Floor Statements

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

The motion was agreed to; accordingly (at 10 p.m.), the House adjourned until tomorrow, Wednesday, June 3, 2009, at 10 a.m.

Madam Speaker, I rise today to honor America's entrepreneurs, those distinguished individuals who support our communities, drive innovation, and keep our nation strong. Small businesses bring fresh ideas to the table, develop the resources to meet the demands of an ever-changing world, and make a meaningful impact on our neighborhoods. Entrepreneurs are responsible for providing 60 to 80 percent of all new jobs, giving them the potential to propel rapid economic growth and expand ever-developing fields. Some of the country's largest companies began as start-ups in small offices, homes and garages exploring these new fields. Limited only by their imagination, these firms performed cutting-edge work in emerging industries that have become the very foundation of our society.

As our nation and the world face the most difficult economic conditions in decades, entrepreneurs have the potential to lead us back to prosperity. The resiliency and adaptability shown by small businesses in past recessions demonstrate their capability to meet the challenges standing in their way and emerge stronger than ever. America's small businesses will drive the economic recovery from this downturn and our economy will emerge stronger than ever. Times may be tough, but America's entrepreneurial spirit is tougher.

To recognize the monumental achievements of our nation's small firms, the Small Business Administration (SBA) has declared May 17-23 as the 46th Annual National Small Business Week. The House Small Business Committee is celebrating all our country's hard-working entrepreneurial by saluting the Heroes of Small Business, those men and women who have shown the strength, leadership, and resourcefulness that keeps our economy moving forward.

I ask that you, Madam Speaker, and the entire U.S. House of Representatives join me in recognizing and thanking Mr. Greg Prestemon for his tremendous accomplishments on behalf of small businesses. Mr. Prestemon has led the St. Charles Economic Development Center (EDC) for 15 years, helping spur the county's rapid population and economic growth during his tenure. Since he assumed the top post at the EDC, St. Charles County has grown by almost 120,000 residents and total valuation assessment has risen from less than $2 billion to $7.2 billion in 2007. For his efforts, Mr. Prestemon was named as the 2008 Non-Profit Executive of the Year by St. Charles Business Magazine.

This month, the SBA named the St. Charles EDC as its 504 Lender of the Year after the organization disbursed more than $22.5 million to 37 businesses throughout the region in 2008, valuable assistance that helped create or retain over 1,000 jobs. He holds a bachelor's degree in political science from Iowa State University and a master's degree in economic development from the University of Iowa.

Madam Speaker, Mr. Prestemon has exemplified the remarkable accomplishments of which America's entrepreneurs are capable. This week, he will testify before the House Small Business Committee to share his story. I ask that you and the entire U.S. House of Representatives join with me in honoring him for the extraordinary work he has done for the small business economy. His efforts demonstrate that if given the right resources, America's small businesses can be the catalysts that lift our economic from the current downturn and put us on the road to recovery.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. It is a pleasure to be able to join you this evening and my colleagues on a couple of very interesting topics. I think the first thing that we will talk about is something that has been on the minds of people since this morning. That was when we got an announcement from Iran that they had just fired a missile some 1,200 miles. That is what they claimed.

We don't know the details. We're waiting for a brief on the Armed Services Committee on exactly what it was that Iran did, the nature of the missile that they fired. But this is something that has captured the attention and the concern of Americans because you have coming together here a combination of three things that we find to be of high level of concern.

The first is the ability to make these long-range missiles; particularly, we're talking about solid fuel missiles that have multiple stages. That allows a missile to go some considerable distance and therefore target larger areas of the Earth's surface.

The second thing is nuclear energy. That is a weaponized nuclear energy in the form of a warhead. So now you have a missile that can go some distance; it has a nuclear warhead on it. That becomes extremely dangerous.

And now when you add the third element, that is radical Islam, to that, people who think it is their destiny and their duty to destroy other people who don't think the way you do, you put those three together and you have something that has indeed captured the news for the day. So I thought that would be important today to look a little bit at what do you do when you have an adversary that has a missile, a nuclear warhead, and a will to use it against you.

That was the question that was faced historically some years ago by Ronald Reagan. Up to that time, there had been a whole series of treaties and different things had come along, and we had gotten to the point where we said, Well, they have got missiles; they can blow us up. We've got missiles; we could blow them up. And that would be so crazy, we will have a Mexican standoff. We will call it mutually assured destruction. But that really was a very, very foolish idea.

I'm joined tonight by one of the foremost authorities in the U.S. Congress on the subject of missile defense and strategic missile defense, my good friend, Congressman Franks. And it's a treat to have you here on the floor, and talk about a timely subject, Iran just having launched a missile.

And surprisingly, this has been a matter of a great deal of partisan division and a lot of debate on this subject, and if you could help us with a little bit about the logic and the history. I would like to do the background on missile defense so we can understand what is going on today in context.

I would yield.

Or a rock and somebody had a shield to stop the rock or something. So one offense, one defense.

I didn't mean to interrupt. Go ahead.

And just to reclaim my time.

I recall--and even that was a very troublesome kind of truce, because one thing we found was they cheated on every treaty that they signed, and we didn't cheat. And we had made an agreement that we were not going to develop a defense against nuclear missiles, and then that whole idea was challenged.

Now, why don't you run through----

Reclaiming my time.

I think the one thing that I really recall--and I think it's something we historically skip, and that is really the guy--we have an awful big ``thank you'' to say to Ronald Reagan. He had the imagination to take a look at this mutually assured destruction and say, This is nuts. I mean, as you said, all through history of mankind, somebody picks up a rock and somebody picks up a garbage can lid, you know? I mean, there's always offense and defense. He said, If we're saying we're not going to defend ourselves, we're crazy.

So we start talking to scientists and came up with this idea that we could use different kinds of technology to stop those missiles so they wouldn't come and hit our children and families. And then he went a much more gracious step and said, What's more, we're going to share our defensive technology with our opponents so that mankind does not have to live under the threatening shadow of the nuclear mushroom cloud. And he sold that idea to the American public. And, of course, the liberals all made fun of him. They said, You can't do it. It won't work and it's too expensive, and all of those kinds of things. But he hung on and kept talking about it, but he actually didn't build it, did he?

You know, the funny thing was--I was elected in 2000, came here in 2001 and started right off in the Armed Services Committee. And we had these debates in the Armed Services Committee in those long hearings, and every year for about 4 years or 5 years when it came to funding missile defense, it was a party line vote. The Democrats never wanted to do anything with funding missile defense. And yet, because we had a majority, we voted for it.

And President Bush became very unpopular in Europe and with Russia. He went over and he gave them their 6 months' notice. I think the treaty required, give us 6 months' notice. So he went over and said, Okay, guys. The clock's running. We're going to start developing missile defense in 6 months. And the Russians just had kittens, Putin went nuts, and the Europeans were all upset about this. They thought he was some kind of cowboy from Texas. And yet at the end of that 6 months, we started funding it in the Armed Services Committee, totally party line vote, and we started on the path of actually building the dream that Ronald Reagan had passed down to us.

Wait, wait, wait. Reclaiming my time.

What you just said is pretty important. When Bush left office, the setup was there was--we were going to build a couple of sites. One was a radar site and one was an actual place to launch these ground-based missiles. The radar site, was that in Romania?

So the Czech leadership responded to our initiative, said, We'll put the radar site in the Czech Republic. The leadership of Czechoslovakia had a public that was not that enthused about that idea, but they sold it to them. We are going to move ahead. And so you had the Czech Republic was going to have the radar and the actual missiles were going to be loaded--was it in Poland?

This has been, with the new administration, President Obama has traded that away to the Russians, is that correct, or do we know what the deal was? Because he's cut all of the money out of it.

Reclaiming my time.

Now, wait a minute. This isn't supposed to be funny hour. We're here talking about missile defense because Iran just launched a missile. Is that the sort of influence that Russia has over Iran, that it's going to help them launch solid rocket loader multistage missiles that can go 1,200 miles? Is that what we traded away in order to give up missile defense for Europe? Wait a minute. I don't see--the logic of this is incredible.

Reclaiming my time.

These are some of the missiles. This picture was taken before the launch this morning. And then we have a picture, I believe--I believe this picture was one released of the actual launch this morning. So you can see this appears to be a multistage kind of a missile, but we don't know the details on it yet because we haven't had the brief on it.

Just reclaiming my time.

Is this a multistage, do you believe?

We have a few more minutes to talk about that. I think people might be interested in how did this--how does this technology that we have work, because for years, people are saying, You can't do it; it is impossible.

I'm an engineer by training, and what we have developed in America-- basically on the dream of Ronald Reagan--is an incredibly elegant solution. And from a physics point of view, this is the kind of thing that should inspire kids in school to be studying up on physics. And I didn't know if other Members want to join us.

We have Congressman Bishop here. We'll talk a little bit about the way the thing works, and then we'll jump in.

And what we have when you talk about missile defense is you've got-- basically you've got the boost stage where the enemy's rocket here, if this is aimed at our country or one of our allies, this is taking off. It's called a boost stage. Then as the missile starts to go more horizontally, it goes into what's called midcourse. And eventually, when it comes down on the target, and that's where it's reentering--if it's a very long-range missile, reentering the atmosphere.

So we kind of break missile defense into these three areas, and we have different technologies to try to shoot the thing down before it hits us. And our thinking is, well, the more shots you can get, the better, because if you miss with the boost phase, you may get it in midcourse. And if you miss in midcourse, you may still stop it in reentry. So we have different kinds of technologies.

But the main one that's been developed that's just incredible, from a physics point of view, is a metal-on-metal kill. We don't use any explosive in it. We just send the missile up, and the guidance is so accurate, and the head-on collision that we energize generates so much energy that it just literally vaporizes the missiles. And I would encourage my friend from Arizona to just sort of flesh out how it's done.

Reclaiming my time, it's interesting that you just explained something that really put a little spring in the step of a lot of Americans and should give an awful lot of our kids that are reading Popular Science and Popular Mechanics, that should fire them up, jazz them up a little bit, and there's not a word about this. All we hear is, oh, it won't work, it won't work, and the amazing thing is I've seen some of those pictures where here comes the enemy missile. These things are taken in fractions of a second, and you see basically the thing is creating through a sighting mechanism a target on the side of the enemy missile, and it is literally picking a spot, as you said. It's not hitting a bullet with a bullet. It's hitting that spot right on the missile where they want to hit it.

And to be able to do that--I've always been awfully skeptical as an engineer about when people say you can't do it. You know, when you tell Americans you can't do something, it's like, oh, yeah? Well, the fact of the matter is, we did, and as you said, not only did we hit the first missiles dead-on, we just picked off the biggest piece of scrap metal that was left after.

We've got our friend, Congressman Bishop from Utah. If you would like to join us, we would love to have you in our discussion this evening.

No doubt about that. I yield.

I yield to the gentleman from Arizona.

Reclaiming my time, let's take a look at what this budget is doing because the gentleman from Utah has brought up some good points.

What's happened is the Democrats are basically cutting component parts of missile defense. They know it works. They have seen the tests. They know the stuff works. They can't say it doesn't work, but they are not going to fund it. They're funding some of it, but they're not funding some of the key programs that are important.

The first thing they're cutting is the number of what's called ground-based missiles. Those are the ones, if you think about a missile and how far it can go, the missiles that go the farthest, we call them intercontinental ballistic missiles, and those missiles, the only way you stop them is with that ground-based defense. And so we're going to freeze the number of those ground-based defenses, but that's not all that we're cutting.

What we're also going to do is, we're going to stop the kinetic kill. Is that in the reentry aspect? Is that what that was for, or is that a different part?

So what's happening, though, are they cutting the funding for the airborne laser, also?

So, in other words, what we're doing is we've got the three stages where you can shoot at a missile: when the missile is being launched, which is in some ways the place where the missile is most vulnerable and where you turn it into junk, it falls on the country that launched it at you. Then you've got the mid-course and we're limiting that. And then you've got the reentry part of it. So what you're saying is we're doing some serious cuts in all of those areas.

And so here you have Iran just this morning launches this, and their technology is moving fast, moved to solid rocket, multiple stage. They're busy putting the centrifuges together to make the nuclear devices. Let's take a look at what a range of 1,200 miles would mean.

Here from Iran, as you come out in these circles, what you are saying is, first of all, you can hit all of Israel, and second of all, you can threaten sort of the southwest part of Europe with that range missile. Is that correct, gentleman from Arizona?

And yet our President has negotiated away, from what we know, putting the radar that we need and the battery of missiles to protect Europe and eastern United States.

I'm going to reluctantly recognize the gentleman from Utah. He's been bringing a lot of bad news tonight, but still I guess we better know what the truth is.

Reclaiming my time, now you're stopping the preaching and getting on to meddling.

What you're saying is in the first five weeks that this Congress met, we passed this porkulous bill or stimulus bill or whatever you want to call it at $800-something billion, and you're talking about cutting missile defense by less than $2 billion. Did I understand the number correctly?

So we're talking about less than 1 percent, a minuscule part of our defense, to protect our cities from being turned into dust. I don't understand the logic of that.

Also, this is a North Korean ballistic missile threat. So it's not just Iran, and Iran threatening Europe. We're also talking about North Korea developing longer and longer-range missiles, and as they stack more--as you have said before, you take these solid rocket motors and you stack them up into multiple stages. You get the velocity to get the distance to start threatening the continental United States from North Korea. And he hasn't shown any signs of backing off. He's still busy making nuclear weapons and still busy working on his warheads. And even if he doesn't use them, he wants to sell them to other people. So why would we want to be cutting our missile defense at this time? It just seems like about insanity.

I yield to the gentleman.

So we're talking out of both sides of our mouth here again. What you are saying is, on the one hand, they're saying we need more testing, and second of all, they're cutting the budget so we can't test.

It just comes back out to the same thing. There's this hostility to developing the defense that we need to protect our homeland, and the excuses that it won't work have been proven--test after test, these things are working extremely well, and the fact is that if there's any function of this Congress that we should be paying attention to, it's protecting our own citizens. And so I just find it impossible to understand the decisions that are being made in cutting the missile defense.

I don't think that's the right thing to do. I can certainly say that on the Armed Services Committee, I will not vote to cut missile defense.

And I would yield back to my friend from Utah, Congressman Bishop.

Reclaiming my time, wait a minute now. I recall that the President stood on this floor, and one of the things that he made a big point about was transparency. I have a hard time understanding the transparency of the administration cutting a major part of missile defense that's very important, and we're on the Armed Services Committee and we didn't even have a clue that that was going on. Is that transparency?

I yield to my friend from Utah.

Well, that's quite an indictment. And you sure had a snoutful of bad news for us. I didn't even know about that last one. And it's enough to really make you irritated, isn't it?

You know, we hear about transparency, and yet there isn't transparency, and this isn't the way we should be running a country. It seems to me that somebody's trying to hide something. That's what it seems like, somebody is trying to cover something up.

Now we're about done with our first half hour so we're going to be finishing up on ballistic missile and strategic missile defense. I am going to let the last word go to my good friend from Arizona, Congressman Franks.

I appreciate your passion on that subject. Gentlemen, there's one point that I always like to make on

missile defense that it seems like many times people overlook it. And what I hear, just talking to people back in my district they say, well, couldn't these bad guys basically smuggle a missile into our city and just set it off? And they don't really need a missile to do that. And the answer is, they can try, but that's not as easy to do as it appears because the bombs and things do emit some radiation and there's some chance we could catch them.

But the other main point is that a bomb set off up in the air is far, far more deadly, hundreds of times more deadly in terms of casualties than one set off on the ground. I think that's part of the reason why you see our opponents developing these ballistic and intercontinental ballistic missiles because of this high level of threat and a very rapid ability to deploy a weapon. And so that's part of the reason why this is a very key topic.

And I thank you so much. The gentleman from Arizona has taken a lot of time to understand this, knows it inside and out. He's just about like an expert. And Arizona has been doing the right thing sending you up here.

And I think we're going to move on to another topic which is particularly of importance to Americans today, and that's the subject of taxation and energy. Not so long ago, our President said, under my plan of a cap-and-trade system, or that is cap-and-tax system, electric rates would necessarily skyrocket. That will cost money. They will pass that money on to consumers. This is the President in a meeting in guilty January of 2008.

Well, he is now the President. And they're talking about this cap- and-tax system that's been the subject of debate now for hours and hours in the Energy and Commerce Committee. And from what we're seeing and taking a look at what's being proposed, the President was accurate in this statement. It is going to be extremely expensive, and electric rates are going to skyrocket indeed.

The interesting thing about this though was he stood here at the beginning of this year and said, I'm not going to tax anybody that's making less than $250,000. And yet what's being proposed here is every time you turn a light switch on, you're going to get some more taxation.

How much taxation are we talking about? And what's the logic of this?

Well, the logic is supposed to be that the Earth is getting too hot, and that's really a serious problem for us. The Earth is getting too hot. And so I thought it was interesting to take a look back historically over the last hundred years, not at the temperature of the Earth, but at what the scientists have been saying down through the years.

In 1920, the newspapers were filled with scientific warnings of a fast approaching glacial age, 1920s.

1930s, scientists reversed themselves and they said there's going to be serious global warming in the 1930s.

In 1972, Time magazine, citing numerous scientific reports that imminent runaway glaciation is what the Time magazine called it. And by 1975, Newsweek, scientific evidence of an ice age. And so people were being called to stockpile food, and the question of whether we should use nuclear weapons or some method of melting the Arctic ice cap.

1976, U.S. government: ``The Earth is heading into some sort of mini- ice age.''

And now we've got global warming. And so over the period of the last hundred years, well-meaning scientists and, supposedly majorities of scientists, even, have changed their opinion about this global warming about three times or so.

Well, the complaint now is that we've got this CO2 that's being generated which makes the Earth warmer and, therefore, we want to tax the CO2. When the government wants to tax something, usually you'd better hang on to your wallet. We're talking about a lot of tax.

And tonight we have probably one of the most foremost experts in the House on the whole subject of this what's called cap-and-tax. A man who's been in the middle of these hearings for hours and hours is joining us. It's a treat to have Congressman Shimkus from Illinois. I yield time, gentleman.

Reclaiming, you're just saying that what we said is, hey, gas is painful when it gets up there to $3 or $4 a gallon. But you're saying if gas gets to $5, we put an amendment saying enough already; that's enough tax at $5 a gallon. And that was a party-line vote. The Republicans voting, I assume, that they don't want to let it get over 5. The Democrats saying it's okay to tax more than that; is that correct?

Just reclaiming my time for a minute. What--how much unemployment do we have now? We're not up to 10 percent yet, are we gentleman?

Right near 10. So you're saying if it gets to 15, enough already. We've got to ease back on this thing that's hurting us. Because the point of the matter is this tax is going to create unemployment. Right? And if they say, well, it's not going to create unemployment, then they don't have any problem with an amendment saying that at 15 percent unemployment we're going to stop it. Right?

But, no, so they're saying no we don't want that amendment, saying they think it will go over 15 percent.

Congressman Shimkus is just doing the yeoman's job on the committee. It's a tough thing. Those amendments seem to me so commonsense that I'm kind of amazed that

anybody in the political business would dare to vote against something that's saying, hey, it's $5 a gallon for gasoline or unemployment is at 15 percent. Actually, that's not such an odd idea because Spain has put in this same thing that is being proposed here. Their unemployment now is 17.5 percent, and they're suffering. They're calling all the green jobs ``subprime jobs.''

Thank you very much, Congressman Shimkus.

We're joined by a very sober judge from the State of Texas, my good friend, Judge Carter. Welcome to our discussion this evening. Let's talk a little bit about these taxes.

Yes, they're sobering. They even make a judge sober. I yield.

That's absolutely right. I appreciate the gentleman's perspective, and that's coming from a judge.

You want to know what has happened and exactly what's going on. Don't put this behind smoke and mirrors. We're talking here about comparing the cost of these taxes being proposed. This is the cost of World War II right here, this big blue circle. This cap-and-trade here at $1.9 trillion is a tremendous, tremendous tax. The other wars--this thing here--would be the war in Afghanistan and the terrorist wars and all. All of these are small by comparison to what's being proposed.

So what does that mean for the average family? What are their costs going to be?

Well, you can see the energy here. The blue here is gasoline, and the gasoline is going to jump 16 percent. This is just by 2012. You're going to see a 16 percent increase in the cost of gasoline. The green is electricity. That's going to jump 9 percent, and that's just the beginning. That's only by 2012. Then you've got natural gas, which is going to jump 14 percent. Now, when the economy is rough and people are having trouble with unemployment, this somehow or other seems like a pretty strange thing to be talking about, a massive tax increase like this.

We're joined by my good friend from Georgia, and I would yield time to the doctor.

Dr. Broun, I appreciate your firmness and your just basically calling this what it is.

An hour ago, we heard the Democrats talking about the fact that, oh, they're really into technology and innovation and all of this kind of stuff. This thing has nothing to do with technology or innovation. This is just a plain, old tax increase. It's a plain, old tax increase, but it's a big, whopping tax increase, is what we're dealing with here, and the justification is kind of amusing.

