Floor Statements

Mr. Speaker, it is a pleasure to join you and my colleagues this evening on a subject that has been of great concern and attention to Americans now for a number of years, unfortunately, and that is the subject of the economy and jobs. This ongoing discussion and debate is taking new turns here the last few weeks, and I think it is helpful and perhaps informative to try to put that into perspective somewhat.

The thing that I think that perhaps we have to understand from the beginning is that the whole question of the economy and jobs is owned right now by the Democrats, because that party has been driving the train for the last couple of years.

The distinction between the parties has never been more sharp over the past 2 years because of the fact that you have had almost entirely party-line voting on major piece of legislation after major piece of legislation. When it came particularly to the stimulus, it was called the stimulus bill, some people called it the ``porkulous'' bill of a couple of years ago. That was a black and white kind of party-line vote, along with quite a number of other items on the agenda.

So what we have right now is essentially the Democrats have been running things for a couple of years, and we have got a recession going. And the question is, what are we going to do about the economy and about jobs?

There are two solutions to the problem. The ones that the Democrats have proposed over the last couple of years have been a very, very high level of Federal spending, and what they consider to be stimulus, which is more Federal spending, which they think will somehow fix the economy.

For a couple of years I have been here on the floor on Wednesday evenings saying, with all due respect, I don't think that solution will work. I am not saying that it won't work just because I think it won't, which I don't, but also because prominent Democrats have also said that it won't work.

I have quoted Henry Morgenthau, FDR's Secretary of the Treasury. They tried a whole lot of Federal spending. It was the time that ``Little Lord Keynes'' had come along and it was all the rage. If you get in trouble economically, spend a lot of money, and that will get the economy ``stimulated'' and you will pull right out of the recession. That is the theory.

It has not worked. It has never worked. And after about 8 years, Henry Morgenthau, a Democrat, came before the House Ways and Means Committee and said, it won't work. He said, we have tried spending, and unemployment is as bad as it ever was, and we have a huge deficit to boot. Well, it didn't work then. It still hasn't worked for the last couple of years.

I think the point as we move forward into this discussion about what are we going to do with the expiring tax cuts left over from the Bush administration, I think it is important to understand where we are in context, and that is we have come to a point where the Democrats have been making the calls and they have been driving this equation and the economy and jobs has not turned around.

We were told at the time of the stimulus bill that if we did not pass the bill, that we could have as much as 8 percent unemployment. Supposedly, if we did pass the bill, unemployment would be lower.

We did pass the bill. Unemployment jumped to about 10 percent. And those numbers are pretty conservative, because people who have been looking for a job for over a certain number of months are no longer counted as unemployed. So in fact the unemployment number is probably higher, by the way many people would calculate it. So, that is what has gone on.

Now, this is not complicated economics, if we are really serious about creating jobs. But there really are two different party solutions: One is more bureaucracy and food stamps; the other is more jobs and paychecks. That is America's choice, and America chose in the November election to move toward the more jobs and paychecks and less bureaucrats and food stamps. But this is some of the spending we are talking about in the last couple of years. You just can't do this and have it not affect jobs.

We had the Wall Street bailout, which some of it was supported by Bush in the past, but also by the Obama administration. Then you have got this supposed stimulus bill, $787 billion, which was a total disaster, and other miscellaneous items here. Then, of course, health care reform, which is the biggest of all, ObamaCare, at about $1 trillion. So you have a tremendous record of Federal spending.

Let's step back a little bit and go back to the things that we know work. You can go to anybody who you know that started a small business, people that run businesses; you can go to Main Street anywhere in America and you can ask the people who run businesses, what does it take to make jobs? It is not very complicated. But you will never be able to, as the Democrats try to do, separate the employer from the employee. If you want jobs, you can't destroy the employer. If you destroy companies, you will have less jobs. It is that simple.

So, let's say that you ask people on Main Street, well, what are the things that you have to worry about in terms of destroying jobs? The thing they are going to tell you probably first out of their mouth is going to be excessive taxes. When you have too much taxes on business, what happens is they use their money to pay the taxes and they don't use their money to invest in new equipment, new processes and new R&D and various ways that when they invest they create more jobs.

So the first thing that is an enemy to job creation is, first of all, excessive taxation. So what we have coming along now, and everybody has known it for years, is these tax cuts are coming along, they are going to expire and it is going to be a massive tax increase.

In fact, we have what in a way is a tax increase train wreck. You could think of it as the train is steaming along and everybody knows the bridge is out. The bridge is out on January 1st, 2011, the tax cuts expire, and what happens then, America receives the largest tax increase in the history of the Nation. Now, that is very bad medicine for an already-sick economy. So that is the situation we are facing.

So there is no surprise about this. Everybody has known these tax cuts are going to expire and there will be this whopping big tax increase, and somebody has to do something about it. So now we are waiting to the last couple of weeks of December to try to deal with this problem. That is not particularly responsible, I suppose.

So what is it when you go to Main Street and you ask businesses, what is it that kills jobs? Well, the first thing is major heavy taxes on businesses and on entrepreneurs and on the people that run businesses. That is the first killer of jobs. Now, we are doing that in spades. We are doing a lot of that. And if these massive tax increases come along, it simply makes it a whole lot worse.

What is the next thing that businesses would talk about that would kill jobs? Well, it is something else that eats into their profits, and that is a whole lot of red tape and government paperwork. So how are we doing in that department?

Well, one of the big bills that the Obama administration, the Democrats, wanted to push was cap-and-tax. That was the tax and tremendous amount of new red tape and bureaucracy to prevent global warming.

Now, if you believe in the theory of global warming, one of the things it says is it is really bad to create CO2. An honest attempt to stop global warming would say, well, we probably need to stop burning as much carbon in any form and move to some other source of energy generation, which suggests nuclear. If you were to take the number of nuclear power plants in America and double them, you would in effect get rid of the same amount, if you did that, of all the CO2 produced by every passenger car in America.

The bill didn't do that. The bill created instead more taxes, which, again, kill jobs; and, second of all, a tremendous amount of red tape.

Now, that bill didn't pass because of the fact that even some of the liberals

thought this didn't really make a whole lot of sense. Instead, the Obama administration has said, well, what we are going to do is we are just going to implement it through rules and regulations.

What does ``rules and regulations'' mean? Well, in street language, that means a whole lot of red tape. What does that mean to businesses? It means less jobs. It means it either prevents jobs from being created or kills jobs that are already there, because the red tape again costs them overhead to have to deal with it, and the increasing volume of red tape makes Americans less competitive, which then, of course, shifts jobs overseas.

So the second thing, after a whole lot of taxes that makes it hard on jobs, is too much red tape. Unfortunately, we are doing that as well.

So then you have got a whole series of other things too that are all contributing to this excessive loss of jobs, and that is going to be uncertainty. Now, one of the things the way businesses operate is if you don't know what the future is going to be, you are going to be very careful about taking any risks or making any investment in new equipment or new processes or new technology which is going to create jobs. So uncertainty is the third big enemy of job creation. How are we doing in uncertainty?

Well, what is being talked about as a way of stopping this massive tax increase is simply kicking the can down the road somewhere between a year to two years. And so does that help in terms of uncertainty? Well, people argue is the glass half full or is it half empty? It seems to avert the train wreck, but it is like you've got a train about to go off of a bridge that's out and you build a couple more spans of track further out but the track still ends. And so I suppose you avert a problem but, on the other hand, from an uncertainty point of view, it still creates uncertainty.

If you're wanting to know how you're going to do estate planning in terms of the death tax, to know that the thing is going to be extended with additional coverage up to $5 million and cover a 35 percent tax rate, but you know that's only going to happen 2 years, that doesn't help you a whole lot in estate planning. It may help for a year or two, but it still leaves a huge question mark.

But not only is the death tax a question mark, but capital gains and dividends. Another thing that takes time to plan for is a question mark. Is it better than having the train go off the cliff? Perhaps. But it still does not solve one of the things that makes it hard to create jobs, and that is if you've got a whole lot of uncertainty. So this, in a sense, may increase, but it certainly doesn't help the high level of uncertainty that's coming along.

In fact, it's been argued in the Wall Street Journal that the whole tax policy now, because there's so many different parts of it that are part of this deal that's been struck, that you really do create almost more uncertainty because there's no definitive final solution. What are we going to do? What is Federal policy on the death tax? Are we going to tax people after they die? One more chance to get them after we have taxed them all their life, the money that they have saved that they didn't get taxed on, we're going to get it again a second time or a third time. So the uncertainty is a big factor in jobs.

The next one is liquidity, which we, again, have not done a good job with. Liquidity is the business owner may want to go to a bank and get a loan. Typically, those loans are negotiated on about a 5-year basis. They pay a pretty good interest rate because the banker is taking some risk. So the banker, if things go well, does well with it. On the other hand, if the small business struggles or fails, then the banker gets caught, too. So there's the question of liquidity, do the small businesses have the liquidity they need to move forward.

With the new banking regulations you have Federal bureaucrats all over the bank saying, I don't think that's a good loan you've made to Joe Blow over there. And so the Federal Government is second-guessing what the banks do and requiring the banks to have much higher interest rates but also higher percent of collateral for anybody who borrows money. That makes liquidity more difficult. That makes job creation more difficult.

And the last thing of the five things that you will hear when you go to Main Street and ask a business owner what are the things that make it hard to create jobs, they're going to say Federal spending. Federal spending just absorbs money out of the economy. It makes it so the businesses are starving. If you starve businesses, then you're going to starve jobs. You cannot disconnect the business from the jobs that it creates because if you're going to get a job, you're going to work for an employer. It sounds not very complicated. And yet somehow here in Congress we seem to forget--the Democrats seem to make the disconnect on those things.

So these are all policies that have been set up by the U.S. Congress. It is not a surprise that there's unemployment going on because we're violating all five of these basic principles of job creation. So then the debate comes, Well, what are we going to do about these taxes that are expiring? We have had a number of years to think about it, but nobody wanted to do anything about it. But now, after the election, we're starting to say, Hey, this really may be a problem. And the President, because the buck stops with him, to a large degree, has been the first to acknowledge within the Democrat groups between Reid, Pelosi and the President, the President is saying, Hey, we better do something about this. If nothing else, whether he is seeing the light, at least he felt the heat in the November elections.

So the question is then you have got this pattern of all five of these things being wrong--the taxes, the red tape, the uncertainty, liquidity problems of the banks, and the Federal spending. All of these things are done the wrong way. And so the Republicans, because things have been so polarized, we voted ``no'' on all of this stuff, it is quite clear that there is this sharp contrast between what we're going to do now.

Now the contrast becomes more blurred with the proposal of trying to do something at the last minute with the Bush tax cuts. So we're going to do a look at that in a minute and what is the nature of those tax cuts and what was the effect when the tax cuts went into effect.

So, moving along, we continue to see the deficit under the Democrat budgets. Now there was a lot of talk that the Republicans under Bush overspent. And it's true that the Republicans did overspend. You can take a look at some of these. 2002, you had a $400 billion debt here. It went down, until we get to 2008, this was under Speaker Pelosi's Congress, but you had $459 billion when Bush was President of deficit, and that a lot of people objected to and said, Hey, that's terrible. We're going to change these elections around. We're going to elect a different President, et cetera, et cetera.

So these were the Bush years; and now look, all of a sudden here you get to 2009, with Obama, and you have got these trillion-dollar deficits, which are three times the very worst that Bush ever had. So we're talking about a level of spending that's unprecedented. So when we use this term on this chart ``stupendous spending,'' it really is stupendous spending. It is unlike anything we have seen before, and it makes George Bush look like some sort of a Scotch Presbyterian or something because he is not spending at all compared to this trillion- dollar operation that's going on here. Of course, that results in unemployment.

Now I have been critical of the Democrat policies because historically and economically they're going to create unemployment. They have done that. And so the question is, Do you want more bureaucrats and food stamps, or do you want jobs and paychecks? That's what America has to answer. Now what is the solution to this? One of the proposals is to not let these tax cuts expire. Then the question becomes, Well, then doesn't that add to the deficit? Well, part of it does and part of it doesn't. That's kind of the interesting thing that goes on here. If you continue to pay people for not working, which is extending unemployment, and certainly because there is a high level of unemployment, that's appealing. But the trouble is the unemployment is created by those terrible policies of too much taxes, too much

Federal spending, the uncertainty, and liquidity, and those other component parts.

So here's the solution to some degree, and that is when you cut taxes, in fact what happens is you don't build a deficit. You reduce the deficit. Well, how can that be? If you cut taxes, it means the government gets less money, doesn't it? If the government gets less money and keeps spending at the same rate, doesn't that mean you have more and more deficits? The answer is, No.

Because of a very interesting effect that was made public I suppose by an economist by the name of Laffer, quite a cheerful fellow. He was here in the Capitol no more than a few weeks ago. He was an economist under the days of Ronald Reagan. And what he has shown is this red line is the rate of the total Federal tax. The blue lines are the total Federal tax receipts in dollars. And this is the top marginal income tax here, going from all the way up at 90 percent, dropping way down. And it's the top marginal rate that is the rate on all of these supposedly rich people who, by the way, the rich people are the ones, a lot of them, own those businesses that create the jobs. So if you tax them into the dirt, what is going to happen to the jobs? You won't have the jobs. You broke the code. If you want jobs, you're going to have to allow people to keep their wealth and invest in business.

So what Laffer is saying here is we dropped historically. As we drop this top tax rate, take a look at what happens to the total tax receipts of the Federal Government. The tax receipts are going up. Doesn't that seem counterintuitive? Doesn't that seem as though you're making water run uphill? The answer is, no, it is not. And here's, I think, a simple way to try and understand it and it helps cast light on the votes that are coming up here later this week and perhaps even the week of Christmas. There has been certainly the threat that we'll come in on Christmas week and maybe New Year's week as well. It's interesting that we couldn't get our business done so we're going to try and jam it all in at the last minute. And it's also interesting to see what the real priorities are.

So what does this say? Well, for instance, let's say that you are made king for a day or king for a year and your job is to try to raise as much revenue for your kingdom as you can so you can run your government.

You're allowed to do one thing. You can tax a loaf of bread.

Now you start thinking and contemplating, and you say to yourself, Well, if I were to charge a one-penny tax on every loaf of bread--and there are millions of loaves that are sold--why, we'd raise some money.

Then you'd say, hey, instead of a penny, what happens if I charge $10 for a loaf of bread? Why then, certainly, that would make a difference. If you charged $10, you'd get much more.

Then you think, Well, wait a minute. Nobody would buy any bread if you put a $10 tax on it. So you start thinking to yourself, There is probably some optimum between a penny and $10 where I would get the most revenue on the bread. If I were to raise the tax, I'd actually lose revenue because more and more people wouldn't buy any bread, and so I'd actually have my tax revenue go down even though I'd raised the taxes. On the other hand, if I were to lower the tax too much, then I wouldn't get as much revenue as I could.

So there is an optimum point, and that's what Laffer is really pointing out here, that the taxes are so high that, when you actually drop the tax, the Federal Government makes more money. You can see it. This is one graphical display. This is just talking about the top marginal income tax rate. We're going to see it even on the larger scale as we take a look specifically at the Bush tax cuts in 2001, particularly the Bush tax cut of May 2003.

So how did things unfold back then in 2003? I have some charts I think you will find very interesting.

These charts are all laid out in essentially the same way. I have three charts in a row. The line that appears right here on all three charts is for May 2003. These are the years across here. This is 2001 March. There were a bunch of tax cuts here. You can see that the job creation isn't looking too solid in here. Some of the tax cuts we did were politically ``feel good'' kinds of things--giving people some more money to spend and a few things like that--but there was another tax cut which was part of this whole series in May of 2003.

What we're going to focus on is this tax cut. This was capital gains, dividends, and the death tax. Now, those are not popular tax cuts because it seems like they're tax cuts for people who have more money, but again, the people who have more money are also the ones who are driving a lot of those businesses that have the jobs.

So let's take a look at what happens.

This is May 2003. We introduced the tax cut to cut the capital gains, to cut the death tax and the interest, the dividend rate. So let's take a look. This is pretax relief. This is job creation. Every line that goes down indicates that we have lost jobs out of the economy. That's what we've been doing now for a number years. We've been losing jobs out of the economy. This isn't good. We don't want to lose jobs.

Why do we lose jobs? Because we are violating the basic principles of economics.

Now, we were losing jobs during these early years. We did some tax cuts, but the tax cuts didn't seem to turn this around, which suggests that not all tax cuts are necessarily going to create jobs.

Here we go May 2003. Take a look at what happens now to job creation. All the lines going up are creating jobs. You can see there is a pretty good difference between here, which is before the tax cut, and after the tax cut. So we see the immediate reflection in terms of jobs.

Now, are jobs the only things created by this tax cut? That's kind of interesting.

This is what we've been saying all the way along for a couple of years now. My Republican colleagues and I have respectfully stood on the floor and have said we love the Democrats, but they're doing everything wrong to the economy. They're going to create unemployment. They're going to create distress in the economy. They're going to make it hard for businesses, and they're going to ship jobs overseas. We've been saying that. We're saying this is not going to work. You're not going to be able to reduce the deficit. You're going to increase the deficit, and you're going to break the back of America economically if you keep on doing this. We've been saying this over and over again from this floor. Now the numbers, after the last few years, indicate that that's exactly what's happening.

The fact of the matter is we don't have to not learn from history. We can learn something from history here, which is that this tax cut particularly seems to have done an awful lot to change the job picture.

Now, of course, you could always make the case. You could say, Well, maybe it wasn't the tax cut that produced this effect. Maybe something else was going on here that would explain this.

The only other thing that is happening in the economy here is that Greenspan has got the interest rate close to zero, and that of course was driving the big real estate bubble, we now know. That's what happens when the Fed drops their interest rate very low. You have all of this easy money looking for someplace to invest. In this case, they landed on real estate, and created a big problem. So you could say that the interest rate being low could contribute to this, but it's interesting that you get this very stark and immediate contrast when this tax cut goes into place.

Let's continue this because it's kind of a little bit of history that is going to inform us as to where we need to be in the decisions going into the new year.

Here is the same tax cut here. This is again the beginning of 2003, but this is the gross domestic product. Of course, that's a measure of the overall productivity or of the efficiency of the U.S. economy. This is pretax relief. The average GDP was 1.1 percent. You can see it was not only 1.1 percent, which wasn't great for GDP, but it also was kind of spotty. You had this one where it was actually going down in gross domestic product, and these numbers were not very high.

Then you go to the tax cut--capital gains, dividends, and the death tax.

Now this is only carrying the thing over to 2006. These are older charts, but they're interesting charts. You can see the effect afterwards--at least it appears to be an effect--of going from 1.1 to 3.5, depending on which year, but the difference is that it is a marked difference.

The scary question then to suggest is: If there is a causal relationship between this tax cut which allowed businesspeople to make more investment in American businesses, what happens if you turn the economics upside down and do it in reverse? What happens if that tax cut goes away? What does that mean relative to job creation if, all of a sudden, this thing, this event which created more jobs--what happens if you do it upside down? Isn't it logical that if these tax cuts expire that it will have the reverse effect? That it will do the very thing opposite of what it did when it went the other way?

That's a very scary thought because, if all of a sudden we have now 9 or 10 percent unemployment and we do something to make that worse, that's not a very good idea. That's why even moderates and even the President are starting to say, I'm not so sure we want to burden America with the biggest tax increase in the history of the country right at the time when it's not at all clear that we're even out of the last recession.

There are some people who are optimistic. They think, Oh, we pulled out of the other recession that we were in.

I'm not so sure.

I measure that based on those same 5 points we've been talking about, which is the problem with excessive taxes, the problem with excessive redtape, the uncertainty created by all kinds of government actions in the marketplace, the liquidity problem in the banks, and of course excessive Federal spending.

So here is GDP after the tax relief. Do you see that the GDP has gone up? The job creation looks good.

Here is the last chart--also very interesting. This is the one that we talked about just a few minutes ago, which appears to almost invalidate the law of gravity. You cut taxes here. This red line here is Federal revenues, and Federal revenues are going down. Then we cut taxes, and you think, Oh, they're going to go down even more. Terrible. There's going to be a huge deficit because we've cut taxes, and now there's going to be a deficit. So the Congressional Budget Office adds it all up, and says, Well, golly. If we're making $100 with this tax now and if we cut it in half, why, we'll only make $50.

It seems like a logical assumption, but it's not. Take a look at what happened.

When you cut taxes, businessmen invested the money. Businesses started getting going. As businesses got going, they raised more taxes. So what happened is the Federal revenues actually went up as a result of the tax cut.

That's one of the reasons there is this fundamental difference between Democrats and Republicans. Democrats always want to say, if you're going to do a tax cut, you have to pay for it by cutting something. It sounds like good economics. It's not good economics. The fact of the matter is, if you do tax cuts, if they're the right kind of tax cuts, you actually get more Federal revenues, and it does not hurt the deficit. It helps to reduce the deficit.

That was the effect in 2004, -5, -6 and -7. You can see 4 straight years of increases in Federal revenues as a result of these taxes.

Now, here's the scary question again. I'm going to say it over and over: What happens if you turn this math upside down? Instead of reducing capital gains and death tax and dividends, what happens instead of reducing them if you increase them in the biggest tax increase in the history of the country? Will it not do the exact opposite? And when you increase those taxes, is it not possible that the Federal revenues will drop even more rapidly and the deficit will become even more unmanageable? I think there's good evidence, and many solid economists would say that we do not want to allow these things to expire.

Now, let's just say that the Congress votes in the next couple of days, as I think, being a Member of Congress, I suspect we might well do this. We'll vote and we will pass this supposed tax cut deal. Does that solve the problem of excessive taxes? Well, it gets rid of a problem of the biggest tax increase in the history of the country coming, so it's averting damage. But if you take a look at where we are right now, we are still overtaxing and we've got the unemployment problem. So it's good to avert the evil, but does it really fix where we are? No, it doesn't.

And does that then change the red tape picture? No, the red tape picture is still bad. Does it change the liquidity picture of the banks? No, it doesn't change that. Does it change the high level of Federal spending? No. It makes it worse, because we're spending some money which is not tax cut money, but we are spending money on extending unemployment, which is a legitimate form of Federal spending which does affect the deficit. So it doesn't help the deficit in that way.

