Floor Statements

I think whether you are talking about foreign policy, what's going on in the war, or what you stated their agenda was the last week, which has been pretty much the same for the past couple of years, just a bunch of stuff that really hasn't worked, and you could just look around to see the facts of the matter, but there is a general sense by this Congress, and I think this administration, of we don't have to fix these problems. They are somehow just going to fix themselves.

I found it very interesting, one of the bills I am most excited about when we get back in is Representative Tanner's bill and Representative Cardoza's bill that says we are going to basically audit the government. We are going to find out whether there is fat, where there is wasted money, where there are programs that aren't working cut them and squeeze them and put that money into stuff that is working. But that takes initiative, as Mr. Meek has said, it is about rolling up your sleeves and going to work and doing the hard work.

But I found it very interesting, as I was going through former Speaker Gingrich's basic proposals in the Wall Street Journal, I am sorry, and going through here, he makes a lot of comparisons to the Civil War. It is very well written and very insightful.

I want to just share with the House, Madam Speaker, a couple of things that Mr. Gingrich has said, which I think is the kind of attitude that he wanted to bring in 1994, and I think the kind of attitude that we want to bring in, and we will bring in when we take back the House of Representatives next year. He says, as he is going through the war, some suggestions for the President. He talks about several initiatives.

One he said, then, he, the President, should announce an aggressively honest review of what has not worked in the first 5 years of the war. Based upon the findings, he should initiate a sweeping transformation of the White House's national security apparatus. The current, hopelessly slow and inefficient interagency system should be replaced by a new metrics based and ruthlessly disciplined integrated system of accountability with clear timetables and clear responsibilities.

That is what the Democrats want to do. Let us provide some oversight to all this nonsense that has been going on, and then we have to listen time and time again, new show after new show, about how everything is going okay, we need to stay the course, and we have the former Speaker telling us, no, it is about an aggressive honest review of what has not worked.

There are numerous examples of that, and it is about time that the body that was created by Article I, Section 1 of the Constitution, provides the proper oversight. We are not talking about what's going on in local Rotary Club project. We are not talking about a local Kiwanis Club project to go create a river walk in a downtown. We are talking about almost 3,000 American soldiers being killed. We are talking about 20,000 of our soldiers being injured.

We are talking about thousands and thousands of Iraqis, many of them very innocent people, being killed, because we haven't figured out how we are going to win this war, and we have a Secretary of Defense that says he will fire the next person who asks for an exit strategy, or a post war plan. That is not leadership. I don't care what party you belong to.

This isn't about Democrats and Republicans. This is about fixing a major problem that will cripple the American economy, bust our budgets for the next generation.

Again, Mr. Gingrich says, because the threat of losing of millions of Americans lives is real, Congress should hold blunt no-holds barred oversight hearings on what is and is not working. Lives should be changed to shift from bureaucratic to entrepreneurial implementation throughout the national security and homeland security elements of government. That is exactly what Representative Tanner's bill will do. That is exactly what Representative Cardoza's bill will do. Let us throw it all out on the table. Let us hold oversight hearings. Let us audit this government that is not working. This government was meant to work in an industrial society, and it is operating like it is 1950, which it would be fine if it was 1950, but it is 2006.

Everything has changed except for our national security offices and our homeland security offices. We created a 20th century bureaucracy with the Department of Homeland Security to battle a 21st century problem.

Are you a member?

Pay your dues?

Which means you don't have to pay your dues.

If the gentlewoman would yield, so you are saying and it is fact that there is not anyone who believes that there was any connection between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda except for the two or three main leaders of this administration, period.

I do not know if they believe it. They are going along with it.

I just want to reiterate this. The 9/11 Commission was not a partisan commission. That was not a Democratic commission. That was bipartisan, that was Lee Hamilton, one of the most distinguished Democratic Members of the United States Congress; the former Governor of New Jersey, a prominent Republican. A Republican in the Republican Party, very active and involved. That was a bipartisan commission said no evidence. No evidence. And then the new Senate Intelligence Committee, the Senate is controlled by Republicans, which means the Intelligence Committee is controlled by Republicans. This is a Republican committee, Mr. Meek. So it is just, again, third-party validators, two committees, one bipartisan independent committee, another committee controlled by the Republican Party, both saying no evidence.

And then the Vice President gets on ``Meet the Press'' and says something different, and Secretary Rice is out talking about something that is just not even in the realm of reality. That is an insult to the American people. That is an insult to the 700,000 people in Ohio and the 1.4 million people that you represent in Florida. That is an insult. Don't insult the American people, Madam Speaker. Fix the problem. This should have been solved years ago figuring this stuff out, and it is kind of frustrating.

WWW.HouseDemocrats.gov/30-Something. All of our charts and visual aids will be available on this Web site. HouseDemocrats.gov/30-Something. And you can e-mail us there, too. Any comments, please feel free. Members who are watching or listening right now can have an opportunity to e-mail us and ask us any kind of questions. Ms. Wasserman Schultz.

Madam Speaker, I appreciate the opportunity to kick off the 30-something Working Group, and my good friend Mr. Meek from Florida, who was delayed for a minute, will be here any second to talk about taking America in a new direction.

We have heard a lot tonight, and I want to agree with my colleagues on one thing that they said earlier, just a few minutes ago, that the American people know how to spend their money better than the United States Congress, and I agree with that.

If you look at where this Congress has given the money, $16 billion in subsidies to the oil companies, hundreds of thousands of dollars in tax returns, tax breaks for millionaires, Madam Speaker, I agree that the American people would not do that, and that is why it is time to take the country in a new direction.

I want to, before we get too revved up here, thank our good friend from Massachusetts for carrying the ball last night when the younger and the weaker, the fatigued other Members of the 30-something did not have the stamina to come here at 11:40 last night, and you showed up, and I yield to my friend.

What is that $50 billion going to be spent on?

Again, this is the 30-something Hour, Madam Speaker. This is the 30-something Hour, so we are talking about issues that are going to face generations to come, but I want to agree again with the statement that the previous speakers made, which we do not like to refer to, but they said that the American people know how to spend their own money better than the United States Congress, and I am all in on that statement.

And not spending it in a manner which the United States citizens, from Florida and Ohio or Massachusetts or wherever they are from, would completely and totally and wholly disagree with where the Republican Congress is spending their money. They are building hospitals in Iraq. They are building schools in Iraq. They are building clinics in Iraq. They are building roads in Iraq, in a fruitless attempt to try to win over the Iraqi people.

We are borrowing the money from China, Japan, and OPEC countries in order to fund the war and to fund tax cuts that are going predominantly to people who make more than $1 million a year.

The average American person, Madam Speaker, does not agree with that policy. They wholly reject that policy because it makes no sense. People in Youngstown, Ohio, work very hard, and they meet their obligations for the Federal Government. They pay their taxes, and to watch the United States Congress, Republican-controlled, take their hard-earned money and build roads and bridges in an elective war, with no plan, no exit strategy, no idea of how to execute it, and take their money and build roads and bridges and hospitals over there. I yield to my friend.

Will the gentleman yield?

Within the first 100 hours.

If the gentleman will yield.

Because I think it is so important that the American people and the Members who are watching this here tonight understand that things will be completely different when the Democrats take over in January; that we will, within the first, not 100 days, Madam Speaker, Mr. Delahunt, but within the first 100 hours out of this House we will pass a minimum wage increase that will get us in a few years to $7.50 an hour; that we will, in the first 100 hours, cut student loan interest rates in half for parents and for students, which will save families $5,000 over the course of the loan.

We are not rocket scientists. We are not saying we have some extravagant plan that is very elaborate and very complex. These are basic fundamental things. We are going to strip the oil companies of the $16 billion that they get in subsidies, and we are going to put that towards education and innovation and alternative energy sources. And all these things we need to do, Mr. Delahunt, in order for us to be competitive as a country.

Reclaiming my time, I yield to my friend from Massachusetts.

And the bill stripped the courts of hearing a case that the courts actually ruled in favor of what they wanted.

Ms. Wasserman Schultz, you are exactly right. It wasn't that they didn't like the answer, because it went to the appeals court and the court ended up ruling in their favor, that ``under God'' should stay in the Pledge. But they didn't like the question, which is so typical down here, Mr. Delahunt.

They don't like the questions that people are asking, whether it is at President Bush's press conferences or having a hearing and asking questions about what is going on in Iraq or Katrina or with gas prices or what the oil companies are doing. When you have an elected body in a democracy that stops liking the questions, we are losing the basic fundamental aspect.

Be happy to yield.

I yield to the gentlewoman.

Madam Speaker, in this talk today, as we watched the press conference, the Iraqis have army and police force in one region that is in southern Iraq, where nobody lives. They have got control of it, and the Prime Minister is here with the President saying, See, we are making progress.

You are not making progress. Electricity, water, utilities are all at prewar levels. Below prewar levels.

Or that the baby, in the country that this baby was born into, is going to owe $11 trillion to China and Japan and OPEC countries.

This is bogus. This Congress is bogus, Madam Speaker. This is the biggest illusion, smoke and mirrors nonsense. This is disrespecting the American people in the past couple of weeks. Totally has disrespected and insulted the intelligence of the American people.

I yield to my friend.

231.

Madam Speaker, I think that is the perfect example. Those are facts. We did not make it up. Those are facts on how the Clinton administration versus the Bush administration handled illegal immigration.

But look, if you are just the average Joe and you are sitting in the cheap seats watching politics in America, that is not all you see, is the failure to address the illegal immigration problem.

You have watched over the past 5 years, Katrina, in which our FEMA, the Republican appointed members of the emergency management system here in the United States of America, had five or six days, knowing that a hurricane was coming to the Gulf States, and we got the kind of response that we got go.

You look at Iraq. You look at not when the statues fell, but look afterwards, and you see it has been an utter and complete failure. Utilities and all the electricity, all at below pre-war levels. Our army right now, two-thirds of our army is not combat ready. Two-thirds. That is atrocious.

And when you look at lack of investment in alternative energies, and the median wage is down 4 percent, all of the increases in college tuition, all these things, if you are just watching this from afar and you see millionaires getting tax breaks and average Americans struggling to get ahead and falling behind every single paycheck, you have to at some point say, aren't you taking the country in the wrong direction? Aren't you taking us down the wrong road?

Real quick, Mr. Delahunt, whether it is domestic policy or foreign policy, you look at what is happening, and there is a severe disconnect between where the American people want to be and where the administration and President Bush's Congress is taking us.

I enjoyed watching Mr. Gingrich over the past year or so be critical. But the funny part is that this is the neoconservative agenda we are living with now. It has been implemented. There is really nowhere else to go. They have given tax cuts to the wealthy. They have appointed all of their cronies. They control the House, the Senate, the White House, the Supreme Court. They control every major branch of government, they have all of their appointees in all of the right positions through the executive branch, and it is not working. They have implemented the neoconservative foreign policy agenda.

We have increased the number of terrorists.

That is William F. Buckley.

I want to thank Mr. Meek for the opportunity to speak on this point, which Mr. Gingrich stated back in March that they, the Republican majority, are seen by the country as being in charge of a government that can't function.

When you look at what he is talking about, and what even Mr. Gingrich stated the other day on Meet the Press, is that the institutions haven't kept up with the times. And the majority has had now 12 years to try to reform these institutions, and they have made them worse, not better. Because, in the example of FEMA where they appointed horse attorneys, equestrian attorneys to run FEMA, or all the graft and patronage that is going on in Iraq, Mr. Delahunt, which you know about better than us and spoke very eloquently about at 11:30 last night by yourself, all of these issues add up.

When you have higher tuition costs, the paycheck you get doesn't buy as much, when you have higher health care costs, when you are worried about your pension, when you have the auto industry collapsing before its very eyes, you have a low minimum wage that hasn't been raised since 1997, you are unable to govern, as Mr. Gingrich said.

We want to congratulate our 30-something. Ms. Wasserman Schultz here was rated ``One of the Most Beautiful People on Capitol Hill.'' And that is quite an honor. It is an honor for us to be here with you. Kendrick and I and Mr. Delahunt didn't even make the list. I don't even think we were nominated. But we have all have roles to play, and unfortunately, Ms. Wasserman Schultz covers them all. WWW.HouseDemocrats.gov/30-Something. All the charts you saw here tonight, and we could maybe get a copy of the Hill newspaper.

And I thank the leader and our leadership, Steny Hoyer and Jim Clyburn and John Larson for the opportunity to be here.

I think it is important what you said. These aren't unreachable goals for us. These are goals that are achievable, and they are very achievable in the early days. Many of these advances we could make within the first 100 hours, Mr. Meek, within the first 100 hours. Within the first 3 or 4 days that we are here, the American people are going to know by the legislation that we pass out of this House next January that there is a new America, and we are going to go in a new and a different direction.

And all we have to do, Mr. Speaker, is just think about what will happen in those first 100 hours. We pass an increase in the minimum wage to $7.25. How many lives will that affect around this country? Six or 7 million directly, and then millions of others as the bottom gets bumped so the middle income people will get bumped as well.

Cutting student loans. If you have a student loan right now and your rate is 6 or 7 percent, parents and students, loans interest rate will be cut in half within the first 100 days here. That is $12 billion. So many people may be saying, well, are you going to get the money? We are going to not give the oil industry $12 billion in corporate welfare. The American people have a choice to make. Okay? They can reaffirm that legislation, they can reaffirm that position that the Republican Congress implemented over the last year or two and that President Bush affirmed by signing the bill into law and Vice President Cheney kicked off with his secret meeting that he had years ago where we were complaining and saying, well, the oil industry was in there writing the legislation. And everyone said, well, the Democrats, you know, they were in there writing the legislation and now we have $3 gas prices. Okay?

So these small steps, and as you said so articulately at the wee hours or almost the wee hours of the morning about balancing the budget. We implemented what was called pay-go years ago, which means the government can't spend any money that it doesn't have. It can't go out and borrow it. You have to cut it from a program in order to get it, like we will do with our education. We are going to reimplement those rules so that we have a system in place that will restrain the runaway spending.

Now, you have many conservatives like William F. Buckley saying that this President is not a conservative because of the spending, the borrowing that has been going on from this Congress, on and on and on and on. We can take care of these problems very simply.

