W. Akin

Mr. AKIN

Mr. AKIN. So what we have seen, according to what you're saying, is very clear. First of all, you've got the tremendous, tremendous level of spending, which is exactly the wrong thing. And what is happening with that tremendous level of spending, you're getting what you would expect, you're getting a lot of unemployment, and that's making it worse and worse. As you do that spending, of course, we have a question of who owns our debt. In 1970, the foreign debt holdings were 5 percent. It doesn't seem like 1970 was so long ago to me. In 1990, 20 years later, foreign holdings had gone from 5 to 19 percent. Now 2010, another 20 years later, total foreign debt is now 47 percent. Those are not numbers that make people who understand business and understand economics comfortable with where we are in this country.

Mr. AKIN. What we have is foreigners basically bailing us out. As long as they're willing to do that. But pretty soon they're going to say, If you want us to bail you out some more, you're going to have to pay me more interest. And boy, it's going to be a problem then. This is a comparison. Sometimes it's helpful because when you start talking about billions and trillions of dollars, you say, man, the only thing I can understand is a hundred or a thousand dollars. And so here we are compared to other countries. This is deficit as a percent of gross domestic product. This is the United States here. We are third only to Spain and the United Kingdom in terms of our deficit. The United States is third only to Greece and Italy. You take a look at these European countries, and they're not just in nifty economic shape. In fact, I heard a statistic today, I don't know if you had heard this before, gentleman, but I was told that if you take a look at what we call the poverty level in America, a person in America living at the poverty level is doing better than a person in the middle of the middle class in Europe. That's what socialism buys you. I will say that again. A person at the poverty level in America is doing better economically, right at the poverty level line, than somebody who is a middle class person, an average middle class person in Europe. That says that all of this Keynesian socialistic stuff is terribly inefficient. And here we go right down the line trying to imitate the examples of Greece and Italy and the United Kingdom with the fact that we're just overspending radically. We go back to this thing. It just seems like, I've talked about this a lot of weeks, you've joined me, and this isn't that complicated. There are things that kill jobs. One of them is excessive taxation. When the government takes too much money, the people that have the businesses can't invest because they're giving their money away. So what are you going to do? You tax all the well-to-do people. It's well- to-do people who own the businesses. You can't have it both ways. If you want to destroy the businesses, you're not going to have any jobs. It can only be one of two ways. Insufficient liquidity. We have the wrong laws in terms of that policy. You have just given us an incredible example of red tape and government mandates just destroying the job market out west. Those are amazing numbers. Did your office pull those numbers together, gentleman?

