Floor Statements

Madam Speaker, I appreciate being recognized. As we do on occasion on Wednesday, after the main part of the House business is closed, we have an opportunity to take a look at various topics and subjects. Usually we have chosen subjects of significant importance to Americans, ones that affect everybody's lives. And it might seem odd in that we have already passed the government takeover of health care bill that we would go back to that bill, but I think there is continuing information that is being released that a lot of people may not have known about when the bill was passed, additional facts and figures which are, at a minimum, quite disturbing.

The facts and figures that I thought that would be important to talk a little bit about today are the facts and figures that come from the President's own people, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services. These are people that the administration has chosen. They are a group of people who are taking a good look at the bill that was proposed and has been passed, what its implications are and some of the financial facts.

So this was something that was actually approved by the Obama administration. This was not the House Congressional Budget Office, which is viewed as being fairly bipartisan and has its own numbers. But these facts have just come out recently. We have to assume the President knew them, and the facts are in sharp contradiction, in complete disagreement with statements made by the President himself.

So I think we need to take a look at some of these things. Particularly, there was the claim in the health care bill that we have to bend the cost curve down because the numbers financially, for our Nation, we can't continue to have increasing health care costs.

Everything was centered on the fact that we are spending too much on health care. First of all, of course, the premise of that is a little odd. If you are a sick person, maybe you are not spending too much on health care. Maybe you spent what you needed to get well. But we are looking when that comment is made on what the government is spending on health care, particularly Medicare and Medicaid. So we are saying the government runs Medicaid and Medicare and they are spending too much, so the government needs to take it all over.

But the whole thing was sold on we are going to bend the cost curve down so Medicare and Medicaid, also health care in America, will cost less. Here we have Obama's hand-picked Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services saying that, in fact, this bill is going to increase the cost of health care. Well, that is kind of odd because the whole logic for doing it was because we are going to decrease it. And now we are hearing it will increase it. We are going to look at some of the different promises, quotes, and comments.

I am joined by a good friend of mine from Pennsylvania, and hopefully we will have some other guests on the floor tonight. I will introduce things first, and then we will discuss this.

This was an attempt to try to summarize the 2,000-page bill. They say a picture is worth a thousand words. Well, this picture may be a little tough. I don't know if it is worth 2,000 pages or not, but it is a tough picture. This is a rough idea what the government has to take over on the bill we just passed. So obviously it is going to be complicated. It shouldn't surprise us when we see this and ask: Is this going to save money? The answer now from Obama's own people is, No, this is going to cost more money than it is going to save.

So this is one of those things, just to get a sense of how complex the change is, and people are asking our offices all the time: When is this going to take place? For instance, those of us in Congress, we lose our health care coverage with this bill. So we are asking ourselves: When do we no longer have health insurance; and where do we have to go to buy it?

Well, you have to go to an open exchange. And there are a lot of questions about how is it that the Federal Government is going to take over one-sixth of the U.S. economy and somehow make it more efficient than what we have right now. The answer is they are not. They are not. The authorities appointed by the Obama administration again say it is not going to be more efficient, it is going to be more expensive.

There were all kinds of promises that we heard about, and I think it is important to go back and look at some of those things. Congressman Thompson from Pennsylvania may remember some of those quotes.

First, this is one that the President said: If you are among the hundreds of millions of Americans who already have health insurance through your job, Medicare or Medicaid or the VA, nothing will require your employer to change the coverage with the doctor you have. Try to explain that to the Members of Congress who are all losing their health insurance. This doesn't even pass the laugh test. This is ridiculous to make this statement.

The proposal that is before us, and you can probably technically say first, if you are among those who already have a health insurance policy, nothing in this plan will require you or your employer to change. Well, for how long? Well, until the bill goes into effect; then it will make you change. So this is really something here. Particularly the people who are going to be rather cynical when they read this are the people who are the Medicare seniors on Medicare Advantage. I don't know how many hundreds of thousands of people are in Medicare Advantage. You are going to have half a billion dollars taken out, $500 billion being taken out of Medicare Advantage. And obviously when you take that money out, the people on that plan are not going to have that same plan. About 50 percent of the seniors in Medicare Advantage are not going to have the same thing.

I want to contrast back and forth, the President says something, but yet, it taint necessarily so, as the song goes.

Do you think we really know the consequences? I don't think people have a clue what the consequences are.

So we are getting this radical, one statement says one thing and yet when you look at it, it is the exact opposite.

The promise was if you don't pass the stimulus bill, this was a year ago, you could have unemployment above 8 percent. I wish we hadn't passed it because our unemployment is now 10 percent.

You were on the floor here about a year ago saying it wasn't going to work. It wasn't that we were being pessimistic, but we learned from history from Henry Morgenthau, FDR's Secretary of the Treasury. He said this economic approach of the government spending tons of money doesn't fix this problem of unemployment and recession. It just doesn't work. After trying it for 8 years, it wasn't that we were rocket scientists, it is just we learned a little something from history.

Yet we get this one promise that if you don't do this, unemployment is going to go as high as 8 percent. Instead it went to 10 when we spent whatever it was, $700 billion or $800 billion. That is just amazing. That is one of the promises. I was thinking about the health care promises, but you're right on that.

Here is one that might be of interest to you. I have a couple of examples.

This is a quote from Senator Barack Obama and it was on 10-4-08. We will start--talking about his health care proposal--we will start by reducing premiums as much as $2,500 a family. If somebody told me that, I am saying I like that. Our expenses, we go through a lot of money with a bunch of kids and health care. If you are going to reduce my premiums by $2,500 a family, that is a great promise if it is any good. And yet after making this promise, now here we go, not only the Congressional Budget Office which is our bean counters, Republican and Democrat bean counters in the House and Senate, our guys, and this Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services which is the administration's, it is Obama's bean counters, are saying it is going to reduce the premiums by as much as $2,500, both of these offices are saying that the insurance premiums will increase under the Obama care, not decrease by $2,500, it is going to increase and it is going to increase by, I think they are saying--let's see, here it is: Americans who buy their own health insurance plans will pay an average of $2,100 a year more for their policies.

So if you are somebody going out and buying your health insurance, instead of decreasing by $2,500, it is going to increase by $2,100. That is a little different story. That is the sort of thing that gets people upset.

We are joined by a doctor with a medical opinion on this subject.

I want to mention that there may be some people joining us that are not always here on Wednesday evening. You are not just a Member of Congress, you are not just a former doctor, but you are also from the State of Tennessee, and the State of Tennessee is one of two States that tried this ObamaCare kind of approach to health care. And your experience in the State of Tennessee was did it decrease premiums and decrease the cost of insurance? That is what was promised by the President when he was a Senator. He said we are going to start by reducing premiums by as much as $2,500 a family. Did you believe that?

So your costs tripled when you went this route?

Let's get this straight. You have a company here and the company is being faced with some choices now. Their first choice is just take their employees and dump them into, is it the State or the Federal?

You can take your employees and unload them on the Federal Government, and if you do that, how much money does it save?

So if you are a big company, you can make $40 million by just dumping your employees onto this plan?

Why wouldn't somebody do that?

Okay, I'm starting to understand. Doctor, you're great at explaining this stuff.

So what you're saying is you've got a certain number of people that are all kicking into the system and paying for medical care. All of a sudden you create a government incentive to dump all those people on the government. Now the government is having to pick it up, and guess who's going to pick up the bill? Well, it's the people who are still buying private insurance. So when you take these people out--the company is not paying for them anymore--now the private insurance guys, their cost goes way up to compensate for these other people because the government is not paying enough to cover the insurance.

So if the government puts in 50 cents on the dollar, somebody's got to make up the other 50 cents. Guess who it's going to be? The other poor sucker out there who's trying to buy his own health insurance.

Oh, so we're designed to fail because if you get the private system to fail, guess who's going to end up having to run the whole system?

The Federal Government. What a treat.

Every time we take a look at this thing and we discuss it on the floor, no matter which way you poke at it, it seems to me you come to the came conclusion. There's one solution to this problem: repeal this silly bill that we passed. It's a disaster.

Congressman Thompson from Pennsylvania, please join us.

Just interrupting for a minute, from a business standpoint, because my background was engineering and business, when a business is running at 1 to 4 percent, that's like if you think about somebody that has to breathe keeping his lips above the water, you don't have much margin there before you go into the red when you're running at 1 to 4 percent.

Let me just cut to the chase for a minute here. Are you suggesting that with this new proposal, because of the tremendous pressure that's going to be placed on those hospitals, that they're basically going to be starting to close?

So they're saying that this new bill, among other things, is going to close hospitals.

Now there's something here that just seems to be ironic to an extreme. We passed this massive government takeover of health care, and the very people that the President and his administration chose to take a look at and study the effect on Medicare and Medicaid of this proposal are saying it's going to close hospitals; and yet this bill is going to hire 16,000 new IRS agents to try and enforce the plan. You would think if you had a medical bill, you would hire more nurses and doctors. No, we're going to do 16,000 IRS agents.

Yes.

Which is brought on by the bill, is my question.

Wow. Well, we're joined by a good friend of mine who does represent a rural area from the great State of Missouri, Blaine Luetkemeyer, a gentleman that I have already a tremendous amount of respect for, and somebody who is also going to share a couple of his ideas on this whole ridiculous situation with this government takeover of health care.

Congressman.

I really appreciate you bringing that point up, gentleman, because what you're really saying is there are a whole lot of question marks out there. It almost seems like to me, coming from our State of Missouri, it's almost like maybe you fall off your roof and you land on the ground and you know you hit pretty hard--you get to be an old geezer like me--and you kind of pick yourself up and say, I wonder if anything's broken. You start reaching around to see what's the damage. It seems like now people are kind of asking the question, what's the damage going to be? You really hit the nail on the head.

Go ahead, I didn't mean to interrupt you.

You're talking about a bill that is actually driving the unemployment worse. It's a bill that's going to create unemployment is what you're saying. That's what this small business owner says. In other words, you're saying he's making enough money as it is now to open additional franchises, but with the cost of this bill, it pushes him under water, which says, I've got to close some rather than open them, and there goes some more jobs. So why in the world are we doing this when we've got an unemployment problem?

I would like to underline that point. We just had my good friend from Tennessee talking about what happened when Tennessee did this crazy harebrained idea and how it really messed up the economy in the State of Tennessee. And now you're saying, actually, if I remember right, is that today the President is coming to Missouri to some degree to assure people that he's concerned with unemployment, and yet what you're telling me is you had small business owners going to bankers--I think you had a banking background, is that right, gentleman?

They're going to bankers, those loans are all set up, and when this thing passes, they go, Forget it, we're not going to expand business that way. And so you literally have people you know in the banking business in the State where the President is visiting today, and they're saying, These people came to us and said we don't want your money because we can't make enough profit on it to pay you back because we passed this piece--you keep coming to the same conclusion that--and I don't mean to beat on this a little bit--the solution to this is repeal. We've got to get rid of this thing.

I am also joined by another good friend of ours, another doctor who has been a stalwart on this from Georgia, my good friend, Congressman Gingrey.

We've just been talking about this tremendous gap between statements that the President is making, and now the gap between what the President is saying and what this Centers for Medicare and Medicaid, the center that's collecting the numbers, is saying totally different than what the President is saying. I just wanted your thoughts on that because you've been very much on top of this bill.

If you let me just cut in for a second, Doctor, I've actually got that exact quote. Here it is. This is President Obama, June 15, 2009: ``If you like your doctor, you will be able to keep your doctor. If you like your health care plan, you will be able to keep your health care plan. No one will take it away no matter what.'' And yet this center is saying that's not true. Go ahead.

How many of those doctors voted for this bill? Of those 10 doctors you just mentioned, how many voted for this bill?

There was no chance for input or anything else.

My good friend, Congressman Luetkemeyer, you recently have been elected to Congress. You come from an out-State part of Missouri with a lot of pretty conservative, but Democrats, in your district.

Now, what would they have thought if you had voted, first of all, for cutting

Medicare? Next, you've got a brilliant idea for a tax on wheelchairs, on medical devices and on something which is going to increase the average person's cost to health care and which is going to force the person to go to the Federal Government ultimately to get health care.

What would they have thought of you if you had voted for this thing?

There were 1,100 people in a town that had 1,000 people?

There were 5,000. So more than one out of five were there.

Well, I'll tell you that I'm going to be talking to one in another hour or two not very far from my district. I think they've got the same set of concerns. It's at a place where the President has been visiting, and they're turning out to say, We're not buying this solution.

My good friend from Pennsylvania, are you getting the same kind of sense from your constituents that there is a deep-seated concern for a plan that is just going to put 16,000 new IRS agents on the line to try and monitor whether you've done the right government thing?

Could I interrupt just for a moment and jump in there? I do have specifics on that very point that you've made.

I don't know if you gentlemen were aware of it, but as of today, there are 19 States representing 41 percent of the population--and our State of Missouri is not here, but I know they have this on the burner to do. As of today, there are 19 States, representing 41 percent of the population, which have sued the Federal Government over ObamaCare, which has caused Justice Briar to make the statement: ObamaCare, a good candidate for review by the Supreme Court of the United States.

So it's not just Tennessee. It's not just Missouri. It's not just Georgia. It's not just Pennsylvania. There are 19 States here that are saying something.

I do yield to my good friend from Georgia.

Maybe we're doing a bad job.

I want to continue back with my friend from Pennsylvania.

You're saying we are training this year 600 primary care physicians?

I don't want you to make just a final point, but I'd like you to answer this question:

The Democrat Governor of Tennessee, before this bill was passed, called this the mother of all unfunded mandates. In other words, one thing State legislators hate is when we up here pass some piece of legislation which busts their budgets. Then they have to take the political hit for the fact that we're fiscally irresponsible and legislatively irresponsible.

Now, is this a budget buster for a State?

Was that the cornhusker kickback?

Wow.

We've been joined by a good friend of mine, Congressman Lamborn.

Welcome to the discussion. We're just taking a look at the fact that, you know, you'd think logically: What in the world are these Congressmen doing, standing on the floor, railing about some bill that has already been passed?

Well, part of the reason is there was some truth in what Speaker Pelosi said, which is that you've got to pass the bill to find out what's in it. We're still discovering all kinds of surprises. In a way, that's what we've been talking about tonight--things that the Obama accountants in the Medicare/Medicaid group are analyzing in the bill. They're saying, Whoops. It's not going to bend the cost curve down; it's going to bend the cost curve up, so it's going to be more expensive. Uh-oh, it's going to cost jobs.

Anyway, please join us.

Influence the debate with any facts? My goodness, people might not vote for this thing.

That is really frustrating, isn't it, to basically give people a mushroom treatment. You keep them in the dark, smother them in some sort of a fertilizing material, and we tell them these things: if you like your doctor, you will be able to keep your doctor, period. If you like your health care plan, you will be able to keep your health care plan, period. No one will take it away, no matter what. And yet the report that you are talking about makes it clear that this just flat is not true. So it is a frustrating thing. And in a sense, all of these things are falling out now, and it wasn't so obvious before.

My good friend from Louisiana, Congressman Scalise, please join us.

That's an incredible question, isn't it, the control of the information, the spin on the whole thing, the promises initially of it being a transparent process, it's going to be on C-SPAN, everybody can watch it, and in fact everything is closed doors.

A couple of our doctors have left, but, Dr. Roe, were you invited to take part in the drafting and putting this bill together? Were you allowed to go into their meetings? I think that's an important question.

So I guess from what you are saying, a quick summary, 31 years in medicine, you thought maybe you knew something about medicine, decided to take the huge amount of effort to come to Congress so you would have something to say about the debate. And in spite of the fact that you tried everything other than carrier pigeons and smoke signals, the White House refused to honor their promise to let you look at line by line what's going on. So the logical conclusion is you are going to run for President? Is that where we are going?

What you just said is so common sense and straightforward. You are going to take how many more people and put them into Medicare?

Thirty-six million more people go into Medicare--now, you don't have to be too much of a wizard on business--36 million people go into Medicare that weren't there before, it's going to cost more money. And then you are going to cut $575 billion out of the program. So now you are doing two things: one, you are adding millions of people into the program, you are taking billions out of the program, and you are saying, hey, maybe your quality of health care is going to go down. That's pretty straightforward.

I yield to my good friend from Pennsylvania.

This is part of that same report that we were just talking about that has just now been released conveniently after the bill was voted on.

Let's get the exact quote.

Less access or, as you used the word, rationing.

Wow.

I have not jumped in from a personal point of view because you guys are all experts. I am just the poor sucker that receives the services. I am a cancer survivor. I happened to have taken a look at the cancer survival rates in foreign countries that have socialized medicine. You notice the U.K. survival rate of cancer in men is a whole lot less than it is in the U.S. Well, why would that be? Is it that the cancer technology is different? I don't think so.

I think the deal on cancer is if you've got it, you want to get treated as quick as you can. So what happens in the U.S., you don't have the same waiting line. Now, you start putting those waiting lines in and it starts to affect your statistics of what's going to happen on a disease. That's what we talk about when you all of a sudden hear your doctor say, oh, by the way, you're

doing great, Blaine, but little detail, you have cancer. That kind of gets your attention. And you think, I better get that dealt with right away. They say, well, that's just fine, but you are going to have to wait for, you know, whatever it is. You are going to have to wait 6 months to get treated. You got melanoma, that's probably not a real good idea to be waiting 6 months.

I have a good friend that's a doctor friend of mine, Steve Smith. He has told me that on these kinds of things, you just don't want waiting lines. You just don't want socialized medicine. His advice to me is the same as the doctor friends we have down here, just repeal this piece of junk. That's what he is saying.

My good friend from Missouri, Congressman Luetkemeyer.

Thank you very much, Mr. Speaker. I appreciate my colleagues joining me here tonight and for being a part of an important discussion. It is an ongoing story.

Madam Speaker, my name was mistakenly added as a cosponsor of H.R. 2499. Let the Record reflect that I would remove my name as a cosponsor of this bill if I were able.

Mr. Speaker, it's a treat to join you and my colleagues once again this evening and talk about a subject that has been troublesome to all of us for some number of months now, that is the state of the economy, the problem with unemployment, and the various causes and factors that caused some of the tremendous level of distress economically which we have been experiencing.

Sometimes it's helpful as we wade into a rather broad subject such as the problem of jobs and the economy, it is helpful to take a look back a little bit, see what we can learn from some of the lessons of history and how we got into the mess in the first place.

Some of the first rather troubling signs of the condition which brought on the recession go back to September 11, 2003, as recorded by the New York Times, not exactly a Republican or conservative oracle. The particular news article here says that there is a new agency proposed to oversee Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae. This is being proposed by the Bush administration, and it said that it today recommended the most significant regulatory overhaul in the housing finance industry since the savings and loan crisis a decade ago.

Apparently, we did not learn a lot from the savings and loan crisis. But the Bush administration was trying. And so they were requesting to Congress that there be an overhaul of Freddie and Fannie because they saw problems coming. Why was that? Because Freddie and Fannie had had a few billion dollars here and there that they couldn't really account for. And things weren't going so well for them. And so this is back in September 11, 2003, the middle of the Bush administration, Bush asking for greater authority to oversee Freddie and Fannie.

Well, what was the result of that request?

Well, the result of the request was that the Republicans in the House passed legislation to do that and sent it to the Senate. Now, at that time, we have the congressional Democrats weighing in. At that time the Democrats were in the minority in the House. And we had now-chairman, he wasn't at that time, but he is now-Chairman Barney Frank in the New York Times, same article, September 11, 2003. This is what Barney Frank says: these two entities, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, are not facing any kind of financial crisis.

Now, this is a Democrat that's supposed to know what's going on with Freddie and Fannie. He's a chairman now of that committee, the committee that looks over these things.

He says, they're not facing any kind of financial crisis. The more people exaggerate these problems, the more pressure is on these companies, the less we will see in terms of affordable housing.

Well, it's always easy to look back in hindsight. Hindsight, people say, is 20/20. Congressman Barney Frank was obviously wrong, not just somewhat wrong, he was way wrong. He had previously been quoted as saying, we're going to roll the dice and make sure that anybody who wants to get a home loan can get it. And yet here he says there's no real problem with Freddie and Fannie. Of course what we find is there is a big problem with Freddie and Fannie.

And so the Republicans, seeing this coming, passed a bill in the House. And as you know, when you pass a bill in the House, the next thing you do is send it to the Senate. Now people are much more aware today as to how things work in the Senate. It's not sufficient in the Senate just to have a majority of votes. You'd think, now there

are 100 Senators. You'd think, well, if you get 50-plus votes, you ought to be able to pass something in the Senate. The Senate is a very weird place. That's not how it works.

It takes 60 votes in the Senate to bring something up for a vote. And once you bring it up for a vote, then you can pass it with 50-plus votes.

So what happened then, the Republicans passed this bill to regulate Freddie and Fannie. It went to the Senate, and it died over there, along with a whole lot of other bills that the Republicans in the House passed, and it died because it did not have 60 votes.

Why did it not?

Well, the Republicans had 50-some Senators, but they would have to get five or six Democrats to go along. None of the Democrats went along with further regulation of Freddie and Fannie, and so the bill died in the Senate.

So Freddie and Fannie cruise along happily through the night, and no concern about icebergs or bad weather ahead, and as we see, and as we saw, come to grief, and then require a major Federal bailout to try to protect them.

Now, what Freddie and Fannie had been doing was this: for many years before this, even before 2003, there had been Federal policies saying that you have to--the different banks in different cities have to give loans to people, even though it may seem like the job that they have or the place where they want to buy a house is not a good bet financially. In other words, what you're saying to people is, yeah, you don't have too good a job, and we're not so sure you can pay this loan off, but the Federal Government was demanding that banks make these loans to people who were what the banks would call poor risks. And so we have more and more of these banks.

Now, over time, Freddie and Fannie had carried some loans that were bad risks over time; and particularly under Clinton's last year, those percentages were kicked up, forcing Freddie and Fannie, effectively, because these loans all ended in Freddie and Fannie, to accept more and more loans that were very marginal.

Now, for a time period, through the Bush years, things worked pretty well, because house prices, housing prices, as a lot of people remember, really started to go up. In fact, when I came down here as a Congressman in 2001, and I take a look back at about 2006 or 2007, I'm kicking myself. I'm saying, what was wrong with me? I must be really stupid because if I'd bought a house when I first came to Congress, it would be worth twice as much now because housing prices were shooting up because all kinds of people were dumping money into the liquidity that had been created which was being dumped into this housing market.

So what happens?

As long as that housing market goes up, up, up, up, up, people think this is a good deal. And so we don't have too big a problem. But all of a sudden, pop, the bubble bursts. Housing prices start to come down, and now all of these lousy loans are coming home to roost. The loans by Wall Street were then chopped into all sorts of little pieces and packaged up with all kinds of other loans and sold all over the world. So this created one whale of an economic mess.

What was the start of it? The start of it was the fact that we had these liberal programs trying to suspend the rules of mathematics and saying you can make loans to people who can't afford to pay their loans, and you can just keep doing it and doing it, and nobody is ever going to have to pay.

Guess who had to pay? You got it right. The U.S. taxpayer had to pay.

And we come back again, now, we have this chairman, Barney Frank, who's now in charge of fixing this problem, which he was very comfortable with. Freddie and Fannie are not facing any kind of financial crisis. The more people exaggerate these problems, the more pressure is on the companies, the less we'll see in terms of affordable housing.

It turns out that he was just wrong, and now his job is to try and fix it. Well, now we've got ourselves a good economic mess on our hands, and we're starting to have problems with the economy. And we're going to get into what happened next in just a minute. This is a regular whodunit. I hope you'll stay seated and ready to go. But I have my good friend from Louisiana joining me. And, Steve, please.

Congressman, as I hear you speak, I'm just reminded that I probably didn't do you justice to introducing you, because, to some degree, you're an economic wizard because you stood here on the floor a year ago, just before we were going to pass this cap-and-tax bill, and actually, I guess I'm thinking about the--I called it the porkulus bill. Some people called it the stimulus bill. And you told, on this floor, and this is nationally recorded for anybody who wants to look at it, you said that stimulus bill is not going to work.

Now, the Democrats were saying, if you don't pass the stimulus bill, you're going to have more than 8 percent unemployment, so you guys better pass the stimulus bill. And you stood here on this floor, I remember you doing it, saying, it won't work.

Well, now, a year and a couple of months later, you're a regular economic genius because you saw that it wasn't going to work. You understood the principle of why it wouldn't work. They went ahead on a one-party rule, without any Republican support, passed a bill that we knew wouldn't work, and now it hasn't worked. And now we've got over 10 percent unemployment. And they said, if you don't pass a bill, you'll have 8. I wish we had just stuck with 8, I suppose.

But $700 billion of supposed stimulus. Now, we do have the Chief of Staff for the President, a former Member of the House, who said that every time one of

these economic crises come along, you've got to milk it for everything you can get. And so they loaded into this $700 billion bill all kinds of expansions of welfare and all kinds of government programs and hiring a bunch of people by the Federal Government. And of course it wasn't going to work.

You didn't have to be really an economic genius, although you are. All you really had to do was to read a little bit of history.

I do yield.

What amazes me, Congressman, is if you looked out at the average guy in America that runs a family, okay, there's all these families all over the place, all over America. How many of them would be dumb enough to think when they're in hard economic times that what they're going to do is they're going to increase their level of spending. They're going to go out and spend a whole lot of money in order to make the fact they're in hard economic times better. You know, I don't think there are that many dumb people in this country that really believe something like that.

And yet somehow or other a majority of legislators in the Federal Government fell for that scam. I think a lot of times people fall for something because they want to, not because it makes any logical or rational sense.

But these weren't the only legislators that have been sucked in. You know, you go back to the days of FDR. There was a recession going, and he managed to come up with just the right policies to turn it into the Great Depression because he wasn't any genius on economic matters. And so at the end of 8 years of the Federal Government spending money like mad, his Secretary of the Treasury, Morgenthau comes back to the House here, to the Ways and Means Committee, and he makes a statement. We've tried spending money. I guess we've heard this before. We're spending more than we've ever spent. They spent nothing compared to what we're spending before. And it doesn't work. I say, after 8 years of the administration, we have just as much unemployment as when we started, and an enormous debt to boot.