Now, I am not saying that the structural problems are not going to be more difficult. Getting to a balanced budget after the Republicans have bumped the debt ceiling five times and are going to allow the United States Government to borrow more money from foreign governments than any President prior to President Bush put together, that is going to be a difficult thing to overcome, and that is going to take time. Reforming the government when Republicans have put in all their cronies that operate like they operated FEMA, it is not that they are bad people, but it is that power corrupts, Mr.

Speaker, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

The institution is corrupted because there has been no change, and we when you see Newt Gingrich, the man who gave birth to the Republican revolution, be the most critical of what is going on here, it is not the Democrats saying it only. It is William F. Buckley, it is Pat Toomey, it is Newt Gingrich, it is Dick Armey.

It is Charles Barkley. For God's sake, if you do not believe it, Mr. Speaker, that Newt Gingrich criticism does not hold water, Charles Barkley's should.

And who has a record of it.

We do not really have to look that far to the 1993 operation that we had here and the Democrats who obviously were not perfect, but we knew how to balance budgets. We knew how to implement the PAYGO rules so that we were not borrowing money.

We actually were going to pay down the debt and begin generating surpluses in the United States of America. Can you imagine now, since the Republicans have raised the debt limit five times, harking back to a day when we actually had surplus money and we were on track to actually pay off the national debt in the United States of America? Actually pay it off?

That is what we need to get back to. And it is not that difficult if you are

disciplined and you are willing to say no.

This is like giving candy to a baby, and then the baby wants more candy, and they keep giving it to them. That is the oil industry. That is the top 1 percent. And really, quite frankly, I am even starting to meet people in my district who are in the top 1 percent who are saying I don't want any more tax cuts. I am doing fine. I have a Hummer, I have this, I have a nice house, I have Italian marble flown in, I am doing okay. But kids 2 miles away, on the other side of town, aren't doing well. Their parents are trying to work for minimum wage, a single mom with one child is living in poverty with that kid by working a minimum wage job. It is unacceptable.

And when you run these huge budget deficits and you raise the debt, and this is the interest we are paying in the 2007 budget, $230 billion, just on the interest on the debt. We get no value from that. That is not lowering tuition costs, where people would benefit, get educated, contribute to the economy and generate wealth. That is not taking care of our veterans. That is not investing in health care or research or alternative energy sources. There is no value from that. And that is the disappointing part, is that we are not getting any kind of benefit from that money.

In fact, as Mr. Meek pointed out in the last hour, that money is going to Japan and China to pay down the money that we are borrowing, and paying interest on the money we are borrowing from them. So here we are, and this is just silly, we are borrowing money from China to give tax cuts to the wealthiest 1 percent, who don't need it, and to give $16 billion in subsidies to the oil companies, to give huge subsidies to the health care industry, and then the money that we borrow, China will charge interest on it, and then take the money they make off us and invest it back into their state-run factories because China is a Communist country.

That is not a level playing field, to begin with, because China manipulates their currency, as we talked about yesterday. They do not enforce their intellectual property laws. They have no environmental laws. They have no human rights, no religious freedoms, none of the things we value. So they are taking this money and wiping out the middle class of the United States. That is not free trade. That is not fair trade. It is an unbalanced system.

And we just keep feeding the beast: Right here. How much more do you want? How much more interest do you want?

Be happy to yield.

Well, one other thing that we have forgotten to mention tonight, and I know the clock is ticking, but with all these other costs, we keep forgetting to mention interest rates for people who are going out and trying to get a car or a house and the significant increase over the past year or so in interest rates. So you have the health care, you have the tuition costs, you have the gas, natural and what you get at the pump, and you throw in there if you are trying to get a new house or car and what your interest rates are now, or they would have been because everybody is going out trying to borrow money, you run into a difficult situation.

Again, by balancing the budget, as President Clinton and the 1993 Democratic Congress proved, by balancing that budget, you will in turn reduce interest rates and then let the private sector go out and borrow money and make things happen in the market.

Www.housedemocrats.gov/30something. All of our charts and everything are available, including the article that voted Ms. Wasserman Schultz one of the 50 most beautiful people on Capitol Hill.

With that, I yield to Ms. Wasserman Schultz.

I thank the gentleman. I always enjoy our afternoon sessions here much better than the late night sessions that we normally have.

But you made a point earlier that I think we need to expound upon, that is, the issue of debt and balancing the budget. You mentioned

See, last night, you tried to one-up me with the chart, and now tonight you are copying my charts.

I will get you one.

Then when we come down here, we will just take the chart from our office and carry it down here.

What this really illustrates is our plan, as we have it here before I get into the homeland security, our plan is, as we begin to rein in the spending from the Republican Congress, cut out the corporate welfare, with the Medicare part D, all the major subsidies that are going to all the big pharmaceuticals and health care industries, what we want to do is we begin to move towards balancing the budget, reducing this payment here in the red, and then we have money to invest in lowering college tuition costs, making sure health care is affordable for all of our citizens, making sure we raise the minimum wage. All of these things are going to fit into our long-term economic plan that the Democratic Party has.

We just need to control the levers of government here to make sure that happens. This is exactly how we are going to go about it.

One of the other things that we will invest in, my good friend, and I think it is important to make this point, just in the first few days when we get in, think about it, raise the minimum wage and reduce the loans, the interest on the college loans, by half.

So for the parent loans and the student loans, in the first day or two that we are here, we will cut the interest rates on those loans in half. You will save thousands of dollars over the life of your loan, about $5,000 for the average loan. We will raise the minimum wage, and that is for a single mom who works for minimum wage, who lives in poverty right now. That is unacceptable in the United States of America.

Another thing that we will invest in that this administration and the Republican-led Congress have failed to address is the issue of border security. These are facts that we are going to show you here. When you compare, because I think again the rhetoric on the other side is right where it needs to be, but the reality is something drastically different. If you look at here, Clinton, and these are all comparing President Clinton and what he was doing under his term, two terms, and what happened under President Bush and trying to compare, the average number of new Border Patrol agents added, per year, under the Clinton administration, the average was 642 Border Patrol agents per year.

Under the Bush administration, 411 per year. It is one thing to say you are for protecting this country from illegal immigration, and it is another thing to do it. Under President Clinton, we were able do it under his leadership.

Fines for immigration enforcement, through the INS, in 1999, under President Clinton, 417; 2004, three. Three. Completed immigration fraud cases, 1995, under President Clinton, 6,455; in 2003, 1,389, 78 percent fewer. Democrats understand how to administer government and what needs to be done. Under the leadership of President Clinton, we were able to achieve success.

I wish we could keep going in the right direction.

But, unfortunately, under the Republican Congress, under the Republican House and Senate, under President Bush, this Congress has consistently taken the country in the wrong direction, and I think it is frustrating for a lot of people because I think the rhetoric is there.

The numbers for 2004 have come in, and a lot of our friends on the other side want to tell us how great the economy is doing. I invite all to come back to my district where we have thousands of Delphi workers and thousands of General Motors workers and steelworkers and people who are not doing so well, and an increase in the minimum wage would affect them.

But the numbers have come in from 2004; and in 2004, the top 1 percent, their real income grew by 17 percent for the top 1 percent. Same people that get the corporate welfare, same people that get the tax cut, real income grew by 17 percent. The bottom 99 grew by 1\1/2\ percent.

Is there economic growth? Yeah. The problem is it is not affecting everybody. The problem is it is just 1 or 2 percent of the people. Even upper-income people, upper-middle-class people did not benefit from real wage growth like they should have.

Since there has been oil.

And the bottom line with the minimum wage is that the increase in the minimum wage is good for the economy. In 1997, when it was raised, there were 11 million new jobs that were created after the increase in the minimum wage, 11 million new jobs. States that have a higher minimum wage than the Federal minimum wage have an increase in business start-ups, an increase in sales, retail sales, because it is a different philosophy. It puts the money in the pockets of the consumers and allows them to go out and spend the money, and that stimulates the economy.

We have implemented the neoconservative agenda, and it has not benefited 99 percent of the American people, whether it is foreign policy, the war in Iran, the disengagement in the Middle East, what is going on all over the world or on the domestic side, with Katrina and the prescription drug bill and the stagnant wages and the increase in energy costs, all of these things.

We have now witnessed what it looks like when the neoconservative agenda is implemented, and just look around. If you want to know what happens, just look around. You see it.

What we are trying to say is an increase in the minimum wage, cutting student loans in half, implementing the 9/11 recommendations, shoring up our border security, these are things that we are going to do; and we have a long history in our party of doing it, and we will continue to do it when we take over.

But it is important to recognize that the statistics are there regarding the

minimum wage. We could sit here and make moral arguments all night long because it is, it is the morally right thing to do; but at the same time it is good for the economy and it is good for people all over the country, and I think the more we recognize that, the better off we are going to be.

I want to make one more point. When you talk about this 7 million people who make minimum wage and the underclass and the people all over our country who are living in poverty, and the minimum wage would keep you in poverty if you work 40 hours a week and you are a working mom, we only have 300 million people in this country. We are competing with billions of people around the world, 1.3 billion in China, 1 billion people in India. We only have 300 million.

So we have got to go to great lengths to make sure that all 300 million that are physically and mentally and emotionally capable so they can be on the field playing for us.

This is what an increase in the minimum wage does. That is what cutting interest rates on student loans in half, that is what that does. That is when you look at the Democratic Party's Innovation Agenda, creating incentives for venture capital and research and all of these things that we are doing, broadband access for all Americans in the next 5 years, when you look at what we want to do with alternative energy sources, my God, we cannot just reject science outright.

Let us turn it up. You know, let us get America focused on an alternative energy plan, and we can do that and that is doable; but we need the leadership here in Congress and the resources. Instead of going to the top 1 percent to give them a tax cut, we should be focusing on what is the next generation of alternative energy going to be.

Let us implement the recommendations from the 9/11 Commission. Let us secure our ports. We can do all these things; and at the same time as we are doing this, we have to talk about what Mr. Tanner came down here a couple of weeks ago to talk about with us, Dennis Cardoza from California, his piece of legislation, that says we are going to audit, we are going to audit the Federal Government, and we are going to make sure that there is no fat, no waste, no abuse, no misspent funds, no misappropriated funds, no misallocated funds, and frankly, like in Iraq, there are funds missing, $9 billion. Nobody knows where it is.

I know.

You know what Mr. Tanner's bill says, it is our bill, it says that if you are the Secretary of the Department and you cannot pass these audits, then after a couple of years, you have got to come back before the United States Senate and you have got to get confirmed again because you are not doing your job.

We are trying to run a government that is based, it looks like it is 1950, but society has moved forward. Society has decentralized, and the Republican Congress, they are like dinosaurs that just do not recognize the changes that have come in the world and have not done the due diligence necessary to reform government.

I mean, you can say, well, here is the Democrats making this up again. We do not have to make anything up. Look how FEMA worked with Katrina. Look at how after the military portion of the war in Iraq, look at how we have done after that, not only losing money but not achieving the objective, not really having an objective, to having a big problem there, too.

As Newt Gingrich said last week on Meet the Press, with all that is going on around the world, our bureaucracies do not have the capabilities of handling all these situations. State Department, Pentagon, Department of Defense, all of these. Come on. We need to reform this government and we don't have time to wait.

Because if there is going to be a terrorist attack in the United States of America, it is not going to be like Katrina where we have 5 days where we could watch it on the Weather Channel and know it is coming. This government needs reformed and it needs reformed immediately and that means getting to the bottom of things. That means getting all the facts necessary. That means calling hearings.

What that also means, Mr. Meek, is that some people are going to get embarrassed. Maybe people just need to come before Congress and say, ``Mr. Meek, under this system, no one could do this job.'' Maybe that is the case. I will give you the benefit of the doubt. You appointed equestrian attorneys and all this other stuff to key positions. Yes, there has been a lot of cronyism here, let's not make any mistake about it. And it cost lives and money during Katrina, bottom line. But at the same time, maybe there are good people, hardworking Americans, that want to serve their government that are trapped in a bureaucracy that was designed in the 1930s or 1940s or 1950s and has stayed there and they can't work within this bureaucracy.

Have the decency and the guts to try to reform it.

I appreciate you cutting your answer short.

I agree with you wholeheartedly. If we don't recognize and understand from A to Z what needs to be done in reforming the Government to make sure that we can respond to the needs of our constituents, we are in the service industry down here. We administer programs and we regulate commerce and we take care of foreign policy and we build a military, raise a military, raise an army. We have that obligation. I commend you for your passion and your support and your ideas which do not go unnoticed. But it is so important for us to recognize when we get down here, the few decisions that we will make immediately will have an immediate impact on the lives of every American. By auditing the Government and by going back to make sure that we can figure out how Government needs to look and run and be administered and executed in the 21st century based on an economy that is based on knowledge and information and science, not necessarily industry and huge steel companies and huge auto companies and big bureaucracies were needed to combat and administer and lift people up. I think to a certain extent we need to maintain those principles, but at the same time Government needs to change.

There are so many programs that have really been frustrating, Mr. Speaker, that we have seen funding reined in on, the programs that will ultimately lead to economic development: the manufacturing extension program, the Small Business Administration 7(a) loan program. These are the kind of things that local economic development folks can use. We need to focus on how we export goods out of this country. We have been playing a lot of defense and I think the resentment that you feel in places like Ohio and Indiana and Pennsylvania and the old industrial Midwest is not that there is change, but the country has the wherewithal to pass free trade agreements and begin to compete in a global economy; but at the same time, we haven't done anything at home to make sure that we have adequate skilled workers that will be able to be employed or create wealth in this new society and which we can export and create wealth with business incubators, with job retraining.

Why is it so difficult for us to get some of these workers from the auto industry or the steel industry or wherever it may be into the health care industry? We have a nursing shortage on one hand. We have job reductions in many other industries. What is the problem? We need 3 million health care workers in the next decade or so. We need a million new nurses in the next decade or so. Government needs to be nimble enough and flexible enough where we could make sure that we address these issues. Not because we want to do it for the sake of the Government but because we want to do it because it is going to be good for the overall economy. It is going to be good. The more nurses, the more doctors, the healthier we are going to be. The more general sense we have about wellness and community health clinics and putting clinics in our schools and wellness programs and intramural programs and after- school programs, these ultimately lead to healthier, more educated, more productive citizens which means increased value, more wealth creation and ultimately a strong America so that we can deal with all of these complex problems in the world, not from a position of weakness.