I'd like to take just a minute, and then I'm going to recognize my good friend, Congresswoman Lummis from Wyoming.

Having an engineering background, I kind of get interest out of it. How much human activity does it take to affect greenhouse gases? This block here of all of these boxes represents all of the greenhouse gases which comprise only 2 percent of the atmosphere. So these are all of the things that cause global warming. Most of this is water vapor. By the way, it's not CO2, okay? Now then, this yellow stuff over here is the part of the greenhouse gases that is CO2. Those are the yellow boxes. The little red box there is the CO2 that is caused by human activity, and that little red box right there is the excuse for this whopping, big tax. Now, somehow or other, the logic of this just seems like a very, very thinly veiled excuse for a great big tax.

The thing that is the most amusing on this is that the one major source of energy that we have that makes no CO2 is not being given any credit or is being pushed forward at all, which is nuclear power. We'll talk about that, but I want to yield to the gentlewoman from Wyoming, Congresswoman Lummis.

Thank you for joining us tonight. It's just a treat to have you here.

Reclaiming my time, Congresswoman Lummis, what you're saying is really exciting. You're talking about what the Republicans have been pushing for now and since I've been here, which has been since 2001. It's an all-of-the-above strategy. It's saying let's let freedom work. Just get out of the way, and let's start developing hydrogen. If we've got places we ought to drill for oil, then do that. Fine. If we've got to do coal, let's figure out if you're going to sequester it or not. If we need nuclear and if you're really worried about that percentage of CO2--I mean if you're really serious about that, then why not embrace the number 1 technology that doesn't make any CO2, which is nuclear? We're saying do all of these things. Let the free marketplace work and let freedom basically run. Let American innovation--and let the resources that God gave us on this land--work, and we will have energy.

You know, there's an ironic thing that is just absolutely crazy about government. Do you know why the Department of Energy was created years and years ago? This is kind of a quiz question if any of my colleagues happen to know the answer. Why did we create the Department of Energy?

Dr. Broun from Georgia, do you know why we created the Department of Energy?

What has happened since we've created it, Congressman?

We are less that way.

What has happened to the number of employees in the Department of Energy?

In fact, you could almost say it's of inverse proportion. The more people they've hired and the bigger it has gotten, the more dependent we have become on foreign energy. That doesn't make a whole lot of sense.

I want to thank Congresswoman Lummis, and I also want to get back to Judge Carter here.

I want to give you a chance to take a look at some of these things. We've got, I think, only just about another 5 minutes or so.

I think that was pretty straightforward. If they don't do the job, fire them.

Now, Ronald Reagan wanted to close the department down.

Is that what you're advocating?

Reclaiming my time, these are all different places. If you're going to have to use it up, it's going to cost you $1,900 per household just for the first year of this tax. This just tells you what you'd have to give up to save that money to pay that tax. This one here is all of the meat, poultry, fish, eggs, dairy products, fruits and vegetables that a family eats in 1 year.

That's what you've got to give up to compensate for this tax that's being proposed. Or, maybe you don't want to do that. You want to give up this--all furniture, appliances, carpet, and other furnishings. You can give that up for 1 year.

Are you going to collect that in bags, gentlemen?

I think we're getting close on time, but the good news is my good friend, Congressman King from Iowa, is here. I think he is going to continue talking on the same subject. I think he might be willing to recognize some of the other Congressmen that want to weigh in on this absolutely crazy sort of tax system that's being proposed.

The funny thing is that, just to conclude, this chart right here, this is something the Democrats have been unwilling to deal with or talk about. But, see this little card? There's a little plastic thing here and there's a thing inside there that's the size of two mechanical pencil erasers. There's enough nuclear energy in that little pill right there to equal 149 gallons of oil, 1 ton of coal, or 17,000 cubic feet of natural gas. That's how much energy is in that one little tablet. Maybe we ought to be thinking about real technology.

Thank you all for joining me this evening.

I thank you very much, gentlemen. Congressman King is known for the Opportunity Society that he chairs. He brought in a speaker just a matter of a couple of weeks ago, an economist from Spain, talking about the exact same thing that's being proposed here in America. In fact, the President has referred to Spain as a great example of what we should do. And he informed us that it's a great example if you like 17\1/2\ percent unemployment.

What he described was--one of the things that was just amazing to me in terms of the contradiction that's involved was, they closed down nuclear

power plants in Spain because they're worried about CO2. Yet, nuclear power plants don't make any CO2 at all.

In fact, the chart next to my good friend from Iowa there, the chart is a blowup of that little tiny card in the top left corner that's clipped on there. That little tiny pellet that's the size of two pencil erasers, if you have a couple of those, it takes just--let's see, if you have two of those, it takes all of the energy you need to heat your house for 1 year. Two of those little tiny pellets. Yet, you're talking about two times 149 gallons of oil or 2 tons of coal or the equivalent of two times 17,000 cubic feet of natural gas.

And so if you're really serious about stopping CO2, aside from the flatulence of the sheep in Australia and all, look, nuclear is clearly the logical thing for us to do.

If you could pop the next chart up there, too. These are the sources of emission-free electricity. If you take a look at it, nuclear right now, that's making no CO2 emissions, is 73 percent. Yet, there's no discussion at all about what is going to be done with nuclear. That just seems to be--I mean, what we are really talking about is just a good excuse to tax people. And I'm afraid.

I don't want to ramble on too far, but it seems so odd that Spain would basically shut down nuclear in the name of trying to protect against CO2. I mean the engineer in me just says these people have drunk some kind of Kool-Aid.

The thing that was frightening--and I will conclude with this--about the Spanish system, was that the country sold off licenses to people to make their clean energy that was solar and wind. And the government would guarantee you a really high rate of electricity if you bought solar panels if you bought one of these licenses.

So the people would give these licenses. You've got all these people with licenses. They're buying solar panels and windmills. As they do that, they feed that electricity into the grid, and they get paid a good chunk of change for it, which then of course is then passed on to the taxpayers.

They have had a 30 percent increase in electric rates in the last couple of years for the consumer. But for industry, in a year and a half, it's been a 100 percent increase. Here's the bad thing. When the wind and the solar don't cooperate, they tell the aluminum manufacturer, they tell the steel manufacturer, Shut your plant down.

Guess what those aluminum and steel manufacturers are doing? They're moving out of Spain. That's why they have got a 17\1/2\ percent unemployment over there.

And so I don't think we really want to follow Spain's example. They create this system where now, politically, they can't put the genie back in the bottle because you have all these people on the take and you politically can't say we're going to take away your lucrative business of making all of this electricity because they bought windmills and solar panels which don't work when the sun isn't shining or the wind isn't blowing.

It's a really amazing thing. I sure hope America doesn't go down this big old tax thing. I yield back to my good friend from Iowa and your leadership.

Madam Speaker, I had the privilege of participating in the 57th Annual National Prayer Breakfast with my colleagues, Congressman Heath Shuler of North Carolina and Congressman Vern Ehlers of Michigan, on February 5, 2009. This annual gathering is held here in our Nation's Capital and is hosted by Members of the U.S. Senate and the U.S. House of Representatives weekly prayer breakfast groups. I would like to request that the summation of the transcript of the 2009 proceedings be printed in the Congressional Record at this time.

57th National Prayer Breakfast--Thursday, February 5, 2009, Hilton

Washington Hotel, Washington, DC

Co-Chairs: U.S. Representative Vern Ehlers and U.S. Representative

Heath Shuler

President Barack Obama: Good morning. I want to thank the

co-chairs of this breakfast, Representatives Heath Shuler and

Vernon Ehlers. I also want to thank my good friend Tony Blair

for coming today, as well as our Vice President, Joe Biden,

members of the cabinet, members of Congress, clergy, friends,

and dignitaries from across the world.

Michelle and I are honored to join you in prayer this

morning. I know this breakfast has a long history in

Washington, and faith has always been a guiding force in our

family's life, so we feel very much at home and look forward

to keeping this tradition alive during our time here. It is a

tradition that I am told actually began many years ago in the

city of Seattle. It was at the height of the Great

Depression, and most people found themselves out of work.

Many fell into poverty and some lost everything. The leaders

of the community did all that they could for those who were

suffering in their midst. And then they decided to do

something more--they prayed. It didn't matter what party or

religious affiliation to which they belonged. They simply

gathered one morning as brothers and sisters to share a meal

and talk with God. These breakfasts soon sprouted up

throughout Seattle and quickly spread to cities and towns

across America, eventually making their way to Washington,

DC. A short time after President Eisenhower asked a group of

Senators if he could join their prayer breakfast, it became a

national event. And today, as I see presidents, prime

ministers and dignitaries here from every corner of the

globe, it strikes me that this is one of the rare occasions

that still brings much of the world together at a moment of

peace and good will.

I raise this history because far too often we have seen

faith wielded as a tool to divide us from one another--as an

excuse for prejudice and intolerance. Wars have been waged,

innocents had been slaughtered. For centuries entire

religions have been persecuted, all in the name of perceived

righteousness. There is no doubt that the very nature of

faith means that some of our beliefs will never be the same.

We read from different texts. We follow different edicts. We

subscribe to different accounts of how we came to be here and

where we are going next. And some subscribe to no faith at

all. But no matter what we choose to believe, let us remember

that there is no religion whose central tenet is hate. There

is no God who condones taking the life of an innocent human

being. This much we know. We know too that whatever our

differences, there is one law that binds all great religions

together. Jesus told us to ``love thy neighbor as thyself.''

The Torah commands, ``That which is hateful to you, do not do

to your fellow.'' In Islam there is the hadith that reads,

``None of you truly believes until he wishes for his brother

what he wishes for himself.'' And the same is true for

Buddhists and Hindus, for followers of Confucius, and for

humanists. It is, of course, the Golden Rule--the call to

love one another, to understand one another, to treat with

dignity and respect those with whom we share a brief moment

on this Earth. It is an ancient rule, a simple rule, but also

perhaps the most challenging. For it asks each of us to take

some measure of responsibility for the well-being of people

we may not know or worship with or agree with on every issue

or on any issue. Sometimes it asks us to reconcile with

bitter enemies or resolve ancient hatreds--and that requires

a living, breathing act of faith. It requires us not only to

believe but to do--to give something of ourselves for the

benefit of others and the betterment of our world. In this

way, the particular faith that motivates each of us can

promote a greater good for all of us. Instead of driving us

apart, our varied beliefs can bring us together to feed

the hungry, clothe the naked, comfort the afflicted, to

make peace where there is strife and rebuild what is

broken, to lift up those who have fallen on hard times.

This is not only our call as people of faith, but our duty

as citizens of America, and our duty as citizens of the

world, and it will be the purpose of the White House

Office of Faith-based and Neighborhood Partnerships that I

am announcing later today.

The goal of this office will not to be to favor one

religious group over another--or even religious groups over

secular groups, it will simply be to work on behalf of those

organizations that want to work on behalf of our communities,

and to do so without blurring the line that our founders

wisely drew between church and state. This work is important,

because whether it is a secular group advising families

facing foreclosure or faith-based groups providing job

training to

those who need work, few are closer to what is happening on

our streets and in our neighborhoods than these

organizations. People trust them, communities rely on them,

and we will help them.

We will also reach out to leaders and scholars around the

world to foster a more productive and peaceful dialogue on

faith. I am not naive. I don't expect divisions to disappear

overnight, nor do I believe that the long-held views and

conflicts will suddenly vanish. But I do believe that if we

can talk to one another openly and honestly, and if perhaps

we allow God's grace to enter into that space that lies

between us, then the old rifts between us will start to mend,

and new partnerships will begin to emerge. In a world that

grows smaller by the day, perhaps we can begin to crowd out

the destructive forces of excessive zealotry and make room

for the healing power of understanding. This is my hope. This

is my prayer. I believe this good is possible because my

faith teaches me that all is possible, but I also believe

because of what I have seen and what I have lived.

I was not raised in a particularly religious household. I

had a father who was born a Muslim but became an atheist,

grandparents who were non-practicing Methodists and Baptists,

and a mother who was skeptical of organized religion--even

though she was the kindest, most spiritual person I have ever

known. She was the one who taught me as a child to love, and

to understand, and to do unto others as I would want done. I

didn't become a Christian until many years later when I moved

to the South Side of Chicago after college. It happened not

because of indoctrination or a sudden revelation but because

I spent month after month working with church folks who

simply wanted to help neighbors who were down on their luck,

no matter what they looked like or where they came from or

who they prayed to. It was on those streets, in those

neighborhoods that I first heard God's spirit beckon me. It

was there that I felt called to a higher purpose--His

purpose. In different ways and in different forms, it is that

spirit and sense of purpose that drew friends and neighbors

to that first prayer breakfast in Seattle all those years

ago, during another trying time for our nation. It is what

led friends and neighbors from so many faiths and nations

here today. We come to break bread and to give thanks, but

most of all to seek guidance. And to rededicate ourselves to

the mission of love and service that lies at the heart of all

humanity. St. Augustine once said: ``Pray as though

everything depends on God and work as though everything

depends on you.''

So let us pray together on this February morning, but let

us also work together in all the days and months ahead. For

it is only through common struggle and common effort, as

brothers and sisters, that we fulfill our highest purpose as

beloved children of God. I ask that you join me in that

effort and I also ask that you pray for myself, for Michelle,

for my family and for the continued perfection of our nation.

Thank you so much, God bless you. God bless the United States

of America.

Congressman Ehlers. Thank you very much, Mr. President and

Michelle, for being with us. This is an auspicious occasion.

As I had said earlier, this prayer breakfast started with

President Eisenhower and every year since then it has been

graced by the presence of the President of the United States.

It has been a real blessing to have the President and the

First Lady here today.

Congressman Shuler: Welcome back Casting Crowns.

Casting Crowns: [sing] Who am I that the Lord of all the

earth would care to know my name, would care to feel my hurt.

Who am I that the bright and morning star would choose to

light the way from my ever wandering heart but not because of

who I am but because of what you've done and not because of

what I've done but because of who you are and I am a flower

quickly fading here today and gone tomorrow a wave tossed in

the ocean, the vapor in the wind, still you hear me when I'm

calling but you catch me when I'm falling and you told me who

I am, I am yours.

Who am I that the eye that's seen the sin would look on me

with love and watch me rise again. Who am I that the voice

that calmed the sea would call out through the rain and calm

the storm in me, not because of who I am but because of what

you've done, not because of what I've done but because of who

you are.

And I am a flower quickly fading, here today and gone

tomorrow, a wave tossed in the ocean, a vapor in the wind,

still you hear me when I'm calling, Lord you catch me when

I'm falling and you told me who I am, I am yours.

Whom shall I fear, whom shall I fear, because I am yours.

Congressman Ehlers: Thank you again Casting Crowns for your

words of faith and encouragement, we appreciate your

participation today.

I hope that all of you have been uplifted and inspired by

what you have seen up here--people of different parties,

nations, races, generations and backgrounds coming together.

As the Prime Minister and the President both said, faith can

be a tremendous force for good in this modern world and we

all need it--all the help we can get. It all begins with

obeying the simple commands that Jesus talked about. Loving

God with everything we have and loving our neighbors as

ourselves. This is the first and great commandment. We in the

Congress are trying to do that and I hope that you will

commit to do that more and more in your daily lives. We ask

that you will also join in prayer every single day and pray

for us in the Congress and in other agencies of leadership

around the world as we all try to serve God above all and to

serve people and to keep them safe and secure in their lives.

Congressman Shuler: Now to close the event, I am honored to

turn to a great American hero--from the age of 23 he was a

national leader in the struggle for civil rights and for more

than four decades he has been a shining star of justice. To

present our closing prayer, the Honorable Congressman John

Lewis of Georgia.

Congressman John Lewis: My beloved brothers and sisters,

let us pray. Lord our God, this morning we stand before you

as citizens of the world, as leaders of many great nations,

and as humbled public servants, tasked with a powerful

responsibility. Lord my God, your people are suffering in

teeming cities and in the distant corners of the earth--too

many of your children are hungry and naked, homeless and

poor, too many are sick, too many forgotten, too many are

locked in the struggles of war and suffering alone in silent

despair. Lord, we stand before you today as a human family in

need of your help. Please Lord, give us the faith to be still

and know that you are God. Give us the faith to trust that

you are with us at all times. Lord God, give us the power to

see that your light shines brightest in times of the greatest

need. Lord, give us a will to seek your divine understanding

in every decision that we make. Thank you Lord for sending us

a man, a leader and a President Barack Obama, we ask for a

special blessing on his behalf. Guide his steps and please

direct his path. Hold him and his family in the palm of

your magnificent and all powerful hand. Let your angels

watch over them, protect them and be their preferred and

invisible God. Thank you Lord, thank you this morning for

sending men and women who prepare to do thy will. Pour out

your blessing upon us all. Give us the power to do what is

right, what is fair and what is just. Please Lord show us

how we can bring peace to a violent world. Let the day

come when we can lay down the tools and instruments of war

and study war no more. Lord, give us the will and the way

to build and not destroy. Give us the capacity to be

reconciled and not divide. Give us the strength to love

and not to hate, that these gifts be made manifest in all

that we do and in every way that we serve your people. We

ask all these things in Thy divine name. This is our plea.

This is our cry. This is our prayer. Amen.

Congressman Ehlers: Go in peace, love God. Serve God and

your neighbor.

Mr. Speaker, it is a pleasure to join you this evening here in the Chamber and talk for a while about what I think a very interesting subject to many, many Americans. If they're not interested in it now, they will be rapidly as this issue develops here in Washington, D.C.

What we're talking about is, most specifically, the background on a thing that's called cap-and-trade or cap-and-tax. And ``cap-and-tax'' is probably a better name for it because what we're talking about is a very, very large tax increase that is to be justified because of the great danger, the imminent peril that is created by global warming-- although that has now been called sometimes ``climate change,'' or global warming, or other various names. And soon the Legislature is going to actually be doing the debating and the voting on this very, very large tax increase.

Now, the President promised people that there would be no one making $250,000 or less who is going to get any tax increases. But, unfortunately, this tax increase hits all Americans; even the average household will be paying thousands of dollars more.

The President promised that nobody making $250,000 or less was going to get any tax increases. Well, we have seen that is not true, and particularly with this cap-and-tax situation, the tax on all kinds of people in the country. In fact, every time you turn a light switch on, you would be paying a tax. So I don't think we can take the President seriously on that promise.

Now, the justification for this very large tax increase is the popular subject of global warming, or climate change, or whatever. And that is the general idea that mankind is making CO2--that's the product of burning something. When you burn something, the oxygen in the atmosphere combines with the fuel and it makes CO2. It's the bubbles in soda pop. So we drink CO2, as a matter of fact. And in a sense, the soda pop manufacturer is sequestering the CO2 in bottles of soda pop and you are letting it loose when you open the can. Anyway, the theory is that CO2 is the culprit, and therefore we have to reduce the amount of CO2. And so this tax is being justified to reduce CO2 so the planet won't burn up. That's the fast version of it.

So what I thought I would do this evening is to give just a little bit of a historic perspective because sometimes when you go into one of these debates, it's interesting to take a look and see, you know, are we the first people that have ever been talking about this, or is there a historic perspective of some kind on it? And I found that the historic perspective here is somewhat amusing and kind of interesting. So I'm going to take you back to the year 1920. At that time, in 1920, the newspapers were filled with scientific warnings of a fast- approaching glacial age. So in 1920, the scientists were saying that the planet was going to get really cold, there was going to be glaciers running around all over, so we need to be prepared for very wintry weather because there are glaciers that are going to blow around. So that is 1920.

1930s; the predominant scientists at the time reversed themselves to the fact that in the near future there is going to be what they called ``serious global warming.'' So from the twenties to the thirties, the scientists changed. In 1972, Time magazine cited numerous scientific reports of imminent ``run-away glacial activities.'' So now we've gone from global warming to glacial activities again in 1972.

In 1975, Newsweek says, Scientific evidence of a great ice age, and we were being called to stockpile food, that maybe what we should be considering doing was melting the ice packs, the icecaps at the North and South Poles to try to stop this tremendous ice age that was coming in 1972 and 1975. But in 1976, the U.S. Government says the Earth is headed into some sort of mini-ice age.

So this was continued through the seventies, and now we've gone back to global warming.

So over a period of the last hundred years or so, the major scientists--at least the ones that were talking out on this subject-- have reversed themselves three times. I think it gives us some cause to be a little cautious before we jump into a massive tax increase to deal with a problem that has been coming around for the last 100 years, either getting too hot or too cold.

Now there were statements made today that say that there is complete agreement that we have global warming and all of the major scientists all agree and the time for debate is over. Particularly, I'm quoting, in 1992, going back to '92, Al Gore made this statement, quote, Only an insignificant fraction of scientists deny the global warming crisis. The time for debate is over.