Now, this obviously proves that we learned nothing from history. Certainly the Democrats learned nothing from history because that is exactly what we just did a year ago. We spent $787 billion. It wasn't even good old Keynesian stuff. It wasn't hydroplants. It wasn't building big ships for the Navy, putting people back to work with the government getting manufacturing jobs on the street. No. It's all this more food stamps, welfare checks, bailouts for States that hadn't managed their budgets responsibly. So here we go.

So you said, gentlemen, this isn't going to work. You knew because Morgenthau told us. The Democrat that worked for FDR told us it wouldn't work. And we tried it again, and it still didn't work. That is how we got started.

Then after that, of course, we introduced some other factors in the economy which, just like FDR, we're going to take a bad situation and make it worse. I love these cartoons.

Now give me one good reason why you're not hiring. We see the President here talking to some guy who owns the china shop and he's got a couple bulls coming in the door. Health care reform, cap-and-tax, and then the war tax. So we've got all of these taxes, and these bulls are coming in, and this guy is a little concerned about hiring these bulls to help his china shop.

So, anyway, here we go. We're starting to get into the first part of last year. We're seeing unemployment going up. We're seeing the solution is government spending, and things have not gotten a whole lot better.

I yield to my friend.

Wait a minute. You just cussed on the floor of the House. I didn't think you were allowed to say that. Horrible world. Cutting taxes. Oh, no. You're going to get accused of a hate crime, gentleman, if you keep that up.

I would like to slow you down just a minute because you are smart in this stuff, and what you're saying is historically accurate. But I would like to take that apart, slow it down just a little bit so people can see the logic of why this works the way it does. Because what we know from Henry Morgenthau--if nothing else, the Democrats should be able to learn from Democrats, but they're not. They refuse to, and the reason they refuse to is because they don't like the answer that Morgenthau said, which is they can spend money like it's going out of style.

Now, what Democrat could you learn from? You just mentioned his name. It was JFK. He understood enough about economics to know that if you back off the taxes, you can actually get the economy going. Well, how does that work? Well, when you back off the taxes, it leaves more money out there for small businesses to hire people. And if small businesses have more money to invest, they invest in a new wing on a building and a new machine tool and they invest in their own business, and those people then, as they invest, create jobs.

So what you've said is this isn't rocket science. This is something that JFK understood. Ronald Reagan did the same thing. He cut taxes, and the economy grew. And Bush did the same thing. But here's sort of a weird thing. They call that supply-side economy. Democrats call it trickle-down economics. Whatever you want to call it, it works.

But the thing that strikes me is that logically, how is it, because it seems like you're making water run uphill. What you're saying is that the Federal Government is going to lower their tax rate, and yet they're going to get more money back. That seems counterintuitive. So I'm thinking about it like Congressman Scalise.

Let's say you're king for the day and the only thing you can tax is a loaf of bread. So you're thinking in your mind, How much tax am I going to put on one loaf of bread? You're thinking, If I put a penny on it, nobody's going to notice, and I can collect a penny on all of these loaves of bread. Then you think, Hey, how about if I put 5 bucks tax on the loaf of bread? Then I'd really get a lot of money every time somebody buys a loaf of bread. But then you'd think, But maybe people wouldn't buy as much bread if you've got to pay 5 bucks just to try to get the bread.

And so you're going back and forth in your mind, and pretty soon you say, commonsense says there is some optimum tax on that loaf of bread where you can get the most possible money. If you go too high, you get less revenue for the government. If you go too low, you left money on the table. So there's some sort of an optimum point.

And I think that's what Ronald Reagan and the other Presidents understood, that when you tax the economy too much, it basically drives it into the ground, which is exactly what's going on here. And so what you're saying about the fact that we drop taxes and that helps get the economy going, that's the logic of it. You actually drop the taxes and you get more money into the government. So the result was we dropped taxes, and what we saw was the government got a whole lot more money, and we started to pay off the debt.

And so I thought it would be good to take that apart and explain the logic of it, because what you're saying historically is right, but it seems odd that the government drops taxes and they get more money back.

I do yield.

That permanent bailout concept, isn't that a dangerous kind of thing? Because what we've seen is more and more of the government wanting to get into all of these different businesses, and that certainly is a scary kind of thing. And the other thing we're seeing a whole lot of, which is making people tremendously frustrated and angry, is seeing one thing being said and opposite things being done.

The true engine of job creation in this country will always be America's businesses, but government can create the conditions necessary for businesses to expand and hire new workers. This statement is completely true. Unlike a lot of statements that are made, this statement is completely true. The true engine for job creation in this country will always be America's businesses.

Let's put a little bit sharper point on it. What businesses? Well, 80 percent of the jobs in America come from what are small businesses or businesses with 500 or fewer employees. So the businesses with 500 or fewer employees in America hire 80 percent of the employees in America.

Now, the true engine of job creation in this country will always be, in America, as we say, smaller businesses, but government can create the conditions necessary for business to expand and hire new workers. That's absolutely true. The government cannot create a job no matter what it does, but it can create conditions which allow the small businesses to prosper and hire a lot of people. So this statement is entirely true. The President is right in this. The conditions can be created.

Well, what are those conditions? Well, let's take a look at it. Does it mean $2 trillion in tax increases over 10 years? No, it sure doesn't. What happens when the government takes a whole lot of tax money out of the economy? It's taking it out of the pockets of the people who own the small businesses. Guess what tax category the people who are running those small businesses, guess what tax category they're in? They're in the exact bracket that President Obama said he wants to take tax from, people making over $250,000.

People say, My goodness. If somebody's making $250,000, they ought to pay a little more taxes. Fine. Keep taxing them. What happens? If you keep taxing these guys, they won't invest in their businesses. If they don't invest in their businesses, where are the jobs going to come from? You can't have it both ways.

And yet it seems that the administration wants to talk, saying that we've got to create the right conditions, and they're doing precisely the things that destroy jobs in America, worst of which is excessive taxation on the people that own the small businesses. So that's certainly the wrong thing to do. It's creating the exact wrong conditions. It is driving unemployment, making it even worse, which is what FDR did to take a recession and magically turn it into the Great Depression.

One of the pieces of legislation that the President in his last State of the Union urged Members of Congress to support, the job-killing cap- and-tax legislation. What's this? Well, this is a tax on energy. Well, wasn't there a promise that said, unless you make $250,000, we're not going to raise taxes? Yeah, unless you flip a light switch, and then you're going to get taxed because he is pushing a tax on energy. Everything uses energy, particularly small businesses.

So if you put this cap-and-tax bill into place, you're doing another thing that makes it harder for creating jobs. That's why this cartoon has got a lot of truth when it says that you've got this health care and the cap-and-tax. These are things that are destructive to jobs.

New taxes on employers who don't offer a government health insurance plan. Of course, the new socialized medicine bill is going to be brutal in terms of creating unemployment, because what are you doing? You're, first of all, trying to balance the cost of giving everybody Cadillac health care, and you're going to try to balance that on the back of small business owners. What are they going to do? They're going to say, Hey, I don't want any more employees than I could possibly have because I've got to buy health insurance for all of them, and it's terribly expensive. So I'm going to work my employees as many hours as I can just to make sure I don't have a single employee more than I need. So you're creating a tremendous economic pressure to get rid of jobs by passing this socialized medicine bill.

So let's take a look standing back a little further.

What is it, what are the things that are killing jobs? Because obviously something is killing jobs in America. What are the different factors that are killing jobs?

Well, here is a whole list of them. If you want to kill jobs, this is the thing to do, and this is just what the administration has been doing for a year and a half. This isn't rocket science. This is very common sense. It's about as common sense as a lemonade stand.

The first thing is economic uncertainty. If you're a small business man and you don't have a clue what the government is going to do to you next, what do you do? In Missouri, we call it hunkering down. You don't make decisions. You don't hire people. You don't buy expensive new machine tools. You hunker down when there is economic uncertainty.

So that's first of all when you have things out there such as cap- and-tax, which is going to tax energy.

You've got a new socialized medicine bill that nobody understands how it's going to be implemented. But we know it has been loaded with taxes. They have even got wheelchair taxes. I don't know what poor mind thought of the idea of taxing wheelchairs, but it seems kind of perverse to me. Maybe that should be a hate crime, too. I don't know.

Economic uncertainty. This is a job killer. You want a steady economic climate if you want to keep jobs running forward.

Consumption reduction. That's just talking about the economy slowing down. When you have the economy slowing down, it hurts everybody. Just as a rising tide floats boats, a tide that's going down, you end up sitting on the rocks. So the poor economy also is a job killer.

Excessive taxation is probably, probably the biggest factor which is going to kill jobs, and that's why it is that the Democrats should have learned from JFK. I don't expect them to learn anything from Ronald Reagan, but they could learn from JFK. They did the same thing Reagan did, and that is cut taxes so that the businessman has money to invest and create jobs. But instead what we have been doing is tax after tax after tax, all these new taxes. What's that do to the guy that owns the business?

Well, to start with, he doesn't hire anybody. To start with, he reduces any kind of expansion to his business. But after a while, just like your body, if you keep cutting off your food pretty soon you start to get skinnier and skinnier and eventually guess what happens to that little business, it goes out of business and now there is no longer a little engine there to create jobs because that business is gone.

And that's what FDR did, he drove the taxes so hard that the businesses started to shut down from excessive taxation. In a temporary sense, the business just doesn't hire. In a longer-term siege, what happens is the business goes bankrupt, and now there is no one there to start to create the jobs in the first place. Excessive taxation is deadly as a job killer.

Insufficient liquidity is another problem that seems a little complicated but it makes a lot of sense. If you own a small business, one of the things that you have to have is liquidity. That is you have to have some money to be able to borrow to get going on different projects.

There is a company in my district out in the St. Louis area called Innoventer. Innoventer is obviously an idea coming from inventions. They are inventive sorts of people, and one of their latest inventions is something that people that live in the Midwest would be tickled to know there is a use for, and that is pig manure. When you get out in the country, and you smell something that smells a little funny, you know you are near a hog farm.

And pig manure is not one of those things that people will go out of their way to try to obtain, it's considered something of very low value and something you would just as soon not smell. Well, Innoventer has come up with a way of taking pig manure and putting it into essentially what is a glorified pressure cooker, they put it at pressure and under a certain temperature. And they break that pig manure into sort of like the oil that is pumped out of the ground, sort of a primordial kind of goo which they have found they can then use to make asphalt with.

So what do you need in order to make this little business go? This is not as pretty as making lemonade, but you are going to create these furnaces, electric furnaces with pressure and these containers and eventually it makes this stuff which you then can turn into asphalt. And we have a section of road in the St. Louis area paved with this asphalt made from, you got it, pig manure.

But you have got to have some money to build the equipment to do this. Well, where do you get the money from? Well, you get loans from banks, okay. So a lot of small businessmen, they will take a 3- or a 6- year loan, and they have to pay a pretty good interest rate for it because small businesses can make a mistake and go bankrupt.

And so they get a loan from the banks, and the local banks underwrite the small businesses and, as they convert pig manure to asphalt, you will see people getting hired.

The trouble, though, is this: You have got to have liquidity. And so what has the administration done in order to make it so banks have liquidity? Well, they started one way with the crack cocaine in the Federal system, that is they released tons of money into this, they used to call it printing money. So at the high level in the big banks there is lots and lots of easy money that's created by the Federal Government.

Usually that creates bubbles and then they blow up, but now what's happened is that easy money is not coming down through the arteries to the small businesses because the banking regulators are so tough with small business, the small banks are afraid to loan any money. And so now you have got guys that have imagination that would be creating jobs because there is insufficient liquidity. Now they are being choked out.

Now this particular innovator has found maybe a way around it to get some money, but a lot of problems are in this liquidity are. What's the biggest culprit? Probably excessive taxation. Second biggest may be this liquidity, certainly the economic uncertainty. All of these things are factoring into that 10 percent unemployment.

Excessive government spending is a job killer, but it does it sort of slowly and it does it on a rebound. It's not a direct effect.

What happens is when the government spends too much money, then the problem is there isn't the liquidity in the economy and so the money is not invested in the businesses, therefore they don't create jobs. So that's how that works.

And then, of course, excessive government mandates and red tape. Obviously if you are a small business person, and you have got to fill out pages and pages and reams of red tape, which small businessmen have to do in America, that takes away from your efficiency. If you are a great big company, you have got a couple of bureaucrats and, boy, they are experts at every red tape that comes along. You can get some efficiency in a big company dealing with red tape. But for small businesses, red tape is a real, real job killer. And so that's who the thing that we don't want.

So, now, if you take a look at the logic of where jobs come from and what you don't want to be doing, and you take a look at what we are doing, you are saying hey, Congressman Akin, you are creating a perfect storm. About everything that creates unemployment, you are doing it all. And we have a statement from the President saying, hey, I understand. He says, I understand that the government, the government can create the conditions necessary for business to expand and hire new workers.

He understands that principle, and yet we are doing everything wrong. Everything he has told us to do is going to affect the jobs.

And so what are some of these little treasures? Well, first of all, this health care reform that we just passed, boy, is this a humdinger. I have been here 10 years--I hate to admit how old I am--I have been here 10 years, and I have seen some lousy bills in my day. But this health care, this socialized medicine that we just passed is two or three times worse than any other bill I have ever seen.

This is going to have terrible consequences for unemployment and for just hammering small businesses, and it's going to create not only that, of course, it will create lousy health care, it will probably bust the Federal budget. But I am mostly on the subject of what are we doing about jobs?

And this thing here is a job killer. This is a real job killer. You have got basically, just like we are talking about with Congressman Scalise, what we are doing is the Federal Government wants to take everything over. This is taking over a sixth of the economy. The government just going to

take over health care. It's not a matter of fixing something broken in health care, it's a matter of scrapping it and having the government take it over, not instantly, but over time.

The cap-and-trade, they call it cap-and-trade, it's really cap-and- tax. This is that energy tax that the House passed, people were so mad about it. That was the one where they had 300 pages of amendments passed at 3 o'clock in the morning, and the bill was here from the floor and there wasn't even a copy of the bill when they passed the thing, the House passed it. And people got so mad that the Senate refused to take it up.

But this is a big tax, of course, and, of course, that's not a good thing for small businesses. You have got other miscellaneous taxes coming, many of them associated with this health care reform. That's where some of those taxes are coming from.

So we are doing, we are really doing all the wrong things, and it shouldn't surprise us that we are getting problems with unemployment. Obviously, there are other problems that are going on, too, pretty serious ones, and I would just like to talk a little bit about some of these other taxes.

These are tax increases, tax increases. This is really fine print, isn't it? Look, there are 16 of them on this sheet. If Congress takes no action, these are the tax increases we are taking a look at in 2010. And so what happens when you increase taxes? Businessmen don't have the money to invest in companies, and you pull the economy down. Is that all we have got?

Oh, no, you have got to remember we have got 2011 coming. These are tax increases, if Congress takes no action in 2011.

Look at that, we have got another bunch of these. The marginal income tax rates will increase as follows. These are not small things, these are big deals. The 35 percent bracket will increase to 39.6. The 33 percent bracket will increase to 36 percent. The 10 percent bracket will increase to 15, and the 25 is going to go to 28. So, first of all, all the marginal tax increases on everybody's income taxes are going to go up if the Congress doesn't take any action. This is 2011. This is 2010 down here. Look at all these taxes.

Now, we are having a tax party, aren't we, and it's going to give a tax to our economy. Dividends will no longer be taxed at the capital gains rate for individuals, thereby increasing the double taxation and dividends as much as 164 percent.

Guess what kind of people have these dividends and have money invested in these things? People who own small businesses, of course.

So you are going to tax those people. Guess what's going to happen? They are not going to expand the business, you got it.

The personal capital gains tax will increase to 20 percent and 10 percent from 15 and 5, and the child tax will decrease, so the standard deduction for couples, all of these things, there will be more and more tax increases. Is that it? Oh, no. No, there are more tax increases too. In 2012, the adoption of a tax credit will decrease from 13 to 5,000. The credit for electric drive motorcycles, plug-in electric vehicles will expire, all these things, tax increases.

And so is this the right direction? No, of course it's not the right direction. What we are doing is we are doing precisely what you would do if you are trying to crash the economy.

Now, let's talk a little bit, I don't have charts on this, I want to talk a little bit about what's happening on the spending side. Is it because there are just so many demands on the Federal Government that we just have to keep spending money on all these things? Is it the Federal Government is just getting so expensive?

Well, let's take a look. If you go back to President Bush, he was criticized for spending and the Republicans that were with him, myself included, were criticized for spending too much money. And you know what, that criticism was just. We spent too much money. And 2008 was the worst year in terms of Bush spending too much money; he had a deficit that year of about $450 billion. That's too much deficit.

As you take a look at that, you say, by golly, I don't know how much $450 billion is, that's a little bit outside of my normal family budget.

Well, one way to look at it is as a percent of our overall gross domestic product, the GDP. That's 3.1 percent, which is about common for a lot of Presidents in various years to have a deficit at about 3 percent or so, that's not uncommon. And that was his worst year in 2008 under a Pelosi Congress. So the Democrats were running this institution, you had President Bush in the White House, worst deficit, $350 billion.

Well, what happened in 2009? That deficit, under President Obama, went from 450, went up to 1.4 trillion, that is more than three times Bush's worst deficit spending in 2009.

So how does that relate to gross domestic product? Well, instead of 3.1 percent, it jumps all the way to 99.9 percent of gross domestic product. That's the highest level of deficit since World War II, and that was 2010.

What do you think 2011 is going to be like? Well, you have got it right, 2011 is worse. It takes it over 10 percent of GDP and so we are spending tons of money, that's part of the reason for these tax increases, but the tax increases aren't beginning to be able to keep up with our high level of Federal spending.

And so what you got to the point now is when the Federal Government spends a dollar, 41 cents of that dollar that they are spending is borrowed money, it's not the Federal dollar. So they spend a dollar, but 41 percent of it is borrowed. What would happen, what would happen if the American family ran its budget that way, that you could go out and spend $1.40 but you didn't really have a dollar, you really only had, you know, 59 cents.

I mean, I just can't imagine us putting ourselves into that kind of a situation. So a whole lot of Americans, not necessarily just Republicans, there's a whole lot of Americans saying this has got to stop, this is not the way to run a company.

Yes, the President said something truthful here. He said something truthful. He said the true engine of job creation in this country will be Americans' businesses, but government can create the conditions necessary for business to expand and hire workers.

What he forgot to add was governments can also create the conditions to put people in the poorhouse, drive every job out of this country, and put America's finances in a horrible mess.

We can also do that. That's what we are doing, and it's time for people to start pulling the alarm button and saying enough of this stuff.

I am joined by my good friend from Texas, Congressman Gohmert, and I hope you will rescue me because I'm starting to get a little hot under the collar.

You know, sometimes we use words, and you're talking about being heartbroken because you can connect the policy with how it's going to hurt people.

And you say people are losing jobs. Sometimes I think it's helpful to put a picture in your mind. When I think about losing jobs-- and maybe this is one of my worst fears--I picture a house and a family that's not in the house and a big sofa sitting on a sidewalk next to a garbage can where all of the possessions of this family has been dumped out of the house because they can't live there anymore. That's what happens when you don't have a job.

As a guy, I grew up in the era where the guy makes the income and provides for his family; that's what our job is to do. I think there are a lot of American men that are real men and they care about their family. They carry that pressure quietly. They don't complain about it, but in the back of their mind they're thinking about someday I might not have a job, and I don't ever want to get in a position where I'm sitting on that sofa on a sidewalk with my family saying where are we going to go next. A lot of people feel that pressure. And what we're doing is we're basically dumping people out of their homes.

Another thing I don't get is how do you call it compassion to give a family a loan that they can't afford to pay for a house and then they get kicked out of their house. I mean, I'm hearing liberals saying they're compassionate. There isn't anything compassionate about that, it seems like to me. We're destroying the economy through bad economics. And the thing we're seeing is when you destroy the quality of health care, you're talking about people dying. That is the reason why this is so frustrating.

I yield to my friend from Texas.

You know, the thing that was interesting to me, about December of last year there was a guy who is one cool businessman, he is the CEO of Emerson Electric--which is not a big household name to a lot of people, but Emerson is a gigantic manufacturing company headquartered in St. Louis with operations in countries all over the globe. And this guy was a little bit--I won't say it was a rant, but he was fired up. He said, Look, I think I know something about job creation. And he went back over the record of that company and all of the jobs that had been created and how profitable they were and what they were doing in manufacturing. They have all kinds of really high- tech kinds of things like the electronic controls that control different businesses and huge complicated process industry and things like that, a lot of very sophisticated stuff. They have all of these jobs they have created through all of these years.

So this guy is the CEO of this place. He has come up through the ranks. He is an engineer; he knows what it takes to make a company work. And he says, I'll tell you what, with what's being done in this country I can guarantee you we won't be creating jobs in America. We'll create jobs--we're going to create them in foreign countries because the foreign countries aren't doing this crazy stuff. We can put the jobs there and make a decent profit. Essentially what he's saying is the U.S. Government is forcing us not to make jobs and to do all our job creation overseas.

Now, that's a tragedy; that's a tragedy. And he was shook up about it. He was upset about it because he's an American; he loves this country. He wants the jobs to be made here. But, no, we're going to do this socialized medicine gig, which has never worked in any country of the world. I mean, at a minimum, we could learn from the former Soviet Union. They had the theory that the government should provide you a job and health care and an education and food and a place to live. That's what their theory was, and it didn't work worth a crud and the Soviet Union collapsed. And so what are we doing? Well, the government is going to provide you now with education and food and housing--and health care, of course.

I yield.

The thing that got me was, think of the logic: they have to come up with a bill and they wanted to come underneath $1 trillion. So how do they do it? Well, what they do is they say we're going to tax people over 10 years, but we're really going to start the benefits of the bill 4 years into that. So in other words, we're only going to do benefits for 6 years, but we are going to tax for 10, and therefore it all comes out to be less than $1 trillion.

I mean, it is such bizarre math that it's laughable. If you said I'm going to start a lemonade stand and the first 4

years I'm going to collect money for lemonade and then I will start giving people lemonade at the end of the fourth year in order to make this thing come out, people would say you're crazy. You know, they would say this is bizarre.

The other deal that was cut for the insurance companies--I mean, I just can't imagine why that didn't get more attention--you're a doctor and I'm a sick patient and you and I talk together about the fact that, Todd, you need to get your appendix out or something like that, and an insurance company comes in and they're going to second guess it. Well, if you make the wrong decision, you get sued as the doctor. But now here's a deal: you can make a decision, I make a decision, the insurance company comes in and says you don't need your appendix out, and then I drop dead and my wife says, well, the insurance company made a medical decision, they said Akin shouldn't get his appendix out. I want to sue the insurance company. Check the fine print, you can't sue them. You can sue your doctor, but when an insurance company makes a health care decision, they have no liability whatsoever. Now, why would the national media not pick up on something like that?

You know, we ought to talk about something cheerful. We've only got a couple more minutes to go. Do you know one thing that's cheerful for me to think about? Repealing this piece of junk. That would make me happy. If we could repeal this piece of junk and we could go into health care and systematically fix the things that need to be fixed, that would be a very positive thing and it would put the economy on track.

I would yield to my friend.

Well, gentleman, you had some of those bills, and hats off to you because in spite of the fact that the President said we didn't have any bills, then later on he claimed that he had read all of our bills, which seems a little hard to understand----

Yeah. Well, you had a number of the bills.

Mr. Speaker, I thank you for allowing us to just talk about unemployment and what's going on with the economy.

We're about to start on a journey on an interesting topic of discussion and one that has hit the papers and one that could very much affect the shaping of how the world develops and the safety of the world. And that is the new discussion on the Nuclear Posture Review. That's a report that the Federal Government has just released along with the new START Treaty which the President has been working on negotiating with the Russians.

And these are talking about the future of our country, the future of our world, particularly as it relates to nuclear weapons or weapons of mass destruction. And the initial kind of read on what's going on sounds pretty good. We want to try to reduce the amount of proliferation of nuclear materials to make the world a safer place. We want to talk about a day when there won't be any nuclear weapons in the world. We want to try to, in general, reduce the amount of threat and risk to our own Nation and other nations.

And it all sounds pretty good when you first look at it, until you start to take a look at the troubling assumptions that have been built into these two documents. First of all, they call the Nuclear Posture Review the NPR and the START Treaty, of course, is going back to the 1991 historic treaty.

And so I'm joined here on the floor by some good friends of mine, some people who are good thinkers. But I think I will mention some of the topics that I would like to see us be talking about here in the next number of minutes. And I think we need to take a look at assumptions.

Many times people have good intentions, but the assumptions that are built in are not so good. There was once a guy who was a pharmacist and he had good intentions; but, unfortunately, he prescribed too much of a particular chemical and killed his patient. He had good intentions, but the result was the death of the patient. That could easily happen to many Americans with the false assumptions that are built into the START negotiations and this Nuclear Posture Review.

The first thing I would like to take a look at is going to be the world without nukes and is that a reasonable assumption; is that something that we should be working toward and exactly how are we going to produce this world where there are no longer nuclear weapons.

The next assumption is whether or not it's reasonable to trust Russia when you negotiate arms treaties.

The third question would be the overall whether or not we're going to be advancing missile defense and whether or not we're going to develop a missile defense. Is that connected to the idea of the START Treaty?

The fourth point would be does it make sense to say we're not going to develop any future nuclear weapons or devices.

And, lastly, to define when we might or might not use a nuclear weapon.

These are all kinds of assumptions built into these documents. I think they need to be discussed and discussed very carefully by those of us who are dealing with our nuclear posture.