And certainly the question of uncertainty is one of those things. Is the glass half full or half empty? Right now, we have certainty there's going to be a train wreck, there's going to be an economic disaster on January 1 because we have not dealt with the massive, massive tax increases coming. There is some certainty in that. It also means there is a big problem coming.

On the other hand, is kicking those tax cuts forward by 1 year or 2 years, does that create more certainty? Well, the answer is no. It's maybe a little more certain, but it still doesn't give you a basis for planning, for estate planning or for capital gains dividends, those kinds of things for the businessman, no. Their loan cycle is typically a 5-year cycle to the banks, and so having a capital gains dividends policy that's extended out a couple of years doesn't get within that 5- year window. So is there more or less certainty? Well, you can argue back and forth.

So the Republicans are caught sort of in a weird situation. We think, well, certainly you shouldn't nail America with the biggest tax increase in the history of the country, that doesn't make sense, but even if you avert that disaster, does that mean these other elements are taken care of? And the answer is clearly no.

Do you think that the things that are burdening our economy, that's holding down job creation, that makes it very difficult on families, do you think those conditions have been mitigated? No. No, we're still taxing too much. We're still have too much red tape, too much uncertainty, too much Federal spending, and the liquidity problem with the banks is still not taken care of.

So here we are. We've got before us a bill. Republicans are kind of scratching their heads on it because it has some bad parts and some good parts, and we understand what we have to do. This bill is not really going to solve the problem of unemployment. It's not going to solve the problem of overtaxation. It just prevents an evil from happening.

But it is interesting to note what level of risk there is ahead for America if this issue of these taxes is not dealt with, and we're not in a position to be able to do that. That's something that has to happen with the Senate and it has to happen with the President, and they're going to have to get serious about reducing spending and also reducing taxes. And over the next number of months, I have not the slightest doubt that a Republican-run House is going to choose, they're going to choose jobs and paychecks over bureaucracy and unemployment. Not bureaucracy and food stamps. That's not our choice.

Our choice on the American Dream is to allow people to take risks, to invest their own money, and to get jobs and to receive paychecks. We think that's the best form of security. Economically, it is a good paycheck. It's the best thing for a healthy Nation.

And so we will be making proposals to cut taxes, to cut red tape, to create certainty, and to reduce Federal spending, all of those things. We'll be making those proposals, but we won't be able to pass them. We can pass them out of the House, but it's got to get through the Senate. And if it gets through to the Senate, it has to be approved by the President. So everybody will be able to see what's going on.

Now, in the past when I was here, 2001, 2002, 2003, we passed a number of things through the House that were

very good policy that no one paid any attention to. They were killed by Democrats in the Senate because we never had 60 votes in the Senate. A couple of those are kind of interesting.

One of them is an energy bill, because it said we've got to pay attention to the fact that we are dependent on foreign countries, particularly the Middle Eastern foreign countries, for our oil supply. We are too dependent on foreign oil, and so we put a number of energy bills together, killed in the Senate by Democrats.

We also recognized that there was a problem with health care, that there were some things that were out of balance. We said there's some things that have to be done. We've got to do some tort reform. We've got to do some associated health plans. We've got to make some changes in health care. All of those proposals were killed in the Senate by Democrats. 20/20 hindsight, just like energy, fixing health care was an important priority.

And then we also passed a bill particularly to try to rein in the excessive practices of Freddie and Fannie. President Bush on September 11, 2003, in The New York Times, not exactly a conservative oracle, said he wanted authority from the House and from the Senate to allow him to regulate Freddie and Fannie because their financial practices were out of control and were really going to become a liability. We passed legislation to do that. It went to the Senate. It was killed by the Democrats in the Senate.

In each of those cases, a Republican House passed legislation that historically, you look back and say, policywise, you're right, nobody noticed it. The media didn't cover it but it occurred, and you can check it. It's part of the Record. And the same thing could happen in this next year, but I don't think it will. I don't think it will, because I believe that Americans have been paying more attention to what's going on in government.

I believe that Americans are fed up. I believe that Americans are at the point where they're saying that government is no longer the servant of the people, that government is becoming a master. It's an out-of- control government, and it's time to start putting the genie back in the bottle, and they're going to do that one way or the other. The question is whether those of us that have been elected to serve as servants are going to step up to our job, cut the red tape, cut the bureaucracy, cut the Federal spending, cut the taxes, and make the Federal Government a servant of the people.

In order to do that we can't just simply say, well, we're going to take 10 percent off of this department, 10 percent off of that department, 10 percent off another department. We can't say we're going to cut waste, fraud, and abuse, because there isn't any budget item that says waste, fraud, and abuse. It's a more complicated process than that.

What we have to do is go back to the drawing board, which is the U.S. Constitution, and we have to start asking ourselves what are the essential functions that the Federal Government must do and those we must fund. And particularly, that includes providing for the national defense and the other things that are not essential that the Federal Government do. We must start to say maybe we should just plain get out of that business and turn that back over to the States and turn it back over to local cities and to the citizens of America and let them deal with those things, because Americans are fed up. They're fed up with unemployment. They're saying no more bureaucrats, no more food stamps. What we want is jobs and paychecks. And I think that's where the public is heading.

So the question then becomes, well, what's everybody going to do on this big tax bill? The answer is we could avert some evil, but we're not going to solve the real problems that we have to do by simply postponing or kicking these things down the line a little bit and creating more uncertainty and postponing them.

On the other hand, we cannot allow the major tax increase to go forward, so you're going to see a checkered pattern in the voting, particularly the Republicans. There will be some for and some against them, arguing whether the glass is half full or half empty.

But there won't be any argument about what we need to do. There is no argument about the fact that we do not want 10 percent unemployment. There is no argument that we want the Federal Government to be a fearful master. We are sick of that, and it's time for things to change. And that is, to some degree, what has led me personally and quite a number of other Republicans to understanding that as we approach this next year, that there is a new area that we have to go to. And that is, we have to take a good look at this wonderful Chamber; we have to take a good look at the U.S. House and say, Have we really run this place the way it should be run? Or have we allowed a series of fiefdoms over the years to build and develop where we have created a structure that is so unmanageable, so crusty, so interconnected, and from a systems point of view, so unmanageable that even if you put good people in it, you get bad results?

I believe that the results of the excessive growth of the Federal Government indicates that there is a need for a redesign of the House entirely. We need to take a good look at the budget process. There is a lot of confusion over earmarks and what should or shouldn't be the job of the Congress to appropriate money constitutionally. We need to take a good look at--you can see that we have started that process by the new schedule that's being published already. It says, we are going to tell people ahead of time, we're going to be in, serving in Congress, on these particular days. There won't be votes before noon time, so committees can actually do their work without telling witnesses that have flown across the country to testify that they have to wait 45 minutes while we name another post office after somebody. And we are going to know for sure that on the day we get out that there won't be votes after 3 o'clock so people can schedule their flights home and can be doing work back in their districts.

So what we're trying to do is to redesign the entire system so we can deal with these kinds of problems. But we're not going to do it with a quick shot that says, Hey, let's just postpone this problem for a year or postpone another problem for another year and a half and have the thing still hanging out there. There has to be specific tax policy. It has to be a tax policy that is friendly to American jobs and allows us to be competitive.

It gives me no satisfaction to see us create a set of rules which are guaranteed to have the international corporations in America say, Hey, you're making the rules so that we can't put jobs in this country. We'll still make a profit. We'll still create jobs. The jobs will be in a foreign country. What good is that to us? It maybe makes some business people or investors a little bit more money, but it isn't where we should be going with Federal policy. Our policy should be, America can be competitive, but let's not create a system where we basically are destroying ourselves. And that's what's going on with excessive taxation and with excessive red tape and all. So that's where we are.

What we're seeing again is this rush in the last week or two of this year to do things that show a priority that is a bit weird. Today I was on the floor a little earlier, and I commented on the fact that a long, long time ago, there was a chance to see a total solar eclipse. Now if you've never had a chance to see something like that, they don't happen very often. But I was out on the edge of Massachusetts, on Cape Cod, and it was an area of the U.S. where there would be a total shadow; that is, the Moon totally comes in the way of the Sun. And right in the middle of the day, the Sun just darkens up slowly. And light doesn't totally disappear, but it is an eerie and strange feeling. That doesn't happen very often that you can observe an eclipse.

What happened today was also a kind of eclipse, what's happening at the end of this year. This is the first time in I believe it's 48 years that the House has not had a defense budget. That is weird. That's an eclipse of reason that we have no defense budget. And so today when the House has no defense budget, instead what do we vote on? Well, we vote on getting rid of the Don't Ask, Don't Tell, so we're going to deal with gay policies in the military.

We don't even have a military budget, and we're pushing some social agenda here in the last couple of days for fear that the new people that come in won't really want to do this thing. So at the last minute, we're going to hurry up and do something which you've got three generals--a general of the Army of America, a general of the Air Force of America, a general of the Marine Corps all are saying it's a bad policy. We have got two wars going on. And what are we doing? Are we doing our business? Are we passing a defense budget?

No. No, instead, we're tampering around with social policy to try to make some constituency happy. Why do we want to burden the military with social policy anyway? Why not allow them just to defend us and keep the discussion on social policy as an American and a local kind of question. Let the States deal with it. No, we're not going to pass a military budget. We're going to do that. It is a question of priorities here.

And this effect that we're seeing says there is big trouble next year if we don't do something about what happens. Because if these numbers go in reverse, what you're going to see instead of Federal revenues going up, they're going to go down. What you are going to see in reverse is, if you do the reverse of this change here on GDP, you'll see GDP going from--which is too strong now, it's going to get worse. We can't afford that. We don't want that to happen. And particularly-- and this is cruel and harsh to Americans--you're going to see jobs vaporizing and disappearing.

That's not where we need to be going with this Congress. Even in the last couple of days, in the last week or two, depending on if they decide to call us in for Christmas and New Year's, I'm not sure about that. We're not calling the shots on that. But we are not creating the policies which support a good stable economy.

And the policies are available. It's not just Republican policies. I might mention that the person that understood this effect was JFK. He had a recession; and what he did was, he treated it with a good dose of solid, sound tax policy by cutting taxes. And JFK saw this same kind of turnaround while he was a Democrat President. Also Ronald Reagan did the same thing. He inherited a lousy economy, just as Bush II had done, and he had cut taxes aggressively. People made fun of it. They called it Reaganomics and trickle-down economics and things like that. They made fun of him for a year or two until the economy snapped around, jobs were created, the economy steams off strongly for many years, and these same policies were vindicated. They work. And it worked for George Bush when he did it here.

The question is, Are we going to learn from history? Or are we going to take a recession and turn it into a Great Depression? I'll tell you, there are some areas where we have serious problems in this country that are not all clear, and it gets into some very esoteric areas in the area of real estate, both commercial and residential real estate.

And we have not fixed Freddie and Fannie as a result of this last big housing bubble which has affected people's savings terribly in '08. Many people lost a great deal of savings in '08, and it was caused by a series of things in the housing industry that were not done properly. It's courtesy of the U.S. Congress. It was the fault of the U.S. Congress and the Senate and our policies, relative to loan policies. And we haven't fixed any of those things.

So not only have we not fixed tax increases, not only have we not fixed red tape, not only have we not fixed the problem of liquidity, not only have we maintained an air of uncertainty which is problematic, not only are we excessively spending at the Federal level, we've got some other problems in real estate that are still out there.

So all of these things lead us to understand that there has to be a fundamental change by the way things are done here in Washington, D.C., and it says that we cannot afford the level of Federal spending and the excessive taxation that have burdened our economy the way it has.

It's a treat to be able to join everybody this evening, and it's a treat to be able to talk about these things because this is current and relevant. It's quite possible tomorrow that the vote will come up on the tax thing. And I think what you'll see, as I've said, is kind of a mixed pattern from Republicans.

There's bad stuff in the bill because it's going to increase the deficit. Good stuff in the sense we're preventing a terrible tax increase, but yet, overall, it's not fixing the problem. And the solution to the problem is going to come and it's going to be something that we'll do one piece at a time. We're going to send it over to the Senate, and we're going to give them an opportunity.

One of the things we'll do will be to take the death taxes and say, Let's make a decision. What are we going to do on this? This thing has been running along since May of 2003. Everybody knows you need to make a decision on it. What are we going to do? Are we going to make it permanent in some way? We're going to let people plan and know what the Federal policy is going to be? Are we going to--after we nail people for taxes all their life, are we going to nail them again when they die? When a son inherits his farm from his dad and the farm is worth a number of million dollars and the protection is only for a $1 million cap, does the son have to sell the farm, in fact, liquidate the farm, in order to pay the taxes we're going to extract from the person who died?

That's the question. And it's time for us to make a decision. Is it going to be more bureaucrats and food stamps or is it going to be jobs and paychecks? That's the decision before us.

We will send those pieces of legislation to the Senate. You need to look for them. I guarantee you that we'll send them. The question's going to be: What's the Senate going to do and what's the President going to do?

I'm joined here by a very good friend of mine, Congressman King from Iowa, somebody who has a passion and love for America and a love for free enterprise. And he has a good reason to have a love affair with free enterprise, because he is a small business man, started his own business, sustained his family and has held his head high and proud. He has some tendency to speak sometimes on the floor here in Congress. Many of you may know my good friend Congressman King, and I'm going to call on him and just ask him if he'd like to make a comment or two about this whole situation that's coming up this week and how it relates to the Bush tax cuts and whether or not it's really going to solve all the problems that the country has and what the solutions really would be. And I believe you'll hear a story that's very common sense, very much in line with free enterprise and the American Dream and refreshing and hopeful. My good friend, Congressman King.

You know, I can't help but get excited about what you're saying. You're talking about the American Dream before there was all this tampering government. And the thing that I find just absolutely amazing--let's compare your grandfather to somebody else. And I don't know who it was, but somebody else who, instead of making those sacrifices and doing the hard work, went out and drank and gambled everything away so he died penniless. Now, the system of tax that is being proposed by the Democrats is going to reward that guy because he won't pay any death taxes at all. And yet your granddad, who made all kinds of personal sacrifices and hard work to set up his children and grandchildren, he's going to get his hide taxed off of him. What kind of tax policy is that? A tax policy should encourage the American Dream, not destroy it.

Fifty percent of his earnings

You know, just stopping your story for a minute there, it strikes me that the policies that killed your grandfather's dream in the Great Depression were the same policies that we've been following for the last 2 or 3 years. There's nothing new about it. It was excessive Federal spending, excessive Federal taxation all packaged up as Keynesian economics. And Henry Morgenthau, after he killed that dream, came to this Congress and said, Guys, it didn't work.

And we're not listening to it, and here we go again doing the same thing. I just feel like we have got to learn something from history. And your grandfather is such an inspiration. And certainly what he passed on was the vision of the fact you can make it in this country. You can go from being poor to being well-to-do if you work hard and you try hard and you live that dream that's in your heart. That's what America's supposed to be about.

I yield.

Mr. Chairman, I thank my colleagues for joining us in the discussion here about really the future of America.

A couple tractors, combine, some equipment worth a lot of money.

I appreciate your yielding for a moment, because what you are talking about, I guess economists would say, there is sort of an economic lot size. If you have a farm worth 2,000 acres, that may be viable; but if you have to sell off 55 percent of your land, 55 percent of your tractors or your combines or your equipment, and then you divide it across several siblings, it won't work anymore.

So what you have done is not only have you taken away something that was part of the dream that somebody saved all their life to pass on to their kids; we are saying we are going to punish people who want to pass things on to their kids. That is not the American dream. That is killing the American dream.

Now, you raised another thing, and I would like to talk about this. I have heard people, talk show hosts and others, talking about this, and I feel like they are not approaching it from the right way. You are talking about class envy, and it is always the upper class and the middle class and the lower class, and, ``I am for the middle class.'' And it is all this class, class, class stuff. And I feel like saying: Stop. Wait just a minute. I thought America was a classless society. I thought America was a place where you could come here dirt poor, end up as a millionaire, and nobody really made a whole bunch of stuff about that. They didn't tag you with, you can't go to dinner at somebody's house because you are not the right class. That is the way it is in Europe, but that is not the way it is in America. The America I know is classless. And I don't look down my nose at somebody doing a hard job, because the guy working hard is probably going to be the guy who is going to be the millionaire, he is probably going to be hiring my kid to mow his yard for him.

So why do we talk about classes? Why don't we talk about jobs and the American dream? That is what I don't understand.

I appreciate your yielding. Certainly I think the point that you have said eloquently I tried to make earlier tonight, and that is what you are looking at here is not the Republican solution. It is not a good economic solution. It is not a good moral solution. It is something that is a Christmas-New Year's solution on something that people have seen for 3 or 4 years coming along, plenty of time, if we really wanted to deal with it.

The other thing is that all of the discussion that I hear is so amazingly oblique to what we should be thinking. It is all about, well, does the middle-class guy get more? Does the rich guy get more? Does the poor guy get more? It is not about that. It is about America. It is about the fact that we have got an economic recession going. It is about the fact that we want the American dream to have some fresh life breathed into it and economic policies that don't rip people off. It is about the fact that socialism is theft. It is not a legitimate function under the Constitution or the government. It is about the fact that we want the government to be the servant and not the master.

It is the time now for us to blow the whistle and say, enough already. It is time to get back to the system that was designed by our forefathers, and not this endless class warfare gibberish which misses the fact that we are USA Americans.

Madam Speaker, I rise today to honor TSgt William Timothy ``Tim'' Wymore, an 18 year veteran of the Missouri Air National Guard and of Operation Enduring Freedom. I have the honor to count Tim Wymore as a constituent.

During a ``Hometown Heroes Salute'' on 4 December the Missouri Air National Guard paid special tribute to TSgt Wymore for his

service. I am grateful to the Guard for recognizing Tim's contribution to the security of our country.

In 2004, Tim deployed to Balad, Iraq, one of our largest air bases, with Missouri's 131st Bomb Wing. He was one of only five members of his unit sent to Iraq. While everyone who goes to war is affected, some return more affected then others. Tim Wymore is one such person.

Tim is one of thousands of our service members exposed to hazardous materials while operating in and around the burn pits in Iraq. Since returning, Tim's health has deteriorated to the point where he is unable to work. He's been in and out of the hospital and today cannot stand on his own and relies on oxygen to breath.

Through it all, Shanna, his wife of 25 years has not only stood by his side, but fought to get the benefits and care he deserves from a system sometimes indifferent to his suffering. I got to know Tim and Shanna after they contacted my office seeking assistance with the Veterans Administration.

Madam Speaker, I stand here today to honor TSgt Tim Wymore, so I won't take further time to elaborate on how the system has failed to support this warfighter. I will only say that I will continue to work to see that the Veterans Administration is held accountable for how it serves our citizen soldiers.

Despite his suffering, Tim Wymore remains a patriotic citizen and father. In fact, rather than try and dissuade his son from serving in uniform, he supports his youngest son Cody's decision to follow in his footsteps and enlist in the United States Air Force.

I pray God bless the Wymore family and the United States of America.

Mr. Speaker, it's a pleasure to be able to join you and my colleagues this evening. We have had a busy day and dealt with a lot of different questions and issues. And, yet, on the minds of Americans I believe all across our country people are thinking about the economy, they are thinking particularly about jobs, and they are also thinking about what appears to be imminently approaching, at least the beginning of the new year, the largest tax increase in the history of our country.

That's an odd thing to be approaching at a time when there is a high level of unemployment and a lot of uncertainty in terms of the economy. And of course that is a matter of some considerable debate and discussion and different political maneuvering. We won't talk so much tonight about political maneuvering, but try to stick more in the area of some understanding of economics and the things that we need to be doing to put America back on the right track.

I think Americans really want Congress to fix it. They don't want to hear a lot of discussion and talk. They want to know let's just get things organized, get it straightened out, get the economy going, get people back to work. You know, there is a choice people really have in our country of two different things. One, you can have bureaucracy and food stamps, or you can have a job and a paycheck. I think most people in America really want a job and a paycheck.

So that's what we are going to talk about tonight. I am joined by a couple of my esteemed colleagues, people that are very long on common sense, so they are my friends, but also people that I believe that very much are respected not only by their own delegations, the people that elected them, but increasingly known across the country.

I am joined by my good friend Dr. Gingrey. I don't know how many careers he's had. That's why he got the

doctor part. He delivered a bunch of babies, I believe, down in the Atlanta area, and also has been a State senator, and now has joined us here and helped us on a lot of health care questions. But also pretty good on these economic things. And G.T., all the way from Georgia, all the way across over to Pennsylvania, and another small business man who worked in health care businesses privately, but also a Member of Congress and a good conservative friend of mine.

I am going to start off, before I call on them to join our discussion here this evening, and just talk a little bit about something that when I first came to Congress 10 years ago seemed a little odd to me. In fact, as an engineer it almost seemed like water running uphill, because people were saying that if you cut taxes, the government can take in more money. Now, that seems like an odd thing, doesn't it, that you can cut taxes and have the government take in more money.

Well, what's going on there is an effect that when you crank taxes up high enough, you stall the economy. When the economy stalls, you can keep running the taxes up, but you don't get any more revenue because things are not working right and the machine isn't churning out any money, so you actually lose money. I came up with a way of explaining it.

And we had a chance to have Art Laffer, an economist back with the Reagan administration, who came up with this understanding. And he explained it in different ways the other night earlier in the week. But the point of the matter is that you can actually cut taxes and the government gets more money.

Here is the way it might work. Think about a loaf of bread, and you are king for a day, and you got to tax the loaf of bread. What are you going to tax it, a penny or $10? You go back and forth in your mind and say penny, it's easy. I can get everybody to buy just the same loaf of bread that they do today. So we would sell a lot of loaves of bread and maybe get a penny for each one. But that doesn't add up very fast. Maybe I can charge $10 on a loaf of bread. Well, maybe people wouldn't buy very much bread, but boy when they did, I would get 10 bucks.

Well, common sense would say there is someplace between a penny and $10 on a loaf of bread where you can collect the most taxes. And that's what's going on. When the government cuts taxes, it actually gets the economy going. And this chart shows that. It's called the Laffer Curve. This red is the tax rate, and then this here is the Federal revenues. So what we are seeing here is that you have a ratio. As you start to drop taxes, actually the Federal revenue goes up. And that's what's happened a number of times. We are going to talk about that.

But would either one of my colleagues want to join in and talk a little bit about where we are going, what we ought to be doing? What do we do on the biggest tax hike in the history of the country? Are we going to let that go into place in January or not? What do you think?