Mr. AKIN. I think we need to make sure that given a particular period of time--and I appreciate your joining me here. Thank you very much, Congressman. I am so thankful for some of the very, very fine people that are good thinkers, very thoughtful, coming from all areas of our country that have a deep interest in America. What you have going on here is a systematic attack on the fabric of what America really is. And you have a belief system if there is a consistency in Federal policies, and that consistency is that the government is taking everything over, and the American public, at least a certain percentage of the American public, is really getting concerned about that. They are concerned because they feel like we're losing our country. The government is not our friend, the government is not our servant. The government is becoming our master. It's becoming a tyrant. And it's taxing us to the point and it's spending to the point that it's going to destroy our country. You take a look at what's going on in Europe, and you see that we're competing with some of the most fiscally irresponsible nations in Europe in terms of our numbers, in terms of our spending, in terms of our taxation. And this has got a lot of people scared, a lot of people scared. And they have very good reason to be. And the fact of this matter is you can hear all kinds of economists talk about fancy theories, but it's not very complicated. It's as simple as a lemonade stand. If you tax that lemonade stand too much, the guy that runs it can't afford to keep it going. If you tax it just less than too much, you make it so he is never going to add any new lemonade stands, because that takes extra money, and you took all his extra money away. So when the government takes money and creates jobs, or hires more people, now the government--supposedly, the rate of pay of a government employee is twice what it is of an employee in the private sector. If the government keeps doing that, what happens is it pulls money out of the economy. That creates the unemployment, and then you start to go into this joblessness situation. So here we are. These things are not complicated. Too much taxation. JFK understood that you can't do that. You've got to cut taxes. Ronald Reagan understood that. George Bush understood it. And when they cut taxes, what happened was we pulled out of the recession. Insufficient liquidity. This is one of those policies just like Congressman Bishop was talking about, where the Federal Government is making bad business decisions, making it hard for businesses to get loans. And most of the businesses don't even want loans because the environment is so toxic for business there is what we say in Missouri, they are hunkered down like toads in a hailstorm. Because they're saying, oh, my goodness, we've got all this economic uncertainty and all this red tape that's being generated, we don't know what's going on next. And as that happens, they're not investing the money. So what happens? We don't have jobs. So this is all very predictable. It's about as simple as a lemonade stand. If the government red tape tells you that you've got to test every glass of lemonade you make, and you have to put 10 different tests on it, it makes it so expensive that you can't sell the lemonade. This stuff is not that complicated. What's happened is the government is no longer the servant of the people; the government is taking over massive sectors of the economy, and they are spending way beyond what there is any possibility that we can maintain. And most people, when they take a look at this level of deficit spending, they realize that something has to change. Now, there's a couple different ways that you can change it. The first you could do is you could just take everything the Federal Government's doing and try to freeze it or reduce it. The problem is that's not going to get it. The second thing you could try to do is get rid of the waste, fraud, and abuse. Well, there are no line items that say waste, fraud, and abuse. And you're not going to fix this problem by getting rid of waste, fraud, and abuse. What has to happen is we have to go back to some sense of sanity and realize that the Federal Government's job is not to play God, not to try to be all things to all people, but have the Federal Government become limited once again and do the things that it must do. Most of the things we're trying to do now could be done by States. We should send those decision-making policies back to the States. And what we need to do, instead of spending this much money, we need to do the few simple things that the Federal Government can do and must do. What are those things? Well, first of all national security. States are not going to be able to run our military. That's not the job for State government. That's a job for Federal Government. And the other thing is, of course, our law enforcement system, the fact that we don't want terrorists running around inside our country. So the justice that the Federal Government should be rendering is external, that is our military, and internal in the sense of our police, and laws, justices, courts, et cetera, and jails. So those are the basic things the Federal Government has to do. When the country started a long time ago, Washington, D.C. was a boring place. They only had a couple of laws on the Federal books. One of them was against piracy on the high seas. That was something that the States weren't having to deal with. That was a Federal job. Piracy on the high seas. Another one was counterfeiting. The Federal Government makes the money supply. You don't want people counterfeiting. That was a Federal law. And so you had a few Federal laws, but all kinds of other things were done at the local and State level. But here what we've got going on is the government is trying to be God to everybody, trying to be all things to all people; and what's happening is it doesn't work. It never worked in other countries. I'm amazed that we would be foolish enough to do this level of spending. We saw a country, it was called the US--It's something that I recall historically, called the US, and they had a philosophy of government in this particular US that said the government is going to give you food and housing and education and a job, and it's also going to give you health care. That country was called the USSR. That country economically failed and collapsed. We all saw it coming. We were frightened of it because of their nuclear weapons, but we saw that their economy didn't work. And what are we doing with this? Every single thing the Soviet Union was doing, which is the government is going to take care of your housing, it's going to take care of your food, it's going to take care of your health care, going to take care of your education, and your job because the government is taking over all of these businesses. We're repeating the same thing that didn't work. And Americans all across this country--I'm not talking about just Republicans, Democrats, and independents--it's just people are starting to get it that we're on the wrong track. So it led to the bumper sticker that said, Had enough change yet? I think that's one of the things the President promised was change. And I think he's certainly keeping his promise in that regard, if in no other. So these are things that are really upsetting people; and when you take a look at the combination of what's going on, these are really, really serious. The comparison of these other countries I think is really telling. When you see deficit as a percent of GDP and the United States is third worst in terms of deficit--debt is a percent of GDP; United States is the third worst. You go, This is not good at all. Then you find out the statistic that I just heard about today, which says that the poverty level, the line that says you're in the poverty