I think what you showed with your map, with all the different countries and the debt that is owed and the net interest that we are paying on the debt, we are now in a position of weakness. We need help with North Korea and we go to our bank, China, and ask them for help. You can't negotiate from a position of weakness. That is what we are doing right now. So we don't get any help with North Korea. We need help with Iran and some of these other countries. Everyone who is loaning us money says, go take a hike. And we hear the utter disrespect that Vladimir Putin showed, not our President but our country, because our President is representing all of us, all 300 million, when he goes to the G-8 summit. And to have Vladimir Putin basically say, no thanks, we don't want the kind of democracy that you're trying to push in Iraq, that is disrespecting the United States of America. When you look at how people are viewing us around the world, it becomes very, very difficult to try to promote the kind of values that we all believe in and try to maintain our strength here at home.

I will give the Web site. In closing, I would just like to say that when you look at the history of the country, being an American really is an adventure. We have seen, from the inception of this country, that there have been tremendous challenges. But tremendous leaders and heroes abound in the country, all over, in the public sector, in the private sector, in education, in science, in medicine. We have seen and produced some of the greatest individuals in the history of the world, and being an American is an adventure.

The most frustrating part, I believe, in the last several years, and we have said this before on this floor, is that after 9/11, with all of the political capital that the President had, with the whole country watching him, the best, greatest most demanding challenge he could come up with was for the American people to go out and go shopping. You know, that, I think, illustrates the kind of leadership we do not need in all of these changing times.

And so our leadership that we provide from Article I, section 1 of the United States Constitution, which creates this House of Representatives, I am excited about the possibilities, come January, that we will have, when we are running this government, at least from the House side and hopefully from the Senate side too.

But like you said, we want to use all of the talents, all the creativity, all of the ability and intellect that this country can muster to make sure we are pushing it forward. As you said, with alternative energies and investments in education and getting creative with how we are going to create wealth in the 21st century, through business incubators and some of these small business programs that we have that can go and help and retool small businesses that don't have the wherewithal to pay $1 million for consultants to come in.

We have a public program that allows businesses to retool themselves for 80 or $90,000. And I have had people in my office who have experienced this program. It led to tremendous job growth here in the United States.

So there are things that we can do. And I think it is an exciting time for all of us. And I very much look forward to us doing this in January. www.housedemocrats.gov/30something.

I appreciate that, because exactly what you are saying fits into the overall economic picture. And there was a great column the other day in the New York Times by Paul Krugman, who kind of outlined, as the statistics finally came in from 2004, we now know how the economic pie was divided in 2004.

So what happened in 2004, which I find very interesting, this is inflation-adjusted income. The top 1 percent in 2004 had a real income increase of 17 percent. And the other 99 percent had an increase of 3 percent.

Basically what we are saying here, is over the past 5 or 6 years, where President Bush is in and the Republican Congress, Senate and House have all been in, the top 1 percent had an income growth of 17 percent on average. They received tax cuts from this administration. They are the same executives that represent the oil companies that get $400 million retirement packages. They are the same representatives on the boards of all the major multinational companies that have been going gangbusters.

When you move the jobs offshore, and you take them to China, and the profits go up, and they just go to a small group, that is the same group that is getting the tax cut. That is the same group that is getting the corporate welfare, on and on and on.

All we are trying to say is raise the minimum wage for the least among us, the 7 million people who need a little bump. For many people, this is irrelevant. I was having lunch today with a guy from Girard, Ohio, who owns a bunch of nursing homes. His people are at $8 or $9 an hour. He says, this has no benefit for me, one way or another. Why not raise it? Why not lift those 7 million people up, because you want to make an incentive for them to work and not create an incentive where they want to go on the government dole.

But if you look at what's happening here, while the top 1 percent had an income growth of 17 percent, while they got corporate welfare in the energy industry to the tune of $17 billion, this is what has been happening here at home.

Minimum wage has gone up 0 percent since 1997; whole milk, 24 percent. This is where the rubber meets the road. This is where you are going to the grocery store, and this is having an effect on you. Bread, up 25 percent; 4-year public college, 77 percent up; health insurance, up 97 percent; and regular gas, up 136 percent.

We have leaders in the Republican Party saying I don't believe in the minimum wage, I am never going to vote for the minimum wage. I am never going to vote for an increase in the minimum wage. I mean, come on, what are you thinking?

We need average Americans to be lifted up. I know, down in Florida, in Ohio, time and time again, we have people who need assistance. I want to make a point that the system right now is cutting against average people.

If you got a couple kids in college, and tuition has doubled in the last 5 years, and you have to take your kids to and from school, and gas is up 136 percent, and you own a small business and you are trying to cover your employees, and health insurance is up 97 percent, you are just an American trying to make ends meet, keep your family together, and hopefully give the next generation an opportunity to have a little bit better off than you had it.

People down here aren't doing anything to be helpful.

Well, and the best part about this chart is again, really, college tuition up, gas prices up, health care up, this is since President Bush has been in; median household income, down 4 percent. When you have all of these increases, rapidly increasing, and the wages are increased by 4 percent, a terrible problem.

But here is the real problem, President Bush says, America's economy is strong and benefiting all Americans. Come to Youngstown, Ohio, Mr. President. Come to western Pennsylvania. Come to south Florida, come to the Midwest. The economy is not benefiting all Americans, and the President needs to realize that.

You know, I don't want to get into the whole international relations discussion here, because this is our focus, and I don't want to. But I am going to make one comment, because I know you want me to.

This administration has been totally disengaged from average American people, from the international community. This problem we have in the Middle East right now is because this President disengaged the peace process 5 years ago. He has not been engaged.

The number of terrorists are up from what they were in 2000, okay? Up. We have got problems now in Lebanon, Syria, Iran, North Korea, Iraq. We have got insurgency in Iraq, and we are spending $8 billion a month that needs to be going to address these problems, not building roads and bridges, health care centers and hospitals, and schools in Iraq, but building them here in the United States of America and lowering tuition costs.

Why do you have to always try to one-up me?

Republican House, Republican President, Republican Senate. Bottom line.

My old friends in the House.

If you just look at what we would do once we get in, just in the first day or two, pass an increase in the minimum wage; reduce college tuition costs, interest on student loans by half for both parents and student loans, cut in half to save people about $5,000. Just those two things alone will

save average American families thousands of dollars. Implement 9/11.

Now, Mr. Gingrich brought up a great point. They are in charge of a government, Madam Speaker, that just cannot function. They do not know how to run government. They have had the opportunity over the past 5 years, and they have been incapable and unable to execute and administer government.

They run it down for years and then they expect it to work. They hire their buddies who know how to run ponies and administer horse shows, but then they cannot execute FEMA, Katrina, Iraq, Medicare, health care, gas prices, college education. They do not know how to administer government.

Everyone likes to say that the Democrats do not know how to administer an immigration policy. Well here's the statistics. From 1993 to 2000, the average number of border patrol agents added per year under Clinton, 642; under Bush, 411. Who is trying to protect the country from illegal immigrants coming into the country? It looks like to me that the Clinton administration did a heck of a lot better job than the Bush administration and the Republican Congress did.

INS fines for immigration enforcement, 1999, under President Clinton, 417 fines for immigration; only three in 2004 under President Bush. Seventy-eight percent fewer completed immigration fraud cases under President Bush. Under Clinton in 1995, fraud cases completed, 6,455; in 2003, under President Bush, 1,389.

It is not about ideology. It is not about what your rhetoric is. It is not about our little cute phrases that you may have and you may have worked on in some little interest group or some little building somewhere in D.C. and you just say the right things and it may sound like you know what you are doing.

These are facts. Gas prices are facts. College tuition numbers, they are facts. Health care costs, those are facts. Prescription drug costs, those are facts. Tax rates on small businesspeople, those are facts.

It is kind of funny because you go back home, you go back to the real world, and you get out from where the Potomac fever is, and you go back home and people are not saying things are going real good for them. But you come down here and our friends, many of them are our good friends, on the other side that stand in the well and they will try to convince everybody how great the economy is going. But when you go back to Ohio or Miami, it is not same.

We know how to do this and we want, Madam Speaker, an opportunity to take back over the House of Representatives that was created by Article I, Section 1 of the United States Constitution. We want an opportunity to govern, to lower tuition costs, increase the minimum wage, implement the 9/11 Commission report, provide for the common good, the common defense, and do it with some commonsense and get the country going in a new direction.

On www.housedemocrats.gov/30Something, all of our charts will be available. This was the 30 Something 2-minute drill today.

Mr. Speaker, we appreciate the opportunity again for the 30-something Working Group to be down here to talk about issues that are pressing not only to the country but to those people who are in their 20 somethings or 30 somethings and how some of the policies here in Washington, D.C., are playing out in their day-to-day lives.

The previous speakers talked a lot about making sure that we secure our border, and the Democratic Party has been very supportive of trying to fund Border Patrol and take different measures that we are going to make sure that we did actually secure the border. I think all Americans can agree that if we do not secure the border, any policy that we try to deal with afterwards will not be effective until we actually do secure the border.

I would like to go through a list here of different amendments that Democrats have tried and tried and tried to get passed since 2001 that the Republican majority has voted against. Now, this is not a partisan issue. You would think it is an issue all Americans should be concerned about, but sometimes when you get one-party control of the House and the Senate and the White House, you get obstruction and this is what happened. These are all dated and these can all be found on our Web site.

In 2001, vote 454, November 28, Republicans voted against consideration of an amendment that would have added $223 million for border security. In 2003, another one, Republicans voted against consideration of an amendment that would have added $300 million for border security. 2003, vote 305, Republicans once again voted against consideration of an amendment that would have added $300 million to enhance border security, adding border agents and inspectors along our border. June 16, 2004, vote 243, Republicans voted against

consideration of an amendment that would have added $250 million, Mr. Speaker, in order to meet the promises that the Republican majority made regarding the PATRIOT Act. Again in 2005, vote 160, Republicans again voted against a motion to send a report back to conference with instructions to add $284 million. And for fiscal year 2006 and 2007, Republicans have repeatedly broken the promises they made on border security in the intelligence reform bill, the 9/11 Act of 2004, which included 2,000 additional border patrol agents, 800 additional immigration agents and 8,000 additional detention beds per year from fiscal year 2006 to 2010.

Democrats have consistently tried to increase border security, and the Republican majority has consistently voted against it. I am not done. Again, 2005, vote 174, Republicans voted against consideration of an amendment that would have added $400 million for border security to meet the promises that Congress made for the 9/11 Act, again increased immigration agents, increased border patrol agents.

2005, vote 187, Republicans voted against a Democratic substitute to the homeland security authorization bill that was designed to fulfill the promises again in the 9/11 Act, and it goes on and on, again vote 188, in 2005; vote 56 in 2006; vote 210 in 2006 in May, where the Republicans finally voted against consideration of an amendment that would have added $2.1 billion for border security.

We have tried and tried and tried to put the proper legislation and the proper funding in place, Mr. Speaker, to secure our border, and that needs to be the message. Before we get on to any other discussion regarding immigration in the United States of America, if we do not secure that border then nothing will matter, and that is exactly what we have been trying to do.

I think, Mr. Speaker, when you look around the world, and it hit me as I was reading the Sunday Times from this past Sunday, why it is so important for the United States to maintain a strong position in the world, promoting peace and democracy and liberty and freedom and capitalism, all of the basic tenets of our society, all the basic structures of our society. If America does not do it, it will not happen, and it will not happen.

All you have to do, if you do not believe me, we like the third party validators here, look what is happening in Russia. We hear a lot about what is happening in China, crackdown, dissent, human rights abuses. We hear a lot about what is going on, currency manipulation, suppression of religious freedom, but look what is going on in, quite frankly, state-run enterprises that are putting American businesses into bankruptcy.

We also see what is happening in Russia. Russia offered to help North Korea protect their nuclear weapons with technology, and then this is a special report in the paper, the Kremlin tightens reins on free market, where President Putin is having a Cabinet meeting and those major members of the Cabinet are also running major enterprises in the state.

It is imperative for the United States of America to maintain this position of strength, and it is nice to see that I have been joined here by my friends from Florida and from Boston and our other friends who made it here, too, to have this discussion about why it is so important for America to maintain this position. The Democrats have consistently tried to take this country into a new direction, into another direction and get ourselves out of this wageless recovery and this endless occupation that we are in.

I would be happy to yield to my good friend from Massachusetts.

The same thing with the deficit. With the fourth largest annual deficit in the history of the United States of America, the President makes his way out, Madam Speaker, and touts it like it is some great success, like we should all be pounding our chests and proud of this. The fourth largest deficit in the history of the country. And we are borrowing the money from Japan and China and OPEC countries and all these other countries that give them real leverage on us when we try to act in a diplomatic way, whether it is with North Korea or Russia or China or whatever it may be.

What would the Democrats do and what have the Democrats attempted to do time and time again? The Democrats have tried to reestablish the PAYGO rule, and we have tried to do it numerous times in the past several years.

Now, what is PAYGO? PAYGO basically says that we will not spend any money in Congress unless we can pay for it. We are not going to go out and borrow the money. We have got to pay for it. Here it is, and there have been numerous--this is just a couple: The Spratt substitute for the budget resolution in 2006 failed, not one Republican voted for it, rollcall vote number 87.

We are not making this up. We tried to put PAYGO rules into the budget process and the Republican Congress voted against it, because that would limit their ability to provide corporate welfare to the oil industry, to subsidize tremendously the health care industry. Again, Congressman Spratt, vote rollcall number 91, failed again for the budget resolution in 2005, 194 to 232. How many Republican votes? Zero.

And I know Dennis Moore has tried to do it, Charlie Stenholm, when he was in Congress, he tried to do it. Time and time and time again, Ms. Wasserman Schultz, Democrats have tried to implement basic structural

changes so that we could balance the budget.