Let's do this quote again. 1992, Al Gore says, ``Only an insignificant fraction of scientists deny the global warming crisis. The time for debate is over.'' Yet in that same year a Gallup poll said that 53 percent of scientists involved--these are the scientists that are involved in the climate change debates and questions--only 53 percent of them didn't agree that there was going to be global warming, 30 percent weren't sure, and only 17 percent believed that global warming had begun in the year 1992.

Moving closer to our own time period, just last year you have in The Wall Street Journal a report by an MIT professor, Richard Lindzen, says--this is his quote, There is no consensus on global warming.

Now when he made that statement, boy, did he get beat up. All the media and all kinds of people were all over him saying, that was a reckless thing to say that there's no consensus on the subject, which led him, after he'd taken a tremendous amount of political flak, to say that it seems that global warming is more of a political issue than it is a scientific or technical one. And that was the professor from MIT's opinion in that regard.

So that's just to try to give us a little bit of an introduction to obviously what is a controversial question. Even if global warming were widely believed to be true by scientists, then there are a whole series of other questions that have to be asked. Can we do anything about it? Should we pass a huge and massive tax increase? Is that necessary? So that's what we're going to talk about.

We're joined, as usual, by some really capable people that have taken some time to look into this issue, and I am absolutely delighted to introduce one of those to you now, and that is Congressman Latta from Ohio.

So just see if I can understand because you are giving us a lot of information. It is very good stuff but at a pretty rapid pace.

So what you're saying is that this big tax that's being proposed is going to have an impact. You started by saying that you come from a district in the State of Ohio, and that that was a very big manufacturing district. So this is of particular interest to you.

So the connection is that somehow this tax and all is going to really affect those manufacturing jobs. That's your point, is that not so?

And the reason of course is why? Let's flesh this out. I think it's fairly obvious, but I will yield.

Let me reclaim my time. What we have here in the State of Ohio and many other heavy manufacturing States, which is the backbone of a major part of industry in America, you have, first of all, heavy industry or manufacturing, and that has the unique characteristic that it uses a lot of electricity, some more so than others. And you also have the unique characteristic that you're burning a lot of coal, and therefore, you will have to pay a whole lot of taxes on the energy that's generated off of the coal.

So you put those two things together, it says, now those businesses are no longer competitive because they're getting taxed more and more and more on the profits that they're making, which has the effect of making those companies have an economic reason to move somewhere else. And that's what you're concerned with, is that correct?

I yield.

Reclaiming my time, let's take a look. I have got a chart here. It was prepared along the lines of what you're saying. And this is the annual increase of electric costs under the Obama cap-and-tax plan. So this is not specific to your congressional district, but it is specific to your State, Ohio.

And it is specific to other States across the country. I don't know whether or not it's that clear because there's different shades of green here, but this is increase per capita.

These are the States that are the darkest green, and it's an increase of over $1,500. That is a whale of a lot of money for somebody to be picking up in an increase in electric costs. Where is that coming out? Well, it's coming in these States here and also, as you mentioned, Indiana, next door to you, and over this way. You can see some of the States, and you've got the ones that are over $1,000 per capita.

So this is a very big tax increase, and you can see a whole portion of the Midwest is in that category. We've got quite a lot of them that are over $50.

Now people may say, oh, my goodness. Now Congressman Akin, you are a Republican, and you're just trying to scare people about the talk about, this is going to be a big tax increase. But here you have the words of our President at a meeting of the editorial board at the San Francisco Chronicle. This is January 2008. He is very direct in what he is saying, Under my plan of a cap-and-trade or a cap-and-tax system, electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket.

That's just what you're saying, gentleman. It's going to skyrocket in Ohio, but it's going to skyrocket in a lot of other States too. That will cost money. They will pass that money on to consumers.

Now a guy from MIT took a look at what they thought that would be per household, and they were looking at $3,000. There is a lot of speculation as to how much it would be. But $3,000 for every household in America, that is really an incredible number and especially when the President has said, I'm not going to raise taxes on people over $250,000. And now we're talking about, you flip the light switch, and you are already getting taxed at an increasing rate. What that does, of course, is makes us uncompetitive.

Now there's two ways to deal with jobs that are fleeing overseas. One of

them is to tax all the imports coming in, which is a very blunt instrument. It makes the cost to everybody in America go up, and we reward people that are inefficient producers. The other thing is to create a set of laws in our country that allow us to compete competitively with other countries. This is the exact opposite because when you tax electricity and energy production, that's a major part of all of manufacturing, and now we can't compete. So just to your point, we're basically taking those jobs right out of the country at a time where we're concerned about unemployment.

I'm just thankful for your joining us. We're joined also by another good friend of ours, a gentleman from Utah (Mr. Bishop), highly respected, and he also agreed to talk a little bit about where we are in this entire situation.

Congressman Bishop, if I could jump in here.

What you are saying is tremendously important. First of all, you are saying, we don't have to go this route on this great big huge tax. And what's more you are saying, instead of just taxing people as an excuse for not developing responsible American energy, you are saying, we ought to be developing American energy, getting off of our dependence on foreign energy, and that we should be using a plan that advances a whole broad spectrum of different solutions and let the marketplace start solving this problem instead of just depending on taxing everybody unequally but with a tremendous tax.

The thing that's unique to me, and sad, someone explained to me the other day that we created a Department of Energy years ago. And do you know why it was created and what its mission was? The interesting thing is it was created so that we could become not so dependent on foreign energy.

Now they have increased many, many, many times the number of employees in the Department of Energy, and their whole mission was so that we would not be dependent on foreign energy. And look where we are today. It's gotten worse and worse and worse. So you kind of ask yourself maybe Ronald Reagan was right when he said we ought to get rid of them because we are more dependent on foreign energy.

Please proceed, though, Congressman Bishop.

Sears and Roebuck was delighted with that, I'm sure.

Just reclaiming my time, as you take a look at the technology even now that's out there, maybe I suffer as one of the few people here in Congress trained as an engineer, but you start looking at what the possibilities are here. And one of the things that is particularly interesting, and I wonder because I take a look at what Europe is doing and it raises this question and we ought to talk about this a little bit too, and that is, is there a genuine interest in reducing CO2 or is this just a big excuse to levy a big tax on people? Because you go over to Spain and they have a very aggressive antiglobal warming policy there and they closed their nuclear reactors. Now, that makes you kind of wonder because that's one source of energy that we have in America that we have developed that doesn't make any CO2 and it makes very, very clean energy.

But just taking a look at what you're saying, take the innovation, first of all, the nuclear power plant. And some people may be fanatics. I like going over to Home Depot or Lowe's or something and looking at their tool section, and they've got all these nifty new tools that run on batteries, and these batteries are getting better and better. They're getting smaller and they're getting much more powerful. So if you put together an improvement in battery technology with nuclear energy and use the nuclear energy to charge up people's batteries in their cars and all, we're talking about a completely different way. And that's just one possibility.

But I wanted to get back to my good friend from Utah. You said you wanted to develop one specific area. Please jump right into that.

They call it subprime; is that right?

Just reclaiming my time, you're getting me excited. What you're talking about is a word that my constituents love. It's called ``freedom.'' The idea of freedom, the idea of challenging people's innovation and saying, okay, the first one to do this, this, or this, we're going to give you a prize. I didn't have all of those great examples that you gave us, but people the world over love a chance to win a prize. Plus it gives people a chance to start thinking: I bet you I can win that thing. I've got an idea of how to do that. What a great illustration of a freedom-based solution as opposed to a totalitarian top-down, government-knows-all-the-answers kind of thing and we are going to solve every problem in the world with more taxes and more spending. I like the freedom approach. I think that's a great idea.

I want to take my hat off for this American Energy Innovation Act that you're talking about. Sometimes people say that the Republicans don't have solutions. Our solution is called freedom. It's called innovation. It's called imagination. It's called turning the smarts of the American people loose on a problem and see what kind of wonderful things can happen.

I'm going to yield to the gentleman from Utah again.

Reclaiming my time, that sort of gets your dander up a little bit to be told you're going to get charged $600 billion and that's going to be the tax because you don't know how to solve this problem and the government can do it for you.

The funny thing is we've passed a lot of laws and they have these unintended consequences. And I can tell you right now what's going to happen. You tax the good old boys from Missouri, you tax them on their electricity and on their natural gas or their propane that they're heating their gas with in order to try to get CO2 down, and you know what's going to happen? They're going to get those steel chainsaws out and they're going to be chopping firewood and they're going to be heating with firewood. That's what is going to happen. And it's going to have the effect of creating more CO2 than if you just left the thing alone and not taxed them at $3,000 per household a year.

We are joined by other Members of Congress. I did want to be able to get back, though, to Congressman Latta from Ohio so you have a rejoinder in this, and then we have got another fantastic Member joining us tonight as well.

Reclaiming my time, hit those numbers again because you're not saying it that clearly. I didn't quite catch it. When was the last time we sited a new nuclear power plant?

And that makes how much CO2?

None. So we're all worried about CO2, and yet we have not sited another nuclear plant since 1977. That seems like such an odd thing.

I recall when we had the Speaker come into the Science Committee, I think at the beginning of this year or the end of last year, and she was talking about wanting to deal with the global warming thing and all because Al Gore was coming in also and there was going to be this great big pow-wow on the subject. And I asked her, If we're very worried about CO2 and nuclear power plants don't generate any CO2 and we have hundreds of them floating around in ships in the Navy and they have never been a problem technically to us, what's your thought on that, because it sounded to me like you were becoming a little more open minded?

Oh, yes, we're becoming more open minded.

And yet legislatively you get no credit at all for generating energy that makes no CO2. Now, what's the logic of this? Please help me because I don't get it.

I yield.

Reclaiming my time, that gets right back to your point. We are basically shipping jobs overseas when we do it because we can't be competitive that way.

We have got another fantastic Congressman who has come to the floor, Michele Bachmann from Minnesota. And she is just such a sweet, wonderful lady, but she also is extremely articulate.

It's a treat to have you, Congresswoman Bachmann. I yield.

That is really a vision. You know, what I am hearing, if I am trying to put a little title on that, I think I am hearing let freedom ring. Let Americans use their ingenuity. Let us use the resources that God gave us. Let's see what we can do.

Let's be an exporter of energy. Let's take what the Lord has given us and really start to define clearly what the problems are and take a look at what the alternatives are. Let the innovative juices of the American system go to work on this thing.

I mean, that's even assuming you have got a big problem with CO2. Even if you assume that, there are a lot of ways to deal with this.

But to try to come up with--look at this. This is the cost of World War II here, 3.6 trillion. This cap-and-trade tax, 1.9 trillion. This is more. This is what we are talking about in the next couple of weeks. We are talking about a tax that's going to cost a little bit more than the Vietnam War, the space race, the New Deal and Hurricane Katrina combined.

And that's not even counting all the jobs we are going to be shipping. And we could just basically let Mother Freedom ring the bell. Let's just go ahead and use these resources and figure out ways to solve these problems, because we could do it. That's what we believe in. We believe in freedom.

I would like to go back to my good friend from Utah, Congressman Bishop.

That is American ingenuity, I suppose.

Yes, I just don't think that taxation is a solution to every problem.

I think one of the things that has been held up as a shining example for us to follow is the nation of Spain. And we heard about that last week from a very interesting brief we got.

And if you could just share with us a little bit about how that system would work. Because when you hear how the system that is very similar to what's being proposed here works in Spain, you are going to go, Oh, my goodness, I am not so sure we really want to be like Spain and doing all of this stuff.

Why don't you just share a little bit of that with us, Congressman.

I recall some of the presentation. What really concerned me was the first thing was they have got 17.5 percent unemployment. Now that would get the attention of Americans anywhere, 17.5 percent unemployment.

Now, how did that come about? Well, here is how it came about. They decided they wanted to go with the green energy plan, so what they did is they closed their nuclear facilities. Now, that says to me, I am skeptical.

I think this was more of a political deal than a technical deal, because nuclear makes zero CO2. And yet they closed them and what did they replace them with? Windmills and solar panels. Well, that's nifty when the sun is shining and the wind is blowing.

But what happens when it doesn't? Well, they say to industry, Sorry, no electricity today. Now, my family, years and a number generations ago, started a steel mill, and the steel mills nowadays have these electrodes the size of telephone poles, three of them. They lower them into an electric furnace and lightning and thunder comes out of that furnace, and it melts the steel scrap in there.

That takes a lot of electricity. People that want to make aluminum take aluminum oxide out of the ground, that's aluminum and oxygen combined quite tightly together, and they have to separate those two molecules to get the aluminum. That takes a lot of electricity.

So what happens to steel? What happens to aluminum manufacturing in Spain? It's gone.

You can't have a whole bunch of people coming to work today and say, Sorry, the wind is not blowing hard enough, not going to make any aluminum today. And those companies go overseas, and so they lose all their jobs over there.

You know what scared me the most about his presentation, what he basically said is that the government has come up with such a clever, integrated kind of system in the legislation they passed. What happens is they, first of all, through various means--he claimed that even the Mafia, he thought, could be involved in it--they give licenses to people to generate electricity.

And so if you happen to get one of these licenses, this is a license to make some money, because you put enough solar panels and windmills up, and the State guarantees you a certain rate per kilowatt hour. So there are all these people in line wanting to get licenses to generate green energy.

So that's how they start. And everybody that has one of those licenses, let me tell you, politically, they are bought into this system. They are not going to let this system change for love nor money because they are making a ton of money on these licenses that they got from the government.

The only trouble is, the government is paying so much for that energy that the society can't sustain it. It's chasing all the jobs overseas. But then they go through this fast now you see it, now you don't economics, and sort of write it off this way, send it another way, and eventually run it into future debt.

So they are increasing their national debt. Their jobs are going down like mad. Their economy is in--but they have created a system politically that so many people are part of it that they can't let go of it. They can't get out of it.

That's really frightening. It's not something you can just turn off and say, Oh, we made a mistake. They can't go back because everybody now is part of this deal.

Yes, we do have this. This is an estimate of job losses, if we go with this tax. And is this the kind of thing we should be doing in these economic times? Are we supposed to be losing jobs? I don't think this is a logical thing to do at all.

And the thing that's so tragic about this whole thing is we have the resources. We have the technology. We have the innovation. If we want to define the problem precisely, we put those incentives out there in the form of prizes and different things.

I tell you, get out of the way. Because when you give Americans a bunch of prizes and free enterprise and freedom, they are going to go for it and we are going to generate a tremendous part of energy.

Now, here is part of problem we are dealing with here, and maybe this comes from my engineering background. But there are a whole series of questions that really need to be asked before we go any farther with this massive tax increase that's being proposed.

And I think the first thing is there is a question between technical people and scientists, first of all, on the amount of CO2 that we are really generating, that human beings are generating. That's not absolutely agreed to among scientists at all.

The fact is that human beings add something to the CO2 in the atmosphere, but how much that is is kind of an unknown thing. We know it is going up, but we don't know how much mankind is adding to that, which then raises the next question, and that is, first of all, what are the effects that if we have the CO2, what is that going to do to the climate? Because, if you recall, it used to be we talked about global warming. The only thing is now you don't hear people, the liberals aren't talking about global warming anymore. They are talking about global change. Why not? Well, because it's not warming.

They have these models, these computer models saying the Earth is really going to be warm. Now, if you take a couple of years ago, there was a statement, let's see if I can find it here. They said something to the effect that the waves are going to be breaking at the steps of the Capitol.

That's what we were told. I mean, I was here in Congress. This is recently.

And they said, Hey, the water, the ice is melting so fast that we are going to have the waves breaking at the steps of the Capitol.

Well, now subsequently it seems, I have the exact quote here, just a few years ago scientists predicted that the seas would rise from 20 to 40 feet because of global warming with waves crashing against the steps of the U.S. Capitol, that would launch boats from the bottom of the Capitol steps. That's what people are saying.

So the question is, first of all: How much CO2 are we contributing? Second of all, what will be the effect of that CO2. Then, the next question is: What is our ability to do anything about it, even if we wanted to? How effective could a solution be?

In my opinion, which is what you see in Spain, is this tax that's being proposed--this massive tax increase for our constituents, is this really about a concern for CO2, or is really the global warming just basically a stalking horse to give politicians another great big tax increase, increase the power of the Federal Government, and take away that precious freedom that our dear friend from Minnesota is just talking about?

I'd like to go back to my friend from Utah, please.

Reclaiming, we didn't do a tax increase, did we?

It was because it seemed to make sense--and Americans did it.

Reclaiming my time, it seems to me that if you're a businessman, the way businessmen think--because I used to be in the business world--you give me the rules and we will play the game. If I have got a chemical cracking facility in America and we're taking oil and we're breaking it into different products and things, and I'm going to get a great big tax, one of the things I might consider doing is just moving that overseas. Because if I move that overseas, the jobs go away here. Then I can sell the same products back into this country at a much lower cost, and anybody left in this country is going to be at a tremendous competitive disadvantage.

So you're creating an incentive for companies to close American businesses and move them overseas by what we're doing. Somehow or another do we want the government making policies which manipulate the things that businesses do--not based on what is good for our citizens, but based on some silly set of laws that somebody came up with down here in Washington, D.C.; certainly not something I would vote for.

I would like to recognize the gentlelady from Minnesota.

Reclaiming my time, do you know what it sounds like to me? This is just another color version of another bailout deal.

We're going to say, Oh my business can't live with this cap-and-tax. So I need a bailout. And so now we're going to get in the business of trading off bailouts. I wonder who's going to get the deal.

The thing that's amusing on this entire situation, every time we seem to tamper with these things, we create these laws which do the opposite of what we're really trying to do. I think that the thing that we need to be having an awful lot more faith in in this Capitol is the idea of freedom and the imagination, the innovation that's available in America through the natural resources we're blessed with.

All of these things come together to provide us with solutions where there's choices and options and free enterprise is working. And what is a good solution today is going to be replaced by something better tomorrow. It's even going to be better the day after tomorrow.

I am so thankful for our guests here. We have just got a couple more minutes. I will go back to the gentleman from Ohio, if you would like to make a quick closing statement, and then we're going to call it an evening.

Reclaiming my time, I am just so delighted with our guests here on the floor. You know, the common sense in me can't resist showing this little chart. How much does a human activity affect greenhouse gases? Well, if this block represents greenhouse gases right here, then CO2 is those yellow boxes. That's the amount of greenhouse gas that's heating the world by CO2. The rest of this is other things that are heating the world. Then, this is the amount that's caused by people. So this seems to be an awful big tax for such a little tiny box.

I want to once again thank my good friends, Congresswoman Bachmann from Minnesota and Congressman Latta from Ohio and Congressman Bishop from Utah for joining us. I hope that this has been as informative and interesting for everybody else as much as it was for me.

It's a pleasure to be able to join you this nice spring afternoon. On a somewhat different subject than we have talked about in the last several weeks, the subject we're going to be dealing with for the next hour is the subject of missile defense.

It's a rather interesting story. It involves some history. It also involves some very interesting sort of political wheeling and dealing between various nations, and it is of particular interest to us because it is the subject of defending our homeland and our lives.

The story starts, at least as my memory allows, going back some years, back to a thing called the Antiballistic Missile, the ABM Treaty of 1972. That was an agreement between a number of

different nations not to develop a missile defense.

Now what does that mean exactly? What it means is different nations were putting together two pieces of technology. The first was the ability to make missiles. That was started at my old alma mater, actually, by a guy by the name of Robert Goddard, who was an experimenter, and he was doing experiments like you might see kids do to make model rockets and things.

So people started to realize that you could put a weapon on the end of a missile and could shoot it at your enemy.

That idea had been done with skyrockets before that with just black powder. The Chinese did that, to some degree, and they even used them on Fort McHenry. But this was a new development, and this was coupled with the idea of these nuclear warheads.

The nuclear warhead put a whole new different meaning on things, because it was such a powerful weapon that if you could put a nuclear warhead onto a missile and then shoot that at your enemy, you didn't even have to be too accurate, even, and it would cause tremendous damage.

So as I was just graduating from engineering school, what was going on was that we had negotiated a treaty with the Soviet Union called the ABM treaty in 1972, and what it said was that we were not going to defend ourselves from nuclear missiles.

Now, that is kind of a crazy idea in a way, because the job of a nation is to defend their own populace. The main job that we have in Congress, if you were to say, what is your main job? One of the main things needs to be to defend America, to defend our homeland. Yet this treaty said: We agree that we are not going to defend ourselves. In fact, the whole thing was called MAD, and indeed it was mad, Mutually Assured Destruction. If you shoot a nuclear weapon at us, we'll shoot one back at you. Everybody melts down and everybody loses.

So the theory is that that will create stability. Well, it was not so clear it was going to create stability, because if one guy could shoot first and take the other guy down, then it was not such a good thing not to be able to defend yourself.

And so it was that we went through a number of decades from the early seventies with this philosophy of mutually assured destruction. And it was really challenged in 1983 by Ronald Reagan. Ronald Reagan started doing some thinking and saying there has got to be a better way to do this thing than to have the Soviets and the Chinese aiming all these missiles at us, and they could melt down our different cities. So he came up with the idea of what was called SDI, Strategic Defense Initiative. He spoke at some length and did a very good job selling the idea that America should be looking at defending ourselves from these weapons.

