do get to vote. It changes the political dynamic in America. That is the urge on the left. That is their motivation to not stand by the rule of law, to not defend our borders, to not enforce domestically the violation of immigration laws, Madam Speaker.

On the other side of this equation are the companies that are profiting from illegal labor. Now, they will argue and they have argued relentlessly and vociferously that we cannot be deporting 11 million illegals. I would argue that, yes, I think we could if we had the will to do so if we could find the means and the way to do so. I do not suggest that we do that, but I reject the idea that we could not do that.

I would argue that they came here on their own. They could go back on their own. And we need to get people to go back to their home country, get in the line to come into the United States legally, not illegally.

To give an example of what happens when you reward people for breaking the law, I recall a protestor that had signs out at an event that I attended some months ago, and those signs said, ``I was an illegal immigrant. Now I am a United States citizen. Steve King is a'' pick your adjective that you might want to describe me as, Madam Speaker. But it struck me that this individual was proud that he had come into the country as an illegal alien, but he was given amnesty in 1986 in one of the two times that my beloved President Ronald Reagan let me down.

So the reward for breaking the laws of the United States was United States citizenship. And then he has contempt for the law and argues that we ought not enforce our immigration laws today. He was a beneficiary of not enforcing them in 1986. Now he is a United States citizen. Now he is exercising his rights of citizenship to protest the idea that I would stand up to defend the rule of law. Of course he has contempt for the rule of law. The rule of law did not restrain him from breaking it to come into the United States. And he was rewarded by citizenship for breaking the laws of the United States.

One of the foundations, one of the basic tenets of being an American, our American values, is respect for the rule of law, Madam Speaker. And if we bring in millions of people who have contempt for the rule of law, we will find ourselves devolved into a downward spiral of the kind of corruption that we see south of the border. There is contempt of the rule of law there. You have to pay off the police force. You cannot protect the rights of property. There is a reason that their economy has not grown like our economy has grown. And that reason is many of the things that we know: the rule of law; respect for the law; a kind of a culture that polices itself.

When we wonder whether it is actually the Mexican military, Madam Speaker, or whether it is paramilitary dressed like the Mexican military or active duty Mexican military who are hired out to the drug cartels that are escorting convoys of drugs across the Rio Grande into the United States, it does not matter a lot to me. A country that can have that kind of thing going on has contempt for the rule of law, their own laws, and absolutely has a policy that runs directly against the laws of the United States of America.

Fifty-eight percent of Mexicans believe they have a right to come to the United States, 58 percent. How can that be in a nation that hears this media? Our television blasts down in there. Our radio blasts down in there. Don't they hear this message continuously that Congress is now fed up, that we passed immigration laws?

I guarantee you, Madam Speaker, they do because somewhere between 25,000 and 40,000 of them were here in this city last week protesting the fact that we want to enforce our borders.

Now, think of this. The Nation State, United States of America, Nation State, one of many, one of several hundred Nation States in the world, if there was ever an institution that demonstrated its resilience and its success over the last century, the 20th century, it is a Nation State, and a Nation cannot be Nation unless it has borders. You cannot declare there be borders unless you enforce them.

The reason we have borders is, one, for national security, national security, so foreign armies do not come in, so that contraband does not come in like illegal drugs, guns, weapons, weapons of mass destruction. It could be chemical weapons. It could be biological or nuclear. It could be a dirty nuclear device. A Nation has to have borders and enforce their borders to protect their national security, for one thing.

To control the flow of commerce for another so that our commercial treaties that we have from one Nation to another are honored and respected and any duties that might be owed at the border get paid, going both ways, another reason to have a border. You have to define that location with a bright line, Madam Speaker, because a border defines the line distinctions between the law of two Nations. We have a law that says you do not come into the United States in violation of our law. You have to have lawful presence to be here, but the contempt that is demonstrated on our southern border encourages more than 4 million to come across the border in a single year.

In the last reporting year, 1,159,000 illegals were stopped by the border patrol in the southern border. That is 1,159,000. Of those 1,159,000, there were probably another 3 million that made it in that did not get stopped, but of 1,159,000, only 1,640 were adjudicated for deportation. That is not a very good percentage, and the rest were released on, one might say, their own recognizance, but I would say they are released on their promise to return to their home country, I promise I will go to my home country, please let me go, Mr. Border Patrol, and they are released.

About 155,000 of them were other than Mexicans, OTMs, and these were those that we did not have the right kind of a treaty arrangement to be able to deport them to their home country. So now we have a lot of Congress that is upset about that. I cannot draw a distinction between whether they were other than Mexicans or whether they were Mexicans. They all fit into the same category to me. They broke the law to come into the United States. We need to enforce the law.

Why can we not do immediate deportation? Why can we not we just issue the order that says you came into the country illegally, we will take you down to the turnstile and you go back where you came from; if you come back here again, we have got your fingerprints now; we will lock you up; now then we will send you back. That is a simple solution.

But we need to put a fence along our southern border, Madam Speaker, and I called for that fence on August 22. We passed legislation that would build a fence here 3 months, 3 weeks and 3 days, 114 days, later and that would be 700 miles of the 2,000. I supported that. I thought Duncan Hunter did good work on it. He wrote up a very good plan to build a reasonable fence. I would connect it the whole way, and even with a 10-foot chain link fence, with wire on top, it would be about $680 million to build it the whole way.

I would want to delineate and define and identify our border, and I would hang signs on the south side of them in Spanish that say, you cannot come here through this fence. You need to go sign up, go sign up and then wait your turn, and you can come to the United States if there is room for you in the amount of legal immigration that we are going to allow.

We cannot guarantee that everybody that wants to come to America can come here. In fact, if we opened up our border, Madam Speaker, and allowed everyone to come here that wants to come here, I would imagine there would be somewhere around 6 billion in the United States. Sooner or later, if we ended up 3 or 4 billion, maybe by that point it would be so crowded that folks would decide they do not want to.

But at what point does it sink the lifeboat called the United States of America? At what point when we are taking people on and bringing them in and telling ourselves that we are the relief valve for poverty in the world and we are doing good things for these million or 2 million or 3 or 4 million people that come in here every year, and that makes our heart feel good, but while that is going on, there are another 10 or 12 million that are born, that are not going to have that opportunity to come here. There are another 4.6 billion people on the planet that have a lower standard of living than the average citizen in Mexico.

So it is not possible for us to alleviate poverty by opening up our borders. Maybe we can alleviate any kind of guilt that is there. Madam Speaker, I feel none. It is a great blessing to be born in the United States. It is a tremendous privilege to be able to come here as a lawful resident and be able to earn citizenship that is here. I see that from people who are Americans by choice, and the depth of their patriotism and their commitment to this country is strong. I appreciate that and they bring their talents with them, and it adds to the vitality and they love freedom. Many of them love freedom as much, or more, than native born Americans do because they have known something other than that freedom.

But we cannot be the relief valve for the poverty in the world. We can export our values, but if we think we are going down take on all the poor people in the world: Bring me your tired, your poor, or your hungry, the wretched refuse of your teaming shores, that cannot go on because this lifeboat will sink. And then where do people migrate to then?

So I would ask as you are involved in this debate, and as Americans across the world are, I would ask them to pose the question, when somebody steps up and says I think we ought to have open borders and a guest worker plan and a temporary worker plan, I would ask them this question: Is there such a thing as too much immigration? Simple, number one, easy question. If they

will not be willing to answer, because they know that if they answer the question the way they would like to answer it, which is, no, there is not too much, then they have to answer the question if 6 billion Americans are too many. When you ask that question you say, well, that is a few too many, or about 5 billion or 4 billion or 3 billion, or 2 billion, that is all too many.

They have to begin to settle on an answer of what should the population of the United States be. Is there such a thing as too much immigration? If so, how much? Why would there be too many people living in the United States? If it came to 1 billion people here like there are in China and India and the answer to that is that, yes, we could sustain that kind of population. It would be crowded, packed and put pressure on our infrastructure. We would not have enough roads, schools and hospitals. Our parks would be packed in full, and we would have to shut some of them down. We would not have enough clean water. We would have trouble handling the sewer. We could make those adjustments if we had the people, but there is not a reason to open the doors to take on that load and change the character of America that dramatically.

So there is such a thing, Madam Speaker, as too much immigration, and too much immigration from a single country changes the culture and character of America.

I am not here the say whether that is good or bad, but I am here to suggest, Madam Speaker, that we need to have a national debate on that. We need to have a national debate to discuss what is the character of America, what has made us strong, where do we derive our strength.

I do not hear that discussion here in this Congress. I do not hear it around the hallways of the offices that are around here, and I do not hear it a lot back in Iowa either, but I would submit that the strength of America comes from three main pillars.

Those three main pillars are free enterprise capitalism. We have had the freedom and the opportunity and the structure and the rule of law to let us invest our dollars in our sweat equity to do the best we can to earn our way through this life. If you rise to the top of the heap and you are worth $50 billion and you are Bill Gates, hurray for you. America cheers that kind of success because we know when someone makes it to the top of the ladder, they have also helped many others up to the top of the ladder with them, and that kind of success spills out amongst us all. A rising tide lifts all boats. The tide of Bill Gates and Microsoft and $50 billion and an individual's wealth has risen all boats and we all live better because of that and that creativity is awarded here in the United States because we have a rule of law. We have free enterprise capitalism. So the first pillar is free enterprise capitalism.

The second pillar of the strength of America's economy is Western civilization. We could go into a discussion about the struggle of the west versus the east right now, and Western civilization being challenged by radicalism, but I think, for the time being, I will take us to the benefits of Western civilization, Madam Speaker. I will suggest that the origins of Western civilization are rooted in the Greek, the Greek thought, 2000, 3000 years before the time of Christ when they sat around and took great pride in being able to reason, to be rational, to be able to set up a theorem and be able to track that and be able to prove to the level of the science that they had things that they could believe in that were factual. Once they could establish those facts, they could move on to other facts that were based on real truth.

Now, we are in this age where there is an argument that there is no such thing as truth, but I will argue that there are many things that are true, and it is the math and sciences, the physics, the chemistry, the geometry. Physics, chemistry and geometry, math, those sciences, those things, exact sciences, the things that you could count upon and use to calculate the engineering design to build a bridge over a river, for example, that is some of the foundations that grew from Western civilization.

We saw the Romans develop their engineering in a magnificent way, and they were part of Western civilization, and they demonstrated how you could take science and reason and be able to do wonderful engineering designs, many of which exists to this day in Rome. That is, the Greeks, in particular, and the Romans successes are the foundation of the Western civilization, and as that thought, that age of reason flowed its way up through Europe and found itself in the age of enlightenment in France, in particular, in the late 1600s and in the 1700s, that age of enlightenment that brought forth the industrial revolution, those values of Western civilization, the beginnings of the industrial revolution found their way to the new world, found their way to the North American continent.

Where? We had free enterprise capitalism now married up with an industrial revolution that was the Western civilization, the success of Greek thought, Roman thought, age of enlightenment in Western Europe that came over here and tied up together with this almost free enterprise opportunity where there was almost no taxation and no regulation, but there was a protection of the rule of law. There was a return on capital. The return on that capital, coupled with the science and the technology, brought about this robust economy here in the United States.

That robust economy would, I think, have turned this Nation into a voracious, imperialistic Nation that would have been seeking to conquer the world and that conquest and occupation of the world would have been the natural result of that appetite, of almost perfect environment for free enterprise and almost perfect receptacle for Western civilization, those two pillars, free enterprise, Western civilization.

But the third pillar came along to mitigate this, tie this together and give it a moral foundation. That is our Judeo-Christian values. Those are the values that are part of our culture, that tell this Nation of Americans that you have a duty that goes beyond yourself. We have a duty to the world, we have a duty to posterity and duty to God to establish a moral foundation. That moral foundation has been our restraint, our restraint that causes us to help other people up the ladder and reach out and promote this freedom and this liberty so that the rest of the world will have that opportunity to benefit from the technology, the industrial revolution, the free enterprise capitalism, the descendants of and now the leaders of Western civilization.

But it was our Judeo-Christian values that tempered that aggressive appetite and made us a moral Nation. That is the core that has made America great. That is a debate that we have to have and the values that we need to preserve, and if we will preserve those values and if we can infuse those values into people that come here to take advantage of these opportunities, and if we are knowledgeable about what has made this Nation great and if we are humble about this blessing that we have and if we take this responsibility seriously, so that we know that when new people come here their opportunity for assimilation becomes also a way for them to be incorporated into these American values, these values that I have articulated of free enterprise capitalism, Western civilization, Judeo-Christian values, all tied together, that drive us toward a destiny to be the leader of the world, not just the leader of the free world.

We used to say United States of America is the leader of the free world. No, we are the leader of the world. Our Nation is the world's only future power. Being the world's only future power is an awesome responsibility, Madam Speaker, but also shaping this Nation is an awesome responsibility.

So the question becomes, is there such a thing as too much immigration? Yes. If so, why? It overburdens us, as I said, our infrastructure, the highways, our sewers, our roads, but also, it changes the shape and the character and the culture of America. We should be always nurturing this character and culture to be pro-free enterprise, pro-Western civilization, pro-Judeo-Christian values, and you might notice, Madam Speaker, none of those values I have given necessarily run contrary to the largest population that comes into the country both legally and illegally, but we need to articulate this and bring people under our wing so they can be assimilated as Americans.

Then to ask the question of those who are for open borders, what will

America look like in 10 years, 25 years, 50 years, 100 years?

What is their vision for America? What do they believe are the circumstances and the consequences of essentially unlimited immigration? And their answer will be: This Nation can't get along without the immigrants because, after all, it was built on immigrants. And we can't get along without the labor that is there. Business will collapse.

Madam Speaker, I would submit business won't collapse. Four percent of our labor force is illegal labor. They do 2.2 percent of the work. They turn out 2.2 percent of the work; 4.0 percent of the labor force. And they earn about $75 or $76 billion in wages, and they send between $20 billion and $30 billion of those wages back south of the border to their home countries.

Now, that puts a burden on our health care, our education services, and our welfare services. And you would argue, no, they do not access welfare if they are not here legally. True. But their children do. So it comes out to be, for the average illegal family, about $2,700 that an illegal family is a burden on the taxpayers. Most of that is to provide education and health care and those things.

If they were legalized in a guest worker or temporary worker plan, then that burden on the taxpayer would go up because they would utilize those services more. The calculation by the Pew Foundation is about $7,700 per family, if my memory serves me correctly. So it would be not quite triple the cost of having an illegal family here to legalize them.

But it is not a net gain to our economy by that measure. In fact, it is a burden on the taxpayer, Madam Speaker. And so I would go further and submit that of the 11 million, and now perhaps 12 million people, it has been charted that the workforce that exists is 6.3 million, some will say 6.5 million of the 11 million, and that group, and I will use the 6.3 million, is the workforce. That is the workforce that would need to be replaced if they were all doing essential work.

I would submit that if they are mowing lawns, if they are trimming trees, if they are doing servant work around houses, people that might be able to mow their own lawn, trim their own trees, maybe make their own bed or do their own vacuuming, that that is not essential work. Some of that is not essential. Some is. But for the sake of argument, let us just say there are 6.3 million people here illegally working doing essential work. And if they all went home over a period of time, it wouldn't happen all at once but over a period of time, then maybe we would need to replace that workforce.

How might we do that, Madam Speaker? I would submit that one of the ways we could do that would be to go into the unemployment rolls. On any day there are 7.5 million unemployed, and we are paying them not to work. There are another 5.2 million out there that have exhausted their unemployment benefits that will answer the polling and the survey saying I am looking for work. I want a job. So 7.5 million, plus 5.2 million. That is 12.7.