Well, I really appreciate your perspective, and I think you are right.

I had a similar experience back in my district in the St. Louis area. We had a meeting that we had on Main Street. You know, you have got to have a Main Street. In downtown St. Charles, across the river from St. Louis County, there is a Main Street in downtown St. Charles. So we asked a bunch of small business owners, I think about 40 or 50 of them, to come to a meeting about a year or so ago.

We just asked them. I said, Here's the deal. I am just collecting information, and I have my own opinions as to what you are going to say, but I want you to give me your best shot. What are the things that are going to create unemployment?

And, of course, the converse of that is, if you don't do those things, then employment will come back. What are the things that are really enemies to just wrecking the economy?

And they gave me a list of five things. We didn't actually put them in order, but the one that came to their mind first was taxes. It was just basically along the same lines as what you are saying, gentlemen. Because, if you are a small business man and you get taxed and taxed and taxed, it takes away the money you have to invest in new processes, new technology, new lines of equipment, adding a wing on the building, putting some machine tools in there, whatever it is. All those things create jobs. But if you take all their money away, then they can't make those investments.

Now, if you do what FDR did and you do it over a sustained period and you keep lowering the boom on them, you will not just cause them to hunker down and not hire. You will just put them out of business. Then it will be a long time before that business ever comes back again. So far, I don't think we have shut them all down yet; although, a lot of businesses have had to close. There are still businesses out there.

If they had the revenue, and if the Federal Government would get off of their case, I think we could see some jobs turning around. But the very first thing they mentioned was taxes, and the second thing you mentioned was uncertainty. They mentioned that about second. So you were exactly in line with the St. Charles people. People in Pennsylvania and the State of Missouri----

Same way.

Dr. Gingrey, I see you in a contemplative air there, and we would love to hear a little wisdom on the subject of free enterprise as well, my friend.

I really appreciate what you are saying, and I didn't think I was going to be saying anything complimentary about our President, because it seems like all his policies relative to the economy and jobs and all seemed like it was highly destructive. He was making the same mistakes that FDR made. He wouldn't listen to Henry Morgenthau.

We on the floor came out here, both of you gentlemen, week after week after week now for the last couple of years. We talked about the idea of the stimulus bill and the idea that you can grab your bootstraps and lift and fly around the Chamber; it's about as reasonable as fixing a bad economy by a Federal Government spending money. It doesn't make any sense in a commonsense way, and it has never worked, never worked historically.

But both of you have made references to what does work. And if you are Democrats, you don't have to listen to Ronald Reagan and Bush. You go back to JFK, as you have said, and he basically used this same economic principle. The idea is whether politicians like it or not.

What has to be done is that you have got to stop the Federal spending and you have got to reduce taxes and you have got to create some stability and, if you can, knock that red tape down and then give the economy some time to breathe. And that money will eventually work into those businesses, and they will start to hiring people.

Now, we saw that happen here. This is a--I have a couple of charts here, antiques. They are a couple of years old, but they are talking about when the second part of this Bush tax cut came in place in May of 2003. I hate to admit it. I was here at that time and we saw this.

So I have got a series of charts, but this May 2003 is in the center of these different charts. And if you take a look, this is job creation. In this case, this is job loss that goes down; job creation goes up. And the red is before the tax cut and the green is after.

Now, what you see going on here is we are losing jobs heavily, 2001 to 2003. Then by May of 2003 you have 1 month that we have lost jobs. But after that, it's all increases in jobs.

So this is the kind of thing that I assume the President must have looked at and gone, Oh, my goodness. I have tried our stimulus bill. We have spent $787 billion.

I think they spent it before they really thought the economy was that serious. So in that money, they had bailouts for the California teacher pensions and the Illinois teacher pensions. It wasn't even FDR stimulus. It was just basically pork; robbing other States to pay for the mismanagement of teachers' pensions that California and Illinois had done.

So it had all kinds of stuff in it, but it really wasn't even much of a stimulus bill. They said it was going to generate, I think it was, 3 point something or other million jobs, and the result was we lost 2 million jobs and unemployment went all the way up close to 10 percent.

So that didn't work for the President. And now he has got some true believers in the House and the Senate, the Pelosi and Reid gang. They still think that you have got to tax everybody out of house and home and you can have all these jobs, but the President has had 2 years and the jobs have been going down, going worse and worse.

So I think maybe he's starting to pay attention to this effect. And so this first chart is actually job creation. And I have a couple of the other ones as well that we can talk about. But I want to give either of you an opportunity. If you really want to talk specifically about jobs and tax cuts, here's an example of the tax cut, and here's what happens in terms of jobs.

And I think the moral of this story is a very, very complicated economic principle which is frequently lost on my liberal friends, and that is, if you want jobs you've got to have employers. And if you don't have employers you don't have employees. It's complicated, I know, but try to grasp it. You have to have a business in order to have people working for a business. And if you destroy the business, you don't have any jobs. And that's the moral of the story.

And that's why you're going to have to allow some people to have enough money to invest in their business. And it may mean there will be some Americans that achieve the American Dream. They're actually going to be rich. They're going to have a lot of money. And just because somebody else has a lot of money doesn't mean that they're having that much fun. But maybe they are.

But that's okay because the American dream goes like this: you start poor and you have something to look forward to and before too long you actually make some money and come out okay. That's the whole point of the American Dream.

The American Dream does not work. You're rich and the government taxes you into the dirt. That's not the idea. That's how the communist dream works. This is America. We've got to go from letting people who don't have so much to save and get wise and get smart and try these different ideas and pretty soon, by golly, they have some money. That's the way it's supposed to work.

My good friend from Pennsylvania.

I about forgot what that word meant.

But, gentleman, you did mention the point that if you take a look at what it is businesses need, they need to have the taxes off their back. But they also need a certain sense of stability, because you're not going to make a decision that's really going to be with you for a long time if you're not, if everything looks turbulent in front of you. You want to kind of hunker down and wait and get through the not knowing where things are going to bounce. And you see if those tax cuts are permanent, that gives you that sense of, okay, now we know what the environment is that we're in. And people take some risks if they think, okay, things are going to be stable a little bit.

I got an email before I left St. Lewis from one of those people. And the choices are really more bureaucrats and food stamps or more jobs and pay checks. You know, that's the choice. Are you on the bureaucrat/food stamp team, or are you on the jobs and pay checks? And most of the people I know, they kind of hold their head up and they'd really like to have a good job and a decent pay check. You feel better at the end of the day than a bureaucrat telling you what to do and giving you food stamps. And that's the choice.

And this guy was complaining about all these tax cuts for the rich. Blah, blah, blah, you know. And the fact of the matter is that the people that this thing affects is the people who own the businesses. And if you don't allow them to have some of their own money to plow back into the business, you're not going to have the jobs. And people miss that.

And then it's always this class warfare, rich and poor. This guy's too rich; we ought to take him down, you know. And it's because we forget the American Dream. It's okay for some that you have some money. It's okay for them to run a business and hire people. That's what we want. That's what we're trying to accomplish. And that's what this all shows, that when you ease off on the taxes, it's a blessing to everybody.

And I know my good friend from Georgia is not going to let that talk about the American Dream go by without a comment or two, because I'll tell you, that Georgia delegation's looking like they're some pretty patriotic folks, and I'm proud of your State for who they're sending down here to Congress.

I appreciate your perspective. One of the things, when you keep looking at this from the poor people/rich people kind of continuum, that is really the wrong question to be asking. The question should be: What do we need to do to put the economy back on track? That should be the question. What do we do to provide jobs and paychecks? That is our objective, not to discuss whether somebody is paying too much or their fair share of taxes.

I forget the exact numbers, but as I recall, I think it is the top 10 percent of people who pay income taxes, pay something like over 70 percent. All of the tax money that is paid to the Federal Government comes from only 10 percent, and the bottom 40 percent pay zero. Now that is a pretty graduated income tax, that you have only the top 1 percent paying a very, very high amount, I am trying to remember if it is as much as 50 percent but it is quite a lot. But all of this stuff about the rich and the poor and the pay, it really should be about America. It should be about the American dream. And it should be common sense that when the economy is in bad shape, the one thing you do not hear anyone with any common sense saying is that you want to increase taxes. That is just plain nuts. And yet that is exactly the train wreck that is about to happen January 1 if this Congress doesn't take action.

I at least credit the President for getting the message. He got it late. I don't know whether he has true religion or not, but he appears to be on the right track. At least they are going to keep these things going for a couple of years so in the middle of a recession we don't hammer the economy with another shot.

But let's look at this from a logic point of view. Here is another chart. This is the GDP after the tax relief. This is the same tax relief in 2003 May. In May 2003, we did the tax cut here for dividends, capital gains, death taxes. Take a look at what the GDP is then doing. This is gross domestic product before the tax cut. You can see, it is kind of a shaky line. The GDP not up to 3 percent, dropping down so we are actually losing it on a couple of different quarters here.

Then you put this tax cut in place and look what happens to GDP. It looks like you just gave it a shot of fertilizer all of a sudden. So you can see there is quite a difference in the average. So not only from the first chart that we saw here, not only did the tax cut affect job creation, job creation is much better. It doesn't surprise you, when the job creation is up, so also your gross domestic product is up.

These are a couple of charts that show this effect, that tax cuts don't really lose the government money. They actually get the economy going. That is why JFK did it. That is why Reagan did it. That is why Bush did it. It worked in all of those instances. That is what we should be doing.

In this case, unfortunately, what we are talking about is not a tax cut. What we are talking about is a tax increase which we are trying to prevent. It is a very different thing. If we prevent an increase, it means that the damage won't be done. But these things economically, they work both ways. If you do one thing it makes it better; if you do the reverse, it makes it worse. So why do we want to do a big tax increase? It doesn't make any sense.

My last chart, this kind of completes it. Here is the tax cut right here. This is Federal revenues. This seems to be an odd chart, doesn't it? You have 3 years of decreases. As we are going into this recession, you have capital gains, dividends, and death tax, and all of a sudden you have cut taxes and what is happening? Federal revenue is going up. That is why the deficit under Bush, even though we had a couple of wars going on, things were looking better because we had 4 years. This chart was made back in 2007, I guess, because we had 4 years of straight increases where we did this. So do you want to reverse this thing now? Do you want to put the biggest tax hike in the history of the country and have that effect go the other way so Federal revenues plummet, jobs plummet, and GDP plummets? Is that what we want to do for January 1? I don't think so.

I appreciate you gentlemen being out here on the floor tonight and standing up for the commonsense Americans who know. We say if there is a recession going on and the economy is not strong, we say what you have to do is cut taxes. You have to cut government spending. You have to cut redtape. You have to create certainty.

The average person on the street in our districts understands that. The average business person says of course. Even an awful lot of people who are carpenters, machinists, they are people who work with their hands. They are people with a lot of common sense. They understand when you are in a recession, when you have economic problems, you don't go out and just bust the budget spending money. They look at what goes on in this city and they think, what in the world is wrong with that place? We need to get some people in there that will talk some common sense.

Fortunately, we think that the President is, whether it is because he really believed or because he just felt the political heat, has put us back in the right direction not to reverse this very thing that worked so well for us. Now this doesn't solve the problem we are in; it just prevents an evil from happening. But right now that looks good.

I see my friend from Georgia, Dr. Gingrey, has joined us again, and I yield to Dr. Gingrey.

I thought that was socialized medicine. That's what I call it.

Well, you know, I really appreciate your perspective, particularly as a medical doctor.

As to the whole medicine thing, you know, the public just isn't behind it. We have had enough trouble with the government running Medicare and Medicaid. As to those things, all of the economists-- liberal and conservative--say that, at the rate they're growing over time, because of the changing demographics of the population, they are going to put us in the poorhouse nationally in terms of spending.

Well, if the government can't manage Medicare and Medicaid, how are they going to manage the entire medical system?

The public does not want the Federal Government running our health care system, and that's what was shoved down our throats. That $1 trillion price tag, as you correctly point out, gentleman, that is a very optimistic trillion-dollar price tag. It is going to cost much, much more than that.

You're right. The Republican leadership and all of us are committed to trying to stop that bill. That's not so easy to do, but at least we will try to de-fund it. Eventually, if there are enough votes, we will try to repeal it. There are certainly things that need to be done to health care in America to improve it but certainly not just throwing it under the bus and having all of health care taken over by the Federal Government. That has to be repealed, and then we can start with what we are going to do to the existing system.

So that's just one of a whole series of these things, which is just runaway Federal spending. Boy, is that ever a recipe for disaster.

You know, you mentioned your constituents were upset and angry and worried and scared and all those kinds of things. The three of us here on the floor have been feeling that way also for 2 years. I was ready to move away to some island somewhere if the election results hadn't come along the way they did. Now, at least, I think there is a little ray of hope.

Today, we've been talking about the fact that we want to change the way things are done down here. We've taken a few steps even today, announcing how the House is going to be run in a much more businesslike kind of way. We're going to know what our schedules are, and we're going to know when the last votes of the week are so we'll actually be able to plan our time and schedules and do a better job in visiting with our constituents. I think that is a very encouraging first step.

I think the other thing that was very encouraging to me--and I don't want to get too much into the touchy-feely department. You know engineers don't do well in the touchy-feely department. But I remember our first meeting a couple of weeks ago. The Republican Party got together in a conference, and we had won the biggest election since 1946, which I don't remember. I was born in '47, so it was a year before I was born. We had the biggest victory we have ever had, and the tone in that room was dead sober, and the attitude was:

We've been given another chance, and it's time for us not to do the same old things. It's time for us to really do what is right and to use some common sense. Let's get this mess under control. Let's stop the Federal spending. Let's start cutting the things that need to be cut, and let's start backing off on the taxes in order to get this economy back on track.

We don't think that the American Dream is bureaucrats and food stamps. We think it's jobs and paychecks. That's the course that we think the public has told us to take. Common sense, a good bit of hard work and good management is what is required--and also learning a little bit of something from history. That's where we have to be going. There is a strong commitment now. Even the President has seen this, and we are encouraged.

Congressman GT, I just really appreciate the fact that you run your own business and that you have that just commonsense kind of experience to know what it takes to make it work. A lot of Americans understand that; but somehow or other, for a couple of years, the majority down here just hasn't gotten that.

The fact of the matter is we are, right now, kind of sitting at this precipice. You know, we're just a week or two away from January 1; and the question is: What is going to happen on this massive tax increase? Are we going to get, after these last 2 years of not only socialized medicine, but the idea of cap-and-tax or cap-and-trade or whatever it was about the global warming thing?

You know, I asked my constituents a question on a survey: Are you more concerned about global warming or about our dependence on foreign oil? Do you have a guess as to what the results on that were? About 80 percent said, We're worried about being dependent on foreign oil. Let's keep this conversation somewhere in the reasonable zone.

Anyway, I yield to my good friend GT.

Whoo, what did you do wrong?

Would that have been about 1870s or so?

And yet he's having to buy his own company back from the government.

It's a death tax.

They've already been taxed all through their lifetime. They have saved something up for their kids and they die.

And they want to pass it onto their kids. So the death tax is going to tax them, whereas if they had gone out and got drunk and gambled it away, they wouldn't have to pay any tax. So what sort of incentive is that? It's immoral, you're right. I'm sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt.

That death tax is a killer, isn't it?

Right. I think what Congressman Thompson said earlier about it being permanent, that would add a tremendous amount of stability to what's going on, particularly if you're trying to think about doing estate planning and things like that and it's zero this year and 55 next year--unless it gets changed to 35 and there is this exemption. But how in the world does anybody plan what's going on and how in the world can a small business survive?

You know, if you've got a multitrillion-dollar business and armies of accountants and people like that, you've got the flexibility that if the tax rules change, you move your business overseas. You don't want to create jobs in America, fine. We'll create jobs overseas. You show us the rules, we'll play the game. Big business can do that. But those small businesses that have most of the jobs in America don't have that flexibility.

And when we hammer them with a 55 percent death tax--which is what's fixing to happen, as they would say in Missouri, on January 1, that's pretty tough. You could picture a farm and, as you said, what are you going to do? Are you going to sell the fields? Are you going to sell the tractors and the equipment? Are you going to sell the sheds? What are you going to do? You inherit the farm from your dad, you've worked it, he's worked it all his life, you've got the homestead there. Are you going to sell that, liquidate the whole thing and sell half of your farm just so you can pay the government for something that you already paid taxes on that you bought with your money?

I just can't imagine your discussion, G.T., with the family that bought their own business three times. You can see why people get a little hot under the collar.

And then what are we using the money for? That's another big question. To bail out the California teachers' pension when they can't manage their pension? That makes me mad. In the State of Missouri, we've got teachers too. They've got a pension, and they're expected to manage the pension properly. If they don't, it goes bankrupt and they don't get their pension money. So why are we bailing out the teachers of some State that can't manage their own pension? I don't understand that. That's why I don't like that great big old bailout. It was a scam, and it didn't work and a whole lot of people are hurting.

I was asked by a very liberal talk show host, What are you going to say to somebody that lost their job? I told them, I can't say anything. These are the policies that this liberal Congress allowed to happen, and this isn't what we need to be doing. We need to be getting back on to some good solid economic footing.

I think we've probably got about 3 or 4 minutes, but I would be happy to yield to my good friend from Pennsylvania. Congressman Thompson, if you would like to add a couple of finishing comments.

You've got your Wall Street bailout here, economic stimulus. Boy, that was a doozy. Here's that socialized medicine at $1 trillion. That's the Optimist Society's version. They are not going to get by with $1 trillion on that. And the IMF bailout. Yeah, there are some winners there.

Yes. We're saying, Jobs and a paycheck beat bureaucrats and food stamps.

The nightmare act.

Well, you brought up a tender topic here basically. And I appreciate you gentlemen joining us. I appreciate your commitment to the American Dream. And God bless you and the American public.

Madam Speaker, I rise today to honor Roshara ``Rosie'' J. Holub, president and chief executive officer of the Missouri Credit Union Association, the service and support association for Missouri's 153 credit unions and their more than 1.3 million members. After decades of service to credit unions and their members, Rosie will be retiring on December 17th of this year.

Rosie has an extensive and impressive resume of professional accomplishments. She served as Chairman of the American Association of Credit Union Leagues (AACUL), as Chair of Credit Union House, LLC (Washington, DC), and as a Board member of the Filene Institute. Rosie also served on the Credit Union National Association (CUNA) Partnership Committee and the National Action and Response Program (NARP) Coordinating Council.

Once named as one of the 25 most influential businesswomen in St. Louis, Rosie has positively impacted Missouri's financial services community through her leadership and educational efforts. Among her contributions to Missouri, she served on the Board of Trustees for the Missouri Council on Economic Education (MCEE) and the Board of Advisors for the University of Missouri's College of Health and Environmental Sciences: Personal Financial Planning Department.

I've had the honor of knowing Rosie Holub for many years. She has represented the Missouri Credit Union Association, its employees and member credit unions with a warm personality and professionalism. My staff and I will miss her, but wish her God's blessing in retirement.

Mr. Speaker, I also wanted to add my note to the already numerous congratulations and praises for Chairman Skelton. I have served my 10 years in Congress on the Armed Services Committee. I told him the night before last at a reception that I thought that Ike was like my big brother down here.

You know, sometimes as we go on CODELs in the field, and we can talk to different level officers, sometimes it's a sergeant, sometimes it's a general, sometimes it's in between, how we get different answers, and sometimes a well-placed question to the right person is very helpful. I am a Republican, and sometimes a well-placed question to a Democrat is a very smart thing to do.

I will ask Ike, I say, I think I have got a bright idea, Ike, but what do you think of it? And he will tell me sometimes, Todd, that's the dumbest thing I ever heard. And sometimes he says that would be a good thing if you can get that done. Because Ike is like a big brother. He is a big brother to everybody down here.

Ike runs a committee the way I understand it used to be done, where the objective is to deal with the security of our country, and that is the business of the committee.

So I thank you very much for your great work down here. We are going to miss you a lot, Mr. Chairman, Mr. Marine, and my big brother.

God bless you and Godspeed.

Madam Speaker, I appreciate the opportunity to join you and my colleagues tonight in a discussion that has been very much in the attention of people now for a number of years and something that because it is so important it has maintained the attention politically for many, many months, and that is the condition of our economy, indeed, the condition of the world economy as well.

This might seem like kind of an esoteric topic, but it affects Americans all across this great land, and the main effect is that people don't have jobs. When you don't have jobs, things don't go so well.

The American Nation was founded by many, many courageous people over a period of hundreds of years, and they came to this land with dreams in their hearts, an idea to try something out, idea to test their abilities, to make something that had not been made before, do something that had not been done before.

And so they came. Initially I talked a couple of weeks ago about that brave band of mothers and fathers and kids that we call the Pilgrims. They came to this land with a dream of starting a new Nation.

In the first few months half of them almost died, just slightly under half. And yet when the Mayflower left Plymouth Harbor, those people that had that dream in their heart stayed because they believed that this could be a special and a unique Nation. And they saw themselves, as Governor Bradford wrote, as stepping stones to others who were coming to found a new nation.

Starting with that little group and with others even before them at Jamestown, you have people like Thomas Edison. He had the idea that he would make a light bulb. So he made a 100 different lightbulbs, all of them failures, and his attitude was, well now I know 100 ways not to make a light bulb.

So it was that America, with all of these courageous people that had that perseverance and that grit, one person at a time started building this Nation, one dream at a time. It became such a common thing, we gave it a name: We called it the American dream. The dream was to be able to come here with barely the shirt on your back and end up in much better condition than when you started. And so the condition we find ourselves in with unemployment high, and the economic conditions difficult, is something that we should view is not very consistent with our past or what we expect from this country or the standards that we would hold up.

The condition of the economy is one of those things that if you look at it from a mathematical point of view, there are basic principles in economics that govern how things work. If you violate those principles, there are bad results. But if you keep to the principles, you do pretty well.

Unfortunately, over the last number of years, and with both Republican and Democrat sometimes at the helm, we have violated some basic principles, and now we are starting to see the fruit of that in a high level of unemployment.

Now, I have here a little cartoon. This is the President, and he is wanting to know, how come you are not hiring people? You have coming into the china shop, triple bulls here, the health care reform and the cap-and-trade or cap-and-tax bill, and the war tax. And this poor guy that has got the china shop is looking a little bit worried. This is a nice cartoon.