One of the things that most people didn't know and that he educated the American public on was the fact that a foreign nation could shoot a missile from one continent to the other. We could see it on the radar coming in. We would say: New York City, you have half an hour before you're turned into dust, into a nuclear cinder, and there wasn't a thing we could do about it.

So Ronald Reagan said, there has got to be a better way to skin the cat than that and so he came up with the Strategic Defense Initiative. His detractors called it Star Wars, which actually didn't hurt from a marketing point of view. So Ronald Reagan talked about the different technologies that could be deployed in order to try to stop one of these incoming missiles.

That became kind of a hallmark of one of the things that Republicans stood for was missile defense, and it was one of the things that the Democrats decided they were against. They didn't like missile defense. Well, why was it they didn't like it? They had two reasons: One, it wouldn't work. And, two, it was too expensive. Also, they said it would destabilize relations between the countries, as though they were so stable during the Cold War period.

So that is what happened in 1983. Ronald Reagan made that proposal. It wasn't until actually many years later when I got to Congress, in 2002, that President Bush decided that it was time to move forward on this thing and protect our country. So he proposed and actually initiated the changes to give notice to the different countries that were involved in the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and said: You've got your 6 months' notice. We're going to start developing missile defense.

Now, that gives us a little bit of the background. I am joined here today and I am greatly honored to be able to have one of the outstanding experts in the U.S. Congress here on missile defense joining me on the floor, and that is my good friend, Trent Franks from Arizona.

We are going to hear what Trent has to say and kind of get into this subject. We are going to be joined by other Congressmen talking about something that is so fundamentally simple that it is very hard for me to understand how anybody could be opposed to our government defending our citizens from nuclear weapons.

I would now yield time to my friend from Arizona, Congressman Franks. Thank you for joining us.

Let me just interrupt a second because you've brought up a couple of really interesting points.

The first one, I remember starting to have some interest in politics, and I was really skeptical of the idea of even negotiating that treaty, because what we found was the Soviet Union cheated on all of their treaties. As we look now, as the Soviet Union has collapsed, we find they were busy cheating on this thing all the way along. So we were kind of really out there, weren't we, with this ABM treaty not having any defensive capability.

The second thing I would just mention is, now, the equation has changed, hasn't it? It is not just one or two nations. Now we are starting to look at a different scenario, aren't we?

Reclaiming my time, they had a nation-state; and they knew that if they launched at us, the thing was, we might launch back at them.

But now you're talking about a terrorist that may not have a nation- state. That is a different formula. Isn't it?

So what you are talking about is we are not only dealing with something that is not a nation-state, but we are also dealing with a different frame of mind, a different calculus on the value of life. You are talking about, if nuclear weapons fall into the hands of people that have this mindset, this whole thing is really a game changer.

Then is the only threat sort of the radical Islamic threat? Because it seems to me that North Korea also poses a threat.

Am I mistaken on that?

You are giving us a lot of valuable information. You are saying North Korea now has conducted missile tests. The missile, of course, is a delivery system. And the most recent test that they shot just a couple weeks ago went all the way over Japan and went some considerable distance, twice as far as their previous test. So the range of their missiles is going farther. Not only that, they are equipping the missile, or they can equip the missile, with a nuclear warhead, and our understanding is that they are busy developing that nuclear capability. Is that correct, to the best of our intelligence?

So North Korea sold some of the technology to Iran. But Iran has then been able to develop it more rapidly even than North Korea, perhaps because they have more money to put into the project. I don't know.

So now you have got North Korea and Iran both that we consider that the leadership is highly unstable in those countries, and they have the capability, or are rapidly developing the capability, of projecting a missile either into Europe or even potentially onto the continental United States with a nuclear warhead on it.

That is a scary thought. Thank you. And we will get back to the Congressman, as the expert.

We are also joined by some other wonderful patriots and people who have been paying some attention to this subject as well.

Congressman Coffman from Colorado, I would be happy to yield you some time. What is your thought on this? I want you to be part of our conversation here this afternoon.

Reclaiming my time, I want to be very direct here. This has really been a very partisan debate, hasn't it?

I think it was a Ronald Reagan thing. But this has been a straight Democrats one way, Republicans the other for many, many years. But that is starting to change some, isn't it?

It is hard to understand that mindset for me after September 11 to say that somebody is going to behave rationally, that you are going to assume, you are going to bet your city that somebody is going to behave rationally. And that is an interesting question.

We are also joined by a good friend of mine, Congressman Bishop, who wants to be part of the conversation as well, from Utah. And I want to include you in the conversation, too.

Thank you for your good work on these questions and willingness to take on some areas that some people don't want to think about or debate or discuss, just want to say it won't work and these people will never be mean to us, they will never go after one of our cities. I yield time.

Reclaiming my time, you are talking about the fact that we are going to be cutting missile defense. There are going to be cuts to this program. And the question is, is that a good strategy given the light of what's going on? Now, if the only people you are dealing with is the Soviet Union or the former Soviet Union, that is, Russia and China, that is one thing. But we are not dealing with that anymore.

I appreciate your perspective. I hope you will stick with us a little bit.

What I would like to do is get back to our technical expert here, Congressman Franks. And I would like to get into the weeds just a little bit further because people need to understand that every missile is not a missile, they have different ranges and they require a different response. And so when we start taking a look at our modern missile defense system, it basically is done in pieces and layers.

I would like to turn to my good friend from Arizona, and let's talk a little bit about the first way we break things down, which is the boost phase; the midcourse is that the missile is actually at times up in space; and then the reentry as it is coming down. And we treat those differently because there are different vulnerabilities. And we have actually started to build weapons that work--even though people said you can't do it and it won't work, we have these two missiles that have the capability now, which we have tested, where they are coming together, going 15,000 miles an hour closing velocity. And we don't just have one missile hitting another missile, we have one missile hitting a spot on another missile.

One of those missiles is pictured here to my left. This is called the ground-based missile. This is our longest, most powerful missile. And it can stop a missile launch from another continent from more than 10,000 miles away. It can see it coming--not this missile, but the system that goes with it--see the missile coming, has time to casually get up to speed, go out across the ocean, and intercept that missile with no explosion whatsoever, closing velocities of 15,000 miles an hour. Now, some of you might consider what it's like to have a car accident; two cars going 100 miles an hour coming down a highway and hitting head to head. Now, that's a nasty car wreck. But that is just one-twentieth or less than what we are talking about here.

I would like to call my friend from Arizona to give us the logic of how these things work.

I would yield to the gentleman.

Well, reclaiming my time, I appreciate that common sense. We have just seen people who are too willing to use terrorism as a tool for us to assume that we can just relax and not defend ourselves. It just doesn't seem to make any common sense.

And I completely agree with your comments. But I had yielded to the gentleman from Arizona to try to get a little bit of the technical thing. And we will also hear from a good friend of mine, Congressman Lamborn, who is great on this subject, also, from Colorado. But I want to go to my friend from Arizona first just to get the mechanisms of how this works.

So just reclaiming my time, what you are talking about--and I am a little bit of one of these Popular Science-type guys, it is sort of interesting--one of the strategies that uses what I described, you shoot a missile at a missile, and both of them are traveling, and you have to wait until your missile gets there to do something. And the trouble with that is it takes time. And what you are talking about is boost phase. How many seconds is boost phase typically?

You are getting to the point. A laser is like a flashlight; if you could aim it at the right thing and hit it, you don't have to wait for anything; whereas a missile, even if it's a fast one, you still have to wait for it.

So then if you catch it in boost phase. The other thing is it's really fragile, isn't it? I mean, it's got all of these gadgets and tanks of pressurized fuel. You don't have to do much to it, and it gets it all confused. It just literally blows right over the enemy's territory and they get to do the cleanup.

So, now, that's the boost phase. But I want to jump over to the gentleman from Colorado here.

Congressman Lamborn, I appreciate your work on this and also your concern for our country. Please jump in.

Reclaiming my time, let's develop that a little bit and go back over to some of our other experts here on this.

The first thing is the airborne laser, and let's describe that a little bit. First of all, I actually was onboard the plane that's going to be the first plane that carries it. It's like Air Force One. It's a huge aircraft with these multiple, multiple tires on the landing gear and everything, and it's full of some very high-tech equipment. And the purpose of this thing is to shoot a laser, as I understand it, and it hits that fragile missile on the boost phase.

Now, Congressman Franks, is it true that that's what is being targeted in the budget that we are going to get rid of that thing that we've spent all of this money on? We're supposed to fire it for the first time this summer. Are they really going to cut that thing?

I yield.

Could you imagine if we had a bunch of those planes traveling around? Any nutcase that wants to shoot a missile with a nuclear device on it, we just poke a hole in it and plop it and it will just fall down. I mean, we could protect incredible numbers of human beings with that kind of technology. I don't understand why we would want to cut that.

But the gentleman from Colorado would like to jump in.

We've heard that before, that you can't do it, and it turned out you can do it.

Congressman Bishop.

Reclaiming my time, that is an incredibly important point you just made. People are asking the wrong question. It's not whether we're using it because, as a deterrent, every day we protect ourselves, we are using it. Is that what you said?

I yield.

I am going to yield to my friend from Colorado, Congressman Lamborn.

Reclaiming my time, I am concerned at a number of different things as it relates to missile defense that the current administration is doing. One thing we are doing is cutting the airborne laser. Another thing is this multiple warhead re-entry situation where we basically gave or sold the Chinese the technology of being able to send a missile up and then have the warhead split into parts and those parts targeting different things. So that's a more complicated target to stop, and we're giving up the technology to do that. But then we're also, in some sort of a diplomacy thing, going over to Putin and telling him we're not going to deploy missile defense in Europe to protect Europe and the eastern seaboard. That doesn't make sense to me either.

And I would like to go back to my friend from Arizona. Help us out with some of these things because this just doesn't add up, my friend.

That's this missile right here. Am I correct in that?

We have how many silver bullets like this right now?

I thought I remembered 24 but----

So that's it. We have got 26 or 28 silver bullets here, but that's about all we've got in case somebody shoots an intercontinental. That means more than 10,000 miles. It means it's going up pretty high. You have got to have a big missile to stop a big missile

I really appreciate having you here just to clarify and give us the detail on some of these points, Congressman Franks.

Congressman Bishop, I thought I remembered that you were a little tight on time, and I would yield to you if you would like to clarify some points that you were making.

You were saying that some of these solid rocket motors are actually made in your district and that we're basically losing our industrial base capability to try to continue building some of these things, and that's, of course, worrisome as well.

I yield.

I would go back to our resident expert, Congressman Franks.

We're also joined by another good friend of mine, Congressman Turner from Ohio.

I would like you to have a chance to be a part of our conversation and discussion because this is something that affects all Americans and it's something that apparently has not been given a high priority budget-wise; so we want to talk a little bit about that.

And I think we could get into the budget a little bit and where we have been spending money if people want to do that.

But I yield to my friend Congressman Turner, a fine Congressman and great reputation too in the House.

Well, I appreciate your joining us here and recognizing what we have got going on. You have also mentioned quite a number of other missiles.

And just for some of our colleagues that are involved watching our discussion, and I started at the beginning, there is all different kinds of missiles an enemy can shoot at you. Some of them are little ones, some of them are medium-sized, some of them are big ones, and some of them are really big.

They all have different trajectories. And so depending on the trajectory, we match that with whatever size missile that we need to be cost effective to try to stop something coming.

The picture that we had before is a ground base. This is the big daddy. This is the one for the missiles that are coming over 10,000 miles, but there are a lot of other kinds of missiles. Some of them are more in the 3,000- to 5,000-mile range, and that's where you have our ships, our Aegis-class cruisers and our Arleigh Burke destroyers, with missiles inside these destroyers that they can direct at what's called a ballistic missile, but not an intercontinental ballistic. That's sort of the 3,000 to 5,000 range.

And then you have got your Patriots, that literally we have batteries, those defending a particular area or something like in South Korea, where there is a military base. You have Patriot missiles just defending against short-range North Korea.

So there is quite a range of these different missiles, and I appreciate your bringing that very important point out, and also the fact that this technology is moving and we need to be putting money into it and keeping ahead of the power curve on this; otherwise, we are going to see some one of our cities paying a big price on this kind of thing.

I want to go back to my friend from Colorado, Congressman Lamborn.

I don't understand it either, but I have got a chart. Unfortunately the printer was down so I couldn't put it up on the board, but I could just read some numbers off of it.

You go back to 1965, and in 1965 our entitlement spending was between 2 and 3 percent of the budget, of the gross domestic product. It was 2 or 3 percent of gross domestic product was entitlement.

Now that entitlement has gone from the high 2s to 8.4 percent in 2007. So it has gone from a little over 2 to 8.4 percent. That's the entitlement growth. And yet the defense spending, at about '68 or so, was almost 10 percent of GDP, and that's gone all the way down to 4 percent.

So what you are saying in terms of numbers is absolutely true, and that is we have been slashing defense spending over a period of a number of decades and increasing entitlement. Now, maybe there is a good reason to have entitlement spending, but the one thing is sure: If our country gets hit with nuclear weapons, there isn't any security at all if you don't have military security.

I wanted to defer to my friend from Utah, Congressman Bishop.

That duck and cover and the idea that somehow you can kind of stick your head in a hole like some sort of an ostrich and hope that thing isn't going to land on you, that sort of thing just doesn't work when you start to talk about nuclear weapons.

So I think we have gotten into a little bit of this question about funding. And I find it somehow a little bit cynical when in the first 5 weeks that we met in this Chamber this year we passed this bill to spend $840 billion, you put that in defense spending, that's equivalent of the average cost of an aircraft carrier. We have 11 aircraft carriers. That would be like building 250 aircraft carriers end to end.

That's how much money we spent in the first 5 weeks, and we are saying that we can't defend ourselves against

these kinds of missiles that are being developed by rogue nations. That, somehow, just doesn't seem to make sense.

And when you see that we have the capability of putting one of these systems into the air like this, and we can basically buy the lives of millions of people in a city for this kind of investment.

Now, I am going to ask my friend from Arizona here, you know, is this a big part of the defense? My understanding is we are only talking about 2 percent of the defense budget to be able to do this to protect our citizens. That doesn't seem like too much. Am I about right on the numbers?

My good friend from Ohio, Congressman Turner, please fill in some more of the details here, because you are the person in the committee that's really paying attention to this and we really appreciate your leadership on this.

This is so important, a lot of times I am sure your constituents are on you to do all kinds of things, and they probably don't realize how much time and attention you have to give to some of these issues. But we appreciate you and we are very thankful that the people of Ohio send you here.

There is one thing I promised that I was going to toss in here, and this is something that I don't think people understand. We need to answer this question, and that is, if somebody could smuggle a nuclear weapon into our country, why do we care so much about something on a missile?

And the answer is that when a nuclear weapon is exploded high over a city, the amount of damage it does is hundreds of times what would happen if it were on the ground.

And I think that's something that people forget, that it's a combination of the missile getting the altitude and no problems with security, and then all of a sudden you have this tremendous burst in the air over a city, just wreaks absolute havoc and kills millions of people. I want to make sure you hit that point, because people say, oh, this is a waste because somebody could just bring it in a suitcase. Not so simple. Please talk to that point.

It is such a treat for me tonight to be able to share this time with my colleagues, people who are patriots, good friends of mine, people who love this country, want to see our cities and our citizens defended, people who continue in the tradition of Ronald Reagan.

I am a little bit surprised that we want to be cutting these programs. I don't think it's the right thing to do.

I don't think if the American public knew about our vulnerability, knew about the development of North Korea being able to fire missiles from North Korea and actually hit parts of America, this is not something that we want to play around with. We want to have a robust capability, and we need to make that investment, and the idea that we don't have enough money is absolute foolishness.

Mr. Speaker, there are two very good reasons to vote ``no'' on this bill. This bill is called the hate crimes bill.

The first major reason to vote ``no'' is that this bill increases hatred in America. I will say it again. This bill increases hatred in America. How does that happen? It can be easily illustrated. Let's say that you're a parent and that you have a number of children but that you don't give the children equal laws. Some you favor and some you don't. What quicker formula to create animosity between children?

This law violates the most basic principle of law. Lady Justice is always supposed to have a blindfold across her face because, regardless of who you are when you appear before Lady Justice--whether you're black or white, male or female, rich or poor, fat or skinny--Lady Justice does not notice. This bill violates that basic principle. It creates animosity by elevating one group over another group; thus, it creates hatred. This is counter to everything American law has ever stood for, and it will increase hatred in America. For that reason alone, there should be a vote of ``no.''

A second good reason to vote ``no'' on this bill is that our courts have a large backlog of various cases. Our judges and juries have to take a look at a certain set of facts and must determine whether or not somebody did or did not do something that is specifically illegal in the law. This law says that now we're going to try and turn them all into psychologists and have them figure out whether the criminals had good attitudes or not when they did the crimes. That does not make sense to waste precious judicial resources in trying to make everybody psychologists to determine whether or not some specially protected class gets a special privilege.

It's a good reason, and there are many good reasons to vote ``no.''

Thank you, Madam Speaker. It's a pleasure to be able to join you, my colleagues and friends this evening.

The topic for our Wednesday evening discussion is ``the first 100 days.'' It has become kind of a tradition for people to take a look back at previous Presidents and at the current President and say, ``What happened in the first 100 days? What kind of records were set?

What sort of tone was set? What were the accomplishments? What was sort of the pace of how the new President has approached the office?''

It's quite interesting. Obviously, there are very different Presidents, different political points of view, different things that they're going to focus on, and there are different times and different challenges. Tonight, we're going to take a look at that. We're going to take a look at those first 100 days. There were some records that were set, and there was a record that was set in a unique situation because, unlike any other time and for a long time, the Democrats have been totally in charge in Washington, DC.

In the case of our own House here, this is a body that, as to whichever side has the majority of votes, it pretty much does what it wants without too much regard for the other side. That has been fairly traditional, but it is even more so now under the Congress of Speaker Pelosi. They can do what they want, and they do do what they want. In fact, a lot of the legislation is written directly with the staff, and it comes to the floor and is voted on.

The Senate is a different matter. The Senate has always required 60 votes to get a bill before the Senate for just a regular vote. So you have 100 Senators. If you have 51 Senators voting in favor of something, you can pass a bill, but unless you have 60 votes, you can't get it to the floor to get it passed. It's kind of an odd rule. Many people don't know that. Of course, the Democrats almost have the 60 votes they need to control the Senate as well, and of course they have the Presidency. So we have here on the flip chart ``100 Days of Democrat Dominance.'' It is certainly the case.

Now, as to one of the things that the President challenged Americans to do when he came to office, he said, ``I want you to hold our government accountable. I want you to hold me accountable.'' So we're going to take a look at these first 100 days and see accountable and what regard and what sort of records have been set.

One of the records that we set was accumulated debt. That's kind of an interesting number. If you take a look at President Clinton, in his first 100 days, he managed to rack up $86 billion of debt. This is President Clinton. President Bush didn't rack up any debt at all. In fact, he had $70 billion of surplus at the end of his first 100 days. The clear winner in this regard is President Obama with $564 billion of debt. That's half of $1 trillion of debt. So the clear winner in the accumulated debt contest has to go to President Obama.

Now, in coordination with this, if you take a look at National Debt Day--and we have a National Debt Day. That's the time when we have finished spending all of the money we've collected that year in taxes. As you know, we get the taxes in on April 15. People send their taxes in. The government gets its money, and it has been spending since the beginning of the year.

The question is, ``How far do you get into the year before you run out of money?''

A lot of families have that problem in terms of the family budget, but usually what happens is we get to about, you know, August, sometimes to July in a bad year or to September. Not so this year. We have set another record in terms of debt day. It's already gone. It was 2 days ago. It was April 26. By April 26, we'd spent all of the money that was coming into the Federal Government in taxes this year. That's not a good sign. That says we're creating a tremendous amount of debt.

Therefore, that leads to another record. We have a clear winner in terms of who can pile up the most debt in a very short period of time. If you take all of the Presidents added together from George Washington to George Bush--the two Georges--you have a total of $8.5 trillion in Federal debt. With President Obama--with his own numbers and with his proposed budgets--you have $8.7 trillion, so he beats by 1\1/2\, just by his own spending alone, all of the other Presidents combined. So we have another great record that was set.

There have been other kinds of records, but I notice my good friend is here, the gentleman from Texas, Judge Carter, a highly respected judge. There's something about judging, and there's something about Texas which sort of combines common sense and not putting up with a lot of flowery kind of stuff.

Judge, you're known as a man who gets right to the point, so I'd like to yield you time. Help us and join in. Take a look at these last 100 days. Let's talk about records. Let's talk about holding people accountable. What has been going on?

Reclaiming my time, she really did get a present on Debt Day in a sense because that debt is being unloaded on her, isn't it?

Reclaiming my time, there are some records being broken, aren't there? What we've seen is a lot of complaints over the last years about the high cost of the war in Iraq, the high cost of war in Afghanistan, President Bush just squandering and spending way too much money. And a number of us voted not to spend some of that money. But there were a lot of complaints.