In addition to that, between the ages of 16 and 19, the teenagers, there are 9.3 million teenagers that are not in the workforce. Not even part-time. Presumably some of them would like to go to work and earn some money for their college education or perhaps some spending money or to pay for their car, even on a part-time basis. So there are 9.3 million of those. And between the ages of 65 and 69, people that are in retirement age, and some of them presumably in pretty good health, as our health is nowadays at that age, there are 4.5 million people in that age group.

Now, I add up a little more, I started looking, and this is all from the U.S. Department of Labor statistics that are available on their Web page, but between the ages of 20 and 64, and including those ages, there are 51 million people that are not in the workforce. We only have a workforce in America of 140 million people, and we have about 283 million by our census from the year 2000. That has grown some, but 140 million people working out of at least 280 million. So perhaps less than half of America is actually working today, and the other half could, some of them, presumably, could go to work.

But of the lists that I have given, the unemployed, those looking for work, those 16 to 19 years old, those between the ages of 65 and 69, and those between the ages over 20 and 64 that are not in the workforce, there are 51 million of them between the ages of 20 and 64 not in the workforce. They might be retired, independently wealthy, they might be working for cash, or they could be drug dealers, Madam Speaker. They could be doing anything, but they are not in the workforce. So I add these people up to find out how big of a pool there is to hire from. And that pool totals up today, by those statistics, at 77.5 million people in America that would be a pool that one could potentially hire from to go harvest the onions or the grapes or fix the roof or vacuum the floors or make the bed or cut the grass or trim the trees or pull the weeds or whatever the situation may call for. Whatever job it is that some say Americans won't do.

We would only have to hire from those Americans one out of 12 of those sitting around idle and put them to work to replace those who are here illegally. One out of twelve. Is that too much of a burden on America for the rule of law, to hire one out of 12 of the idle among us, to put them to work?

But, I forgot, Madam Speaker, there is work out here that Americans won't do. I remember a particular high-profile leader made a statement here a couple of months ago that was, if it is 105 degrees in Dallas and you need a roof fixed, you aren't going to find an American to do that job. So I went back to my staff and I asked them, What would be the dirtiest, most difficult, most dangerous job that there is to do anywhere in the world?

We surveyed around through the jobs and the different countries and came to the conclusion that rooting the terrorists out of the hovels in Fallujah would be the dirtiest, most difficult, the most dangerous, and the hottest job there is anywhere in the world. With 130 degrees, you put on a flak jacket, go in there and risk your life to root the terrorists out of Fallujah. Well, the lowest ranking marine would be collecting about $8.09 an hour. That is if he was there on a 40-hour week. And you can bet he is turning in more than 40 hours in that combat environment, Madam Speaker. But $8.09 an hour to do that kind of work.

And they are proud of their work. And they deserve every accolade we can give them and all the honor from here in this Congress and from the American people. They have demonstrated that they will do that work for that kind of pay plus the honor that comes with the sacrifice. And the memories that we will have and the memories that their families will have and the appreciation and the gratitude this country will have cannot be measured in dollars. And they would be the first to tell you that. But it gives you an example of the kind of work that is being down out there for low pay.

I have spent my life in the construction business, and I have hired all kinds of people to do all kinds of work. I never hired anybody to do work I would not do. In fact, I never found work I would not do. If it needed doing, I would jump in there and do it alongside the people I hired. But I could find people to do necessary work, and sometimes I had to pay them an adequate rate for that necessary work.

But paying someone $6 or $7 an hour to harvest a crop and arguing that that is a good going rate, or $8 or $9 an hour and saying I am paying $8.50 an hour for people to harvest my onions, but I can't get anybody to come do it for that kind of money. Well, okay, that doesn't mean there isn't available labor. It means the going rate is higher than that.

I spent some time working on the pipeline when I was a young man, when I was about 19 years old. They would pull in on a job, might be Kansas, in fact, this one was, and they would start hiring people and the wage would go. And it paid a good wage and it paid expenses and mileage. And we had people come from all over the country with their welding rigs and their campers. And in no time at all, there would be a little town that would build up out there on the prairie, and it would be right there by what we called the bone yard, where we dispatched our trucks and our equipment and we went out and began building that pipeline across the State of Kansas.

They built a little city there because there was enough money to attract workers from all over America. They brought their equipment and they brought their trailers and they came and set up a campsite and went to work. And that is not the only place that that has happened. That is just an example that I happen to live by. And the reason we came from places like Iowa and Utah to places like Kansas was because the pay was good. For me it was $2.10 an hour, so that was enough to get me all the way down to Kansas to do that work at that time.

Today it is a different wage scale, but the incentive is the same. I have heard arguments that our onion and blueberry industries would collapse, and nobody would be there to harvest the grapes or the cucumbers or the zucchini. I would not lament if the zucchini were never harvested. However, unlike the first President Bush, I do like broccoli.

However, the markets that are there have been established by supply and demand, and the labor is established by supply and demand. The argument that there is not labor there to do the work, I would submit that there are many businesses that are raising specialty crops that have established their business on the premise of hiring illegal labor to do the work. When it became more difficult for illegal labor to get there to do the work, now they come to the government and say, legalize them.

They have become addicted to illegal labor, the addiction of the heroin of illegal labor, and now they want the methadone of the legalization of a guest worker or temporary worker plan. There is no such thing as a temporary worker plan in the history of the world. No successful plan, I would submit. I would say that I can think of one temporary worker plan, and that was when Moses led the Israelites out of Egypt. That is an example of a failed temporary worker plan. I find no example of a successful temporary worker plan.

I sat in on hearings and I listened to a witness testify that their agriculture processing operation was near the border and they had a weekly turnover of 9 percent of their employee workforce which was a substantial size workforce. So it was difficult to recruit new people because they had trouble coming across the border to go to work every day, sometimes for the week I imagine. And it was the fault of Uncle Sam because we have tightened up our border enforcement, which I am somewhat surprised to hear.

I would submit the business plan was based on an illegal premise, the plan of setting up a business near the border so it would be easily accessible by illegal workers, to bring people in because they would work cheaper and you could send them back to their home country and not have to worry about, and I do not know in this particular case, but from a general perspective one could take this assumption, and not have to worry about health insurance, workers comp, litigation, retirement benefits, the kind of things that are the burdens attached to any employer here in the United States who hires legal people.

There is a benefit to hiring illegals. They work cheaper. You can hire them when you need them, send them away when you don't need them. They do not have a contingent liability that goes with them. They are not filing a lawsuit against you.

One of the things they do also is they claim a maximum number of dependents. At say $10 an hour, to pick a round number, claiming the maximum number of dependents, there would be no withholding for Federal income tax. And in Iowa, there would be no State income tax withholding, especially for the States that do have income tax. An illegal would forfeit their payroll tax, the 7.65 portion for Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.

When that is said and done, compared to an American citizen, the illegal would take $1.54 more an hour than your legal American citizen. How long is an American citizen going to put up with that, taking home less pay, knowing that the person next to them is not paying taxes except for the mandatory withholding of the 7.65 percent that goes to Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.

So I asked the American people: What do you think of this? What would the real survey results be, and I sent out a mailing of 10,000 questionnaires to the Fifth Congressional District of Iowa, randomly selected households from different areas of the 32 counties that I represent. I asked a series of 20 some questions on immigration. The most operative question, the most instructive question asked on a scale of 1 to 10, with 10 being the most intensive, how intensively do you agree with this statement: We should eliminate all illegal immigration and reduce legal immigration.

Now, I am not calling for reducing legal, I would freeze it where it is, but that was the question. On a scale of 1 to 10, 82 percent wrote down 10. Some of them I think held their pen like a dagger when they wrote their numbers and comments on the side. They were intense.

Madam Speaker, 82 percent said eliminate illegal, reduce legal, and they were emphatic. If you added up to the 6s, 7s, 8s and 9s to the 10s, 97 percent said eliminate illegal immigration and reduce legal. That is the America that respects the rule of law and knows that if we do not have rule of law, control of our border, if Congress does not have the will to enforce these laws, how can they advocate that there is going to be something like a guest worker or temporary worker program. They cannot legitimately do that. The American people know better. They know this administration has not demonstrated a will to enforce the laws of the United States of America.

And if we put more laws on the books, as we have sought to do here on the floor of Congress and sent over to the Senate, if those laws are signed into law by the President, that does not mean that a single one of them will be enforced by this administration. In fact, in the last 2 years, I cannot count you a half dozen businesses that have been sanctioned for hiring illegals. Yet I can point to a business that had 34,000 no-match Social Security numbers, and the withholding of those went into the suspended earnings file. Over 34,000 for a single company, they got the letters from the Social Security Administration. They know they are hiring illegals as a matter of practice.

I have put together a piece of legislation that seeks to remedy this. It is called the New IDEA bill. New, there are not hardly any new ideas in any legislative process, and this Congress is no different, but I believe this is a new idea. It is called the New Illegal Deduction Elimination Act.

I looked around and tried to identify what government agency is doing their job, what government agency is enforcing, what agency has the will to enforce the laws that they are charged to enforce and protect and to bring penalty and interest and do their collection. We know who that is, it is the Internal Revenue Service, not the IRS, not the current ICE, but the Internal Revenue Service.

So I thought how can I use the IRS to enforce immigration law. I drafted up some legislation and it does this: New IDEA, Illegal Deduction Elimination Act, removes the Federal deductibility for wages and benefits that are paid to illegals. It allows for an employer to go on the basic pilot program on the Internet, instant check I call it, entered the Social Security number and some other data. That search mechanism goes out to the database of the Department of Homeland Security, NCIC, and comes back and it will tell you if that identifies, the information entered identifies someone who is legal to work in the United States.

If an employer uses the instant check program, they get a safe harbor protection from the New IDEA. But if they do not use instant check or if they use it and ignore the results, they know or should have known they are hiring an illegal, and the IRS, in the course of their normal audits, would come in and remove that deductibility.

So presumably, let us go back to the $10 an hour employee. That $10 an hour employee would have been a $10 deduction for the employer from their income side. It would go over to the schedule C side of their income tax. But when the IRS looked at that and determined the $10 that you paid went to an illegal, the company knew or should have known it was an illegal, they remove that from the schedule C and it goes back over into the gross receipts and presumably becomes profit.

If this is a company, corporate income tax perhaps in the 34 percent

bracket, then their elimination of that $10 deduction from their income becomes income and the interest and the penalty and the tax on that accrues to about $6 an hour. So your $10-an-hour employee when the IRS is done with their audit becomes about a $16-an-hour employee. That makes it a circumstance by which a legal American can perhaps compete. A $16-an-hour illegal does not look quite so good any more compared to the $12 an hour legal.

Those kinds of rational decisions will be made by the millions across this country when we pass New IDEA, when the President signs New IDEA into law. It will dry up the jobs magnet. We need to shut down this jobs magnet because that is what is attracting the illegals into America. Shut off the jobs magnet, eliminate birthright citizenship, and seal up the border. If we could do those three things, what we would see happening is fewer people would be coming into the United States. Two of the biggest reasons to come here would be gone: Birthright citizenship and jobs. The jobs dry up.

And then the human traffic that is 4 million strong; this human haystack that pours across our border begins traveling back in the other direction and starts to head back south again. That will happen by the millions. I don't think it empties out 11 or 12 million. In fact, I think there are perhaps 20 or more million in this country that are illegal. But I think it maybe takes 30 to 40 percent of those that will go back south again. I know that there are quite a few that were working off the books that aren't even being deducted. They are working cheap enough that the employer decides, I am not going to do the book work on them; it is too much trouble. I am just simply going to hand them cash and pay them off.

But I also know that there are perhaps 50 percent or more that are on the books that are sending in these no-match Social Security numbers that go in the earning suspense file like the 34,000 for the single company.

We pass New IDEA, that changes some of that. That sends the traffic back to the south, shuts off the jobs magnet in many of these companies; and American citizens have a chance to go to work again, people that are lawfully present here in the United States, the green cardholders. Those that are trying to earn their citizenship the right way have an opportunity.

And what do we say, Madam Speaker, to the young people in America that decide they don't want to go to college and become a doctor or a lawyer or a scientist or somebody that is an MBA from Harvard? What do we say to those people that say, I have had 13 years of school, kindergarten, K-12. I have had it. I want to go to work. I want to work with my hands. I want to develop my skills. I want to start earning a paycheck and bring it home, and I want to do something different with my life. This is the pace that I want. Those people have all been cut out of this.

I got a letter from a lady the other day. She and her husband had been involved in the construction business all their lives. They have been pushed out now. There is no opportunity for them. They are essentially jobless because illegal labor has undercut their wages to the point where they can't get a job anymore.

One Easter I was in a motel visiting my in-laws, and I happened to have a conversation there in between mass with a couple of people that were of Mexican descent. They were U.S. citizens. They happened to be working up in Nebraska. I said, Why are you here? And it is Easter and you are away from your families. And they said, well, we can't go to work down on the southern border because there are so many illegals down there that you can hire four of them for every one of us, so we have to come here to Nebraska. And one of them was going to the Philippines the next week. But they were traveling and sending their money back to their families in southern Texas because the proliferation of illegal labor shut them out of the job market in their own neighborhood, Madam Speaker. This goes on, over and over again.

But I beseech the United States Senate to cease discussion, deliberation, bringing language out of the Judiciary Committee that provides for guest worker-temporary worker. It is a flawed plan. There has never been a successful guest worker-temporary worker plan ever in the history of the world. The arrogance or the idea that you could configure one in committee and sit back and draw one up because you know what's best for America, without a model. And then what would happen is that comes over here from the Senate after you water down the enforcement that we sent over there, and you send us your temporary worker plan, which America knows can't work, and it comes to the floor of this Congress and for political reasons, nearly every one on that side of the aisle will vote for it, Madam Speaker.

And for whatever reasons, misguided reasons, I think, political reasons, because business wants cheap labor, some of the people on this side of the aisle will vote for it too and this will go, if it goes to the President, he will sign a temporary worker plan. It will be an amnesty plan, Madam Speaker. I have seen nothing that anyone has drafted up that is anything but an amnesty plan.

The American people know amnesty. They will understand amnesty, and they will let out a hue and cry and a scream that will be heard for generations if we fail them now; if we fail to provide enforcement at our border to build a fence, to seal that border and send a message that this is a sovereign line between two countries; if we fail to sanction employers; if we fail to pass New IDEA; if we fail to put policies in place that cause people to migrate back to their home countries.

But if we can succeed in enforcement, we can also promote American values, Madam Speaker. In those countries that need help and the people who are coming here are the solutions for the countries that they are leaving. If they would go back to their home countries and build their countries and enforce the changes that are necessary for the reforms, the world is a better place. Their country is more prosperous, their children will have opportunities. And that is the legacy that can echo around the world. It can't succeed under guest worker-temporary worker.

We have an obligation and a duty to our Founding Fathers, to our constituents, to Americans, to God to preserve and protect this great country and to shape an immigration policy that is designed to enhance the economic, the social, and the cultural well-being of the United States of America.

Mr. Chairman, I want to thank Mr. Rehberg for leading on this amendment and giving me an opportunity to participate in this.

I would like to also thank the Chairman, Mr. Souder, for the intensive work that he has done on meth. It has been a real catalyst for all of us that have joined together on this team.

This amendment would dedicate a minimum of 10 percent of the funds to the anti-meth ad campaign to win the war on meth. Meth destroys our rural communities from the inside out. We need to make sure that people, especially our young people, get the message: meth kills.

In Iowa, we are turning the tide in the war on meth with an 80 percent reduction in the number of meth labs after passing a tough precursor law. Unfortunately, meth continues to pour in from our southern border, primarily Mexico. The dedicated dollars in this amendment will help stop young people, especially, from using meth in the first place.

Meth is more than 10 percent of the illegal drug problem in America. Spending 10 percent on this ad campaign is the minimum that we should commit.