But the point of the matter is that there are things that we can do which are going to make it very hard to create jobs. Now if you were to try to categorize those things, and I have had a chance to go to my district in the St. Louis and St. Charles area in Missouri and talk to many small businessmen, medium-size businessmen, but people from across the Nation too up here in Washington D.C., and if you ask them this question, people who are in the business world, what are the ways that you can make sure you are going to kill jobs?

Maybe this is a reverse way of looking at it. I apologize for that, but there is a reason for why I am approaching it this way.

One of the things to do if you want to make sure that there's not going to be jobs for people, well, I think about the first thing usually, and I don't know that these are necessarily exactly in the right order, but certainly this first one is the one that comes to the mind of most people if you ask them, ``What are you going to do if you want to kill jobs?'' and the first thing they think of is excessive taxation.

Now, that might seem kind of theoretical, but it really shouldn't be any surprise to us. If you picture yourself with a lemonade stand or making some other kind of product and you figure out how much it costs you to buy your raw materials--you have, maybe it's a lemonade machine, so you have to put the lemons in it. You have sugar that you have to buy. You have to have some good water. You have to have an ice maker. So you put that all together and figure out what it's going to cost you to make some lemonade, and you look at the cost of the ingredients. People come and buy. It's a hot day, and so they are buying the lemonade you're making. There's a difference between what it costs you and what you can sell it for, and you make a profit. And that is basically the lemonade stand idea. It's not complicated.

But if the government comes along and taxes every glass of lemonade that goes out, it makes it a little harder to try and make a living. What happens if the government raises the tax too much on your lemonade? Well, nobody will buy it, and now you're out of business.

So this isn't a very complicated idea, that if you do too much taxation on a business, either the business sort of hibernates and tries to weather the storm, or they actually just plain go out of business and you kill the potential for creating any new jobs as well as getting rid of old ones. So excessive taxation is usually at the top of a lot of businesspeople's things if you want to kill jobs.

Another one, and this sounds like a big thing, insufficient liquidity. What that is saying is that businessmen need to borrow money at various times, and they have to get the loans from banks. And if the bank policy is such that the businessman has trouble getting a loan, then it makes it harder for him or her to expand the business.

In the current conditions, what we're dealing with, you find that a lot of Federal regulators are all over the banks and telling the banks to be very, very careful about any loans they make, and they have to have a tremendous amount of security to make sure that they can even have that loan on their books. And so depending particularly on Federal regulations toward banks, the liquidity is a big deal in our time right now. That liquidity is very tight.

The subject of our talk tonight is taxation. What should we do about the largest tax increase in history that's coming down the pike the beginning of next year? That's the question. But I want to put it in the context of jobs, because tax increases may sound theoretical. But having a place to work, being able to pay your mortgage and being able to put food on the table for your kids are very real things for Americans. The stress of being a good citizen, wanting to take care of your family and not being able to do that just puts a horrible stress on families and on Americans all over. And it's not the right thing, and it's because we in Congress have not done the right things.

So these are some job killers: excessive taxation, liquidity, and the economic uncertainty. That might not seem to people, right off the bat, is that really such a big deal? Well, it really is. If you own a business, every day, every week, every year you're in business, there are two degrees of gamble. You are gambling that you can keep your cost of making a product lower than what you can sell it for. But what happens if you're not quite sure what's going on with the economy? You're not quite sure about what's going on with the economy. You're not sure whether anybody wants to buy your product at all next month, and you have a whole lot of costs coming along. How do you figure that out?

Well, each businessman has to live in that area of taking risks. But you're not going to take many risks if it seems like every time you turn around there's something you weren't expecting that's coming and whacking you upside the head, something that's affecting your business and making it harder for you to operate. And so if there's uncertainty, that's one of the things that's going to guarantee that a business owner is going to hunker down and wait for better times. So economic uncertainty is a very big factor in employment or unemployment.

The other one here is, I guess, pretty self-evident, and that is government red tape and government mandates. Obviously, you have a lemonade stand and you've got your equipment and understand what the taxes are going to be, but all of a sudden somebody comes up and says, Are those glasses you're using clean enough? Have they been government certified? And you say, Well, we put them in a dishwasher.

That's not good enough. You have to turn in this, this, and this report. And, by the way, have you done this? Have you done that?

And all of these things may not affect your product at all, but it sure affects the cost of doing business, because you have to hire an accountant to keep up with all the red tape that the government lays on you. And so red tape, regulations and mandates is particularly difficult for small businesses because they don't have lots of employees, so they can just designate one person to cover it. It takes a whole lot of the owner of the business' time.

So all of these things are job killers. And, unfortunately--I have left one off the list--unfortunately, in every one of these areas, the last number of years we have been doing exactly these things. We've been killing jobs. We've been doing all of these things in spades. The last one is excessive government spending.

You put that package of five together, and I don't care what the chairman of the Fed does or what people want to say about the razzmatazz of Wall Street. The facts of the matter are, you do these five things and you do them aggressively and you will see jobs being scarce and actually going away.

Currently, supposedly, the unemployment rate is 10 percent. Is it really 10 percent? No. It's worse than that because, if you haven't had a job for a certain number of months, they just take you off the list. They say, Oh, you don't count anymore. But there are a lot of people who haven't had a job in a long time. They're not considered unemployed, and so they are not considered part of that 10 percent unemployment number. So the real number is even higher than what the government publishes.

All of those things, though, are largely the result of policies made by Congress, made by our President, that are job killers. And we have to turn this around if we really want to see the economy turn back and return to some version of normal and for the American Dream to work.

Now, obviously, in the political world there are different theories about what you should do in government and what would work, and during the days of FDR there was a theory that became quite popular. It was proposed by Little Lord Keynes, but also another person who was very much involved in that was Henry Morgenthau. And the theory was that if the economy were not doing well, if the government would just spend a whole lot of money, the money that the government spends would buy stuff, get people buying things and get the economy going, and therefore, by the government spending money, you could solve the problem of a recession. It was sort of the siren call to people in politics because it sounded like a good deal. You just take and spend a whole lot of money, which makes you popular because you get to spend money on all kinds of pet projects, and presto zingo, the economy is going to turn around and you're going to do better. That was the theory.

The problem is that the theory never worked. It never did work, and it's never going to work in the future because it defies the basic laws of economics.

Now, in my State, we talk a little about common sense. And the people in Missouri I don't think would buy this theory that the way to get out of economic trouble is to spend a whole lot of money. In fact, I think they would look at it a little bit like you grab your bootstraps and lift up and try and fly around the room. If you were the head of a family and you came home to your family and said one night, ``Hey, we have all kinds of credit card bills. We've overspent the budget and things are not looking good. I don't have a job anymore. What are we going to do for the family budget?'' and somebody proposes, ``Well, hey, let's go spend a whole lot of money,'' people would think you were nuts. They'd probably put you in a funny little white jacket there if you did that.

Well, this is what Henry Morgenthau, who was FDR's Treasury Secretary, did. And so they tried this little scheme. And then at the end of about 8 or 9 years, before the Ways and Means Committee, this was as late as 1939, Henry Morgenthau said, We have tried spending money. We're spending more than we've ever spent before, and it does not work.

Now, we just passed that supposed stimulus bill, and we were told it was going to work. We knew it wasn't going to work because we knew Henry Morgenthau knew it wouldn't work. It's never worked in the past. But we had to try it again. And we tried that last year. And guess what? It just does not work. And then he says, They say after 8 years of the administration, we have just as much unemployment as when we started and an enormous debt to boot.

What they had also done, which he does not mention, they had taxed businesses to the point that the businesses closed. And it takes time to open a new business, start a new business and get it going. So we were able to turn a recession into the Great Depression.

We should learn from the people that went before us. And particularly, I believe the Democrats should pay attention to this Democrat Secretary of the Treasury that worked for FDR, because he told us in 1939 it would not work.

And what are we doing, we are spending money at the Federal level at a rate unlike anything we have seen before. The budget this year is about the same in terms of deficit as last year. People said of President Bush that he spent too much money. Well, perhaps he did. When he was President and Speaker Pelosi was Speaker, he had his worst year of spending, about $450 billion of deficit. That is not good. But

the deficit in 2009 was $1.3 trillion, and it looks like it is very close to $1.3 trillion for 2010. That is three times worse than the Bush years. We should be learning, it just does not work. We can't continue to spend money and think that we are going to deal with the problems of unemployment. In fact, we are making it worse.

Now, one of the things that the Bush administration did that was smart and that was right, they learned from previous Presidents. They learned that when you are in a recession that what you need to do is get off of taxation. You want to reduce taxation. They learned that not only from Ronald Reagan; they learned it from JFK. JFK, of course, was a Democrat. I wish the Democrats learned from JFK. He understood, cut taxes when you have a recession going on.

We had a recession when I first came to Congress in 2001. It started in 2000; 2001-2002, the economy was not good. President Bush understood that you needed to cut taxes. He told people that, and we were able to cut taxes. And so in 2003 particularly we cut three taxes that were very, very important. We are going to take a look at the result of that in just a minute. He understood that.

When we cut the taxes, what happened was the economy sprung around, and we had a number of good years in the economy until we turned back around and started getting into more taxes again. The taxes that we cut, those tax cuts are going to expire next year. A lot of people are talking about what are we going to do with this huge tax increase that is coming on top of us at the beginning of next year. Are we going to make the Bush tax cuts permanent? Are we going to extend the Bush tax cuts, or are we going to talk about it and do nothing? What is going to happen here?

Well, ordinary income, these are the top rate increases, moves from 35 percent to almost 40 percent. Capital gains goes from 15 to 20. Qualified dividends, 15 to almost 40 percent. And particularly the death tax, probably one of the most insidious, one of the most unfair and one of the most ridiculous of our taxes goes from zero percent to 55 percent. That is a killer of a lot of small businesses that have not protected themselves against these tax increases that are coming up. There are some other different ancillary tax increases that will be coming. The bottom line is the biggest tax increase in the history of the country. And when is it coming, when the economy is weak, when unemployment is high. This is a formula for disaster. We are going to talk about why that is so bad and why we must do something, and the thing we have to do is to make those Bush tax cuts permanent unless we want an even worse level of unemployment.

I am joined by my good friend, Congressman Scalise, and I would yield.

I am delighted you made those points. And I have some charts here that have been kicking around my office for 4 or 5 years on the very points you are making because you are so absolutely correct. It seems to me that somehow President Obama and the other leadership here in Congress have forgotten some amazingly simple things, but we make life too complicated sometimes.

One thing is the American Dream was not to make rich people poor. The American Dream was about making people who didn't have much money to be richer. Sometimes richer economically, sometimes because they come here without a high school education and watch their kids pick up a college diploma. There are a lot of ways that American Dream works, but it was never to tear people down. It was always to build people up. That seems like kind of a basic idea, but it seems like the focus is we are so worried about somebody being rich that we are willing to melt the economy down just to try to get them. And the funny thing is that people who are very rich have ways of hiding their money, and all you do is hurt a lot of innocent people.

The other thing that seems so simple to me is if you are really honestly worried about unemployment and jobs, it seems like the obvious thing is jobs come from employers. And if you destroy employers, how are you going to have jobs? That is not a complicated formula. In Missouri we would say that is kind of a no-brainer; and yet somehow here in Washington, D.C. we make it too complicated. We have a tremendous level of Federal spending, bury people in red tape, mess with their liquidity, create uncertainty in the markets, spend money like mad, and tax all of these businesses, create uncertainty, and then wonder why there aren't any jobs. It doesn't seem like it is that complicated an issue.

Getting back to what you said, my good friend, right here, and this is May 2003, there were a series of tax cuts that happened right here in May 2003. The tax cuts was capital gains, dividends, and the death tax. Those are not really popular taxes. When the Republicans passed them, we were criticized, you are trying to do special deals for rich people and blah, blah, blah. The question is when we cut these taxes, the liberals were saying you've spend all of this money because if you cut the taxes, you won't get this revenue that comes in.

And that was their reasoning because their mindset is the government owns everything and we're going to let the people who work keep a little bit of it.

Well, we did this tax cut, even though it wasn't popular, in May of 2003, and this talks about job creation. I started on the subject of jobs. This is the job creation before and after taxes, and anything that's going down means we lost jobs. Any line that goes up says we gained jobs. Well, here's the tax cut here, and look at this. Look at this graph of the job creation. Now, that says that something is going on at this point. Now, why would that be the tax cut made jobs? Well, simply because you let the businessman keep more of what he owns. So, in terms of job creation, these taxes had a very beneficial effect.

What happens if we reverse this? What happens if we go from here? Now, right here, we have a lot of unemployment. What happens in a time of unemployment if we reverse this effect? What we're going to do is it's going to be the same process but backwards. We're going to take jobs that existed and destroy them. Are we in a position with 10 percent or more unemployment to turn around and destroy more jobs? That seems like a definition of an insanity.

And these are month by month, year by year. This is what happens after this tax cut and this is the job effect, and I will allow you to comment on it if you want. I've also got two other kinds of interesting charts here, not just jobs but gross domestic product, and your last point, which was government revenues, quite interestingly. I yield.

They're exactly wrong. They've got it upside down, just as they have it upside down the American Dream is to make people that are poorer richer, not richer people make them poorer. They've got it exactly reversed.

If you want jobs, you don't have an employer. It's kind of a basic thing. I very much appreciate your perspective; and what you're saying is, absolutely, you can prove it by taking a look at the economics.

But when I first heard that, I was kind of scratching my head. I'm not a wizard at economics but I'm an engineer, and I was trying to say, now, wait a minute, you're telling me that if the Federal Government reduces taxes, they're going to take in more money? That sounds like making water run uphill, you know. And so I started to think about it, and actually it makes a whole lot of sense.

But here's the way it seems to work to me. Let's say that Congressman Scalise is king for the year, and your job is to raise revenue for your government and the only thing you can do is tax bread. And so you start rolling this around in your mind, and you say I could put a penny tax on a loaf of bread, or I could put $10 on a loaf of bread. You think, a penny, nobody'd notice it, but I'd have to sell a lot of bread in order to make very much money; but if I did $10 a loaf, wow, wouldn't take too many loaves. I'd get a lot of money. Well, on the other hand, nobody would buy the bread. So your common sense says probably somewhere between $10 tax on a loaf of bread and a penny tax, there's some number that's an optimum; and if you raised it, you get less government revenue, and if you lowered it, you get less government revenue.

And what this effect is showing is that we're overtaxing; and by overtaxing, we're actually losing Federal revenue. So what you're saying is exactly right. It's been proven by history. We cannot afford to not cut the taxes. Certainly we cannot afford to allow a massive tax increase when the economy is on its knees and unemployment is running at 10 percent.

Let's take a look at what the numbers were. I think people might be curious about this. Here we've got job creation. Here's the tax. This is capital gains, dividends, death tax. That's what the tax cuts were. This is what happened to job creation. Let's take a look at another number here.

Let's look at the gross domestic product of our country. This is kind of a neck snapper of a chart, it seems like to me. If you can get into these funny economic charts, this, though, is a reflection of what our future could or could not be. This was the gross domestic product here before the tax cut. Here, again, is the tax cut right here, and take a look at the national GDP, even have a couple of times when we're actually losing GDP in a couple of months when the recession is bad, 2001. You see it coming up a little bit up here to sort of a sluggish two, but you see it's spotty; it's up and down.

And then we put these tax cuts in place. Not only did employment change but take a look at gross domestic product. Kabaam. You know, we're talking, we had one quarter where we had 7.5 percent GDP growth. That's a pretty decent level, but you can see quite an improvement after this tax cut went into place.

Now, as you would expect if you got GDP going along the right direction, employment going the right direction, here's the other thing, and this was your point. My respected colleague, take a look at Federal revenues. If the example of the loaf of bread and the tax line up seems a little bit odd, here's the evidence. Here's the tax cut. This is Federal revenues. Federal revenues are tanking because the economy is in trouble.

We do the tax cuts in 2003, just as we did with JFK, with Ronald Reagan. All of a sudden, you see Federal revenues coming up. Now, this is totally opposite to everything the President and the liberals are saying. They cannot explain this. This completely puts the lie to what they're saying.

If you do not cut the taxes, what's going to happen is we're going to continue in this death spiral that we've

created, and we've created it out of stupidity because the facts are here. After that tax cut, four straight years of increases in Federal revenue, and so there you have the effect.

We are overtaxing. We have stalled the economy. It's a little bit like you're in that little World War I, World War II biplane, whatever it is, and you're in that spiral headed to the ground and you grab the stick and you pull the stick up and you pull the stick up and the plane just keeps spiraling and the ground gets bigger and bigger as you're losing altitude; and you pull the stick up and you say, oh, my goodness, everybody has gotten in a graveyard spiral and almost died and then one guy came along and said I'm going to do something that's a little counterintuitive.

What I'm going to do is I'm going to push the stick forward. It's going to allow the plane to stabilize even though it's going down, and when it gets stable, then I'll pull the stick back up.

In a way, that's what we did. We have got the economy in a spiral where we are taxing people and where we are red-taping them to death. Liquidity is a problem; there is uncertainty, and we are spending money like a bunch of fools. What we are going to have to do is use some sense from the past, from the people who came before us.

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

You know, you're giving a very concrete example, and maybe I was being too general.

My point was, if you punish the business, you shouldn't be surprised if there are no jobs there. The business is the one that hires people. It's not that complicated. There is a direct connection between employer and employee. What you have just given an example of is: When you shut the company down, then you can't say, ``Well, I'm so surprised that there is unemployment.'' You created the unemployment by the policy. It's crazy. It's really crazy.

I understand that the President did support some drilling, but it was off of a foreign coast, and it was with American tax dollars. We are encouraging them to drill, but we can't drill on any of the American sites. That just doesn't make any sense. I think that's what the voters were concerned with in this last election. I think they are concerned with that. They see that there are ways that we should be going as a country, things that we can learn from history, and if there is one thing we should be dealing with immediately, right now, it's making those Bush tax cuts permanent because the economics of that thing works both ways.

If you cut the taxes, you saw what happened to the gross domestic product. It goes up. Unemployment goes down. If we create jobs, we create more revenue for the government. If you do the opposite, then the result is going to be the opposite. You're going to have more unemployment. You're going to have less revenue, and you're putting us farther into this downward spiral. Our country can't take a whole lot more hits like that, especially with the incredibly aggressive spending schedule.

I don't recall specifically, gentleman, whether you were there with Dr. Laffer today as he was visiting us.

He has some very simple and easy-to-understand ways even though he's one of these Ph.D.-type economists and all.

In fact, what we're talking about here was named after him, the ``Laffer curve,'' showing that when you cut taxes--and he has proven that--that you're going to actually get more Federal revenue--if you do the right kind of taxes, that is. What he was saying today sort of captured my attention.

He said, Look at it from a simple point of view. If you're a business, are you going to hire somebody?

Well, what you're going to say if you're a businessman is, ``It's going to

cost me this much money to hire this guy, and if I do hire him, he is going to make this much.''

So you take a look at that. If he is going to make more for you than what it costs you to employ him, then you're going to hire him because that's the way businesses work. You hire people in order to make a profit, to make your business grow.

Now, what happens in this equation if the Federal Government says to the businessman, ``Okay. Now, before you hire that guy, just remember this, that we're going to tax you. We're going to put these additional costs into what you're going to have to pay if you hire this guy''?

Well, you don't have to be a rocket scientist to say, Oh, my goodness. If the government starts adding things that the businessman has to pay, it's going to make it harder and harder for him to find the economic ease to hire somebody.

That's another way of saying what we have done by these policies is we have essentially driven that unemployment number. We have actually created that by the foolish policies down here, by forgetting the simple fact that, if you destroy an employer, then you're not going to have employees.

The simple fact is that America wasn't based on class warfare, on uncovetousness, saying, ``Don't you hate that rich guy? Look at how much fun he's having. Are you having as much fun as that rich guy?'' That wasn't what made America great. What made America great is we're all on the same team, that everybody wants to see everybody else prosper, everybody working together, being honest with each other, each following the dream that God put in their own hearts. That's the America that our Founders built. That's the America that most Americans want to see us returning to. They want to see a win-win scenario, and they want to see us do the policies that are right here. We know we don't create any jobs here in Washington, D.C. Any time we create a government job, it takes two jobs out of the economy. We don't create jobs, but we do affect the playing field that jobs are on.

Why do we want to send our jobs to foreign countries? I can't see why we should be doing that.

You know, the thing that was amazing, the way he explained it was really a contrast. You have a person, and say he's a couple of years away from dying and he has this business and this business is worth millions of dollars. Now there are two courses he can take. The first is he goes and drinks like mad, does drugs, chases women, gambles it all away, and in every way wastes the money. Does he pay any tax on it? He has already paid the taxes. No. So the government lets him off scot-free for that. So we encourage that behavior. But what happens if he says, hey, I have a son, I would like to pass the business on to my son. And he has some employees and they want to buy part of the business, so I'm going to not squander my money, but I'm going to save it. So he waits 5 years, saves his money, dies, and now what do we do? We tax the family 55 percent.

Now how many people have a business--picture if it's a farm or a manufacturing business--where you've got to take more than half of it, liquidate it to sell it in order to pay the tax on it. It's going to destroy the business. And so we have a policy that rewards people for being totally irresponsible and punishes people for doing the right thing. As Dr. Laffer said, that's just so contrary to common sense.

And what are we going to do? We're going to let that death tax go from zero to 55 percent. That is just nuts. And what it's going to do of course is, guess what? It's going to destroy jobs, it's going to reduce Federal revenues, and it's going to hurt the GDP. And yet here we go because we figure we've taxed them every which way, but we haven't gotten them one last clip when they die. And why we would even have a death tax, it just seems so abhorrent that we would possibly let that go on.

I think you're absolutely right. I think that's what the American public is seeing and sensing. I might put it in slightly different words, and maybe just because I'm a little older than you are, but my sense is we had a tradition that the government was to be the servant of the people. It seems to many of us as though that has started to tilt, and the government is now a fearful master. I think the public is saying we have had way too much government, we're taking a look. The problem isn't the outside, the problem is the government, and the government has to be reduced back to its servant status, back to the basic principles of economics, back to honoring the traditions of our Founders and the dream of allowing people to use their imagination and their ingenuity, and to succeed or to fail. If we didn't let Thomas Edison fail hundreds and hundreds of times, we wouldn't have any lightbulbs. You have to allow freedom to work. I think that's where we have to go as a country; we have to go back to the traditional paths that have always worked for us.