level in America, that line is the average of the middle class in Europe. The average person in the middle class in Europe lives below our poverty level. So do we want to go down the direction of what these European countries are doing with the government taking everything over, all kinds of rules and regulations that hamstring the free enterprise system? I think not. I'm going to close this evening by talking a little bit about the America that I love. The America that I love was populated by these crazy people that came here, and they had dreams to do amazing things, things that a lot of people would have said in Europe that you can't do that. And yet these people came to this country with these dreams, and the dreams as they worked on them became a vague possibility and then even a possibility. And finally they became a reality. And so America was built one dream at a time by different creative people that came to our land. I think first of all of my favorite historic group of people, the Pilgrims coming to this land; and just over a hundred Pilgrims came. They had a dream of creating a civilization different than anything in Europe. You know, the teachers always say the Pilgrims came here for religious freedom which, of course, is silly. They had religious freedom in Holland. They didn't come here for that reason. They came with a much more grandiose idea. They wanted to build a new civilization unlike anything they'd seen in Europe. And so they gave us certain ideas. They separated church government from civil government. They wrote a written Constitution called the Mayflower Compact, the first time in all of human history that a group of free people under God created a civil government to be their servants. The civil government servant, not master. That piece of paper signed on the great table of the Mayflower. In ye name of God, Amen. Goes on to say, We do covenant and combine ourselves together into a civil body politic for the glory of God, the advancement of the Christian faith, and to frame such just and equal laws would be meet and necessary. The first time there was a written Constitution under God of a group of free people making a civil government to be their servant, the entire foundation of the American civil government founded in 1620 because these people dared to have a dream, and when they came here within the first 3 months, half of them died. And the Mayflower going back to England said, You guys better give up. You started here as a little over a hundred, 103 people. Now you're down to barely just 50. You need to come back to England and give up. They said, No. We believe God called us here for a purpose. So they said as they were dying as they got older and as Plymouth Colony survived and did well, they said they thought that they were stepping stones for people who were going to come after to build a new nation because they had a dream in their hearts of what this country could be. By the way, they threw out Socialism in Plymouth Colony because they knew it was unbiblical. They understood in 1620 what we don't understand in 2010. They were followed by other kinds of people, all of the diversity of these people that came with all of these crazy ideas. One of them built a hundred light bulbs and not one of them worked. And his attitude was very cheery. He said, Now I know a hundred ways to not make a light bulb. He kept trying and pretty soon Thomas Edison made his first light bulb. So America was built this way on free enterprise by people having the courage to take a try at something and fail and try again. But it wasn't built by the government trying to give everybody jobs and the government taking everything over. They were trying to get away from those big kings of Europe. They wanted the government to be simply a servant, just a facilitator, a facilitator so people could enjoy what they believed were their God-given rights, to life, to liberty, and to the pursuit of happiness. They could pursue happiness. They knew the government could never guarantee happiness. But they just new that they could try. And so it was for generations and generations. America became one of the most unique and exceptional countries in the world because it was based on a new idea, a new set of principles. Some people call it free enterprise. Some people call it the American Dream. Some people talk about it as the can-do attitude. And what we're doing is we're killing that dream. And that's why we stand here on the floor and talk about these policies. What we're trying to do is to turn America back into Europe. We left Europe. We don't want to go back to Europe. Some people may want to go back to Europe. Be happy if they'd take a one-way ticket over there. Don't turn us into Europe with the socialistic policies of the government taking over everything. We've seen so many examples of the Federal Government being lousy at doing what it does. We think about the efficiency of the post office, the compassion of the IRS. Think about the Energy Department. The Energy Department--people aren't aware it was created so that we wouldn't be dependent on foreign oil and ever since the Energy Department was created, we're more and more dependent on foreign oil. Talk about something totally failing in its mission. And we've just seen what happened in the gulf oil spill. We've seen taking the President 50 days before he even contacted the head of BP. The President having the authority to put a team together of the best resources not only in the country but in the world and being unwilling to take these big ships that foreign countries owned that could come and suck up all of that oil and process the oil and spit the water out. But no, we're not going to do that. Dithering around with more and more government bureaucracy. Is this the sort of thing that we really want to put more trust in our Federal Government? We've seen historically that federal governments of foreign countries have killed more people of their own citizens than all the wars of history since the time of Christ. If you add up all of the people killed in wars since the time of Christ historically, there are less people killed by war than there are by governments killing their own citizens. Do we not have some natural fear of excessive government? I don't understand why we have this irrational faith in the efficiency of big government. It seems to me that it's just a very, very unwise place to be putting our faith. Why do we want to go back to Europe? It doesn't make sense. I think we need to think, rather, in terms of the bright light and the freedom that comes from people being allowed to succeed or to fail, for people to be able to pursue their dreams. The Bible tells us that for every single human being in this world, God made a special job for them to do. And when people have the courage to just chase after what's in their heart, the dream that's in their heart, that's what makes great civilization. That was one of the things that distinguished America that made it such a unique and different Nation because people were able to follow the dream that was in their own heart. And how can you do that if the government starts to keep taking everything over and taking more things over and taxing you and making it impossible for you to do the kinds of things that Americans for generations have done? There are two views of America that we see. The view that you see now is the view that reflects the Democrat Party. What you have seen for 18 months is total Democrat decision-making. The Republicans on most of these issues vote ``no,'' and we are totally ignored because we are, quite frankly, 40 votes short in this Chamber. And ignored in the Senate as well. So what you see is Democrat policy, what you see is European policy, and what you see is the destruction of the American Dream. And that must stop.