I thank you.

Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from Georgia (Mr. Gingrey) and appreciate you yielding me time, and I rise in support of H.R. 4167, the National Uniformity for Food Act and in support of this rule.

Ensuring food safety is a partnership between the Federal Government and the States. However, while it is a partnership, a national food supply requires a national approach to food safety. H.R. 4167 would allow for an orderly review of existing State regulations that may differ from Federal regulations. The legislation carefully balances the need for uniformity, while respecting the important role State and local governments have in making sure our food supply is safe.

Under the current system States may impose contradictory regulations, imposing unnecessary complexity and cost on food processors, manufacturers and wholesalers throughout the United States. That translates into costs that are passed on to the consumers, not to mention the tax burden, Mr. Speaker, for administration of different and duplicative regulations.

Science-based food warnings should be applied uniformly. If a warning about food is supported by science, then consumers in all 50 States should have the benefit of this warning. Inconsistent warning requirements confuse consumers, which does not lead to sound decisionmaking.

This bill will result in allowing States and the Federal Government to work together in establishing science-based food safety policies. Consumers are not protected well under a system where States adopt different regulatory requirements on the same food products. Consumers deserve a commonsense approach, a clear, single standard.

To speak to an example, a 2002 study conducted by Swedish scientists that provided evidence to support that a substance with cancer-causing properties called acrylamide was formed in some snacks and other foods when fired or baked at very high temperatures, but since 2002 some additional studies have confirmed these results, causing some States to consider warning label requirements for foods containing acrylamide.

Specifically, in August of 2005, the California attorney general filed a lawsuit against several different manufacturers of potato chips and French fries and has requested a court order requiring companies to label certain food products containing acrylamide with a warning of the agent and its cancer-causing properties.

The Food and Drug Administration does not currently require States to place a warning label on products which contain acrylamide after the baking process. Therefore, enactment of H.R. 4167 would, for all practical purposes, prohibit the State of California from requiring food manufacturers to place an acrylamide warning on their products unless the State filed a petition for exemption with the Secretary of Health and Human Services, or unless the FDA decided to set California as a requirement for the country as a whole.

This is a well-balanced bill, Mr. Speaker. It brings good, sound science to the table, and it provides for a regulation and a means for the States to make their case with the FDA so that the entire United States of America can benefit from the wisdom of the Californians.

Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the privilege to address you, Mr. Speaker, and address this United States House of Representatives. I have a series of issues on my mind here tonight. As I listened to some of this discussion, I promised myself to discipline myself and speak to the subject matter I came to the floor to address, and that, Mr. Speaker, is the issue of immigration.

First, I would say that we have a history of immigration in this country that certainly goes back to the very beginnings of the colonization of the 13 American original colonies.

America certainly is a nation that has benefited greatly from immigration, so that is why the Founding Fathers and the ratifiers of our Constitution put into this Constitution the directions to the United States Congress, Mr. Speaker, that we establish immigration policy. That immigration policy is the responsibility, the constitutional duty and the province of the United States Congress, and throughout the decades, and now centuries of immigration, that policy has been established by Congress, and we, for the most part, have adhered to those amounts and values that were reflected.

As I look back across those two centuries, I think there was a time in the early part of the 20th Century when there was a significant and massive amount of immigration that came in, much of it through Ellis Island, there was a real effort to settle a land that did not have a lot of population in it.

The region I represent in Western Iowa is one of those areas, as most of America is, I will say west of the East Coast. In fact, the population peaked out in my home county in the year 1912, much of it because of immigration. Since that time, it held steady for quite a while and has actually reduced in my agriculture county because we found ways to get the same amount of work done with less people because we have machines now to do a lot of that farm work that wasn't being done any way except by hand.

So immigration has been certainly the only way that this continent could have been settled. As I look around the United States, that is the case for most of us.

Mr. Speaker, I should back up to about 1924. That was a watershed year for immigration. That was the year in the aftermath of World War I, after the huge numbers of immigration had poured into the country, after my ancestors arrived here in a legal fashion, I would point out.

In 1924, Congress made a decision that they wanted to slow immigration down significantly. They wanted to do so so there would be an opportunity to have a time period where there could be an assimilation into this American culture. There was a concern that the picture of America would be different if the immigration kept continuing to refuel the cultural values that came from mostly Europe in those days, Mr. Speaker.

Our predecessors in this Congress understood that there is a limit to how much immigration a nation can prudently accept. They understood that there is something called a unique American culture, an overall civilizational culture here, that is the sum total of the values of all the sub-cultures that come into America.

They understood that we needed to have come on values, and one of those common values was a common language. They understood that we needed to have a common sense of history, a sense that we were pulling together, all pulling that same wagon together, not riding in it, but pulling together toward a common destiny. Those things that bind a nation together, our commonalities, common sense of history, a common sense of similar religions for the most part, a common language, English the official language, an opportunity to chase one's dreams, an opportunity to pull ourselves up by our bootstraps. And part of this American dream is to leave this world a better place for the succeeding generations and for each generation to have more opportunities than the preceding generation had.

That has been a true fact, I believe, for every generation of Americans. Each generation has had more opportunity, and it is because this American work ethic, this culture that we have, has always striven to provide for more opportunities for the next generation.

So in 1924, they dramatically shrunk down the legal immigration coming into this country and they stalled immigration throughout that period on from 1924, on through the Second World War, on through the 1950s, up until about 1964 when they passed an immigration act that began to open up immigration in a larger way here in the United States. That was perhaps a 40 year hiatus from significant immigration numbers, and that was the period of time by which actually two parts of two generations were assimilated into America and there became a distinction here in this country, very much commonality.

We lost our sense of what was the country that our ancestors came from, we lost our sense of ethnicity, and we absorbed this American ethnicity with this great dream we are all created in God's image and there is not a distinction between his creation, and we could all come here and thrive and prosper together and all under one flag.

Well, so in 1964, perhaps 1965, when immigration laws were changed, it began to open this up, and it was opened up in a way that they didn't realize at the time I don't think the kind of numbers that would be coming, but it began to set a new set of parameters.

Chain migration was one of those, where a person could immigrate into the United States and then begin to be able to bring their family members in. Later on there was legislation that was passed that provided for a visa lottery so that there would be 50,000 people that would come into the United States by just entering their name in a lottery, and if their name was drawn from the lottery, they would come to the United States.

Those kind of policies began to come into play, and as that went along, immigration accelerated then from 1965 on up until 1986 when there was an amnesty program that was passed by Congress and signed by the President. This truly was an amnesty program. It was about 3 million illegals in America at the time that were given a lawful permanent resident status and a chance to become citizens of the United States.

I have met some of the people that came here illegally that presented themselves under the amnesty plan and became citizens of the United States, and I don't quarrel with the contribution they have made to this country, Mr. Speaker, but I do quarrel with the idea that we could present amnesty to people and expect them to respect the rule of law. If they came here by breaking the law and then we gave them a break on the law and eliminated the penalties that they were facing for breaking our laws, why should we be surprised if they don't respect the rest of the laws here in the United States of America?

So, from 1986 on, there was a contempt for the law, and the pledge though in 1986 was we will give amnesty to those perhaps 3 million people that are here in this country illegally because we really don't know how to deal with them otherwise, and then we are going to make sure that we enforce employer sanctions.

That was when I as an employer received my I-9 forms, and any employee application that I had, I had to take their identification down, their Social Security number, get the data introduced on an I-9 form, put that on file, and that was my protection in a way, but my responsibility as an employer to ensure that I was doing due diligence to hire lawful residents here in the United States, people who were legal to be here in the United States and could work here legally in the United States. I followed that with due diligence for years and years, anticipating then the INS would knock on my door some day, go through my files, check my employees and verify that I had been doing that due diligence and hiring legals.

Of course, the INS never showed up in my small operation. They showed up in a few of the larger operations back in 1986, 1987 and through the early nineties. But as the years went by, there was less and less enforcement at the employer level, fewer and fewer employer sanctions. And I wasn't very happy during the Clinton years as I saw a lack of will to enforce our immigration laws.

So we come to the year 2000, the election of our current Commander- in-Chief. And as I watched the enforcement, and I have noticed that within

the last couple of years there haven't been a half a dozen employers that have been sanctioned for hiring illegals, that is how far we can have come with this rule of law. We sent the message to people that came into the United States illegally that there was a reward for breaking our laws, there was amnesty at the end, there was a path to citizenship, which many of them did receive.

And then the trade-off was that there would be enforcement. And that would make it harder, that would shut off the jobs magnet, and, of course, then it would take the incentive away for people to come across the border to come into the United States illegally. That was the idea on how we were going to slow down border crossings, especially on our southern border.

But when the employer sanctions wound down, slowed down through the Clinton years and came to essentially a stop in the last couple of years, at least from all practical purposes came to a stop, that message echoes down below our southern border.

In fact, that message was going below our southern border well before it was clear that there are no employer sanctions. I happen to know that there was at least one corporation within the region that I represent who put up billboards in Mexico to recruit Mexican citizens to come to the United States illegally, to come to work for this particular company. There were other companies that did the same thing.

So the message goes down clear into southern Mexico, here is a path for you, come on up, we will set up your transportation, we will recruit you down here, we will bring you into the United States, we will put you to work, and we can put you to work under whatever Social Security you might submit, because, after all, there would not be any employer sanctions, there would not be an INS raid that would come in and pick people up and deport them back to their home country, which is what the law says.

That is what has happened with the immigration picture here in the United States over that century called the 20th century and beginning into this new century that we are in, this 21st century. And we have evolved into a situation now where people in America understand we do not control our border. We do not enforce our laws. We do not stop illegal traffic in a significant way coming across our border, and once they get into the United States they are essentially home free. They can go to work for about any company that is willing to hire them, and we will not see now ICE show up, the Immigration Customs Enforcement people show up, to enforce employer sanctions or to do a round-up and do a deportation.

And so businesses, being what they are, capital is always rational, Mr. Speaker, and so it will follow this path of least resistance. And you need a series of components to run a successful business anywhere, and certainly that is true in the United States of America. And some of those components are raw materials, facilities. You need capital, and, of course, you need administrative ability and know-how. You need a product or service that you are going to sell and a marketing ability and all of those things that go with it.

But you also need labor. And generally the highest cost to any business, single cost, is the cost of labor. And so business, being astute, will reach out to fill that gap in the cheapest way they possibly can. The most effective way for the dollars they will invest, I should say, because if they can get good, high-quality labor and pay a little more money for it, they will go that route, because that is rational, as capital, we know, is rational.

So business has set about bringing in cheap labor, especially across our southern border, putting them to work essentially with impunity, without fear of sanctions.

And this process as it began, it accelerated. Well, it was not a new process, especially along our southern border where we have a large amount of producers that raise specialty crops. It takes a fair amount of stoop labor and hand labor to raise those specialty crops. It took more 20 years ago than it does today, because machinery and technology has replaced some of that labor.

But that problem along the southern border was often the kind of situation where it was fairly localized. I do not excuse it. I do not agree with it. In fact, I disagree with it. But it did not bother the rest of the United States very much because that human traffic would come across the border and go to work and go back south of the border to live.

It was cheaper to live south of the border, and the money could be made north of the border. As that flowed back and forth, there was not a lot of public outcry until such time as the penetration of that illegal labor began to come up into the heartland of America and spread out to our coasts, along the Atlantic and the Pacific coasts, and on up into the Upper Midwest and Chicago, New York, the Northeast part of the United States. But in Iowa also we received a significant number of illegal workers.

And so as that happened, America began to understand what was going on in our southern border. But business was taking care of themselves by going to the well for cheap labor, because they could make profit with cheap, illegal labor.

Now, there is a thing in business called supply and demand. I mean, Adam Smith articulated it better than anyone and earlier than anyone in 1776 in his book Wealth of Nations. But I will submit, Mr. Speaker, that labor is a commodity like oil or gold or corn or beans, where I came from, and the value of that labor is determined by supply and demand in the marketplace. If there is a large supply of cheap labor, labor that is willing to work well under the going market for the existing labor, that cheap labor is going to underbid those workers, displace those workers, and businesses are certainly going to make that hire, and cash the profit. That is what they are in business to do is to return investment to their shareholders.

So they did not need to ever come up with other alternatives to labor because they had the easy supply of cheap labor just south of the border. So business did the rational thing. It was capital, after all, driving the decision. Capital is always rational.

The United States had that option, because we have a 2,000-mile border on our southern border, and wages are significantly cheaper down there. But just, Mr. Speaker, take, if you will, if the United States were a Nation unto itself, a continent that were sitting out in an ocean, perhaps like Australia is, if we did not have a border that was adjacent to a country that could supply cheap labor, if we did not have an ability to just open that border and let that labor pour in and find its way through the marketplace as this illegal labor has, what might we have done as we saw that we had a need for this and a demand for more labor?

And I would submit, Mr. Speaker, that we would have done a number of other things if illegal labor were not an option. And perhaps we would have recruited from other countries, and gone to this Congress and asked this Congress under its authority granted in the Constitution to open up legal immigration into the United States. We might have reached out and recruited people to come here, people that had assets, that had skills, that were trained, that were trainable, people that could best and the most quickly assimilate into this society and this economy.

We probably would have raised the numbers of legal immigrants if we had not had the border open for the illegals to fill that demand. That would have been one alternative--to go to more legal labor, in a prudent, manageable style that we could regulate.

Another alternative, and it would happen more than it has, would be to develop technology to replace the labor. I happened to see a show on television the other day about how they have replaced the hand labor picking tomatoes with machines and, through selective genetics, produced a tomato that has a tougher skin on it that can now be handled by machines. And many of the tomatoes in America are now picked by machine. It has cut down dramatically on the amount of labor that is necessary.

That is one kind of technology that has come forward. And the technology that used to be, the hand harvesting of sugar beets, is now done by machine. And the list of those items that we

used to think were all hand labor has dramatically changed.

A lot of the grapes in America are now picked by machine rather than picked by hand. If we had not had access to the labor, we would have produced more machines, developed more technology. In fact, as there is pressure on labor today, there is more technology that is being developed.

And another thing that was always evident, Mr. Speaker, in the ag communities in the world, it has always been the case, you know, to some degree it has been the case in my particular life, with my aspiration in the construction business where I spent my life, families tended to raise the labor that they needed. They had large families on farms because they needed the people to do the work. That was an alternative. It was a rational decision to have quite a few children.

That has stopped. And I should not say stopped, but it has dramatically reduced. And families before that would have had 5 or 6 or 8 or 9 or 10, or some of the households I have been in that have 12 or 14 or 15 children, the next generation has 1 or 2 or 3 children. And those children are trained and educated to move off the farm, go get a college education, take that diploma and cash it in for the biggest paycheck they can get anywhere in the country or even in the world, and not come back to the farm except to visit.

That is the message that has been sent out, Mr. Speaker, and I would ask, what are we doing in this country for the young man or the young woman who wants to finish their high school education and not go to college, they do not see themselves as a student, they just want to go to work, they want to go to work in the plant, the manufacturing plant, or they want to go to work in the food processing plant, or whatever the industry happens to be that is close to home? What if they just want to grow up and go to work, punch the time clock, do their 40 or 50 or even 60 hours a week, take their paycheck, hang up their hard hat and go home and raise their family, buy a house, and build their future?

Those young people in America do not have that chance anymore, Mr. Speaker. They do not have that chance because illegal labor has underbid those kind of low-skilled jobs that used to be respectable jobs that used to pay a reasonable wage, and used to pay reasonable benefits. But there are young Americans that do not want to go on to a higher education. Are we operating under the presumption that everyone should be a college graduate?

I applaud education, a good man or a good woman with an education is better than one without as far as revenue of their life work is concerned, but, still, they do not all want to go to school, Mr. Speaker. So we have taken that away from them. We have allowed that to be taken away from them by the underbidding of cheap illegal labor.