We are a very unique Nation in so many different ways. People around the world, when there's an earthquake or when there's a problem, the Americans are there. After World War II, we defeated our enemies and we taxed ourselves to rebuild our enemies. We established no empires. We built no kingdoms. We are absolutely unique in the history of mankind, and it's because we have high standards, high traditions, and we believe in freedom and the American way. This is the way to turn things around.

My good friend, Congressman Scalise, I thank you so much for joining us tonight. I know our time is starting to get a little bit short here.

I would once again encourage Americans--we know the solution to move forward, but we are not going to be moving forward if we allow the largest tax increase in the history of our country to settle in on January 1. It will have the same negative effect as its positive effect when it first went into place. We do not want that. We have to keep those tax cuts in place, and we have to make that decision and move forward for the good of all of America.

Mr. Speaker, thank you so much.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Good evening.

I would like to talk about several different topics today. One, I think, is on the hearts and minds of Americans everywhere. I want to talk a little bit about unemployment. I want to talk about the economy and what the solutions are to this problem. This isn't very complicated, but people try to make it more complicated than it needs to be.

When we get done with that subject, I'm going to change gears and do something that's a little bit more topical for the Thanksgiving season. I'd like to tell you the actual story, a great adventure story, about the Pilgrims, about the Thanksgiving that they celebrated and about the many other ways that they have blessed our country.

First things first, let's talk a little bit, though, about something that's on everybody's minds--the problem of unemployment and the problem of the continuous and rapid growth of the Federal Government, which stifles our freedoms and liberties, which buries us in red tape and bureaucracy, which raises our cost of living, and which makes life more and more miserable for Americans as they lose their freedoms, and the Federal Government's out-of-control spending that accompanies that.

These are problems we've talked about, and these are problems that the voters have voted on. The voters seem to think that this is a problem in spite of the fact that we're going to try and shove socialized medicine down the throats of Americans and in spite of the fact they don't want it. We're not dealing with unemployment. We're not dealing with the causes for unemployment, but I think we need to talk about it a little bit because it isn't as complicated as some of my colleagues seem to make it out to be. It's not a matter of class warfare. It has nothing to do with that. It's just simple economics.

Now, if you want to talk to anybody who is a small business man and ask him what are the things that kill jobs and ask him what are the job killers, I would bet you he's going to be talking about things on this list right here.

The first thing is excessive taxation. The second is insufficient liquidity. What does that mean? It means it's hard for businessmen to get money from banks.

Economic uncertainty. People don't want to take risks when they don't know what's going to happen next. Then, of course, there is a whole lot of red tape and government mandates. All of those things are enemies to jobs and job creation.

Now let's go into this just a little bit because this isn't so difficult. It's not a matter of class warfare. It's not a matter of rich people not paying enough. In fact, there is an interesting statistic or two. What percent of the overall tax burden do you think the top 1 percent of Americans carry? What percent do you think the top 10 percent of Americans carry? Well, the top 10 percent of Americans carry about 70 percent of the tax burden in this country. How about the bottom 50 percent of Americans? What percentage do they carry? Less than 10 percent. So I guess we've got a pretty graduated income tax. If that were the solution, we'd already be in great shape, but let's get back to the basics about jobs.

First of all, why is it that excessive taxation kills jobs? Well, the reason is that the people who own small businesses create most of those jobs. Small businesses--maybe we should say medium and small businesses, which have 500 or fewer employees, are the businesses that hire 80 percent of Americans.

Now, my Democrat friends can't seem to make this connection. If you kill the business, you're not going to have the jobs. If you tax the businessman's hide off, he's not going to hire people because he's not going to have the money to buy new equipment, to

put up new buildings, to invent new technologies, and to expand his business. So the connection is pretty straightforward. If you want to kill jobs, you tax the guys who own those businesses. A lot of those business owners don't really think of themselves as wealthy, because they've started some little businesses that have grown and grown and grown, and as they grow, they keep putting more and more money back in the businesses. They haven't stopped to consider the fact that they may be multimillionaires, but they keep putting the money into the businesses and the businesses grow and they hire more people.

If you're just so hung up on the fact that somebody is filthy rich and if you're so hung up on the fact that they may be having more fun than you are and that you've got to tax them into the dirt, well, then you're not going to have any jobs. You just can't have it both ways. If you want jobs, you have to have healthy businesses, and you can't have healthy businesses if you tax them out of existence. So excessive taxation is just going to be a job killer.

Insufficient liquidity. That is, if you run your banks and if you have bank regulators all over the banks so they can't make any loans, it's hard for the businessman to get money to invest in new things.

Obviously, economic uncertainty. Let's say you own a business, and you've got lots of money tied up in it. Are you going to take a great big gamble when you don't have any idea what next goofy policy the administration is going to come up with or what kind of additional taxes and red tape and bureaucracy you're going to face? No. You're going to hunker down. You're going to say, Wait a minute. I'm not going to take any risks in this environment. Business is off.

A lot of people are boarding up their businesses. A lot of businesses are shutting down. A lot of jobs are being shipped overseas. We create such a hostile environment for business that the big businesses say, Okay. You show us the rules. If you don't want to have your jobs in this country, we'll take the jobs somewhere else. The small businesses just close their doors, and the jobs are gone forever. So the economic uncertainty is a job killer.

Of course there is red tape and government mandates. There is one that should be on this list, and that is excessive government spending. That is also something that has always, historically, been a problem.

Now, on top of the unemployment problem, on top of the runaway Federal Government that is no longer a servant but has taken on the effect of master and is bossing Americans around and taxing them out of house and home and ruining the economy--if that's not bad enough, we've got another problem that's coming, and it's something that we need to deal with in the near future.

That's the problem of a huge tax increase that's just around the corner at the beginning of the year.

So, if we're already in trouble with close to 10 percent unemployment and we know that excessive taxation is one of the things that is a job killer, do we want to then apply a whole bunch more, another huge tax increase to the economy? Most people would say you have to be crazy to do something like that. Most people, when they look at history, say that's the dumbest thing in the world to have a huge tax increase right when the economy is having a hard time, and yet, that's precisely what is going to happen next year if the Congress doesn't take action.

What's happening is, because of some rules in the Senate, the Bush tax cuts, a series of Bush tax cuts are going to expire, and when they do, you can see some of the jumps here from 2010 to 2011. This ordinary income tax, a bracket of 35 percent, is going to jump to 39.6 percent; capital gains going from 15 to 20. You know, the capital gains, that's an important one because that's a place where people who invest in businesses have money. If this tax is low enough, they can plow it back into business. As you raise it up, there's less money going back into businesses. And these are different kinds of dividends, going from 15 to almost 40 percent.

And the death tax, wow, is that ever taking a jump. Everybody who needs to die, you need to die this year, that's for sure, because death tax is zero. It's jumping to 55 percent. So when you get beyond the first million or two that are protected from the death tax, what's happening is, your dad owns a farm and he has a lot of fields and he's got a lot of pieces of equipment, and your plan is to follow in your dad's footsteps and be a farmer, and your dad dies and you find out you're going to have to sell 55 percent of your farm to pay the taxes that your dad owes on his death. Isn't good enough to tax him when he's alive. You tax him when he's dead. So we have a death tax. Well, by the time you get rid of selling half the fields and half the pieces of equipment you say, well, I can't run the farm. Well, that's really smart tax policy, isn't it, that we shut down a small business by jumping the death tax from 0 to 55 percent.

We have child tax credits here that are going up, marriage penalty, lowest tax brackets going from 10 to 15 percent. So, these taxes are coming. Most people would say, that studied economics a little bit, would say this is not what you should be doing during a recession. In fact, regardless if you're a Republican or Democrat, history says this is not what we should be doing.

You could learn--and I'm kind of surprised that the Democrats haven't taken a lesson from Kennedy because he had a recession when he was President. He cut taxes and the economy sprung right back, and of course Ronald Reagan did it. I don't expect the Democrats to learn from Ronald Reagan, even though he used to be a Democrat, but JFK, you think they could learn from him.

You think maybe they could have learned from FDR even. FDR had a guy who was Secretary of the Treasury who was Henry Morgenthau. Henry Morgenthau came up with the same idea that Obama and company came up with a couple years ago, said we're going to stimulate the economy by spending tons of money. It's a little bit like grabbing your bootstraps and pulling and hoping to fly around the room. You know, they're going to spend a lot of money, spend enough money that will get the economy going. That's the idea.

Now, no normal rational person that's not been smoking those funny cigarettes can come up with such an idea. If you came home and your husband or wife said to you, hey, we've got too much credit card debt here, or I'm not making enough money, you know, things aren't going right economically, what do you think we should do? Oh, let's spend money like mad. You would think somebody was crazy. That's what people have tried. Henry Morgenthau tried it. He tried it for 8 years. He came and appeared before the House Ways and Means Committee. His words were, We have tried spending money. We're spending money, more than we have ever spent before and it does not work, I say, after 8 years of the administration. We have just as much unemployment as when we started and enormous debt to boot.

Now, I would hope that we could learn something from history. This is FDR. This is World War II vintage-type stuff. We should have learned from this. We could have learned from JFK. No. Could have learned from Bush. We could have learned from Reagan. When you're in trouble like this, what you want to do is you want to back off on the taxes and back off on the Federal spending. We're going the exact opposite direction. It doesn't make any sense to be raising taxes. We know that taxing small business is a job killer, and yet, we're forging ahead, trying to get everybody paying attention to the fact that, oh, the rich's guy got too many cigars or too many cars or something like that.

But the trouble is the rich guy, who owns that company, is the one who's hiring people. He's the one making the decision to add a wing on the building, put a new machine tool under the wing, to invest money in new processes, to come up with a better way to do things, to be more competitive than a foreign competitor and put Americans back to work. Those are the kinds of people that you need to have taking your money and plowing it back into the economy.

Now, there's some people think through this idea of Federal Government spending money that you can put people to work by the Federal Government hiring them. That seems on the

surface like a bright enough idea. Certainly if you take some tax money and you go out and hire some people, those people have a job. Doesn't that put people back to work? Well, yes and no. The people you hire do get a job. The trouble is for everyone you hire, there are two people in the private sector that lose their job because the government's sucking that money for those salaries out of the private sector. The private sector then becomes less efficient, and economists will say that you lose about two jobs out of the private sector for everybody you put on the government payroll. I mean, if putting people on the government payroll worked, we'd all work for the government. They tried that in the Soviet Union. It wasn't such a hot idea.

So, what's the danger? Why am I talking about this stuff? It should be a day when politics is over, the elections are over, we could get back to work and do the right thing. Well, the right thing here is paying attention to the fact that America is in trouble with a 10 percent unemployment rate. It's actually more than that because I don't know if you know it or not, but anybody who's been unemployed for a certain period of time, they don't count them anymore. So they're not unemployed, even though they don't have a job. That's sort of an interesting way to count, isn't it?

But anyway, here's what happened a number of years ago. I actually was here in Congress when this happened, and these charts go back a few years, but I think it's kind of interesting. This is the gross domestic product. So these vertical lines are America's GDP, and this is before and after a tax relief which occurred in 2003 about the first or second quarter of 2003.

And so the tax decrease we're talking about here is the very tax that's going to expire. So when we cut this tax in 2003, what happened to GDP? Well, here's GDP going along like this before. We do the tax cut and take a look at what happens to GDP afterwards. Now, that suggests that if there's any causal relationship at all that the tax cuts gave us a better GDP.

Let's take a look at the same tax cut not applied to gross domestic product, but let's take a look at it applied to jobs. These lines are job creation. The ones that go down mean that we are losing jobs. The ones that go up mean that we're creating jobs. This is what the economy is doing. Now, this, again, is this May 2003 when these tax relief measures went into effect. Look at all the jobs we're losing here, and look at the snappy turnaround right here when you let the small businessman keep some of what he earns. My goodness, what a turnaround.

Now, here's a very unpleasant thought. If these tax cuts had this positive effect when the tax cuts went into effect on jobs and on gross domestic product, if these tax cuts had that positive an effect, what happens when we reverse that same thing? What happens when we turn it upside down? What happens when the tax cuts expire? Are they not likely to exert the exact opposite force on our gross domestic product on our already high unemployment? Now, we're not in this situation.

Right now we're having trouble with unemployment, but why do we want to put a force on it that's going to make it even worse. If these things did some good when they went into effect, why do we want to let them expire? It's bad enough the way it is. If we extend the tax cuts, it may not fix the 10 percent, but it may not go to 15 percent anyway. So this is what happened when the tax cuts went into effect to job creation, and that's why the economy took off.

Now, one of the things, it seems to me, that my dear socialist friends don't quite understand is that if you are a happy socialist, what you want is, you want the government to be doing well, you want to have lots of money that you can slop around and spend on different programs. And of course we've been doing too much of that, spending more than we have. But you would think you would want a strong economy because what a lot of people don't realize is, if that economy isn't strong, not only are individuals hurting, not only are States that have to balance their budgets hurting economically, the Federal Government revenues are also way down.

I was surprised during this time period when people wanted to say that the tax cuts had cost us a whole lot of money, that when you took the money they claimed the tax cuts cost in lost taxes and added it to the war in Iraq and Afghanistan that the amount of money total was less than what it cost us to have the economy in the tank in these first couple of years. So when the economy is bad in your home, it's bad in your State. It also is lousy in the Federal Government. So you put all of these tax cuts in place. You think, Oh, that's fiscally irresponsible because then the government is going to go into debt more and more. Oh, is that really so? The fact is not so.

Let's take a look at what happened. Here are Federal revenues. This is the year. That is the tax cut. So Federal revenues are coming down here. We cut taxes, and the Federal revenues actually go up. Now that seems like making water run uphill. Why is it possible that the Federal Government would get more money when we reduce taxes? It is known to some people as a Laffer Curve. But what this is, it's the effect that when the economy gets going, we collect more tax revenues.

Let's look at it this way: let's say that you are made king for the year, and your job is to collect as much revenue as you can collect in the selling of loaves of bread. So you start to think. You say to yourself, Well, I could put a one-penny tax on a loaf of bread and people would eat a whole lot of bread because we're not taxing it very much, and we'd raise a certain amount of money. And then you think, Wow, but if I could do that with a penny, I could move that decimal over and charge a dollar a loaf of bread. Then I would get much more money. How about $10 a loaf? You say, Well, wait a minute. So $10 a loaf, I could get $10 every time. But people wouldn't buy bread anymore. It would be too expensive. It would go on the black market, or they would buy cake or something else.

So common sense would tell you that if you are king for the year and you are taxing bread, that there is some point between a penny and $10 perhaps, there is some point where there is an optimum amount of tax where people will still pay it and still buy bread. And if you raise the tax, what, in fact, happens is the revenue that the government collects goes down rather than up. In other words, it's not possible to just keep taxing too much because if you do, it basically drives the amount of money you collect down. So there's an optimum point.

And my point here is that if you are a happy socialist, you want the economy strong, and the way to do it is to let the people that run the businesses have enough money to make those investments so that the economy is strong, and we have more Federal revenue coming in. This is what happened '04, '05, '06, '07. The Federal revenues start going up even though we did these tax cuts. Now what we want to do is to reverse this. We're going to get rid of the tax cuts which is then going to have more effect to drive the economy down. It's going to create more job loss, and it's going to make the GDP worse.

We are having trouble learning some very basic lessons from history where we are at a point where we are overtaxing the economy. And if we want to get this economy going, we have to learn from JFK, we have to learn from Ronald Reagan, we have to learn from Bush II that the way to deal with this thing is to cut government spending and to cut taxes. It's a very straightforward answer. But we also have to realize that if we don't deal with the tax increase that's coming up, we are going to add significantly to the already existing economic problems of our country.

So what's the solution? It's not complicated. Make the Bush tax cuts permanent. Now we, Republicans, have proposed that for years. The Senate Democrats have opposed it. The Democrats in the House have opposed it. They say all of these tax cuts are for rich people, and they talk about the classes of society in America. And the one thing they can't seem to remember is the fact that if you don't have a strong business, you're not going to have jobs, and you're just going to have to get used to it.

In America, some people get stinking rich; and it's okay; and it's all right for them to have their money because a lot

of times, if they get enough money, they start spending it on other people anyway. And so what you've got to do is let those businesses have some money to work with because the government is not going to create the jobs. And by letting these tax cuts expire, you are just going to further damage the economy and increase the suffering of Americans all across our country.

So the solution is straightforward, at least to what we should be doing with these tax cuts. What we should be doing is keeping the tax cuts and voting to make them permanent and not letting them all expire. That's the commonsense way to approach the thing. It's not going to necessarily get us out of all the problems we're in right now, but it's going to prevent them from getting a lot worse.

And what we have to do then obviously is to get back into the business of cutting back on Federal spending, and we're going to have to cut back on government red tape, and we're going to have to dismantle some of the complicated and redundant different Departments that we don't need to be paying for. We have to start looking at the Federal Government and say, What does the Federal Government have to do and all of the stuff that it would be nice if the Federal Government did that cost money, we're going to have to just stop doing that. We're not going to get it out of waste, fraud, and abuse because there isn't a budget line item that says that. What we're going to have to do is we're going to have to reform the system.

The one thing I believe the Republicans are looking at very closely-- I'm certainly very interested in it and am trying to sell it to my Republican colleagues--is the idea that we have an opportunity, though we can't pass legislation through the Senate and even if we did, it's unlikely that President Obama would sign it. But what we can do is we can send bills to the Senate, and the public can watch and see that we've heard the message. We understand. We want less taxes. We want more affordable government. We want to shrink and reduce the Federal Government in places where it doesn't really need to be putting money, and we can do that.

But there is one thing we can do and that is in the House here, we can change the rules. We can change the system. The House, with Democrat and Republican leadership through many, many years, is really a series of fiefdoms, as different committees gain lots of power.

And if we take a look at that system and we design a system which is not so much designed to spend money but to make it hard to spend money, then we can start making some progress to develop the tools here in the House to try to reduce a government that is literally a runaway government that is no longer the servant of the people but is increasingly becoming a fearful master.

That is our task; and we will be evaluated by the American public, I have no doubt, on our ability to perform the task. And to the degree we have a majority in the House, we can at least start in the House by saying, Let's change the whole committee structure. Let's take a look at how we do the budgeting process. Let's take a look at how these earmarks fit into who spends the money, who makes money, and how do we hold the committees accountable for reducing the size of the Federal Government.

All of these things are ahead of us, but we need to stop this train wreck coming, and we need to make these tax cuts permanent. That's the quick answer to something that we need to be doing.

Now I'm going to turn to perhaps a little bit lighter topic, a completely different topic, and that is the advent of Thanksgiving coming along next week. The Thanksgiving story is one that, as I have gotten older, I get to love the story more and more. It's a fantastic adventure story. It's a story of people of tremendous courage, tremendous vision who took very great risks and gambles and blessed you and I and all true Americans, blessed in ways that we've forgotten and in ways that we need to remember. I'm going to grab a picture, if you will excuse me a second.

Last year, I had this picture on a larger format. Unfortunately, I just had this framed copy. The picture that is by my side, some of you may recognize, is a small version of the picture that is in the Rotunda here not so far from where I am standing.

The picture is called ``The Pilgrims at Prayer,'' and I would like to talk to you about this little group of Pilgrims that came over and gave us our Thanksgiving, the particularly famous Thanksgiving that took place in Plymouth, Massachusetts. There was an earlier Thanksgiving in Virginia, but this particular group of Pilgrims, though, gave us a lot, lot more than Thanksgiving. So while it is the Thanksgiving season, I think it is appropriate to think a little bit about their great example to us, because it is the principles and ideas of people like this that we need to reproduce and we need to follow their example as we move America forward in the days ahead.

So let me start by saying, first of all, who were these Pilgrims that we talk about that were at Plymouth and that gave us Thanksgiving? Who were the Pilgrims? They were really a couple of groups of people, but about half of them, and some of the very influential ones, were called Separatists. They were what you might call in their day sort of the evangelical Christian types of England, except that they were a little bit of a weird subset in this regard.

They had listened to the writing of a Scottish theologian that followed Knox in about the 1580s or so, and he started finding in his Bible this interesting idea that the Bible, particularly the Old Testament, or, for Jewish people, the Torah, there seemed to be a distinction between civil government and church government.

Now, that may seem very obvious to us today, but in those days, if you recall, there was a king half the time running the church and a church half the time running the kingdoms, and the two were very much interconnected and very much intermixed dating back to the time of Charlemagne.

But they came up with this idea that the Bible seemed to indicate that there was a difference between church government and civil government, and they got that from looking at the story about Moses. Moses was like the civil authority, but he had a brother who was running the worship service, Aaron. And so he saw that example, but then there were other examples that were less known.

There was a guy, Uzziah, who was a king, and he went into the temple and started burning incense because he thought he was able to do anything he wanted. A couple of courageous priests stood up to confront him, and he started to stick his finger at them and give them a lecture and say, Off with their heads, and he looked and his hand was covered with leprosy.

So there were these stories, particularly the story of Saul, the first king, where he offered the sacrifice and Samuel read him the riot act and said, You've really have blown it now, buddy.

So you have these examples in the Old Testament where civil and church government were separate. So these guys, the Separatists, had learned from their Scripture and had decided in their day that they didn't want their church to be run by the King of England. This was following old Henry VIII, who had separated the English church from the church in Rome, and so the church was being run by the King of England. These guys decided what they were going to do in Scrooby, England. They decided that they would get this manor house. They would all get together and worship and start their own little church, and the church wasn't under the King and it wasn't under the King's thumb. Well, as you can imagine, that did not meet with the approval of the King, and he said, I am going to harry them out of England.

And so these Separatists were given all kinds of very tough treatment--fines and taxes. Their wives were put in the stocks and made fun of and all kinds of difficult things so that these Separatists couldn't really live in England and they couldn't have their little church that they had started or their series of churches. And so, as you know the story, they moved to Holland where they could have freedom to start their own church.

So they lived in Holland for some time. It was a difficult existence. They

had to work 7 days a week and many, many hours a day; very, very difficult economically for them. But they didn't complain, and they were able to have their church worship service the way they wanted. That lasted for some period of time as these Separatists were in Holland, but a couple things happened that convinced them to look around at something else, and the main thing was that their children were picking up some bad habits from the Dutch kids and they didn't like that. They had come there because they had some very strong theological beliefs about what was right and wrong. They were worried about their children and the culture in which they were living, and so they cast about for what God would have them do.