I'm going to start off by recognizing my good friend, Rob Bishop from Utah. Congressman Turner also is joining us, Mike Turner from Ohio. And I know that they have their own perspectives on this and are very well qualified in certain areas here, and I also have some charts we could go to.

But I would like to take a look at some of those assumptions because the devil is often in the details.

I would yield time to my good friend, Congressman Turner from Ohio.

What part of Ohio are you from?

A good industrial area, too. Good for you.

Thank you, Mike. Please.

Could I interrupt for a second?

I think what you brought up is an interesting point. First of all, the President said all of the options are on the

table. And here we go again seeing him say one thing and doing the exact opposite.

It reminds me of a question. I'm a pretty old geezer. I've been around here for a while. I remember the Ronald Reagan days. And I remember it was kind of the height of the Cold War and people would ask him, Now, President Reagan, what would happen if this and this and this. And he would kind of look at people with his big old grin and he would say, You know, I've told you before, I don't answer ``what if'' questioning. Now, he said that in a nice way, but his point was why do we want to answer what if and then lock ourselves into some particular means of responding when it isn't really appropriate when the actual day arrives.

It's answering a whole lot of what-if questions. Why do we have to do that?

So just stop for a minute. Let's do a what-if, because that's apparently what this treaty is trying to define, these what-ifs.

So some country has maybe signed agreements that they're not going to develop biological weapons. They do that on the sly, hit our cities with biological weapons and people are dying with some strange kind of virus or something running around, and we're losing a whole lot of population--and of course I think we have a pledge that we're not developing biological weapons so we can't respond with biological weapons somewhere. So what are we supposed to do then? We've already guaranteed them that we're not going to use nuclear weapons.

Sure.

Okay, so it seems to me we have got a couple of different issues here that you brought up. The first question is, does it even make sense for us to do the ``what if'' question? If somebody does this, this, and this, well, we are not going to do that. What is that bias, you know, and is that really helpful? And particularly when these things tend to be nuanced the way they are phrased, it adds a lot of haze and uncertainty. But certainly answering that ``what if'' question probably doesn't make us a more secure country.

But let's go to what I think is your second point.

Assurance to our enemies.

But the second thing was the idea that somehow we are going to move toward this world without nukes, and the way we are going to do it is to reduce not only our number of nuclear weapons but reduce our development or deployment of nuclear weapons. I mean, it sounds so good on the surface, but let's just take this apart a little bit.

Let's just say, you have got America now. We have a bunch of nuclear weapons, and we just say, hey, this is such a great idea. We are just going to get rid of all our nukes, and we are not going to develop any. Or we are going to get rid of a certain percentage of them, and we are not going to develop any new ones, which is what this treaty is supposed to do.

My question is, how is this going to reduce the number of nuclear weapons in the world?

First of all, think about there are 35 or more nations that depend on us to create this nuclear umbrella of protection. So they are not developing their own nukes because they know that the U.S. is going to protect them. So what are they going to do logically if that umbrella of protection of the U.S. having this overwhelming nuclear force, if we take that down, if you are one of those 35 nations, what are you going to be thinking?

So we are reducing weapons, but these other nations are going to want to increase, so that doesn't really compute with the logic of this thing.

Now let's go to the next class of nations, third-world nations, maybe some of them that are more likely to be our opponents, adversaries, or troublemakers. Now we tell them we are going to reduce our number of nukes and our development of new things. What is their logical response to that? Well, let's see, they say, well, we could never whip them in conventional forces, so we have got to find some other way.

So what are they going to do?

But shouldn't the focus be on U.S. security? Shouldn't that be the question? And are we going the wrong way?

So the bottom line should be about U.S. security. I mean, that's what we should be focused on. Yet how does it get us more security if we reduce our nuclear capabilities and other nations than become encouraged to increase theirs?

So there is a fundamental disconnect in the logic here somewhere. Understand that it's all for glorious and super ends and supposed to be a good deal and all, but how does it specifically help us and how does it increase U.S. security? That is not clear at all.

The idea of us reducing capabilities seems to be completely counterproductive. Because it's going to encourage either third-world adversaries to take advantage of our vulnerability that we created voluntarily on ourselves, self-inflicted wounds, or the people who are our friends are going to develop additional nuclear capabilities to protect themselves. So I don't see how this thing works.

The history of missile defense goes back quite a ways. It goes back to Ronald Reagan, who proposed the whole idea of missile defense; and people, liberals, tried to make fun of it. They said it was Star Wars, and it will never work, and it will destabilize relations between nuclear armed countries like us and the Soviet Union.

Ronald Reagan said, no, I don't think so. He said, we have a responsibility to defend our citizens, and we need to build a missile defense.

Of course, we, all the way through from the time of Reagan to when I came here in 2001, we had really not done it. President Bush went to the Russians, went to the Europeans and said, sorry, guys, I am going to let you know, here is your 6-months' notice. We are going to start developing missile defense.

And, of course, the Democrats had been opposed to it, but they were in the minority, and we passed it when we were on the Armed Services Committee to do missile defense. And it wasn't missile defense against China or Russia, but it was missile defense against these rogue nations like Iran and North Korea. So we built it. In spite of the fact people said you couldn't do it, we did it. Test after test, we did it, and we made it work, and we built missile defense. Then they made a treaty with Poland and the Czech Republic, saying we are going to deploy missile defense not just in Alaska but in Poland and the Czech Republic.

Thank you very much, Congressman Turner from Ohio. I really appreciate your leadership on the whole area of national security. You have done a great job.

I am joined also by my good friend, Rob Bishop from Utah.

But let's just get on this missile defense a little bit. So we built it, and we built a number of missile defense silos in Alaska. It was called a ground-based system, and it shoots a missile that's tremendously large, about 20-some tons of missile. It goes very high, very fast, and it has the capability of stopping intercontinental ballistic missiles.

Many of the trajectory of those go past Alaska where these missiles can do a good job of stopping the enemy. Now these same missiles were going to be put into Poland, into the Czech Republic. One was a radar site. One was an actual missile site. And the Obama administration decided to cut the ground out from behind our allies. They had made significant political--took a lot of heat from their own citizenry, got permission, got the support of their citizens to build these systems to protect Western Europe, particularly from Iranian ballistic missiles.

And the administration decides on very little notice, literally on the day where the Polish were observing the time that the Russians had come into Poland, and just cut the ground out from under them and said we are not going to do that. What are they going to replace them with? Oh, they said, we are going to use a ballistic defense system based on our ballistic missile destroyers.

The only trouble is, it was based on a missile that hasn't been developed yet, that doesn't work yet, and it's a 2-ton as opposed to a 20-ton missile, and it's a missile that we don't have. So now we are supposed to have these destroyers floating around the Mediterranean providing missile defense for Europe, and these destroyers don't even have the right kind of missile on them to stop a ballistic or intercontinental ballistic missile. The bigger the missile, the bigger the anti-missile that you have to have to fight it.

So the whole point of this was here you have North Korea. They fire these different missiles. The current range of the larger North Korean missiles is 3- to 6,000 miles. That puts Alaska in the sights and other potential targets from North Korea.

Likewise, we have Iran potentially launching, and you can see these different distances, depending on how much power the Iranian missile has, how many stages and how far it can go, starts to move into targeting Western Europe. This is what we were protecting against with the missile sites in the Czech Republic and Poland, which this administration has cancelled.

They have also cancelled a number of other aspects of missile defense which we will get into, one that was tremendously successfully tested just in the last few months. It's this aircraft here with this funny- looking nose, looks like a cyclops, and this is a very powerful, actually, three lasers in one. That was tested successfully to knock down

missiles; and, of course, to shoot a laser at a missile isn't that expensive.

You can get a lot of shots out of a laser and it goes very fast. It is a very effective way to stop missiles on the launchpad. So that's another thing that this administration decided that they were not going to fund. These treaties are talking about continuing that trend to reduce our investment in missile defense, and that is very troubling indeed.

My good friend Congressman Bishop from Utah knows quite a bit about the specific missiles that do this, and I would like to call on your expertise to help us with this subject, please.

A bag of nails. Now, I appreciate having a history professor here. It's just a little detail, but it was an important and sort of a tide-turning detail that was not considered.

So let me just recap what you're saying.

If you don't have the industrial base to produce the kinds of missiles that we need for missile defense, the way that that can work is, one, you're not going to have the rocket scientists. In other words, a rocket scientist is a rocket scientist. You've got to have some of them around if you want to make rockets. Those people are being employed currently for this particular solid rocket that is noted more for space exploration than it is for defense, but it's the same technology.

So, first of all, your industrial base is eroded by the fact that you can't keep those engineers around and they don't have anything to work on, so they go do something else. The second thing is, because you don't have the production facilities, now the cost of materials goes up.

And it goes beyond that, doesn't it? You don't just build one of these things in thin air. You've got to have a building to build it in. You've got to have the machines that are used to package the fuel and the design of how the pressure is contained, and how you control burn rate and the direction--all kinds of things that go into building a rocket; right?

Well, the thing that strikes me about this whole situation is, first of all, if you want to deal with the nuclear proliferation thing, that's one thing, but to connect it to missile defense seems to be the height of stupidity, just really an irrational decision. And to walk away from the fundamental principle that the job of the Federal Government more than anything else should be the defense of this country, the security of the citizens who pay for that defense, and to give that idea up for the old concept of mutually assured destruction, just makes no sense whatsoever.

We were on the right track to develop missile defense. The people that said we couldn't do it were all proven wrong. We are doing it. We not only hit a missile with a missile, we hit a spot on a missile with a missile, metal-on-metal collisions. And not only have we been able to do that and shown that we have the technology to do that, but now what we're talking about doing is even going beyond that to the airborne laser system, which just this last year, firing its last shots before it was going to be shelved, it was called by the Democrats a big science experiment--I suppose that's a pejorative term saying we don't think much of it--and yet this aircraft flying off the west coast engaged two targets.

One was a liquid rocket motor missile. It was launched from some considerable miles away, in excess of 100 miles, I believe, and this airplane locked onto the missile with its--it has two small lasers. The first is just to find where the missile is, and it's putting that first laser on the missile. The second laser checks the optics of the atmosphere. The third laser, which is tremendously powerful, fires a beam, and it just destroyed that liquid fuel missile in air. Then it turns around and does the same thing to a solid rocket missile, and yet this is another thing that the administration is scrapping.

And the question is, if we're interested in U.S. national security, why in the world do we want to bow down to the Russians? Ronald Reagan was there at Reykjavik, and there was a great big idea that they were going to have this big treaty. Reagan walked away from it. He said to the Soviets, he said, Look, I'm not going to agree to that because I'm going to protect my people with missile defense. And here we are going back in history, and now we're going to stop this missile defense. And what you're talking about, Congressman, is a part of one of the supplier base that has to be there to do missile defense. Why are we going to dismantle that? It just doesn't make sense.

Well, I really appreciate your perspective, gentleman, and particularly the little historic lesson of the bag of nails.

It seems to me sometimes our leadership is getting so grandiose and it's saying what we're going to do is provide a world without nuclear weapons. You know, it seems to me that what they probably should do is invest in a time machine and go back in history if they want a world without nuclear weapons, because we can get rid of all of our nukes.

We can open the kimono and let people beat us up, and that's not going to change the fact that there are going to be nations out there that are going to proliferate. Now, that doesn't mean we need to encourage them. We need to try and stop them. But we're not going to stop them by being weak and selling our own national security down the river, and that is what's going on here.

In an effort to apparently be a grandiose peacemaker, we're thinking you're going to create peace out of weakness. We have found that that is not a good formula, and particularly, to betray the security of the American people without looking at the details, as you're saying, really does not make sense.

Now, there is another aspect--and you know something about history. I recall all of these treaties we made with the former Soviet Union, and when the Soviet Union collapsed, we got information about what happened on those treaties. What we found out was that the Soviet Union was cheating like mad on every single one of those treaties. They said, We're not going to build any biological weapons. Yet they've got a biological weapons laboratory going in Russia.

We were over here, and I was a brand new guy in the U.S. Congress just a few years ago, and we were interviewing one of the top scientists who worked in the biological weapons laboratory, one which the Soviet Union had said, We're not going to do that. We find out 15, 20 years later that the Soviet Union has got these ballistic missiles loaded with the smallpox virus that they're going to shoot at us, and we haven't got the foggiest idea that they cheated like mad, have a biological weapons laboratory, and are going to pepper us with smallpox, which we have a limited amount of vaccine to protect against.

So here we are again, learning so much from history that we're going to make another deal with the Russians and assume they're not going to cheat on it. I guess my question is: How do we know that they're not going to cheat? What are we getting out of this deal?

Do you remember some of the history of those treaties, gentleman?

They're not playing by the same rules anyway.

You know, I thought it was on the front page of the paper today, the idea that scud missiles had been given, I think it was, from Iran to Hezbollah or something like that.

From Syria to Hezbollah, scud missiles.

So there was a weapons transfer to a group that is a pretty known terrorist group. They're not all part of this deal. So even if you could trust Russia, which I don't and which we have no historic reason to trust, what happens to the other nations when you make these deals, especially when you're not going to develop more missile defense?

There is another thing we're not supposed to develop either--and I really appreciate my good friend from Utah for joining us, Congressman Bishop. You have provided really good detail, particularly on that industrial base aspect. Thanks for the ``bag of nails'' explanation.

You know, with regard to details, I do remember there was something about the German tank corps being unstoppable except for there was some problem. They didn't have the right type of spare fuel tank or something, and it was a big problem because they hadn't gotten the right kind of gas can to go along with their tanks. It was some small detail.

I yield.

Well, I very much appreciate your perspective and the clarity with which you make your points.

The Congress is a richer place because of Congressman Bishop and his service to us.

We are joined by another good friend who is probably one of the foremost authorities on missile defense, my good friend from Arizona, Trent Franks.

Before we jump into that, I thought I might just give a couple of points to recap and to focus our discussion here this evening. We are talking about two different things that have been going on in the news.

The first is the question of the Nuclear Posture Review, or the NPR, which is an overall document released by the U.S. Government, talking about what we're doing with nuclear kinds of things. It contains a whole series of false assumptions, in my opinion. While it sounds good on the surface, the question is: How does it really work? Also, there is the New START Treaty, which the President has been negotiating with the Russians, and that is along the same lines as the Nuclear Posture Review. My concerns are pretty much listed in five points.

The first point is that somehow we are supposed to create a world without nukes, and the way we're going to do that is to reduce America's stockpile of nuclear weapons, not develop anything new, and cut back on missile defense. So we're going to reduce our own national defenses, and somehow that is supposed to help make other people do the same thing. My question is: Does it really do that?

The nations that depend on us will say, Oh, we can't count on them for a nuclear umbrella.

They're liable to increase.

Then the Third World country that may decide it wants to cause us a lot of trouble or to blackmail us says, Hey, the way we can do that is the U.S. is disengaged. We need to jump in and really develop our nukes.

So how do we get to this ``wonderful world'' without nukes?

The second point is: How much do you trust Russia? Even if you do, how about all of the other countries?

The third point is: Why do we connect missile defense to the nuclear posture? Missile defense is simply a way of making our Nation more secure. Why would we freeze that?

The fourth point is: Why would we want to limit further nuclear development? We'll get on to that in a minute with my good friend from Arizona.

Then the last question is: Why are we going to do what Ronald Reagan said you should never do, which is to discuss what-ifs? I think if we're attacked by a foreign nation and it does us harm, it doesn't need to know exactly what we're going to do. Everything should be on the table if you endanger U.S. citizens. Yet this treaty is going to say, Well, if you do this, we won't do this, this and this.

Why do we want to try and spell that out?

So those are five concerns that I want to make sure that we discuss today, and I want to recognize my good friend from Arizona, Congressman Franks.

Well, I thank you, gentleman.

I'd like to just pick up on a couple of the themes that you've mentioned. You've used this phrase frequently. I don't know if you coined it, but I think of it as something that you authored. I guess you could almost think of it in terms of planets and astronomy, which is, when you get a juxtaposition of two things, the first thing you're talking about is the development of nuclear weapons, and the second thing is that it's in the hands of a terrorist state.

We already have nuclear weapons. We have terrorist states, but we haven't seen the eclipse of when those two things come together. You're talking about that as being a very destabilizing situation in the world, a situation that threatens the lives of at least thousands, perhaps many millions, of people; and it is a nation that has a history of essentially blackmail. So when you put that kind of combination together that you're talking about, we're talking about a very significant international kind of crisis that we have to be prepared for.

Now, they also have to be able to deliver that weapons system. That's another thing that you're really an expert on, which is that ballistic missile defense is also coming in. There are people who say you can just put this stuff in a suitcase and smuggle it into town. So who cares about ballistic missiles or ballistic missile defense? Yet, as you know, these nuclear weapons have to be delivered in some way, and there are different ways to deliver them.

One of them, of course, is to put them way up in the atmosphere, and they go off and take out all of your communications. Another one, of course, is to bring them over a city where they go off and they kill many more people than if they were sitting on the ground. So there are combinations of those things, and those are all things that you have studied and have taken a look at, and all of them are bad medicine.

What concerns me particularly is the reckless course of this administration as it's making these grandiose kinds of ``we're going to make the world a safer place'' ideas by disarming and by saying, We're not going to be developing missile defense and by saying, We're not going to develop any new use of nuclear things.

One thing we've not yet talked about on the floor--and you can jump in on this if you'd like--is that we've got North Korea and Iran, both of which are pretty good at digging tunnels. They take their capacities and put them way underground. You can drop conventional bombs on them, and nothing happens because they're down in the Earth that far. The only way to stop that is probably with some new type of device called a nuclear Earth penetrator where you put a nuclear device, a small one, on a bomb that goes way down in the Earth, and it explodes. Now, anything radioactive stays down in the Earth, but it creates enough concussion that it basically shakes those tunnels and collapses those infrastructures.

That is an example of where we might want to develop a new nuclear device because of a problem that we have, and yet we wouldn't be able to do that with this negotiation. So are you concerned about that? Have you given that some thought?

That is really, really a frightening prospect. The thing that I find interesting about this, what we are doing is we are reducing our defense spending. Here is a chart of the budget that would reduce our national defense spending. These are numbers that were released by the Obama administration. This is the 45-year average at 5.3 percent. And what you can see is it is being reduced here.

Now, the thing that is amazing, this wouldn't be so troubling to me if it weren't for the fact if you took a look at what rate we are spending money. Bush's worst spending year was 2008 under the Pelosi Congress here. 2008. And that was about $450 billion he spent that we didn't have, which put us, that is about 3.2 percent of gross domestic product. This last year, 2009, instead of being $450 billion, it was $1.4 trillion in spending that we didn't have. That was more than a three times increase over Bush's worst spending. And that goes up to 9.9 percent of GDP, which is the highest level since World War II.

So we are spending money that we don't have at an incredible rate. Take a look at what is happening to defense here. This is a wrongheaded set of priorities and very troubling. I have my good friend from Texas, Congressman Gohmert, who is joining us. I know that you have taken a look at a number of these different issues and questions. Please jump in and point out your own perspective.

I thank the gentleman for joining us. Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I look forward to seeing you next Wednesday.

Mr. Speaker, I rise in opposition to this flawed health care bill.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I'm just taking a moment here to arrange some charts and I will be right with you.

Mr. Speaker, we once again are going to be on a subject that seems to be increasingly riveting the attention of Americans--and for good reason. What we are talking about here this evening is the proposition that the Congress will take over, over a period of time, one-sixth of the U.S. economy. That is the health care section of the economy.

Obviously, this big a change, a remake of health care, which is not just changing a little portion here or there, but a complete remake of health care, is a question of significant proportion. It is a very costly proposition. It's one that involves a tremendous amount of change, and any change, of course, is controversial. This proposal, though, is more controversial than most and is resulting in a tremendous outpouring of phone calls. The switchboards are almost shut down here at the Capitol. But we, once again tonight, are going to be talking about it because there is talk we might even vote on the bill this week, and who knows what's going to happen.

I'm joined in the Chamber by Dr. Fleming, a very fine physician but also a Member of Congress and someone who knows a considerable amount about the health care bill. Part of what the discussion has been lately has been a question of the procedure of how the bill would become law. That's, I think, where we should start, because that's where the news is right now and it's a big question.

Dr. Fleming, I thought we might start there because a lot of people have heard about the bill, even some of the things in the bill, but the question is how this bill would become law.

I'm going to start by just laying down the simple pattern that's in the U.S. Constitution. The way that a bill becomes law is that it's passed by the Senate. It's passed by the House. It's sent to the President, and he signs it. That's the plain, bare-bones facts of how it works. That's what the Constitution says. The Constitution gives the House and the Senate a lot of flexibility in how we design our rules, but ultimately the bill has to pass a straight-up vote in the Senate and a straight-up vote in the House and has to be signed by the President. If it doesn't do that, it doesn't meet the constitutional standard.

Now, the process becomes a little more complicated as we go on because the Senate has a weird rule. In fact, the Senate does a lot of weird things, but it has a weird rule, at least to those of us who are Members of the House, and that is that before a bill can come up for a vote, it takes 60 votes to bring it up for a vote. So if you've got a bill and you say, Hey, we've got a hundred Senators; I've got 55 votes for the bill, you're in deep trouble, because you won't ever get the 60 votes to get it up for just a straight-up vote even though you've got enough votes to pass it. In other words, the Senate has a little bit of a higher bar to protect to make sure there's at least 60 out of 100 Senators that are willing to pass a particular piece of legislation or bring it up for a vote. So that makes things more complicated.

The Senate took a House bill which we passed on health care. They gutted it. They took every single thing out of it and stuck their own language in it, a couple thousands pages of new ideas and text and all this, took it to the Senate floor and fought and fought and fought. Finally, on Christmas Eve, passed it by the 60 votes that were necessary, and so the bill was passed through the Senate.

In order to do that, they put all kinds of special deals in there just to keep certain Senators to vote for it. There was what is called the second Louisiana purchase, a big benefit for Louisiana; the Cornhusker kickback; a special deal for people of Florida that they get to keep their Medicare Advantage money, but everybody else, the other 49 States, have to lose $500 billion out of Medicare.

And so there were all of these special deals in there, as well as a whole lot of other legislation; for instance, the fact that the government would be paying for abortions for people, which is a big problem for many Americans, and other provisions such as there would be health care for illegal immigrants and things like that, which are very controversial. So all of that is then passed on Christmas Eve and comes to the House.

Now, in order for that bill to become law, two things have to happen. Either the House has to pass it just the way the Senate did, in which case they can send the bill straight to the President for his signature--so, if the House--and, of course, they have 80 votes less over on the Republican side. So we can all vote ``no,'' but Nancy Pelosi could lose a whole lot of votes because she has 80 votes more than the Republicans do. So what they need is a majority of Democrats to vote for the bill just the way the Senate passed it, could go straight to the President and the bill could become law. That's a way to do it.

The problem is, it has all this junk in it that nobody wants to vote for. And so they're kind of stuck with making a decision: Are we going to just vote on it and send it to the President or are we going to try to amend it, which then requires it to go back to the Senate where it has to face a 60-vote rule to get these things cleaned up? And so that's the tension. So what's being proposed is something that is neither. It's something that is rather unusual and completely unprecedented, to a degree, and that is what they call deeming the bill passed; that is, it was never really voted on to be passed.

In the past, we have done this deeming thing many times, but it's usually after a bill has gone back and forth and we're working out the details of an amendment. But this is thousands of pages of legislation that's never had a vote, and they're just going to say, Well, we've just decided it's all approved, without a vote. Now, that is really pushing the limits on what is constitutional. So that's the beginning of the process.

So I wanted to invite my good friend Dr. Fleming to join me. Let's just talk about this process. Most people are really bored to death by this stuff, but when it involves one-sixth of the U.S. economy and everybody's health care, it's like, I guess we have to pay attention.

Please join me.

Well, there are just so many things in this bill to talk about, and that's why you have such old and young, male and female--the public just doesn't like this bill. And the reason is because there's stuff for everybody to hate in this bill. I thought that this was an amazing quote Nancy Pelosi said. I just can't resist putting this up here. ``We have to pass the bill to find out what's in it.''

Now what it seems like is going on now is, not only are we supposed to not read the bill, but we're supposed to not vote for the bill. So we want to pass a bill that we haven't read and haven't voted for. This seems to be really twisting the long arm of conscience a little bit to say, not only are you not supposed to read it, but now you can't vote for it, and we still want to pass it. And we wonder why the American public is just a teensy bit skeptical.

I think some of the shenanigans are amazing. One of the ideas is, you have to get an assessment as to how much the bill's going to cost. The Government Accounting Office, who is supposed to be impartial, they take a look at a bill, and they go all through it and figure out what they think it's going to cost. Well, one of the tricks that they're playing is that they're going to collect taxes for a bill over a 10- year period, but they're only going to count the bill being in effect for 6 years. Now that's kind of an amazing way to calculate what the bill's going to cost because the implication is that that's what it will be running along at. And the thing is is that every time the government's gotten into this taking over of the medical system, anytime we do a bill like Medicaid or Medicare, it always costs at least two times more than ever any accountant thought it was going to be, sometimes as much as 10 times more expensive than what some accounting office says. And yet we're going to start off with this, you know, smoke and mirrors deal where we're going to tax people 10 years but only run the bill six. And that's supposed to be how you figure out how it costs $1 trillion. I think that's what you're referring to.

You're a doctor. Let me just ask you this question: What happens if you keep cutting the money to Medicare? What's going to happen to people?

Let me stop you. Because you know this stuff cold, but there may be some people, some of our other Members here that just don't know this as well. So you've got Medicare, which is reimbursing doctors at 80 cents on the dollar, which means that somebody's got to make up the 20 cents. So we do a cost shift and shift that 20 cents into Medicare and dump that cost onto people who have private insurance, right?