That is what business has done. They have done the rational thing because we have not enforced our laws.

Now, on the political side. There is the other benefit that is there. Why does not Congress have the will to step in and ensure that our immigration laws are enforced?

I will submit that there are significant numbers of Members in this Congress that are here because they represent a significant supply of illegals that are residents within their district. When we do the census every 10 years, as we did in the year 2000, we do not count U.S. citizens for redistricting purposes for these 435 congressional districts. We count human beings that happen to be residents in the United States and then we draw the district lines around that, about 600,000 people within each one of those district lines.

When people go to the polls to vote on whether they will send me back to this Congress, Mr. Speaker, it will take a minimum of 120,000 votes for me to be returned back to this Congress, and that is because that is perhaps one more vote than half that will be cast. About 240,000 votes will be cast in the Fifth Congressional District of Iowa. But there are at least two congressional districts in California that it will only take 30,000 votes to win a seat in Congress and come here and represent the people of those districts. And the reason is because our census counts people, not citizens. Noncitizens do not vote, at least they should not vote. The law says they cannot vote. And so because of the massive numbers of illegals that are residents in those regions, they have representation here in Congress whether they vote or not.

Their Member of Congress is elected from that region, certainly influenced by the public opinions in that region, and sent to this Congress on a mere 30,000 votes when those of us who represent predominantly citizens in our district are required to earn four times that many votes. So one can say that an illegal in America has at least as much representation in Congress as a U.S. citizen does.

I think, Mr. Speaker, that is wrong; and I think we need to amend the Constitution so that in our census, we can count the people. We should know how many residents that are in America. That is the intent of our Constitution. But for redistricting purposes, our Founding Fathers did not envision that we would be giving representation to people who are here illegally. And so that is the political benefit that comes from illegal labor.

Additionally, there is also on the liberal side of the aisle, there is a strong push to legalize and give a path to citizenship to people that are here illegally because they see the political benefit to having more numbers, more votes, more political influence here. I have a real strong bias in favor of citizens of the United States of America and I am a great cheerleader for legal immigrants. And I submit that they are the people that deserve the representation in our country and that those that are here illegally do not deserve representation in this country and they are not fully protected by the rights of citizenship as some would submit in this Chamber, Mr. Speaker.

There is a business demand for cheap labor, Mr. Speaker. There are the political benefits. Then people will argue that we cannot replace this labor supply. We cannot get along without this illegal labor. They will not say illegal labor. They always confuse the term of legal immigrant with illegal immigrant. Immigrant to them is a generic term that covers everyone, and I will tell you that when I am talking about illegal, that is the people who have come in here illegally. Real legal immigrants, I do not know anyone that opposes legal immigration. I certainly do not. It has been good for the United States of America. It is something we must manage.

But for 3 years that I have been in this Congress, we have talked about 11 million illegals in the United States of America, 11 million. If you go back and look at the numbers and look at the proportion that is employed, the workforce is about 6.3 million of the 11 million illegals. These are numbers that have been bantered about here for at least 3 years. Well, that 6.3 million workforce represents 4 percent of the labor force, 2.2 percent of the gross domestic product or, excuse me, of the overall wages of the many dollars, I think it is trillions of dollars of wages that are earned altogether in America. It is 2.2 percent of that that goes to the illegal workforce.

So if by some miracle, illegal labor did not go to work tomorrow morning and that was stopped for an extended period of time, we would have to find 4 people out of 10 to fill those roles but the productivity is down to perhaps half of that. So maybe we do need someone to fill those roles. We noticed the difference, but it is only 2.2 percent of the overall earned wages.

So it is something that if I have a crew, a work crew of 100 people and I am going to lose two of them tomorrow morning, you can bet we will keep things running. We will keep your operation going. We will keep our production up there. We will notice a difference but we will find a way to adapt.

People say, well, you cannot replace those illegal workers, that 6.3 million. I would submit, Mr. Speaker, that today there are 7.5 million on the unemployed rolls. Those people are being paid not to work today, 7.5 million. There is another 5.2 million who are looking for work, who have exhausted their unemployment benefits but they will answer the polling questions and say, I want a job. I am still looking for work.

So you add that up and that is 12.7 million. Then you add to that the young people between the ages of 16 and 19 that presumably would be looking for at least perhaps some part-time

work and some that would like to go into full-time work. There are 9.3 million in that group between the ages of 16 and 19. They are not in the workforce in any way whatsoever, not even on a part-time basis. They may be going to school. They may be full-time students, but many of them could be brought into the workforce and at least work part time. They can flip some burgers or cook some steaks or mow some lawns or fix some roofs or go out and do some harvest out here in the time that we really need the labor.

Additionally, between the ages of 65 and 69 there are 4.5 million Americans and some of them presumably would go to work if we did not penalize them for earning too much money once they start to collect their Social Security check.

Additionally, Mr. Speaker, between the ages of 20 and 64, that age group that is really the workforce age group of America, there are another 51 million Americans that are not in the workforce and they are not listed on the unemployment roles and they are not part of that 5.2 million that are looking for work. This 51 million Americans, they may be retired because they are wealthy. They may be homemakers. They may be working in the black market somewhere doing some cash trade so they do not show up in the workforce. But there is a potential for 51 million Americans between the ages of 20 and 64.

So this all adds up, Mr. Speaker, to 77.5 million Americans that are not currently in the workforce. There are a universe of people that could be gone to hire them to do these jobs that people say that Americans will not do. So I took the 6.3 million illegal workforce, divided it into the 77.5 million Americans that are not working and that comes out to 12.3 times.

There are 12.3 people in America that are not working for every illegal in America that is working. So if you just hired one out of those 12.3 and put them to work you could solve this problem. I cannot believe that business is not smart enough to figure this out. They are smart enough to figure it out but they are taking the easy option, the cheap option, the option that avoids liability, the option that really, again, it is rationale to higher illegals because they will go to work cheaper for one thing, Mr. Speaker. They do not file unemployment claims. They do not file workers' comp claims. You do not really have to have a lot of health insurance for somebody that is here illegally. You do not have to put together their retirement plan. You do not have to worry about an illegal worker getting mad at you and filing a lawsuit that might shut your company down.

You add up all of those burdens that become part of the risk and responsibility of hiring legal people to work here in the United States and then you add to that that you can hire the illegals cheaper, but let's just say you can't. Let's just say that you will put $10 an hour out on the table and you will higher an illegal for $10 an hour or you will offer $10 an hour to a legal person. Now, the legal person might be working right alongside the illegal and they might be getting gross wages $10 an hour each. But the legal one, even if they are a single dependent, they have to claim themselves as a dependent, and then there will be withholding for their Federal income tax, and their State income tax, and their payroll tax including Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.

That comes out of their check. The illegal almost invariably, and I have stacks and stacks of check stubs in my filing cabinet that show me this, claim the maximum number of dependents. So there is no withholding for Federal or for State. They give up their payroll tax to Social Security and Medicare the .0765 side of the thing, 7.65 percent of their payroll, but there is no withholding for Federal and for State if they claim the maximum number of dependents.

So what it amounts to is, if you are an illegal worker working for $10 an hour and make that decision to claim the maximum number of dependents, whether you have them or not, the withholding different is about $1.54 an hour. What American citizen wants to go out and work alongside someone who is here illegally? The American citizen is making $10 an hour, and the person who is here illegally is making $10 an hour, and you see the take-home pay. You work next to somebody. You often see that, and you realize that guy is taking home $1.54 more than I am. Why would they stay there in a job like that? Why would there not be resentment when the employer on this other side of the equation sees once he pays that $10 an hour, he is done with that?

It is kind of like piecemeal work. It is like custom work. It is not like you really have a full-time employee that carries all those responsibilities with it. You just pay the hourly rate, and when the shop closes that night, you are done until the next day. There is not a lingering liability that goes on like there is with a legal employee.

I have dealt with those things on my side, and believe me, I have great respect for all employers. But I wrote out payroll checks for over 1,400-and-some consecutive weeks. We did it all legally, and we competed against people who did not often. It is unjust for us to put employers in this country, who want to do it right, and competition up against those who refuse to do it right, but a lot of it is our public policy.

So, Mr. Speaker, we passed some legislation here before Christmas, enforcement legislation, on the floor of this Congress, and it does a number of things, including tighten up our borders.

It requires employers to use the employment verification program, so I call it the instant check program. When they hire someone, they will have to enter the Social Security number, date of birth, place of birth, perhaps the mother's maiden name, a series of different indicators. That information then goes out on the Internet, out to the Department of Homeland Security database, and also, it goes to the ICE database, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement, those two databases. It will verify if that information that is entered into that computer identifies a person legal to work in the United States.

I have this program entered into my computer, and I have run a whole series of different tries on it. The longest delay I have had is 6 seconds. That is not so long when you think about how long it takes to fill out the paperwork to hire someone and the effort you have to put in it.

That bill requires that the employment verification system be used by all employers. That will be helpful, Mr. Speaker, if we can enforce anything, but I am not optimistic that this administration will enforce. So I have introduced legislation called New IDEA legislation, the New Illegal Deduction Elimination Act. IDEA is the Illegal Deduction Elimination Act. It brings the IRS into this.

The Internal Revenue Service has demonstrated a desire to enforce the laws that they are entrusted with. They want to enforce that we all pay our income tax, and they seem to be entirely willing to levy interest and penalties against underpaid taxes. So New IDEA would give the IRS the authority to take the Social Security numbers that are introduced on the 941 employee withholding forms, enter those into the instant check program, the employment verification program, and if the employer knew or should have known they were hiring an illegal, it allows the IRS to disallow the wages and benefits that were paid to illegals as a business expense. The IRS makes that decision. That $10 an hour that was an expensed item goes over into the plus side, into the profit column, and presuming that the business is profitable, perhaps a corporation would be in a 34 percent corporate income tax bracket. If that is the case, then the $10 an hour expensed item, that becomes now a profit item. It gets the 34 percent tax levied against it and also interest and penalties. This totals up to about $6 an hour on top of the $10 an hour.

The net result of New IDEA, H.R. 3095, Mr. Speaker, becomes a $16 an hour liability for this illegal employee. Now, I will not tell you that you can hire then a $16 illegal because we have all of those things we talked about, health insurance, workers comp, unemployment and retirement benefits and all that contingent liability that comes with that, but perhaps a person can take a job that is legal here for maybe $12 an hour, and that levels the playing

field so that lawful permanent residents in the United States and especially citizens of the United States then can have some opportunities instead of being undercut and underpriced by cheap, illegal labor.

That is the idea of New IDEA, the New Illegal Deduction Elimination Act, H.R. 3095, and it will generate billions of dollars for the United States Treasury until employers figure out that it will be enforced by the IRS.

You might, Mr. Speaker, contemplate that it would be unjust for us to go in and levy that kind of a penalty on employers if we did not give them some kind of safe harbor if they use the instant check program. New IDEA does give safe harbor to employers if they use the instant check program and they used it in good faith, then that gives them safe harbor. So the IRS then cannot levy interest and penalties against the employer if they happen to hire someone that is illegal and maybe the instant check could potentially have a mistake in it.

So we set this up with the right kind of structure. We bring in the IRS to do a good task, to help enforce our immigration laws. We direct the IRS then to make those kind of reports to Immigration and Customs Enforcement so that once there is a determination made that an employer was, I will say, willfully hiring illegals, then Immigration and Customs Enforcement can come in and levy employer sanctions under those cases.

So the risk could be significantly greater than another $6 an hour on top of your $10 an hour, but what it does is it puts enforcement in place where enforcement did not exist before. It brings a new agency in that has demonstrated a willingness to enforce Federal law. It changes this dynamic. It shuts down the magnet so that this magnet that is bringing people into the United States for the jobs, it shuts down the jobs magnet, Mr. Speaker. That is what New IDEA does, and you couple that with building a fence and more employer sanctions, those are encouraged. They are required to use the basic pilot instant check program. These things all go together to shut down the jobs magnet.

Another thing that we need to do and we can do so statutorily, not requiring a constitutional amendment, is to pass a law here in the United States Congress to put an end to anchor babies, birthright citizenship. That was not envisioned either in our Constitution. It is a practice. It is kind of a bad habit that we have gotten into, and so it is not guaranteed in the Constitution that a person born in the United States can be granted or shall be granted automatic United States citizenship. It is a practice that we have take on and it has gotten out of hand.

So we need to shut down the jobs magnet. We need to end birthright citizenship. We need to build a fence because not only is it a way to control the flow of humanity, which in the last year we have had perhaps 4 million illegals come across our southern border. I can tell you how many we stopped. We stopped 1,159,000, thanks to an effective border patrol, and I say effective given the manpower that they have, faced with the manpower that they are faced with. That is a fairly astonishing accomplishment to pick up 1,159,000, but we only adjudicated 1,640 to go back to their home country.

The rest of them, some of them, perhaps 155,000 OTMs, other than Mexicans, were released because we did not have a deportation agreement with their home countries. So they just disappeared into America's society.

Then on top of that, the rest of them were released on the promise that they would return to their home countries. Will you go back to your home country? Yeah, I will go. Okay, fine. Nobody took them down to the turnstile and saw to it that they went through and were put in airplanes and flew back into Mexico City and put them on a bus and took them to their hometown and did so because it was further for them to come back here to the United States.

You know, I think that is a questionable policy, and I do not know if it is very effective on the dollar, but we did some of those things. And yet the Border Patrol has testified that they stop perhaps one- fourth, or, maybe on a good day, a third of the illegal entrants. So that will take that 1,159,000 that came in and it takes that number up to about 4 million. So 2 to 3 million, if you do your math, that came into the United States unobstructed, and reasonably thinking that most will stay here. And yet for 3 years we have been saying 11 million illegals. But in 3 years we could have accumulated another 11 million illegals. And if the number was right 3 years ago, today maybe it is 22 million illegals rather than 11 million illegals. And maybe this workforce is a little bigger than 6.3 million. Maybe it is 12 million. Maybe you have to hire 2 out of every 12 that are not working in America to fill that gap.

But many have said they are doing work that Americans won't do, and that concerned me. I heard a story that if you need your roof fixed in Dallas and it is 105 degrees, no American will go up and fix that roof. Well, Mr. Speaker, I would submit that myself, this Member of Congress, and my crews have worked in an environment that from the heat index temperature on up to 126 degrees, and from a wind chill index temperature down to 60 below, and we have done that for days at a time. So that is 186 degrees, and it feels like temperature range. And certainly at 126 it doesn't feel a lot hotter than that on that roof in Dallas. But I asked myself, what would be the hottest, dirtiest, most difficult, most dangerous job there is anywhere in the world?

I conducted a little informal poll and came back with a consensus that rooting terrorists out of Fallujah probably is the hottest, most difficult, the dirtiest, most dangerous job anywhere in the world. And we have soldiers and marines that have been doing that, Mr. Speaker. And if it is noncombat pay, it pays them $6.80 an hour, and with combat pay it comes to $8.09 an hour. Plus benefits, I admit, Mr. Speaker. That is $8.09 an hour for a soldier to put his life on the line when it is 130 degrees, with bullets flying and RPGs going through the air. That is what is going on with brave American patriots.

If they will do that kind of work for that kind of money, then I believe that the difference is this work that is here in this country, that people claim Americans will not do, has simply just been bid down or it pays too little. And I have watched entire crews, almost entire crews of, I will say, 1,300 in a packing plant that were only about 8 Hispanics 10 years ago go to 81 percent today. And it is not because all of a sudden those people that were there 10 years ago picked up and left. They have been displaced one at a time. The wages and benefits stayed low, and so the illegal labor came in and replaced the labor of the people who had built their lives and their dreams around that plant and around that job.