So the picture that is printed, it is a wonderful painting. It is about 10-by-20 feet in the Rotunda. This picture depicts the key turning point for a bunch of these Separatists, and this is in the town of Delfthshaven. And if you take a look closely at the picture, certainly you can't see it here in the camera, but it says ``Speedwell.'' That is the name of the ship. And these are the Separatists gathering together at Delfthshaven in a farewell to their pastor, John Robinson, who they loved dearly.

John Robinson was a very even-tempered, peace-loving man. He had risked his life a number of times trying to separate groups of different Christians that were fighting each other, and his parishioners said he had the wisdom to see trouble coming and to steer his little flock away from the trouble. So they loved John Robinson.

He is now preaching his last sermon, because he will not go with the Pilgrims to America but, instead, will stay behind with the members of his church that were still going to be back in Holland.

And so, as you can imagine, if this is your last time and you have all of these friends who are going on this absolutely incredible expedition to plant a plantation in the middle of the wilderness all the way across the ocean, you are going to give them your best shot. You are going to talk to them about the things that you think are most important.

So we have a recording of what he was preaching about. And he, first of all, bewailed the state of the Calvanists and the Lutherans. And he said, ``For though Luther and Calvin were bright lights in their own day, yet were they living today they would readily embrace the additional truth that God is breaking forth from his word.''

What he was saying, in effect, was that our understanding that we get from the Bible is not static; it is something that moves over time. And as people learn lessons from history, we should learn from them, and we should continue to learn the additional things that God is going to teach us in practical sense from his Bible.

In a sense, his idea of the Bible was it was a gold mine. It was full of truth. And as men over time read it and understood it, they could improve the lot of civilizations. It turns out that this was a pretty good theory in all practical sense. Whether you happen to have any interest in theology or not, it turned out to be a pretty good theory, and you will see why in just a few minutes as we follow this little group of people on this incredible adventure story.

You have to think about this. When people came to America in Jamestown and other places, it was men. They came here, to some degree, to say they were going to spread the light of Christ to the heathen, but mostly they were looking for gold. That is what the history books show us.

But this little group of people were different. They were going to take their wives and their children on a one-way trip across the North Atlantic to try to plant a civilization. And they were doing it not as a bunch of dogs that had their tails tucked between their legs because they had been chased out of one place and chased out of another place, but with a vibrant vision of a challenge to build a new civilization based on new principles and new ideas. They wanted a change from the European civilization because, Robinson goes on and says: Now, when you go to this new land, be very careful what you adopt as truth, sayeth he, for it is unlikely essentially that a Christian civilization can spring so rapidly out of such thick anti-Christian darkness.

He was talking about Europe, and how Europe was very resistant to ideas that the Bible would suggest were a good way to do things. So he was saying: Now, when you go over on this great expedition, be really careful what you do, because how you set things up is going to be very, very important. And you don't want to set it up just the way they did in Europe, but continue to use the Bible as the blueprint.

So this group of people are going to leave Delfthshaven here and they are going to go across and rendezvous in England with the ship Mayflower.

Now, it turns out this old Speedwell was a leaky bucket. They tried to take a couple of attempts to start from England to go over to America, and the seams on the Speedwell opened up and it started to leak so badly they had to turn around and come back, and then they had to take some of the different passengers off and some of their supplies off. They had to leave the Speedwell behind. It got to be kind of complicated and expensive.

Eventually, like a family getting off on a vacation late, they eventually get in the Mayflower everybody they could fit in there with what supplies they could and started across the North Atlantic. Well, that delay put them in the North Atlantic in the fall, which is a rough time to be crossing the North Atlantic.

Well, the old Mayflower started getting beaten by storms. In the beginning, the Pilgrims--and let me maybe clarify this point now. The people in the Mayflower at this point are really two groups. About half of them are these Separatists, which you see here, and the other half were just jolly old blokes off the streets of England that were part of the merchant adventurers financing this trip to plant a colony over in the New World.

The idea of the colony, of course, was it was going to make money for the people that were financing this undertaking, and they were hoping they would get rich from it. So you have really a little over 100 people, about 50-50 between these Separatists that have a vision for a new civilization and other people that are just there mostly hoping to make a good living and to turn a page in their lives.

So they come across the North Atlantic, and in the beginning the sailors all start making fun of them because they are all seasick. It is pretty miserable to be seasick. You almost feel it would be better to die when you turn green. So the sailors would call them ``puke socks.'' That was what one of the boatswains called them, ``you puke socks,'' because everybody was sick and feeling pretty bad.

But the storms intensified as they crossed, and after awhile the poor old Pilgrims noticed that the sailors weren't joking so much about it. They looked a little bit upset too, because the storms got really severe. And in spite of their prayers and everything else, the Mayflower was just beaten by storms.

One time in the middle of the night they heard a groaning and a crack as though they had run into a rock or something, and it turned out one of those great big huge oak beams that was supporting the main mast had started to sag and break under the weight of the mast and the tremendous pressure of the wind and the rigging and the sails.

So they were almost thinking they had to turn the Mayflower around and go back to England, when one of these passengers, one of the Separatists, remembered there was a big printing press screw jack in the hold, which they fought out of the hold and managed to get it in position and cranked it up to support the oak beam so it would not be sagging.

They continued the trip across the ocean, and because of the storms were blown significantly off course and landed the first time out in Massachusetts, which, of course, is not Virginia. Virginia in those days went as far north as New York, but they were headed much further south. They weren't surprised. They knew they had been blown north by the storms.

So there they are after a couple of attempts to try to come south down the outside of Cape Cod. The winds were very unfavorable, it is late in the season, the storms are rough. These old

square riggers, the Mayflower, they were not great technological wonders at being able to sail into the wind, so consequently they didn't want to get with a hard wind to be driven on to the sandy beach, because the ship would break up and that would be the end of the deal.

So they are anchored out at Provincetown, and it is getting I guess into about the November timeframe, getting pretty chilly up in Massachusetts. They realized that they are not in Virginia and so their charter didn't apply. So now we get the first real lesson in civil government from the Pilgrims, and, boy, what a great lesson for all of us it is today.

Because the charter didn't apply, the two groups that were in the Pilgrims were known as the saints and the strangers. The saints were the Separatists, that is the saints here at prayer, and the strangers were the ones that were strangers to God. And the strangers are saying, hey, it is like Australia, you know. No rules, mate. Everybody for himself. We get to shore, we can do whatever we want to do.

It had quite a smell of anarchy about it, and it was then that the saints said, no, we kind of need to pull things together. So they exercised some leadership, took a piece of paper and wrote a document. It is called the Mayflower Compact, one of the greatest American documents produced. We don't have a copy of it. We have copies, but we don't have the original. It was viewed by the Pilgrims as not really an astounding thing, but subsequently we have considered it of great import.

So it starts ``In the name of God, amen.'' It goes on to say, ``We do covenant and combine ourselves together in a civil body politic for the glory of God, the advancement of the Christian faith, and to frame such just and equal laws as may seem good.''

And so what is it that is so special about this Mayflower Compact? Well, as far as I know, it is the first time in human history where you have a group of free people under God creating a civil government to be their servant. Does that sound like a familiar pattern? Of course. It is very similar to what our Declaration of Independence is saying.

You have to understand in the context of history how innovative what they had done really was, because in Europe, the model for civil government was the divine right of kings. If you are a politician, it was a great deal. You say ``God put me here as king. When I say jump, you are supposed to say `how high?' ''

So Europe had been dominated by the divine right of kings, and each king felt like they weren't a servant, they were the boss. God put them there, and they tell you what to do. That is how Europe did things.

But these Separatists when they came across the ocean had the concept that we are trying to infuse in the Republican Party as we deliberate very soberly about changing the system, that we are going to change the system from Europe and the divine right of kings to the system that the government would be the servant of the people and that individual citizens had God-given rights and it was the responsibility of the government to protect your God-given rights.

That is what the Mayflower Compact was all about, and that is why this very first moment, as they are at the great big oak table in the great room of the Mayflower, why this moment is so significant to all of us, because the Pilgrims gave us the model of American civil government.

Now, to them it was sort of a straightforward idea, because they had already struggled with this question in the context of their church government. In Scrooby, England, they had decided to separate themselves from little old King James. He was a little bit of a weird fellow. He had some very strange social habits. They didn't want him running their church.

So a group of free people under God had covenanted together to create a New Testament church, and they took that model of the New Testament church and simply picked it up and applied it to civil government. A group of free people under God created a civil government, not a church government, to be their servant.

Now, they believed those two were separate, so they didn't tangle up the church with their civil government, but they used the same pattern. So the Mayflower Compact is really to our knowledge the first written constitution pulling these elements together; that under God, free people are creating a civil government to be their servant. That is the basic pattern. It is called the covenantal view of civil government. It is the first written Constitution in America that is on that same pattern. That was 1620.

Now, I will continue with the story of the Pilgrims, but just to jump forward, it is not so long after that, 1620 to 1634, you have a more advanced constitution for Boston, and then a very highly advanced constitution called the Fundamental Orders of Connecticut, only 18 years later. So that is 1638, very early.

The Fundamental Orders of Connecticut has basically the whole model for the whole U.S. Constitution. It has federalism, separate branches of government, a lot of the technical sophistication of the U.S. Constitution just 18 years after these Pilgrims had started with the Mayflower Compact. So you have a tremendous period of the development of the concept of American civil government very early.

Well, I told you this group of Pilgrims here had blessed us in a lot of ways. It should be obvious, two of the ways they blessed us--these are ideas that just completely undergird America. The first is separating civil government from church government. That is something they took from the Bible. It is amusing, isn't it?

The second thing they did was give us our model of civil government, which is the fact that the government is to be the servant, not a fearful master. So those were pretty good ideas.

They also came, and I think this is a pretty important concept, they came with the belief that they could learn things from the Bible and should use the Bible as a blueprint to guide how they did things. And that same concept was picked up later by the people who would follow after the Pilgrims.

So let's finish the story a little bit and get to Thanksgiving. The Pilgrims, they are on Provincetown at the tip of Cape Cod, and they do the Mayflower Compact. Then they take pieces of a prefabricated boat called a shallop that was stored in their holds and they put that together. It had been damaged some by the storms coming across. It took them a number of weeks to build it up. But a shallop is a pretty good size rowboat. It would carry more than a dozen people, it had a sail and a rudder.

They took the shallop up in the shallow water around the inside of Cape Cod, and they had their first encounter at Eastham beach, there just about sunrise. A whole bunch of Indians screaming and yelling shot arrows at them. It wasn't exactly a warm welcome. They shot some of their muzzle loaders off and nobody got hurt. And they continued around the inside of Cape Cod.

They were looking for a place, and Cape Cod, I have a chance to go there in the summer times, it is known as Barnstable Harbor. Translated, that means Barnstable Harbor.

They were out in the surf, the sand is shallow there, they are out in the shallop and it got to be dark, and they are trying to figure out, the wind is coming up, it is starting to snow, they are getting ice all over their clothes. They try to make a run in to where they thought the entrance to Barnstable Harbor was, and they were mistaken. It was not. It was just a sandy beach, and the surf was starting to pile in on the beach. And right when they are in the waves, the guy by the name of Clark says--grabs the steering oar, and he swings the shallop around in a desperate maneuver. He says, ``If ye be men, pull for your lives.''

And they laid into the oars and were able to snatch the shallop out of the waves and out into the deep water. Again, the snow. It's dark and the snow is coming down. Ice is freezing on their clothes. And eventually, eventually they manage to find something where they can pull into the lee of this piece of land where they got out of the heavy blowing wind and were able to pull their boat up on the shore where there weren't any waves, and they spent a waterlogged Sunday on this island. It turned out when they got up in the morning, it was an island in the middle of a beautiful harbor, which we now

know as Plymouth, Massachusetts. The island was named after the seaman Clarke, who said, If ye be men, pull for your lives.

And so they start making rapid discoveries. They find that there's an area of land that's clear where they can plant crops. There's beautiful fresh water coming down from a hillside and a high area that they can fortify to try to protect themselves, defend themselves from whatever problems there might be. Particularly, they were concerned about the Indians that were in those parts. They didn't see any Indians, but they were worried that there might be some because the other Indians over in Eastham had not been too friendly. Of course, there's a reason they hadn't been too friendly. It's because there had been some ships that had come by and stolen some of them and sold them off into slavery. It put the Indians in a bad mood, you might say.

And so you have the Pilgrims now late in the season, in fact, about Christmas Day, starting to build their first shelters in Plymouth. As you can imagine, the trip had been tough. Their supplies were limited. And the people that were getting in and out of the wet boats and trying to work on building shelters there started to get sick. And over a period of the next couple of months, more and more of them died, to the point that in some days as many as four Pilgrims at a time would die. There was a time, a day or two, when everybody was so sick there were only two or three that were able to get up and feed everybody else and sort of show themselves on the palisades of the little fortification they'd made just in case the Indians made some sort of attack.

But they were in rough shape. In the middle of the night sometimes a man would take his dead wife, would drag her out across the frozen ground and bury her under leaves and rocks. And it was very tough. There were children, wives, and adults. By the time that March came around, half of the Pilgrims--almost half the Pilgrims had died.

Now you might ask yourself, these are people that came with a vision. They had a vision that God was calling them to found a new Nation based on new principles, new ideas, ideas that they took from the Bible. And you'd say, Well, where was their God? He blew them off course by the storm and now half of them died. You'd think they might get discouraged. It's easy to be discouraged, as you can imagine, in those conditions. Very few families didn't have someone who died in that first couple of months.

And so the captain of the Mayflower, who had anchored the Mayflower there in Plymouth Harbor for the winter to try to give them some protection, in the spring decided he had lost half his crew, decided he had to sail back to England. And so he prevailed on the Pilgrims. He said, Now, you need to go back with me to England because this little adventure hasn't worked too well. Half of you are dead; half my crew is dead.

And so you can picture standing on the shore, Plymouth, and the wind is blowing through the pine trees behind you and you're looking across to the harbor. There's the Mayflower and the boatswain is giving the call. Sails are being squared to the wind. The sail is being raised. Men are walking or actually turning a big crank. It wasn't quite a capstan. It was a different type of arrangement to lift the old seaweed-covered line that held the anchor to the bottom of the harbor. And first large, then small, the Mayflower disappears over the horizon and there's just the sound of the wind in the trees. And every one of the Pilgrims stayed there on that beach because they believed that God had called them to a mission, to the beginning of something that was going to be great that He would bless, in spite of the fact that half of them had died.

It wasn't too long after that that they had their first Indian sighting. The lookout said, Indian coming. You mean Indians? No. Indian. They look out and here's this tall brave dressed in a loincloth walking boldly down the street. He looks at them and in perfect English says, Do you have any beer? Quite a reception from their first Indian guest.

It turned out he was an Indian that was a chief of a tribe up in Maine. He liked hitchhiking down the coast. And he could speak English. He'd actually gotten to know English pretty well and developed a taste for smoked duck and for beer and things. Until he had eaten a good supply of the Pilgrim's food, he wouldn't tell them too much. After he had a good meal, he told them about the Indians in the parts. He told them about the fact that the land where they were living had been considered cursed by the Indians because the Patuxets that had lived there had died of a plague. And so God in his providence took the Pilgrims to probably one of the only places on the eastern seaboard where they could stay where there weren't hostile Indians.

It turned out they made a good alliance with Massasoit, who was a good Indian chief and had became a friend of the Pilgrims. Massasoit talked to them about the last of the Patuxets that was living by himself, alone and lonely. And when Tisquantum understood the plight of the English settlers in Plymouth, he decided to join them because he knew something about it. He had been shanghaied, sold into slavery, bought out of slavery by some monks, traveled to England, learned to speak English, and gotten a trip back in a ship to go back to the Patuxets. He got there and the Patuxet tribe was wiped out, I assume by small pox or something. And so he's living by himself.

Now he joins the Pilgrims and helps them and teaches them all kind of useful lessons. He told them that in a short period of time that the streams would be full of little fish and they could use that to plant corn. He taught them important things like taking your moccasins off and wiggling your toes in the mud so you can catch eels, which they could fry up for food. All sorts of useful things Tisquantum taught them. Of course, we know him as Squanto, friend of the white man.

Squanto lived with them some time and helped the settlers there. They were living under the conditions of the contract that the merchant adventurers had set up. And one of the things that they had set up was it was going to be a socialistic society. Everybody was going to pitch into the common store. They had common land. They're going to grow food on the land. Everybody had to work the field. Everybody had to wash everybody else's laundry. And that wasn't working too well. In fact, Governor Bradford--he was elected Governor soon after Governor Carver had died, probably of cerebral hemorrhage--Governor Bradford said in his diary of Plymouth Plantation, as though men were wiser than God, he said this idea of socialism--he didn't use the word socialism--taking everything in common may have been a good idea to Plato and other ancients as though they were wiser than God.

But he basically pitched out socialism and said every man can have his own field, could grow his own corn, and his diary said that it made hands very industrious. People who would feign to be sick or too weak to work now were out busy in the cornfield growing corn for their family and the women didn't complain about washing other people's clothes.

Anyway, they got rid of socialism. Eventually, after about a year or so, decided to celebrate a day of thanksgiving. And so they invited a couple of Indian chiefs to join them for thanksgiving. The trouble is the Indian chiefs, Massasoit, brought along about 90 braves. So when the Pilgrims saw this massive number of Indians they were going to feed for a meal, they're thinking, Oh my goodness, this isn't going to work very well.

Fortunately, the Indians did some hunting. They brought deer and turkey and a number of other things, berries that they had collected. And they had a wonderful Thanksgiving. The Indians didn't know they had just been invited for one Thanksgiving dinner. They stayed 3 days and enjoyed Thanksgiving over and over again. In the meantime, they had footraces and contests and shooting with bows and arrows and all kinds of other things that they did that was a lot of fun. It was a great couple-day celebration of thanksgiving in Plymouth Plantation.

Thanksgiving became a very popular holiday in the colonies up and down the eastern seaboard. And the first national day of thanksgiving was called by George Washington to celebrate the adoption of the U.S. Constitution. It was later set at a particular time in

November--I think it was the third Thursday in November as I recall-- and it has stayed there to this time.

So we have the story now of the Pilgrims. As you celebrate your Thanksgiving this year, it might be helpful to think back and say there is more than Thanksgiving with the Pilgrims. They were a group of people who were willing to change the system, to think of different ideas. They came here and separated civil and church governments. They came here and created the model of a written constitution, the idea that the government is to be the servant of the people, that people have God-given rights and that it is the job of government to protect those rights, as we stated another 150 years later in our Declaration of Independence. They came here with the idea that, after trying socialism, it wasn't going to work. They realized that it was not biblical, that it was a form of theft, so they kicked socialism out. They learned that in the early 1620s.

So we can thank these people because of the fact that they were innovative and had that spirit and desire. Even when half of them died and the Mayflower was going back, they clung to their vision. They had the courage to create a new civilization. In the words of Bradford Prince, as written in his diary, they felt that perhaps they'd lit a candle on a dark shore. They felt that perhaps they could be steppingstones for people who would come after them to found a great Nation. So the dream that they had of coming here to do something new, unlike what Europe had done, was very much in their hearts. It was very much a part of their thinking as they scratched that existence on that lonely, rock-strewn Massachusetts shoreline. To this day, as we celebrate Thanksgiving, we can remember their first Thanksgiving when they put a few kernels of corn on a plate to remind them of how close to starving to death they had been at one time.

It's a beautiful story. There's a lot more to it, a lot more adventure to it. There were knife fights in cabins. I haven't had time to cover all of that with you, but the basics are there. This is a great bunch of Americans, a wonderful adventure story and a time for us to give consideration to the fact that we also have been given a challenge, a challenge of a beautiful land that was established on a firm foundation. It's our job to keep it that way and to pass it on to our children--a government that is the servant of the people and not the master.

God bless you all. Have a wonderful Thanksgiving.

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

Madam Speaker, I rise today to honor John Harwood of St. Louis, Missouri.

On Saturday, September 25th, 2010 John Harwood passed into eternity. Mr. Harwood lived an exemplary life of service. He dedicated over a quarter of a century to helping fellow men live lives based on spiritual principles. He assisted many with the development of personal character based on humility, faith, love and service. Mr. Harwood was known as a tough man, who had the courage of his convictions and unique powers of persuasion. Yet, he had a deep sense of service and dedication to fellow human beings. Mr. Harwood often stated that one of the secrets of life is to ``learn to love another human being.'' He exemplified this philosophy in his own life, every day, as he held out his hand to many who needed a little experience, strength and hope on the way to a better way of being.

I ask my colleagues to join me in honoring John today.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

Good evening. It's a pleasure to be able to join you. I had a chance to listen in on some of the last hour presented by the Democrats and their views on the economy. It seemed like a fair amount of sophistry to me and a lot of excuses. It would seem like we're blaming things on Bush and the Chinese. So I am going to be presenting and maybe even have some guests here presenting a different perspective on the economy, and the American people will be the judge of that debate and discussion in November.

Now I would suggest that the Democrats and their policies are actually destructive to the economy. I don't think it's a coincidence that if you look at the 10 cities in America that have the highest percentage of people below the poverty level, that those cities have been managed, every one of them, for many years by Democrats. Now you can blame the Chinese and you can blame President Bush, but I would suggest, and I will show in the next hour in plain, simple terms why the Democrat policies are literally destroying the economy.

Now you could say, well, I don't like that, or maybe you're being partisan. I'm not really quite so concerned about being partisan or whether we like things politically. I'm concerned with America. I'm concerned with the people that don't have jobs. And I'm concerned that not only are we creating unemployment but we are systematically destroying the businesses that can create employment in the future.

Let's take a look at these questions. Those are strong charges to say that the Democrats are the ones that are actually responsible for what's been going on. I think a lot of Americans have some sense that that may be true. Sometimes it's fun to take a look at some of these political cartoons. We have the President here now talking to the guy that owns the china shop: ``Now give me one good reason why you're not hiring.'' And you have health care reform storming in and cap-and-tax or cap-and-trade and the taxes that are impending and all. The point of the cartoon, of course, is the fact that the policies that we have seen are creating the unemployment.

Let's look at that again just a little bit closer. Now when we talk about the economy, there are different ways of measuring it, you can see. Well, is Wall Street doing well? Am I doing well? Am I happy with my job or are things going comfortably for me? Is there a lot of employment or unemployment? Those are measures that we use. We take a look, also, at the rate of the Federal Government, how much it's spending money versus how much it's having to borrow. Those are all things when we say the economy, what does that mean? But particularly it's very personal when we talk about unemployment and it becomes not a political issue but a personal issue when it's your job that was just lost.

