Steven C. LaTourette

Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent that the Committee on House Administration be discharged from further consideration of Senate Joint Resolution 49, and ask for its immediate consideration in the House.

Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent that when the House adjourns today, it adjourn to meet at 2 p.m. tomorrow.

Mr. Speaker, I hadn't planned on talking, but as I conclude my service here in the United States Congress, every time somebody comes down to the well and says that they want to set the record straight, the record winds up looking like the hind legs of my dog: very crooked.

Knowing a little bit about this and caring about this issue, as everybody that serves in this Congress does, I

really feel compelled to talk about where we are. And I'm heartened by the fact that both the Speaker and the minority leader spoke today about the need to come up with a solution.

Last spring, a guy named Jim Cooper, a Member from Tennessee, and I offered in response to the budget resolutions that were going on, something called ``Simpson-Bowles.'' Simpson-Bowles is also known as the fiscal commission appointed by President Obama to look at the Nation's fiscal problems and come up with a set of recommendations.

The fact is that, even though it was President Obama's commission, he has not sought to implement one of the recommendations. Why? Because the recommendations are tough. There's a lot of tough love. You don't get into a situation as a country where you owe $16 trillion and not have a solution that involves some difficulty and some sacrifice.

Included in there--and sadly, as you listen to the news accounts and you listen to some of the comments on the floor--the rhetoric is that those mean, nasty, nasty, mean Republicans are so interested in protecting the rich people in this country that they're not willing to increase and ask them to give just a little bit more. As one Republican who, in fact, says give the President the 2 percent of the rate increases that he's looking for--that still doesn't solve the problem, as Mr. Woodall so eloquently indicated--I would come at it a different way.

If you let the Bush tax cuts expire on the top 2 percent of wage earners in this country, by the President's numbers--not my numbers, not some number that was pulled out of the campaign--it raises about $900 billion over 10 years. Not being the sharpest knife in the drawer when it came to math when I was growing up, even I can do that. If you divide $900 billion by 10 years, you wind up with $90 billion a year. That $90 billion a year is enough to run the Federal Government for 11 days.

The fiscal year around here ends on September 30. The President's proposal, in terms of sticking it to the rich people, making them pay a little bit more, gets you from the end of the fiscal year on September 30 to Columbus Day. Then what? It completely ignores the fact that two- thirds of the Federal budget--the Federal budget is $3.6 trillion.

Two-thirds of the Federal budget is what is called the ``middle class entitlements.'' It's Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, and the interest on the debt. Those checks go out automatically. There is nothing that any Member of Congress has to vote on, unless you have a proposal, which Simpson-Bowles was and is.

You may hear the ads playing on the radio from the Nation's CEOs and others saying, We can't play small ball. We've got to come up with a package that actually heals the country.

If there is a sadness that I have and one of the reasons I'm leaving is, if you listen to the people talking, the President's advisers are saying, Well, you know, going over the fiscal cliff, we're putting the Republicans in this box and the 2 percent, that's good for the President. And you hear the Democrats saying, Listen, if we can have this discharge petition, make people not like Republicans, that's good for the Democratic Party as we go forward.

Some people, quite frankly, in my party--the Republican Party--are saying, Hey, listen. If we can paint the President and the Democrats as tax and spenders, then that's good for our party.

Mr. Speaker, when are people going to stop thinking about what's good for themselves or good for their parties and start thinking about what's good for America?

What's good for America is that we've got to come together and solve this problem, not just with taking that $90 billion, which really is not much, but with reforming our Tax Code. We have to look at the programs of Social Security and Medicare, not to eviscerate them, not to throw Granny out on the street, not to not have health care for people in this country, but to make those programs not only viable today--but what about the people in their forties and thirties and twenties?

They did a survey a little while ago of high school seniors, and asked: What are you more likely to see, a Social Security check or a UFO, an unidentified flying object? More seniors picked the UFO, and with some of the leadership around here, I'm not surprised that they picked the UFO.

The fact of the matter is that we can't play small ball. When Cooper and I put this thing on the floor last spring, it got 38 votes; 26 Democrats and 12 Republicans were willing to stand up and do this. It's time for the big deal, and it's time for leadership.