So there is work, and Americans will do all of this work. And I always argue that if you want to see it on the other side, if marines rooting terrorists out of Fallujah for $8.09 an hour doesn't move your heart, Mr. Speaker, then I would say this: that I could hire Bill Clinton tomorrow to mow my lawn if I just paid him enough money. That is the other side of the equation.

In between those two extremes are all kinds of solutions. There are the 77 million nonworking Americans and there are ways to recruit them and to motivate them. We can have bigger families and we can use more technology and open up illegal immigration. But the rule of law must be maintained, and it must be restored if we are going to have respect for the laws in this country.

A question that is never asked, or seldom asked and never answered by the proponents of open borders, Mr. Speaker, is the question: Is there such a thing as too much immigration? That is the number one most obvious question of all. If you are going to enter into this discussion and this debate and you are going to seek to establish an immigration policy and be a part of that debate and put your vote up, you ought to have an opinion on whether there is such a thing as too much immigration.

Some will go off on tangents and not answer that question. If you pull them back from their tangents and just insist, is there such a thing as too much immigration, in the end they have to admit that if there isn't such a thing, then they have to argue, well, okay, we can have 6 billion people here in the United States. Everyone wants to come to America, for good reason. So if there

is not such a thing as too much immigration into the United States, legal or illegal, then everybody in the world might well want to come here, and 6 billion people living in these 50 States of America and depopulating the rest of the world, I do not think that is the formula we want to look at.

So someplace between this 283 million that we have and the 6 billion that are out there to be recruited might be the right kind of number. Maybe the number is even perhaps less than the 283 million. I don't think so, but it should be part of our discussion.

So there is such a thing as too much immigration. We can establish that clearly, unless they are willing to take the position that 6 billion people would be an appropriate number for Americans. So if there is such a thing as too much immigration, then the next question is, well, how much is too much? And what are the reasons by which we would come to a conclusion?

I would argue, Mr. Speaker, that we need to bring people into this country who can assimilate into this society, who can contribute to this economy, and people who hopefully have an education and perhaps some capital. We need to look at the industries that are there and have these debates about H1 and H2B visas so we can supply the demand that is there.

But I am hearing people whine when I say we need to enforce our immigration laws, and it is because they are afraid they are going to lose their gardener or they are going to lose their housekeeper. I talked to an individual the other day that drove up to the illegal immigrant distribution center, where some of the communities have built a building so they can gather the day laborers there. He pulled his car up and he said, I need someone to work for the day. He had 100 people around him. Then he said, I have got $10 an hour, and they all walked away. He had to get out of his car and say I have $15; now I have $20. He found one that would work for $20 an hour for a short day.

I would submit that that is not a national security issue if you can't hire someone to pull the weeds out of your garden. If you cannot go out there or hire someone to do that, go rent a condo and sell the house to someone who can figure that out. This economy will sort this out. Supply and demand is always taking care of this. People used to migrate to go to work. They migrated out of Oklahoma to go to California. The Okies picked grapes out there.

I read a story about a 6-by-6 area in Milwaukee, 36 square blocks, where they used to have heads of households all working in the breweries. They came there in the 1930s from the South. And on that day, and this has been some years ago that I read this article, but on that day there wasn't a single working head of household because those jobs had disappeared in the breweries in Milwaukee. But nobody thought that that labor force might want to migrate somewhere where there was a job, because the safety net that is there has become a hammock. That is why we have 7.5 million on unemployment and that is why there is another 5.2 million that are looking. And many of those are good people. But if we provide a safety net there, it is easier to set back on that, rest a little on the hammock instead of having to get out there and go to work.

So if there is such a thing as too much immigration, then how much is too much? And I would submit, Mr. Speaker, that we are working at an effective rate right now. We will see differences in numbers, but the legal numbers are about a million a year. That is a lot of people. I think we can assimilate a million a year. But at some point we need to make sure that they have an opportunity for education; that they can learn the language.

We are printing ballots in more than 22 different languages just in Los Angeles County alone. We are in the process of reauthorizing the Voting Rights Act and people are arguing that even after all these generations people need a ballot handed to them in the language they are comfortable with. And I would argue that if you are born here in the United States or are a naturalized citizen, you should have had enough access to the English language to be able to read the ballot and cast a vote.

The only way that you can argue that a person that is legal to vote in the United States, that means a United States citizen, doesn't have a command of the English language, it wouldn't be if they were a naturalized citizen because they have to demonstrate proficiency in English to be a citizen, so they would have had to have been born here in the United States, had birthright citizenship, lived in an enclave, and didn't learn enough English to be able to know President, Vice President, Congressman, State senator, or State representative. Now, how long would it take to learn that? And if you couldn't learn that enough to vote, how could you understand the current events and the culture well enough to make an informed decision?

So I think that we are going down this wrong path with catering to people. We need to bring people together under one umbrella. A common language is the single most powerful unifying force that there has ever been throughout history. God knew that at the Tower of Babble. We have known it many, many times.

There was an emperor in about 245 B.C. in China. And I will never get the pronunciation right in Chinese, Mr. Speaker, but I call him Qin Shi Huang Di. He was the first emperor of China, and that part I know I have right. But he looked around and realized there were all these different tribal regions within China. They had a common culture, they wore similar clothes, ate similar food, a lot of similar habits, but they couldn't communicate with each other because they didn't speak the same language.

He set about to unify the Chinese people for the next 10,000 years, and that was a quote from him, by hiring scribes to draft the Chinese language. They did that, and that language has bonded those people together for a fourth of that time. That is how powerful language is as a unifying force.

I will submit that we have a debate ahead of us, and it is going to be an intense debate. Immigration is a very, very complicated and convoluted subject. There are people whose oxen are going to be gored. There are people who walk away from the rule of law, and they say, What are we going to do? We have businesses that are dependent on illegal labor so you need to legalize this labor.

I heard that last Friday in testimony in a trip out West. I heard a witness testify that they had set up their business near the border based on the premise they could bring illegal labor to do that work. Now they have what I call an attrition rate of 9 percent a week, and we should legalize that, that is their request. We should legalize because, after all, the business cannot get along without illegal labor.

If they premised their business on illegal labor, it does not tug at my heartstrings so much because I have great reverence for the rule of law, the order that is here in the United States of America, for this Constitution that I carry next to my heart every day, to the continuity of our history, to our responsibility to this sacred covenant that really is our Constitution, this responsibility, the legacy that is left us by our Founding Fathers, this rule of law, this greater American civilization, the one that welcomes people in a legal way and gives everyone here an opportunity to pull themselves up by their bootstraps and succeed.

And often, newly arriving immigrants surpass their peers, those born here in the United States that maybe take some of this for granted. A lot of the vitality in America comes from immigration, but the idea that America is a Nation of immigrants and therefore we cannot have a rational immigration policy is an idea that is built upon a fallacy.

I asked the question in an immigration hearing of a series of witnesses: Is the United States a Nation of immigrants? And the answer was yes from all witnesses. Then please submit to me, since you are here as an expert, name a nation that is not a nation of immigrants? No one could answer that question because all nations are nations of immigrants. All nations have benefited from the flow of human traffic.

When people come to go to work, temporary worker, guest worker programs, there is no model in the history of humanity where there has been a

successful temporary worker program. When people are brought into a country to work, they put down roots. It is human nature. They raise a family and buy houses. They should do that. If we bring people into this country, however we might do that, and whether I lose this debate on the rational side of this or not, we ought to ensure that they do have an opportunity to become full-fledged American citizens and not create a second-class category of citizens here in the United States. That will build resentment. People who come here and live and work here, and do so legally, should have a path to citizenship. It should be an earned citizenship. They should respect and revere our laws and our history, but a second-class level of citizenship will be a wedge between us. It will pit people here in America against each other.

And a guest worker, temporary worker program sets up a lower class of residence, quasi-legal workers, but that does not guarantee that there will not be competing groups of illegal workers that are underbidding the guest workers. With guest workers, you have to make sure they are not putting too much pressure on the services, such as health care and education. If you do all of that, it raises the price of labor. They are going to want more money anyway because now they are legal and they have some options.

The people who come in to underbid that will be another wave of illegal workers, and that other wave will drive the price down even further.

So we must control our borders and insist that there is respect for our laws. We must look down range to the future and what America is going to look like in a generation or two. We must maintain our cultural continuity, respect the rule of law and make a prudent decision here, not one that is based upon the idea of we do not have any alternatives. We have many alternatives. We have 77.5 million nonworking Americans. We have technology that we could develop. We could increase our birth rate, open up legal immigration for the skills that we need, and those are just some of the solutions that I can come up with. But, in fact, business is so creative, they can think of many, many more.

With that, Mr. Speaker, I would express my appreciation for the privilege to address you and this United States House of Representatives.

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

The motion was agreed to; accordingly (at 11 o'clock and 55 minutes p.m.), the House adjourned until tomorrow, Thursday, March 9, 2006, at 10 a.m.

Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent to speak out of order.

Mr. Speaker, I am honored to deliver the story of an American hero, Marine First Sergeant Brad Kasal, to this Chamber and to the American people.

Sergeant Kasal was born in the small town of Afton, Iowa, where he was raised on a small family farm and where he learned Midwestern values which would later serve him very well in his service in the United States Marine Corps. Sergeant Kasal is 39 years old and has served three tours of duty in Iraq and Kuwait. He is a member of Weapons Company, Third Battalion, First Marine Regiment, also known as ``Thundering Third.''

When you hear Sergeant Kasal's story of courage and sacrifice, it is not surprising that he comes from a solid family of patriots who have also served our country.

Brad Kasal's brother Jeff is a retired Army paratrooper who served our country in Operation Desert Storm with the 82nd Airborne and now works in Iraq. Brad's brother Kelly served in the United States Army, and his brother Kevin also served in the United States Marine Corps. And 50 years ago, their father, Gerald, served in the Iowa National Guard.

But even among the patriotic Kasal family, Sergeant Brad Kasal's experiences set him apart. During his three tours of duty in Iraq and Kuwait, Sergeant Kasal has received two Purple Hearts. His first was awarded for an incident in August 2004 for shrapnel wounds to the face, neck and shoulder from a rocket-propelled grenade.

His second Purple Heart came from events which took place on November 13, 2004, when Marines were in their fifth day of Operation Phantom Fury, which was a battle to free Fallujah from the grip of the terrorists.

Sergeant Kasal was patrolling the streets and had the duty of clearing terrorists from buildings when he saw a fellow marine wounded and leaving a building. He told him that three more of their men were still inside and under attack.

Without regard for his own life and safety, Sergeant Kasal charged into the building to defend and rescue his men. It was then that he saw several dead Iraqis, the wounded Marines, and a terrorist confronting him with an AK-47 rifle less than 2 feet away. While he managed to dodge the bullets and kill that terrorist, another terrorist was able to sneak up behind him and open fire. Sergeant Kasal was hit by those bullets and fell to the ground. He was dizzy and disoriented from his wounds, but he immediately began caring for another wounded marine. Sergeant Kasal knew he had to stay alive to save himself and the others. As he struggled to remain conscious, a grenade dropped onto the ground next to a wounded marine.

Responding to his instinct to protect his comrade, Sergeant Kasal threw his own body over Private First Class Alexander Nicoll. Thankfully, Sergeant Kasal's helmet and body armor protected his vital organs, but he took the full brunt of shrapnel to his back, shoulders and legs. For the next 45 minutes as he lay grievously wounded, Sergeant Kasal used his 9 millimeter handgun to defend himself in a prolonged shootout where he suffered another bullet wound.

This picture shows Sergeant Kasal being helped from the building still clutching his trusty 9 millimeter handgun. He explained that he kept the gun because he was being evacuated through a kill zone where he knew a number of terrorists remained, and he feared his weapon might be needed to fend off more potential attackers.

Long after he was rescued, Sergeant Kasal learned the full extent of his injuries. Ultimately, he lost 60 percent of his blood. He took 40 pieces of shrapnel wounds, and suffered seven bullet wounds.

Despite his wounds, Sergeant Kasal said his efforts and wounds were worthwhile. The marine whom he shielded, Private Nicoll, had survived the battle.

Sergeant Kasal must undergo constant medical procedures and therapy, but his ultimate goal is to recover so he can resume his service in the Marine Corps to defend you and me and the people of our country.

Marine First Sergeant Brad Kasal does not think of himself as a hero. He is a model Marine and hero for Americans.

In all wars, there are stories of bravery and heroism. The story of Marine First Sergeant Brad Kasal stands out among them. There is no doubt that Sergeant Kasal's actions on November 13, 2004, prove he is an honorable marine with a bigger passion for his fellow marines and our country than his own life and safety.

Sergeant Kasal believes the values he learned in his Iowa upbringing, as well as the strong spirit of the Marine Corps, gave him the strength and will to persevere in an otherwise unsurvivable situation.

Sergeant Kasal makes me proud to be an Iowan and an American; and I thank him for his bravery, honor, and patriotism.

Mr. Speaker, I have with me a letter written by Najim Abdullah Abid Al-Jibouri, the mayor of Tall 'Afar, Iraq who saluted the Third Armored Cavalry Regiment. The mayor of Tall 'Afar saw that the United States soldiers were sacrificing and turning that city into a city that had an opportunity for freedom and prosperity, has carefully penned this letter, and a letter to the Third Armored Cavalry Regiment.

It states: ``In the name of God, the compassionate and merciful, to the courageous men and women of the Third Armored Cavalry Regiment, who have changed the city of Tall 'Afar from a ghost town in which terrorists spread death and destruction, to a secure city flourishing with life. To the lion hearts who liberated our city from the grasp of terrorists who were beheading men, women and children in the streets for many months. To those who spread smiles on the faces of our children and gave us restored hope through their personal sacrifice and brave fighting and gave new life to the city after hopelessness darkened our days and stole our confidence in our ability to re- establish our city. Our city was the main base of operations for Abu Mousab Al Zarqawi.

``The city was completely held hostage in the hands of his henchmen. Our

schools, governmental services, businesses, and offices were closed. Our streets were silent, and no one dared to walk them.

``Our people were barricaded in their homes out of fear; death awaited them around every corner.

``Terrorists occupied and controlled the only hospital in the city. Their savagery reached such a level that they stuffed the corpses of children with explosives and tossed them into the streets in order to kill grieving parents attempting to retrieve the bodies of their young.

``This was the situation of our city until God prepared and delivered unto them the courageous soldiers of the Third Armored Cavalry Regiment, who liberated this city, ridding it of Zarqawi's followers after harsh fighting, killing many terrorists, and forcing the remaining butchers to flee the city like rats to the surrounding areas, where the bravery of other Third Armored Cavalry Regiment soldiers in Sinjar, Rabiah, Zumar, and Avgani finally destroyed them.

``I have met many soldiers of the Third Armored Cavalry Regiment; they are not only courageous men and women, but avenging angels sent by The God Himself to fight the evil of terrorism.

``The leaders of this Regiment, Colonel McMaster, Colonel Armstrong, Lieutenant Colonel Hickey, Lieutenant Colonel Gibson, and Lieutenant Colonel Reilly embody courage, strength, vision, and wisdom. Officers and soldiers alike bristle with the confidence and character of knights in a bygone era.

``The mission they have accomplished, by means of a unique military operation, stands among the finest military feats to date in Operation Iraqi Freedom and truly deserves to be studied in military science. This military operation was clean, with little collateral damage, despite the ferocity of the enemy. With the skill and precision of surgeons they dealt with the terrorist cancers in the city without causing unnecessary damage.

``God bless this brave Regiment; God bless the families who dedicated these brave men and women. From the bottom of our hearts, we thank the families. They have given us something we will never forget.

``To the families of those who have given their holy blood for our land, we all bow to you in reverence and to the souls of your loved ones. Their sacrifice was not in vain.