It is not a coincidence that when President Clinton was in and the Democrats passed the budget in 1993 and we began to implement some of these rules, we had a tremendous explosion of economic expansion that lifted everyone up; and then, in 1997, passed an increase in the Federal minimum wage which, actually--there is a statistic here that I just love from American Progress, 4 years after the last increase in the minimum wage, the economy enjoyed its strongest growth in over 3 decades, adding 11 million new jobs. And, the small business employment between 1997 and 2003 grew more in States that had a higher minimum wage than the Federal minimum wage.

Raising the minimum wage is good for the economy. It is a different philosophy, it is different, but it works.

There was a gentleman at work who worked for President Bush, Douglas Eakin. Holtz-Eakin, former director of CBO for President Bush said, ``The long-term outlook is such a deep well of sorrow that I can't get much happiness out of this year.'' This guy used to work for President Bush.

And just to clarify, if you don't mind, Ms. Wasserman Schultz, as you stated, we do not have the money to give to these millionaires to go out and buy a Hummer. So where do we get it? I don't know even if we have a chart here.

Mr. Meek has a chart. I will yield to the gentleman in a minute.

We don't have the money to give, so we have to go out and get it somewhere. We borrow this money from China, OPEC countries, Japan, to give to a millionaire so that he can get a Hummer.

No American, I can guarantee you, believes that that is a good idea. That can't be a good idea. Because now we owe China money, and we have given the wealthiest people in our society a Hummer, and our kids are left to foot the bill.

I wouldn't be too complimentary. This President hasn't vetoed one spending bill, and he comes to the Rose Garden and says the Republican Congress needs to control their spending. He has not vetoed one spending bill.

If the gentleman would yield, it is not just the eight or nine that I listed, as you were probably walking down here, the eight or nine times that Democrats have offered to increase border security and border patrol and actually fund it and not just make the promise to do it. Think about the Medicare prescription drug bill. One of the first things we will do when there is a change of power in January is make sure that with the Medicare prescription drug bill we will allow the Secretary of Health and Human Services the ability to negotiate down the drug prices to save the taxpayers' money.

Now, that is good policy from any party that is running the government, but our friends on the other side have refused to implement that basic thing. So we have tried for border security, we have tried to reduce the cost of the Medicare prescription drug bill, giving the Secretary of HHS the ability to negotiate down the drug prices, and we will increase the minimum wage on the first day we are here when we take over in January. That means a pay raise for all Americans because that will trickle up and push everybody's wages up.

That was proven. When we raised the minimum wage in 1997, the economy grew 11 million new jobs. And in the States that had a higher minimum wage than the national minimum wage, there was increased numbers of small businesses that were created, new start-ups, and retail small businesses were increased. This is good for the economy.

In the first week we will be here in January, we will reduce student loan interest rates and we will cut them in half, both for parent loans and for student loans. We will have a significant impact in the lives of many, many Americans just in the first couple of

days from what we are going to pass out of the House: Increase in minimum wage, lower student loan rates for you and your family, increased border security, and allowing the Secretary of Health and Human Services to begin to negotiate on behalf of all the Medicare recipients.

This is not brain surgery. We are not saying we have this grand elaborate scheme that we cooked up somewhere and we are bringing it before the American people. This is basic fundamental stuff. But when you are not so attached to the special interests, when you don't have a K Street Project in which there is this give and take with the big lobbying firms down here, you are able to govern in a way that benefits all of the American people. And that is what we are trying to get at.

Let us take the country in a new direction, where we have a philosophy where everybody contributes to America and everybody benefits. We are actually looking out for the common good. We will provide for the common defense and we will increase the common wealth.

You know, I go to some of these States like Virginia and Pennsylvania and Massachusetts, and they are all commonwealths. That philosophy, what do we have in common, how can we pool the common wealth to benefit everyone? Everyone contributes and everyone benefits. And what we have now, Mr. Delahunt and Mr. Meek, is a situation that has set up a system that has been corroded and corrupted. Now, I am not saying by individual Members. I think over time this happens.

Jefferson said that every few years we need to have a revolution. Well, we need a bloodless rebellion to shift power out of the hands of the Republican controlled House, Republican controlled Senate, and the Republican White House. This is George Bush's Congress, Mr. Delahunt. Let us make no mistake about it. They do what he says. They follow his lead. They are afraid to stand up to him.

He hasn't vetoed one spending bill or one bill that this Congress has passed out. They rubber stamp the Bush philosophy and they consistently agree with the President. This is his Congress.

I yield to my friend.

I appreciate your yielding as we begin to wrap up. Maybe Mr. Meek could get that chart down there and give us the Web site as we begin to close.

I think you can be an amateur historian to recognize what has happened here; that in 1994 there was a move afoot to change things. Newt Gingrich, Dick Armey, and there was a crew of them who came to this floor, like we come to this floor, and like we will continue to come to this floor, to talk about issues. They were talking about balancing the budget and they were talking about instilling fiscal discipline. Mr. Meek showed earlier the quote from Mr. Gingrich, and I read last week in the Boston Globe a comment from Dick Armey, the former House Republican leader, who said ``I'm not sure what this Congress has accomplished.''

These are two of the main leaders of that revolution. The Republicans have gotten very far away from what they wanted to accomplish and, I think, what this country deserves. And when that happens, Madam Speaker, it becomes time for a change in America. I think that is where we are.

Again, if you just look at what the Democratic Congress will do within the first couple of days that we get in, that this Republican Congress has failed to do in the past 5 or 6 years under complete Republican dominance, we will raise the minimum wage, we will cut student loans in half for both student loans and parent loans, we will implement the 9/11 recommendations to make sure we provide for the common defense of the United States of America, and we will allow the Secretary of Health and Human Services to negotiate down drug prices for the Medicare bill to not only save the taxpayers money but drive down drug costs for everyone.

We are going to invest in the small business, as our small businesses are trying to retool themselves. We need assistance for them with the Manufacturing Extension Program and with the SBA 7(a) loan program. We want to give local community development organizations the tools they need to help their small businesses, and some of these programs help businesses. They send out a couple of engineers to help them retool, to make sure that they are streamlining their businesses, to make sure they can find export markets. This is a positive thing, because many small businesses can't afford to do it.

So we've got an agenda. Put us in, coach, we are looking for an opportunity to play. We have an agenda, and I think the American people will recognize in just a few short days what the difference is between the current Republican leadership and what the Democrats will do.

Our Web site is www.House Democrats.gov/30something, and all of these charts and statistics are available on that, Madam Speaker.

Or at least have a discussion about how is this going to end; how is this thing we have in the Middle East going to end. We are not having that discussion. We are all patriotic; we all support the country. We are Members of Congress. For God's sake, we love America. That is easy. And if you want to say ``under God,'' say it. Parents should tell their kids, just say it. Problem solved.

I guess if we were on the other side, Mr. Speaker, I guess the question we have to ask ourselves is, Why are they trying to distract? What are they distracting us from? And I think when you look at what is happening and why the Democrats want to take the country into a new direction, all you have to do is look around. And I know, Mr. Meek, and you know, Mr. Meek and Ms. Wasserman Schultz, there are a lot of Republicans, when we start saying this stuff, they have got to turn their TV off, they can't listen to it because I think it rings true.

The bottom line is this, the neoconservative Republican agenda has been implemented into the United States, period. And look around, here is what it looks like: Iraq, Afghanistan, gas prices, health care prices, tuition costs, minimum wage. Look around. Deficits, who are you borrowing it from? That is the neoconservative agenda. It is here. And we need to take the country in another direction. So they obviously don't want to talk about it.

And just those few steps that we can take in the first week that we are here, talk about taking the country in a new direction. Imagine if we raised the minimum wage that first day, imagine we cut the student loan interest rates in half saving students and parents $4,000 or $5,000 over the life of the loan, the negotiation by the Secretary of Health and Human Services with the pharmaceutical companies, the money we would be able to save the government just in those three steps. We are not talking about brain surgery here. We are talking about basic fundamental commonsense moves that will benefit everyone, commonsense moves for the common good. And I think moving the country in a new direction is what we need to do.

That is it. We don't have some elaborate playbook that is going to run left and fake this way and run this way. Three or four different basic things, and you will see the difference between having Democrats running the government and Republicans.

Something more important than us.

Wow. When is your birthday?

The belly of a whale.

It is the same old song, we don't need a minimum wage increase. Things are going just fine. The President said the economy is doing great and it is benefiting all Americans. Well, he hasn't been to my district, and I am sure he has not been to a lot of districts around the country where people are struggling.

I found it interesting, over the 4th of July break where we do a lot of parades, and doing a parade is like taking a poll in your district as to how people feel. They will shout at you exactly what they are thinking. As you are going down and shaking hands and meeting people, you hear about the gas prices and the lack of vision; you hear about the trailers sitting in Hope, Arkansas. And you hear about the $9 billion being lost in Iraq. This is what average Americans are talking about.

And then the kicker is when the Republican Congress pushes a pay raise for themselves, but not a pay raise for the American people. Give me a break. They raise the salary for Members of Congress, but at the same time not at least tie it to minimum wage and say the American people need to be a part of this, too? Come on. What is going on?

No matter what issue you are talking about, and this is the thread that ties all of this together, the Republican majority is incapable of executing government as stated by our friend, Newt Gingrich.

Mr. Speaker, he said, ``They are seen by the country as being in charge of a government that can't function.'' He, the former Speaker of the House, the father of the Republican revolution, is now calling the leadership and the Republican Members of Congress ``they'' and also saying that they are in charge of a government that can't function.

Whether you are talking about negotiating down the drug prices or the $9 billion in Iraq, or FEMA, or any other issue, I think time and time again they are seen as being incapable of being able to execute government.

Look, the retirement package, Lee Raymond, CEO of Exxon, $398 million retirement package. He gets a $2 million tax break. So it is bad enough you are already subsidizing his business to the tune of $14 or $15 billion.

And this is the kind of disparity, we have the highest disparity between the wealthiest people in the country and the poorest people in the country since the 1920s, that is going like this. And the whole idea is to try to lift all the boats up into the middle class.

And we were talking earlier about the economy. This is, again, third- party validator, as we begin to wrap up. The long term, because we get a lot of happy talk, but the long-term outlook is such a deep well of sorrow that I can't get much happiness out of this year. That's a former director of the Congressional Budget Office that used to work for President Bush. It is such a deep well of sorrow.

This country is going in the wrong direction, whether you are talking about oil or Medicare or the war or Katrina or whatever, and my friend has got his toy there. This country is going in the wrong direction and we want to go in another direction.

If you like the neoconservative agenda that has been implemented, look around, gas, oil, retirements, pensions, minimum wage, Social Security, college tuition, keep the Republicans in office.

And even in the first couple of days, we will raise the minimum wage and cut college loan interest rates in half for parents and students. Just in the first couple of days, once we get this signed into law, we will recognize a huge difference. Www.housedemocrats.gov/30something. All of the charts that we have here can be accessed on the Web site. Www.housedemocrats.gov/30something.

It has been a real pleasure.

We always enjoy your presence, and I think you have made a good point.

And I come from a conservative Democratic district in Ohio. I am probably one of the most conservative Democrats from Ohio in the Congress.

Regardless of how you feel about the gay marriage amendment, regardless of how you feel about flag burning, regardless of how you feel about any of these political issues that the Republican Congress is bringing forth, I think we can all agree that gas prices, health care costs, tuition costs, and lack of education funding rank just a little bit higher than these issues that the Republican Congress and Republican President bring out every other year or every election year.

Now, the President runs a whole 2004 election campaign, Ms. Jackson- Lee, on the gay marriage amendment and then days after getting reelected says, I do not think we are going to pass it. I do not think I am going to push it. The country is not ready for it.

You just ran your whole campaign on it. Now you are not for it? And they, the President and the Republican Congress on the other side, actually think that the American people are going to fall for this again. Well, we have got news for them.

Exactly. We are not the only ones.

And I think the country is obviously divided on those very polarizing issues. But regardless of how you feel, we have got real problems in this country, Mr. Speaker. Can we stop insulting the American public to think that they are going to somehow fall for these shenanigans again that were used in 2004? The President was for a gay marriage amendment; then he was against it and decided he was not going to push it. And then 1\1/2\ years later, when he is 30 percent in the polls and the Republican Congress has not passed one piece of significant legislation, all of a sudden, they are for the gay marriage amendment again.

It is not going to work. Do you know why? Because this is what has been going on, Mr. Speaker: People making more than $1 million are getting $42,000 a year back in tax breaks, and we are borrowing the money from China. We do not have money to give a millionaire $42,000 back in this country, Mr. Meek, Ms. Jackson-Lee. If we had the money to give them, we would have a discussion. We would have a debate: Why are we giving someone who makes $40,000 a year $17,000 and someone making $1 million a year gets $42,000? If we had the money, we would have that discussion. We would have a national debate about whether or not that was a good idea, about whether or not that money should go into tax cuts for millionaires or education spending or Head Start spending or health care for our citizens or making sure that young kids had health care or veterans would have the proper care that they needed. Mr. Speaker, we would have that discussion. But we do not have the money. We do not have it. We are running $400 billion deficits, borrowing the money from Japan, China, OPEC countries.

Mr. Meek, can you imagine with the cost of gas right now, we are borrowing money from OPEC? We are not just giving it to them at the pump. We are going to go out and use them as a bank.

Let us get this country in order, Mr. Speaker. It is time to go in a new direction. And do you like this? Do you like the cost at the gas pump when you have got to put in 55 bucks to fill up your truck? Do you like the fact that the health care costs are up, health insurance up 97 percent; that 4-year public college is up 77 percent; that gas is up 136 percent; that bread is up 25 percent; that whole milk is up 24 percent? If you are happy with this, vote Republican. Continue. They have been in charge of the House and the Senate and the White House for a good many years now. The neoconservative agenda, Ms. Jackson-Lee, has been implemented. We do not have to worry about what is going to happen. We do not have to wait and see one day how it will affect the American people. It has been implemented and this chart is the end result.

Look at these numbers. And we are having debates about gay marriage? You have got to be kidding me to insult the American people like that.