We were told that we had to come up with this economic stimulus bill last year. We were told that if you don't pass this economic stimulus bill, this unemployment could get above where it is now. It's going up, could get above, but if you don't pass it, why, we could have 9 percent unemployment if you don't pass this stimulus bill. And so the Democrats, all by themselves, passed this $800 billion bill to supposedly stimulate the economy. After they passed it, what happened? Well, now we've got this unemployment here at 9.7 percent. The numbers vary, but we're pretty close to 10. But that 10 percent is very conservative, because if you've lost your job more than a year ago, you don't get to count in the statistics anymore. So, in fact, the unemployment rate is well over 10 percent in America.

Now we were told that if you passed the stimulus bill, that we could keep it underneath 8 percent. That's the words that the Democrats brought to this floor a year ago. The fact is they were wrong. Anybody can see they're wrong. Just take a look at what the unemployment numbers are, and they don't bear it out. In fact, they spent $800 billion, and where did it all go? Did it go

for a lot of projects? Or was it just more bailouts? In fact, it turned out that it had a lot of bailout money in it that didn't really go for even things that FDR would have considered an economic stimulus package.

This is what's going on. We've got a high level of unemployment. The stimulus package that was passed here, and the Democrats said the Republicans didn't help any. They're right, they didn't, because we didn't think that stimulus package would work. We stood here on the floor, I stood here on the floor on a time just like this, on a Wednesday night, and said, ``It's not going to work.'' But they did it, anyway; and now we can see, it didn't work.

And now what are they going to do? Well, they want to do some more stimulus packages. Is it going to work? No. Because it's based on faulty economics. It will never work. The interesting thing is they should have really listened to the Secretary of the Treasury under FDR, Henry Morgenthau. He tried the same thing. This was back in the 1930s. He said, we've tried spending money to try and get the economy going. We've spent and spent. Now we're in a tremendous amount of debt and unemployment hasn't changed a bit. He said, ``It does not work.'' To this House Ways and Means Committee, Henry Morgenthau, way before I was born, he was saying, ``It doesn't work.'' Yet here we go; we're doing it again.

Now let's take a look more specifically at what the Democrat policies are that are in conflict with creating jobs, because I would suggest that the Democrats have got this problem. The problem is, is that everything they stand for is specifically going to be in conflict with creating jobs.

What are the things they stand for? Well, let's take a look at where jobs come from. And this is the linkage that the Democrat Party doesn't want you to figure out. It's not a very complicated thing. And, that is, if you get a job, you have to get a job from somebody. Who's the ``from somebody''? Well, it's a business somewhere. You can't separate employers and people who run businesses from jobs. Jobs just don't hang out out there floating around somewhere. They're created by an employer somewhere. And if you create conditions economically that make it impossible for the employers, then guess what's going to happen. You're not going to have jobs. It's not very complicated. It's about as simple as a lemonade stand. I'm going to use the illustration of a lemonade stand to try and hammer through this very simple truth; and it's very important, because the future, the economic future, the future of families in America hang on understanding these simple principles.

The idea is that jobs come from an employer; and if you harm the employer, you're not going to have the jobs. And if you do it bad enough as FDR did and you hammer them bad enough, you'll put the employers out of business, and then it's going to be a long time before the company starts up and new jobs can be created. So let's take a look at what happens.

Let's say that you've got a lemonade stand. You happen to have a very fortunate piece of property and a whole lot of people are coming through there. They're hot, sweaty and tired. You've got the one piece of property where you can put up a whale of a lemonade stand. So you start out. You hire your younger brother and sister to work there. You squeeze the lemon juice in the morning and get some sugar from the store, put it all together, you get some ice, get out there and you have a pretty good day. You sell a lot of lemonade, you get going at it, and pretty soon, though, you realize there's a whole lot more demand for your lemonade than you have capacity to make this stuff.

So you start thinking, man, I wonder if I should go down and buy some sort of a lemon squeezer and a great big shaker machine and ice machine. I'll hire five or six more people, not just my younger brother and sister but I'm going to bring some other friends from my class and they can all work at the lemonade stand and we'll make a whole lot more lemonade then, you think to yourself. But for me to buy that ice machine and the lemon squeezer and all, I'm going to have to have some money and I'm going to have to make sure that there's going to be enough money coming in from lemonade to pay off the cost of that machinery.

So if you're an owner of a business, one of the things you have to figure out is you have to have enough money to be able to create new jobs. Now if you go with your plan and you buy the lemon squeezer and the ice machine, you can hire eight more people to make lemonade and you can sell it.

But it requires that you've got to have some money to buy the ice machine and the lemon squeezer. You've been making good money in the lemonade stand, you can see how you could pay it off in a couple of months, but you don't have the money right now. And so as a businessman you're saying, well, I've somehow got to get this money, and that comes into a question about liquidity, if you can borrow some money from somebody.

Now, what happens to this lemonade stand guy if you're running along, you're making this lemonade, and all of a sudden you say we're going to put a tax on lemonade stands and we're going to charge 50 cents a glass of tax on lemonade? Well, if you do that, that means the guy that owns the lemonade stand isn't going to have the money to pay off the ice machine and the lemon squeezer, so he's going to just hunker down. He will pay the tax, he will keep things going the way they are, but he says, man, this is a hostile environment out here. They're taxing every glass of lemonade I make, and so I'm not going to create as many jobs.

Now I guess a lemonade stand may be silly, I'm trying to make it sound simple. It's not complicated. If you tax the owners of businesses heavily they're not going to have the money to make the investments to create new jobs, and it's that linkage which the Democrats refuse to understand and it is so obvious and so simple. Our policies are going after the owners of businesses and we're calling them ``rich guys'' and we're saying you've got to punish the rich guys by taking their money so everybody else can be okay. This is the bailout mindset. This is the bailout fever that has infected this city. It is the bailout concept that the government has to redistribute wealth. And when you take it away from the guys that own the business, you're not going to be creating the jobs.

That's just the mechanics of how economics works. You don't have to like it. I didn't invent it, I'm just explaining what is common sense and most Americans can understand: Jobs come from employers; if you destroy employers, you're not going to have jobs. And how do you destroy employers? The best way to do it? Tax them. There are other ways to destroy businesses, but taxing them is a pretty good way to do it.

Let's take a look at other questions. One, like the lemonade stand example, if the owner of the business, maybe he's making good profit on his lemonade but he doesn't have a huge bank account or money saved up. What he will want to do is go to a bank and borrow some money for his ice machine and his lemon squeezer. So he goes to the bank and he tries to get a loan from the bank, but what we found is going on right now, the policies on banks are so tight--even though the Fed has released tons of money--that the bankers are afraid to loan money to businesses and businesses are afraid to borrow it. That is not a good condition if you're trying to create jobs because you have to have a source of money for businessmen to borrow in order to get innovation and things going to get the marketplace going.

Another thing that's a huge killer of jobs is if the businessman doesn't know what's going to happen. The guy with the lemonade stand is doing a land office business because it's 100 degrees every day and everybody is coming by his lemonade stand. But the thing is he knows the season is changing and fall is coming and he's not so sure that he is going to be able to sell that lemonade as the weather gets colder. Now he's got some unknowns, the weather is in there. Well, we've got a big unknown, and that's what the people in Washington, D.C. are going to do to businesses next.

When the businessman doesn't know what's going to happen, guess what? In Missouri we have an expression, it's called ``hunkering down,'' or sometimes people say ``hunkering down like

a toad in a hailstorm.'' Well, they hunker down because they're not sure what these guys in Washington, D.C. are going to be doing. And if they're going to pass a health care bill which is going to crank taxes way up on everybody that's working for you, if you're going to pass this great big tax increase, there's some uncertainty there. And if you think the economy is really bad and everybody is struggling and there is not much demand because nobody has jobs and the whole economy is sort of sluggish and sitting like a stone, then you're going to be very careful about doing anything in terms of increasing your productivity or how fast or how efficiently you can make something because you're saying, wait a minute, I'm going to have to make a big investment. I don't know if I can sell enough product with the taxes and everything to be able to pay it off. So uncertainty is a killer in terms of jobs.

And then of course red tape and government mandates. If you make that lemonade stand, test every single glass to make sure it's just crystal pure and you have to file a report with the government and with the EPA that every single glass of lemonade is certified and has been tested on analytical equipment to be sure, what that does is that red tape then makes your cost of product go up and it makes it harder for the guy to run his business. So when you do that, he's not going to hire as many people.

So all of these things are things that are going to make the unemployment rate go up in America. These are the main things. Now, this isn't just Todd just invented this, you can see it by common sense. But also, I've talked to all kinds of businesses. I have had forums of businesses and said, now give us the list of things that make it hard to hire people. These are the lists they come up with, it's not a big surprise. This isn't any kind of rocket science. So my proposition was the Democrat policies are basically in conflict with creating jobs. Let's take a look at what some of those policies are because we have examples of them.

We've been told that all of this woe that the economy is in is President Bush's fault, China's fault. Is it really? Here's the legislation. Democrat tax increases. We just talked about tax increases, the number one enemy of creating jobs. ObamaCare, socialized medicine, $570 billion, that's what that is supposed to be for a year. That's a lot of money. Who's going to pay that money? You guessed it; it's supposed to be the guys that owns those businesses. Is that going to make for more jobs? No, it's not. SCHIP, $65 billion. The stimulus, $7 billion. The benefits and other homebuyer credits, $23 billion. HIRE Act, $6 billion. Total package, $671 billion in tax increases. Is that the way to create jobs? No.

Now the Democrats don't have to look at Republicans to get the right answer, they could look at history. They could look at JFK. JFK was a Democrat. He understood this stuff, he got it right. JFK came into a time when there was a recession, and he did the right thing; he knew what the right thing to do was, and that was that he cut taxes. And when he did, the economy rebounded. The Democrats could learn from JFK, but they refuse to. They don't want to hear this because they like spending money. Their solution to everything is more money and more government--more government spending, more government programs. They're not listening to JFK, they should have. They could have listened to Ronald Reagan, but they don't like him too well. They don't have to listen to him, they could listen to JFK.

They could also listen to Bush, who inherited a recession in 2000, and in 2001, 2002 and 2003 did a bunch of tax cuts. Those tax cuts got the economy back going again. They could learn from examples, but they're not. Instead, they're following the same path of FDR, who turned a recession into a Great Depression. And they're not listening to Henry Morganthau, who was the Secretary of Finance under FDR. So these are tax increases. Does that help the job situation? No, not at all. In fact, they harm it.

Well, what other tax increases have we got going? Oh, okay. Not only are we going to increase taxes for all these programs, what we're going to do is we're going to allow all the tax cuts that took place under Bush--which were designed specifically to get the economy going--and we're going to allow those things all to expire or some portion of them to expire, which means that whatever effect they had--because we did move from a recession into some good, strong economic activity in 2004 and 2005 and 2006--whatever effect they had is now going to boomerang, and it's going to hurt us in the same amount in the down side as the other helped us in the up side. And so the ordinary income, the top income rates in 2010, 35 percent, they're going to jump to just under 40 percent. Capital gains is going to go from 15 to 20 percent. Qualified dividends, 15 to almost 40 percent. And the death tax is going to go from 0 to 55 percent.

Let's take an example of what this death tax is going to do. You've got a couple of guys running a farm. You've got 1,000 acres, they've got some good equipment. It's a dad and his son. Tragically, as time goes on, the dad gets old and dies. The farm was owned by the dad. The son wants to take it over--take that equipment, take that acreage and make it go. They hire 10 people to work their farm for them--I just made up the number 10, I don't think they need that many maybe. But anyhow, they got some people that are hired to do that. And so the death tax comes along and says to the son, hey, you owe the government because we're going to tax your dad for dying.

We want 55 percent of the value of that farm. His son takes a look and says, Well, Mr. Government, if I had to sell half the land, I'd be from 1,000 to 500 acres, and I'd have to choose which tractors that I sell. I couldn't make the farm work. If you take 55 percent out of it, I couldn't make the farm work. The government says, I don't care. Just give me my 55 percent.

It may not be a farm. It may be a small business, but that's what this death tax does. That's why we got rid of the death tax because we want those businesses to keep going. We want that money to be plowed in. And we're willing to live with the fact that somebody may be very well-to-do and very comfortable and having a very nice life. We don't begrudge it to somebody to work hard, save money, and do well. Because we realize if you allow that guy to do well, he's going to hire other people, and that's what creates jobs, and it increases everybody's standard of living.

This policy to allow this thing to go back to 55 percent is going to hurt the job situation. It's going to hurt the economy. It's going to hurt Americans.

Now, the other thing here, the capital gains is the same kind of thing. So if you keep taxing businesses a lot--now, there is this other thing, child tax credit, the marriage penalty and the average, those things are changing back again. And the lowest tax bracket, it goes from 10 to 15 percent.

Now, the Democrats may change this a little bit to make it look pretty to people, but if you don't deal with things like the death tax and qualified dividends and capital gains, these are the things that make the difference in whether or not there are going to be any jobs or whether we're going to have companies going bankrupt.

Well, you got the message. It's really dumb to be raising taxes when the economy is having a hard time. Everybody can tell you that. It just isn't smart. There aren't many people who have been dumb enough economically when the economy is in trouble to want to go ahead and push for the largest tax increase in the history of our country.

Now, I notice my Democrat colleagues were talking about how bad it is that things weren't made in America. They said we've got to bring those jobs back in the country. How are you going to bring jobs back in the country when we create a set of rules that makes it so expensive to build something here that you have a huge advantage somewhere else to build it in another place?

What sort of things would that be, Congressman Akin? Are you telling me that America's got policies that make it so people don't want to produce things in America? Well, yeah.

Take a look at this. This is the corporate tax rates of a whole bunch of countries--you may not be able to read them all down here. But this is Ireland down here, has a 13 percent; and as you go down the line, let's see, this is Turkey over here. It's gotten to 20 percent. And let's see. Where else do we go?

Sweden, they're pretty socialistic. They're at 20 percent. Then you've got all the way over here to Canada and France. And that green line, that's the United States. We're second only to Japan in terms of corporate tax rates.

Now, it's pretty hard for me to see the logic of complaining about things being made overseas when what we do with our tax policy is tax corporations so heavily that you create an incentive to chase the production overseas. If you're a businessman, you're competing. You're competing with all of these other countries. And what you're going to have to do is be competitive or else people won't buy your product.

So for us in Congress to complain about foreign imports and things when we've got a corporate tax rate that's second highest in the world is once again an example of Democrat tax policy being completely at odds with a goal of a strong economy and lots of jobs. You can't keep taxing the creator of jobs without losing your jobs. I think it's straightforward. I'm trying to make it simple. Because there's one example after the other that our policies just don't make sense.

Here's a chart done in a little more colorful way. We compete with France and Spain, U.K. and China. We talk about China. They've got 25 percent. Here we are. We've got a 40 percent corporate tax rate. Why in the world would we want to be doing that? It just doesn't make sense, and that's why our economy is in trouble. And if we don't fix this, it will just get worse. Because what you do is you hammer a business and you hammer a business and you hammer a business, sooner or later it's going to go out of business. Then it's going to be a whole lot harder for somebody to start up a new company and try and put those jobs that could have been there otherwise if our policies had been more favorable.

Now, here's what happened when we did the stimulus. The Democrats' answer to this is, of course, well, the government can direct things and make things work and they'll really make it good. So you've got to take a whole lot of money away from all of those taxpayers. Let's grab a whole bunch of money from the taxpayer, and we're going to spend it in this stimulus bill--which, by the way, went to pay, among other things, the teachers' union in California because they had overspent their pensions and were getting near bankruptcy; same thing in Illinois.

So we're taking this stimulus bill, taking money away from States like mine in Missouri, and giving the money to States that couldn't manage their budgets--like California and Illinois--and taxing the taxpayers all across America to bail out people who were irresponsible. That's where a lot of that stimulus money went. It also went to other various miscellaneous projects and all.

But what was the result of all of the stimulus spending? What you see is we've lost 2.6 million jobs since the stimulus started.

You see, Henry Morgenthau was right. It's not logical that, if government spends a whole lot of money, it makes the economy better.

If you ran your household and you're in trouble economically--you've got a whole lot of loan payments that are coming due, you don't have enough salary to pay those things, you've got some medical bills, everything is not right in your economic little family--and you say to your wife, Hey, here's what I'm going to do. I'm going to go out and get this credit card and I'm going to spend money like mad and that way we can fix our problems here with our little family, your wife would think you were nuts. She'd tell you to stay away from the bar or stop smoking them funny cigarettes because anybody's got the common sense to know that if you're in economic trouble you don't spend money like mad. And yet here we are in economic trouble, we spend money like mad, and then we're wondering how come we lost all of these jobs. What in the world are we thinking?

The Federal Government cannot create jobs by spending lots of money. The Federal Government can spend a lot of money and they can hire people. You say, Wait a minute now. The Federal Government takes a billion dollars and they hire all of these people. Isn't that going to create jobs, because you've got these people working for the government.

Well, here's the trouble with that line of reasoning. It's true; you have government employees. But for every government employee, you've taken money out of the economy which could have been used in the private sector. And when you do that, you lose more than two jobs out of the private sector for every government employee you hire. Obviously, you can't do that very long. Pretty soon you've got more government employees than you do people working in the private sector. And when you've got that, you've got a country that doesn't work anymore economically. And we are rapidly marching toward that point where these economic policies are going to bring a great deal of trouble down on our heads if we don't get sober and start taking a look at the hard facts about economics.

Now, there are a whole lot of people now suffering with unemployment, but it's important for them to understand the principle that you have got to allow businesses to prosper if you want to have employment.

This is where the Democrats should do some reading. This isn't too much reading to do for maybe a week or so. Here it is. Henry Morgenthau, Franklin Delano Roosevelt's Treasury Secretary, before the House Ways and Means Committee, 1939: We've tried spending money. We're spending more than we've ever spent before, and it does not work. I say, after 8 years of the administration, we have just as much unemployment as when we started and an enormous debt to boot.

How many times do we have to replay the sad lessons of history? Well, I can hear all sorts of things. Well, Democrats just saying, Well, the Chinese are fiddling with the currency, and President Bush's policies, they're the ones that brought us all this trouble. No, it's not. No, it's not. It's not President Bush's policies.

Look. President Bush spent too much money. His worst year was 2008 when Nancy Pelosi was Speaker of the House here. He had a deficit of $450 billion. Too much. He shouldn't have had 450.

In 2009, under Obama's Presidency, $1.4 trillion. That's three times Bush's worst year out of Bush's 8 years, Obama's first year. The amount of debt incurred in that year was three times in 2009 what Bush's worst was. Don't tell me about Bush. Obama makes Bush look like Ebenezer Scrooge. He's a mere piker when it comes to spending money you don't have. And 2010 you say--was 2010 any better? No, it was worse. It was $2.5 trillion in deficit spending. We aren't listening to Henry Morgenthau. We should learn from Henry Morgenthau, if he is a Democrat. We should learn from JFK. If you want jobs, you can't destroy the businesses.

Take a look at these government deficits. That's the number that I am talking about here. This gives you a little bit of a sense. Now, you can't run your family that way. And over a period of time what we're going to find out is you can't run a country this way either. Because when you have deficits like this what's going to happen eventually is somewhere along the line you got to pay. And who's going to pay? Well, that hasn't totally been determined. But you can bet one thing: When the economy goes bad everybody suffers.

In fact, if I were a happy little Socialist, and I'm not, but if I were a happy little Socialist what I would want to do is I would want to implement an economic policy that made the economy strong because I would get more government revenues to slop around to my friends. If the job of the government is to redistribute money, is to be experts at bailout, which it should not be, but if that is your goal at least you should adopt policies that are going to provide as much revenue to the government as possible.

In 2001 and 2002, if you took a look at the items that the economists would say were the big ticket items of George Bush, one was the war on terror and the other was the tax cuts. And people said, oh, look at all the money the government lost from the tax cuts. So you add the war on terror and you add the cost of the tax cuts, and what you find is that the money that the government was losing in 2001, 2002, and 2003, in terms of the economy being bad, was worse than the tax cut plus the war on terror. And so when the economy is

bad, not only do people not have jobs and poor people suffer, and more well-to-do people suffer, governments suffer too. The governments don't have the money.

And if you happen to be a State governor and you have a balanced budget amendment in your Constitution, such as Missouri, you are in big trouble if you are the governor because you've got to do some serious cutting. And you're not going to be very popular when the economy goes bad and you happen to be a governor. On the other hand, if the economy's doing well it makes you look like a hero because you have plenty of money for everything and you can be benevolent. So when the economy goes bad it sinks all boats, everybody, including government's as well. So this level of deficit spending is unparalleled in our history, and it's going to destroy our country if we continue along the lines.

Here is one way of looking at the destruction right here. See when we have the Chinese buying up our debt, the Chinese are buying Treasury bills and the Chinese are happy because they're getting paid a certain number of percent by the Federal Government for every Treasury bill. And so they're willing to sit there quietly buying up America and they're getting their percent.

Well, what happens when we spend so much money that all the money that we're taking in with taxes can't afford to pay for what our debt service is? This would be the equivalent of you're at home and you've got these credit cards, the credit card companies really like you and everything, and so your family budget, well, you are spending a little more each month, a little more each month, and pretty soon you find out when you add everything all up that you take a look at your credit card debts and the interest rate that you are paying on all those credit cards is more than the amount of money you make. What's that mean? That means you are in deep doo-doo. You are paying more in interest than you are getting in terms of how much money you make.

When the Federal Government gets to this point what's going to happen is that the amount of tax revenue is going to be less than what we're paying on all this debt that we're buying. That's another way of picturing the fact that these economic shenanigans that are going on cannot continue forever. People understand that. It doesn't make a difference if you are a liberal or a conservative. If you have any understanding of economics, you are going to say, look, this is not sustainable. And that's kind of where we are.

This is Social Security and Medicare. This is what their entitlements are going to cost. This is what the U.S. economy is. You can't sustain this with this. It just doesn't work. And so that's where we are. I started with the premise that the Democrat policies, the Democrat policies are actually destructive to the economy and they're destructive to creating jobs. And what are those policies? One after the other they are policies of increased taxation, more government programs, more government redtape. And the combination of those things, along with excessive Federal spending, basically creates a suction where there is no money in the economy for small businesses and you don't create any jobs. And that's what's going on.