``They are not dead, but alive, and their souls hovering around us every second of every minute. They will never be forgotten for giving their precious lives. They have sacrificed that which is most valuable.

``We see them in the smile of every child and in every flower growing in this land. Let America, their families, and the world be proud of their sacrifice for humanity and life.

``Finally, no matter how much I write or speak about this brave Regiment, I haven't the words to describe the courage of its officer and soldiers. I pray to God to grant happiness and health to these legendary heroes and their brave families.''

Mr. Speaker, there are no words that can improve upon this letter.

Mr. Speaker, this Member appreciates the privilege to address you, Mr. Speaker, and to stand on the floor of the people's House, the United States House of Representatives, and convey some thoughts that I think need to be shared with you, Mr. Speaker, and hopefully picked up by the American people.

As I listen to the presentation and delivery that continually comes here on this floor night after night, Mr. Speaker, and as I analyze the tone and the attitude and the lament that flows continually from the other side of the aisle, I hear this constant strain, this constant strain of, and this is a quote, ``It would be different if we were in charge, but we are not in charge,'' meaning the minority party.

But I am going to say this, that the members of the minority party have the same individual responsibilities as the members of the majority party. Each one of us is \1/435\th of this task that we have here, \1/435\th of the total voice of the American people, designed by our Founding Fathers, written into our Constitution, drafted in such a way that we do redistricting in America and we do so every 10 years. We draw new lines. We make sure that each of us represents pretty close to the same number of people, approximately 600,000 people. And the voice when you hear me speak, Mr. Speaker, is the voice, hopefully, of the 600,000 people in western Iowa that I have the honor to represent. And I would like to think that when the voice of any of us steps down here and speaks, it is the voice of the collective opinions of their constituents within the districts of all the Members of this House of Representatives.

If one listened to this debate here on the floor night after night after night, one could easily, an uninformed person, come to the conclusion that if you are a member of the Democrat Party, if you are a member of the minority party, you are really powerless to do anything about this.

Take, for example, the case in point, the alleged $9 billion that is wasted in construction in Iraq. And I would point out, Mr. Speaker, that I came to the floor the night before last, and I spent perhaps 55 minutes outlining the effort in the Middle East, the effort in Iraq, and particularly the construction projects that have been initiated there. I led a CODEL over to the Middle East and particularly into Iraq for the very purpose to identify, follow through, observe the projects that had been initiated, those that had been constructed, to go in and probe and ask questions and get a sense of where those dollars, that $18.5 billion that was part of an overall appropriations bill, where they went, how they were spent, under what conditions, and what are the projects that have been initiated and the projects that have been completed.

I did not bring the poster over here tonight that has that chart on it, Mr. Speaker, but I do bring it in my memory. And as I discussed this with the United States Army, who had a responsibility for somewhere in the neighborhood of $13 billion in those projects, they have initiated over 3,300 projects with those dollars. They have completed over 2,200 projects with those dollars, and there remains another 1,100 projects that are either in the process of construction right now, soon to be completed, or they will soon be initiated, and the last projects will be completed some time after the first of next year. They will be the last pieces of that fallen place.

And I heard the statement on the floor the night before last that all of that money was wasted. All of it. So if it is not even going to be qualified that one single dollar out of $18.5 billion went to something good, I wonder how much value one would put on the rest of the statements that are made by that side of the aisle and by that ``informative'' team, and I put that in quotes, Mr. Speaker.

So I watched as they were nearing completion on the mother of all generators up by Kirkuk, a project that has 750,000 pounds of generator and turbine to drive that generator mounted there and is up and generating electricity for the people in that area.

We have heard the complaint that Iraq's oil production is not up to where it was at the beginning of the war, that there is less electricity available and less electricity production than there was before the war. Or before the liberation, I prefer to say, Mr. Speaker. And I can categorically inform you that that is simply not true. The oil royalties before liberation in March of 2003 that came into the Iraqi Government were $5 billion a year. The royalties for the oil that was exported and collected, royalties for the last year were $26 billion.

Now, one cannot conclude that oil production is down with five times the royalties being paid to the Iraqi people to help fund their overall budget. And, yes, we have put money in that and resources in that. We have put minimal dollars into oil development and production, and we have done so because we have said the United States is not in this for the oil.

We are in this for freedom for the Iraqi people. We are in this to erase the habitat that breeds terror, and there has been extraordinary success that has been accomplished there. But to own the oil or to invest United States taxpayer dollars into that oil infrastructure and then turn around and turn it back over to the Iraqis was never part of our plan. We did suggest that oil revenue in Iraq would go to pay for the reconstruction in Iraq. And after we had been there for 6 or 7 months, it was apparent that that kind of revenue just was not going to flow, that the infrastructure in Iraq was so dilapidated, that it had not been reconstructed, had not been modernized in at least 35 years.

So think, for example, of massive oil fields that have significant quantities of oil, oil so rich that it seeps to the top of the ground up by Kirkuk, but yet not drill a well. Or not drill wells in significant numbers. I should qualify that statement. To not build pipelines, to not build refineries, to not build a system to extract that oil, refine the oil, and distribute the oil to the rest of the world so that you can continue to increase your production while world consumption is going up, those are things that did not happen under Saddam Hussein's regime.

So the production that was there 35 years ago simply diminished gradually in increments as Saddam took those resources for his own uses and starved the Iraqi people. But the production of oil is up. The production and generation of electricity is up, Mr. Speaker. An average day of electricity before the liberation, and I will pick a month, early March, 2003, would produce over 2,000 megawatts of electricity.

Today, it is over 5,000 on peak days, and it falls off maybe 1,000 on your average days. But it is still significantly more production.

Now, the statement will be made on the other side of the aisle, if they are paying attention and if they are astute, they will say, but Baghdad has less electricity than they had before liberation.

Mr. Speaker, that also is true. And the reason for that is because Saddam focused his electrical resources into Baghdad. Baghdad had 10 to 12 hours of electricity every day under Saddam Hussein's regime. The rest of the country got very little at any time, an hour or two a day. Now it has been shifted so the distribution of that electricity roughly doubled the generation of electricity by setting up new generation plants, setting up new transmission systems and new distribution systems. And one of the things that is a constraint there now is not being able to wield that power anywhere in Iraq where it is needed, not having a central terminal where switches can be thrown and you can send electricity to Mosul or Kirkuk or Tikrit or into Baghdad, into sections and zones that need it. That is also going to be rectified within the next half a year or so so that the need for electricity can be targeted to the regions of Iraq where it is going to be the most valuable.

And the predictability that has been established there, it used to be unpredictable under Saddam for the outlying cities, more predictable in Baghdad because he took care of Baghdad. Today, it is predictable in most areas of Iraq. But the areas of Iraq outside of Baghdad have gone from one to two hours of electricity a day to 10, 11 and 12 hours of electricity a day, at predictable times, so people that are running a business or doing a little manufacturing or maybe there is someone doing their laundry, they can plan their lives around having a stream of electricity.

We don't know what that is like, to have to think about managing our lives so that when the electricity is on we turn on the washing machine, plug in the iron, turn on the air conditioner and go start the pump to pump water for our livestock or even our irrigation. We don't think about that. But that has been a fact of life in that part of the Middle East from the beginning of electricity.

So all of the country of Iraq is far better off in access to electricity and consistent supply, substantially better off, four to five times better off, with the exception of Baghdad.

Baghdad is about one-fourth of the population of all of Iraq, excuse me, I should say one-fifth of the population of all of Iraq, and their daily electrical supply is down from what it was. It is no longer 10 to 12 hours a day, it is 2 to 4 hours a day. And that needs to be ramped up, Mr. Speaker, and it will be. As soon as they are able to wield this power in a more efficient fashion and get a couple more generating systems up on line, then Baghdad will be moved up into the level with the rest of the country and provide some stability for that city as well.

But it is important that Baghdad be brought into the level of electrical supply as the rest of the country. As Baghdad goes, so goes Iraq. With that kind of a population of about 5 million people, it is the core of the country. It a large metropolitan area, of course, Mr. Speaker.

But they made significant progress. Some of that money went to great good. Some of that money went to security. When you are going in to lay a sewer plant because there are children playing in raw sewerage in the streets of Sadr City and you have insurgents shooting at your construction workers, some of that money needed to go for security, and some of it did.

But if there is some money missing over there, and Paul Bremer says it is not, and if the Inspector General says it is, then I go back to the King law of physics, and that is everything has to be somewhere.

So if it is alleged that $9 billion are missing, Mr. Speaker, then my challenge to the people that make that allegation would be, where is it? Did it disappear into thin air? Whose hands did it go into? Was there graft and corruption? If so, what? Be a little more definitive. Don't throw out just some wild allegations that here is some money that is missing and it is somebody else's responsibility to address this.

We all have the same responsibility, 1/435th of the responsibility, all of us responsible to the people of the United States of America. And to stand here and admonish night after night after night that if they were just in the majority somehow they would do their job, but they are in the minority so they don't have to do their job, that their job is to criticize people in the majority, well, that is a bitter pill to swallow for those of us who get out of bed here, go to work, work late and do the research, and our staff goes to work in our district and here on the Hill, and we have a network with people around this city, around this country and in our districts and in our States and, in fact, around the world.

I have watched my colleagues over here on this side of the aisle age in the few years I have been here. I can look at them today and see lines that weren't there 3 and 4 years ago. I see hair that is absolutely gray that had a trace of it 3 and 4 years ago. They are working hard for the people of this country. And things happen around the world, and anything you can find to criticize can't be laid at the feet, not everything, of the people on this side of the aisle that work hard for the people of the United States of America.

In fact, I don't agree with all the decisions that are made by the majority of this Congress, and who in the world

would? If you agreed with the decisions that were made by the majority of the United States Congress and you served in this place, or you are someone who hopefully aspires to come serve in this body someday, if you agree with the majority opinion, that means you are not thinking for yourself.

Of course, we are critical among ourselves. We are critical among ourselves as a Republican majority. We are critical on the other side of the minority's opinion. But in the end we have to stand on our own integrity, use our own intelligence, use our own research and be objective, open up our eyes and ears, read, listen, hear, think, analyze and resolve to do the right thing for the American people in a bipartisan fashion that brings us toward a conclusion and towards a successful conclusion. And that success is not defined as if the Democrats were just in the majority in the House and in the Senate and had the White House the world would be a different place. Yes, I am convinced it would be a very different place, Mr. Speaker. But that is not how you define success.

You have to lay out a plan and vision for the American people. You need to stick to that plan. It has to have vision. It has to have foresight. It has to have a short-term, midterm and long-term vision. It has to be something that the American people can subscribe to and believe in, something they can work for and work towards. In fact, Mr. Speaker, it needs to be something that the American people can sacrifice for so that they know that the delayed gratification can one day turn this country into a better country, tomorrow, next week, next month, next year, next decade, next generation, next century, and on and on into the future of this great Nation, the United States of America.

So I would submit, Mr. Speaker, that it is not that ``it would be different if we were in charge.'' No, it won't be different. You will still hear complaints. What makes things different is if you lay out a vision.

So, in the brief time that is here on the floor of this Congress, Mr. Speaker, I don't propose to be able to lay out a complete and total vision for America. I would touch a few subject matters that were raised here and then move on to the subject I came down here to talk about.

One is the issue of foreign debt. I would agree, we are borrowing money from foreign countries in order to provide for the funding to run this government, and that is because we have deficit spending.

I am one that stands here and says I am for a balanced budget. I am for a balanced budget without taxing the people of America any more than we are today. In fact, the Bush tax cuts that were passed in 2002 and in 2003 were tax cuts that don't affect the bottom line of our deficit in a measurable fashion. But what they did do was stimulate the economy.

I would back us all up to the day, Mr. Speaker, that we had a recognizable, identifiable dot.com bubble. We saw great growth in this economy. It was speculative growth in the economy for the most part.

People said, well, we are in the information age. We have gone through the stone age, we have gone into the industrial age, and now we have transformed ourselves into the information age, and the information age is an era by which the ability to store and transfer knowledge in and of itself apparently had a lot of value.

Because whenever we would come up with a microchip that could store and transfer information more effectively and more software programs and more creativity that had to do with all of the intel industrial out there, the investors of the world looked at this and said, my gracious, I can't wait to jump on that, I can't wait to buy some shares of this intel company, because it is going to grow, and I am going to double and triple and quadruple my money, and I will be a rich person someday because we are in the information age. Surely, this company can store and transfer information faster and better than ever before. That has to have value.

So that created this dot.com bubble, because we forgot something. We forgot that the marketability of everything that we have has to come back down to something that has substance, that is sustainable, and that is this, and it has always been the case in the economy, you have to produce a good or a service that has a marketable value.

Now, what does information have for a marketable value? Well, companies will want to be able to purchase information and the ability to store and transfer and sort that information because it makes them more efficient in their decisionmaking process and in the delivery process of their products or service.

So if I am in manufacturing, I will have sales and I will have inventory coming in and I will be manufacturing things and my inventory will be going out. We will have our marketing and distribution. All of those things happen to be working.

Now ways that I can use the dot.com industry on that, this information age, is that if I can sort my inventory better, if I can order more efficiently and precisely, if I can get better bargains because I am doing an Internet negotiation auction as opposed to a purchasing agent sitting there on an old black dial telephone, yes, information has value then.

If it allows me to store just-in-time inventory so I can bring the trucks of my raw materials in just in time, so I cut down on my own inventory, that capital investment, turn it into a product and turn it out the door more efficiently, and if it helps my sales people get out there and market that product, and if I can get that product made with computerized equipment so that it is done with better precision and more cost-effectiveness and better quality and get that on the truck and get it delivered to the customer in just-in-time delivery time, reliable, all of that information has value.

So we paid for those things because information had value. But we created our ability to store and transfer information way beyond our ability to utilize it within our economy. In fact, we created it to the point where information itself had a recreational value, and that recreational value became in some components of the Internet.

So here is the day today where a vast majority of the households in America have Internet access, including mine, wireless. I was one of the first ones wireless, one of the first ones with high-speed Internet in my office. Actually I was the first one in the telephone service company where my construction office is and my campaign office. That office was the very first customer for high-speed Internet services for that telephone company.

Out in the country where Marilyn and I live, it is another telephone service company, we were the very first customer there to have DSL high-speed Internet services in our house, because we also ran the business out of the house and we needed access to high speed. So I love technology. It has value.

But, in the end, when you pay for all of this information and this technology and even when you market it to people for recreational purposes, that means their disposable income, people say I have an extra 25 or 40 or 50 dollars a month that I want to put into this Internet. Even though I can get along without it, I really like the convenience of being able to send out the e-mails to my friends and be able to find the answer to any question I want to ask just simply by going up on the Internet, do a search, and here it is.

So we marketed that as well off of the information age. But we produced the ability to store and transfer information way beyond our ability to market it. That was the dot.com bubble. You knew I would come back to that, Mr. Speaker. That was the dot.com bubble.

So this bubble in our economy was the speculative bubble that was created because there was investment made in the information age that went beyond the amount of information that could be sustained by the economy. And, like any bubble, bubbles will burst, and that bubble did burst, and it burst about the same time, just before we had a transition from President, from President Clinton to President George W. Bush.

The bursting of the dot.com bubble, Mr. Speaker, and we forget that so often, and as we saw our economy take the downturn and plummet and try to adjust for the bursting of the dot.com bubble, we also saw two planes go into the Twin Towers on September 11, 2001,

right dead center into the financial center of America and the world. At the same time, a plane went into the ground in Pennsylvania and into the Pentagon.

We were all of a sudden from a nation that was scrambling to recover from a dot.com bubble, we were thrust into a worldwide war on terror, with our financial centers crashed down around us and left just a smoking hole in the ground at the Twin Towers. Our economy went down with that. It already was headed down, and as it ran down the hill, it was pushed off the cliff by September 11.