So we're really charging them some amount more, whatever their bill was. If it was $100, we're going to add a little extra to that to compensate for the Medicare thing. So now you're driving the cost up for the guy that's really doing what we think is responsible. And that is, going out and making sure he has insurance, and he buys insurance in the private market. But he's paying a premium for

that insurance because he's got to cover Medicare that's underfunded. So that's the first thing. Do I have that right?

So let's just say for instance that we wanted to cut more money out of Medicare. Let's say we're going to take $500 billion. But just theoretically, if you drop the money in Medicare so we're putting less money into it, what's the net effect of that going to be on the person that's counting on Medicare to pay for their medical care and to the usually older person that is counting on Medicare to cover their doctors' bills? What's going to happen then?

Oh, wait. You are saying it will cut access for older people to Medicare?

Okay. Can you explain that?

Okay. So let me just see if I get this right. You're a medical doctor. You went all through med school. You've been practicing a number of years. You enjoy what you're doing. Old people come to you that need medical attention. You don't mind treating them. And before you were treating them at 80 percent of what the cost is. But let's say you drop down how much Medicare is paying. Well, at a certain point, you're just saying, I just can't afford to do this at this price, because ultimately, you've got to run an office. You've got to hire people. You've got to pay the rent on the building and all of those kinds of things. You've got a lot of insurance you're paying for, and you're trying to provide for your family. At a certain point, Medicare is reimbursing so little that you basically say, Hey, the old people I've been seeing before, I'm going to keep them on because I'm a nice guy. But I'm not going to take any new people. And so some old person that's sick wants to go find a doctor, perhaps they moved or something like that. And everybody says sorry, I'm not seeing any new Medicare patients. So while they've got Medicare, it doesn't mean they've got health care. So they don't get any health care.

So that's the problem with it.

So this new bill is going to pull $500 billion out of Medicare?

So if you know nothing else about the bill, this is saying, Well, this is something to pay attention to. Now we haven't talked about some of the other nifty features. This is what gets me worried. This is what I don't like the most. And I don't like this bill. I want to be completely clear. I'm a conservative Republican. I do not trust Big Government to do a lot of stuff. And particularly, I don't want them meddling in our health care. So I'm not, I guess, objective, or I am objective, but it's just because we talk about how bad it is to have an insurance agent between you and your doctor. The last thing I want is a government bureaucrat or thousands of government bureaucrats between me and my doctor.

This is a picture we've seen and used on the floor sometimes. But this is a very much simplified version of thousands of pages of legislation with shall, shall, shall, which means the government's going to do all of this stuff. And somehow as a consumer of health care, you're supposed to find your way all the way across, over to the doctor over there. This is like some sort of a maze that you've got to go through. So this is a very complicated government takeover of what is otherwise the private system of health provision in this country. So that, to me, is something that really causes me to say ``no'' on this bill because as Republicans, we don't like anything that gets between the doctor and the patient. And insurance companies, we don't like it when they get in there. But at least if you have a bad insurance company, you have a chance of changing your insurance company. What happens if you've got all these bureaucrats in there? You will never change it. And so this thing is really a very, very dangerous piece of legislation in my opinion. But I know you've given your whole life to taking care of patients. What's your impression of this whole deal?

So let's try and get up to 50,000 feet here and take a look at the sort of choices there are before Americans as to how we approach health care. It seems to me that in the beginning, you've got the sort of supply and demand situation. If everybody in America got absolutely the very, very best medical care that you could get, it would just bankrupt the country probably because the supply and demand law says that if you don't have to pay anything at all, people are just going to get the very most expensive thing they can do. So basically the whole country stops if you try to give everybody the very best thing possible.

So the question then is how do you balance supply and demand? And we usually have a thing we call freedom, and we allow individuals to work hard, earn money, and then they spend their money to buy what they want to buy with it. They can choose whether they want health care, or a vacation, or food, or shoes, or a new car, and that's called freedom. So that's the free market, which allows people to decide how much money they can afford to pay on health care. So that's one way to balance that supply and demand.

Another thing: The insurance companies then came along and said, Yeah, but we can get you some savings. We can reduce the amount of tests and do some other things and negotiate some special rates with a whole pool of doctors that we make a deal with so we get you a product that gives you pretty good health care, but it's a discount-priced product because we're doing some things to drop the cost down. So the insurance company then is one that is starting to take part in that management of the cost of health care. The free market, it's just a matter of you paying the barrelhead, and you go back and forth and figure out what the price is. That's the way we do most things. You have the insurance company which is kind of a hybrid.

Then you can go to the socialistic model where the government does it all. But the government still can't make mathematics change. So the problem is that the governments in other countries that have tried it-- it's not like we're the only ones doing this. Canada and England do this kind of thing. And what they do is, in order to keep the cost down, they keep a big waiting line, so you have to wait a long time to get your health care. So it's basically a form of rationing. It's kind of a nice rationing because you're told,

Get in line. We're used to getting in line. You get in line, and that's how it is that they keep their costs down.

The only trouble is, if you are like me, I had cancer. If I have to get in line, that means I have to wait. If I have to wait, it reduces my life expectancy. And that's one of the reasons why England has really high cancer rates, because of that. But let's just talk about places where this kind of idea has been tried before. Dr. Fleming, as I recall, they tried something like this in Tennessee, didn't they?

So in other words, what's going on is if you tell people with this system they can have anything they want, you're going to have a tremendous level of demand, which is what we see in the other countries after this gets going, and then you have all the waiting lines because you can't do that all.

So it's really a nice promise. The trouble is there isn't any backup to the promise. It's just a piece of paper saying you've got free health care, but you got what you paid for. That isn't any health care at all.

I see my good friend from Illinois, Congressman Manzullo, and somebody who really understands the Small Business Committee, understands small business in general and is a fierce, fierce defender of his section of Illinois, and a good friend of mine. And I'd like to yield some time to my good friend, Congressman Manzullo.

I call that the wheelchair tax. Now, I've thought of taxing a lot of stuff, but would you ever think of taxing a wheelchair? I mean, that's imaginative. It really is.

So it's not just wheelchairs. We're going to tax other medical devices.

Now, let me just ask you a question. My friend, you come from the Midwest. You're a commonsense kind of guy. Now here's why this bill is having trouble getting votes, because it's like trying to grab yourself by the boot straps and lift yourself up and fly around this Chamber, because think about it a little bit.

We've got the U.S. economy in serious economic problem because of three entitlement programs. They're the main things that are the budget busters: Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security. So the government has stuck its nose into what was previously a free market with Medicare and Medicaid. And how well has the government managed those programs? It's about to bankrupt our country.

So we've got Medicare and Medicaid about to bankrupt the country, and the government says, trust me to take it all over. I mean, there's something counterintuitive here somehow.

Let me see if I can just cut in and restate what you said, because I know that you have an expertise in small business.

So you've got a small businessman who's showing a lot of creativity, the sort of innovative spirit that's in America, comes up with a medical device machined out of aluminum, which is a very specialized kind of device. And so what's going to happen is we're going to drop a tax on this thing, which makes it more expensive. And what you're saying is somebody overseas is going to say, I can make that device, and what's more, I don't have to pay the tax on it.

And you're already looking at, most people are looking in their district at a 10 percent unemployment rate. We're looking here at a bill that's going to cost trillions of dollars, 500 million jobs, a government takeover

I mean 5 million jobs. Excuse me. That would really be something. And a government, a major government takeover, and yet what do we have for the quality of results to expect in that we've seen it done in other countries and in the State of Tennessee and Massachusetts? I think Massachusetts health care costs are up 20 or 30 percent over the average of other States. That's not a very good model.

Tennessee, the Governor of that State, a Democrat Governor of Tennessee, said this thing is the mother of all unfunded mandates. The States are struggling with their budgets. And here you've got a guy who's a Democrat who's experienced with this thing and saying why are you going to impose this nationally, when it doesn't work on a State basis.

I notice that we're joined by another good friend of mine from the--

Well, thank you. It's good to hear from Illinois. And I hope that you continue to join us in this discussion. We have my friend from Ohio, another State from the Midwest, a big manufacturing State, and a great young legislator, Congressman Jordan. I yield time.

You know what amazes me about that, gentleman, is I have heard various news outlets and various individuals, even people of political stripes saying that this bill is being held up by the Republicans. Now, somehow that just tickles my funny bone. You know, they've got 80 more people on this floor than we do, and if we all voted ``no'' and lit our hair on fire, there's no way we could slow this bill down. There's nothing we could do. The only thing slowing this bill down is there's a whole lot of Democrats that are going, ooh, is it ugly. So how in the world are they accusing us to be obstructionists or, you know--there's nothing we could do. I wish there were. But it's amazing.

What you're saying, I just want to underline because what you're saying is it's the American people. The American people are the ones that are really driving what's going on here. And they're looking at this thing and they're saying, oh my goodness. What part of no don't you understand? Go ahead. I didn't mean to interrupt the gentleman.

Let me just restate that. That is really an amazing premise, isn't it?

This bill is going to insure 30 million more Americans and it's going to be budget neutral. Do you think people believe that?

I sure appreciate the gentleman from Ohio joining us. I had a telephone town hall with my constituents last night, and I just asked them whether they thought it was a good idea for the government to be taking this over. And it was about 90 percent even said they just don't trust the government to do that. It's that freedom point. It's that idea of do we want a bureaucrat telling us what to do, what

doctor can treat us and all? And we are mandated to buy this?

Of course the minor point of that is that's unconstitutional. The government can't force you to buy something. And so that's unconstitutional on the face of it. Just absolutely amazing.

I just want to get back to my good friend, the doctor from Louisiana. Would you like to jump in? I did throw this chart up here about cancer rates in different countries. And so if you want to talk about that.

That is called free enterprise, I guess.

So when the government doesn't have enough money to pay, they just say, well, we're not going to cover certain things because they're too expensive.

So the government makes a decision as to whether or not you are going to get care or not, which is rationing.

And so you have here in the U.K., these numbers here, this is women, but this isn't just breast cancer, but cancer in general for women, the survival rate at 52 percent or 53 percent, 66 in the U.S. So this difference is because of the fact they are just not covering some things.

So if you want to know why the telephones have been ringing off the hook, and there are a whole lot of people who don't like this bill, here is a whole block of people. Anybody who might get cancer, this is a pretty good reason not to like it. Is that correct, Doctor?

So if you are in Canada and you have cancer, what you really don't want to do is you don't want to sign up at the hospital, you want to sign up at the airport for a flight that is going south to the United States so you can get taken care of.

Right. I think the point was made once that if you've got a bad faucet in your kitchen you don't remodel a whole kitchen, you fix the faucet.

Again, I would like to turn to my friend from Ohio, Congressman Jordan, and just see if he wanted to make a comment about that or a different point.

Boy, I really appreciate your putting that in perspective. Because we sort of rush through each day, each day is so busy, and we sometimes fail to just take a look and say, oh, my goodness, what is going on here? You know, first of all, a President of the United States firing the president of General Motors? And then surrounding himself with these people not approved by the Senate that he calls czars. That's weird. I don't know where that idea comes from. And then taking over AIG, a great big insurance company. And then you go through all of these other things, the bailout for Wall Street and this supposedly stimulus bill, which cost $700 billion and is not creating jobs, 10 percent unemployment.

We have just heard people critical of President Bush for spending too much money. You take his very worst year, which was '08 with the Pelosi Congress here, and it was $470 billion I think he overspent if I remember. You are the expert on numbers. And yet here we go in 2009, $1.4 trillion. That is a record since World War II. We keep setting these bad records and then here comes this piece of legislation.

My constituents are going crazy. They are telling me, Todd, what can we do? What can we do? What do you want me to do? We had a great big meeting and thousands of them showed up to protest. The media covered it. But what can you do? I mean, they are shutting the phone boards down. Sometimes I don't know what to say, gentlemen.

We are joined here by my good friend, Congresswoman Foxx. I think of her as somebody who is just one of those

Americans who has common sense, and she's tough. She's tougher than nails because she believes in commonsense American values, and she doesn't put up with a whole lot of baloney.

I am just delighted to have you on the floor joining us tonight.

There is something that smells, doesn't it? This thing has been sitting around for about a half a year, and the more people find out about it, the more they hate it. A week or two ago, I just started making a list of all the people who would hate this bill, and there are just circles of Americans, one on top of the other.

If you are an older person you don't want all that half a trillion dollars taken out of Medicare.

If you are pro-life you think, well, I don't like abortion. Well, if you don't like abortion, how do you like the fact that your taxpayer dollar that you are forced to pay is paying for abortion? That to me is different than just--I mean one thing people talk about is choice. I don't call it choice, I call it killing children. But even if you accept the idea of choice, some people think abortion is okay, some people think it is not. But to take the people who think it is not and force them to pay to do abortions where they think it is killing a child even if other people don't, no wonder people don't like this thing.

Or illegal immigrants getting medical care on the back of the taxpayer. I could see there are so many people that wouldn't like it.

I do yield.

Not only confusing, but in the telephone town hall I did, I sense an anger and a frustration in the public. First of all we are told that you don't have to read the bill, just vote on it because we haven't even put the bill together. You don't have to read it. Now we are being told, not only you don't have to read it, you don't have to vote on it. That seems like the silliest thing I ever heard. And yet that is what is being talked about, about bringing a bill to the floor, you just vote for a rule instead of actually voting on the bill. And it is questionable whether it is even constitutional.

My good friend, Dr. Fleming.

Sort of like fraud, waste, and abuse is like a line item in the budget and you can just line it out and make it go away? All these years, if we had fraud, waste, and abuse, we try to get rid of it, but they say we're just going to line--it's really amazing. I didn't mean to interrupt.

I think that's part of the reason why you see this tremendous opposition to this legislation.

And, you know, one of the things we did, trying to get some kind of perspective on some of these main points, imposes half a trillion in Medicare cuts. The Republican alternative didn't do that, but the President's bill and the Senate bill does. It enacts a job-killing tax hike and government regulations costing hundreds of billions of dollars. The old Democrat bill and the President's new bill do that, and the Republican thing doesn't do it.

I mean, we have a lot of reforms. I think you're a cosponsor/sponsor of a bunch of bills that reform things in health care, but it's not a complete government takeover of the system, and we're not talking about raiding Medicare and all of these other sad provisions.

Now, one of the things that I think Americans are sensitive to is unemployment. I mean, there are a lot of people out there without a job. According to the government numbers, there are about 10 percent unemployed Americans. And that is not counting the people who have been out of a job more than a year, because they take them off. They just wipe them off the charts.

So you have got a lot of unemployment, and now what you're going to do is you're going to enact these tax hikes on small businesses, which is no better way to get them to want to get rid of employees than to run their taxes up or their costs of having employees. So you're a small business owner, and all of a sudden it's going to cost you more to have an employee. You've just created a big economic incentive to get rid of some employees because now you've got to get rid of the taxes.

You're also being encouraged not to invest in your own business to put the new wing on a building, to get the new machine tool or whatever is going to create new jobs. You're not going to do that when you're going to get hammered by this new tax increase.

And I think Americans are sensitive, from what I found in my district. And I don't know about yours, but in Missouri, people don't like unemployment and they'd like to see us--they know government doesn't create jobs, but they'd like us to create an environment where small businesses can prosper. And this is the exact opposite to me. This doesn't make sense either,

that we're not thinking about the unemployment component.

I think a lot of Americans feel that there are things that need to be fixed in health care, and a lot of our colleagues that are Republicans think there are things that need to be fixed in health care, but we don't think you melt the whole system down.

One of the things that I was asked in my town hall meeting--and I think maybe there are people that have this question in their minds, so maybe I'll ask myself this question and try to answer it. They said, Okay, you big-mouthed Republican--they didn't quite say that, but they said, You were in the majority for 6 years and you never fixed any of these and now you're bad mouthing them when the Democrats are doing it.

Let me tell you about when I was a Republican for the 6 years that I was here when I was in the majority, and that was we passed a whole lot of bills in the House, a number of them, to fix health care that nobody has ever heard of or knows anything about. What happened to those bills? They passed the House. They went to the Senate, and there were Democrats in the Senate that basically filibustered it because we didn't have 60 Republican votes to push it through reconciliation so you could get it out to a vote on the floor. I know it's not reconciliation. Whatever they call it on the floor. The 60 votes in the Senate, we never had them.

What sort of bills did we pass? Well, we passed a bunch of energy bills to deal with the high prices of gasoline that were killed by Democrats in the Senate. We passed a bill to deal with Freddie and Fannie that were being improperly managed financially that were going to cause a big crisis, and that was killed by the Democrats in the Senate. We passed associated health plans to allow small businesses to combine their employees together to get a better price on health insurance. That bill was killed. We passed it numerous times. It was never taken up. They never had the 60 votes in the Senate to deal with that.

We did tort reform, which various States have passed. Dropped health care costs by 10 percent in some States. That went to the Senate, was killed by the Democrats in the Senate.

So it wasn't that we didn't pass things or try to fix things as Republicans. We had a lot of reforms, but they were always killed because of the 60 votes in the Senate. So when people say, Hey, you guys were in the majority, how come you didn't do anything? We did things, but it was because of the way the Senate is set up, none of those things passed.

And I think that's helpful for people to understand that because Republicans do have ideas, but they were more selective things that we knew were going to save money, going to give people better health care and solutions that we knew from other States that would work. So I think that's important to kind of get that out.

Let's see. This thing here. Benefits trial lawyers by failing to enact meaningful lawsuit reform. Well, these bills do benefit trial attorneys. The weird thing about these bills is they are actually sort of antitort reform. It's not that they don't deal with those huge punitive damages which run the cost of health care up. In fact, the States that have tort reform, it makes it so they can't use their tort reform. So this thing is, from a tort reform point of view, is actually hostile to tort reform, and I'm sure you see some of that.

Thank you, Madam Speaker, for allowing us to deal with this very, very important subject. I know the American public is interested.

Madam Speaker, as I walk across back and forth from the Cannon Building to come to this Chamber, there is a wall in the steam tunnel of all of these different pictures that are painted by our high school students, and one continues to arrest my progress.

A beautiful little redheaded girl about 17 years old who looks like my daughter, and has beautiful lighting on her face. And as you look into her face, she has a profound sadness there. And the thought has crossed my mind that that's how my daughters will look if this bill passes with government rationing of health care, with the budget busted, with the destruction of our economy, and unemployment out of control.

We need to fix health care, but we don't need to destroy American health care or the American economy. That would be sad indeed.

Mr. Speaker, it is a pleasure to join you here once again as we get a chance to take a look at Special Orders, and also I am joined by some of my distinguished colleagues. We are going to be looking once again at a subject that has really absorbed the attention of Americans now for almost 9 months, the question of health care. It is still before us.

Today was a little bit of a unique day for me because the President came to my district in the St. Louis area, and he wanted to deliver speeches and tell everybody that they should vote for the health care bill.

He and I have a difference of opinion on the bill. I think his opinion is that if people just know more about this bill, they will like it. My opinion is the more we have looked at it, the more that people have taken a look at it publicly, the uglier they think it gets and the more they hate it. Fortunately, the poll data seems to be on my side, and the more you look at the bill, the more it seems it has problems with it.

We have, today, joining us some distinguished colleagues from all over the country. We have two doctors and an attorney, and just, I think, a businessman and an engineer. It almost sounds like the start of some sort of a joke. But this isn't a joke, unfortunately. This is a very serious subject, indeed.

So I am going to recognize Dr. Broun from Georgia, a gentleman who has spent a lifetime practicing medicine and then got elected to Congress, and now he is trying to straighten things out. I am going to have him, followed by Dr. Fleming as well.

So, Dr. Broun, thank you for joining us tonight. Let's talks a little bit about this health care bill.

I really appreciate your bringing that up. I am just thinking, picture yourself instead of being a doctor as being a salesman, and you are given an assignment that you are supposed to go out and sell something.

Say you are the President and your job is to go out and make this case. We have three huge entitlements that are destroying the solvency of our country. One of them is Medicare, one of them is Medicaid, both methodical things, and the government is running these things and they are destroying the economy because they are out of control, they are spending so much money. So your assignment is to go out and sell people that we ought to have the government take over the rest of the medical part. That is a little counterintuitive. You could be a good salesman, and it is hard to make that case. We have it messed up in this and this area, so give us the whole thing. It takes a little bit of courage to even try to do that.

Dr. Fleming, please.

That is interesting. What I think I am hearing you say is, as much as you want to knock the insurance companies, the fact that people have insurance and the insurance pays claims, in a way they are the ones that are helping to balance out the cost of health care, because Medicare and Medicaid are underpaying the actual cost of what it takes.

That gets to a point, and I would like to ask you, I am going to go to my good friend from Texas too, Congressman Gohmert, but sometimes we get into the weeds a little bit too much. So let's say you get way up on an airplane and take a look at the health care question.

What someone told me is, he said, Look, look at health care in America as two parts. The front end is the medical service we provide to the people who are sick in America. They said that is the best health care anywhere in the world. If you are a millionaire sheikh from Bahrain, you want to come over here to get some of that health care. So we have the best health care service, in terms of providers.

What the problem is is how we pay for it that has gotten messed up, and I think that is a little bit to your question.

My good friend from Texas, Congressman Gohmert.

I would like to just run over to our good friend from Pennsylvania, Congressman Thompson, and I just wanted to get your perspective on what you are seeing. It has been almost 9 months, and people have been looking more and more into the details of the bill. The more they see it, the more they don't like it. Yet the majority seems to be determined, they have the pedal to the metal, they have the battleship at ramming speed, and they are going to just try and drive this thing through.

What is your impression of where we are?

I appreciate your perspective on that. I bet you that has got to, even after all these months, has got to really bother those of you who are doctors. I mean you invested I don't know how many years in med school. I flunked fetal pig. I would never have made it. Part of the reason was because you wanted to treat patients. And to have some insurance person sticking their nose in that relationship has got to really rub you the wrong way. But what happens if--at least if it's the insurance company, you can get rid of the insurance company. But what happens if it's the Federal Government? That would drive me crazy.

Congressman Broun, please.

So this is going to be a good deal. Everybody is going to have medical insurance, but you just won't have any doctor to go to see.

Dr. Fleming.

You know, I just today was talking to my constituents back in the State of Missouri and we were having this forum. I spoke in pretty strong terms. I told my constituents that this bill, first of all, would destroy the quality of health care in America. The second thing it was going to do was it was going to destroy the Federal budget. And that if I were to put this bill on a scale of all the legislation I've seen since I've been in Congress--and I'm getting a little older; this is my tenth year--that this bill is more than twice as bad as the next worst bill that I've ever seen. So this bill is altogether in another category.

I spoke before a group this last weekend, and I looked out and there were a lot of other legislators I'd served with in the State of Missouri. I said, We've all served in the majority, we've served in the minority. But I said, The last year and a half, we've served in the wilderness. I said, The difference of the wilderness is that I walk up as though I were walking up to the edge of the Grand Canyon and contemplated what happens if you go over that abyss.

It appears to me tonight, gentlemen, and tell me if I'm not overstating this, that we are standing on an abyss. And that if we step off the edge by passing this bill, America will not be the same country she's ever been in the past, and we will not be able to recover from that.

I do yield.

You know, when we're running at whatever it is--and these numbers, I don't really believe them, because these numbers are worse-- but 10 percent unemployment, and you dump 5 million more jobs lost on a bill that is already going to cost trillions of dollars that we don't have, this thing, it just seems like somebody has to have some sort of blind faith to have their foot down on the pedal of the battleship and just try to drive the battleship through the dock.

In my district, this is a working day today. We rented a facility at the St. Charles Convention Center. It had seating for 800 people. Now where are you going to find 800 people that care about politics in the middle of a Wednesday? Wednesday morning at 10 o'clock in St. Louis. When the beginning of the town hall started, we had over a thousand. By the time it had gotten going a little bit, we had 2,200 people. You couldn't even get any more people in the room. And their sentiment was along the lines of what we sense here. They said, We don't like this bill. We really don't like this bill. They were begging, What can we do to stop this thing? So my sense is that we're not the only people that are thinking like this in this country.

My good friend from Texas, Congressman Gohmert.

You know, that's the ironic thing about this quote and the reason why we put it on this chart. The President has been saying a lot of things. I think the most truthful thing he said was that, I'm going to bring you change. I think he's been fair in doing that. Not much else that I've heard that doesn't seem to have some contradiction.

But this quote here, Reconciliation is therefore the wrong place for policy changes, such as the government taking over one-sixth of the economy. In short, this process seems to have lost its proper meaning. A vehicle designed for deficit reduction. That's what it was supposed to be for--deficit reduction, fiscal responsibility. It's been hijacked.

I'm glad you asked that question because the date here says December, 2005. So I don't think he really wants us to remember what he said in 2005, because if you were to take this today, this would mean that they aren't going to pass this bill.

So it kind of depends whether its your bill or my bill, I guess.

I appreciate your perspective and particularly calling attention to the fact that this reconciliation is hijacking the entire legislative process. He is willing to do this, to pass this particular piece of legislation.

My good friend from Pennsylvania, somebody said that if you've got a busted faucet or sink in your kitchen, a smart thing to do is to fix the faucet or the sink, not to remodel the whole kitchen. Does it appear to you that the difference between the two political parties on this issue is that the Democrats have really decided they're going to remodel the kitchen, whether you want it or not, and the Republicans, we have a lot of different health care bills as Republicans, but ours are all fix the sink or fix the drain. We're taking a look at what we have, seeing what needs to be fixed to make it better, and we're selectively doing that, whereas it seems the Democrats have the concept they're just going to re-create everything. Take one-sixth of the economy, have the government run it.

Does that seem like it fits for you?

So remodeling the kitchen--

There you go. That's another counterintuitive thing. This whole bill seems to be counterintuitive, doesn't it?

Let me ask a question. We have two of you who are medical doctors here, one who's a judge, one's a former medical professional. I'm an engineer by training, and now we're Congressmen. And one of the things that we have to do and we should pay attention to is our constituents. We get calls from people saying, Hey, I've got a problem with this, Congressman. You need to help me. And they ask us to do some weird stuff sometimes. Like, I remember the first time they asked me to get them a job. And I'm thinking, Hey, I'm not a job agency. I'm a Congressman. But we're asked to do a lot of different things, and we try to help out.