So as I said as I began, it's not a coincidence that the 10 poorest cities in America, the cities that have the highest percent of people below the poverty level, have all been run by Democrats, some for over 100 years. And they keep electing Democrats because we don't understand the basic idea that jobs come from businesses. If you want a healthy economy and businesses, you're going to have to allow some people to prosper and just grit your teeth when you say it, some people are going to get filthy rich. But the benefit of allowing a few people to get wealthy means you are going to have some healthy companies and companies that are growing and hiring people. And when the economy does better, everybody prospers.

You got a guy on the street, just a little kid trying to make some money. He goes around mowing lawns. Now that kid, would he rather be mowing lawns in a rich neighborhood or a poor neighborhood? I would suggest the kid may be dirt poor, but he would do better in a neighborhood of millionaires because when he mows the lawn, they are going to give him a little bit better price. Another neighborhood full of people that can barely afford putting food on the table, they're not going to pay him much to mow their yard for them. So when the economy gets better, it helps everybody. And when you drive the economy into the dirt, then everybody suffers at the same time.

We may not like it or not, but we're all hooked together in this great country called America. Now, I think there are some ways we could get a little bit philosophical here. I think there are some places where we as Americans have to take a look at our forefathers and maybe learn some lessons from them. Our forefathers bled and died and sacrificed greatly for freedom. Their understanding of freedom was maybe a little different than the way we are today in America.

Their understanding of freedom was a sturdy independence, a sturdy character of hard work and wise decision-making. Honest business transactions. Courteousness. A sense of neighborhood and community service. It was so many things that I heard in an Eagle Scout ceremony on Sunday. All of these virtues about being courteous and cheerful and hardworking and diligent and all these kinds of things. And that was the freedom of our forefathers.

It seems to me that to some degree now in America we've started to adopt an idea of freedom that it means that anybody can do anything they want regardless of whether it's very smart to do or not. And when things don't go well, we just want the government to come and bail us out. That's what I call bailout fever. I don't think that's the freedom of our forefathers. I don't think the idea is instead of saving for your retirement that you go out and buy the ski boat or whatever it is that you don't really have money to buy, you buy it on credit. And you buy a house too big for what you can afford, and then when things don't go right we say I'm a victim. Those rich somebody or others did this to me. It was George Bush's fault. No, it was the Chinese's fault. No, it's not my fault that I spent all that money on the ski boat. That's not freedom. That's not being responsible. Freedom doesn't mean do whatever you want to do and expect the government or somebody to bail you out and blame someone else. It doesn't mean you are dependent on the government or other people.

Freedom means that you have a right to certain basic inalienable rights, the inalienable right of life, to be alive so people don't kill you, and liberty so you have a right to free speech, to share with your neighbor what you think the truth is and to share your opinions. To be able to get in a town hall meeting and challenge people and say, where did you spend that money and why did we do that? We call it free speech. And to pursue happiness.

To pursue happiness, that means whatever gifts God gave you, whatever desires or interest that you can pursue that career, and you can succeed or you can fail based on whether or not you made good decisions, based on your being responsible.

When the Founders a couple of hundred years ago used the word ``government,'' when they talked about government, they did not think about capitol domes. They did not think about Washington, D.C. They thought about the government that a man exercises over his own life, whether he was honest, hard working, trustworthy, whether he was friendly, whether he was a good citizen in the community, that was the use of the word ``government.''

Today, we tend to think of government in terms of capitol domes. We need to get back to the traditional view of things in America and not look at freedom as license to do things that are irresponsible and then ask Big Brother government to come pick up the pieces, because the government can't afford to do that anymore.

Recent statistics have just come out, I think it was the front page of the Wall Street Journal saying that in a good number of households in America, almost half of them, there is someone in the household that's getting government bailout of some kind, some type of government subsidy.

Now, obviously, if you keep doing that more and more, there is going to

come a point where it doesn't work and that's what all of these graphs and charts are showing, that you can't continuously have the Federal Government spend more and more money without the wheels falling off of everything. We have come to that point, and the point has to be turned around not even so much by people in Washington, D.C. It has to be turned around by the good citizens of America that look back to the strong parts of our past that have made America such a unique Nation, a totally unique Nation in the history of the world, and we have to go back to those virtues and that self-government that's necessary to rebuild this country.

America was built by these crazy people that came here with all these crazy ideas. They didn't know what ``can't'' meant. They didn't know what ``I can't do it'' meant. They just tried. Some dream became a vague possibility, then possibility, and then eventually that dream became reality and America was built one dream at a time.

It became so common we gave it a name. We called it the American Dream. It was a phenomenon of freedom, of citizens being able to be free to succeed or fail without all kinds of government red tape, without excessive government taxation, without bureaucrats looking over your shoulder. They could go out and try. And a lot of them failed.

There was one guy, his name was Edison. He failed a lot. He was trying to make light bulbs. He made a hundred of them. Every one of them didn't work. When he got done with a hundred, he said, well, now I know a hundred ways not to make a light bulb, and he kept on trying. That was that American can-do spirit.

He doesn't ask the government to subsidize his light bulb company; he didn't go to the government for a bailout. He didn't say his mom didn't give him enough chocolate chip cookies so he was really a victim. No, he just went back to the drawing board and kept on working.

And that was the American Dream. So America became a more and more unique country. We came to be the oldest country with the written constitution that we have. We were known for going all over the world when there is a hurricane or a tragedy. Where there is a war where people are being oppressed, you find the American soldiers there helping out. And people around Europe can be cynical; but when there is trouble, they sure like it when America is around.

America was different in other ways too, and in its perhaps most important way America was unique because we were built on a religious principle. We believe that there is a God and that that God granted to all human beings certain basic fundamental rights. We wrote it in a thing called the Declaration of Independence.

We believe that every individual should have the right to be alive. You shouldn't just shoot people. People should have a right to be alive unless they do something terrible. Second of all, that they should have a right to liberty, the liberty to speak their own, to have the right to free speech and to own property, not to have their property stolen from them by the government and given to someone else.

We didn't believe it was ever the government's job to take money from one person and give it to the other. That was socialism, that was theft, that was immoral. You had the right to own what you worked hard for and you also had the right to pursue whatever it was that God had gifted you to do. If you were to be a singer, God would say go out and be strong and do a good job being a singer.

If you are going to be a businessman, be a good businessman. Treat your employees well. Work hard, be diligent. Don't waste; don't pollute.

If you are going to be someone who is a doctor, go to the top of your profession. Do a good job. Take care of people well. Come up with new procedures and new drugs so that people can be healthy.

And over a period of time the standard of living increased in America because we believed in these basic ideas, these traditions of America. But freedom never was a license to take from other people. It was never a license to make the government the big bailout expert.

That's not what our country was built on. And if we go back to this other approach, it doesn't work economically.

So Americans, again in November, they have a choice. You can believe all of the sophistry and the blame of George Bush and this and that, but we have seen the stimulus bill and it flat didn't work. We have seen the taxation of small businesses. We have seen unemployment go up and up and up, and people have a sense that all is not right economically at the tremendous rate we are spending money. They know that we can't keep on this path. And so the choice is to be made November.

Which approach are we going to take? I think the approach of our forefathers to have a sturdy, hard-work ethic, integrity and each person being responsible and accountable for their own decisions, and scaling back that Federal Government, I think a lot of Americans today believe that in an effort to maybe in a good intended effort to do right things.

We have made the government no longer a servant but a master. I think a majority of Americans now are threatened by the government. I think a lot of Americans realize the government is the problem, not the answer.

I believe those people are going to be rendering a verdict on that regard, into that regard. There is a point when the government becomes the master and not the servant. How close are we to that point? How much control do we really have to the machine that is promising so much more than anybody has any reasonable expectation that there is revenue to pay for?

How much control do you have when the government agent talks to you about runoff of water? How much control do you have when you want to look for a loan for your kid to go to college and the government is the only one doing it. The government is in the flood business; they are into the automotive businesses. We have got Government Motors now, not General Motors.

They are in the insurance business. The government is going to take over all of health care. How much do you want the government to run and how good a job have they done with the Post Office?

We have a Department of Energy, that's an interesting Department, isn't it, created to make sure that we are not dependent on foreign oil. Boy, I am sure glad we have got that Department working hard.

We have got a Department of Education. That's a wonder too. The government runs that Department of Education. I think the Wall Street Journal about 3 weeks ago said the ACT test scores of kids that are being tested that want to go to college, 24 percent of them, are ready for college. That's amazing, isn't it? You have got a government product, State government and Federal Government product where 24 percent of them are acceptable.

If you bought gasoline and every tank of gas out of 100 tanks, 24 of them worked and the other 76 of them didn't work, you wouldn't buy gas there very much.

So we can let that government agency then run our health care? Is this what we really want in America? I don't think so. People in Missouri had a referendum on that socialized medicine bill, and they passed by 80 percent a measure to challenge that in court. It is unconstitutional to require people to buy health insurance, they be part of this big government bailout, socialized medicine boondoggle. They didn't want it.

And I have a feeling there is a whole lot of other States full of people who are tired of the government being the master and of the attitude that freedom means you can do whatever you want and if things go wrong you are going to live with the bailout.

We cannot continue the level of taxation that we have done. We have to start rethinking, and it doesn't start in Washington, D.C.

I think there are a lot of people that think if we got things right in Washington, D.C., everything would take care of itself. No, that's not right.

Freedom starts in the hearts of individuals that believe that God gives them basic rights. And when the Federal Government starts to take away the basic rights that God gives you, that's when there is really big trouble. That's where there is a clash; that's where true patriots stand up and say, enough already.

That's what happened in the War of Independence. That's what happened in the other wars of America's past. When people threatened our premise that God gives you certain basic rights, and they got in the way of that, that's when Americans stood up and they acted.

Today, there are a lot of Americans that are saying to our Federal Government, No, this is not what America is built on. Our government was built on justice. It was built on the concept that people are equal before the law. If you are a rich man or a poor man, it makes no difference. Everybody is equal before the law. That's not bailout fever.

We have given up justice and gone to socialism. It hasn't worked in Europe. It didn't work for the USSR, and it won't work for us. We need to go back to what works, and that is people are equal before the law and people are free to take a gamble and try to run their business, and if it doesn't work, then they've got to pick themselves up and try again and not complain that they need more bailouts.

In short, there is a reason why there is unemployment today. There is unemployment today because it was created by government policies. And those government policies have to change. We have to take the chains off of American business, and we have to go back to the principles that work.

Well, we've talked about a couple of very philosophical kinds of things: Justice, which is a very important word. Justice does not mean that Lady Justice who has the blindfold over her eyes is peeking. It does not mean that she peeks and gives a special deal to one person or another person. We have created now, with the law, a special bill to create a whole bailout section of the Federal Government so Lady Justice can peek and give money to one person and maybe not to another.

What confidence does the individual American have that the government is going to come and bail them out when they need it? Is the government going to be there? Do you want to be servant to Big Government or do you want to be a free person? Do you want to breathe the fresh air, live in the fresh air and the sunshine of being free, knowing that you also have to be responsible? Or do you, instead, choose the gloomy path of the promise that the government will take care of you even though you know that it can't economically, or it will not take care of you well and allow you to live in some sort of pseudofreedom where you don't make responsible choices and you hope the government will take care of you when it doesn't work?

That's where we are as Americans. It has to start in our hearts. Freedom starts in the hearts of self-governing people who love God. They love their family and they love their country. And America is full of those people. And I have confidence, I have confidence that the American public still has a passion for freedom, still has a love for this country, still cares about the American Dream and wants to live in an environment where they can be free to exercise their God-given gifts and abilities. They want their children to grow up in a better condition than they are. They want to see civilization building and suffering going down. But the only way you can do that is you have to allow some people to prosper. You can't knock down all the businesses and anybody who makes money and expect to have jobs. You just can't do that. It doesn't work.

And so we come back as we started. Do you want jobs? Let's get rid of all this excessive taxation. Let's do what every President in the past has done when there is a recession--JFK, Ronald Reagan, Bush. Let's cut the taxes. That is what we've got to do. We've got to change the regulations in the banking system so there's liquidity for businessmen to raise money. We have to create an environment where people aren't afraid of some new whacky idea coming down the pike and totally changing the business climate. We have to create a condition where people have confidence that there will be a stable government in this country which is not hostile to business, and we've got to cut the red tape and the government mandates.

What that means is we basically need to take a look at the Federal Government, and we need to say anything that the Federal Government does not have to do, it has to be just gotten rid of. We need to delegate it back to the States or the local governments. We've got to get the Federal Government out of all kinds of businesses they have no constitutional reason to be in, and we have to focus on the basic things, which are justice. We need to make sure there is a level playing field at home for people to do their work, and there has to be a secure environment internationally, which means we have to have national defense. Those are the basic functions of justice. Those should be the functions of limited government.

When the government gets too expensive, you have to go back and say, Wait a minute. Let's do the basics. Let's do the basics well, and everything else the Federal Government does not have to do, then let's get rid of it. That's where we have to be going. That's a clear path. It's something that's not going to happen overnight because it has to change in the hearts of Americans, in the families of America. In the churches and places of worship, there has to be an understanding that it's not the job of the government to take care of everything that goes wrong in everybody's life, because it won't work.

And then Washington, D.C., will change, reluctantly, but Washington, D.C., will change, and we will see a new America and a brighter day and a better day for Americans. We will see a place where people are employed and excited about their work and where there's a responsibility and a vigor and a vibrancy that was so common of the old Yankee that the Europeans used to make fun of. And once again, that Yankee will be back again, Yankee Doodle. They used to sing about it to make fun of us, but as we have seen tsunamis and hurricanes and all kinds of crises around the world, they like old Yankee Doodle to come to help them.

And so I'm proud to be an American. I know that you're proud to be Americans. We have to move back to the policies that made this country great.

And I see that a very good friend of mine, a former judge, a Congressman from the great State of Texas is here to join us before long, and perhaps he will carry on along these lines. I know he is a man who loves God. He fears God. He loves his country, and he loves his family, and that's why I love him. And so I think the next hour will be exciting, and I urge you to stick with us here.

Madam Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

I rise in strong support of House Resolution 1052, honoring the members of the Army and Air National Guard of the State of Oklahoma for their service and sacrifices on behalf of the United States since September 11, 2001. I want to commend Representative Boren of Oklahoma for sponsoring the legislation.

The units and personnel of the Oklahoma National Guard are remarkably diverse and capable. Their contributions since September 11, 2001, not only during the global war on terror, but also for the security of our homeland, are significant. They have conducted multiple major unit deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan, including the mobilization and deployment of the 45th Infantry Brigade, some 2,700 soldiers, to Iraq in 2007. That was the largest deployment for the Oklahoma National Guard since the Korean War.

Oklahoma National Guard units also mobilized more than 2,500 personnel in response to Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, performing missions to protect life and property. Since September 11, 2001, the Oklahoma Air National Guard has flown numerous air sovereignty missions to protect the U.S. mainland.

The successes and contributions of the Oklahoma Army and Air National Guard are directly related to the dedication, sacrifices and the professionalism of the civilian and military personnel who carry out the Guard's missions, and to the outstanding support of families for the continued service men and women of the National Guard. Their efforts and sacrifices deserve our recognition and thanks. For that reason, I urge all Members to support the resolution.

Madam Speaker, I have no further requests for time, and I yield back the balance of my time.

Madam Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

I rise in strong support of House Resolution 1251, as amended, which honors the members of the United States military who died on D-day, June 1944, during the Battle of Normandy.

I want to commend Representative Ted Poe of Texas for sponsoring the legislation.

The facts of the opening day of Operation Overlord, the start of what General Eisenhower called the ``crusade in Europe,'' are clearly set forth in the text of the resolution. This was the largest amphibious operation in history.

The 1st U.S. Army Group, responsible for the landings on Omaha and Utah beaches was commanded by Omar Bradley, known as ``the soldiers' general,'' and, I might add, a native of Missouri.

In breaching German defenses, the Allied Forces suffered more than 10,000 casualties on the first day of the invasion. More than 1,400 Americans died.

Beyond the facts of the invasion, however, is the heroism and unselfish sacrifice of the men who carried out this most magnificent operation. Because of that heroism and sacrifice, the door to Hitler's Fortress Europe was cracked open.

So it's entirely fitting that today, 66 years after that historic day, we take the time to honor and commemorate the men who made the ultimate sacrifice on June 6, 1944.

Moreover, I would also urge my colleagues to take the time to individually thank every previous and current member of the Armed Forces they encounter for their service.

I heartily recommend that all my colleagues vote ``yes'' on this resolution.

I have no further requests for time, and I yield back the balance of my time, Madam Speaker.

Madam Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

I appreciate the good comments from the chairman of the Navy and Marine Corps Subcommittee, Chairman Taylor, and he has got it absolutely right. This is pretty straightforward. This is whether you want a good deal on buying something. There is a little more to it. And I would join with the many members of the Armed Services Committee, including Gene Taylor from Mississippi, and rise in support of H.R. 6102.

This legislation was included in section 122 of the Fiscal Year 2011 National Defense Authorization Act, which was passed unanimously by the subcommittee, the full committee, and by a majority of this House in May. Unfortunately, the Senate has not yet passed its version of the Fiscal Year 2011 Defense bill. It's essential we pass the authorities contained in H.R. 6102 prior to the end of fiscal year 2010, which is why the chairman and I have co-authored this stand-alone bill today.

Simply put, the legislation would ensure that the Navy can enter into a

multiyear procurement contract for F/A-18E/F/G aircraft, which would save the Navy and taxpayers almost $600 million. The Navy plans to buy 124 of these aircraft between now and 2013.

This bill would make no changes to the quantity to be procured. Rather, the Navy has a choice between buying these aircraft in four 1- year increments or spend nearly $600 million less by using one 4-year contract.

Basically you are just getting a volume discount. The Congress already gave the Navy the authority to use the multiyear contract in the fiscal year 2010 National Authorization Act. But the Department of Defense was late in submitting a required report to Congress regarding the terms of the contract. It was due in March, and the Navy submitted the report in May. Due to the Department's delay, unless we provide a one-time fix or extension of this due date, the authority to sign the multiyear contract will expire by the end of the month. This is the correction that was made by the 2011 defense authorization bill passed by the House, also captured by H.R. 6102.

It is true that the Department of Defense was slow to embrace the F/ A-18 multiyear contract, but it eventually saw the wisdom in entering into this 4-year contract for 124 of the Navy fighter planes. The House Armed Services Committee has been pushing the Navy to consider this contracting strategy for nearly 3 years. In 2008, I inserted language into the 2009 Defense Authorization Act requiring the Department of Defense to report to Congress on the potential cost savings of a multiyear contract for F/A-18s. Last year, I successfully added an amendment to the Defense Authorization Act giving the Navy the authority to enter into a multiyear contract for F/A-18s. This year, I added an amendment to the House-passed Defense Authorization Act adding eight additional F/A-18s to help address the Navy's looming fighter shortfall.

Although this bill would not have been necessary had Secretary Gates embraced this cost-savings measure from the outset, I am nonetheless pleased to see that his eleventh hour efforts to secure approval for the multiyear contract are in keeping with his well-publicized position on reducing wasteful defense spending. Likewise, I am hopeful that the Secretary will remain consistent with his new and positive stance on savings and competition as the Armed Services Committee considers additional ways in which to maximize taxpayer dollars.

In conclusion, Madam Speaker, this bill will save over half a billion dollars in taxpayer money while providing vital stability to the fine Americans who build these planes in St. Louis and across the country. I want to thank Congressman Taylor for his leadership and support on this issue, and I urge the Senate to pass this bill quickly.

I yield back the balance of my time.

Madam Speaker, on July 29, 2010, I was absent from the House and missed rollcall votes 491, 492, 493, 494, 495, 496, 497, 498, and 499.

Had I been present, I would have voted ``no'' on rollcall No. 491, ``yes'' on rollcall No. 492, ``yes'' on rollcall No. 493, ``yes'' on rollcall No. 494, ``yes'' on rollcall No. 495, ``yes'' on rollcall No. 496, ``yes'' on rollcall No. 497, ``yes'' on rollcall No. 498, and ``no'' on rollcall No. 499.

Madam Speaker, today I rise to commemorate the commissioning of the USS Missouri to take place tomorrow, the 31st of July, and to congratulate the crew of the newest addition to the United States naval fleet.

USS Missouri is the nation's newest and most advanced nuclear-powered attack submarine. This vessel was designed to not require refueling during the life of the ship--a feature that will reduce lifecycle costs while increasing underway time.

The Missouri is 377 feet long and 34 feet wide, and is capable of traveling in both shallow and deep waters. Specially designed for undersea warfare, she can dive deeper than 800 feet and is capable of operating speeds exceeding 25 knots while submerged.

Weighing 7,800 tons, Missouri is a Virginia-class submarine engineered to excel in anti-submarine and anti-surface warfare, special operations missions, strike, intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance, carrier and expeditionary strike group support, and mine warfare missions.

The soon-to-be-commissioned submarine embodies five of the six Navy maritime strategy core capabilities including sea control, power projection, forward presence, maritime security, and deterrence.

The seventh of the Virginia-class of submarines to join the U.S. Navy, the Missouri was built under a teaming arrangement by General Dynamics Electric Boat and Northrop Grumman Shipbuilding-Newport News.

She is scheduled to be commissioned on July 31st at Naval Submarine Base New London in Groton, CT, and will join Submarine Squadron 4 under the leadership of Commander Timothy Rexrode with a crew totalling 134 officers and enlisted personnel.

Following the commissioning of the Missouri on Saturday, she will be the fifth Navy ship to bear the name honoring the ``Show Me State.'' The fourth such ship was the famous battleship which served in World War II, the Korean War, and the Persian Gulf War. It was aboard this predecessor of the Missouri that the United States and Allied officers, among them Fleet Adm. Chester Nimitz and Gen. Douglas MacArthur, accepted the unconditional surrender of Japanese forces marking the end of World War II on September 2, 1945.

The people of the great state of Missouri are proud to have a fantastic new ship bearing our state's name. It honors our state and the many men and women from Missouri who proudly serve in the United States Armed Forces.

We expect great accomplishments and a life of unwavering loyalty and service from the newest USS Missouri. It is with great honor that I welcome the USS Missouri to our nation's fleet, the best submarine in the strongest navy in the world.