Mr. AKIN. Wow. And then, of course, the economic uncertainty as you're saying. When you see the government taking over the auto industry and the insurance industry and then going to take over the health care industry, that makes people that understand economics very uncertain. They're not going to put a lot of money into trying to create jobs. They'll make jobs. There's a president of a company in St. Louis called Emerson Electric. Emerson Electric says, we'll make jobs; we're just not going to make them in the United States because we can't afford to. We have created a set of policies that are so toxic, we have done so well with this list of job killers and doing every one of these things very well that he said, Yeah, we'll create jobs, but they're going to be in foreign countries because we can't afford to do business in this country because we've made the environment so toxic. And yet we talk about saying, oh, my goodness, we've got unemployment, we've done all this wonderful stuff, but now we've still got to do more to help the unemployment, if what we're doing was so wonderful. Take a look at these policies. Sometimes a picture is worth a thousand words. Here we have the President saying, ``Now give me one good reason why you're not hiring.'' You've got the government taking over health care, the cap-and-trade, the global warming thing, and all these other taxes that are coming along. As it turns out, health care has got a lot more hidden taxes than we realized in it. Here's the poor shop owner of the china shop with these bulls marching around; he feels like hiding behind his desk here because of the fact that we just can't seem to understand some very, very basic economics. Here is what we're doing. One of the big killers, of course, is tax increases. These are the corporate tax rates across the entire world. You see the green line over there, it says the United States has the second highest corporate tax rate. We say, gosh, I can't figure out why we don't have more jobs. But look at what we're doing. It's foolish policy. And then you can take a look at the largest tax increase that we're looking at starting in 2011 unless Congress acts. Married people; the standard deduction is going to be changed.