I go to Giant Eagle in Niles to do my shopping. Union meat cutters, a small little town of Niles, Ohio. I go and get some bread, Lucky Charms because I like to eat cereal, and I get the organic

milk because it lasts a lot longer than regular milk. We are traveling a lot; so I get the organic milk. So we go and I fill my basket up, and I checkout. And you know how it is when you go back home, people will grab you and they will want to talk issues. No one grabs me in the aisles and says, ``Can you please stop the gay people from getting married up in Massachusetts because they are really affecting the gas prices?'' No one says that to me. No one asks me about flag burning, Mr. Meek.

They ask me about how are we going to reduce the cost of gas because I am a nurse's aid and I have to travel around.

Making barely minimum wage. I have to quit my job because I cannot afford the gas prices as they are. I am better off going on welfare and registering for Medicaid.

We have a system that is going against people who want to work. We want to incentivize that. And in the first 100 days, it will be amazing what the Democratic Party can do.

Can you imagine in the first week when we raise the minimum wage? I am just going to pick two of the issues: We raise the minimum wage, and we cut college loan interest rates in half. Can you imagine the impact for average people in Ohio, in Miami, in Texas? Can you imagine? You are actually going to be helping people. We can do this, and we need an opportunity to do it, Mr. Speaker.

I have taken way too much time, and I know both of you have points you want to make. But look at what is happening in the country and look at the disgraceful debate that is happening here in Congress.

And one final point: The debate we had a couple weeks ago on the Iraqi war resolution, we had a debate here in Congress. We have lost $9 billion in Iraq, and no one really seems to know where it is, and the Congress is not much interested in finding out exactly who has it. We have spent $318 billion, $400 billion, tons of money in Iraq with no oversight. We have had hurricanes in the country and we do not know where FEMA is spending money. They are paying for divorce attorneys' fees and the like, and we don't have any oversight hearings on that. So if the American people want to keep going in that direction, all they have to do is continue to rubber stamp the Republican House, the Republican Senate, and President Bush.

I think that is exactly it and I know Mr. Meek has points he wants to make, but I think Members of Congress and average Americans need to ask themselves just one question, and we will just pick two of these.

Implement mentally this in your mind if you are an American. We will raise the minimum wage to $7.50 an hour in the first week we are here, and we will then cut your student loan interest rates in half. Whether they are parent loans or student loans, your rate will be cut in half if Democrats are in. Let us just pretend we will not do anything else, and we have got binders full of ideas here that we will implement, broadband access, tax cuts for venture capital that was basically written by the high-tech industries who Nancy Pelosi sat down with to make sure how do we get the country up and running again.

But just say we do those two things, we are not saying we are going to overpromise. We are saying in first day or two we are going to pass the minimum wage and we are going to reduce college loans by half. What would that do? That will save students $4,000 or $5,000 over the course of their loans, parents the same way, and the minimum wage will be increased unfortunately just a few thousand dollars a year. Hopefully, if we take the majority back in a significant number, along with the Senate, we can do maybe even more.

But just picture those two things and the impact it would have on your life.

This guy said that George Bush dethroned Lyndon Johnson?

Corporate welfare. Let us expand just for a second. Corporate welfare, $16 billion to the energy companies and between 20 and $30 billion to the health care industry. That is where that money is going. So if you are going to dethrone Lyndon Johnson, at least dethrone him by investing in education.

Look at this, Mr. Meek. The Republicans increased the debt limit by $3.7 trillion. You will notice that is a ``T'' there in the red, not a ``B''. In June of 2002, May of 2003, November of 2004, March of 2006, and the House Budget Resolution, another $653 billion, $3.7 trillion this Republican Congress has increased the debt limit, which is saying, go out, Mr. President, Secretary of the Treasury, go out and borrow some more money. It is okay to borrow money and then spend it on corporate welfare for the oil industry and the energy companies. It is okay to spend it for the health care industry.

Come on. Let us get things in order here. This is not brain surgery. And, you know, Mr. Meek, I thank you for doing that, because our whole mission here as 30-Somethings is to break down and talk about issues that are going to affect our generation in the long term. And when you look at the kind of borrowing from these other countries, you know, just an example of China. Okay. How much we are borrowing.

Now we are asking China to help us negotiate with North Korea. Well, you think they are going to be helpful when they are our bank? You think they are going to be pressured by us when they are loaning us money? Like you say so eloquently, when you loan someone money, it changes the dynamics of the relationship. You loan me $5, now I owe you so I cannot come back and say, hey, help us with North Korea.

This is not about North Korea. We got to take this country in a new direction. This is about North Carolina. This is about the north side of Youngstown. Okay? This is about the north side of Cleveland and the north end in Boston. This is about America. Let us get this country going in a new direction again.

We know what the world looks like when a neo conservative Republican agenda has been implemented. Just look around. Read the front page of the newspaper, Mr. Meek. Look at the foreign policy, look at the domestic policy. That is the implementation of the neo conservative agenda.

You like it, vote Republican. You do not like it, take the country in a new direction and vote for the Democrats. And let me get this out here, our oldest and most trusted chart. If you would like to contact us, Mr. Speaker, Mr. Meek, www.housedemocrats.gov/30somethings.

All of the charts that were available here tonight are available on that website. I would like to take one second to thank Tom Anatos who does such a tremendous job helping us gather all of this information.

I would like to thank my good friend from Miami. I missed not being with you last week while we were on break. I look forward to spending more time with you.

Tonight is a great night. Tonight is like super 30- something night. This is like great stuff. I mean, I am excited. I may need to sit a couple plays out tonight, because not only do we have the chief Blue Dog, we are hoping that at some point during the course of the night that he will deputize us as maybe Blue Pups tonight. I want to be a Blue Pup tonight.

Please.

The point I would like to make, and this is why I am such a big fan of Mr. Tanner, I think this helps us convince the American people and shift our party into a direction that says we don't want to go and tax people. We know that they struggle with health care and gas prices, college tuition, all of the costs we review here every night, increased by 40 and 50 percent.

What Democrats in 2006 are saying, following the lead of the Blue Dogs, is that there is waste in the government. We need to audit and find out where that money is so we can take that money and invest that money in education and invest that in health care and invest that into all of the programs that we believe in, our priorities.

This is for me, personally, 32, 33 years old and a new Democrat in many ways, this is a beautiful thing because this is the vehicle, your piece of legislation, that I think changes our party in 2006 and gets us ready for the next century to say that we don't want to tax anybody any more than we need to run the government, but we can never go back to the taxpayer until we first

say we are spending your money responsibly.

And what is the end result of all of this wasteful spending? I think it is important to point out what the long-term effects are.

When President Bush took office, our debt limit was $5.9 trillion. As you can see, and these charts are on HouseDemocrats.gov/30something, in June of 2002, it increased by half a trillion dollars.

May of 2003, another debt limit increase. November of 2004, another one. March 2006, another one. The budget this year for 2007, the budget resolution will raise our debt limit to $9.62 trillion. By 2011, the debt limit under the Republicans will almost double from when President Bush took office.

Now we are trying to say that we want to audit the government and save money and make sure that we invest it properly into our priorities that will lead to economic development, and it is clear that the Republican majority, which controls the House, Senate and White House, has been fiscally irresponsible not only with the way they lack enforcement, they don't audit and pay attention to where the money

goes, and then they turn around and borrow it from China and Japan and OPEC and all of these other countries and run us into this huge structural debt that hurts the economy long term.

This is the interest payments on the debt. This is the 2007 budget of what we are going to pay. It is about $230 billion just on interest on the debt. So all of those numbers we were showing, this is big time.

To make a point, when we were talking about what we have control over in our own government and how we can streamline and do the audit and make sure that everybody is held accountable, I bet we know exactly where every single one of these dollars goes. There is someone in China on the other end saying, you owe me another 10-, and I want it here right now. They are not waiting around to say where did that $10 million go? We know where all of this $230 billion went.

That is probably a driver, a 3-wood and a 7-iron for you.

Would the gentleman yield?

We had a wonderful, and I am going to share this with the Speaker and the House, we had a wonderful conversation about three weeks ago with Alvin Toffler, who wrote ``Future Shock,'' and then wrote this new book, ``Revolutionary Wealth.'' And he goes into how civilization during the Industrial Age was much different than it is now.

He used the example of 9/11, about how this decentralized, information-based, cells popping up al Qaeda, basically a private group, moved money and information around the world on cell phones and very decentralized, attacked us. And our response was to build a 20th- century pyramid bureaucracy called the Department of Homeland Security because that is what we know how to do. We know how to build these bureaucracies. And how we are living in an age that no longer represents, those kind of bureaucracies no longer address the needs of the American people.

So this audit and what Mr. Tanner and Mr. Cardoza are trying to do is squeeze this government, squeeze these bureaucracies, get the fat out of them and find out where we can gain resources and invest them into the new programs, the new technologies, the new ways of doing things. And Democrats are for this. And I am excited about this summer and this fall for us to go around the country and talk about this new approach that we have because people say, oh, the Democrats aren't going to do it.

We are experiencing the implementation of the neoconservative agenda right now. They haven't done anything. They are spending like drunken sailors. We are running huge budget deficits. We are spending $230 billion a year, just paying interest on the debt. We are borrowing money from China and Japan and all of these other countries and funding these long-term structural deficits that we have.

We need an opportunity to take over this government, and let us start auditing this thing. This is a new Democratic Party, Mr. Speaker, that wants to squeeze the fat out of this government.

The Republicans had a lot of good talk in 1994. But even their own leader, Mr. Gingrich, Speaker Gingrich is saying now they are in charge, they are seen as in charge of a government that can't function.

Because it is not about us. It is not about the Democrats; it is not about the Republicans. It is about fixing the problems. I mean, we have got real problems in this country, serious, structural problems. And we do not have time to be nitpicking with each other to say, Well, that is a good idea, but you are a Republican, so forget about it. Give us all the ideas.

Do you know what this comes down to? This is just boiling all this down, regardless of the issues that you are talking about: What do we believe in as a country? What do we want our country to be? The great thing about being an American is we get to decide. We do not have 30 or 40 people in the upper echelons of government telling us what we want the country to be like. We get to vote on it, and the American people get to express themselves at the ballot box and decide what we want this country to be like.

Now, what we have had here over the past 5 years with a Republican House, Republican Senate, and Republican White House is tremendous deficits, borrowing more money from foreign interests in the last 4 or 5 years than we have borrowed in the last 224 years.

Do you believe in a government that should put everything on a credit card? Do you believe in a government that should give tax breaks to millionaires and then never raise the minimum wage? Do you believe in a government that should have a $1 trillion prescription drug benefit and not do anything to contain the cost because the pharmaceutical industry may not like it? If you believe in that kind of government, then you want to continue with what we are doing right now.

But if you believe in a government that is for the common good and the common defense and uses common sense, then you want to vote for the Democrats. If you want to raise the minimum wage by a couple bucks an hour, then you want to vote for the Democrats. If you want to reduce the cost of prescription drugs by using the bargaining power of the United States Government and the Medicare recipients, then you want to vote for the Democrats. If you want to take some of this money that we are going to squeeze out of the government because we are auditing and finding the waste and abuse in our government and invest that money in the Pell Grants, then you want to vote for the Democrats.

I mean, this is very simple. They have their beliefs; we have our beliefs. And we need the American people to affirm those beliefs at the ballot box.

And I believe in November, Ms. Tubbs Jones and Mr. Meek, that the American people are going to affirm the beliefs of the Democratic Party because we are ready, willing, and able. We have the will and the desire to go out and lead. Put us in coach. We are ready to rock and roll.

And whatever business you have, your customers are going to have more money to go and spend. This is the basic difference that we have between what the first President Bush called ``voodoo economics,'' which is the current system we are in right now, the implementation of the neoconservative agenda. That is what is happening right now. And if you are happy with what this system is yielding for you and your family, then you need to continue to vote for the Republican Party. But if it is not effective for you and your family, then you need to look for alternatives, and that is what we are doing here.

But the Democratic Party is saying raise that minimum wage and give these small businesses more customers to go out and purchase their products.

I would like to make a point, because when you raise the minimum wage, you raise the wages for all people who are participating in the labor market.

Let's take for example our friends at Wal-Mart, okay? If you raise the minimum wage, now, if you don't work at Wal-Mart or somewhere else of that caliber of a store that hires so many millions of people around the country, they are all going to get a boost. So instead of companies like Wal-Mart making billions and billions and billions in profits, some of that money will make its way back to the workers, so all the workers will get a couple dollars more an hour, which means you are going to have consumers with more money in their pocket so they can pull it out and go buy more goods, which will stimulate the economy.

The American people right now are feeling they are not benefiting from what is happening. I think a raise in the minimum wage would do that, it would accomplish that, it would give demand a spark, which is obviously what we want to do.

Then, like we have talked about here, investing in sewers and roads and bridges and infrastructure and get this country back where it needs to be with our infrastructure, so that we could build industrial parks and roads and bridges and increase commerce in the United States, extend broadband. All of these things will stimulate the economy here in the United States of America, educate our kids, get information into the households, and, at the end of the day, you have got a strong country.

Are you talking to me?

I appreciate you letting me do this. Www.housedemocrats.gov/30something.

Thank you, Mr. Meek.

I just read today in a paper from American Progress, Scott Lilly, former staff member here, who wrote on the minimum wage, and I think he said in there that the minimum wage has the lowest value since the Eisenhower administration.

So it is unbelievable to think exactly where we are and the lack of leadership that we have here.

On that one poster you just had up, President Bush said the economy is benefiting all Americans. I find that interesting. I had some steelworkers in my office just today from all over Ohio, and they certainly don't think that the current economy is benefiting all Americans, that is for sure.

And in the context of this, where do we get the money to give the millionaire to get the Hummer, we don't have it.

We are borrowing this money. That is the kicker. As Mr. Meek pointed out earlier in the hour, where we are getting the money from to borrow to give to the people who make more than a million a year, and now we have to pay interest on that money. This is what we pay in interest on the debt, just the red, $230-some billion compared to what we spend on education, homeland security and veterans.

So a disproportionate amount of our budget dollars go just to pay interest on the debt. We get no value from that. We are just giving the Chinese, the Japanese, the OPEC countries, our money that they will continue to try to invest and take jobs away from us. We do need to go in another direction.

I think this goes right to the heart. There are two belief systems here. There is the Republican belief system that says cut taxes for millionaires, give corporate welfare to the oil and health care industries, okay. That is their belief system. Let's make sure that the pharmaceutical industry has no ability or we don't have any ability to negotiate down the prices with them. That is their belief system.