Now, my question to you is, let's say we jump off the abyss, and now we've got this mess, and we have people back home calling us saying, My mom, my mom is sick. She got cancer. She got it bad, and she's going to need help right away. So I went to get some health care for my mom. They said I have got to wait 6 months. What I'm asking you is this question: How, as Congressmen, are we going to get through this mess to try to help our constituents? And even worse, how are our constituents ever going to get from here over to get their medical care? Does that concern you? Congressman Gohmert, do you want to take a shot at that? This doesn't look friendly to me.

Now wait a minute. You have got me all confused, Congressman Gohmert because my understanding is, Republicans--from what the President has said--don't have any ideas. We don't have any bills. Of course he also said that he read our bills, so that was a little confusing too. But what you just outlined was basically getting up at 50,000 feet, looking at the problem and saying, We really don't need the government to get into all this detail. We simply take the amount of money that the government's spending right now. You break it into pieces, just designate the number of families in our country, and you've already got something that's going to work.

Well, I appreciate that, Congressman Gohmert. You know, those of us who know Congressman Gohmert--and I know my colleagues do-- know that he has a gift of persistence. And I recall one of his more persistent moments. It was right here on this floor when there was a bill that I would say is probably the second worst bill I have seen. It's only half as bad as this bill, and it was a bill that was amended with 300 pages of amendments at 3 o'clock in the morning. I think it was the late part of spring of this last year.

I remember Mr. Gohmert had the same sense of persistence, and he got this idea that maybe if we're going to vote on a bill that it ought to be here in the Chamber because there is a rule that the bill we're debating and voting on is supposed to be in the Chamber. I remember just asking, is it north, south, east or west? It was like a kid looking for a button that's hidden in a room somewhere. And he's back and forth and back and forth. Finally they said, The bill is right up there in that desk. He went up and looked for it. And guess what? It wasn't there.

So I don't know, people like to hide things on you, Congressman. I don't know what to tell you, but it would be interesting if we knew what the financial score on some ideas, such as what you had, that are innovative. And it's the fact that Republicans, of course, don't have any ideas except that the President did read them and all. So that makes it kind of interesting.

I notice we're joined by some other good friends of mine. Congressman Scalise from Louisiana is here, and I just wanted to let you have a chance. We're going to talk a little bit about this really amazing medical bill that's being pushed forward.

I certainly appreciate the gentleman making that point. And it is usually presented as a pro-life position that we don't want the government funding abortions. It almost struck me as kind of two different things almost. One, Do you think it's a good idea to abort little children? But the second question is a conscience question, Do you think it's a good idea to force people to pay taxes and then use those taxes for something that they believe is the destruction of a human life?

You know, one of the things that has really encouraged me--you just talked about that election in Massachusetts. You know, in America there's always been a few people that say they're agnostic or an atheist. And what really encouraged me about that election is that nobody can claim they're an atheist or agnostic anymore in America because only God could have elected a Republican in the State of Massachusetts. I mean, it couldn't have been done by anybody else. So I'm glad at least we won't have too many of those kicking around.

I am joined here also by the gentlewoman from Minnesota (Mrs. Bachmann), and you have been a voice for conservative values and so strong on this bill, and I am so thankful we have the A-Team out here this evening as we are coming down to the finish line, and that is the bill will be finished. I appreciate your giving us a northern perspective as well as some other perspectives as well.

That sounds like it would be very interesting, because we just had 2,200 people come to our town hall meeting today. We should have had our Declaration of Health Care Independence there because you would have had another 2,200 people.

Please share their comments.

I appreciate you, Congresswoman.

When we were at this last summer, the President said, I want a vote before we go on summer break. And you were pleading the charge last summer, saying, No, we are going to hold the line. Even though we are 80 votes short in the House, we are going to talk. We are going to take this battle to the American public. We are going to win the war of ideas.

What we have seen is we got past the summer. We got into the fall. After we got through the fall, it looked like if we could just get into 2010, it will be election year, maybe people will listen then. We saw at Christmastime, we saw the situation where the 60 Democrats got together and they passed it and it looked like we were really in trouble.

And what struck me, you and those on the floor tonight, and my friends and comrades, a band of brothers and sisters, have been discovering in our hearts what our minds knew for a long time, and that is when a group of people stand and do everything in their power to do what is right, they can call on the power of God to help them, just as our forefathers did, and expect to see unusual results.

When I saw Massachusetts with a Republican Senator, I had to start laughing. I thought, Boy, does God have a sense of humor. And we saw, while we didn't have any power at all, all we could do, as you are doing, just tell the hearts of the American people. Let people understand, you are not the only one out there who is feeling like you are crazy. You are not the only one who is starting to see that government is not the answer; government is the problem. The American public is making their voices heard, and they will make them heard in the elections coming up.

Thank you for joining us.

Congressman Thompson.

So what you are talking about isn't exactly a surprise to us. You've been there, and what you are saying is health care is just what you expect. When the government does it, it is inefficient and it is a tremendous waste. And so to try and say, Now we have got Medicare and Medicaid that have gone bankrupt, and so give us the rest of health care to take over, there is a problem with that line of reasoning somehow.

I'm going to yield to my good friend, Congressman Broun, but I can't help but think that we need somebody who's a songwriter. Do you remember there was a guy in Boston that won a political race by writing that song, ``Charlie the MTA?'' It was a sad song about poor old Charlie because he's bound to ride forever because he doesn't have the last nickel for the fare that some politician was pushing, an increase in the rate of the train. But we could have poor Charlie trying to get through this mess, lost forever in this system trying to get his cold medicine, or whatever it is; he's going to get lost forever in that mess.

Congressman Broun from down in Georgia.

I think a lot of Americans have come to the same conclusion, government is the problem, and they want a whole lot less of it down here threatening them from D.C.

My good friend from Texas, Congressman Gohmert.

Now I've got a question: Do you think that the guy that came up with the idea that if we add people that are uninsured to the health care situation it's going to save money maybe was the same guy that said the economy will get better if you spend a whole lot more money? I thought maybe they were twins or something like that.

Dr. Fleming, just got a minute.

All special deals, yeah.

That's an amazing quote, isn't it? We have to pass the 3,000-page bill just to find out what's in it.

Well, there does seem to be some parallelism here, but it seems like it's close to insane almost.

We've got just a minute or so left, and Michele, I wanted to give you the last minute or two here.

Thanks, everybody.

Let's elect her to Congress. That's a good idea.

I think we're about out of time here. I just want to thank the A team for coming out tonight, just a great discussion.

Mr. Speaker, it is a pleasure to be able to join you, my colleagues, and those gathered in various places around the buildings here near the Capitol.

I have had the opportunity, having served in government as a legislator for a number of years, to serve both in the majority, in the minority, but also in the wilderness. This last year and a half has been different; I have served in the wilderness because we have actually come up to the edge of the abyss with a piece of legislation that promises to be so threatening and so destructive to our country that should we decide to swallow this poison pill and pass this piece of legislation, America will never be the same.

I have seen, in the majority and in the minority, pieces of legislation which are harmful and that may be poor solutions to some particular problem or solutions to a problem that doesn't exist or excuses just to have more taxes and more government control, but we have never quite seen a threat like the threat that confronts America today, and we, you and I, my friends, who love the red, white, and blue, are looking off the edge.

I don't know if you have ever stood on the edge of the rim of the Grand Canyon and looked thousands of feet downward, or if you have ever been on the top of some high skyscraper or bridge and looked off into empty space, but that is where we stand tonight. That is where we stand this week or next week in America. We are standing looking into the abyss, into a piece of legislation which is quite possibly going to be passed. And if it is passed, it will leave our Nation very, very weak, much weaker and unlike anything that we have seen before.

It threatens to do two major things: to destroy the quality of health care in America, and to destroy the fiscal integrity of our very country. I am talking, of course, about an old topic, a topic that has been debated now for more than half a year here in Congress. It has absorbed the attention of the Nation, and it is an interesting topic because the more that it has been around, it seems the more the public is aware of it, and the more they see of it, the more they don't like it. In fact, as you start to take the covers off the legislation on health care, it becomes a very ugly picture, and the American public is wise. In fact, the statistical information suggests that at least 20 percent more Americans believe that we would be better not passing this piece of legislation and a great majority think we should just scrap it and start over again by systematically defining a problem and fixing it rather than having government take over all of health care.

Now, the process, the way that the legislature works historically has been so boring that none of the American public pay any attention to it, but that has changed since we have been in the days of looking into the abyss, the abyss of the destruction of health care and the destruction of our economy. And people are becoming conscious of how it is that bills are passed and how they become law.

What would be required to have this health care bill passed would be a process that people call reconciliation. What that means essentially is that the bill would end-run or bypass a safety process in the U.S. Senate. The U.S. Senate has a very conservative way of operating, and that is that you can have a bill that you have 51 Senators who would vote for it--so it would pass if you had a chance to vote on it--but they put this extra caveat, that you have to have 60 Senators agree to bring it up for a vote. So in a sense, everything in the Senate requires a 60 percent approval before it goes to a final vote.

Now, there is an exception to that, and that is because of the necessity of dealing with the budget and spending and taxing and some of those issues, that on certain financial kinds of transactions, because of the fact that we can't afford a gridlock, we allow a 50-vote majority to be able to move something along, and that's called reconciliation. But it is not a process that is typically used for a completely new bill on a very broad subject, which is not just specifically a financial kind of thing.

We have this quote from our President on this subject of reconciliation, he says, ``Reconciliation is, therefore, the wrong place for policy changes.''

Now, wait a minute now, this is the President saying ``reconciliation is, therefore, the wrong place for policy changes. Isn't the health care bill a policy change? I guess it is. It's a whale of a big policy change.

In short, the reconciliation process appears to have lost its proper meaning. A vehicle designed for deficit reduction and fiscal responsibility has been hijacked to facilitate reckless deficits and unsustainable debt. Well, I wish the President would pay attention to his own words. This is what he said, Reconciliation is not a place for policy changes, and yet the health care bill is a massive policy change. It will take over about one-sixth of the U.S. economy. The government will step in and effectively run one-sixth of the U.S. economy with all kinds of rules and regulations and bureaucracies. I guess that's a policy change, Mr. President.

In short, the reconciliation process appears to have lost its proper meaning. Indeed, it does. A vehicle designed for deficit reduction and fiscal responsibility, that's what the reconciliation process was supposed to be about, and in fact it's going to be hijacked. It's been hijacked to facilitate what? To facilitate jamming down the throats of the American public a bill that America clearly does not want us to do. They want to take the reconciliation process as a mechanism to jump with all of America into the abyss.

So I think it's interesting that after the votes, particularly the vote in Massachusetts where the Democrats do not have 60 votes in the Senate, they don't have one Republican that would support this bill, not one, for people who have served in the legislature, that is a huge warning sign. When you see a total party line vote on something, that means there's some problems.

Usually in the legislative process, if it's been done properly, a lot of people have a chance for input, people have a chance to improve and say this part seems to be a little radical, let's go back this way. Usually what you have is more of a mix of people. When you see something being jammed in a process that is not designed--that is, reconciliation--for this massive policy change, and you see not one Republican voting for it, that should be a warning sign for people everywhere, and it is a misuse of reconciliation.

And so while the public is saying in poll after poll, survey after survey, phone call after phone call from our districts, stop this train, do not jump into the abyss, do not allow the Federal Government to take over one-sixth of the economy, and yet, what do we see? We see a tremendous determination to jam this bill through, whether the procedure fits or not. But it's my way or the highway, and we're going to do it because we know what's best for you.

This is a very high-handed approach, and it is something that does not--never does and never will--produce a good consensus in America. It will be something that will divide America, create a tremendous amount of tension and pressure, end up with lousy health care, and a Federal budget that is even more out of control.

Now, if you take a look down here, we have another quote from the Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, and it says, ``This will take courage.'' In other words, for the Democrats to vote for this bill, it will take courage. What does that mean, it will take courage? Well, if it takes courage, it means somebody is going to be mad, somebody is not going to like it. And so you have to be courageous and stand up to somebody who doesn't want you to vote for this bill. Who do you think the ``somebody'' is? Is it the Republicans? The Republicans don't like it, but we have 80 votes less than the Democrats, so we can't say much of anything about it other than explaining why we don't like it. But our votes don't make the difference.

Nancy Pelosi has a whole lot of extra votes. She could have 20 or 30 people vote no and still pass this bill. So why does this take courage? Well, it takes courage because somebody doesn't want it, somebody very much doesn't want it, and they're going to be mad if it's jammed down the throats of the American people. Who is the somebody going to be? You got it, the American public.

People are not going to like this bill. So if you vote for it, the point she's making is you're risking your seat because people are going to be mad. It's interesting when the leader is saying it's going to take courage. That says somebody doesn't like it.

Now, are there some reasons why people don't like the bill? Well, first of all, this is a rough flowchart trying to describe what happens when the government takes over one-sixth of the U.S. economy. Obviously, there's a whole lot of things being done by private institutions which will be replaced with government institutions, and they've got to figure out how to replace it all. So no wonder it takes almost 3,000 pages of bill to try to put some sort of a scheme together for the government to be running the health care business.

Now, on the surface of the whole situation with this bill, this is not an easy sell. As you know, this bill has been around for more than half a year--I guess it's three-quarters of a year. People don't like it very well. The President thinks it's a beautiful bill, but the more that people see it, the less they like it; they think it's an ugly bill.

Well, let's just think about the logic of this, stand way back away from all the details of health care. We've got Medicare and Medicaid, both of those have to do with medicine. They are both very large Federal entitlements, Medicare, Medicaid. In fact, the great challenge to the American budget are three entitlements. People say earmarks is what it's all about. Earmarks are 1 percent. Earmarks are not the thing that's really a threat to the budget. The thing that's a threat to the budget are three entitlements: Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. Two of those have to do with health care--Medicare and Medicaid. And what's the problem with Medicare and Medicaid? Well, they're financially broken, and if they continue as they are right now without changing those laws, they will bankrupt our country.

So we've got Medicare and Medicaid, government programs that are currently bankrupting our country. And so what are we trying to sell the American public? Oh, hey, we've got the government running Medicare and Medicaid, they're bankrupting our country, so let's take over all of health care with the government. There is something intuitively counterintuitive about that, isn't there? Why would you want the government to take over something that it's already messing up, that not working financially, that is in the process of bankrupting our country. If you can't do it in a smaller area of Medicare and Medicaid, why do you want to expand it to everybody?

So this is kind of a hard sell for the President, and that's why it's taking a lot of courage and why this bill is not moving any too fast and why the public doesn't like it. But there are many, many other reasons. You can see the complexity here, and as you can imagine, when you start to look at the details, you find that it is full of a lot of little devils. One of the things that you find--and I think one of the little devils that is perhaps most noxious to a lot of American people--are the special deals. You see, when you have a piece of legislation that's going to take a lot of courage, you have to put some sugar in it to make people vote for it. And the sugar, of course, comes in the special deal form.

So what you find in the legislation--to the best of our knowledge, because the idea about transparency and openness we have not seen, and so we don't actually see exactly what's in this bill in its final form, but you see what it was like in the House, we saw what it was like in the Senate. But we find that it has some of these special little things, that is, that it's going to take $500 billion out of Medicare, but is it taking $500 billion out of Medicare all the way across the country? No. In fact, in the State of Florida, it's not going to take any money out of Medicare Advantage at all. So it won't be coming out in Florida, but in the other States, they do take it out. Well, that was a special deal for somebody in Florida.

Then we've got special deals for--I think it was called Louisiana Purchase II for Louisiana; special deals for Massachusetts that Medicare gets these special reimbursements there; going to build a hospital, as I recall, in New Jersey, but not in other places. So you have special deals. That's one of the things that makes this look ugly to the

voters because you're not treating every State the same; you're making some States pay more and other ones don't, and you're making some special adjustments for various people.

You find there are special adjustments for people who work in a labor union, but somebody who works the same kind of job in a company that's not in a union doesn't get the same break as if you are in a union. So again, this is one of those special deals. The American people in general see that and say that isn't fair, that isn't right, that isn't good legislation, that's special deals. We don't like special deals because they don't treat people equally before the law.

Now, when you take a look at the complexity of this chart, what it suggests is that this is going to be expensive. Not only is it going to be expensive, if you've got a problem and you fall through the crack somewhere, you may never get over to getting any health care at all because it has got so much redtape and bureaucracy. And so the whole idea of this kind of a system working well and providing good quality service is a little bit hard to understand. And when you take a look at the failings of Medicare and Medicaid in terms of the projected way that they're going to take our country into bankruptcy, do you really want to expand all of health care into these categories? So there is a fiscal sanity kind of component.

One of the ways to take a look at the bill and to ask some questions and to get a sense of what's going on as to why this bill is unpopular as people study it and see more and more of it, these are some comparisons of what the health care proposal does. This is the old Democrat bill, this is the President's new online bill, and this would be the Republican alternative, or alternatives. So we have three different bills in comparison here, and a comparison based on a number of different criteria. I think it may be helpful to take a look at some of those.

First of all, it says here that it imposes half a trillion in Medicare cuts. We talked about that just a minute ago. This bill is going to cut Medicare. You always heard the Democrats saying the Republicans are going to take your Medicare away. That didn't turn out to be true, we have not done that, but this bill does. This bill is going to cut $500 billion out of Medicare, and the answer to this of course is yes, the old Democrat bill did that. That's the yes. The President's new bill is going to do the same thing. So it's going to impose a half a trillion in Medicare cuts. The Republican alternative does not.

So this is one of those situations where people are a little uncomfortable. Medicare is having trouble financially, and doctors are not being reimbursed very much in Medicare, so they're starting to not accept new patients because they're not being reimbursed enough to make it worth their while to take patients. If that's a problem in Medicare, why are we going to pull half a trillion dollars out of it? That's one of the ways you can look at these bills. So there is a difference. The Republicans are not proposing that, but both the President's new online bill and the Democrats' bill do that.

Then it also enacts job-killing tax hikes and government regulations, costing hundreds of billions of dollars. It's a $1 trillion bill, which is a conservative estimate. This bill is going to cost a lot more than $1 trillion. How do you pay for it? Guess what. By tax increases-- right?--and with cuts to Medicare. So the tax increases here are going to come from where? Well, a lot of them come from small businesses. When you tax small businesses a whole lot for their employees, guess what's going to happen? They're not going to be able to hire as many employees, so this bill then has the effect of causing unemployment.

So, in our particular climate, with unemployment near 10 percent in America and with not a lot of sense of hope that that employment is going to turn around in a hurry because of very badly shaped policies by the Federal Government, particularly policies which hammer small business owners, to have this bill which is going to tax heavily small business owners and which is going to put tremendous new government regulations on them which will cost billions of dollars is not something, from an unemployment point of view, that is a very good idea.

This is going to be done by the old Democrat bill and the President's new proposal. The Republican alternative, it won't surprise you, is not enthused about tax increases, and we don't know that that's the best way to be dealing with some of our problems in medicine.

I am joined by a very good friend of mine, Congressman Bishop. I would very much appreciate his perspective as to what we are talking about.

I've just been saying--and I don't think I am overdramatizing this-- that, to a degree, it's my sense that America is standing on the edge of an abyss, like looking over the Grand Canyon or something, and that, if we step off the edge and misuse this reconciliation process, we are going to damage our country in a way unlike anything that we have seen before.

Please join me.

It sounds like what you're saying is that you can chrome- plate a pig, but it's still a pig when you're done. Go ahead. Yes.

So, in other words, what's happening is you have other approaches to solving some of the problems of health care, not trying to have the government take it all over but, rather, to fix various component parts. We have a Rules Committee. If you want to offer a suggestion, for instance, they prohibit you from offering it as an amendment to get an up-or-down vote on it; is that correct?

Well, that's the way the process has worked. Yes. Go ahead. Right.

We are basically muzzling a lot of the representative process.

As you said, there have been different analogies. You talked about your son with a candy bar. Another one was the idea of a kitchen that has a broken sink. When you hire a plumber to fix the broken sink, you don't remodel the entire kitchen. Of course, that's the model that the Democrats have been using. It's the concept of, Ha, the sink is broken. Therefore, we can remodel the whole kitchen. They have the idea of remodeling the kitchen, and they've been wanting to do that for a very long time. The broken sink is now the excuse to remodel the whole kitchen.

I think the point of the matter is that the American people would be more comfortable and the legislative process would work better if we were to say, ``Let's define a specific problem in the health care system.'' Instead of having the government take it all over, let's try to solve that one individual problem. I guess it depends on how you explain it or say it.

If I were to ask, Gentleman, would you like the government to buy you a house, you might be tempted to say, Well, that sounds pretty good. Yet, if I were to ask, Would you like to live in government housing, you might think, I'm not so sure I want that. That may be a little bit of an analogy to explain what we've got here.

The idea is to say, ``Hey, don't you want free health care?'' But the other way of looking at it is, Do you really want the government making health care decisions, or would you prefer that your doctor makes those decisions? So it depends how you say it, but the American public has gotten wise to this, and that's why you've got at least 20 percent more in the number of Americans who don't want this program.

You know, I kind of like this chart because I think that some entrepreneur could make money with this chart. If you were to just shrink it down a little smaller and add some additional lines, you could start over here. These are the consumers. These are the people who are sick. The medical professionals are over there. You could sell it to restaurants as a placemat and give people crayons, and customers could try and draw and see if they could get through the maze to get over to the health care professionals, because that's a little bit how this looks.

Now, maybe that sounds like a silly thing to say; but, gentleman, you're in the business in your office--among other parts of the work that we do as Congressmen, we get phone calls from our constituents. Our constituents want us to help them solve problems that they're having with the Federal Government. I'm thinking, if this system gets put in, I'm going to have I don't know how many thousands of people every day on my phone, saying, ``I need this kind of medical care, and I can't get through this system''. They're going to ask me to help them do it. I'm going to say, ``Fat chance. This is a mess.''

Well, you know, I hate to admit how many years I've served in the legislative body. I started by saying I've served in the majority, in the minority and now in the wilderness.

As to most legislation I've seen that works pretty well, surprisingly enough, people are sold on it. There is a process of a bunch of people coming together, defining a problem, working on a solution. Frequently when they start, the bills are pretty rough, are pretty hard to understand, and have a lot of questions and problems in them; but as more and more people have a chance to work on them, to roll their sleeves up and have input in them, the bills get refined.

In the business world, if you want to mess something up, you send it to a committee. In the political world, when committees work on legislation, they tend to refine the product. After a period of time, what happens is you have certain ideas that some people just can't tolerate, and you tend to throw the radical stuff out. What you can agree to comes together. When that happens and particularly when it

happens across party lines, you don't have major fundamental reform, but you change, and you fix things in ways that solve people's problems.

What happened this year is we had 80 less seats than the Democrats, so they thought, We don't need the Republicans. The dickens with the Republicans. We've got such a majority that we can do whatever we want. As they've marched off to totally change all of health care, now they've gotten kind of in a jam because they're realizing the public is not agreeing with it, and they don't have one Republican vote. That's very, very unusual politically that there is not at least one Republican who would vote for a bill.

That says that this has been such a partisan kind of approach, and that's why there is cause to scrap it. It's not that people are going to go back to ground zero in health care, but they're saying this approach right here is just too much.

You are right. The thing about legislation, because it affects so many people, it is so expensive and what you sometimes create can never be taken back, it is absolutely crucial that we get this thing right the first time. We would be far better off--I guess it is maybe a little bit like choosing a wife. You want to be sure you choose the right one the first time. It is less expensive that way.

This is something you want to get it right the first time, and if there is doubt, if there are questions, then it says it is probably better to slow up and take a good look at what you are doing.

Now, there are some things about the bill that are being proposed here that are just completely anathema to many, many Americans. I think if you have to say, well, what would some of those things be, I mentioned the special deals. People don't like that.

But if you get to the heart of what is going on in health care, it is that relationship between you when you are sick and your doctor. We call it the doctor-patient relationship. I think that is fundamental to our understanding of what good health care has to start with, and that is that you have got qualified, professional doctors who work with somebody who is ill. The family and the doctor come together and they put together a solution as to what is going to happen and what the doctors can do to help you with your health.

Now, one of the things that gets people very upset, and with good reason, is when somebody butts in to that doctor-patient relationship. One of the examples that we have seen too frequently is that we have allowed insurance companies sometimes to jump into that doctor-patient relationship, and they say, oh, we are not jumping into the doctor- patient relationship; it is just that we are deciding what we will fund and what we won't fund. In other words, the doctor says you need to do X, Y, and Z, and the insurance company says, oh, you don't need to do that. So we don't like it when somebody who is not a medical professional starts to superintend over our health care and we don't have any control of it.

What is even worse is that when the doctor makes a medical mistake, he is going to get sued, but when the insurance company says you don't need to do that and then you up and die and your relatives say, hey, the insurance companies just cost a life, well, it turns out they don't have any medical liability. That is not a good situation.

But it is not the worst situation. Something worse could happen. It is this. This is what is worse. Instead of an insurance company, which, if you want to, if you have to, you can change your insurance company, this is going to put a government bureaucrat between you and your doctor, and that is something that I don't know a single Republican that likes that idea.

We don't think we want government bureaucrats getting between you and your doctor. And how is that going to happen? Well, because the bureaucrats have got their calculators, and as they calculate, they say, how old are you? What are the statistical chances of this? Whoops, you don't get this care.

So the bureaucrats say, we are not going to allow you to get this kind of health care. And the doctor says, no, I understand the statistics, but in this case this particular medical treatment is necessary. And the bureaucrat says, no, you can't get it. That is one of the reasons why in the United Kingdom health care death rates are much higher than they are in America, because of the fact that the bureaucrats say, no, you can't get any care.

I do yield to my good friend from Utah.

I couldn't agree with you more, and I do think that is a fundamental question. And when people talk about compromise, I would picture people on the outside of Congress saying, why can't those people just get together, solve a problem, bury their partisan hatchets and just serve the American public?