So what did we do here in this Congress? A number of things to react. And the decisions that were made were astonishing in their efficiency. I look back on that era and I commend the people in this Chamber and across in the United States Senate and the President, Mr. Speaker, because two big decisions were made and made fairly quickly.

One I will just briefly reference, the PATRIOT Act, the need to be able to protect us from an intelligence perspective from those who would wish to do us harm and protect the privacy rights of the American people at the same time.

I have sat through 12 hearings of the PATRIOT Act. We need to reauthorize that, Mr. Speaker. That piece of legislation is far better in its quality, and we have improved it some, more than anyone had a right to expect, considering the pressure that this Congress was under at the time to make those changes.

But the PATRIOT Act has sustained itself, and to this date, not a single critic, not in the United States House of Representatives, not in the government function, not in a hearing, even under specific requests of the witnesses that were there in the hearings, not a single critic has been able to name an individual who has had their privacy rights and constitutional rights usurped by the PATRIOT Act. Only hypotheticals, Mr. Speaker, and as we know, hypotheticals don't get you very far in this world.

So that was one thing, one action that was taken by this Congress that was an amazingly efficient action, and we are to this day 4 years beyond, and we have not suffered another attack on American property or people on this soil since that period of time.

So the PATRIOT Act was extraordinarily effective. The Bush tax cuts came right behind that, because we knew that with the bursting of the dot-com bubble, and the attacks of September 11 and the crashing down into a smoking hole with 3,000 American lives along with it, was our financial future.

Now, if we had listened to the naysayers on this side of the aisle at that period of time, we would have said, gee, we got to have a balanced budget here, so let us raise taxes. That is how we will get ourselves out of the smoking hole of the Twin Towers. We would have raised taxes so we had enough money to do what? Arm this huge police force to go out and serve warrants and try to identify these al Qaeda people that wish us ill and go around the world and work with Interpol, and maybe we can bring them to justice in handcuffs.

Some of them said we are not really at war here, and some of them said, well, no, you need to understand them. Some of them said that one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter. Those words were spoken here, Mr. Speaker. And I think they were completely and utterly wrong.

I think the people who have pledged to do us ill mean it. I think they have proven it. And I think it is up to us not just to protect and defend ourselves in this country, but carry the battle to them; and we need to do that with a strong economy.

The Bush tax cuts provided that. And in spite of the criticism, in spite of the things that have been laid out in opposition that say that the deficit is because of the tax cuts, can you go back and calculate the loss of revenue because of the tax cuts and will you see there has been an increase in revenue that came from the growth in our economy. The number is over 14 percent over anticipated revenue over the last year, Mr. Speaker, and the deficit that was projected is significantly reduced, and that is because we have had tax cuts that stimulate business.

So I do not think I would want to have people in charge that do not believe in free enterprise or people that believe that you could tax your way into prosperity. These are the kinds of people that if you give them the goose that lays the golden egg, they wouldn't think you could feed the goose, but they do think you can cut the goose apart and take the eggs and then go on and live in happy prosperity with that basket of golden eggs the rest of your life.

That is the attitude that comes. At some point it goes backwards on you. We have to have a revenue stream. We need a low broad tax scale so that we can stimulate this economy.

With regard to the foreign debt, if we can balance this budget, we can eliminate the increase in foreign debt. If we can produce a surplus, we can pay down the national debt, which reduces the foreign debt. But we have debt to American domestic indebtedness, as well as foreign debt. Both of those concern me. The foreign debt concerns me more than the American domestic debt.

We also have, Mr. Speaker, a negative balance of trade. That number should come out fairly quickly, within the next 30 days. As I recall, it was about this time last year when the 2004 balance of trade number came to us, $617.7 billion negative.

That meant that we purchased $617.7 billion more from foreign countries than we sold, than we exported to them. And some say, yeah, and it was all purchasing oil that was part of that, that was most of that deficit. But, Mr. Speaker, it was a significant portion. I do not deny that. It was over $200 billion that we spent in purchasing oil from foreign countries that added to this $617 billion in red ink trade deficit.

And I submit that we can fix that a number of ways. One of them is drill in ANWR, get that oil coming down here. That will be at least a million barrels a day. That will reduce our dependency on foreign oil.

We are bringing in liquefied natural gas that has got to be compressed in the Middle East and brought over here on a compressed tanker and brought into a terminal and converted back to gas again and delivered up here into the United States.

We sit on enough natural gas under the non-national parks, Federal lands in America, to heat every home in this country for the next 150 years. And we can drill natural gas wells, but we cannot get the distribution systems laid, we cannot get the roads built, because the environmentals are in the way.

They seem to think that we should not develop our natural resources, that this Earth is for every species except homosapiens, Mr. Speaker; and I submit that we are here to have dominion, to manage all of the species. But these resources are here for us.

We got that message clearly from God in Genesis, and I stand by that need for us to develop our natural resources. So we should drill on Federal lands for natural gas and oil. We should do it in an environmentally friendly fashion.

We should build a distribution system so we can heat our homes in America and run our factories and produce our fertilizer. Being from the Corn Belt, Mr. Speaker, I have to say that corn uses more nitrogen to produce it than any other crop. All crops use nitrogen. Corn just uses more than any other. And the production of nitrogen fertilizer uses natural gas.

It is essential in the production of nitrogen fertilizer. In fact, the very cost of the fertilizer, the composition of that cost, out of every dollar of nitrogen fertilizer, 90 cents out of that dollar is the very cost of natural gas.

So if we can cut the cost of natural gas in half, we would nearly cut the cost of nitrogen fertilizer in half. But instead, we have watched fertilizer go from $2 up to $15 in America because we are not drilling on our federally owned lands. We cannot get access to get the gas out, if we can get in there to drill.

We are not drilling on the Outer Continental Shelf because there are environmentalist extremists in the way. These are people that argue, well, if you drill a natural gas well on the Outer Continental Shelf, it will pollute our beaches. So I simply say, please

submit to me a single case in all of history when a natural gas well polluted anything.

If you have a natural gas leak, what happens to it, especially offshore in the ocean? The gas bubbles up to the top of the ocean and dissipates. It does that whether you drill wells or whether you do not, because a significant amount of that natural gas just percolates up out of the ocean floor anyway.

So it would not be measurable if we had a natural gas leak, but the gas does not pollute anything; it just dissipates into the air. So before it all does that, we should go get that gas, tap into that gas, pipe it in here to the United States, and put it into these States that can use it for fertilizer.

And so those things, those things alone would go a long way, Mr. Speaker, towards reducing our dependency on foreign oil. Reducing our dependency on foreign oil helps our balance of trade. But these are components of the fix, Mr. Speaker, and I would say there is one more step we need to take, and then I will go back to how we repair this balance of trade and how we eliminate the foreign debt, how we eliminate the domestic debt of this country and get us on sound fiscal foundation.

One more component, before I go to that solution, Mr. Speaker, and that component is to produce a balanced budget. Produce a balanced budget so we do not have deficit spending, so we do not have to borrow. If we produce that balanced budget without raising taxes so that we diminish the production in this country, then we can have this robust economy that we have today.

And this robust economy that we have is an economy that has grown at a rate of more than 3 percent increase on its gross domestic product each quarter for the last 10 quarters at a minimum. It has reduced the unemployment rate to under 5 percent over that period of time. By anybody's measure, that is the longest, most healthy economic growth period since the early part of the Reagan years. So more than a generation has passed since we have seen this kind of growth.

And I would point out that during the Reagan years we had high inflation, the early part of the Reagan years. Before we got it under control, we had high inflation, we had high interest rates. So that kind of economic growth and that kind of lower unemployment ratings, there was not as good an environment as it is today, because we have got gradual growth, we have got controlled growth, we have got not too hot in our economy, we have got not too cold in our economy, Mr. Speaker, we have got just right.

It is cruising along here at a more than 3 percent growth, less than 5 percent unemployment. It is not as good as it can be. Unemployment can be better than this. By historical standards, it is a high standard. So I would say let us balance the budget without raising taxes. Let us get our spending down. Let us tighten our belts, Mr. Speaker; let us get our house in order.

If you were running a company or running a business or taking care of your family budget, and you realized that on the portion of your budget that had discretion on the parts that you were going to spend, now we all have fixed costs, we have to make our house payment or rent, we have to keep the lights on, we have to keep the heat up some, maybe we have some other fixed costs there, we have to buy some groceries, and this cost of living, you can make a minimal budget on the amount that is a fixed cost.

That is the equivalent to the entitlements in this Federal budget, those things that are fixed today that are very difficult to change, those items in our budget such as Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, and even to a lesser degree interest. They are all fixed costs. They are growing, entitlement costs. We have to have national defense, certainly, in this time. So if you would reduce those things down to eliminating the nondiscretionary spending, which is Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, and you eliminate the Department of Defense, and by the way I would reduce Homeland Security's funding, they have raised that budget out of sight without the accountability that I would like to see.

But if we go to non-defense discretionary spending, those things that we do have control over, those things that if it were your family budget, your going-out-to-dinner money, your vacation money, your recreational-tickets-to-the-ball-game money, going-off-to-golf money, those kind of things that you would naturally tap into if your budget got tight, the discretionary spending portion.

If you looked at your budget and said, well, I have got it in mind for $2,500 this year that I am going to spend to make my life a little richer, but I am spending too much, and one of the ways I can balance my budget is simply take that hundred percent of your $2,500 for your recreational discretionary spending, reduce it down by 5 percent, down to 95 percent.

Now who would not do that if they were running a family budget, or if you are running a company, Mr. Speaker? Would you not do that? Would you not look at those items that you could control and simply say, I am not going to take this procedure of spending the red, I am going to tighten my belt? I am going to do without for a little while so I can get my budget back under control.

Well, what I have described is all we really need to do in this Congress, Mr. Speaker. We need only address the other spending, the non-defense discretionary spending portion, and we need to reduce it by 5 percent.

Now I do not think this is the best way to balance the budget; but it is a way, an understandable way to balance the budget. Reduce that by 5 percent and we have balanced this budget, and in fact it balances the budget under current increases of the entitlement spending on out another 15 to 18 years, which becomes almost as far as we can to predict any economy, in fact beyond our ability to predict the economy.

So we can balance this budget. We do not have the will to balance the budget, so we borrow money because the people on this side of the aisle cannot get along without their programs. They are afraid somebody will throw them out of office if they say tighten your belt.

There are some people on this side of the aisle who feel the same way. They band together. It only takes about 10 or 12 people on this side of the aisle to see to it. Everybody on this side of the aisle will vote against the budget, I guarantee it.

There will be a budget come to the floor of this Congress within a month, and that budget will be debated on this floor. It will be one that is crafted to be as responsible as it can be. When it is done, I will make the prediction that not one Democrat votes for a responsible budget that comes here on this floor, not one, because it is a political vote and it is not an economic vote.

And so the belt is tightened over here. We try to send the right message. And then the criticism flows out of the other side. You cut my program. You squeezed this out. You starved children. You froze old folks. That is an old line. You hear it over and over again, Mr. Speaker.

I have not noticed that it works with the thinking people that have watched history flow. But we should balance this budget. I testified before the Budget Committee the day before yesterday, Mr. Speaker, and I requested that they produce a balanced budget. Whether they can produce the votes to pass it or not, I do not think they can get the votes to pass it, they need to put a target up on the wall so the American people know what it would take to balance the budget.

And I will be supportive of that in seeking to produce and develop a balanced budget. I cannot hide behind the Budget Committee and say, well, my friend, Mr. Nussle, did not produce a balanced budget. He is doing the best he can. He has got to get 218 votes, and it has been astonishing his ability to do so. He can take a 2.4 or $2.7 trillion budget and spin it around his head and calculate it all out, break it apart in pieces and put it back together.

He can go out and get the votes that he needs to get that done. I am impressed with the work that he has done. But I still challenged them to produce a balanced budget so that we know what we have to do and that will help inspire the American people to come forward and say, let me tighten my belt. I am willing to tighten my belt if my neighbor tightens his. Cut my program here, if you like, just do not cut me out of proportion to the person over here. I will take my fair share of the load as long as you do not

put the unfair share on me and give that other person a pass.

But we cannot get there in this debate, because the demagoguery gets so heavy. And in fact last year we had reconciliation in the Ag Committee. We needed to reduce the spending over 5 years by about $3.7 billion. We needed to find a way to do that. That is $3.7 billion out of an annual expenditure of about 34 billion, by the way. So multiply that by five and you are up there in this 165 or $170 billion range to find $3.7 billion in savings there.

In the food stamp program alone there has been identified, even today, by Secretary Johanns' announcement a 5.88 percent error rate in handing out food stamps.

Now that error rate, I suppose it could be by that percentage that we missed that many people that should have had food stamps, but I do not think so, Mr. Speaker. I cannot imagine that there would be an error on that side that we did not reach out and help enough people. In fact, we are out there marketing those services to people in a fashion that I think we are going to find them instead of them finding us.

I would submit that nearly all of that 5.88 percent of error rating in the food stamp program is all on giving food stamps to people who did not qualify, and this does not constrain some of the qualifications. We could tighten those qualifications down, too.

For example, when people come into this country legally, we say you have to be here for 5 years before you can access benefits, welfare benefits from our Federal Government. We could raise that up by a couple of years without too much pressure, raise the standards. But 5.88 percent of inaccuracy translates into over $2 billion a year in waste. And that $2 billion a year over 5 years is easy math. $10 billion dollars could be saved there.

But, you know, even though the numbers were bigger last year, I could not get one soul on that side of the aisle to support one dollar in cuts when we had the waste lying right in front of us, Mr. Speaker. And, in fact, there has been more waste there than they have even alleged took place in Iraq. But that does not disturb them because the waste is going into the households of some of their constituents and they have to answer to them. It is not the matter of the waste that concerns them. It is the opportunity to be critical.

So I actually came to this floor, Mr. Speaker, to talk about a different subject matter, but, as I listened, it changed the subject for me. So now I promised that I would come with a solution on how to repair this deficit in foreign trade and how to fix the foreign debt.

I would lay out real clearly, there is a policy out here, there is a bill, H.R. 25, the FAIR Tax. The FAIR Tax is a piece of legislation that takes the tax off of production in America and puts it on consumption. It is a consumption tax. It is a national sales tax, and it truly is an aptly named bill, the FAIR Tax.

Now, the way we fix this foreign trade deficit with a fair tax is simply this, that whenever anyone goes to buy something off a shelf, a product, and pays retail price for that product, imputed into that cost is the Federal tax composition. For example, if you are a corporation and you are producing a widget, you are going to need to calculate into that your corporate income tax, any other Federal excise taxes that are part of that that you would have to incorporate in your share of the wage withholding in the employees. There are a number of other taxes into that. You build that tax all into the price.

Corporations do not pay taxes. Private companies, sole proprietorships, partnerships, LLCs, they do not pay taxes. Mr. Speaker, that may be a shock to a lot of the American people, but I will explain this. That is that, no, corporations do not pay taxes because they have to add those taxes into the price of the products that they produce, the goods and the services, and pass that along to the consumer. If they did not do that, they would go broke. How could a corporation have any capital to work with if they were going to pay that tax and not incorporate it into the price of what they sold? So they pass that price along, and it is built into the pricing mechanism of everything that they sell.

When that product reaches the retail level, it has in it when you take it off the shelf, a person, and that $1-widget you lift off the shelf has 22 cents of imputed Federal tax built into that, 22 cents. So if we could pull the Federal tax out of those goods and services, the goods would go down by 22 cents, so your $1 widget becomes an 88-cent widget.

But if it is a service and you take the tax out of that service, it is higher yet. Now your 1 dollar's worth of service that you pay your plumber, say your $100 plumber bill becomes a $75 plumber bill because 25 percent of that is imputed price, is built in there to pay the taxes, passed along to, no big surprise, Mr. Speaker, people.