But the Democratic belief system is that everybody needs to pay their fair share and make some sacrifice. Why is it just the middle class, the poor and the small business owner making all the sacrifice while the wealthiest people get their tax break.

Our belief system is that they need to pay their fair share, those making more than a million a year because they are benefiting from the largess of the United States of America, and we need to take that money and invest it into research and development, stem cell research, 21st century technologies, broadband for every household, making sure that our schools are functioning, No Child Left Behind is funded, and that we reduce the amount of interest that you have to pay on a college loan.

Mr. Speaker, what the Republicans are doing with college loans is ridiculous.

Now the Democrats want to cut student loan interest rates in half for both parents and students. The Republicans want to increase it and give tax breaks to millionaires. The Democrats are for raising the minimum wage. The Republicans will not bring a bill to the floor that actually passed out of committee that raises minimum wage.

The Republicans are for giving corporate welfare to the oil industry. The Republican Congress put that money in, $16 billion went to energy companies, corporate welfare at this time of great profits.

All of these things, it is about beliefs and we have our share of beliefs, they have theirs, and the American people are going to choose.

Knowing a lot of members on the other side of the aisle, I am not sure that they don't care, but clearly it is weak, passive leadership. We need strong leadership. We need not only a new direction, but strong, bold ideas that are going to take us forward. This whole idea, the whole political realm is about ideas.

Our friends on the other side of the aisle are dinosaurs. They are still working in the old oil days and those countries that are going to be on the cutting edge are going to be into these alternative energy sources. But you can't have weak, passive leadership that fails to step up to bat when the country needs them.

One gentleman who was in my office said we need leadership. We need you to help us. We are losing control. We feel less and less like we are in control. And the things that the Democrats want to implement are to make sure that people have control of their own lives to the extent that they can, and that is education, that is being healthy, that is making sure that there is opportunity through these investments and research and development that we want to do. We want to make sure that these ideas are getting out there through strong, bold leadership that is going to move the country forward. I know Mr. Meek supports that. I have had conversations with him about that.

And that is not what he was saying last night about Dallas when we were watching the game.

I thought we were going to move on.

You brought up the Republican lack of plan or planning or any agenda really. But I think we are living, as we said the last time we were here, we are living in the midst of an implemented neoconservative Republican agenda. Here it is. We are living in it right now.

You want to know what the Republicans will do? Go to the gas pump. Look at your health care bills. Look at your college tuition. Just look. Look at Iraq. Look at Afghanistan. This is the neoconservative agenda as ordered. This is exactly what they wanted to do. They have the House, they have the Senate, they have the White House, and here it is. Look no more.

Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the opportunity to be here to open up for another discussion with the 30-something Working Group. We will be joined later by our friends from Florida who have been rooting on the Miami Heat in the last few days and are very excited about some key victories. So Mr. Meek and Ms. Wasserman Schultz will be here soon.

The issue tonight, Mr. Speaker, for all of us as Americans, I believe, is one of the most pressing issues our country has faced in a long time, and that is the issue of our national debt and our annual deficits that we are running here in the United States of America. We have always prided ourselves in the United States of being able to balance

our budgets and pay our bills, and making sure that we were like the average family in the United States that had to deal with paying bills, making sure at the end of the month we at least broke even, maybe even had a little bit to save.

Throughout the course of the 1990s, under the leadership of President Clinton, and in 1993 with a Democratic House and a Democratic Senate, we passed a budget resolution, as Democrats, that balanced the budget and led to one of the greatest economic expansions in the history of the world, which lifted up millions of people, created 20 million new jobs, and led to prosperity for everybody in the country.

We put in place PAYGO rules, which said that you can't spend any money that you don't either raise taxes to spend it or you cut spending somewhere, but what you don't do is you don't go out and borrow it. You don't go to China or Japan or OPEC and borrow the money. You make sure we have the money that we generated ourselves, and we pay our bills and meet our obligations: Social Security, Medicare, veterans benefits, education, Pell Grants, health care, children's health care, or whatever the priorities may be, we would have the money to pay for it.

So the discussion tonight, Mr. Speaker, is of an issue that is pressing not only to the 30-something generation, because we are going to be around to pay the bills for the reckless spending, and our kids and our grandkids, the next couple of generations coming, but you can't get something for nothing. And right now the Republican House and Senate and President Bush are basically living on a credit card at the expense of the next generation of Americans who are going to be forced to pay the bill.

Mr. Speaker, I know you have seen this chart before, but it is indicative of the situation we are in in the United States of America. In 224 years, from 1776 to the year 2000, all of the Presidents and all of the Congresses borrowed a total of $1.01 trillion from foreign sources, foreign interests, in 224 years. The current President and the current Republican House and the current Republican Senate have managed, from 2001 to 2005, to borrow more money from foreign interests than all the previous Presidents in the previous 224 years. This is staggering.

And you may ask, Mr. Speaker, well, what are the 30-somethings talking about this for? We are supposed to talk about issues, Mr. Speaker, that affect kids and 20-somethings and 30-somethings, and young families. This is the most pressing issue for the next generation of Americans because we are going to be the ones left footing the bill.

When tax rates go up for the 30-somethings or the 20-somethings, or the kids that are in college or in grade school now, because of this reckless borrowing, it is irresponsible. It is not in the public interest. It is not in the interest of the next generation, Mr. Speaker. And, therefore, it is an issue for the 30-something Democratic Working Group to talk about.

So it may be $1 trillion. Where are we getting it from, Mr. Speaker? Look at this picture of America, and it shows exactly where we are getting it: $682 billion from Japan; $249 billion from China, the U.K., the Caribbean, Taiwan, Germany, Korea, Canada; and $67.8 billion we have borrowed from OPEC countries. OPEC countries.

Can you imagine, in this day and age, with the cost of gas and with the price of a barrel of oil, that the United States has been so reckless and so irresponsible that we would go out and put ourselves in the position where we have to borrow money from OPEC and borrow money from China? This has a lot of different effects. This is just like when you get a loan for your house. You look at your house, and your house costs $110,000, and then when you take out a loan, you look at what you are going to end up paying to actually get your $110,000 house, and it is thousands and thousands and thousands of dollars more.

This is what we are doing here. We may borrow $682 billion from Japan, we may borrow $250 billion from China, but how much more do we have to pay on interest, Mr. Speaker? That money is not going to be going to other priorities here in the United States of America. So China, who has been wiping out the middle class of the United States of America, especially in Ohio and Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, Indiana and Connecticut, and a lot of the other areas of the country, China is loaning us money. We pay them the interest on it, they take the interest, make some money off the Americans, and invest that back into their state-owned companies that will compete directly with American manufacturers here in the United States of America.

Now, I know we are in a global economy, and nobody wants to say that we are not going to trade. We all know that is ridiculous. We all know it is going to happen. But to borrow money from a country that is going to take the interest that you pay them on it and invest it back in to compete against you makes it even more unfair than the situation already is. You are putting yourself at a competitive disadvantage. It is irresponsible, and it is reckless because we have to pay the interest, but you are also aiding and abetting your competition every day.

Again, here is what we borrowed. The increase in the national debt, $1.18 trillion; and of that, $1.16 was borrowed from foreign interests, Ms. Wasserman Schultz, and only $.02 trillion borrowed from domestic interests.

And let me make one more point before the Miami Heat takes the floor again.

This is the kicker, Mr. Speaker. All of that money that we borrow and that we have to pay interest on, here is what it looks like in the 2007 budget authority. This is billions of dollars. The big red bar on the left is what we have to pay in interest, interest on the money that we are borrowing.

So this money that the American people send down here and we spend it on education and health care and this and that, the biggest portion goes to just paying interest on the debt; and China and these other countries will take that money and reinvest it back into their state- owned, Communist-run facilities.

But look how it compares to what we are spending on education or on homeland security or on veterans. This is really the icing on the cake. This is what makes it so irresponsible. Not only are we putting the burden on our kids, but there are current investments that we cannot make because we are forced to spend all this money on just the interest on the debt.

I yield to the Miami Heat.

If the gentleman would yield, do the Celtics still have a team?

I was a Larry Bird fan from way back.

The issue here, and I love that chart because it does put everything into perspective, is that this outfit is leaving America worse off than they found it, and that is really upsetting. When you think about long term what we are going to have to deal with, what the 30-somethings and people with kids in college and grade school, what kind of country are you leaving these kids, that is what frustrates me. We have an obligation to make sure that we leave the garden patch a little nicer than we found it. And the debt, the war, you are strapping this next generation for generations. We are going to spend our entire life in public life or our generation's service to the country is going to be fixing the war in Iraq, balancing the budget, and trying to make ourselves competitive in a brutal global economy.

It is frustrating, but it is the overarching theme that the Republican Senate and House and White House are leaving the country worse off than they found it.

And it is not like we have the money to give the person making a million dollars.

And where do we get the money to give the money to the millionaire to go buy a Hummer? We have to go borrow it. That makes no sense.

In the Democratic proposal to take the country in a new direction, one of the key components, and I am glad you brought this up, two basic provisions, cutting interest rates in half for the borrowers in most needs on subsidized student loans from a fixed rate of 6.8 percent to a fixed percent rate of 3.4 percent, and cutting rates on parent loans for undergraduate students from a fixed rate of 8.5 percent to a fixed rate of 4.25 percent.

This is about running the government and what are your priorities. Now it amazes me, Mr. Delahunt, it amazes me how this Republican-led Congress can go to great lengths to make sure that the oil industry gets their corporate subsidies to the tune of $13 billion, how the health care industry will get $20 billion in corporate welfare, and how tax cuts go predominantly to the people who make more that $1 million a year, as we have seen tonight.

But yet, they refuse to try to enact proposals that the Democrats have

tried to get in place over the past several years, time and time again, in the Education Committee, in the Ways and Means Committee, in the Appropriations Committee, in the Judiciary Committee, whatever it takes to try to get these proposals enacted. And we run up against the stone wall of Republican ideology that is hellbent on making sure the wealthiest people in the world, in the United States, get their corporate welfare at the expense of average citizens.

Welcome to the race of life, and let the Federal Government hook a piano on your back.

Their plan, Mr. Speaker, has been implemented. We are now experiencing the results of their plan, cause and effect. They issued, they administered, they proposed, they passed year after year after year. Democrats, we couldn't stop anything if we wanted to. Went through the House, went through the Senate, the President had the signing ceremony, brought everybody behind him, had 50 pens and was passing them out to all the leadership. And the end result is that chart that you just had up: higher gas prices, higher college tuition costs, higher health care costs, lower median income, $9 billion lost in Iraq, nobody knows where it is. We are building roads and hospitals and schools in Iraq while we are cutting funding here. Katrina, we are paying people's divorce lawyer bills. I mean, come on.

Mr. Speaker, this is a comprehensive agenda, and what I love most about what the Democrats are going to do when they get in charge, our agenda is integrated into creating a government that works in the 21st century. Unfortunately, our friends on the other side are like dinosaurs. They keep trying to work and run the government like it is 1950. It is 2006. We have new technologies, new communications, a new ability to administer government, and the Republicans are caught in the stone age like dinosaurs, unable to run the government.

Look at Katrina. Look at the war. Look at all the issues that we have talked about. It is their inability to run.

So what I like about what the Democrats are doing is we are taking a very new, cutting-edge, progressive approach to administering government. And it starts with making health care more affordable. We are going to use the ability, buying power to make sure we eliminate the major influence of drug companies and HMOs, corporate welfare, basically, that the Republicans gave to the health care industry; get lower drug costs, encourage competition, and make sure that we invest in the stem cell and other medical research. We have cutting-edge technologies that we are that close to getting to, and the Republicans are cutting the budget for research.

Right. And what I really love is what John Tanner's bill is doing, and John Tanner is a Democrat from Tennessee, a Blue Dog Democrat, and this is just good stuff. We are going to audit the government. When we get back in charge, we are going to throw everything on the table, and we are going to audit everything. We are just going to start over, figure out why we are wasting so much money. And Mr. Tanner and I had a great conversation, Mr. Speaker, last week. And we are going to have Mr. Tanner down here because he needs to participate in the 30-something group to explain to the House of Representatives just exactly what his bill does. But in a thumbnail sketch, it audits all of the branches of government. It audits all of the agencies of government. And we can squeeze wasteful spending out of the government right now and invest that money into things that matter.

Teddy Roosevelt.

Mr. Speaker, reclaiming my time, I want to know where all the Members from 1994 went when they were saying we have got to run government like a business, we need a balanced budget amendment, we cannot afford all this wasteful spending. Democrats now have a bill that we are going to put forth before this Congress when we take over of how to run this place like a business. Now, we realize it is not a business; so there are things we are limited to do. But there is no excuse why we cannot audit this government and find the waste and invest it into math, science, education, health. We cannot keep going to the taxpayers and asking them for more and more money.

Please.

Special Order.

We do not have the military one.

Mr. Speaker, reclaiming my time, when you look at what happened in the late 1990s with what the Republican committees were willing to investigate going on in the executive branch, what they were willing to investigate under President Clinton, they spent $40 million chasing him around, and now you are not even willing to provide some oversight for the war or Katrina or any of these other things? It is not a witch hunt. These guys are saying we are screwing up, let us fix it.

I yield to my friend.

We don't mind you making a profit. Profit is not a dirty word. Go out and make money, hire Americans, this is good news. But do it in the national interest.

Who was the one gentleman, Lee Raymond, that got big time money. I don't know how many millions he made last year. I know he got a $2 million tax break.

I think he made $390-some million. So they are paying this guy a $398 million retirement package, $2 million tax break, and companies like this are only investing $10 million, when they can give them a retirement package of $400 million.

Newt Gingrich said, just to wrap up, our good friend, Mr. Speaker, about the Republican Congress, ``They are seen by the country as being in charge of a government that can't function.'' This is your laundry list that you just mentioned.

Mr. Speaker, all of these posters are available on our web site for other Members to access at www.housedemocrats.gov/30something. All these posters are available.

We missed our good friend Mr. Meek, and we cheer on the Miami Heat.

And corporate welfare.

Will the gentleman yield?