Mr. AKIN. Yes. Well, if you recall, in 2001, the Republicans inherited a recession. So they had to do something about it. As President Bush was running for office the first time, he said, what we've got to do is cut taxes and cut spending. So what they did was we cut taxes three different times in different ways. Those taxes, because of the way the Senate worked, they were going to go along until 2011, so it was a 10-year tax cut. At 2011, the taxes were going to revert back to the way they were at 2001 when we were in the middle of a big recession. So we did those tax cuts, particularly a tax cut in 2003 or so, and that was dividends and capital gains. What that did by cutting those things, we allowed those businessmen to invest in their own business. And we saw employment jump up. We saw the economy jump up. And ironically by cutting taxes, the Federal Government raised more money than they had when the taxes were higher. And that worked fine. So now with the economy in the pits, what we're going to do is raise these taxes, which is just plain crazy. I don't know how long we have to stand on the floor and say, look, the idea of continuing to spend and tax is not what's going to create jobs.

Mr. AKIN. That's correct.

Mr. AKIN. Not only have we failed to do anything proactive, but the Democrats have made it absolutely clear that they will not renew these tax cuts. They're not going to do this. So we know that we're going to end up with the biggest tax increase in our history right on top of this huge unemployment and a recession going on. This is not wise.

Mr. AKIN. I think that what you are saying is the list I gave you before is incomplete. I said the government wants to take over autos, they want to take over insurance, they want to take over student loans, they want to take over flood insurance, they want to take over whatever it is, a sixth of the economy with socializing medicine, but it's not enough for them to own all that. What they also want is they want to own the land. So they're going to tax businesses with some sort of a pretext this is a little tax because of the gulf oil spill, and they're just going to use it as a slush fund to buy up more land. It goes back to Rahm Emanuel, he is chief of staff for the President, his incredible statement that let no crisis go without taking full advantage of it. So we've got a crisis that is largely perpetrated by the Federal Government in the gulf. Certainly BP was culpable for doing some things wrong. But their poor decision-making seems to be eclipsed by the total failure of the Federal Government to deal with something that's fairly fundamental. It's called a hole in the bottom of the ocean. And if you were really going to be on top and show people that the Federal Government was something you could really trust, you would put a fusion cell together, you would get people to make decisions, instead of Governor Jindal asking the Federal Government for permission to dredge up a little sandbar to stop the oil and waiting more than a month, as the oil comes into his wetlands, to get an answer. I mean the Federal response to this thing, and a lot of the problems on the oil rig, were because of all kinds of Federal regulations as well. So we have this idea of the containment dome. Here's another containment dome that's not working. We're spending some money, and we're spending it at an unusual rate, a rate that would destroy our country if it continues that way.

Mr. AKIN

Mr. AKIN. Madam Speaker, on rollcall Nos. 448--``yes;'' 449--``no;'' and 450--``yes.''

Mr. AKIN

Mr. AKIN. Madam Speaker, on rollcall No. 436, H.R. 4773, Fort Pulaski National Monument Lease Authorization Act, had I been present, I would have voted ``aye.''

Mr. AKIN

Mr. AKIN. Madam Speaker, on rollcall No. 434, H.R. 4514--Colonel Charles Young Home Study Act, had I been present, I would have voted ``aye.''

Mr. AKIN

Mr. AKIN. Madam Speaker, on rollcall No. 435--H.R. 4438, San Antonio Missions National Historical Park Leasing and Boundary Expansion Act of 2010--had I been present, I would have voted ``aye.''

Mr. AKIN

Mr. AKIN. That's pretty straightforward. All you have to do is just create one job per every three businesses, and there's no more unemployment.

Mr. AKIN. It's one of those things, it's sort of an inevitable law. And you can't just let the government continue to grow and grow and grow, because eventually it takes over everything like a cancer.

Mr. AKIN. Don't you go giving people ideas here in D.C. Somebody will try and do that you know.

Mr. AKIN. Of course, obviously, that doesn't work, does it?

Mr. AKIN. This is what was promised with the government bailout. You know, we are going to do the stimulus bill, $800 billion. And if you do the stimulus bill, these are the numbers the administration and the Democrats said--this is what's going to happen to unemployment; it's going to go down. And if you don't pass the bill, they said this is what's going to happen. But we did pass the bill, and that's what happened. Obviously, their economics don't work. They don't understand the facts. So where have we gone? Here is the picture right here. This is the nasty little secret down here. You remember hearing that they used to say that George Bush spent too much money.