People pay taxes. Corporations do not pay taxes. Businesses do not pay taxes. They collect them. And the reason they do is because government has found out that they are more efficient in collecting taxes than government can be. So we put that on the burden of the businesses to collect the taxes. They impute it into the prices of the goods and services they are producing. They tack it onto that price, and you, the consumer, go up to the shelf, pull that widget off of there for $1, and it is really 78 cents.

Mr. Speaker, let me correct the earlier statement. I am doing my math on the run here. It is a 78 cent widget as opposed to $1 on the shelf because you get to take 22 cents out of that price.

Now, another truism, Ronald Reagan said, what you tax you get less of. And we know that. If you have to pay taxes, it is a disincentive. So if you were going to produce a product and we were going to tax you for it, you would look at that equation and say, why should I do that? I have to pay too much taxes on this.

How about if you are going to work an extra 10 hours a week and it comes in at time and a half and it puts you in another tax bracket and we come along and say, but Uncle Sam will get 50 cents out of every dollar that you earn. Now your $30 an hour that you can make on overtime becomes $15 an hour. Are you going to work or are you going to say, hey, boss, I would like a little time to go fishing, maybe a little golf and spend some time with the kids. I do not really need this overtime because I do not get to keep it. No, the tax is a disincentive to produce.

So when Reagan said, what you tax you get less of, Mr. Speaker, that is the equation that is there. And yet the Federal Government in its wisdom, I will say lack of wisdom, has the first lien on all productivity in America, every bit of productivity in America. Whether it is a good or whether it is a service, when Americans step up to the time clock and punch their time card in at eight o'clock on Monday morning, thunk, Uncle Sam holds his hand out like that and he gets the first of everyone's productivity. And Uncle Sam holds his hand there until you paid your taxes for that day. Then he puts it in his pocket and then you can go to work for the State and that gets put in the other pocket, your State, Uncle Sam, and the other various taxes that come along with this. And then at some point late in the afternoon you are working for you.

Or you can compute it the other way, and you can take a look at Tax Freedom Day. I do not know the exact date. It changes a little bit year to year. How many days do we work before we are working for ourselves? Tax freedom day falls in April or May. I am not sure of the precise date.

Uncle Sam has the first lien on your labor, he has the first lien on the earnings from your checkbook or passbook savings account, and he has the first lien on the delayed earnings of your 401(k) and also any mutual funds you have invested, all of the interest dividend earnings, the capital gains. You buy a piece of property and you turn around and sell that property, the margin will be taxed, and Uncle Sam will be there with his hand out. That productivity that comes from labor or capital is the productivity that Uncle Sam taxes. He taxes it all.

What I am proposing, Mr. Speaker, is that we step in here and we recognize that and we take the tax off of all productivity in America. Eliminate the IRS, the Internal Revenue Service, eliminate the IRS Code, wipe that

thing out all the way back to the early 1900s, 92, 93 or 94 years ago that that began, Mr. Speaker, and pass the elimination of the repeal of the 16th amendment so that we no longer have a constitutional authority to put an income tax on our people.

That sounds really interesting and exciting and thrilling, and it is, but we have to find a way to replace the revenue, and that is the hardest question. I have asked a lot of different questions myself on how to do that, but as I worked this policy out 25 or 27 or 28 years ago, Mr. Speaker, I came to the conclusion then that the only way we could fund the loss of revenue for eliminating the IRS would be to produce a consumption tax, a sales tax, like 45 States have today.

The system is there. It is there to collect the sales off all of that revenue. It is a very simple equation to say to the States, keep the system you have in place, change the rates so we can fund the Federal Government. We will pay you one-tenth of 1 percent commission for collecting the Federal tax through your State Department of Revenue. You send the check out here to the U.S. Treasury, and we will put that into the general fund here.

It is an easy tax to collect. And the other five States that have to generate a sales tax collection system, it has been done in 45 States. It has to be a lot easier than having these 100,000 plus IRS agents running all over here into our kitchens and our offices, prying into our business, making Monday morning quarterback judgmental decisions on the decisions of family and business that we have made and tried to do things in an honorable and ethical fashion and still be dinged for interest and penalty. When you cannot get two IRS agents themselves to agree on this convoluted tax policy that is so confusing that I can find no one on this planet, even the people on this side of the aisle would not argue that if we had a chance to do this over that we would construct anything that looks like what we have with the IRS Code today. It is a disaster.

The cost of collection is beyond the comprehension of people who have not drilled into this and put the pieces together and tried to add it up. But I will give you the total on when you compile the costs of collecting from the IRS.

Now there is some literature that is out there, and some of this has come from Harvard University's Department of Economics, some of it is coming from other economists, but it kind of works out this way, Mr. Speaker. By the time we pay the IRS and fund their infrastructure and build their buildings and maintain them, pay their travel and the overall expenses of the entire agency, that 100,000 plus that are out there every day, I am sure with a smile on their face, trying to increase the tax revenue, and I give them credit for being good servants, but I think they can do a little better in the private sector. They are smart people.

By the time we fund the IRS and by the time we pay for our tax preparers, our H&R Block people, if you will, Mr. Speaker, as a euphemism. By the time we pay ourselves say $10 an hour to sit up half the night on April 14, then you add to that the disincentives we talked about on why people will not work that extra 15 hours of overtime because the tax liabilities are too great.

When you open up the economy, when you accept the increase in productivity that we will have if people are not punished in producing and investing and saving, that adds up to a number that in 1991 was over $700 billion and today it is over $1 trillion.

Think in terms of this. This economy, think of it as a huge cruise ship out there sailing across the ocean in smooth sailing and this is chugging along at maybe 10 knots. Because it is not going any faster than that, Mr. Speaker, because we are dragging this anchor. This anchor we are dragging is the IRS, the cost of compliance, the decisions that are made to not invest, the disincentives for producing because of the tax liability. You add that up to that trillion dollars a year and think of that sitting in a treasury chest hooked to our anchor chain, and we are chugging along in this economy at about 10 knots.

Now, we passed a FAIR tax, H.R. 25. We get to cut that anchor chain, that trillion dollars we are dragging across the bottom. It floats to the top. We throw it on board our cruise ship, and we get to invest that in our economy. Right away the 10 knots turns to 20 knots, and we are going along in 10 years in a doubled economy, at least doubled economy from the freedom that comes from taking that anchor that we are dragging and turning it into something that is productivity. It is really that simple to take that economic incentive of the trillion dollars and roll that back into our economy.

There is another perhaps $11 trillion in stranded capital that is stranded overseas that cannot be repatriated into the United States because of the tax disincentive that is there; and that money would come back to the United States, too. The United States of America would become the destination nation of choice for that capital that is stranded out there in foreign countries. It is really naturally American capital, $11 trillion. A trillion dollars a year that we are dragging around in our treasure chest anchor across the bottom of the ocean, the doubling of our economy that comes.

I would point out also, Mr. Speaker, that to get a handle on the magnitude of a trillion dollars injected into our economy every year that today is an anchor that turns into an asset, think in terms of, if you will, Mr. Speaker, 1992 Bill Clinton was elected President. He was elected President in part because he alleged and there were some statistics that supported his argument, I do not agree with it totally but there were, that our economy was in a downturn.

So when he took office and was sworn in on the other side of the Capitol building, Mr. Speaker, one of the first things he did was to ask for a $30 billion economic incentive plan. So he went to the Congress and said, we need to borrow $30 billion, 30 with a B, and we need to put it into make work projects, much like Americorps is today, and once we put this $30 billion into the hands of these young people that will go out and go to work in our communities to make the world a better place here, that money will be spent. It will stimulate our economy. It will get us out of this economic doldrums that it was bad enough that it removed George Bush, Sr., from office.

That was some of the psychology of the voters of the American people at the time. President Clinton came to Congress and asked for $30 billion. Congress debated and deliberated and they negotiated, and they reduced the $30 billion, Mr. Speaker, down to finally $17 billion. It would have been borrowed money. But, finally, they all looked at the $17 billion dollars and said, it is not worth the trouble.

We are not going to go ahead and borrow $17 billion, put it into make-work programs, try to get it into the hands of the people so the money could be spent to stimulate the economy, because it was not worth the trouble; but if it was even arguable that it was at $17 billion and if it was a matter of consensus that it would have been at $30 billion borrowed money, annual spending $30 billion, think, Mr. Speaker, what $1 trillion of wasted money, $1 trillion of maintenance costs and overhead costs that go because of the IRS for tax collection.

Think what that $1 trillion turned into the asset side of the ledger, into the productive sector of the economy could mean. That $1 trillion would stimulate this economy massively; and inject in behind that $11 trillion that sits overseas, and you can see, I think, with ease, Mr. Speaker, what would happen to the economy in this country.

We would double this economy in 10 years. We see the soundness of our dollar come back. We quit punishing people for savings and investment. Why are you putting money in your savings account with after-tax dollars? How can you get ahead doing that? Or when you make an investment and it is trapped here in a real estate investment, a capital investment, and you see an opportunity to make some money and roll it into something else and meanwhile give an opportunity to a young person to start a business or establish a residence and you sell that property, why do we punish you for that? Why do we give you incentive to hang on to that property until your inheritance right? Because you are afraid of being taxed?

This frees up the capital in America that would not be a punishment for transferring that capital into other

hands, that theoretically in every case will do something more productive than it is today. Otherwise they could not afford to bid on the value of that property. That is the theory.

So the things that we need to do in this economy that are good, Mr. Speaker, are the things such as we need to incent savings and the fair tax incents savings. We need to incent investment, and of course, savings is investment. We need to tell people to put your dollars into mutual funds and a company investment and capital investments and we will not punish you for that. We will let you make all the money you can make, and if you want to sell these shares and invest them over here, then do so.

You can make the very best decision that you like, and we are not going to be in here with Uncle Sam's hand in the way, grabbing something out of every single transaction, not having a first lien on all productivity in America, but incenting earnings, savings and investment, research and development, Mr. Speaker, capital investment, higher education. That is where this money is going to go. The future of this capital would go into those three things, Mr. Speaker.

So I would point out that there is a divide in the House of Representatives. There is a divide in our philosophy. There is a divide that I believe is rooted in this philosophy that of all of us here on this planet, if you could somehow shake us up, erase our institutional memories, start us as unbiased people again, and scatter us all over the globe, without having a network that is going to tell us how to think or indoctrinate us, some of the people would see their glass as half full, and they would begin filling that glass up in an industrious fashion, in a faithful Christian fashion many of them, and filling their glass up because that is the thing to do, go out and earn, save, invest, buy, sell, trade, make, gain.

When we do that, everybody prospers. Pull everyone up the ladder next to us and strive for a better future for ourselves and for the succeeding generation, for our babies that we have in our arms and for our children that are growing up and for our grandchildren. That is what this does for the next generations that are here and across this country, Mr. Speaker.

Half of the people, well, probably not half, a portion of the people see the glass as half full, and they would seek to fill it up, and they seek to help others fill their glass.

There is another percentage of the people, the ones that are on the floor with their lamentations night after night after night that say, but my glass is half empty; and you know, I have sat in here for a lifetime and that person over there that was filling their glass did not put a single thing in my glass the whole time. Never mind they did not lift a finger themselves to do a thing, but they see it as a glass half empty. They see it as the economy is a zero sum game. They see it as a pie that is never going to be bigger, that only can be sliced up and however you distribute that pie, it will always be unfair in their mind's eye.

But we see this as a Nation of opportunity, individual rights and a Nation of opportunity, and we challenge people to be the best you can be, be as productive as you can be, and we struggle to put policies in place and encourage people to be as productive as they can be.

That is why I support H.R. 25, the fair tax, because it encourages everyone to do as good as they can, to produce as much as they can. It punishes no one for productivity. It takes the tax off of productivity, puts it on consumption, and thereby incents earnings, savings, investment, higher ed, research and development, capital investment. All of those things improve the productivity of the American worker, and those things increase the overall revenue and income of Americans.

We really have a choice. We can accept the standard of living of the rest of the world. We can watch them catch up with us. We are on this treadmill. We are on the front of the treadmill, and as they catch up with us, we can begin to accept their standard of living or we can go faster and we can go faster with technology, with education, with capital investment.

Those are the things that we need to do, Mr. Speaker; and so I would point out that before I came over here on the floor I did not know if I would use it, but I used some of this technology that I spoke of earlier and tapped in and did a little search for ``the 10 `Cannots' of Abe Lincoln,'' and Abe Lincoln had this figured out and laid it out in 10 Cannots, and many things he has gotten credit for that he did not do. I have no idea if he actually did this or not, but I am going to give him credit because I think a lot of the man. I would point these points out, and I would like to drill them into the brains of everybody that votes for the future of America on this floor and across this country Mr. Speaker.

Abe Lincoln said 10 points. You cannot bring about prosperity by discouraging thrift. The fair tax encourages thrift and savings. You cannot bring about prosperity by discouraging thrift, Abe Lincoln's statement. So we want to encourage thrift.

He said you cannot keep out of trouble by spending more than your income. You heard me say, Mr. Speaker, balanced budget. We want to come with a balanced budget, and we want to put a tax policy in place that encourages more productivity so that we can spread this tax out among more people and have a lower rate and more individual productivity. The sum total of the strength of a nation's economy is the total productivity of its people.

Item number three, you cannot establish security on borrowed money. Brings us all to a pause, Mr. Speaker, because we are paying for Department of Defense spending on borrowed money. It is necessary that we have Department of Defense spending, but that is something that causes me to want to back up, take a look and determine that we can pay our way, pay as we go. That means tighten the belt; we are at war.

Item number four, you cannot help small men by tearing down big men. A little bit different verbiage in those days than there is today. In other words, you cannot help the poor by tearing down the weak. And I think he actually says that.

Item number five, you cannot strengthen the weak by weakening the strong. Use your strength, build on those, help others, ask them, come on up the ladder with me; but do not pull someone down that has climbed up a few rungs. I keep hearing it over and over again, let us pull those people down; the oil companies made too much money. Why did they? Because the environmentalists would not let us drill for more and the price went up. They invested at least in the energy future of America. They will quit doing that if we punish them. You cannot strengthen the weak by weakening the strong.

You cannot lift the wage earner by pulling down the wage payer. Another solid point that needs to be hammered home.

You cannot help the poor man by destroying the rich. It is important that we have people that have a level of prosperity. They build new houses. They move out of those houses and build a bigger and newer house. They sell that house to someone that can afford it and on and on and on until they get down a level of ways where you and I can afford. So you cannot help the poor man by destroying the rich.

You cannot further the brotherhood of man by inciting class hatred. Class hatred is incited every single night on the floor of the House of Representatives, Mr. Speaker. It does not help the brotherhood of man. It drives a wedge between the brotherhood of man.

You cannot build character and courage by taking away man's initiative and independence. One of the ways that that is done is to create independence, and I spoke about individual initiative and individual responsibility and individual rights, and I pray that we can protect and defend those rights for all Americans, rich or poor, weak or strong, whatever color, whatever sex they might be. We need to guarantee their individual rights and protect them and give them that opportunity.

The tenth one, you cannot help men permanently by doing for them what they could and should do for themselves. I remember that statement of Lincoln's.

So all of these principles of Abraham Lincoln's, the 10 Cannots, have been violated on the floor over here night after night after night. If we could get back to those principles, Mr. Speaker,

if we could get to this point where we understood that individual rights, individual responsibility, if we all could begin to climb that ladder, if we could see our glass as half full and begin to fill out, and as we did that, reached out and help our fellow man, if we could take the tax off all productivity in America, we could prepare this future for the young people, for the children, for those that are here tonight, Mr. Speaker, and with that, I thank you for your indulgence.