And then you take a look, you add up the entire cost of the war in Afghanistan and Iraq, add it together, and within the first 5 weeks here in the Congress, the Democrats passed a bill at $840 billion that was more than those two wars combined over a 6- and 7-year period.

This is a record-setting Congress when it comes to spending. If spending is going to make the economy strong, we're going to have the best economy the world has ever seen.

We're joined by a good friend from Louisiana, Congressman Scalise. Comment on this first hundred days. Let's talk about records and what kinds of things we've seen here.

What you're saying is A to F, is that what you're suggesting?

Reclaiming my time, that's cheating. I thought it was A to F. You're going all the way to ``L'' for ``liberal.''

Reclaiming my time, I also had a chance to go to the TEA party in St. Louis, and parking in St. Louis is a real pain in the rear. And yet you had 7,000 people jammed into this square, and they were exercised. I mean, this was not politics-as-usual in America. And I think you're right. I think the high level of spending, but I think there were other things that were getting them energized.

There are some of these sort of interesting juxtapositions. Here's one that caught my attention.

The Obama administration announced a $1.4 billion cut to missile defense, and the same week, North Korea launches their missile. That's the sort of thing people go, Wait a minute. I don't understand this. The North Koreans just launched this big missile. They are obviously working on nuclear devices and developing the technology through a missile to deliver a nuclear device and so they are shooting off their missile and we are cutting missile defense. That's the kind of thing in our TEA party, people were really mad. When I went down there they said to me, By golly, you've got courage to even show up down here because you come from Washington, D.C.

Judge Carter.

Reclaiming my time, the argument is going to be made as we slash the defense budget, we see a lot of things that are being axed, being on the Armed Services Committee, I am seeing those. And the argument is going to be made, Hey, you know, you can't just afford everything.

And what struck me was when we came here after the first 5 weeks the Congress had been in session, we're going to pass this, quote, stimulus--which I still call a porkulus bill--and I came across this floor--we just smoked $840 billion. I started dividing that thing out because in the committee that I serve on, the biggest thing you spend money on is aircraft carriers. I mean, even the average person on the street knows aircraft carriers are big and expensive. They have got a whole wing of airplanes on them and thousands of people on board. Aircraft carriers, that's a substantial investment.

So we have 11 aircraft carriers. You take the average cost of that and divide that, about $3 billion, into $840 billion. Oh my goodness. You picture this. You're looking at 250 aircraft carriers end-to-end. I don't know how long they would go, but you're talking about a lot of aircraft carriers.

So we start talking about, well, we're going to cut missile defense right at the time when the North Koreans launch their missile. And then the other thing--talk about juxtaposition in timing--the Obama team sent a video to the Iranian people talking about a shared hope, and the Iranians responded by opening a plant to produce weapons-grade uranium. Somehow or other it's like ships passing in the night here. It's like, wait a minute, what are we talking about here?

We've been joined by another great Texan, a Congressman from the Brady district. Kevin, we would be happy if you want to join us in our little discussion. We're taking a look at the last 100 days and different things, records that are being set, things that are a little unusual, distinctive characteristics.

I yield.

I appreciate you sharing that and particularly asking that question of just regular people. I am the same as you are, flying back and forth to Missouri, the Show-Me State, or some people like to call it the Great River State. And I am not sure that their perspective is quite the same as it is in D.C. as well.

Judge Carter, did you have a thought or two about other kinds of records or unique circumstances? I think there are quite a few things as we start to think about it.

Reclaiming my time, let's take a look. What you're talking about is some of the promises that the President started out by saying, ``I want you to hold our government accountable. I want you to hold me accountable.''

So what we've done here, I've got some slides, and these are things that are quotes out of the President's speeches and all.

This one, as you recall, he says, ``I can make a firm pledge under my plan, no family making less than $250,000 a year will see any form of tax increase.'' Now, when I heard that, I breathed a sigh of relief. By golly, I don't make $250,000. I don't need to worry about any tax increase because he promised me that. Not your income tax, not your payroll tax, not your capital gains taxes, not any of your taxes.

Now, he repeated this promise to all of us in this Chamber before, saying, hey, if you're making $250,000 a year, don't worry about paying any taxes. And now you're getting me very upset, judge, because what you're telling me is he's going to put a tax on energy. And my family doesn't make $250,000 a year, but we turn on light switches. We burn propane gas, and we also burn gasoline in the cars.

Yes, I yield.

Reclaiming my time, I thought I heard the MIT professor say it was $3,100 per average family.

This is something that's a little upsetting because first we have this promise. It couldn't be any more clear: If you're not making $250,000, you don't have to worry about this tax increase.

Now, the energy tax hasn't been passed yet; right?

So in that regard, he hasn't broken a promise. He's just proposing it. But then how about this SCHIP that we voted on? This thing has got a tax increase in it for people making less than $250,000.

You know, this kind of thing, saying one thing, doing something different, is what creates some of that tension, that frustration that we saw in the people with tea bags wanting to dump them in the Mississippi River.

I yield to the gentleman from Texas.

Reclaiming my time, how do you explain this promise in the context of what you're saying?

I yield.

Reclaiming my time, it seems to me that pretty much everybody in Washington, D.C., and across the country, as we started this 100 days, if you asked what do you think the main deal needs to be? What does Washington, what does our political leadership, what does the President have to be paying attention to? Wouldn't you agree that that would be the economy? I mean I think everybody, regardless of your political stripe, would say you've got to pay attention to the economy.

And so if you take a look, one of the ways we measure the economy is the gross domestic product. That's how are things working? Is the machine oiled properly? Is it tuned properly? Is it running smoothly? And we got a number today. As I understand it, we set another record. We have a lot of records we've been setting. Unfortunately, they haven't been very good ones. And that was that the gross domestic product number for this quarter, the first quarter of the year, was that we had shrunk the economy by over 6 percent, which is how much the economy shrunk in the previous quarter. When you put those two together, it's the biggest shrinking in the economy in 60 years. Now, that's a record. I'm 61 years old. That's a record for me. But that's not a very good record.

And some of you who are on committees that deal immediately with the budget might want to comment. What does it mean to have the gross domestic product in this country shrink by 6 something percent? That never happened under President Bush's leadership. Anybody want to comment?

I yield to the gentleman from Louisiana.

I would like to get back to that before we close tonight because I want to contrast that mentality with the mentality of what has been called the Greatest Generation, the generation of our parents and what they did.

Judge Carter.

What do you do when people do that? Don't you put them in jail?

Reclaiming my time, the trouble with the Ponzi scheme is sometime the music stops and there aren't enough chairs and then the proverbial stuff slides down the wall and then there's a big problem. That's part of what started this whole thing, what was effectively a pyramiding scheme in a sense.

But some people want to say this is a failure of free enterprise, the problem that we're having in the economy. It's not a problem of free enterprise; it's a problem of socialism. It's a problem of this government telling Freddie and Fannie that they had to make loans that weren't going to work. If you tell someone you've got to do something and they're saying to you economically this isn't going to work and you force it and you keep doing that and then you have a bunch of other people playing along with the scheme and give it a AAA rating and sell it all over the world, pretty soon the music stops. And now what's happening is it's affecting the entire economy.

I yield to my friend from Texas, Kevin.

Reclaiming my time, you're saying the budget today that we passed said the economy is going to shrink by 1 percent. Is that per year?

This year. And then how much did we just shrink in the first quarter?

I've heard of optimists before, but this stretches the long arm of conscience.

Reclaiming my time, the President made some promises. One of them was there weren't going to be any tax increases if you made less than $250,000. For ``Show Me'' guy from Missouri, that's puzzling, that promise.

Here's another promise: He promised transparency. He says, ``I will not sign any non-emergency bill without giving the American public an opportunity to review and comment on the White House Web site for at least 5 days.'' So we are going to have some transparency here.

Now, I wonder how much transparency there was in that budget you're talking about that says we are just going to assume it's going to contract 1 percent when this quarter it has already contracted 6 and it contracted 6 the last quarter. What kind of numbers are those?

I yield.

Reclaiming my time, let me just summarize and see if I got what you said. What you are saying is we kept hearing from the Democrats that President Bush inherited all of this surplus, and it was somehow because, I guess, President Clinton had done something right.

But, in fact, those years, the Republicans controlled the House and they forced President Clinton to balance the budget, and that's why he got his surpluses because you guys made him have a surplus. Did I understand that correctly?

Gentleman, you just said that you are talking about a deficit, was it $2.1 trillion just for the next 2 years?

To put that into context, if you go from George Washington to George Bush, and you add up all of the debt that's been accumulated, you are looking at $5.8 trillion. So what you are saying in 1 year, we are going to do not quite half of that, everything since 1770s to now, we are going to burn that in 1 year? My goodness.

Judge Carter.

You said $156,000?

Some of these numbers do involve making certain assumptions, and if you doctor the assumptions, the numbers may look better than they really are. We just talked about one where they said the economy is going to contract by 1 percent, and we have already gone through 6 in the first quarter.

I yield to the gentleman from Louisiana.

All of us standing here voted for it.

There is this transparency promise, that what's going on in Washington D.C., the public should be able to see it. You see this kind of transparency promise. And then when you take a look at what happened, the President first broke the promise of transparency in January when he signed this legislation which was the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act. It was passed January 27. And he since continued the problem with the State insurance, the SCHIP bill. It wasn't 5 days.

And the reason I mention this is when we came to that supposedly stimulus bill, our staffs got that thing at 11:30 at night, and we're supposed to vote on a 1,000-plus page bill the next day. Now, I am not a speed reader, and my staff doesn't sit around at 11:30 just waiting for some announcement from the Democrat Party.

Now I don't understand the transparency in that situation. But I do understand a little bit, because I don't know what $780 billion is. I started to put it in terms of aircraft carriers, because I understood that. I understood that it was more than the war in Iraq for 6 years and the war in Afghanistan added to it for 7 years. I understand it was more than 250 aircraft carriers. We only have 11 of them. The debt service on it was nine aircraft carriers, and it's all money that we don't have.

So we have got a series, again, going to this 100 days, there is a lot of new records that are being set, particularly in the debt area. But there are other kinds of things, I think, that get these people at the tea parties upset. One is, have you ever heard of the President firing the president of General Motors? I have never seen that before.

I yield to my friend from Texas, Congressman Brady.

I sure appreciate your making some positive comments. And I think it's important that when we are critical that we also offer a better idea.

I was taught that as a kid growing up. If you want to be critical of something, okay, but then say how would you do it better. I think that's an honest way for us all to proceed, and we certainly have a lot of ways to do that.

I would like to just take a few minutes and talk about what are some of the better ways to do things. You just mentioned Guantanamo. The numbers I have is that our best estimate is that 61 of those detainees are now fighting against us. After we let them go, they are back again in the battle fighting against our sons and daughters. My recommendation is when you get people that dangerous, don't let them go so easily.

Let's talk about some solutions. Let's just talk about how would we approach this situation. The economy has now been shrinking. We see this debt that is really skyrocketing, excessive spending on the part of all the Democrats.

Let's just say that working for the day, or we are President, we are responsible for turning this around, what are the steps we are going to take. I think it's fair to ask that question.

I will go to my friend from Texas, Judge Carter.

Summarizing what you said, Judge, what you are saying is, first of all, the Federal Government does not create wealth, other than we print money, which just waters down.

We tax people, slop the money around. But we never create it. We just redistribute it.

So how do you actually take an economy and help everybody to do better? And what you have to do is you have to allow the private sector, the entrepreneurs, the investors, the inventors, the small business people, to get out there and do that, the American dream.

Let freedom work and let people go and use their ingenuity and ability to actually create wealth.

Wealth is not static. It grows if you fertilize it the right way. So what you are talking about is doing things that are going to help small business.

Just an interesting number that someone tossed to me, and that is you take a look at companies with 500 employees. That is what is called a small business, 500 employees. Half of Americans work in a business with 500 or less employees, and those companies create 78 or 79 percent of the new jobs in America.

So if you are worried about the people not having jobs and you really want to turn the economy around, what you want to do is you want to fire that engine of small business, you want to get those 80 percent of the new jobs, you want to start getting those things going. And what do you do to do that? You have to have liquidity for those companies to work.

I recognize another good friend of ours and an expert on small business, Congressman Brady.

Well, reclaiming my time, you are saying that porkulus bill that we passed, it had more money to buy artwork than it did to help small business that creates 80 percent of the new jobs in our economy?

I yield.

That is a no-brainer, gentleman. Keep going.

That sounds like freedom working, doesn't it?

Just reclaiming my time, if I were to list off some things for small business, and you have run a Chamber and run your own small business, it seems like to me there are some things we are doing that I just wouldn't do.

The first thing is the death tax. That is a bad idea. We are having that death tax come back so some poor guy loses his business, I mean he dies, and his son is going to run the business, but now he has to sell half the business to pay the tax on it. What is the logic of that? That destroys jobs and destroys small businesses. So first the death tax.

The next thing it seems to me like dividends and capital gains, boy, did we see the economy jump when we limited that and allowed people to keep more liquidity in the economy. So that is another thing we could to.

Another thing, it seems to me, is when you say you are going to tax people making $250,000, a whole lot of money, those are the guys that own the small business. Do you want them to create jobs, or do you want to suck all the money away from them like some sort of leech until they are so dry and withered up they can't hire anybody anymore?

I think there are some things that we just didn't do. Just leave them alone and let them do what they do so well, which is follow the American dream.

I yield to my friend from Louisiana.

Reclaiming my time, are you saying that hugging Chavez is not really a national energy policy? Is that what you are trying to say?

I yield. I couldn't resist that.

You are talking so fast and what you are saying is so good, you are really referring to three different times in history, where instead of doing what FDR did and Henry Morgenthau tried to do, and came before Congress and said it failed, it doesn't work, this stimulus idea, this Keynesian idea, what has worked was what JFK did, what Ronald Reagan did, and what George Bush did, three separate times at 20-year different intervals, and that was they actually cut the taxes, and this seems like water going uphill, and the revenues of the Federal Government went up.

That is kind of an interesting phenomena, but it has happened time after time. And the reason behind that, I will go ahead and yield and let the gentleman explain that.

Congressman Scalise, I really appreciate your positives and giving very specific kinds of things that can be done to turn the economy around, to reduce this level of spending.

We are just about out of time. I appreciate your expertise and joining us tonight. I am going to just recognize my friend Judge Carter for a minute, and then we are going to have to wrap things up and I will come back to you.

It was basically labeled a Communist rant and an idiot's Bible, I think, by various people that reviewed that book.

Going last to my good friend, a very senior and distinguished Congressman from Texas, Kevin Brady.

I appreciate all of you joining us in this nice family discussion and hope that it has been of interest to our colleagues. I just ask us please to do a little better in the next 100 days.

Good evening, Mr. Speaker. Thank you for recognizing me.

I am interested tonight in talking about a subject that I think is on the minds of Americans everywhere and has gotten people not just on their minds, but on their hearts as well. They're exercised, they're concerned, they're worried. And that is the subject of taxes, and really reckless overspending on the part of the Federal Government.

We have heard over the past about 6 years or 7 years the high cost of the war, particularly in Iraq. People say, hey, we are spending a tremendous amount of money every day in Iraq, what are we getting for our money? This thing is breaking our budget. We're spending too much money. This is terrible. And then what we see here in the first 5 weeks of the Congress meeting, we saw them passing what was supposed to be a stimulus bill--or I call it a porkulus bill--and that bill, at $840 billion, was more money than we spent in 6 and 7 years, respectively, in the war in Iraq added to the war in Afghanistan. So we were really burning some serious money just in the first 5 weeks.

Now, let's add to that, turn forward a little bit, and the American public is becoming exercised about this subject. And just this last week, on the day when filing of taxes is due, we saw all across our country a massive turnout of people, just average citizens, largely--at least certainly that's what it was in the St. Louis area--having these TEA parties. And they were very upset. And they carried all kinds of signs to express their concern about this problem of reckless overspending on the part of the Federal Government. Some of the signs read--and they were fairly clever--``Give Me Liberty, Not Debt,'' obviously taking off of Patrick Henry. And it said ``No More Pork.'' Here's one, ``Got Taxes? Got Government? Get Liberty.''

Then there was a 6 year-old that carried the sign, ``I am 6 years old and I

owe $36,400 in taxes.'' And there were a number of other ones that were fairly pointed, ``Freedom, not socialism'' and things like that.

People are really getting very concerned and with very good reason about our reckless overspending.

In fact, there was enough pressure from all of these different events that happened all over the country that the President felt like he had to make some kind of a statement or gesture. And so he said, very graciously, look, I will tell you what we are going to do. We are going to try to find $100 million in the budget of wasted spending, to get rid of $100 million.

Well, we have illustrated that point here graphically to my left.

This first circle is $410 billion, and that was called an omnibus bill. That was just finishing up the spending for this year.

Then we had two of this supposedly stimulus bill, which is what I was just talking about, at $787 billion in its final version, and then on top of that is the proposed $3.69 trillion, so these graphically represent the amount of money we are overspending and Obama's requested budget cuts represented by this spot, even on this chart, the size of an eraser.

To try to put that into perspective, let's say that your family budget is $100,000. You have a $100,000 budget for the year, but you are $34,000 behind. That's like calling the whole family together and saying to them, now, here is what I am going to do. I am going to give up a $3 Starbucks coffee. That's what this $100 million is equivalent to: $3 on a $100,000 budget.

So these numbers show the fact that the administration and the current Congress just doesn't get it. This overspending problem is really serious, and the public is getting, as I said, very concerned about it.

I have a statement from one of my constituents here, this is what he wrote to me.

He said, this is William from the Saint Louis area, ``I am a small businessman in Union, Missouri, employing 12 people. I built my business from practically nothing to a company worth enough to retire on, or so I thought. I am 62 years old and plan to sell my business in 3 years and to retire on the proceeds.

``In the year I sell my Federal tax rate will be 39 percent, that is assuming that Obama does not raise it even further by then, and my Missouri tax rate will be 6 percent. Since I am a service company, we have no real assets to sell. Virtually all of the proceeds will be taxed as ordinary income.

``That means that I worked a good part of my life to build a future and the taxing authorities are going to take 45 percent.

``Since my IRA accounts have been decimated thanks to,'' I believe he is talking about Congressman Frank and Senator Dodd,'' it looks like I will have to work until I die.''

And then, bitterly, ``Only in America.''

People around America are very upset about what's going on.

I have a good friend, a Congressman from Georgia, Congressman Lynn Westmoreland, I believe that you have a chart also depicting in a different way the seriousness of what's going on with our excessive overspending.

That's correct. Yes.

You are talking about one-third of that $100,000, they are overspending $34,000, right.

That's correct. That's why when you say $100 million with a $3.69 trillion proposed budget, it's almost a joke. It's almost a joke. By comparison, that spot is $100 million. That's the size of a pencil.

This looks like the sun. It looks like a small Moon falling into the sun. That's what we are talking about here. Three dollars, they would laugh you out of the family meeting.

What you are saying is that right after September 11, we are already starting to spend some serious money there. And what you are saying is that by the time we got to September, we had pretty much used up all the taxpayers' money that had paid their taxes that year, and beyond that point, every day beyond that where we are spending money, that's all becoming part of our debt. Is that what you are saying?

Gentlemen, what was going on there was starting about 2003 or 2004 we started to benefit from the fact that the recession had turned around because of the tax cuts and the economy was doing well and the Federal revenues were coming in pretty strong.

That's why we were able to hold things up into that August- September kind of timeframe, even though there was some spending going on.

Gentleman, that number really stands out, because what you are saying is we got all the way through the summer all these previous years when we were screaming about spending too much money. And you and I agreed we shouldn't have been spending as much as we did.

But that being the case, what you are saying is this year we barely got the taxes in on April 15, and by the time we get to April 26th, which is that next week----

We are out of money already.

I am surprised they haven't put us in jail.

You were talking about the budget, the study committee, which is actually a balanced budget, a certain number of years out, it balances out.

Don't you think that's what the people at these tea parties were trying to say, hey, what's wrong with the concept like every other American, you have to balance your budget. What's the problem with us getting this concept down here in Washington D.C.?

Well, we are going to get into that a little bit too. We are joined this evening by my good friend from Indiana, Congressman Burton, a long-time leader in this House, a very respected gentleman.

I would like to yield to him to talk on the same subject. I know it's something you know quite a bit about.

I appreciate the gentleman from Indiana.

Congressman, before you go, just let me ask you a question, you know, both of us grew up and we saw our parents, that had come out of the World War II time period, and they were people that worked very, very hard. They had been called the Greatest Generation, and one of the things that I remember that was just ingrained in my own parents, and I want to ask you whether you had the same experience, but it was the attitude that they were going to do something better for us than they had been able to have for themselves. It was this driving ambition to leave something better, to leave America a better place, a freer country, a safer country.