Part of the reason why you don't see that is because there are really fundamental differences of opinion on what you do with health care, and one of the very, very big ones is that question: Is it going to be between you and your doctor or is it going to be between you and the Federal Government and some doctor that they choose? And that is a very, very big difference in opinions on health care, and this system forces the Federal Government between you and your doctor, and it is why it doesn't have any support, among other reasons, from Republicans.

There are a couple of other things here we probably ought to talk about,

because when we talk about health care being too expensive, one of the things that really increases the cost of health care has been attorneys, particularly trial attorneys who are going to sue doctors for having done the wrong thing.

Now, there are times when doctors do the wrong thing. There are times when doctors do the wrong thing. They need to fix it and need to pay for some of the damages that their actions caused. But this is more than that. These are these punitive lawsuits with millions of dollar claims. And what does that do? It adds a tremendous cost to the cost of health care. So, one of the ideas, if you want to reduce the cost of health care, is that you want to have what is called tort reform.

We were promised in Baltimore by the President that certainly he believed in tort reform. But as we take a look at the legislation that we have got, one of the things that you find is that the supposed tort reform in this bill, the old Democrat bill, and I believe the President's new bill, although I am not sure this is in there, is the fact that the States that have enacted tort reform, such as my own State of Missouri, the States that have enacted tort reform, they cannot keep that tort reform in place when this medical bill goes in. So it gets rid of tort reform instead of making tort reform.

Now, I said that costs a whole lot of money if you don't have tort reform, or tort reform is a good idea to reduce the cost of health care. In the State of Missouri, it has dropped the cost of health care significantly, I am talking in excess of 10 or so percent, States that have decent tort reform. It reduces the cost of medicine. So, that is a reform that Republicans wanted to do, and it is not included in the bill, which is the tort reform.

I do yield.

The cost of the system, and what is the other?

It seems to me the study has already occurred. Various States have done it, tried it, and it saved a lot of money. What more do we need to study on it?

Well, but it is something that needs to be dealt with. If we just kind of run through that, I think people can understand. You are a doctor. You have somebody who is ill, and you think, well, I am pretty sure this is what is wrong with them, but it could be five other things, so I am going to run all these tests, some of them are very expensive tests, just in case, no matter what, so if anything goes wrong, anybody gets me in a courtroom, I can say I did absolutely everything that anybody could do, and a whole lot more besides.

Well, of course, that costs a whole lot more money, and they are doing it strictly to cover their tails because they don't want to be sued and have millions and millions of dollars thrown against them and run their cost of insurance up.

Now, if their insurance goes up and up and up, guess how they have to pay for that insurance? By charging the patients more money. So that is how this tort reform can save in various States. We don't have to study it. It saved a whole lot of money in a great number of States.

So those are some things that I think are important. I talked a little bit about reconciliation, the misuse of that process. I had a good quotation here from a prominent Senator. A prominent Senator was looking at reconciliation. That is the process the Democrats are talking about doing. And this prominent Senator, you have got it, it is the President, says, ``Reconciliation is, therefore, the wrong place for policy changes.''

I think the government taking over one-sixth of the U.S. economy would probably qualify as a policy change.

He says, in short, the reconciliation process appears to have lost its proper meaning, a vehicle designed for deficit reduction and fiscal responsibility. This doesn't seem like deficit reduction and fiscal responsibility. It seems like it is a policy change.

We have to agree with the President that this is not the place for reconciliation. And yet, guess what? In spite of the fact that Massachusetts has even voted on this, we are going to jam this bill through, whether you want it or not, using this process, the misuse of this process called reconciliation, which most people have never heard of before, but it is by hook and by crook and not by a legitimate method.

Here it benefits trial attorneys, by failing to enact meaningful lawsuit reform. That is that tort reform. The old Democrat bill does not put it in; the new one does not. The Republican believes, yes, we should have tort reform.

Here is another one. Protects backroom deals with Washington special interests. There have been a lot of special deals in these particular bills. I think the one that I find most offensive was an agreement made with insurance companies that said if an insurance company makes a decision that overrides the doctor-patient relationship--that is, they say, yeah, we recognize the doctor-patient relationship; we are just not going to pay for it--if they do that and something goes wrong, the insurance company cannot be sued. So the doctor gets sued for everything. But if the insurance company that is not a medical authority makes a decision, the decision turns out to be bad, yes, the doctor said your wife should go to the hospital but we said we are not going to cover it, she doesn't really need to go to the hospital, and then she gets really, really sick because she should have been in the hospital, guess what happens? The insurance company has no liability whatsoever. So that is one of the backroom deals that is particularly upsetting.

The other one we talked about puts the government bureaucrats in charge of personal health care decisions. The Democrat bills are doing that. That is why Republicans--this isn't a matter of, hey, can't you just be a little open minded? No, I can't be open minded. I don't want the government involved in health care decisions with my body.

The Republican proposals don't do that. We're joined--I don't know whether he wants to join us yet or not--by a good friend of mine from Texas. No, he's not quite ready. Will you talk to us in a few minutes? We'd like to have you as part of our discussion. But you're going to do another hour.

Here's one. This is: Breaks President Obama's pledge to not raise taxes on those who make less than $250,000. I recall in the campaign he said, I'm not going to tax anybody who makes less than $250,000. And I thought, Man, am I

glad about that, because I don't make $250,000. I'm going to skate free for 5 years. No taxes. It's not going to be a big deal.

Well, the trouble was the House passed a bill not so long ago that was going to get you. If you flipped the light switch, you were going to get taxed. That doesn't have anything to do with $250,000. This bill is going to tax a whole lot of people making less than $250,000. Yes, it does. And the old Democrat bill, the President's new bill, yes, it is taxing people under $250,000 very heavily. In fact, it mandates that you have to buy a government product, which is unconstitutional. The Republican bill doesn't do that.

My good friend from Utah.

I really appreciate your highlighting this question of unemployment because I really think that a whole lot of Americans would think we were more effective and that they would have more respect for Congress if we were dealing with the fact that we've got a 10-plus percent unemployment rate out there. And in fact that number is probably conservative because of the fact that if you haven't had a job in a year, you're no longer part of the statistic. So as people get more and more discouraged, don't get a job, they fall off those numbers, and we still have a 10 percent unemployment rate.

So I think a lot of the public would say, Hey, why don't you guys pay attention to unemployment. Well, here's a way to pay attention to unemployment. We've got a bill here that, on the face of it, economists have rated it's going to cost 5 million jobs. Why in the world would this proposal cost 5 million jobs? Well, you just hit it. But do it again, gentleman, so people can make that connection.

You have got to understand, this is going to increase unemployment in America. Is that what the public wants, more unemployment? I don't think so. But please run through that again. You're a small businessman and this bill passes, and what does that mean?

Right. So we don't have to create unemployment and deal with health care. It's just that this approach is going to create unemployment. Now let's take a look at how that works. There's a number of ways that unemployment is going to be driven. The first is you're going to tax the guy that owns the business. When you tax somebody that owns a business, it means he's got to give money to Washington, D.C. That means he can't take that same money and put it back in his business to add a wing to the business, to buy a new machine tool to create a new process to create more jobs, because instead of taking the money to build the small business, you're taking it to give to the government to run health care. So when you take money away from the owner of a small business, you're going to kill the job creation process.

What else does it do? Well, it creates a lot of redtape for business owners. And when you create redtape, that also makes it so that it's harder for them to be efficient and competitive. And so that tends to hurt job creation. You also, because this bill has been sitting around and been hanging, scaring everybody to death for three quarters of a year, it creates a sense of tension and a restlessness, so that business owners are saying, I don't know what the business climate is going to look like in 6 months. I don't dare take a risk because I see threats on the horizon to the financial stability of my company.

It forces individuals to purchase government-approved health insurance. Let's talk about that for a minute. Yeah, the old Democrat plan forced you, it forces everybody in America to buy something. And the President's new version forces you to buy something. The Republican does not force you to. And aside from the fact that Americans don't like to be told that you have to buy something, there's a small detail: It's not constitutional. When can the government tell you that you have to go out and buy a gun or you have to go buy a watermelon or something? That's not constitutional for the government to tell you you have to buy something. Yet, that's what's going on here.

Well, I think we have had a chance to take a look tonight at what I started out by saying that we are standing as Americans on the edge of an abyss. I recall standing on the rim of the Grand Canyon and seeing a thousand feet of open space in front of me. And in a sense, that's where we stand today, with America perhaps politically poised to push forward using a misuse of a process to force this government takeover of health care down the throats of many, many Americans who do not want to see this take place.

This is a very serious moment in American history. I can recall historically there's been other very, very serious moments in American history. The Pilgrims standing on the frozen shore of Plymouth with the dream of creating a new kind of civilization; our President-to-be, President George Washington, on his knees at Valley Forge, praying for his little army. And even old skeptic Ben Franklin at the Constitutional Convention asking for prayer each day.

In all of these cases, Americans discovered that in their hour of need they turned to God for his help and his guidance. I believe as we stand on the abyss tonight, for those Americans who are wont to turn to God for answers, that this is a time to be doing that. To ask for his help supernaturally so that we don't make this fatal step pushing our Nation into socialized medicine, creating a precedent for our citizens to be continually handcuffed to a government health care in a system which no politician that's freely elected could ever reverse because the public would say, You're going to take my government health care away. I won't elect you. That's been the experience of other countries. It completely changes the nature of the freedom and the nature of the quality of health care in America if we'd fall off this abyss. And it's time for some prayers.

God bless you all. Thank you. And good night.

I just appreciate your discipline, and having worked through specifically and exactly what the bill says. Because it is easy to say that this bill isn't going to cost a dime because somebody can say it isn't going to cost a dime. Well, that is because it is going to cost a trillion dollars instead. And you are clarifying the importance of words here.

But let me ask you this question: Is it true that the policy defines what insurance has to cover? And therefore, does the Federal Government tell you that you have to have this, this, and this in your policy, and therefore force the policy to be changed even if you didn't want to change it?

The summary of the summary is longer than the summary of the bill.

So if we had the summary of the summary of the summary, would that be 3,000 pages?

So this is a one-size-fits-all.

Then using your logic, the one-size-fits-all then has to change existing policies. And when you change those policies, then you don't have the same policy that you were promised you could keep.

Am I getting the drift of this right?

So you have got one choice. It is a little bit like Henry Ford's automobile. You can get any color you want as long as it's black. In this case, you can get any health insurance you want as long as it's the government policy.

So what you are really talking about is a mandate, isn't it? This is a mandate that says that you've got to buy the government product.

Well, actually, you got to the point that I was going to ask. I know that you are not only an attorney, but you have also served as a judge, as well as a Congressman that we've come to respect. And so what I was going to ask is, is it constitutional for the Federal Government to tell somebody that they have to buy insurance this way? And what I'm thinking I'm hearing you say is that this would be something, if the Supreme Court would look at it--and I know you don't know exactly how they think or what they're going to rule, but if you use the basis of the Constitution, this would be marginally and maybe not constitutional. Is that what I'm hearing you saying?

That's the punitive damages, right?

So we have got not tort reform but reverse tort reform, where the States that have enacted tort reform and have reduced the cost of health care accordingly are now going to be told that they're going to have to reverse that legislation so there is a tort reform. Isn't this the reverse?

Missouri has enacted the same thing. We've had the same experience. It's dropped the cost of health care.

Didn't you start by saying that there is this sort of fallacious line of reasoning where you create a straw horse; is that correct?

A straw dog or a straw horse. And you say that your opponents think this, and then you beat it up. Yet you and I have been here. I have been a Republican now--this is my 10th year. I have never heard Republicans say, We want to reduce or relax what health insurance companies are doing. We've been railing on the fact that we don't want them to get somebody who is not a medical person between a doctor and a patient. We've been trying to defend that point, and certainly we wouldn't do what this bill does, which allows an insurance company to get between a doctor and a patient, make a medical decision in practice and then not be held accountable for that decision.

I don't know where the President comes up with this idea or who it is who writes the speeches for him, but it just isn't really true.

But the problem is, it's one thing with lip service to say that you like the doctor-patient relationship. It's another thing to try to substitute a bureaucrat in between that relationship. And that's what we've been objecting to all the way along.

It paints a vivid picture. And as much as you and I have always railed against insurance companies making health care decisions, that's not quite so bad, because if you don't like the insurance company, you can change to a different insurance company. You might have to change your job to do it. But you can change your insurance company. It's not so easy to change the U.S. Federal Government.

I bet you a lot of people would have wanted to tune in on that.

And yet they have still not scored your bill that has been sitting there since last summer.

That makes it awfully awkward, because let's say that some of these bills were scored. You know this well, some of these bills would save a lot of money. And somebody is going to ask: We have a President who wants to spend a trillion dollars at the cost of $5 million in jobs to pass a government takeover of health care, and the Republicans have a plan that is actually going to cut the cost of health care, doesn't have tax increases in it, why not take the less expensive plan? Somebody is going to ask that question. But it is a lot easier if the Republican bills have not had a chance to be scored.

Interestingly, there is a guy who is scoring the President's bill who is not CBO, and he is a Democrat. I don't know if you have heard of him, but he is the Democratic Governor of Tennessee. Why would he say anything bad about the Democrats' health care bill, the President's health care bill? The reason is because, guess what, Tennessee is going to have to pay for this government takeover of health care. That trillion dollar price tag that CBO hooked on this bill is not all the cost because some of it is hidden. And guess who is going to pick up some of the pieces of that, it is going to be the various States, and the various States like Tennessee that have tried this government-run scheme of health care. They know it is a disaster. It wrecked health care in Tennessee and Massachusetts. It ran the cost of health care in Tennessee and Massachusetts way up. So that Democrat Governor, who also could be taken to the woodshed, says no, this is a bad idea. This is going to be very expensive, and States have balanced budgets, how are we going to pay for this thing.

So there is somebody that is scoring the bill and it is not CBO; it is a Democrat. And he is saying no, it is too expensive.

You are making a point here, my friend. I don't know if you knew that you left off to preaching and went on to meddling, because when you talk about cancer, I am a cancer survivor myself.

If you take a look at cancer survival rates in England, you find they tend to be about 20 percent worse than they are in America. Why is that? Well, you have explained it very accurately, and that is cancer is particularly sensitive. When you diagnose it, you want to get to it quickly before it spreads or gets too bad. The idea of putting someone on a long waiting list is deadly when you are dealing with cancer.

So if you have cancer, you have a much, much higher percent of dying from that if you are in Canada or particularly in England, and it is because of the waiting list. Governments have a little bit of sensitivity to them. Instead of telling you that they are going to deny your health care, they say no, you have to get in line. You can get a free Cesarian section; you just have to wait 12 months. But I needed it in 9. Well, that is a problem, isn't it.

So what you are talking about is a sensitive subject to me because I had cancer in this country. When they discovered it, I thought it was time to take care of it right away and so did the doctor and so did the hospital. I had it on spring break. I had an operation to try to get rid of the cancer back 9 years ago, my very first spring break down here.

But in America, when you get cancer, something the doctor says is, it's time to move, let's go. That's why we have such better survival rates, and that's why the guy from Canada wants to come here to get health care.

You know, it's sort of a ``shall'' bill.

One little ``may'' sitting in there. And the American public picks up on that and says, well, maybe you're not that sure that this bill is such a good thing. It doesn't seem like it's good for you guys.

I think you have really been pretty humble here in talking about that Declaration of Health Care Independence because you're one of the people that wrote it, and you're laying out those basic principles.

I had a chance to speak this last weekend to a pretty good size crowd back in St. Louis, and one of the things that I wanted to talk about or mention was the fact that if Republicans have made the mistakes, it seemed to me we have made just one mistake, but we make it over and over, and that is when we don't stick to basic principles that we believe in.

What you took time to do, gentleman--and I want to just let people know that the guy from Texas that worked on writing this declaration of health care rights, what you're doing is you're laying out these basic principles. You talk about transparency; that's something that is supposed to have been promised to us. You talk about if it's good enough for everybody else, it ought to be good enough for those of us in Congress. That's kind of a basic principle you're talking about that you should not get in the way of the doctor-patient relationship. You're laying out those basic principles in this health care Declaration of Independence, and I think you have--and I was in the meetings where we were writing it too. The point is, other people can write it, other people can sign their name on the bottom, too; isn't that correct?

Madam Speaker, this evening we stand just before a day-- tomorrow--of great political drama.

I am trained as an engineer, and not much of an expert on drama or plays, but I have at least one theory about acting in plays and drama, and that is, usually it's very good or very bad.

As we take a look at the drama that faces people who will be watching tomorrow, the question tonight is: What drama are they liable to watch? Are they going to watch the Olympics, the last part of the Olympics, which will be very exciting, or the political drama of 6 hours of discussions or debate? I think there will be more drama that will take place tomorrow on the health care bill.

Now, we have been talking about this health care bill for more than a year, and the subject has had a tendency to get a little bit stale, but tomorrow is an attempt to revive that discussion. One of the things that is required in good drama is the theme, or the major topic, and the different parts of that drama have to be believable. I think that's one of the things that may make the drama tomorrow more difficult in terms of its success. Let's just talk about what really is believable.

The President claimed about a year or so ago--I guess it was in a State of the Union message--that this new health care was going to save money and that it wouldn't cost us a dime. Well, I guess that's true. It's going to cost more like $1 trillion. Is that believable?

The President repeatedly said that Republicans had no ideas. Yet, in Baltimore, just a month or two ago, he said, not that the Republicans had no ideas, but that he'd read a good number of the bills that had been introduced by the Republicans. Is that believable?

The President also pledged transparency and openness in the whole process of developing a health care bill. What we have seen has been that bills are developed behind closed doors, and for tomorrow, the bill that has been created behind closed doors is going to be revealed only for 24 hours. So is the transparency-openness pledge believable?

In Baltimore, the President talked about the fact that he has a lot of economic experts scoring the bill and taking a look at whether it works financially or not, whether or not the different component parts come together and whether or not it achieves the economic results that he wants. Yet, when the Congressional Budget Office, which is supposedly and to a large degree politically neutral, scored the bill, they said that the Republican bill actually reduces premiums by 10 percent while the Democrat bill makes them more expensive.

Then there is a question about whether or not the meeting tomorrow, which is attempting to be billed as bipartisan and bipartisanship--does that really make sense? Because, if you write a bill behind closed doors, unveiling it at the last minute, within 24 hours, and then demand that the Republicans agree to it, is that really bipartisanship? I wonder if that is believable.

The President promised us that the bill that he was going to present when he was in Baltimore would include tort reform. Yet the bill that we have seen did the exact opposite. The States that had already enacted tort reform were forbidden from using those tort reform laws. So, in effect, it would reverse tort reform and would go in the exact opposite direction. Is that believable?

We were told that the special deals have been taken out. Yet, in a few minutes, we will take a look at those special deals which remain in the bill.

Then last of all--and it is the one that I find most amazing--the Republicans are obstructionists. I find that hard to believe how anybody could even repeat that, let alone believe it. I wish it were true. I sorely wish it were true. The Republicans here in this Chamber, my Republican colleagues, are 40 votes short of a majority. There is nothing that we could obstruct if our lives depended on it. The Democrats could lose 20 voters and still pass anything that they choose to pass. So how we could be, as Republicans, obstructionists, again, seems very hard to pass the old sniff test.

Now, it seems that the President, in setting up this great drama of 6 hours of televised discussion on health care, has made a major assumption, which is, if people just knew what was in his bill, they would really like it. Probably the opposite is true. What we have seen is our constituents, my constituents, have called in, and they have read portions of these bills. They know what is in the bill. Guess what? They don't like it. In fact, this bill that is being proposed is ugly. It's so ugly it has to sneak up on a glass of water just to get a drink. Well, let's take a look specifically at why it is that we are going to have this great health care political drama tomorrow, and yet we are not really passing the believable test. Let's just take a look to see if anything has really changed at all.

First of all, this bill imposes $500 billion in Medicare cuts. That's a whole lot of money. Five hundred billion dollars is going to be taken out of Medicare. The old Democrat bill took $500 billion out of Medicare. The President's new bill takes $500 billion out of Medicare. The Republican alternative takes nothing out of Medicare. Well, nothing seems to have changed here.

This bill enacts job-killing tax hikes and government regulations, costing hundreds of billions of dollars. In the old Democrat bill, yes, that was true for it. The President's new plan, which is online, likewise enacts a lot of job-killing tax hikes and government regulations that cost billions of dollars. Yet the Republican alternative does not.

It spends $1 trillion on a government takeover of the health care system. This is something that people are really conscious of. This is a government takeover of an entire sector of the U.S. economy--$1 trillion. I think that number is short because it's not counting the unfunded mandates to States. The old Democrat bill does that. The President's new bill does it. The Republican

bill does not. So what has changed here?

It benefits trial lawyers by failing to enact tort reform. Well, the old Democrat bill did not have any real tort reform in it. In fact, it went the opposite way. The President's new bill is not different. The Republican alternative is the opposite. It protects backroom deals with Washington special interests. We've been told these deals have been taken out, but they've not been taken out. The old bill had those special deals. The new bill does. The Republican bill does not.

It puts government bureaucrats in charge of personal health care decisions. This is something a lot of Americans are very concerned with. It's bad enough if some insurance company is getting between you and your doctor, but it's even worse if a government bureaucrat does because, if you don't like the insurance company, you can change companies. You can't change governments. So, again, the new proposal is no different than the Democrat proposal, and the Republicans are not doing that.

It breaks President Obama's pledge not to raise taxes on those who make less than $250,000. Well, certainly, the old Democrat bill did raise taxes on people making less than $250,000. The new proposal still taxes people more who make less than $250,000. The Republican proposal does not.

It forces individuals to purchase government-approved health insurance. That's something that people are pretty sensitive to--the government's telling you that you must buy health insurance. The old Democrat bill does that. The President's proposal still does it. Republicans reject that idea. It forces employers to choose government- approved health insurance or they are going to have to pay a new tax. So the government is going to tell you what kind of insurance you have got to purchase or you are going to have to pay a new kind of tax. The old Democrat bill did that. What the President is proposing continues to do it. The Republicans don't.

So is this great drama that is supposed to take place tomorrow really something new? I'm not so sure that it is in that it seems to follow the same pattern.

Now, if we take a look at the proposal, the proposal is still pretty much the same thing. Here is a picture of what this bill looks like. You have got a 2,000-page bill, and it is pretty complicated. To try and read 2,000 pages in 24 hours is quite an undertaking. The only advantage that some of us have is that it's so much like the other proposals that it is not really that different. You don't have to read all 2,000 pages of it to know what's in there.

As I mentioned, the President makes an assumption, which is that, if people just understood the bill better--now that's obviously something that he could talk about for 6 hours, I think, if it's that complicated. If people just understood the bill better, they would like it.

What I would propose is that the President is mistaken in that regard. What I would like to talk about for just a few minutes are the people who are not going to like this bill when they see what it has got in it, because there are a lot of these groups of Americans, various groups, and I will tell you which groups they are and why they're not going to like this bill. I think, the more that this bill is talked about and the more that people read it and see how it works, what's going to happen is that you're going to see these numbers change.

Right now, in the public opinion of health care, 58 percent of voters nationwide oppose the Obama health care reform plan; 58 percent oppose it; 50 percent of voters strongly oppose the plan, and 78 percent of voters expect the plan to cost more than projected. So it's not very popular now. The question is: If they see 6 more hours of drama, are they going to like the plan any more? I would suggest that there are all kinds of groups of people who are not going to like this plan. Let me talk to you about some of those groups of people.

The first is a category that I am increasingly putting myself in, and that's the group of people who are older. I just hit 62 years old, so I'm feeling a little bit older, and older people aren't going to like this plan for a couple of reasons:

The first reason they won't like it is because of something we mentioned just a minute ago, which is that this is going to take $500 billion out of Medicare. Now, when I was first getting started in politics years ago, the Democrats always accused Republicans of taking money away from Medicare. Yet, ironically, this bill which is being proposed by the President is taking $500 billion out of Medicare. So, if you're an older person, you probably won't like it for that reason.

If you are an older person, there is a bigger and more serious reason that you will not like this bill. If you are older, you will go to see the doctor more. If you go to see the doctor more, what this bill is going to do is it is going to harm the quality of American health care. It will harm the quality. This has been the experience of every nation that has had its government take over health care. It has also been the experience of two States--Massachusetts and Tennessee--which have had their State governments try to take over health care. In every one of those experiences, the quality of health care has gone down, and the cost of health care has gone up.

So, if you are an older person and if you see the doctor a little bit more, first of all, you're not going to like that great big cut to Medicare. Second of all, the quality of your health care is going to go down.

Now let's say, instead of being older, you're young. Certainly you would like the bill if the older people don't like it. No. Wrong. If you're young, you won't like the bill because this bill forces you to pay for government insurance which is written the way the government says you have to buy the insurance. If you don't buy that insurance, you're going to be penalized. You're going to have to pay a penalty.

If you are a young person, if you like freedom and if you don't want the government telling you what kind of insurance to buy or if you have to buy insurance, you won't like this bill for those reasons.

The next group of people that will probably not like this bill is the group of people who are married. What this bill does to married people is it says, if you're married, you're going to have to pay more money for your health insurance than if you're single. So there is a marriage penalty in this bill.

In other words, if you have two individuals who are both making the same amount of money--say you have two individuals making $32,000 a year. If you take a look at what those two single individuals have to pay, because they get all the subsidies under this bill, they are going to have to pay a lot less than the two people, as husband and wife, who are making the same amount of money. Those people will have to pay $2,000 more. So this bill contains, for that example, $2,000 of penalties for people who are married. So, if you're married, you probably won't like this bill.

Now, if you happen to fall in the category of being pro-life, or at least if you fall in the category of not wanting government money, your tax money, to pay for abortions, you won't like this bill because the bill that's being proposed is the Senate bill, and it allows in these insurance policies, which are government funded, for people to get abortions through the policies.