Both of you have made one overarching point, and that is that the government is broken. The government is not working the way it was meant to work. We have no leadership in Washington, D.C., from the Republican House, to the Republican Senate, to the Republican White House, that is willing to take on the gigantic task of reforming this government.

It is nothing but status quo. It is nothing but the same old tired ideas that get recycled election cycle after election cycle, with no real solutions. Whether you are talking about energy costs, or you are talking about the war in Iraq, or you are talking about Katrina, we have a broken government and nobody in Washington, D.C., with the guts to try to fix it.

Now, when you look at our foreign policy, and it has been mentioned already here, $8.8 billion given to Iraqi ministers by the coalition provisional authority and nobody knows where it is; $45 billion of American taxpayer dollars spent in Iraq on reconstruction, $96 million in cash and receipts remain unaccounted for a specific project, on and on and on. Why is it broke? Why is the American government broke? Because we are not having any success in rehabilitating the Iraqi economy.

Oil production below pre-war levels, electricity is below pre-war levels, 54 percent of Iraqi households lack access to clean water. On and on and on.

But the main line is this, that this country needs to go in a new direction. The American people are tired.

We went to war with a flawed plan that didn't account for the hard work to build the peace after we took down the regime. We also served under a Secretary of Defense who didn't understand leadership, who was abusive, who was arrogant, and who didn't build a strong team.

That is not Tim Ryan, that is not Kendrick Meek, that is not Bill Delahunt. That is a retired Army general who had action in the region.

This is on Secretary Rumsfeld. He has shown incompetence operationally and tactically and is far more than anyone responsible for what has happened to our important mission in Iraq. Mr. Rumsfeld must step down. That is Paul Eaton, Army Major General's comments.

I think, Mr. Delahunt, this all gets back to what has been happening in this country, a refusal, an absolute refusal by this Congress to conduct the kind of oversight that is necessary. Article I, Section 1 of the United States Constitution, the founding document that really organized this country, gives the power to this Chamber.

Point of clarification. This is foreign money.

I think the point that we are trying to make here is we know it is not easy to admit you make mistakes. It goes against your human nature. But when you are elevated to leadership positions like we have been blessed to be here and to represent our country, 700,000 people apiece, it takes courage.

It does not take courage to have oversight to chase a President's peccadillos around the Oval Office. That is not courageous. Courage is trying to say we have made a colossal mistake, and instead of going down the same road even faster, try to stop, reevaluate the situation and let us find out who we need to hold accountable here, who needs to be brought in before the Congress, as you said. That is not easy. That is difficult. That is one of the most difficult things about being an American, and being an American government is that your warts are here for all the world to see. But that is better than the alternative, which is tyranny and suppression and oppression by the government.

This is a part of our process, these problems getting aired out, but at the end of the day, it is part of our greatness because we can quickly then adapt, fix the problem and move on, but when you have leadership that is afraid--

--afraid to address the real issues today, that is the basis of incompetence, whether you are in government, whether you are in business, whether you are in coaching. Does not matter what your field is. If you do not admit you make a mistake, then you are going to have problems. If a coach goes into a game with a certain game plan, and at half-time you are down 21 points, then you change the game plan; it has not worked. Move forward, move on, make the changes necessary to move the country forward.

If the gentleman will yield, the same type of philosophy with the war, refusing to be accountable and to address the major issues and trying to provide a lot of happy talk for the American people, it is the same with the domestic economy. President Bush says America's economy is strong and benefiting all Americans, yet at the same time, as this graph shows, college tuition is up 40 percent, gas prices are up 47 percent, health care costs are up 55 percent, and median household income down 4 percent. But the President is saying the economy is strong and benefiting all Americans. Where are you living? Not in Youngstown, Ohio; not in Niles, Ohio. Give me a break.

The challenges that the average American person faces today are enormous. The challenges are enormous, and we need to get this country out of this rut we are stuck in and move in a new direction. Let us talk about broadband access for every American, let us talk about fixing the health care crisis in the United States of America so small businesses don't have to pay as much for health care costs. They could reinvest it back into their company and maybe we could shrink the trade deficit just a bit.

We have an economy right now that is very competitive, competing with 1.3 billion citizens in China and 1 billion citizens in India. And they are focused on engineering and science and all of these other issues, yet we are making it more difficult and more costly to go to school. The number of people that have student loans now is going up and up and up, and the amount that they owe back is going up and up and up. I think the stat we used the other night, Mr. Delahunt, was that 8 percent of the people who have student loans owe $40,000 a year or more, up from like 1.5 percent 10 years prior to.

We can't make it more expensive, Mr. Meek. We need to make it more accessible. And I would be happy to yield.

I thank the gentlewoman. This is not about playing gotcha. This is not about saying hey, look, this, this, and that. This is about fixing the problems. We need the information that these generals on the ground will provide us so we can actually fix the problems. And we are going to reach across the aisle and work with the Republicans.

This is not about Democrat or Republican. This is about the United States of America. We need everybody's ideas, we need everybody's intellect, and we need all Americans to participate in this. These are complex problems. There is no liberal or conservative answer.

We are in a new realm. We are well beyond anything we could have ever fathomed with the technology, the innovation, the movement of the economy, globalization, techniques, and the whole nine yards. We are past all the old slogans: Lesser government and big government. We are past that. We are so far beyond that. But the leadership in the country needs to reflect the views of the United States of America and its citizens.

I wanted to make a point that I was going through a GAO study today, and you can get it on the GAO Web site, and it showed two scenarios. One was what happens if we continue going down the same road we are on and we make President Bush's tax cuts permanent for the top 1 percent of the people, and it plays that scenario out through the numbers; what percentage of our budget we would spend on military and this, that, and the other. And one of the issues there was the interest on the debt.

If we keep implementing the Republican proposals that have been going on

for the last 5 years for sure, rubber stamped, but much longer than that in the Congress without the check of a Democrat President where they were working together, we will be paying so much money, a higher proportion of our annual revenues to interest on the debt that it will be staggering.

The American people will wholly reject that kind of fiscal policy. Because when you are paying interest on the debt, you get no value from that.

You are not investing in education where you have millions of students that are now college educated inventing new things, helping us with alternative energy. You have none of that. You are not investing in health care, where kids and parents are healthier and workers are more productive. You get no benefit. You are giving money to China and they are taking the interest and they are reinvesting it back into their state-owned facilities and wiping out the middle class in America.

This is the problem we have. Two final points to wrap it up. Let's get back to the sense of the common good, Mr. Delahunt, where everybody benefits and everybody contributes.

We should demand as Democrats that every citizen in the country, able-bodied citizen, contributes to the good of the country and the economy. They get educated and everything else. We need to demand that of everybody. But at the same time those people who have benefited from the system, the economic system, the capitalistic system, democracy in the United States of America, all of these people need to contribute. The more you benefit, the more you are obligated to keep the system running. Everybody contributes and everybody benefits. Let's start focusing on the common good instead of all of these special interests.

It gets back to this, and this is one of the final points I want to make. Over the past 5 years we have figured out that we, myself personally and my constituents back at home, do not trust the judgment of the Republican leadership in the United States Congress and in the Senate and in the White House. It is not personal. They are good people, but their judgment has been very poor over the past couple of years.

And the end result is tuition costs are up 40 percent; gasoline prices up 47 percent; health care costs up 55 percent; median income is down 4 percent; and nothing with the minimum wage, lowering college tuition costs, and all of things that are going to lead, business incubators and downtown revitalization, all the things that this country needs.

Let's take this country in a new direction. I am excited about the opportunities we are going to have being in the majority in January. I think it is going to be an exciting time with new ideas and a lot of things that we can accomplish here in the United States.

Americans.

Mr. Speaker, it would be an honor for me to watch and listen to you read that with your new glasses.

One more time. Read it twice.

Thank you. Good job.

Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the opportunity to be here again with the authorization and approval of our leader, Ms. Pelosi; Steny Hoyer, our whip; Mr. Clyburn, our caucus chair; and our vice chair Mr. Larsen from Connecticut. We would like to thank them also for giving the 30-something Working Group an opportunity to come to the floor as often as possible to talk about the issues that are facing this country.

Unfortunately, Mr. Speaker, we once again find ourselves in a scenario where there is a major disconnect between what the feelings are of the average American citizen sitting in Ohio or Florida or in the Midwest or any other State with what their issues are, what their challenges are, the problems they face sitting at the kitchen table, and what is going on here in the United States Congress and around the Potomac River.

Mr. Speaker, we have heard now how we have all these new issues that have been dusted off the shelf, brought back out front, back on the talk shows, back on the media circuits, back on radio talking about priorities that only belong to a small fringe group of people in America when the real problems that American citizens face look a little something like this: College tuition costs, up 40 percent; gas prices, up 47 percent; health care costs up 55 percent; and median household income down 4 percent.

The American people are crying out to State capitals all over the country, to Washington, DC, please, please, somebody listen to what our needs are. Please, somebody help us with an alternative energy plan. Please, someone help us reduce the cost of college tuition. Please, someone help us rein in the cost of health care. Please, someone help us lift our wages up, someone invested in the country. That is what the American people want. Yet time and time and time again we continue to get issues of amending the Constitution for any reason we see fit and divisive debates in the United States of America.

So I have a question, Mr. Speaker, that I would like to propose to the American people. What do we believe in as a country? What do we believe in, Mr. Speaker? What kind of America do we believe in? Do we believe in an America that will give the very, very few a tax break, the people who make more than $1 million a year a tax break, while we are increasing the cost of college tuition, while we have high gas prices? And with the top leadership in the United States of America saying conservation is a good personal virtue, but it has no room in the personal policy debate that this country has. Is that what we believe?

See, I believe that the American people want leadership in this country and they want us to take on these issues. These are difficult issues, and it may be hard to go to a millionaire for some people and ask them to pay a little more in taxes, that may be difficult, but the country demands that kind of leadership because we need to invest it into lowering college tuition costs so we can get more people educated in this country.

Now, I agree it is not just money. We need reform. We need to do things differently. We need to figure out how a 21st century college or university should work or a K through 12 should work. We need to do all those things. Just throwing money is not the solution. But to give millionaires a tax break at the expense of the kinds of reforms that the Democratic Party wants to do in college tuition, in alternative energy sources, I think is very, very important.

We have in the United States a lot of untapped human potential. And a lot of times, Mr. Speaker, we get caught up in policy debates about what our resources are, and conservation, and making sure we tap into all the resources of the country, but one of the great untapped resources that we have in the United States of America are our kids. We cannot continue down the road we are going down now, not investing into the arts, not investing into the team sports, not investing into business incubators at the rate we should be, not making sure that every school has a nurse or a clinic so our kids are healthy, not making sure that we reach out with SCHIPs, so that all our kids are covered and have health care so that they can be productive citizens.

These are investments we make into our kids, into our parents to make sure they are healthy so that they can be productive and learn in school. Because the other option is to say, the heck with the kid, he doesn't have the money. He or she doesn't have the money, they can't afford to go to the doctor, well, lose another one and move on. That is not what America believes in, Mr. Speaker.

So the real issue is this: Here is the world we are competing in: 1.3 billion Chinese citizens, 1 billion Indian citizens, and the European Union. They all want to clean our clock, Mr. Speaker. They want to knock off America. They are not scared. They are coming after us. They are barreling down. You go to Shanghai, you are riding a magnetic levitation train, one of the only ones in the world. They are investing in engineers like crazy, schools and education like crazy, knocking over buildings. They do not have property rights, environmental rights, human rights. They do not respect religion. They are not really playing fair, but they are playing to win.

Now, how do we combat that with only 300 million citizens? We combat that by investing into our people, making surely our people are healthy, educated, and have opportunity. And you know what? Some people may not take advantage of the opportunity. We understand that. But we need to begin to provide opportunity again for Americans.

The article today in USA Today about college debt, how can we expect kids to go out and take risks and take chances and start new businesses when they leave college with, last year, averaging $19,000 in debt? Nineteen thousand dollars. You think these kids are going to want to go to an inner city school and teach kids when you leave them with, if they have a Master's Degree or Ph.D. or something, over $100,000 debt if you're a doctor. We need to invest back into the United States of America. We need to have an infrastructure program.

Back home 2 weeks ago people in Ohio were talking about sewer lines and water lines and septic tanks and fees. Look what is happening to our country. We are letting it rot from within.

I just want to tell one story, Mr. Speaker. I went to China last summer for about 2 weeks, and as we toured the country and we went to different high-tech shops and chip manufacturers and Intel and all the fancy new high-tech companies that were there, we had a conversation, a kind of an ongoing conversation about their engineers in China versus the American engineers. And after hearing how many engineers they had and how well they were doing and how cheap they were, but yet very educated and very motivated and knew that they wanted to provide a lot of headaches for the United States, I started asking, well, what are the advantages of the U.S. engineers? And time and time again you would hear that the U.S. engineers are more creative, and they work in teams better than any other engineers in the entire world, all over the planet.

So the question is: Why is that? Partly it is because we promote and had promoted and have promoted in the United States athletics and sports and speech and debate. Team concepts. Teamwork. And we also, for some years, promoted the arts and taught these kids at a young age how to be creative and how to learn how to draw and paint and dance and sing and just to be creative and think outside the box. Those are the two advantages we have.

So I came back to the United States after 2 weeks and all you hear is pay to play. If you want to play sports in high school in Ohio: Pay to play. Some kids it may cost $500. Two kids, maybe we will give you a break, $750. Average families don't have that. But these kids are not going to develop the kinds of skills they need to be competitive in a world economy. Period, dot.

Are we okay with that? Is that something we believe in? Do we believe it is okay if kids have to pay an extra $500 or $1,000 to play sports when we know

it gives us a competitive advantage in the marketplace? Are we okay with that, America? I am not okay with that. I think it stinks. And then you come back and what is the first thing that gets cuts in the school districts? The art programs. First to go.

I had a woman last night from Liberty High School talk to me about how they had cut art programs for their kids in the grade schools because of budget constraints. We are cutting off our noses to spite our faces. We have to make these investments.

And then I come to Washington, DC, and we have a lot of tourists here, now is the tourist season in June and July, we get a lot of students down here, and what are we talking about? We are talking about gay marriage. Wait a minute, Mr. Speaker. We have got college tuition up 40 percent, gas prices up 40 percent, health care costs up 55 percent, and we are talking about gay marriage? Give me a break. Who are they bothering?