And so they would say, and their words were, yes, I am going over to Europe or to the Pacific to do my bit, that they were going to give their lives or their limbs. And they had this ideal of leaving America a better place.

And what you are talking about is the opposite. Is that not right, Gentleman?

Congressman Burton, the distinguished guest from the State of Indiana. We are very thankful for the good people that Indiana sends.

We also have joining us here tonight a judge from Texas. When you get a judge from Texas you're talking about somebody that kind of keeps an eye on things. I would like to yield to Judge Carter, a good friend of mine and a great and patriotic American and an American, as I understand, with some pretty good stories to boot.

Let me reclaim my time. What you're saying is kind of radical here. What you're saying is a bunch of socialistic Europeans are telling us that what we should be doing is providing liquidity for small business to create jobs and to pull our Nation out of recession. That's what I'm hearing you say. You're telling me that these people in Europe are telling us this?

I yield.

Reclaiming my time, what you're saying is America could not join the European Union now because our debt is so high?

I see my friend from Georgia here wanting to get a word in.

I yield to the gentleman.

Reclaiming my time, the alternative minimum tax, usually we have rolled that back every year. Are you saying they're not going to do that this time?

That's kind of a unique accounting principle.

If you did that in the free market, judge, and let me just yield, what would happen if a businessman were to do to that? What would you do to him if he came in your courtroom?

Reclaiming my time, I would like to ask a question whether either of you when you were in maybe first or second grade ever saw these workbooks and they had the pictures, what is the line that doesn't fit in? And they'd have a couple of dogs and they'd have a cat in the line or something like that.

Well, let me just ask you, if you take a look at this chart to my left, can you see the thing that doesn't fit in here? These are either budget deficits or surpluses by year, all through these different Presidents here. This is when you had a Republican Congress and a Democrat President and we actually had a couple of surpluses here. This is September 11. We had the war in Iraq; so we were running some deficits. Do you see the line that doesn't quite fit in there?

I yield to my friend from Texas.

This goes back to 1980.

Those are the actual economic facts of where we are.

I yield to the gentleman from Georgia.

Reclaiming my time, sometimes you can talk about big numbers and when you get past a certain number of thousand dollars, it's hard for me to imagine what we are talking about. But here is a different way to look at it: You go from George to George. That's George Washington to George Bush. And you go through all of that, and they accumulated by overspending $5.8 trillion. That's a lot of money. We shouldn't have that much overspending. I know you gentlemen have voted with me against doing that kind of overspending. But that's the reality of where we are, $5.8 trillion. But now we're taking a look at this President, and just using the numbers he gave us, these are his numbers, and he has got $8.7 trillion he's going to add on top of this. So in other words, he's proposing to spend in the next 7 years $8.7 trillion, which is more than what we had from George Washington to George Bush. Now, that is some serious level of spending.

I yield to the gentleman.

Reclaiming my time, I appreciate the gentleman's pointing that out, and I misspoke. You're absolutely right.

I do yield.

In fact, what you just said, I think, gentleman, was we are like twice over it.

Reclaiming my time, that's not a good scenario when Estonia is better on their economics than what we are doing in this country. And I think that's what generated these TEA parties and things. I will tell you people in my district, St. Louis, they were mad. They were very upset about this.

I am delighted that we are joined here by Congressman Coffman from Colorado. Colorado is a good solid State, and they have elected a great Congressman here. And I look forward to your joining our discussion here tonight.

Congressman Coffman, I yield.

Reclaiming my time, I appreciate your joining us for the discussion this evening.

Sometimes people want to claim that Republicans don't have any solutions and are just always complaining about the excessive spending or what we really should do about it. But the fact of matter is that there are proven ways of getting the economy back on track when you start into a recession. And one of the things that's absolutely critical, and it works a couple of different ways, but what it does is it increases the amount of revenue that the Federal Government takes in, and that's a way to get a budget balanced. There are two ways to do it: cut spending or take in more revenue. The only trouble is if you tax too much, you kill the economy and you take in less revenue and you create something that's even worse than what you had before.

Now, the way to do it is you want liquidity available for the free markets. You want the people who are the investors and the inventors, the small business people, you want those people to have the liquidity so they can run and manage their businesses. A lot of people don't realize that if you take a business that's got 500 employees down, and that's what we call a small business, they employ half of the people in our country but create almost 80 percent of the new jobs. So you want to make sure those guys have got the liquidity that they need, and that's what the Republicans understand.

That is why we are completely opposed to a whole series of things that the Democrats are doing which are going to make it hard for small businesses. It is exactly what you are saying. You have to get off of this spending, and it seems like our administration just does not understand that and we are going to take a recession and turn it into the Great Depression.

I don't mean to cut in on you, but what you are talking about is the livelihood, the potential jobs that people in America wouldn't have access to because they were never created, because we have just vacuumed the liquidity out of the private sector.

I want to yield to my friend from Texas, Judge Carter, for just a minute.

Reclaiming my time a little bit, first of all, who was it that supported this $410 billion for the omnibus? Was that the Democrat party? Yes. And then this bill here, this stimulus or ``porkulus'' bill for $787 billion, do you recall here in the House Chamber when we voted on this bill, do you recall how many Republicans supported that number?

Not one.

Neither did I, gentleman, and that is why we are here, I believe. So people want to say, well, you know the Republicans, we got a few liberal Members and all that kind of stuff and they want to beat us up for two or three Republicans that might vote for something like this. But there wasn't one Republican that supported that number, is there?

All these people have been talking about the cost of the war in Iraq. They didn't seem to worry about spending more than that in the first 5 weeks we were here. I don't understand exactly how that works.

Congressman Coffman from Colorado.

If I could reclaim my time, piggy-backing on what you said, we should take a look at what you said. You said using the financial crisis as an excuse. Of course, that is what we have been doing here. We said, oh, look, there is this mortgage crisis that was created where all of these Freddie and Fannie mortgages were made to people who couldn't afford to pay and the Wall Street community played some funny games with the securities business and we end up in this big mess that was really started by this mortgage crisis. So now we have got the recession started.

So there are really two schools of thought as to what you do when you got a recession going. One of the schools of thought is, and it goes back to FDR and Little Lord Keynes, he was a little weird, he had this idea if you spent enough money you could ``stimulate demand'' and everything would be fine. It was a little bit like reaching down, grabbing your bootstraps and lifting yourself up and flying around the room.

So they tried this theory about the Federal Government spending tons of money. It was called Keynesian economics. And at the end of 8 years of this experiment of the Federal Government spending tons of money, this guy, the fellow who was FDR's Secretary of Treasury, comes before the Congress, the Ways and Means Committee, and he made this statement. This is exactly his words, Henry Morgenthau. He says, ``We have tried spending money. We are spending more than we have ever spent before and it doesn't work.'' It also shows that we don't learn much from history. ``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 theory is what we are doing, the idea we can fix a recession with excessive Federal spending. If that were such a good idea, with the amount of debt we just saw at $5 trillion, we should be doing great anyway, if lots and lots of debt is what makes things better. Yet, here we have Henry Morgenthau speaking to us from 1939 like he is out of the grave saying, hey guys, this doesn't work.

The other solution, of course, is that you could do what we said, which is get the liquidity into the hands of the business people. Let's talk just for a minute about small business. One of the worst things you can do for small business, let's sort of tick the things off.

The thing you want to do is you want to tax them so much they can't run their business, right? So where would you start if you were trying to harm small business?

I yield to my friend from Colorado.

First off, you are going to increase their taxes. So what is the first thing that the President said he is going to do? Anybody making over $250,000 a year, he is going to increase their taxes. I don't know if he realizes that more than half of the small business owners make over $250,000 a year. So if he increases their taxes, then what are they going to have to spend money to help build up their small business? So, right off the bat, he is doing one of the first things to hurt a small business person.

There are other taxes he is proposing. Do you recall some of the others? What else would you do?

I yield.

Reclaiming my time, what you are saying is absolutely fundamental for us to understand. What we are talking about is that the President has said that he is going to increase the cost of energy.

He also said he wouldn't tax anybody making less than $250,000. He said that. But then he turned around and said, oh, no, but we are going to tax energy. How much are we going to tax energy? They call it cap- and-trade. It is really cap-and-tax.

So he is going to tax energy. So who is that going to affect? Well, the MIT people took a look at the proposal and said we are talking $3,100 for the average household in America. The average household doesn't make any $250,000. So he is going to run the tax of energy up. And what else is that going to be? Of course, as you are absolutely right, the astute gentleman from Colorado points out that small business, if it costs more money for energy, it makes it harder to do the business. So we are going to do that.

First of all, we are going to tax them if they are making over $250,000. Then we are going to tax their energy. Any truck driver or anybody that has to bring supplies to their business is going to pay more money for it, because that is going to be taxed.

So have we let off there or not? No, in fact they thought of some other innovative things.

Reclaiming my time, there are kind of two scenarios, aren't there? Let's say you have a small business that is making a product in this country. They are paying an increased cost of electricity, so they have to raise the price of their product. One of two things happens: Either the American consumer buys the higher cost product or they buy a foreign competitor's product that the foreign competitor didn't have to pay that tax on, so they can sell it cheaper. So then what happens is a foreign job replaces an American job and the jobs disappear in this country. Either scenario is not good policy for our country.

I yield to the gentleman from Colorado.

It is a generational theft. It is a budget that taxes too much, spends too much and borrows too much.

The other thing that is kind of interesting to me was, reclaiming my time, if you take a look at this map of the country, these are manufacturing jobs. These are those businesses that are going to be hurt by this cap-and-tax. If you take a look, the ones that are the most orange are the ones that are hurt the most by this.

You notice that our friends in New England and out on the West Coast don't seem to be affected by this tax very much. But somehow, the Midwestern States are going to get clobbered by this tax. And the tax is justified on the worry about global warming. But it is not popular to say ``global warming'' anymore because the world isn't really warming, so we call it climate change.

So the problem is they are claiming we are making too much CO2. So we are going to then tax nuclear reactors for the CO2 they generate. That doesn't make a whole lot of sense, does it, because they don't generate any CO2. Yet we are going to tax them anyway.

So a lot of these manufacturing States where there are a lot of jobs tied to energy, they are going to get hammered with this proposal. So not only is the budget out of control, but now we are trying to raise money with this hair-brained scheme of taxing energy, which is just going to really hurt our productivity, and that is the thing that either chases jobs overseas or it prevents jobs from being created in the first place.

I yield to my good friend from Texas.

Reclaiming my time, I'd just like to try and tick off--I should have a list of them here tonight. Let's tick off what we're doing for our small business people.

First of all, if you're making $250,000 a year or more we're going to increase your taxes. That's more than half the small businesses. So first we're going to increase the taxes of the people that own the small businesses.

The next thing we're going to do is we're going to tax heavily energy, not only the energy they use to run their own homes, but the energy used to run their business and to buy supplies and things for their business.

Next thing we're going to do is we're going to let the death tax come back.

So now we have the death tax so that the guy that creates a business can't pass it on to his kids, and so he's going to have to sell his business in order to pay taxes when he dies. So some guy dies. The business needs a certain amount of capital goods and equipment to work. You've got to sell the business in order to pay the tax. Now the business isn't viable and the business goes away. Oh, that's wonderful for business, for small business.

And then we're going to do--what else are we going to do with the thing? Well, the other thing we're going to do is dividends and capital gains. Now we reduced dividends and capital gains tax to put liquidity into the small businesses at the beginning, in 2003. And the whole recession turned around to a very strong economy for a number of years, greatly helped by the dividend and capital gains money being plowed back in to investors and inventors and small business people. Now, that tax it is going to go away.

So we're hammering them on the $250,000. We're hammering them on the energy; we're hammering them on the death tax; we're going to get them on dividends and capital gains. I mean, how can a small business survive?

And then people are going to wonder, gosh, gee, I wonder where all the jobs went?

We're doing the wrong things, and yet we don't have to. We can learn from history.

I yield to the gentleman from Colorado.

Well, I appreciate your thoughts on that. And again, where we're coming from in this deal is this faulty idea that somehow we could fix the economy by excessive spending. And Henry Morgenthau really shot that thing full of holes. But if he didn't, certainly the Japanese in the 1990s did the exact same thing and it just didn't work. It's really crazy.

And you know, you talk about people suffering. You know, sometimes you think the upside down world in Washington, D.C. just doesn't seem to get it.

Here's a letter I got from one of my constituents, and it just kind of reflects a little bit of the tone. This is Shannon from Baldwin, which is part of St. Louis County. ``You asked how I would be affected by the Obama budget. I'm self-employed with my own small business, professional organizer, personal assistant. I do not earn a large amount of money, but it's been enough to live a simple but comfortable life. I do not have credit card debt, and I have always made it a point to live within my means. Yes, my business has been affected by the economic downturn of the last year. Many of my clients have cut back on their spending, which means less work for me. So whether it be increased taxes, spending that affects me directly, or increased taxing of my wealthier clients, it reduces my overall income. But more than anything else, I think the most negative effect of all the spending, bailouts, irresponsibility, etc cetera, has had on me is that I no longer have any faith in my own government to do what is fiscally right for the country.''

We are destroying the faith of our constituents that this government is in any kind of control whatsoever fiscally. That's what she's saying.

``The government produces nothing. It has no money to spend except for what it takes from taxpayers. I am disgusted with the enormous spending and bailing out of irresponsible or downright negligent behavior. It seems that while I have worked hard to be responsible and follow the rules, I'm now being punished by being forced to clean up the mess of those who choose not to with my tax dollars.''

There's a sense of anger. There's a sense of resentment out there. I think you're absolutely right. And it's interesting that you're sensing that in Colorado.

We also have our very distinguished Congresswoman Foxx from North Carolina. She's maybe not huge, but powerful things come in small packages like atoms, and I would like to yield some time to my good friend, Congresswoman Foxx.

Reclaiming my time, I think he's the one that created that hurricane, isn't he?

Well, reclaiming my time, what we've got now very clearly is a huge majority of Democrats running the House; they're running the Senate, and they control the administration. So they have everything.

And now what you are saying is, this is the equivalent, I mean, this is really hair-raising what you're saying, the gentlelady from North Carolina. What you're suggesting is that essentially we're like a family and we've been given some money to spend for a year. And we've only gotten to April, April

28th. That's just a little after the deadline that taxes are due, and we've already spent it all. In other words, by April 28, that's next week, we're going to have spent all the money that comes in in taxes in the year 2009. And that's what these different charts are showing in very different ways.

But, you know, you've got the tax day, when you have to have your income taxes in, April 15. And now we've got Debt Day, which is April 28. My goodness.

26 is it? Yeah.

Yielding to the gentleman from Texas.

Reclaiming my time, and I note that you are not so different in age than I am, and I'm just asking the same question I asked earlier this evening about our parents' generation. They've been called by some people the greatest generation. And they were called the greatest generation, because, among other things they had this intrinsic compass that said, we're going to leave our Nation better than it was when we were here. And they went to Europe, and they went to the China Seas and they did their bit and they left us a freer country. And they may not have gone through college themselves, but they saved their money so we could go through college, so that we could have a little bit better lifestyle.

Some of those people now are like my own parents. They're just still alive, but they still have that attitude of making this a better country.

And it breaks my heart to say, when I take a look at these numbers, that instead of leaving it a better country, we're leaving debt as an inheritance for our children. And that's tragic.

I thank everyone for joining us this evening; look forward to next Wednesday night.

Madam Chair, there have been people that are saying that America as a nation is going down the path of socialism. We are becoming a socialized nation. But, you know, that isn't really quite fair. Not like the socialized nations of Europe anyway. Because, according to the standards of the European Union, they would not accept America with the budget that is being proposed here this very day.

Now, the spending that we are looking at is unprecedented. We have heard about the Bush administration spending money. They spent too much. We have acknowledged that. But let me tell you, what we have seen here in just 3 months makes the Bush administration look like mere pikers.

The Wall Street bailout, we did half of that this year, $350 billion. Then we added to that this economic stimulus, or as I would prefer to call it, porkulus, $787 billion. Let's understand what this number ``a billion'' means.

You have heard that the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were really expensive. Day after day we have been told, hey, this war in Iraq is just draining money out of America. Yet, add up every day of that war, add it to the war in Afghanistan, and that number is smaller than what the House approved for this stimulus bill in the first 5 weeks that Congress has been in session. And then you have got the omnibus, another 400-some.

So what happens with this level of unprecedented spending? Well, the theory is supposed to be that if you spend enough money, it will make the economy better.

Now, I don't know very many American families who would buy something as silly as that. If you are in trouble financially, do you go and buy a brand-new car and spend money like mad? No. You hunker down a little bit and you try to be careful what you are spending. And yet somehow there is this theory that if we spend money, it is going to make everything okay.

They tried that in the days of FDR. The Secretary of Treasury, after 8 years of trying that foolishness, came before this Congress in 1939 with the quote, ``We have tried spending. The unemployment is as bad as when we started.'' And it didn't work. It didn't work for Japan, and it won't work for us if we keep down the spending.

Look at the comparison. We have heard about Bush spending. This is his average annual deficit, $300 billion. This is proposed by the President. The budget we are looking at here is even more, twice as much. If you take a look at the highest deficit, this was Bush in 2008 with the Democrats in Congress, $459 billion, and yet we are looking at $1.2 trillion. Our new President makes President Bush look like a piker.

Now, did you ever go to first grade and they said, what is it that doesn't fit in in this picture? Take a look at the deficits that have been run or the actual surpluses of all of these different years. And here we go along. These are the Bush years. And guess what line doesn't fit? I mean, we are talking about absolutely radical levels of spending, and here on the floor right now is being proposed even more than that.

Then we hear that the Democrats are saying, oh, this is really good because, look, we are going to take this great big spike and we are going to spend it at half the rate. It is like somebody has been smoking funny cigarettes around here.

I think that it's kind of interesting. People have said that America is becoming a socialized Nation, just like the countries over in Europe, a socialized Nation. But that's not a fair thing to say because with this level of debt, the Europeans wouldn't even accept us as part of the European Union.

I've noticed tonight that we have spent more time blaming President Bush than talking about the positive solution of a Democrat budget. And that's not a good sign when we spend--at midnight--talking about how bad Bush is when we're supposed to be debating a Democrat budget.

I don't think the Democrats are proud of this budget. And if I were the Democrats, I wouldn't be proud of the budget either.

While we're talking about President Bush though, I have got some numbers so we can just do a direct comparison and just see what is the difference here.

Just in the last couple of months--we're only just finishing up March--we've got the second half of the Wall Street bailout. That's about $350 billion. We burned through the economic stimulus--or the porkulus bill--$787 billion.

Now if you were to add will of the cost of the war in Iraq, all of the cost of the war in Afghanistan, and add it altogether, it would be less than this thing. Then you've got the omnibus deal. Hey, we're starting to spend some real money.

Let's take a look at a comparison. If we want to talk about Bush, we can blame the hurricane on him. We've already done that. It's really bad when a President brings a hurricane in.

Let's talk about this annual budget deficit. This is the average annual deficit under Bush--$300 billion. We're not proud of that. But the current President's budget--this is what they're proposing--has got him beat two to one. I'm not sure I'd be proud of that number.

Here's the highest deficit when the Democrats were in the House under Bush, $459 billion. But, oh, President Obama, his projection is $1.2 trillion. Clear winner by more than two to one. Then, the increase in national debt, $2.5 trillion, $4.9 trillion. Again, a two to one.

When you take a look at it, here's what it looks like. Every one of these lines going down is a deficit. Now does anybody see something disturbing in this pattern?

Now we have heard the gentlelady from New York is bragging about the fact that given some time, this number here, the low number, is going to be cut in half. That doesn't give me any sense of satisfaction at all. If I looked at that, I'd say, Holy smokes, I'm moving to some other country. These people in America have been smoking funny cigarettes. What in the world are they doing with this deficit?

Mr. Speaker, I come here this evening to the floor to talk about a subject that is arresting the attention of Americans everywhere. It arrests their attention because it very much involves their futures, their future hopes, and the hopes of their children and grandchildren: that is, the economics and the economic situation that we now face.

Over the past, we have, over the past 6 and 7 years, heard repeatedly in our media the tremendous cost, particularly of the war in Iraq. We were told every day not only of people that were dying there but also of how it's just draining and siphoning money from the American economy.

And so, we come today in a curious situation. If you were to add all of the money that was spent in Iraq in the war there, add it all up for 6 years, and then take the money that was spent in the war in Afghanistan, add it up for 7 years, and you put those two sums of money together, you would come up with less money than this U.S. Congress spent in the first 5 weeks that we

were in session when we passed the supposedly stimulus bill.

That, perhaps, casts a certain amount of light and helps to put in perspective what $840 billion in taxes that we actually don't have, but $840 billion dollars in spending that we approved here on this House floor.

What has happened since that time is we have spent other money, and there have been other large chunks of change, and I think it gets a little bit confusing in people's minds exactly how much is the Congress spending.

And so I have here immediately to my left a chart that talks a little bit about some of the money that we have spent in the past, and we do this on the eve of the fact that we have the new budget coming up which will be discussed and debated tomorrow. That budget is a whopper of a budget, but first, let's put it into context.