So there is not a strict and clean line in the bill the way the House version of the bill was passed which says that there is absolutely no using these government policies to do abortions. So if you're pro-life, you will not like the Senate version of this bill, and you will hear people who are involved in the pro-life cause standing and arguing vigorously that the Senate version is unacceptable.

Now, if you own a small business, you're not going to like this bill. If you own a small business, this is going to cause you trouble in a number of different ways. First of all, you're going to be taxed a tremendous amount of money to help pay for this whole thing. If you think about small business in America as being people who have 500 employees or less, that is, 80 percent of the jobs in America are small business people, those companies are not going to like this bill, the people that run those companies, because of the fact that it requires those companies, first of all, to pay a great deal of increased

taxes to help pay for the trillion-plus-dollar bill in this package, but also it requires those companies to buy the insurance that the government tells them they have to buy, and if even one employee doesn't like it, then there are going to be additional penalties. This is going to cost small businessmen a lot of taxes and a lot of regulations and red tape. If you're a small businessman, you're not going to like this bill.

If you're unemployed, you won't like this bill because this bill is going to cost jobs. It will make it harder for you to get your next job. How is it that this bill will make it harder for you to get your job? We'll get into that in a little bit more detail later, but the basic elements of creating jobs in our economy is allowing the small businesses to create the jobs by creating an environment in the small business that makes jobs.

How does that happen? Well, one, you don't want to tax the guy that owns the business because you want him to put his money back into the business to expand it, to buy new equipment, to put a new wing on the building in order to create more jobs. This bill does the exact opposite. It buries the small business owner in taxes and red tape and a lot of unknown costs for health care. When you do that, it's going to make the small business less likely to hire people, and, therefore, if you're unemployed, it's going to make it a lot harder to get a job because this is a job-killing proposal. So if you are an unemployed person, this is not something that you want to see passing right away.

The people in America who own health insurance are not going to like this bill. If you own health insurance, what this bill is going to do is it's going to charge you more money for your health insurance to help pay for the people who haven't bought any health insurance. So this bill is going to cost you more for the health insurance if you own health insurance.

Let's just run through the list of who wouldn't like this bill. If you're older, you won't like the bill. If you're young, you won't like the bill. If you're married, you won't like the bill. If you're pro- life, you won't like the bill. If you're a small business owner, you won't like the bill. And if you're somebody looking to get a job from that small business owner, you still won't like the bill. Then also if you have health insurance, you're not going to like the bill either. So there's a whole lot of people that just naturally when they take a look at what all of this complicated maze means to them, those are all people who aren't going to like this proposal.

Is that all there are who won't like the proposal? Oh, no. There are a lot of other people who won't like the proposal as well. Let's take a look at some of the others.

If you are concerned about illegal immigration, you won't like the bill because this bill provides no guarantee that illegal immigrants cannot come in and get health care and get the subsidies to health care that will have to be paid for by the American public and all the people who are taxed to pay for this measure. So if you're concerned about illegal immigrants coming and getting a free ride in terms of government-paid-for health care, this bill does not contain the protections. If you're worried about illegal immigrants coming into this country and getting subsidized health care, this bill does that and there is no protection against it.

If you're one of 36 States who do not want the Federal Government to mandate that everybody in your State has to buy government-certified health care, if you want the people in your State to have some sovereignty, if you care about State sovereignty and you want the people of your State to make their own decisions how they'll spend their money and you don't want the Federal Government to force the people in your State to pay for insurance, then this bill is something that you don't want. And there are 36 different States, out of 50, 36 States that have legislation that is in the process of moving in those States essentially banning the Federal Government from requiring citizens of those States to have to buy health insurance product. So if you're one of those 36 States where the legislators are saying we don't want the Federal Government butting into our business, telling our citizens that they have to buy insurance, then this is something that you certainly wouldn't want.

The other people that might not like this, and this probably goes almost without saying, are people who make a fair amount of money. People who make a fair amount of money are going to be taxed very heavily in a number of different regards to try to help subsidize this new health insurance plan. If you're well-to-do and you don't like huge taxes, then you certainly are not going to like this plan.

If you happen to be somebody that's concerned with doing things in a just way, that is, if you're concerned that every State gets the same deal, that there are no special deals in this legislation, you're not going to like it. We've been told that the special deals have been taken out. But, unfortunately, that's not true. Here are some of the special deals in this proposal that are still there:

One of them is what they call Louisiana Purchase No. 2. And that is something for, I believe, Mary Landrieu out in Louisiana. The cost is $300 million, and it provides a special assignment for States recovering from a major disaster. It's written just to include this one State, and it's $300 million to add to the State Medicaid program. So that's a $300 million special deal for Louisiana.

How about for Connecticut? Yes, there is a special deal for a Connecticut hospital, $100 million, which appears to apply only to some Connecticut hospitals.

There's millions of Medicaid dollars for Vermont and Massachusetts, that's $1.1 billion total. It helps with the Medicaid program and gives about $600 million to Vermont; Massachusetts $500 million, for those States.

Cash for New Jersey drug companies. New Jersey's getting a deal. The cost is $1 billion for special deals for New Jersey.

Extra cash for union health care plans. This is a deal of $5 billion. It says that there's going to be a reinsurance program to defray the medical costs of union members. So that's $5 billion for union member health care costs.

Are there other special deals? Yes, in fact, there are. We don't have to pay any Medicare Advantage. Remember how I said this bill is going to cut $500 billion from Medicare. But it won't cut Medicare Advantage for people in Florida. So if you're in Florida, you won't get that Medicare Advantage cut; the other States will.

Special funding for coal miners in Montana. Yes, it does. The cost, we're not quite sure what that is, but it's Medicare coverage for workers exposed to environmental health hazards.

There is a fee exemption for politically connected insurers, in Michigan apparently. Higher Medicare payments for North Dakota providers. Hawaii hospitals are getting exempt from the cuts. And longshoremen are exempt from tax or health plans. There is a whole series of special deals. So if you don't like special deals for various States that your State doesn't get, you won't like this plan.

I think one of the groups, and this is probably not exactly small that doesn't like this plan, would be doctors. Why would that be? Well, what does a doctor do? Why does a doctor become a doctor? Many of them will say that they really wanted to take care of people and help them with their health care. Why, then, would a doctor dislike this plan other than its great complexity?

Well, one of the things that's extremely frustrating to doctors, as well as patients, is something that we don't like but has happened, and that is you allow an insurance company to come between a doctor and a patient. I think most people consider that doctor-patient relation-- certainly my Republican colleagues would say if there's anything in health care that should be principally sacred, it would be the fact that the doctor and the patient need to make the final decisions on health care. That's something that we don't want to have disturbed, and if an insurance company is allowed to come between the doctor and the patient, we don't like that. We don't want somebody that's not a doctor getting involved in medical decisions.

Unfortunately, in versions of this plan, what you have is you have insurance companies who are allowed to

make medical decisions and are not held legally accountable for the outcome of those decisions. That's bad enough, but a doctor particularly won't like this plan because, instead of an insurance company, which you can always change or at least you have some chance to change, you have no chance to change the Federal Government if the Federal Government is the one that is coming between you and your doctor. So if you're a doctor, a lot of doctors do not like this plan. In fact, there have been a dozen different Republican doctors on the floor over the period of the last year talking about the fact that they don't like this plan. They think it's terrible, and that should tell us something. There is another constituent group that does not like the plan.

There's another group of people who will not like this plan, I happen to fall into this group, and it's one that you might not think of off the top of your head, and that would be people who have cancer. Why would people who have cancer not like this plan? Well, one of the things that has been done is to take a look at the survival rate in people who have cancer in various countries. What you find in England is the survival rate is much, much lower than the survival rate in America. The survival rate of cancer patients in Canada is lower than the survival rate of cancer patients in America. So if America, then, changes our medical system to be more like England or Canada, we have to assume also that then the survival rate of cancer patients is going to be less. It's going to be harder to try to survive cancer when you have a State-run system doing cancer. So there's cancer patients.

The list does seem to be getting a little bit long. And is it really such a good idea on this great drama that's supposed to take place tomorrow, in competition, by the way, with the Olympics, this great political drama, is the assumption really true that if the American people see this bill more closely, they're going to love it more, or is it possible that in this drama, the real villain in the drama is this very bill itself? Is it possible that all of these different groups of Americans really do have it right?

Let's run through this again. This is a pretty significant list as I go through it. I would like you to ask yourself, do I fall into that group myself? Is this something that is going to affect me in a bad way? Certainly a great majority of Americans believe it will hurt them, and it is not a bill that they want. But let's take a look at who these people are that wouldn't like it.

First of all, if you're old. Then if you're young. If you're married. If you're pro-life. If you're a small business owner. If you're unemployed. If you have health insurance. If you're concerned about illegal immigration, and they are getting health insurance. If you are one of the many States who are concerned with a government mandate that every citizen has to purchase government-certified health care. If you are well-to-do. If you are those who don't like the special deals that some States get and other ones don't get. If you are a doctor, you are not going to like this plan. And if you care about the doctor-patient relationship, you particularly won't like this plan. And if you happen to be a person with cancer, you're not going to like this plan. But then again, you may be dead, so you might not care as much.

And then you have other people, leaders who are in State government, governors, legislators, various senators or house members in State government. Why would they not like this plan? Well, here, this is another group that has a pretty good concern; and that is the trillion- dollar bill that has been attached to this plan, that trillion-dollar bill is not the full cost of the plan. A lot of cost is going to be passed down to the various States. So this plan contains unfunded mandates on the various States.

Now, a lot of States, because of the recession and the high level of unemployment, their State revenues are very tight. In fact, some of them are in the red. And if we, through this plan, produce something that first of all is going to create more unemployment and going to cost more money to the various States, people who have to manage the State budget, unlike the Federal budget, many States have a balanced budget requirement. And so if you keep adding more costs to those States, they are going to have to cut other things on the State budget in order to pay for this big government-run program. The exact numbers on what unfunded mandates this includes are not entirely known, particularly when a plan is being released and you have 24 hours for different economic experts to look at it.

Now, is it possible that the reason that this bill, after it has been put together behind closed doors, is trotted out for only 24 hours, that the reason for that is people really don't want a good economic look at what this is going to cost? I hope that is not the case, but it is very hard in 24 hours for the Congressional Budget Office to come up and say, well, here is what it is really going to cost.

And even if you take their best estimates, which I think they try, in the past their estimates of Medicare were way, way off by a factor of two or three or as much as seven times off. Those numbers tend to be much lower than what the real costs of the programs are. So there are a lot of people in various State leaderships that are not going to like this plan.

People who do not like red tape. I don't think we need explain that one very much. If you don't like red tape, you are not going to like this. This is a simplified version of a 2,000-page bill. And every one of these new boxes is some government creation to try to make this thing work, because the government is taking over, you have to remember, almost a fifth of the U.S. economy. And when they do that, they have got to create a lot of bureaucrats and boxes and flow charts and all that kind of stuff. If you don't like red tape, you are not going to like this bill.

And then people who don't trust the government to run the economy. Well, I think there are a lot of people who think that the government is not proving to be very efficient in the way it runs a lot of things. Even the premise behind this bill is, well, we've got a problem with Medicare, so we're going to take the money out of Medicare, and Medicare isn't working quite right, so therefore what we need to do is to replace Medicare with the government taking everything over. There is something about that logic.

If you take a look at the overall finances of the U.S. Government, what you find is it is not a big problem with earmarks, the real big problem is with three entitlement programs which are growing because of the demographics in our country and because of the nature of those entitlement programs. The entitlement programs are Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. Two of those are medical entitlements, Medicare and Medicaid. Both of those are growing to the point that over time, and people disagree exactly what year it happens, but they bust the entire Federal budget. They grow so big, they balloon so large that you can't derive taxes any more, and they basically shut out all of the money that Congressmen are supposed to spend on different things like defense or all other kinds of government programs. So these things, like a cancer, are growing so big that they threaten to break the Federal budget and the Federal piggy bank. In fact, right now those three programs, Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, have almost gotten to the point where they are taking half of the disposable budget of the country.

So now we have got Medicare and Medicaid out of control. And so what are we going to do? Oh, well, we're going to have the government take over all of health care. That doesn't seem to be a credible solution to that problem.

This is an article from the New York Times. ``As a result,'' this is talking about this great meeting, this great political drama that is supposed to take place tomorrow, ``Democrats now are considering a plan to use a parliamentary maneuver called budget reconciliation to attach changes to the Senate health care legislation as a budget measure which cannot be filibustered and requires only a simple majority for passage in the Senate.''

Now, does this look like a bipartisan effort to cooperate on health care? I don't think so. What this is is a call by the captain of the ship to go to ramming speed, to take the bill which a majority of Americans do not support

and to try to jam it through. Now, there can be a nice political drama tomorrow, but is it really working in a cooperative spirit to go behind closed doors, put together a bill, pop it out within 24 hours, and then demand that the Republicans all go along with it? Is that really working in a bipartisan way or is it really just more of my way or the highway? I will leave that to your decision. But that is what the New York Times, not exactly a conservative oracle, is saying this is the plan, is to take the bill that went through the Senate, which a great majority of Americans do not support, and push it through anyway.

This is where the public is now. Fifty-eight percent of voters nationwide oppose this health care reform plan. Will 6 hours of drama tomorrow change that? Is this going to change? Is it really going to be drama, or does it lack credibility? I would suggest that when I take a good look at this, I think people may yawn and say, this sure looks like the same old same old, we haven't seen very much changing, and the Olympics is a whole lot more exciting.

As I started by saying, I have observed things about drama and plays. And the things that I have observed are that they tend to be either really good or really bad and boring. And so that is my concern about the high level of drama tomorrow.

Now, one of the connections that I think we need to make, and it is something that has been made, is the connection to something that I think is on the minds of Americans maybe more than a government-run health care program, and that is the problem of unemployment. I would like to connect these two because these two do connect together.

I see that I am joined by my good friend from Georgia. Jack, were you interested in joining our discussion?

I yield.

What you just said, Congressman Kingston, I would wish that that were true. I think the American public is concerned about unemployment. Somebody made the comment that unemployment is an important issue, but it really becomes critical when you are the one that is unemployed. Yet my understanding is that this drama, this political drama, is basically rehashing the same old play, which is, here we go again with this health care situation.

You made the comment that they had, I think it was a $787 billion, some people called it a stimulus plan.

I do yield.

Over $800 billion?

Some of us stood here and said, This is not going to work. I was standing on this floor a year ago and I said, This stimulus plan will not work. It wasn't because some of us were such geniuses. It is because we had learned from Henry Morgenthau back in the 1930s, who stood before the House Ways and Means Committee and said, we tried this idea of excessive government spending, money that we didn't have, and we tried to spend money like mad. This is the guy who was Little Lord Keynes's buddy, he was FDR's Secretary of the Treasury, and he said, it doesn't work.

Now, I don't think you had to be a rocket scientist to figure that when you and your family are in trouble economically that what you do is don't go spending money like mad. If spending money was going to give us a good economy, boy, we would have a great economy right now.

We did.

Let me just toss that number a different way. George Bush's worst debt year was with a Nancy Pelosi Congress, and that was about $400-something billion. I agree with you that was too much debt. And that was '08. You go to '09 with President Obama, and his very first year was $1.4 trillion, three times more than President Bush. And then they want to say, yeah, but it's Bush's fault. Wait a minute.

What you are saying, Congressman Kingston, a billion here and a billion there, that starts to add up, doesn't it?

Wait a minute. This is one of these ones just like we are talking about in that health care plan. This doesn't compute, does it? We say we are going to freeze something that we just raised by over 25 percent in a year or two. That's incredible.

Government to do more and more things. You know, if we go back to that whole thing you are talking about on that supposedly stimulus bill, this is such basic stuff, and yet somehow the administration doesn't understand it. We have a lot of unemployment, we have a whole lot of Americans that would like to get jobs, and so the question is what can the government do to try to get those jobs going? And I have made a list of all the wrong things to do. These are the things that are job killers.

Now, if you take a look at what are the things that kill jobs, first thing off the bat, we score the stimulus bill you are talking about, the health care bill that is supposed to be the centerpiece of this great political drama tomorrow, and it is supposed to be something new, and they are going to open the box and it is going to be the same old ugly thing that was there before. What is it that kills jobs? This stuff is not complicated. Anybody who ran a lemonade stand as a kid is going to understand what these things are.

The first thing is economic uncertainty. If a guy that owns a business, because you think all these jobs, most of them are in small businesses, 500 or less, that is 80 percent of the jobs in America, if you take a look at those

guys and if you say, hey, I don't know what in the world the future is going to bring, you are going to go, boy, I don't want to take any risks because we just don't know what's going to happen. You've got this huge tax for the socialized medicine bill, you've got this global warming deal, which is a tax on energy, tons of red tape that go along with it, a lot of uncertainty.

So the first thing is if you take a look at what we have been doing, we have injected a whole lot of uncertainty into the system to begin with.

Congressman Kingston, I am glad you mentioned that, because when I take a look at some of this uncertainty, I think of three nets that are being thrown over free enterprise. The first was a net on everything that has to do with energy. And as an engineer, energy is very pervasive in everything.

So, if the government is regulating energy all over, that's, as you say, a government takeover of a type.

The next net is over all of health care. But the third net most people don't know about, and I'm very thankful that you brought that up, and that is the net over all the financial transactions. Now, you put those three nets in place and you don't have very much of free enterprise anymore, because the government is tinkering and tampering and adjusting and fiddling around with the rules in all of those areas. And that really builds that economic uncertainty, and that's a job killer.

My friend, you've mentioned that snow. I heard--I wish you could tell me if it's true. I heard that the snow was going to continue unless Al Gore said ``uncle.'' Is that true?

Now, one of my favorites there is the Department of Energy. Did you know why the Department of Energy was originally created? Quiz time.

You go to the head of the class. The whole purpose of the Department of Energy was to make sure we're not dependent on foreign oil.

Of course the Department has grown tremendously as we've become more dependent on Middle Eastern oil. What was it they said? The compassion of the IRS and the efficiency of the post office or whatever.

Did you know there was a report that was done on the Department of Education? I think it was during the days of Ronald Reagan. Their conclusion in the report was that if a foreign country had done to America what the Department of Education had done to education, we would consider it an act of war. I thought that was kind of an interesting report that we're paying money for a department that has done what would be considered an act of war.

What I was just talking about here on the floor a little bit with this great drama that's supposed to take place tomorrow, the question is, you know, drama, there's supposed to be some element of it being credible. A science fiction movie, it's a cheesy movie if it's unbelievable. And yet what's going on tomorrow is we're going to take $500 billion out of Medicare.

Now, and then the idea is that after people watch this 6-hour great debate, that they're going to be happy and they're going to like the bill when they find that they've taken $600 billion or $500 billion out of Medicare. And I'm thinking, I'm not sure that people aren't going to just say that bill is ugly.

That's what I find is almost comical in this whole thing because, you know, you take a look at the American public--and this is my 10th year in the U.S. Congress, and I've got constituents that are reading this stuff, and they know the bill. And you can't tell me these people don't know what's in this bill. People know what's in it, and they don't like it. They think it's ugly

Those meetings seemed to have been pretty exciting this last year.

Let me just respond to what you're saying because maybe I'm being too pessimistic about this. But let's take a look at the format. The format is we're going to huddle behind closed doors. We're going to produce a bill. You get 24 hours to look at it, and then we want you to come and tell us how much you like it. That doesn't seem to me to be sort of an open the kimono and let's work together as a team. It's more like, if you don't support me, then my way or the highway.

Well, I'm not exactly sure of that. My understanding was the bill was supposed to be released 24 hours from the day that they're talking about it, and the only thing I'd seen earlier this morning was outlines, and the outlines, of course, the Congressional Budget Office can't score it. And it appears to be very much the same thing as the Senate health care bill is everything we can tell. We've been told that there aren't special deals in it, and yet as we take a look at it, we find that there are. Somebody managed to take a look at the ones that were there before and a lot of them are still there. The Louisiana Purchase is still in it, as I understand.

Hospital's in--my understanding is the hospital is in Connecticut; Medicaid dollars, Vermont, Massachusetts, New Jersey; drug companies; extra cash for union health care plans. I have a list of some of these. Montana coal miners. Florida seniors don't have to pay that Medicare Advantage. You know, Medicare's being cut, but you don't if you're a Florida senior. It's not cut there, but in other States it is. If you're a union guy, it's not. But if you aren't, you know. And then there's North Dakota Medicare payments. Hawaii hospitals are exempt from the cuts. And longshoremen. I didn't know about longshoremen. But there are, of course a bunch of these special deals in the program.

Yeah, exactly. That's the situation.

And I guess the other thing is, I think the American public is worried about this job thing. Excessive taxation is a big deal, because if you own a small business and you tax that guy really heavily, the small business owner is not going to have any money to invest in new equipment or new plants and things, so heavy taxation on a small business owner is going to be a job killer. And yet, this bill on medicine puts a heavy, heavy tax on small business owners. So, in that sense, it's a job-killing bill.

Did you know that there are supposedly 36--I know Missouri is one of them. That's my home State. There are 36 States that have legislation moving exempting the States from having to be required to purchase health care when the government demands that everybody has to buy federally approved health care? There are 36 separate States moving legislation to stop that. That doesn't say something's popular.

Well, I thank you, gentleman, for joining me today. And the question at the beginning was is this going to be a credible theatrical performance tomorrow or are people just going to tune in to the Olympics. I guess we'll see tomorrow what's going to really happen, but I'm not sure there's much new, from what we can see about what's being proposed from the White House.

When you start talking about what you're saying, the American public does not like these special deals--and special deals a lot of times happen in the darkness, in little dark corners, like the kind of places where cockroaches breed. And these special deals, people aren't real proud of them. And so they're done behind closed doors. They're done when people can't see it. And when they get all put together in a great big piece of legislation, those special deals are rolled out in a big hurry. Hurry up and look at it so that we can pass it before anybody reads it too closely because sometimes they're disguised in little ways so you won't see them.

So the public, they're starting to get wise to this. The idea is that if the public sees more of this health care bill they'll like it. No. If you see something that's ugly, the more you look at it, the uglier it's going to get. And when you put all of these special deals in it, then people have a tendency to want to bring it out in a hurry and don't bother to look at it too closely.

If some used car salesman says, I want you to get this car but don't bother to look under the hood, you're kind of thinking, I wonder if there is an engine under there or not. And that is what's going on. And the public is wise, and they're sick of this special deal kind of stuff.

And we do this in a lot of different ways. We'll put two things together that would never pass, and then we pass it on a regular basis.

I don't mean to step on toes, but the farm bill is an example of that. You take the farm bill, and there is a farm piece and there is all of this food stamp stuff, and neither one could pass on their own. But you put the two together, and you can pass something. And I think the public is starting to stay, Time out. We're tired of this because we can't afford it any more.

I just have a question if I could jump in.

Tomorrow there is going to be this big drama, I guess, 6-hour--maybe it will be pretty boring. I don't know. But it's supposed to be dramatic. Six hours of people sitting around a table talking about this same old health care plan basically.

And there were different people that were chosen to go to participate in this. And I am just wondering if you know--I know there were a few Republicans invited, but were there any Democrats that voted ``no'' on the bill that were invited to participate? Do you know of any?

I got another question for you.

After tomorrow, after this 6 hours of drama, do you think people are going to say that you and I and my good friend Congressman Kingston, do you think they're going to say that we're obstructionists? I am trying to figure out--I wish it were true that we could be obstructionists, because if we were obstructionists, that meant if we vote ``no,'' it would stop the bill. But they have got 40 more votes than we do, so how in the world could we be obstructionists?

I need some help on that because the logic seems to be very hard for me to grasp.

The funny thing is, a number of us have served in legislative bodies for a number of years. One of the rules has always been the public never pays any attention to the process of how we go about passing legislation. You can complain about different stuff like we had a bill that was done here, where we had a choice of voting for either a big tax increase or voting for a cost of living and we had to take a choice between the two. The process or the procedure there is unfair. Anyway, we got this bill here, 300 pages of amendments passed at 3 o'clock in the morning, and we're here on the floor. The Congressman from Texas, he has sort of the sense of humor of Eeyore, and he just asks in this plaintive kind of way, is it normal procedure that we have a copy of the bill on the floor when we are going to be debating a bill?

There is muttering and talking to the Parliamentarian and he says yes, indeed there is supposed to be a copy of the bill on the floor. So he comes back a couple of minutes later and says, I've been wandering around the Chamber and I'm having trouble finding it. Is it north, south, east or west or something like that. Pretty soon the Speaker starts laughing and we go back and forth about four times in a row. Finally he says, I've come up to the podium, and the place where you say there is a copy of the bill there isn't because the Clerk is still trying to stick 300 pages of amendments in this bill. So here we are passing a bill that doesn't even exist.

And the funny thing was--I guess it wasn't funny--the public was paying attention. They understood that we passed a massive tax increase on energy that's affecting very many small people who have to pay that power bill. Everybody who flips a light switch is going to get taxed, along with a massive amount of red tape. And it was done, they thought, in the secret and in the dark of night. But the public was paying attention, and, in my opinion, that started a lot of that Tea Party movement, that very event that we actually were standing here on the floor for.

I would support that in a heartbeat. If you're not proud enough of it to put it out there, then you shouldn't be sticking it out there at all.

It seems like, to me, what you're talking about is, in a way you are defining something that's bipartisan, where people in good faith come to the table, they all have some ideas, they talk about them and say, Well, I don't like this part of your idea, and they say, Well, I don't like this part. Well, what part can we all agree to and put together?

Now, my understanding is the way the President is defining bipartisanship tomorrow is that what he's going to do is go behind closed doors, come up with a legislative product, then give the Republicans the chance to agree with him. And Republicans aren't allowed to bring anything they have in, but he has something that he has concocted. He's going to kind of spring it on them and say, Now are you going to go along with me?

Is that your concept of bipartisanship?