People don't come up to me at the Giant Eagle in Niles when I go down to get a pound of coffee and some honey, Mr. Delahunt, because I like to put honey in my coffee to sweeten it, because my Aunt Rosie taught me to put the honey in. It is good. It prevents colds. Nobody grabs me and says, can you please stop the gay people from getting married up in Massachusetts? They are killing me. No one has ever said that to me, and I am from a conservative district in Ohio.

People want to know what you're going to do about gas prices. What are you going to do about college tuition costs? What are you going to do about health care costs, Mr. Delahunt? These are the real issues in our country.

I yield to my friend.

I am sure you remember the debate, Mr. Delahunt, because you were probably leading it at the time, the debate when we are talking about let's loan the money to the Iraqis. Everybody said they are going to be able to use the oil for reconstruction. Another urban myth. It never happened.

I know our friend from the west of me in Toledo, Ohio, who is one of my mentors down here, has a difficult story to tell us tonight.

I appreciate that. We know the economy sometimes weeds out industries and new ones pop up. That happens. That is capitalism. We understand.

But where is the plan? Where is the plan to figure out what are we going to do next? What is the next best thing? What are these Maytag workers going to do? They cannot all work at Wal-Mart or Sam's Club or Super K or Lowe's or Best Buy, or all of the different white elephants that line the suburbs of America.

Are we going to invest in research and development? Are we going to invest in the business incubators? Are we going to lower the cost of college tuition? Are we going to make sure that we invest in the health care industries with nurses and health care workers? What are we going to do? There is no plan for the country.

I believe we need a plan. I just think the values that are here that we are hearing here in the United States Congress certainly do not reflect the average values. I think the Democrats' priorities are America's priorities.

And that is the key here. When you look at this, briefly, as we are talking about Maytag, this is where the United States is borrowing its money. $682 billion from Japan. China, $249 billion, U.K., Caribbean, Taiwan, OPEC, Korea, Germany, Canada. We are borrowing all this money and giving it to the wealthiest 1 percent, 1.9. Let's see here, $1.9 trillion over 10 years of tax cuts that we are borrowing. So we borrow from them and we give it the wealthiest in our country. And education costs go up, health care costs go up, energy costs go up. I yield to my friend.

We owe, every year, in interest, this is the 2007 budget authorization, billions of dollars. The big red thing, what are we spending all our money on, $230 billion is interest on the debt. All this money we are borrowing, it is like your house or your car. You buy a $20,000 car. Over time you pay $25,000 for it because you have got to pay the interest. It is sucking money from education, homeland security, veterans benefits, research and development, business incubators, community development block grants, all the things that we put in the communities to help communities make local decisions so that they can grow their local economy. We are sucking it out and we are giving it to China. China is taking the interest that we give them, and they are investing it back into their state-owned manufacturing companies that are stealing the manufacturing jobs. That is the cycle of the money over and over and over and again.

And it is a total lack of leadership. If you look, this is quite significant. In the first 224 years of the country, we borrowed $1.101 trillion from foreign interests. In the last 4 or 5 years, we have borrowed more than that. $1.05 trillion under President Bush and the Republican Congress. Look at this. They have managed to accomplish more in the last 4 or 5 years than all previous Presidents combined. And at the same time, as we are borrowing this money and we are paying it back in interest to China, taking more of our money from our budget here to pay the interest, I find it peculiar that in 2004, 8 percent of graduating seniors carried student loans of more than $40,000. That is up from 1.3 percent 10 years prior to. More kids are incurring more debt to go to college at a time when the economy has totally shifted from industry to knowledge based capitalism, knowledge based economy.

All the more reason, there are not many options here. The Democrats want to take this country in a new direction. We want to stop all the borrowing, we want to stop all the tax cuts for people who make $300 million a year, 200 million, 1 million, 2 million, 5 million, 10, stop. Balance our budgets. Implement the PAYGO rules so that we could make sure we are not spending any money that we don't have. And we don't have to borrow it from China and take the country in a new direction. Invest in education, invest into the dams here in the United States. Find the $9 billion that got lost somewhere in Iraq and nobody seems to know where it is.

It is almost the same amount that is being cut out of the student aid. 12 billion cut out of there, 9 billion lost. Take the country in another direction. Move it along. We want our Democratic plan, broadband access for all Americans, alternative energy plans, tax credits for research and development, all the things we need to do to move in this new direction and, at the same time, cut these loans in half.

Make sure that these kids have money to buy a house, buy a car, go back to school, get a Master's Degree, get a Ph.D., do research, start a business, take a chance. These are the kinds of things we need to do.

Now, this is not us speaking. This is what we like to call here a third-party validator. This is former House Speaker Newt Gingrich on the Republican Congress from Friday, March 31, 2006: ``They are seen by the country as being in charge of a government that can't function.'' That is the man who gave birth to the Republican revolution. This is Newt Gingrich. This is not Tim Ryan or Bill Delahunt or Marcy Kaptur from Toledo, Ohio. This is Newt Gingrich, saying that the Republicans are in charge of a government that cannot function. Katrina, the war in Iraq, tuition costs, health care costs, energy costs. What is going on? Foreign debt, all the borrowing that we

are doing, giving Lee Raymond a $2 million tax break. This is not us. This is Speaker Gingrich saying that, and I just happen to agree.

Also, in the same article, he cited a series of blunders under Republican rule from failures in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina to mismanagement of the war in Iraq. He said the government has squandered billions of dollars in Iraq. Newt Gingrich, not the Democrats saying that.

I do not exactly know what specific issues he is talking about, but I am sure he is talking about the $9 billion lost in Iraq. I am sure he is talking about the foreign borrowing, I hope, and find a way to fix it.

This is Pat Toomey. I am sure both of you served a lot longer with him than I did. He is now President of the Club for Growth. ``There's a very high level of frustration,'' says Mr. Toomey, ``and disappointment among rank and file Republicans when they see a government-controlled Congress engaging in an obscene level of wasteful spending.''

``Obscene level of wasteful spending.'' Here is a man who recognizes the fact that paying $230 billion a year in interest payments to foreign countries primarily is not a good investment for the United States of America. And these are the kinds of things that need to change. And these are conservative Republicans.

And all we are saying as Democrats is let us take the country in a new direction because I think our values as Democrats better reflect what the priorities are in America.

And it hit me a couple of weeks ago when we were home for a week and got to spend a long week with our constituents that there is a real disconnect between what the American people want and what is happening down here and the misplaced priorities that I think we see every day here in the United States Congress. And I know my friend from Massachusetts would like to interject here, but just finally to say that it is those investments that we want to make in college education and some of the others that I feel we need to do and do rather immediately.

I yield to my friend.

I agree with the gentleman. There is nowhere to run, nowhere to hide. And when you have Speaker Gingrich saying the same thing that Bill Delahunt from Massachusetts is saying or those of us from Ohio are saying, it must be a consistent theme. And I do not think Republicans are bad people. I just think their priorities are misplaced when you look at what is happening time and time and time again, and it is the same in Ohio. A Republican general assembly, every statewide holder is a Republican, and these kinds of problems have been exacerbated by the local policies at the State level.

And the real issue here is in cities like Toledo, Ohio; or Youngstown, Ohio; or Warren, Ohio; or Niles, Ohio; or Boston, Massachusetts is that there is, as Mr. Delahunt said, an underclass forming. And 70 to 80 percent of the kids who go to Youngstown city schools in in my district live in poverty. Cleveland is now the poorest city in the country.

There is something wrong with the system when we allow that to happen. I do not believe that we cannot figure out how to do something about this. And when you cut community development block grants and you cut Head Start and you make college more expensive, those are not the priorities of the country. And here is why. I just want to make one point. This is not a moral argument. It can be and it is. But I want to make an economic argument to this. How are we going to compete with 1.3 billion Chinese citizens when we only have 300 million and we have a good number of our people living in poverty? They are not even on the field playing for us. We need them on the field. We need engineers, we need scientists, we need teachers, and nurses and doctors in our inner city schools, in our rural communities to help move the country forward and make those investments like the Tennessee Valley Authority, like the G.I. bill. Let us make those investments again, and we will see what will happen to the country.

I yield to my friend.

When you talk about NAFTA, I remember during the whole debate that was supposed to fix the whole illegal immigration problem. So I do not think we can have this immigration debate without putting it into some context to say I thought NAFTA was supposed to fix this problem. Wages would rise, standards of living would rise, and people would not want to come back over here. That was a part of that big debate.

As we wrap up, there is a lot of rhetoric, but you have just got to look at the facts. President Bush says America's economy is strong and benefiting all Americans. Ask yourself, regardless of the rhetoric, what the reality is. College tuition, up 40 percent. Gas prices, up 47 percent. Health care costs, up 55 percent. Median household incomes, down 4 percent. Don't listen to us. Don't listen to Newt Gingrich. Don't listen to the other side. Judge for yourself. Is this the kind of America you believe in? If so, continue to put the Republicans in charge of the government. Quite frankly, I believe as much as we like them, they are unable to govern. Katrina, the war, all of these statistics, unable to govern.

Let's take the country in another direction and really embody the freedom that this country is supposed to have. Www.housedemocrats.gov/ 30something, if any of you would like to email later.

Www.housedemocrats.gov/30something. Dana from Pittsburgh and Amanda from Connecticut emailed us last time. Both emailed saying, Congress needs to talk about the priorities of college costs and gas prices and get on the stick.

I sense a mutiny coming.

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

Mr. Speaker, I rise today in recognition of the Youngstown Connection. This group of exceptional students from the Youngstown city schools serves as ambassadors of our valley throughout the Nation and the world.

The Youngstown Connection is comprised of 12 high school students from Youngstown city schools. They are skilled in all areas of the performing arts including theater, dance, and music.

The talents of the Youngstown Connection have been showcased at National venues, including the Kennedy Center and the Washington National Cathedral in Washington, D.C., the Lincoln Center, and the Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade in New York City. Across the globe they have performed at the World War II D-Day commemorations in Normandy, Paris, and London, Austria's Millennial Celebration of Music in Vienna, and the Berlin Wall Freedom Celebration in cities throughout Germany.

Many of the students come from a variety of socioeconomic backgrounds, and through the Youngstown Connection they are able to explore opportunities they may not have otherwise been granted.

It has been widely reported, Mr. Speaker, that students of the arts continue to outperform their peers who for one reason or another have not taken courses in the arts. According to the College Entrants Examination Board, in 2005 SAT scores of students with coursework or experience in the arts scored between 25 and 65 points higher in the verbal section and an average of 28 points higher in the math section than those with no arts coursework. 100 percent of Youngstown Connection students graduate from high school, and 97 percent go on to graduate from college. The focus, the discipline, and the motivation the students gain throughout these experiences in the Youngstown Connection remains with them throughout their lives.

Today, Mr. Speaker, several alumni of the program are at the top of their career fields, including several professional performers. Lawrence Brownlee, who went on to gain a Master of Music degree from Indiana University, is an opera singer who is considered one of the top young tenors in the entire world. He has performed in every major opera house worldwide and currently has a contract with the Metropolitan Opera. Another Youngstown Connection alumnus, Timothy Gordon, is a professional dancer and teacher in New York who has performed with, amongst others, Alicia Keys. Three former alumni are currently pursuing Ph.D.'s from universities across the country in fields such as cancer and heart research.

Mr. Speaker, all children in every school need the same opportunities as these kids. Imagine the potential that could be unleashed across the country. Let us give these kids the opportunity that they deserve. These students learn the value of giving back to their community through service projects to help the homeless. The group also raises their own funds for travel, costumes, and other expenses through the use of fund-raising activities and generous donations from private citizens and groups. The Youngstown Connection provides these young adults with the opportunity to share their love of the arts and promote the message of brotherhood and peace throughout the world.

I am proud of the Youngstown Connection, Mr. Speaker, and because of them the future of our community in northeast Ohio and the country is in good hands.

Mr. Speaker, I think you make a great point and we have all these issues and China's rising and China's making investments and China's building their infrastructure and China's doing a lot of things that they have to do. Okay. That is their world and they can do what they have to do to be competitive, and you know what, God bless them.

And I understand that, and my point is----

And I understand that and I think that that is true. China has their world. We are feeding them, we are feeding them, and we are not taking care of what we need to take care of here in the United States of America. We have only certain controls over what they do in China, and if they want to focus on manufacturing and this, that and the other, hey, that is their business, God bless them.

But when we are aiding them by paying interest on money that they loaned us, then we are contributing to the downfall of the middle class of the United States of America and, at the same time, not making the investments in what we need to invest in in the United States of America.

For example, the Democratic proposal, the Innovation Agenda for the Democrats is to make sure that we have research and development tax credits, making sure that we have broadband access for every single house in the United States of America in the next 5 years. We have a plan on becoming energy independent. There it is, becoming energy independent, getting off of the addiction to foreign oil. We need to stop and move in another direction.

We cannot control everything that China does, but we have all kinds of control of what we can do here in the United States of America, and if we do not start focusing on making America stronger, whether it is with innovation, energy independence, healthier citizens, more productive citizens, investment in education, these are the things that we need to do in the near future to help us compete in the long term against China, against India and against a lot of other countries like Ireland that want to compete against the United States of America.

The Republican agenda today is to say the Democrats do not have an agenda. That is their agenda. That is all they have got. They have got no plan on energy, no plan on health care, no plan on education, no plan on reducing college tuition costs. They have got no plan on immigration. They have got no plans.

This is a poorly run business right now. Our government right now is a poorly run business that wastes money. And in Iraq, they lost $9 billion that nobody knows where it is. Royalties on the oil companies that we are just not getting because they get a lot of campaign contributions. Subsidies to the health care industry. And $16 billion, as Ms. Wasserman Schultz said, to the energy companies and the oil companies.

I mean, we are hemorrhaging here, and we are giving the millionaires $42,000, and we are giving the oil companies $16 billion. We don't have it to give you. I'd love to give it to you. It would be great if we could give everybody everything.

Bingo.

And giving subsidies is like giving a drug addict more drugs. Giving subsidies to the oil companies. We are getting old school here, with the legal pad.