First of all, in the fall of last year, as Wall Street was becoming weaker and as there were demands for money to bail out Wall Street, the Congress approved $700 billion for the Wall Street bailout. The first $350 billion were spent last year, with an additional $350 billion this year.

Theoretically, this money was supposedly offered with transparency, so we could know what it was going to be used for and how we were getting something good from it. However, in spite of the fact that we spent the first $350 billion, we saw the stock market sliding and sliding. Then we spent the second $350 billion, and people continued to ask whether this money was really an effective tool.

As we asked many questions, even last fall on this subject, what we found was that particularly some people that worked on the savings and loan crisis some more than 10 years ago said that there was a way to help deal with our financial crisis, and particularly the toxic mortgage and bad loans that had been made, there was a way to deal with that without spending a lot of money. In fact, during the savings and loan crisis, we did not spend any of this kind of money, even though the situation was not dissimilar. That involved things like mark-to- market and other accounting kinds of principles that could have been followed rather than going into the American taxpayers' pocket for $700 billion.

Well, this year we spent $350 billion of that. Moving forward to this economic stimulus--I call it the porkulus bill--we spent another $787 billion. Let's put that into perspective. In an area that I work, which is on the sea force committee, sea power committee, and one of the big ticket items that we deal with are aircraft carriers. People that know something about the Navy know that aircraft carriers are expensive, and we protect them by putting other ships around them. We only have 11 of them currently in service, and they average about $3 billion historically. That's what we paid for them.

And so if you were to divide the $3 billion into this $787 billion, what you'd find out is that you have got, you know, over 200 aircraft carriers. Picture 200 aircraft carriers tied end-to-end. That's a whole lot of money that we're spending that we don't have. Or if you want to put it another way, just the interest and the debt service on this money that we don't have that we're spending would be enough to buy nine new aircraft carriers every single year.

And what is there in this economic stimulus package that's so important? Well, as it turns out, it isn't even the good old Keynesian, the good old FDR, ``government spend its way out of trouble'' kind of package. It doesn't have those kinds of things in it. You'd think it would have in there hard manufacturing kinds of jobs, building ships, pouring concrete to make hydroelectric plants or nuclear power plants. You would think it might have a lot of money for roads, something for small businesses to get them going. It turns out it's not. It turns out what it is, it's a whole lot of spending on items that are just budgetary items of the Federal Government. It's just a whole lot of spending on social programs.

It does include some money to protect an endangered mouse in Speaker Pelosi's district. It contains things about education for HIV. It has some money for ACORN and things like that. These are regular old social government programs, but nothing that's really stimulative particularly.

And so this tremendous amount of money added to the debt is something that has very much captured people's attention, but we haven't stopped there unfortunately. We have seen no sign in the economy or in the stock market that this money is doing any particular good. In fact, all of the evidence economically would suggest that it won't. In fact, when you take a good look at the people that came up with this whole idea of stimulating the economy by government spending money, it doesn't even make much common sense.

Think about your average American family. Hey, we've got hard trouble with the budget this year, what are we going to do? Oh, let's go buy a brand new car and spend a whole lot of money. Nobody's that dumb in our country except for the Federal Government, and of course, we want to spend a lot of money. There isn't any economic justification. In fact, Henry Morgenthau, who was the Secretary of the Treasury under FDR, after they did this lovely theory of spending tons and tons of money-- and this is all through the 1930s and 1939--Secretary Morgenthau comes before the House Ways and Means Committee. He said, We have tried spending a whole lot of money and it doesn't work. He's pretty straightforward. It doesn't work. Our unemployment is as bad as it's ever been, and we have a tremendous amount of debt to boot.

So, so much for little Lord Keynes' theory. It was tried by the Japanese back in the 1990s, and the Japanese economy was sick because they just kept spending more and more government money, and it didn't help their economy at all.

So, so much for the theory of a whole lot of government spending is going to make the economy go well. Actually, considering the number of trillion dollars in debt, if the government spending was what made things went well, why we would all be millionaires ourselves if that theory worked. Of course, it doesn't work, and this of course, does not work.

Then we have the appropriations for 2009 which was another $410 billion, and you start putting this together, and it starts to add up to real money. And now we have the new budget that has been proposed, a $3.6 trillion budget, and that includes some different, interesting items.

One that I think is of significance, the President promised us while he was in this very Chamber, he promised us that if you were making under $250,000 you didn't need to worry about taxes because he wasn't going to raise your taxes any. I thought, I'm glad because I don't make $250,000 a year, so I don't need to worry about tax increases.

Well, you better hang on to your wallet in Washington, D.C., because what is this cap-and-tax? This is a tax on electricity and heating fuel, propane, natural gas, things like that. And what's that going to mean? Well, some economists took a look at what that was going to cost, and this is a very credible organization. I believe it was MIT. I forget which university it was. Their estimate was $3,100 for every household in America. So, so much for the $250,000. Sure, we're going to tax those guys that own small businesses, but we're going to tax every household in America on an average of $3,100 every year.

I see a good friend of mine from Indiana, a very respected statesman on this floor, and I would yield to my good friend, Congressman Burton.

If I could reclaim my time, you talk pretty fancy words about how this is going to create all this inflation and stuff. I want to just see if that connects to what I'm saying.

Back in my district, the poor people are investing in lead, and the more well-to-do people are investing in gold. The poor one, it's the lead shells for different types of rifles, pistols and shotguns; the other one is gold coins. Maybe they're thinking along the same lines as you are, with inflation, you have got to do something to protect yourself, and the government is just running the printing presses.

Reclaiming my time, I have heard great things about that book. My own father read it, and he just said it's something you can read on an airplane. It's fascinating.

Fascinating. So I appreciate you mentioning it. ``The Forgotten Man''?

Just reclaiming my time, what you're talking about, Ronald Reagan, a lot of times people say that Republicans, well, all we do is say ``no,'' we don't have any answers. But the fact of the matter is that this idea that Keynes had and Morgenthau had about the government spending lots of money to fix the economy, it doesn't work, it's never worked. So we vote ``no'' on what doesn't work.

But what does work? Well, what you're saying is, one, you want the government to spend less money, but the other thing is certain types of tax cuts, not every tax cut, but certain types, particularly the tax cuts that put liquidity into the pocket of those small businessmen-- that's 70 percent of the jobs in this country are created by these entrepreneurs, these investors, the small businessmen that get their things going. So that's what Ronald Reagan did, and boy, did it work. He wasn't the only one that did it. JFK did it, didn't he?

Just reclaiming my time for a minute, let me ask you: on this chart this is the historic budget in balance. Everything below this line, we spent more money than we had. Anything above the line, we spent less than we had. Every single bar is a year going back to the 1980s and 1990s. You come across here. Does it strike you as being a little bit odd that in 2009 we have this tremendous level of spending? Does that look like a good sign to you? You know something about economics. I yield.

I sure appreciate my colleague from Indiana and his wisdom. He's been in the Chamber for some number of years, keeps an eye on these things, and Congressman Burton is a great leader down here.

Mr. Speaker, Congressman Scalise is somebody who hasn't been here as long but is readily and rapidly earning the respect of his colleagues on the floor, particularly for the fact that he is paying immediate attention to the number one top priority, which is what's going on fiscally.

Mr. Speaker, I'm going to yield the remaining time for this hour and would hope that Congressman Scalise could then pick that up.

I appreciate the gentleman yielding. There are a couple of things. In spite of how deadly serious this is and the tremendous impact it's having in terms of lost jobs and just hammering people's pensions and people struggling with their payments, one of the things that is so odd about what we do in the government sector is we pass these laws and they have unintended consequences.

I'm just thinking about, Here we go again. We're just about to pass another silly law. And I'm thinking about how are my people in the great State of Missouri going to react.

We've got this cap-and-tax tax increase that you're talking about. That tax increase is going to be not on people over $250,000, but what this is going to be is a tax increase on the use of energy--of electricity, natural gas, propane, or whatever you're heating your house with.

So just think about it a minute. This has been estimated to be $3,100 per family in America per year. That is a pretty big tax increase. That is like my entire property taxes on the house that I have now.

So I'm picturing, Congressman, if you think about it a little bit, and all of a sudden your energy is going up at such a tremendous rate and you're having to pay $3,000 more in taxes, what in the world are you going to do?

Well, people in my State are going to get that steel chain saw out, they're going to be cutting up firewood, they're going to get themselves a wood-burning stove, and they're going to start burning firewood instead of natural gas. What's the effect of that going to be? Well, not as complete and clean a combustion.

So we're going to put more CO2 and other types of gasses in the air by passing this bill and it's going to have the exact opposite effect of what it's supposed to do.

It's like when some brilliant genius put this MTBE in our gasoline to make the air cleaner and people figured out that it was ruining the water and the water table because it was washing out of gasoline that was spilled and poisoning the water. So we do something that is supposed to be making the environment better--and we make it worse.

Here we go. We're going to tax everybody's use of home energy. And what's going to happen? They're just going to get wood-burning stoves. It's going to smell nice like a barbecue going on all the time. But this is just another really bad idea, particularly in these hard times, to be laying one more heavy tax burden.

Now we heard a lot about President Bush spending too much money. As a Republican, I voted against some of those proposals. But let's do a comparison here of exactly where we are because you talk about trillions and billions of dollars, it makes my head spin. But I can do a simple comparison.

Here the average annual deficit under President Bush is $300 billion, and what is being proposed by the current President is $600 billion. I can understand the difference. There's twice as much spending going on here as there was under Bush.

Here's the highest deficit. George W. Bush, when the Democrats ran the House, that was when there was the most spending going through-- $459 billion. Under President Obama, he's looking at $1.2 trillion. That's two times more deficit spending.

Increase in the national debt. Under all of the years of President Bush, $2.5 trillion. Well, that's not good. Again, President Obama has got him beat two to one.

So I think it's helpful to try and put numbers in perspective. What we are talking about is unprecedented spending--and guess what the result of that is going to be? You guessed it. Something that none of us like. Jobs lost. That's what's happening.

When you start spending too much money, taxing too much, borrowing too much, you start to lose jobs. Small

businesses shrink down. The guy that made $250,000, now he's getting taxed and not putting that money back in his business.

It's making all Americans across our country hurt. This is something we can talk about numbers. But we're also talking about people, Congressman.

I appreciate your yielding some time here because this isn't the way we should be going. What we should be doing is tightening the belt in government like everybody else is tightening their belt.

Understand that this is not government money, this is hard-earned dollars not of ours, not of our children. It's our grandchildren's hard-earned dollars that are being spent. We just can't allow this to go on.

I'm going to stand here, I know you're going to stand here, and we're going to fight until every American understands what is at stake. I believe when America wakes up to what's happening here, they're going to say: No more spending, no more taxes. Back off, Washington, D.C., and let us do what we have always done so well and that is let America free enterprise and the American Dream pull us out of this mess.

I yield back.

I appreciate the gentleman yielding. It has been such a beautiful day here, we have got the cherry blossoms in full bloom in Washington, D.C., and yet we are talking about a very, very serious and very difficult problem with a government that is really out of control in spending. And I appreciate the gentleman from Ohio, Congressman Jordan, talking about the discipline. We don't have the discipline.

But, you know, part of it is that we have forgotten some of the lessons that the founders that came to this country understood. And I have thought back a little bit, how is it that we got off track? And if you will allow me to just wax a little bit philosophical.

This country was put together, and unlike any other country in the world America is a Nation that was founded on a creed. There are many things that are distinctive about America. We have the oldest Constitution. We have won a number of wars and ceded no territory. We have named no emperors, crowned no kings. And what we did was we taxed ourselves to rebuild.

America is a very unique place, and there are many reasons why Americans could be proud of this country. But America also is a Nation that has, if you will, a political or religious creed, and that is stated in our own Declaration of Independence, why we went to war. And the sentence says: We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights. And it goes on to say: Among these is life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Earlier versions of Jefferson's documents were life, liberty, and property.

And then it goes on to say: Governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers essentially to do, what? To protect life, liberty, property; life, liberty, pursuit of happiness.

So if you take a look at that formula, what it is saying in simple terms is, there is a God. God grants all human beings certain basic rights, and the job of the government is to protect those rights now.

Now, fast forward from 1776 to 1944, to the inaugural address by FDR. He said, well, that first Bill of Rights--which wasn't a Bill of Rights; it was a Declaration of Independence, life, liberty, pursuit of happiness--was okay for a while. But it wouldn't be any good if Americans are hungry or if an American needs a coat, or if some American is not secure. So we propose a second Bill of Rights, and that is that the government should give you jobs and education and health care and things like that.

You note the clever twist here. The first rights are things that naturally occur to all people under God, the right to free speech, the right not to be killed, the right to own some property. These other kinds of things we are talking about now have a strange, strange parallel.

We laughed some years ago in my past when we watched the Berlin Wall fall down and we said, we knew those commies or the USSR, that system would never work, communism, socialism. It won't work. Why was that? Well, because the government is going to give you your health care, the government is going to give you your food and your housing, the government is going to provide a job, the government is going to provide an education. And don't talk about God, because if you talk about God then you know you have natural rights from God, not rights that come from a government.

So what we are doing in America with this kind of budget? What we are doing in America is the government is going to give you health care, the government is going to give you a job, the government is going to give you food and a place to live. The government is going to give you an education. How are we so different from the system we just watched fail?

That is why the Europeans are laughing in their beers, looking at us and saying, has America been smoking those funny cigarettes or what? What are we doing? And I think that is the question we are trying to raise.

I don't mean to be too philosophical, but where did we got off track? We got off track on the road to socialism, to the idea that the government is going to be all things to all people. And it does a lousy job of doing that.

What we should be doing, quite simply, is protecting life and protecting people's basic liberties. And what are we talking about doing? We are talking about saying we are going to have a bureaucrat in D.C. to monitor what you put on your radio program. We are going to call that The Fairness Doctrine.

We are going to take away your right to be able to vote without being compelled or feeling pressure, because we are going to get rid of the secret ballot election when it comes to joining a union or not.

We are talking about taking away people's freedom to own a piece of property because some local government wants to take it and turn it into a strip mall so you don't have any private property rights.

I mean, what is going on? How come we are giving up freedom? I don't think we are on the right track.

I appreciate the gentleman with this hour, and I just felt like it was important to get back to what is basic in America, which is limited government that provides and protects our life, our liberty, and our property, instead of doing this institutionalized theft.

Well, I thank you very much. And I appreciate your calling attention to the fact that we are on the wrong track financially here. It is true that doing the wrong thing financially impacts our freedom in America. And particularly it impacts something that is precious to every red-blooded American, and that is the American Dream. If you think back in the beginning of our country there were all these crazy people that came to America, starting with a group called the Pilgrims. They came to this land, and they had the idea of building an entirely new civilization on a different set of principles. And after they had been here about a month, half of them died. And the captain of the Mayflower comes to them and says, ``Things haven't gone too well. Maybe it is time for you to go back to jolly old England with me.'' So he gives the commands. The boatswain squares the yardarms, the anchor cable is wound up from Plymouth Harbor, at first large and then small, that Mayflower sails out and beyond sight. And here on the shore, with the wind blowing across the pine trees, is a little group of 50-plus people that had a dream of a new country based on new principles.

It has been that way all the way along. There have been these crazy people that came to America with some crazy idea, and then it became maybe a vague possibility. And then they wrote something down, and eventually it became actually reality. And it happened so often that we gave it the name the ``American Dream.'' But it happened because there was a rarified environment of freedom in America where people could succeed. But they could also fail. They understood that there was a discipline that the gentleman from Ohio was talking about. Congressman Jordan understands discipline. There is a discipline. If you want to have freedom, you also have to have responsibility. And that is part of the American Dream. And that is being stomped out by this budget.

We won't take it. And I appreciate your taking the leadership and scheduling this hour and particularly your leadership financially here on this floor, Congressman. Thank you.

Mr. Speaker, it's a pleasure to join you this evening and to talk about some issues that are of significance to all of us. And I thought that what we might do this evening, starting out, was just take a look at--many people are conscious of the fact that we've got some challenges and troubles with the economy. People are aware that we have a problem with jobs and having enough jobs to go around. We have some difficulties on Wall Street, as people know. We have difficulties on Main Street.

We have been told over a period of the last six or 7 years that we spent a whole lot, too much money in the war in Iraq and in Afghanistan. In fact, we have been regaled every day with stories about oh, we're spending more and more money.

But just to kind of put perspective on how much we have been spending lately, let's just consider the 6 years of the war in Iraq and add up all the money we spent in the war in Iraq, and then let's add to that the amount of money that we spent in Afghanistan. And you put the two together, and it's less money than we've spent in the first five weeks when this Congress was in session. That's kind of an amazing number.

We spent this, supposedly stimulus bill, $840 billion. What is $840 billion? Well, it's more money than we've spent in both of these wars over the past six and 7 years all added up, combined.

So how did we get into this situation that we are spending so tremendously much money?

I recall, the President made a statement. It said, ``We cannot simply spend as we please and defer the consequences.'' And many of the President's statements are noteworthy. This is a good statement. ``We cannot simply spend as we please and defer the consequences.''

The only question is, when you take a look at the level of spending, these

blue bars was President Bush, and these red bars, now, become the Democrats and particularly, here, this is this year. Now, this is not, doesn't have projections in it for economists making all kinds of predictions. This is actually what we are spending. And you see how much the spending has gone up. And so this line doesn't square too well with ``We can't simply spend as we please and defer the consequences.''

So how did we get into this really heavy, big spending kind of situation?

I think it's helpful--people say, oh, we just have to keep looking ahead and solving problems. I think it's good to look ahead and solve problems. I think it's also possible to take a look and see where did we make mistakes and what do we need to make sure that we don't do again. I90[H25MR9-R1]{H4012}

And if you take a look at how we got the economy in trouble, the story goes back, actually, a good number of years. It goes back even as far back as 1968, and that was when Fannie Mae was created. It's called a government-sponsored enterprise. It's not really private. It's not really government. It's sort of half and half. And so '68 we created Fannie Mae, and then in 1970, Freddie Mac. And the purpose of these organizations was to make it so that Americans could afford to own homes. And that is, of course a good thing. We all appreciate the American dream, particularly having, when you come home after a hard day's work, have a place that's really your palace. Maybe not a fancy palace, but it's at least a place where there should be some peace and when you can say yeah, this is my house. And that's always been part of the American dream.

And the idea was to create these agencies, to allow more people to have a chance to own their own home. And that was what a good enough idea to start with. But then we started to tamper with the idea some in 1977 with the Community Reinvestment Act, which mandated that Freddie and Fannie--or in the Community Reinvestment Act it mandated more banks had to make loans that were risky loans, not the sort of loan that a local bank would know the people living in their area and they'd say, oh, this is a good guy and he wants to buy a home, but we know he'll be able to pay his loan, so we'll go ahead and make that loan and we'll keep that on our books and allow that to go forward. And then every month we know this man in our community, we know he'll pay off his loan and soon he'll be a proud homeowner.

No, this was not what happened with the Community Reinvestment Act. What we're saying now is that banks have to lend money to people who might not be able to repay those loans, and the government's starting to say, you've got to make these loans that are not so good.

Well, in 1992, the Federal Housing Enterprise Financial Safety and Soundness Act mandated that Freddie and Fannie buy risky loans from the banks. So now pretty soon, you've got this and it's gone a little further. It's not just that the bank is going to make some risky loans, but now the bank has the option of dumping the risky loans on Freddie and Fannie. So you can see where this is going. What's starting to happen is that we're passing the accountability. And guess who's finally going to end up holding the bag? You guessed it, the U.S. taxpayer.

Well, here's what's going on. Now, this enterprise is saying you can take these bad loans, pass them on to Freddie and Fannie. Well.

Then we go to 1999, and under the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, this is where President Clinton expanded the number of bad loans, not maybe bad loans, but much more risky loans that Freddie and Fannie had to take. And so Freddie and Fannie now are picking up more and more of loans where it's not so clear people are going to be able to pay these things. And so Freddie and Fannie start to do some exciting footwork with their finances, and start packaging these loans up in unique ways, and selling them, through Wall Street, all over the world. And so this is going on in '99.

Now, other things are starting to take effect here. The economy was not so good in '99. And so, Greenspan, at that time, lowered the interest rate, took it way down so it created a whole lot of available liquidity, and the housing bubble starts going. And this was the year that I was elected to Congress, 2000. So 2001, if I'd come down here, I was really kicking myself by 2005 because anybody who bought a house in Washington, D.C., why, that house would have doubled in value in about 5 years. You're saying why in the world didn't I buy some big house in D.C.? And then later on you think, I'm glad I didn't.

But anyway, we haven't gotten there yet. So this is what's happening in 1999. Then things start to--the train starts to come off the track.