Is that bipartisanship or is that ramming full speed ahead? That's what it seems like to me.

Gentleman, this is my 22nd year--I hate to admit it--in an elected office, and I have seen 22 years' worth of bills, 12 in the Missouri legislature, and this is my 10th year here. I have never seen a bill like this that is going to affect so many different Americans so profoundly. This is larger than anything we've dealt with before. And I know there are a number of us that believe that if this bill were to pass the way it stands now, not only would it destroy health care in America, it would destroy our budget and would be tremendously detrimental to the lives of Americans from coast to coast. This is a very big deal and it is right for the American people to be very exercised about it.

There just doesn't seem to be a lot of consistency there, does it? We've got 36 States that have legislation they're considering trying to protect their citizens from us demanding that those citizens have to buy the

government-approved package of health care. I mean, there are a whole lot of people fighting back, and they're sick of the nanny state telling people what to do.

I think, gentleman, when you talk about the Federal Government taking things over, what I have seen in the last year seems to me to be three nets that are being tossed over our economy.

The first net is the net that government is going to make all the decisions about energy. And energy is a key component of almost everything, so the government wants to regulate in all kinds of very fine ways the use of energy.

The second net says we are going to control all of health care. Now, that affects everybody because everybody has a body.

And the third one, which has not received a lot of attention but is equally insidious, is that the government is going to throw a net over all financial transactions. In fact, the bill that was proposed would allow the government to determine the salary of a teller in a bank.

So when you put a net over energy, a net over health care, a net over financial transactions, talk about Big Brother looking over your shoulder. No wonder people are exercised.

You know, it was interesting to me that there was a country--it was the U.S.--and they had a theory. Their theory was that the government should provide you with a job, with an education. They should provide you with health care. They should provide you with food and with clothing and with a place to live. That was the job of the government to do those things. We watched that country. It was a big country. After a while, it collapsed. It wasn't just the U.S.--It was the USSR.

Aside from the fact that they just hated people of the Christian faith, aside from that sort of prejudice, that was their operating philosophy--that the government was going to provide things that were necessary for your survival. You've got to have food to survive, so the government is going to give it to you. You've got to have health care, so the government is going to give it to you. You have to have education, so the government is going to give it to you. That was their operating premise. We sat there, as I was a young man, and we went ``yuk, yuk, yuk'' when the whole thing fell apart, because we knew it was a dumb idea.

So what are we doing in America here under the Pelosi and Obama leadership? The government is not only providing education and housing, but now they're going to jump into expanding to take over all of health care, and they are going to tell you where to work.

I guess my question is: How come we are doing the same thing we knew that wouldn't work before? I think that's what a lot of American citizens are saying. Time out. What is going on? We need not just to get the budget in control. We need to deconstruct Washington, D.C., and we need to remove them as a threat to the freedom of this country.

Well, you know, now, when you get to the State of Missouri, that's one of those things that just kind of depends.

Yes. We're going to have to do some showing down in the State of Missouri. We're not too bad on oatmeal, but I'll tell you what is something, I think, of a little bit of New England that I would want to recommend, and that is that you'd get that cornbread and put maple syrup on top of it and then homemade apple sauce over the top. I'd even stack that up against grits in spite of what my good friend from Georgia might say.

That's what we called it during the last hour. We called it ``Political Drama.''

You know, there isn't anything, first of all, that the Republicans can do that could block his bill. The problem he has got is he doesn't even have enough Democrats who want to do this thing, so he is trying to drum up, as you say, support for this thing to make it look like there are people who are supporting it. Yet he goes behind closed doors, puts some deal together, comes out, and says, Now are you going to agree with it?

There is nothing bipartisan about that. It's just a scam. I just don't think the American people are going to buy it.

Madam Speaker, in accordance with House Republican Conference standards, and Clause 9 of Rule XXI, I submit the following member requests for the Record regarding the conference report on H.R. 3326, Department of Defense Appropriations Act, 2010.

Project: Adaptive-Defense HIPPIE (High-speed Internet Protocol Packet Inspection Engine) on a Chip.

Account: Department of Defense, Army, RDT&E

Legal Name of Requesting Entity: TechGuard Security, LLC

Address of Requesting Entity: 743 Spirit 40 Park Drive, Chesterfield,

Madam Chair, in the next hour we're going to be talking about a subject that has caught the attention of Americans. It's, generally speaking, a boring subject, but now it's not become boring anymore, and that is the problem with the Federal Government overspending, the problem with the budgets that have been proposed, the problem of the financial trajectory of our country and the threat that that trajectory poses.

I'd like to step back in time a little bit as a Republican to talk about the fact that over a 12-year period, Republicans had deficit spending in a number of years at about a hundred billion dollars or maybe a little more. If you put that all together over 12 years, you have over a trillion dollar amount of deficit spending.

But what we're looking at in 1 year now is over a trillion dollars. In other words, the Democrats are spending more in 1 year than we did in 12 years, or you could say that they're spending enough in 1 month to compensate for every year of the Republicans.

Now, the past President was criticized that he overspent; he spent too much money. His biggest deficit was in 2008 with the Pelosi Congress at about $450 billion of excessive spending.

Just the number of billion dollars, it's hard for us to recognize how does that relate to something. So let's put it in perspective and take a look at it as a percent of the gross domestic product of our country.

The $450 billion deficit with the Pelosi Congress and President Bush, that number would be about 3.1 percent of GDP. That is actually fairly average for many different years and different Presidents.

The 2008 deficit was followed by 2009, of course, and it was, again, the Pelosi Congress, but this time the Obama administration. And after all kinds of criticism of the Republicans for spending too much money, the budget was $1.4 trillion of deficit. That is three times worse than the worst year of President Bush.

Now we have heard all kinds of complaints that it was the Republicans' fault and all of these kinds of things. And yet the choice to spend that much deficit was still a choice, a choice made by our President and our current Congress under Speaker Pelosi, $1.4 trillion.

Now let's connect that, because $1 trillion is an awful lot of money, and it's very hard for us to understand. How does that connect to gross domestic product? Well, it turns out that 9.9 percent of our gross domestic product was in debt. That's almost 10 percent, just under 9. That's the highest level since World War II. That is an incredible level of deficit spending.

Now the question in people's minds becomes, okay, I'm not used to thinking in terms of billions and trillions of dollars. So how do we put this in perspective? And what does it mean to just the average citizen on the street? Well, one of the things it means is that we are really pushing the financial solvency of our country. We are getting to the point where we are spending money so rapidly, beyond our means, that we are driving ourselves into a condition of bankruptcy which could cause a massive collapse of our entire economic system. Nobody knows exactly when or what could trigger that kind of event.

These are very serious questions we are going to be discussing in the next hour. And I'm thankful to see Congressman Wolf, a very highly respected Congressman from this area. He is also going to share with us something about the situation with this budget and what it means.

Mr. Speaker, our topic this evening, and one that I think has received some coverage in the media, and is something that is of concern to many Americans, is the level of spending in the Federal Government, the budget that has been proposed, the size of deficits, and overall where the American economy stands. These are all very important topics. These topics could not be more timely.

The President has just released his new budget for the next couple of years. We can take a look and see exactly what the numbers are. So these questions, probably even more so because of the high level of unemployment, have a quite a number of Americans asking some very serious questions and have, I would say quite honestly, a number of people in elected office here in Washington, D.C., extremely concerned about the fact that we are not doing what we should do in terms of fiscal responsibility.

Now, one of the things that happens in the political world, and this may be a surprise to some people, but perhaps not to others, and that is that sometimes there is a significant gap between what people say and what they do. And so I prepared a few charts here just to give us an introduction to this subject about the budget, about spending, and about what is really true and what is really a significant factor, and what are more peripheral kinds of questions or issues.

Now, the first statement was made by the President, President Obama, in his State of the Union address here in this chamber not very many days ago. This was his comment. He said, ``The true engine of job creation in this country will always be America's businesses, but government can create the conditions necessary for businesses to expand and hire new workers.'' Now, this particular statement is quite true. In fact, it corrects an extreme misconception that some in government would love to have passed onto the Americans, but in fact is not true. And that is that government never can create jobs.

Well, you say, Congressman Akin, how is it that the government can't create jobs? Can't they take taxpayers' money, go out and hire somebody, and if they hire somebody doesn't that person have a job? Well, the answer is yes, but really no. What happens is when the government hires one person various economists would disagree a little bit on the exact number, but you take about 2 or 2.3 jobs out of the private sector for every job that you create in the public sector. So the government really doesn't create jobs, it simply takes money away from other people to hire someone. So when you say that the government is going to create jobs, that is actually economically false.

What the President says here is true, ``The true engine of job creation in this country will always be America's businesses.'' That is true. In fact, he went on to acknowledge that it is not just any business, but it particularly is small businesses. Someone has figured the statistic that 80 percent of American jobs are in companies that have 500 employees or less. So small business, that is 500 employees or less, is very much the place where jobs are created.

Now, we have some people in politics that are always blasting those rich guys, those people that own businesses. And we are going to tax the rich guy and make sure that he pays for everything. Well, there is only one little problem with that theory. And that is that a lot of the people that own those small businesses are reasonably well to do because they have successfully put a business together, have managed it, have taken considerable risks, have spent a whole lot of sleepless nights worrying about balancing the books, but somehow, in spite of all of that, they were successful. And they wake up 10 years later, after they created a small business, and they find out that they are a millionaire. Now, they may have started sleeping under a park bench somewhere, and a husband and wife look at each other, and there is a smile, and they look and they realize that their dream has come true.

The American Dream worked for the owner of some small businesses. And what that means is, because those people do have money, they can reinvest that money in their own business. And when they do, they'll add a wing on the building, add some new machine tools or a new process or new idea, and create jobs in America.

So what the President is saying is true--the true engine of job creation in this country will always be America's businesses. But government can create the conditions necessary for businesses to expand and to hire new workers. The government can do that. Maybe it would be more accurate to say that unless the government gets in the way, that's the natural cause of small businesses, to grow and to add additional jobs.

What are the kinds of things that the government can do to try to create those jobs? Well, they want to create an environment. It's a little bit like if you're trying to grow a plant, what do you want for a plant to grow? Well, you've got to have some water, you've got to have some sunshine, you've got

to have the right temperature. You've got to have the soil conditions and chemistry more or less right. In the same way you can grow jobs in America if you keep certain basic factors and functions in perspective. We're going to go into that in a minute. But let's take a look.

This statement being true--these are the words, but here in fact are the actions of what is being proposed as you go further into the speech. First of all, what is being proposed are $2 trillion in tax increases over 10 years; $2 trillion in tax increases. We're going to talk about that in a minute, because who's going to pay those $2 trillion? Where's that money going to come from? You bet, it's going to be taxpayers.

And then we have this job-killing cap-and-tax legislation. My chart says cap-and-trade. People want to call it cap-and-trade. They really want to call it the global warming tax. But this cap-and-tax legislation puts a big tax on energy. Now guess who uses energy, aside from homeowners, aside from people who drive cars. Of course, small businesses. They use energy. Depending on the type of small business, some use a great deal of energy. And so you have here a proposal which is about an even portion of government redtape and government taxation. If I had to judge the bill, I think the redtape may be more onerous than the taxation, which is bad enough. The combination of the two are deadly to small businesses and deadly to job creation. We'll get into that in a minute.

What else is being suggested? We're going to have new taxes on employers who don't offer the government health insurance plan. So now what we're going to say to people if you're a businessman, Yeah, we're going to tax you on your energy, but we've got another tax, too, for you. That is, we're going to tax you on health insurance. And, guess what? You're going to pick up a big piece of the tab for this government-run health insurance plan, which supposedly only costs $1 trillion.

Now that's not talking about the amount of cost shifting that's going to go to various State governments. But you have an extremely expensive proposal for government to take over one-fifth of the U.S. economy with this mandated, top down--I think I remember 400 or 500 times in this 3,000-page bill you have the ``shall.'' The government shall do this, shall do that. And so this is another proposal which the President says he wants to move forward with. And then it increases taxes on small business owners who make over $250,000. Well, a whole lot of small business owners can make over $250,000. But, again, as I have mentioned, if you put the taxes on these people, they'll pay their taxes but they're not going to put that money, that tax money, back into their business to create jobs.

And so what we have here is the words that recognize that businesses create the jobs, and particularly small businesses create the jobs, but then in terms of action what we're doing is we're doing the very worst possible thing that you can do in terms of creating jobs and helping our economy. Let's take a look. You know, economics can be pretty boring sometimes. I try to make it as simple as I can.

I'd like to talk to you this evening a little bit about job killers. If you want to kill a plant, you don't give it any water. If you want to kill a plant, you let it freeze. There's certain things you can do that makes it so that a plant dies. If you want to kill jobs, there's certain things you can do to kill them and there's also things you can to create them.

Let's talk about the first factor. It wouldn't surprise you perhaps that the one that I would think of first is taxes. Now how does taxation affect small business people? Well, it's this way. If you tax them more and more, they're going to have less money to put into their business and so they're going to have less money to hire people. And that's the same effect I was talking about. The government can tax and hire somebody, but when they do, they're taking that money away from the small business. And so while you add some government worker, you lose two employees from the local company.

And so tax increases are absolutely deadly, and they are going to be a big factor in unemployment. No big surprise. Other people have recognized this. This is not that complicated. This is not rocket science. This is not laser science. This is not quantum mechanics. It's simple lemonade stand-type economics. And other Presidents have recognized the problem. And so what did they do when they got into a recession and they're having trouble with unemployment? Well, JFK understood. He cut taxes. Ronald Reagan understood it. He cut taxes. And George Bush during the recession also cut taxes. In each of those situations the economy responded fairly rapidly to those tax cuts. And why? Because the small businessman is starting to get some money to plow into his business. So, first of all, taxes are a major factor. And if you raise taxes a lot, you're going to kill jobs.

What have we just got over here? We've got $2 trillion in tax increases. We've got the cap-and-tax bill, the thing on taxing energy with all sorts of redtape in it. We also have the employers--the socialized medicine bill. Where the government to a large degree takes over health care, a trillion-dollar tag on that has to be picked up by a lot of small business people. And then you have, if that's not enough, increases on anybody making over $250,000. That hammers small business people. And this list doesn't even mention the fact that the tax cuts on capital gains, dividends, and death taxes, which were put in place during the beginning of the last recession under Bush to help the economy, those are going to expire. So they're going to compound this problem. So here we have words. We understand that jobs are created in businesses, but we don't really understand because our actions are saying we're going to do just exactly what it takes in terms of tax policy to kill jobs.

The second factor if you want to kill jobs is redtape. Redtape means that it's more cost for businesses to do their work. If the government says, Yeah, but you've got to write a report; you've got to do this; to check with this; got to go to court to take care of this; you better do that; all of that red tape may not be a direct tax, but the net effect is it's costing a whole lot of time for an employer to try to comply with government redtape. Do you think we've got a fair amount of redtape in America?

Think about the amount the average citizen has in their own life and then multiply that significantly for the average business. And so redtape is another big factor. We have words. This sounds good and in fact this is even true. The trouble is the actions are the exact opposite.

I recognize that I've been joined by a good friend of mine, Congressman Bishop, and I'd like to yield you some time if you'd like to talk a little bit about the budget. I'd like to get into tonight a couple of different things that have been said, comments that have been made about this budget. First of all, I want to get a scale of how big it is. Second of all, I'd like to talk a little bit about can you blame it on the previous administration. We keep hearing that it was President Bush's fault that we're in the economic problems. And then I'd like to get back to the job creation question. But I think you've got some specific examples from your district where there were jobs that we're talking about, and particularly an employer that is affected by this budget. Could you share with us, please?

Let me just get the connect, because you're building up to something here. What you're saying is that there are solid rocket motors that are being built in America, which are very high-tech, and they're being built by a particular company. And they're used for the space program but they're also used for something else. Is that correct?

In defense. So it's not just space. It's also our defense.

I yield.

Wait a minute. You are telling me that the ACORN program, the one where we've got people going to jail for voter fraud and all other kinds of strange and weird behavior, registering illegals, registering people that don't exist, turning them out to vote, and even on videotapes, we see them encouraging people to build brothels and to bring in underage illegal immigrants, that organization? You are saying that funding could be instead directed?

What you have said--and I just want to reinforce. There is a difference between jobs and jobs, is what you are saying. Some of these things are very high-tech kinds of jobs. They require building companies over a good number of years, building capabilities, putting that team together, and you've got to have enough work to keep that team operating or else they just have to dissipate and go somewhere else. And if we need that capability for the defense of this Nation, that, in many of our opinions, is the primary function that we must perform here. There are a lot of other things that might be nice if the Federal Government did it, but if we have invading armies riding across our country, we're not very effective.

We're not even spending it in the right place. You know, that's a very, very visible kind of thing. You can see a solid rocket voter has a lot of technical kinds of aspects, how those have been developed, and we have an advantage on that from a technology point of view. Now you are basically saying that we're going to give that up for spending it on what, on something like ACORN? That's why a whole lot of people out there are really wondering what we're doing down here.

Congressman, thank you for joining us. I notice that we are joined by Dr. Burgess, a good friend of mine. We're talking about the budget and about job creation and how those things connect. I also was trying to take apart a little bit because we hear some good words, and yet the actions of what we're doing don't seem to fit. So if you can join us, please.

Whoa, whoa, whoa. Stop just a minute. There wasn't somebody with bailout money from the Federal Government to come just give you some free money?

Fourteen percent interest?

You can say that with a smile on your face today, but that banker wasn't too good a friend.

Sort of one of those 9-month lead time type of things.

You know, Dr. Burgess, what you have communicated here, aside from being a doctor--we always put doctors sort of in a special category and maybe a little bit of an elevated platform. But what you have communicated is just the heart of a guy that has a business and how much risk you took and how you plowed into unchartered territory, just trusting that you could generate that business and then get the business going. And afterwards, you had employees. You provided a great product for people, and there are a whole lot of Texans who are thankful to Dr. Burgess for delivering them. But you gave us an understanding of how that whole system works. And just like your one example, there are really thousands upon thousands of business owners that are looking at this thing, and saying, What in the world is going on?

Now we've talked about words and then actions. Here are some words, but families across the country are tightening their belts and making tough decisions. The Federal Government should do the same. Hey, that sounds pretty good. That's what you were just talking about, Doctor, that families have to tighten their belts and take a good look and make choices between one thing and another.

Congressman Bishop just made a brilliant explanation of why the Federal Government is making lousy choices. Not only are we spending too much, taxing too much, borrowing too much, but we're also doing it for the wrong reasons. And that just doesn't make a whole lot of sense.

This is starting to get to the point where I think things are going to get interesting. We're going to bring on another witness, a fantastic young man who really does know something about budgeting. The big question I think that comes to a whole lot of Americans' minds is this question: When is too much too much? When do we get to the tipping point where the whole thing, just like a table, dumps and the whole economy just basically falls to pieces? You know, just like in your business, if you had borrowed too much, you could have pushed it too far. You intuitively knew that.

What happens when we start getting into this? We're saying that families across the country are tightening their belts, but we, sure as the dickens, are not because with our actions, we're going to double the debt in 5 years, raise the deficit to a record $1.6 trillion this year. That's 10.6 percent of GDP.

Let's put this into perspective. It's one thing to have a deficit during a year; but when you compare the deficit to the overall product of the whole Nation, that's a significant statistic. And last year, we set a record. The year before we set a record. During the time George Bush was finishing and Nancy Pelosi had this Congress, we had a $450- something billion deficit. That was big. That was 3.1 percent of GDP. That was too much spending. And then we come back around to '09 and what do we do? We go from $4.5 billion--oh, billion isn't a big number anymore. Let's try trillion--to $1.4 trillion of deficit. That's three times more with the current President, and when you look at it as a percent of GDP, 9.9 percent of GDP.

So now we've learned our lesson, right, for 2010. Certainly that was too much. No. No. We're going to go for $1.6 trillion instead of $1.4 trillion and 10.6 percent of GDP. When is enough enough?

My good friend Congressman Hensarling, I don't want to pick on Texas too much, but you have really taken the lead on a number of these economic issues. We need some help tonight, and we need to ask that question, When is too much too much? Please help us.

I would like to just butt in. I do butt in a few times. And before you jump a little bit further, one of the things that the President said--because I was at the meeting when you asked the question. One of the things that we heard was, Well, you know, I inherited a lot of this stuff. It was like saying, It's not my fault that I'm spending all of this money.

And this is hard for me to understand. I'm thinking, Look, you've got the previous President. He spent, with the Pelosi Congress, about $450 billion, which you and I, gentleman, thought was too much. It was too much deficit, and we didn't like that. In fact, we vote against a lot of that kind of spending. But that is, in a sense, water over the bridge or down the river or wherever the water goes. Now he is taking that and triples it in his very first year.

How can you blame the guy that came before you when you were three times doing more than he did? Could you explain that, because I don't get it. How can you blame that on someone else?

So, gentleman, just taking a look at some notes I had, this would be about from 1996 to the year 2007, and you total that up at about $1.2 trillion. So that's 12 years of Republican deficit spending, more or less.

I'd like to interrupt you just so you can say that again, because that's really hard to get your mind around. In other words, what you're saying is that what Republicans spent in 1 year, the Democrats are averaging in 1 month, so they're 12 times faster spending money.

You have a chart, I see.

So the blue in your chart were Republican, and those were the budgets, and the amount that's above the line was how much our deficit was, right?

It's not just making it worse; it's tripling it in the very first year, tripling it from 450 billion all the way up to 1.4 trillion.

I'd like to come back to you, Congressman Hensarling. I want to ask you that question that I was getting at, and that is--I think a lot of Americans want to know this--when do we hit some tipping point? Does anybody know? Is there a certain point here where we have to really pay attention, that we're going to get things so far out of kilter that the whole deck of cards is going to fall and there's nothing we can do? I'd like to get back to that.

But we have another guest from Florida joining us, Congressman Posey, and I'd just encourage you to join us on this question about the budget, the tremendous level of spending, the tremendous level of taxing, and the tremendous level of debt that we're picking up.

So, in other words, for people that are not that familiar with the space program, what we're moving from is the old technology of the shuttle, which we see launched in those beautiful pictures with the hydrogen and oxygen central fuel on the main rocket engines and then the two solid boosters. So you see those two tanks on the sides of the aluminum, and I think it's ammonium chlorate or something. So you've got two solid motors, and you've got the hydrogen-oxygen in the center, those three take off. We're replacing that, right, with a new vehicle? Is that what you're talking about?

So this is a more powerful system?

I want to get you to your point. What you're saying is he made a promise that we're going to close this gap. Now, does the budget close the gap or not?

So first of all, no administrator to replace him, which doesn't look like something is on the fast track.

So 1 percent of the stimulus bill, which was, I think, about $800 billion or so, was it, the one that didn't work, at least the rocket motor probably would have gone. This one, we lit it and it fizzled.

I was just going say that you are really, in a sense, making the same case that Congressman Bishop just made; that is, you get some very, very highly trained people, you get the program all set up, it takes years, a whole lot of research to do it, and then you just cut it off at the knees.

I do have to move along because I wanted to recognize Mr. Bishop on this point, and I promised I'd get back to Congressman Hensarling. So let me come back to you, but we are getting a little close on time.

Congressman Bishop.

And gentlemen, both of you have made a very significant point. You're saying 1 percent of that stimulus bill--there wasn't a stimulus bill, of course. It didn't work, and stimulus bills don't work very well anyway. But 1 percent of that would have taken care of that promise, would have kept those very high-tech jobs in Florida, and would have----

Around the country. Okay. And of course the rocket motor, the solid rocket technology, these are places where the priority needs to be, the thing that--what government can provide for the national defense. It's not State governments. This is something that should be fundamental to our thinking down here.

I would like to yield to the gentleman from Texas, Congressman Hensarling. I think you have a chart. You want to give us a visual picture. We've been talking some boxcar kinds of numbers, but sometimes a simple graph is worth an awful lot.

You've really answered the question. We are on some very, very shaky ground economically, and you're saying we're already there.

The thing that is frightening is--and this is something that just kind of amazes me--we got punished by voters to a large degree, from Republicans and Democrats, that said you guys are spending too much. And then what happens is we come down here and triple the rate of spending. No wonder people are mad. It's like the people in this Chamber are tone deaf.

Now, you certainly are not, gentlemen, and I am very thankful. I know the American public is thankful for the fact that you hold the line, and you're making clear what the priorities are and the fact that we can't just run out of control. It's a little bit like the guy that says, I am going to stop smoking next month; I am going to stop eating too much next month, and just continues with a pie eating contest.

The answer to that, as you know, it was a stimulus package. It stimulated the creation of a lot of government handouts and jobs, but it isn't going to fix the unemployment problem.

Congressman Posey from Florida, I thank you for coming out tonight. Your expertise, particularly the expertise in your district. And Congressman Bishop, and I just have got a minute or two and I will close with you in a couple of minutes.

Thank you very much.

One of the things is we talk about this deficit budget and all, I think a lot of Americans may not understand we've got something stalking us here. People talk about this, that, and the other thing. If you want to talk about the fiscal concern that we need to be watching in our country, it comes from Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security.

This is the budget that is being proposed. This is how much money we have in terms of receipts. This is the money that is coming into the government. This is what we're proposing spending. And if you take a look at that, more than half of that is Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security.

Those programs are called entitlements. What that means is we wrote some laws a long time ago. It's like a machine and somebody's turning the crank and it spends money, and it's spending more than half of what this budget shows and quite a bit more than what we have in terms of receipts. So that is a big question. And that is one of the things that we must deal with.

Congressman Hensarling has been very direct in the fact that we need some solutions. We don't need to be on the same drug and drag it out until we're completely on our back. We have to start taking a look at these problems, take some sober-minded solutions and start moving forward with a plan. We've not seen that. We think American people want that leadership.

Thank you, Congressman Hensarling and Congressman Posey. And I thank you, also, Congressman Bishop, for joining us tonight.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I think that concludes our hour.