In 2003, Freddie and Fannie get investigated by The Securities and Exchange, and they admit that $1.2 billion accounting error. At that particular time, President Bush, seeing that, had been warned. Now there'd been some warnings before, back in 1999. New York Times, there's an editorial saying, we are setting up a problem. And here's the problem. You've got a whole bunch of loans that are very questionable, more and more questionable loans. And who is going to back up those loans? Who's going to end up having to pay for them if people default on their loans? So this is, who's going to pay? Well, Freddie and Fannie have all of these things. What's the implication? Well, Freddie and Fannie are backed by who? By the U.S. government. So if the loans are bad, now the U.S. government is, maybe not obligated, but pretty much obligated. By this time, Freddie and Fannie have got more than half of the home loans in America. So is the government going to turn their back and say, oops, all of this is stuff is just going to go away? No, of course. So this is starting to come along.

By 2003, the President sees these problems, and in this article, on September 11, 2003, the article, this is New York Times, September 11, 2003, it says hear, ``The Bush administration today recommended the most significant regulatory overhaul in the housing finance industry since the savings and loan crisis a decade ago.''

So here you have, Republican President Bush is saying, uh-oh, guys. We've got trouble. We need to get into Freddie and Fannie. We need to regulate them some because they're starting to get wild and wooly with their financial wheeling and dealing, and what's going to happen is the government and the taxpayer are going to end up getting caught on the hook.

Well, what was the response? And did we go ahead and take the President's recommendation and move forward with further regulations of Freddie and Fannie?

Well, he was opposed. The same article in the New York Times, same one, September 11, 2003, the ranking Democrat of the Financial Services Committee, Congressman Frank, is quoted in this article. ``These two entities, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, are not facing any kind of financial crisis'' said Representative Barney Frank of Massachusetts. Now, I think he didn't think they were facing any particular kind of crisis. But he was the ranking member on this committee. That means he was in the minority party in 2003. But he was opposed to what the President was suggesting, and that was a strong reining in of Freddie and Fannie's practices. Now, he, by himself, of course, couldn't stop a legislation because he was in the minority party.

So, following 2003, you have, in addition, you have the Bush administration in 2004, again, this is committee testimony saying, we've got to get on to Freddie and Fannie. And then by 2005, a bill was passed in the House. It was mostly, the one in the House was mostly voted for by Republicans. It was opposed by a majority of Democrats, or quite a number of Democrats. And the bill passes out of the House and then goes over to the Senate.

Now, the Senate is kind of an odd body because over there it takes 60 votes to get something passed. And as the New York Times reported, the Democrats were not in favor of this additional regulation on Freddie and Fannie. So here is another version, the Senate bill 190, it's the Federal Housing Enterprise Regulatory Reform Act 2005. And the Senate, it was passed out of the Committee on Banking and Housing and Urban Affairs, but the floor action was blocked by the Democrat minority.

So there's a difference, a political difference here, that the Republicans were in support of more regulation of

Freddie and Fannie. Democrats were opposed to that, killed it over in the Senate.

Now, what happened then, of course, is that all of these bad loans spiraled more and more out of control, and as they did so, they started to create havoc in other parts of the economy. Now, was this problem created entirely because Democrats refused to regulate Freddie and Fannie? No, not entirely because of that. It was a very important component. Certainly, the bad loans are what put us on track for a very serious world economic situation. There was more to it, though.

There were people on Wall Street, such as Standard & Poor's and two other rating agencies--the ones that give us our credit ratings personally. They are the ones that said that all of these mortgage- backed securities were a AAA rating. Well, that turns out to also have been not a very wise thing, and they were not AAA rated. In fact, most of them have gone into default enough so that there is no longer any market for these mortgage-backed securities. So now we are at the point in the last year or two where we have what is clearly a recession on our hands. So what do you do with a recession? There are two basic theories about how you handle this.

The first one goes back to FDR and to his Secretary of the Treasury, Henry Morgenthau. Morgenthau, along with a guy, little Lord Keynes--he was a little weird, but he was an economist anyway--came up with this idea that when the economy gets in trouble what you have got to do is to stimulate it, and so what we are going to do is spend a whole lot of money, and that is going to make the economy a lot better. So they tried that during the Great Depression. After 8 years of stimulating-- that is, spending tons and tons of taxpayer money--you have the guy who really came up with this scheme, Henry Morgenthau, now appearing before the House Ways and Means Committee in the year 1939. He talks about: How well does it work if the government spends a whole lot of money to get itself out of an economic fix? Well, here is what his quote was:

``We have tried spending money. We are spending more than we have ever spent before, and it does not work.''

This is the guy who supports this Keynesian model of economics, which says, hey, the more you spend money, the more it's going to fix the economy. After 8 years of the administration, we have just as much unemployment as when we started--and an enormous debt to boot.

Now, this is a lesson that Henry Morgenthau learned in 1939. He learned it at the cost of 8 years of Americans being out of jobs. He realized that this does not work. The Japanese did not learn the lesson, and in the '70s, they took their economy through 10 years of big government spending to try to get their economy going, and it did not work.

So what we have then is the problem of an approach to fixing an economic crisis which creates unemployment, and of course unemployment--lost jobs--really, really hurt an awful lot of common people. A lot of people who have worked hard all of their lives, who are trying to pay their mortgages off, lose their jobs, and now their houses are foreclosed. I think sometimes, in my own mind, of being the father of a family with a wife and with kids depending on me. I think of what it would be like to come home at night and see your living room furniture sitting on the sidewalk, and you're being tossed out of your house. That is the kind of thing we risk when we start using bad government policies. When we start to take this process of having people being encouraged to take loans that they cannot afford to take, we lose jobs, and things start to come undone.

There is a different approach, another way, of dealing with a recession. One way of dealing with a recession that we mentioned is, of course, the Keynesian model, or the idea of spending your way out of trouble. Now, we need a little bit of common sense down in Washington, D.C. We need a little common sense in Congress. Most people in a lot of our districts know that, if you get in trouble economically, the thing you do is you don't go buy a brand new car and spend money like mad, hoping it's going to get better. That's just plain crazy, and yet that seems to be what the government is doing.

Let's take a look and see what our response has been, because there is another approach. There was the same approach that was used by JFK, by Ronald Reagan and by President Bush, all three times effectively turning a recession into good, solid economic times. I've got a couple of charts here. I just want to throw a couple of these up because this is the heart of where we are in America today, and it affects every man, woman and child in our country.

What I have here right in front of me is the danger of using that Keynesian model--spending money out of control. Let's take a look at this chart. This is a pretty easy one to understand. I know charts are sometimes a little confusing or you have to try and figure out what they're saying, but this just tells you whether or not the family budget got balanced. Every single one of these bars is a line, and if the line goes down, it means the government spent too much money. If the line goes up, it says we actually did not spend as much as we took in. So, just like the family budget, the down lines mean, uh-oh, we went into debt. We're going back all the way here to 1980 and are going out here to this very year where we are.

So what has happened? Well, we've been spending too much money for a long time here. About how much too much? Well, you know, $3 billion to $400 billion worth. That's a lot of money. Here we had a couple of good years where we actually made some money. This was a Republican Congress. Bill Clinton and the Congress said we're not going to spend much money, and there were some disagreements. We actually saved some money for a couple of years. These years right in here are the 8 years of Bush, and Bush was criticized for spending too much money. I voted against some of that spending, and here is what the spending was:

You can see that probably the worst spending was somewhere in the range of about $400 billion. Now take a look at what happened this year in 2009. My goodness, this is absolutely unprecedented. That is the level of spending in 2009. Guess what? We're not done with 2009 yet. So this tells you that we have taken an approach which is saying, boy, are we going to spend some money. You can say that, maybe, President Bush spent too much money. I think he did, but it is nowhere near what we're seeing, and so this spending pattern seems to be in great contradiction with the statement that says: We cannot simply spend as we please and defer the consequences. This is what he said, but look at what we are doing.

I am joined here in the Chamber tonight by a very good friend of mine from Louisiana, Congressman Scalise.

I know that you've been paying attention to some of these issues and have already, rapidly, distinguished yourself here in the Congress. I would appreciate it if you would give us your perspective on what's going on this evening.

Reclaiming my time just for a second, you are talking about these different tax increases and different things that are spending money. It's starting to get a little bit hazy because there are a number of them coming along, and it's easy to get them confused in your mind where it was that we spent money and how much. So I have put together some of the real big ticket items. I mean we're only into March, right? I mean it's only the first quarter. Let's take a look here.

This is the Wall Street bailout. It started, actually, at the end of the Bush administration. They did, I think it was, $300 billion or $350 billion, something like that.

$350 billion.

Then, under President Obama, we got the other $350 billion. So half of this is Bush and half of this is President Obama. Then we've got this economic stimulus--I call this the porkulus bill--and that was $787 billion in its final form. Then we've got the appropriations bill that we passed. That's another $410 billion. So, you know, we are well over $1 trillion here in less than--what is it?--3 months.

Sixty-five days.

I just thought it would be helpful to have those numbers up there. The main thing was the Wall Street bailout, then this porkulus bill and then this appropriations bill.

I yield.

Reclaiming my time, we have gone from $400 billion to $1.7 trillion?

Reclaiming my time, that is really clever politically. So, in other words, what you're saying is the first year, you kick it up-- and it is whatever it is, three or four times more than it has ever been for a long, long time--and then you say, ``But I am going to cut it back so it's just a lot more than it has ever been.''

Reclaiming my time.

We have a chart here. It is kind of an interesting chart in a way in that these are all of our Presidents. You start over here with George Washington and you end up down here with President Bush. And if you add all of the debt that all of these Presidents all the way through Bush put together every time when they overspent the family budget, if you will, and you keep adding all of that together, you come up with $5.8 trillion, which is bad. We shouldn't overspend that way.

But here, take a look at just from 2009 to 2016. That's not so many years. We're only talking about, what is that, 7 years. That's assuming, let's say he were President for 8 years and so this is all during his Presidency. What he's proposing is $8.7 trillion. So he's going to create more debt in 7 years than we have in 232 years of all the previous Presidents. This is kind of getting serious.

I have noticed that we're joined in the Chamber here by a judge. You know, judges are kind of sober and straightforward. And this guy is a judge from Texas, and Judge Carter usually has some very interesting perspectives and a little bit of straight shooting and straight talk.

Judge Carter, please join us.

We've heard about how bad Republicans and President Bush were, so I just made a couple of real simple comparisons.

This is the average annual deficit under President Bush, and it was $300 billion. Now we don't like that. But that was what the deficit was on an average under the Bush years--$300 billion.

Now under Barack Obama's proposed budget--these are his numbers; we're not doctoring them--this is what he's proposing. His annual deficit is going to be 600. He's doubled the deficit of President Bush. And we heard all of this stuff about how bad Bush's spending level is. Here is another way of saying it.

The highest deficit under George Bush happened to be 2008, and that, of course, was with the Democrat Congress, but that was $459 billion, and the projections by the Congressional Budget Office is looking at $1.2 trillion. That's more than double.

And here we got the increase in national debt. Under Bush, he increased the debt, from 2000 to 2008, $2.5 trillion. But take a look under Barack Obama, we're looking at almost double.

So everywhere down the line we're doubling. And we are not fighting the war in Iraq, and we're pulling the war in Iraq back, and we're, in fact, doubling everything.

So these numbers really need some attention, I think, and I appreciate your sharing.

I would yield to the gentleman from Louisiana.

You talked about the TEA party. We were flushing a little tea down the Mississippi River from St. Louis. We had a TEA party, too, and I don't know whether that's gotten down to Louisiana yet. But we had the same thing. We have people saying, Wait a minute. This spending is out of control. Some of the money that we had on the chart here has already been spent. But there is a tremendous amount more spending that is being proposed. And we don't have to keep spending.

We did the $300-some billion bank bailout. That water is over the dam or down the river, however you want to look at it. And that porkulus bill at almost $800 billion, you know, you're talking about more than the war in Iraq and Afghanistan added together. We're talking about just 5 weeks here in the Chamber, and we have gone hugely into debt.

I am on Armed Services. One of the most expensive things we buy on my committee is aircraft carriers. We have 11 of them in the U.S.A., and this bill, for $800 billion, we could get 250 aircraft carriers. End- to-end I can't even imagine how many aircraft carriers that would be. We only have 11. The debt service and the money would buy 9 brand new aircraft carriers. We're talking a lot of money, and the American public is starting to get wise to this deal.

Thirty-two thousand years? Now, wait a minute. What year is this? This is 2009 and you're saying 32,000?

This isn't the year of 32,000. This is the year 2009.

Oh, yeah.

Reclaiming my time.

The special hour that the Democrats did just before we came on here, they were talking about the glories and the benefits of this carbon tax and all the things they're doing with renewables and those kinds of things. But a tax is a tax is a tax.

What we're talking about here is this thing that's called cap-and- trade. I would call it cap-and-tax. This is $646 billion. This is another one of these things you have got to be real careful what you hear when you get an address from the President. Because as he was in this Chamber 6 or 8 weeks ago, he gave us a State of the Union or State of the State, whatever the address was called, he said, Look. I am going to guarantee you something. If you're making less than $250,000, I have got good news for you. I am not going to tax you.

He said that. We were sitting in here. And then he's proposing this cap-and-trade which really is a tax on the use of energy, particularly carbon.

And who is it that uses this carbon? Well, anybody who's got a house that's heated with fuel oil or coal or electricity or natural gas. All of those things are going to get taxed.

So this little tax, this $646 billion tax, is going to come from somebody. Guess who? The average homeowner. In fact, it has been estimated by one organization that you're talking about $3,100 per average household. That's some money for a lot of us.

Three hundred dollars a month.

If you buy a chair or a table or a microphone, anything that you see sitting around us, you're going to move that by rail.

There is energy tied up in everything. And it's all going up.

Reclaiming my time.

I don't want you to make things too gloomy here. We're not just talking about gasoline and natural gas and propane and electricity.

We're talking about the price of all of the things that that energy goes into as well.

That would affect small businesses, too. I yield to my good friend from Louisiana and I know that you have had some small business experience. Maybe you can share your thoughts about does this make sense for us to be doing this great big tax increase on energy when the economy is struggling? Does that make sense to you? I yield.

Reclaiming my time a second, what you are saying is you've got some very hard manufacturing jobs. These are the kind that support other jobs in the community. You're talking about steel mill. You're talking about production. You're talking about a lot of investment, good solid jobs in the community, and your competition is not Missouri, is it?

Reclaiming my time, these are hard jobs. This is a proposal by a company. I used to be in charge of maintenance in a steel mill. I didn't know if you knew that, but I did. In fact, my great-grandfather started a steel mill. I can tell you one thing about steel mills, they use energy. They use a lot of energy. If you're going to put this big, whopping tax increase on energy, guess what you're going to do. You're going to do the same thing that's going on here. You are sending jobs straight out of our country, and that's not what we should be doing in these economic times. It makes no common sense whatsoever.

And how well is it working?

Reclaiming my time, what you're talking about, we see this when you really look at legislation we pass all the time, we pass legislation that's supposed to do one thing, and frequently it does the exact opposite. You know what I'm thinking, if I'm from the good old State of Missouri, we have plenty of guys. There's a lot of oak trees and a lot of chain saws, and you all of the sudden start taxing people's natural gas or their propane or if they have electric heat pumps and things and their family budget gets tight, guess what's going to happen. That old, dead oak tree out behind in the back 40, they're going to get that chain saw, they're going to fire that thing up, and they're going to get themselves a big, old, wood burning stove. And it may not be very efficient, and they're going to really put some CO2 out.

And the thing that is supposed to be not making CO2, instead of building a nuclear plant that makes no CO2, which is if you were really serious that you're worried about CO2, well, then you'd want to go with a nuclear because it makes no CO2. But by doing this tax, all that's going to happen, we're going to make more CO2. It doesn't even make a whole lot of sense, does it?

Just reclaiming my time, you know, the thing I'd like-- we're going to be wrapping things up here pretty soon, and one of the things sometimes that there's some that would like to portray us as being just say ``no'' on everything. I think we need to deal with that for just a minute in our discussion here.

It's not that we think ``no'' on everything. We really think ``yes'' on everything, on a whole lot of things. We just don't believe that the solution to the economic problems that have been created by these bad loans and bad mortgages and things, which were a failed socialist policy, there was no failure of free enterprise. We don't think the solution to the economy is just spending tons and tons of money. And so that doesn't make us just ``no.''

There are ways to get an economy that's in a recession getting it going, and we've seen examples of people that have done it. Why don't we copy what works? JFK did it, Ronald Reagan did it, and Bush 2 did it in some of the tax cuts. If you do tax cuts and you cut Federal spending and you allow small business entrepreneurs, investors to have enough liquidity to invest, then you can get the economy going.

And so we've got a bunch of different kinds of solutions, but the bottom line is you've got to back off on the Federal Government sucking all of the liquidity out of the economy, and you have got to allow small businesses to invest. And you don't do that by taxing them to death, taxing them on their energy, taxing anybody who makes over $250,000. That's more than half of the small business owners in the country.

And so we've got a solution, don't we? It's not like we're saying ``no.'' Our solution is straightforward. You have to allow the investors and the small businesspeople to have enough liquidity to get the free enterprise system going and you've got to get the government in this incredible overspending off of their backs.

I wanted to make sure we're talking positively because we love America. This country has been through a lot of crises, and we're in a whale of a crisis now because of mismanagement. That doesn't mean we have to keep going down the same, dumb path that didn't work for FDR. It didn't work for the Japanese. We need to go for the things that work.

So what we are saying is we're opposed to stuff that doesn't work. We love our country, and we know how to make it better.

That seems like a whole lot better idea than taxing everybody that uses any form of energy and adding that to the price of everything else. That's just brutal in a rough economy. There's a lot of families in my district that are hurting, and to be doing this kind of budget imbalance, take a look at this, these are President after President after President, you can see, you know, this is the wrong track. This is just not the way to do something. The gentleman from Louisiana.

I guess you could say we are spending too much, we are taxing too much, we are borrowing too much. That is kind of a summary of it.

If you just take a look at these bar charts about the budget imbalance, you can see that. This is not the equation of how to fix an economy that's in trouble. That's not what JFK did. That's not what Ronald Reagan did. That's not what Bush II did to stop those recessions. This is even worse than what FDR did.

The problem we have is if something doesn't work, it just doesn't work. It's not like you're being negative. You're saying, Look, it's never worked in history. What we have to do is go back to the time- tested principles of the country we love--and that's just to trust the Americans, the inventors and the investors, the entrepreneurs, the people who love this country, who live the American Dream, who come here with some crazy new idea, give it a try and, by golly, the thing works.

They wake up some day and they've been sleeping under a park bench 10 years before and some guy and his wife realize they're millionaires and they didn't even know it was going to happen to them. That's what this country is all about.

The government can never create any wealth but, boy, we can sure keep other people from ever doing any by overtaxing them.

It strikes me as it may be worse than that. What we're doing here, we're killing the American Dream. That is what's going on. We're killing the dream for people that wanted to come to this country, own their own house, be able to send their kids to get a better education than they got before.

This is a country that is so unlike anything else in the world. We are such a special country. We are unique in so many different ways. Whenever you see there's a tsunami or hurricane, you see our people out there helping. We've been a bastion of freedom for people all around the world. They look at America and say, Hey those Americans have got it down. You could live the American Dream over there. They come flooding into our country. We're worried about the immigration because they understand what this country has always been about. It's never been about this kind of stuff--this irresponsible, runaway government spending. This is killing the dream that Americans have always come to believe in.

I yield to my friend from Louisiana.

This is taxing too much, spending too much, and borrowing too much.

I yield such time as he may consume to a highly respected and distinguished colleague, the gentleman from Pennsylvania (Mr. Platts).

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

Last week, the devastation of traumatic brain injury was once again brought to our attention with the death of actress Natasha Richardson. This tragedy was but one type of traumatic brain injury that brings about death or physical debilitation to over 1.4 million people each year.

While the leading cause of traumatic brain injury is the result of falls, they are followed by automobile accidents, being struck by or against a hard surface, and assault. Men are at the greatest risk of brain injury, and African Americans have the highest death rate from this injury. All of these cold, hard facts do not tell the story of shattered lives of the individual, if they survive, and untold heartache and lifelong impact on loved ones and friends of the injured. In America, there are 125,000 citizens living with life-long disabilities from traumatic brain injuries.

These head injuries come about in many ways, not the least of which are the injuries sustained by our soldiers fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq. The cost in lives and the ongoing suffering is tragic for these brave men and women. Their injuries will continue to require costly medical assistance from State, Federal, and local agencies.

Generally, a concussion is a type of traumatic brain injury that is caused by an injury to the head that many people underestimate. It is critical to recovery that any type of blow to the head, whether it is a child's fall from a swing to a teen sport or automobile accident, be taken seriously. Often, symptoms don't show up immediately, so keeping a close watch on the injured person is imperative so that medical attention can be sought, if needed.

We are grateful for organizations such as the Brain Injury Association of America who are invaluable in generating understanding and awareness of brain injury. We join with all who wish to broadcast a message of hope and action of this often underestimated condition during March, which has been designated as the National Brain Injury Awareness Month.

I yield back the balance of my time.