Mr. AKIN. See, those are these blue years, was George Bush. And then right here was a Bush year, but this is when Speaker Pelosi was in charge of Congress. So this was in a way, if you give Bush credit for when Pelosi was in Congress, Congresswoman Pelosi, then this would be his worst year, which is about $460 billion worth of deficit. That's his worst year. The next year, 2009, was when President Obama and the Democrats ran everything. Take a look at this jump. My goodness, it's a three times worse deficit than the Republicans had run under Bush, and Bush was spending too much money. And I agree we were spending too much money. And then the next year, 2010, it's even worse.

Mr. AKIN. If you spend more money, look what happens. You start to lose jobs.

Mr. AKIN. This is kind of an amazing chart. These are all different countries all around the world down here, and there's a little green line there. And this is the corporate tax rates. And this little green line happens to be the United States. And the only one with higher taxes on corporations is Japan. And we wonder, gosh, we can't understand why we've lost jobs in this country. Well, we've got the second highest corporate tax rate going, not to mention the taxes on individuals, as you're saying. So we're not doing the job. And part of the reason we're doing all of this taxation, of course, is because we're spending too much money.

Mr. AKIN. That's the trouble. There aren't very many of them that are happy because they're so worried about somebody else making money that they don't think--if I were a happy socialist, I would want a strong economy so I had more money to swap around to my buddies, you see. But instead what we're doing is we raise the taxes so much, it kills the economy and we don't have as much money to work on. Now, the Federal Government doesn't notice it so much, but State governments that have balanced budgets--Missouri has a balanced budget amendment. We have to balance a budget. And if you're a legislator or Governor, particularly in a State that has a balanced budget--and most of them do--when you have a recession, it is a tough time to be the leader of your State because people hate you because you have to keep cutting things to keep the budget balanced. Of course, down here, we just let it go.

Mr. AKIN. Madam Speaker, it's a treat to be able to join you this evening to talk about the things that are of great significance to our country and to every individual citizen that lives in America. I thought that as we got into the subject of where things are with jobs and the economy tonight I might start by introducing it in a little different way than we do sometimes here on the floor, and what I'm going to be talking about tonight really is the fact that there is this fundamental difference between Republicans and Democrats. And most of the fighting and argument comes really in the answer to just one question. It's kind of a really simple thing. And the question is this: What should the Federal Government do? That's really what divides us. That's what makes all the people here in this Chamber disagree with each other, and sometimes even scream and yell, but at least respectfully disagree with each other, because we have a fundamentally different idea of what the Federal Government should do. That's a huge part of what we discuss. And, of course, the more that the Federal Government is going to do, it is going to cost more. And the more that it costs, the more regulations and all that you have, the more laws that are passed. And, inevitably, as the government does more, people have less freedom. So there is some sort of a question, well, you know, what should the Federal Government do. So we're going to be talking in a way about that tonight because it is the question of politics, essentially. And of course the Democrat position is--it's almost like the law of gravity, that wherever there's a problem, the answer always is more taxes and more government. The government should fix that problem. That's what they think. And the Republicans always say, well, we want less taxes and less government, and they tend to go that way. So we're going to talk a little bit about that. We're also going to talk about sort of a theoretical question that sometimes I used to ask interns. We had an intern program. These are students that are in college and are just about to graduate from college. And I would ask them this question, and that is, Is it possible for the government to steal? Can the government steal from people? And you'd see they'd get these quizzical or puzzled looks on their faces. Can the government steal? Well, what does that mean? And you'd see them thinking, Well, I guess it's impossible because the government can kind of do anything they want and, therefore, the government can't steal. Of course if you come to the conclusion that the government can't steal, then that means that you believe the government owns everything. Do you really believe that? Many people are taught that in school. As they get older, as they work hard for a living, they start to take a different perspective. They worked hard for that dollar bill, and they're not so sure they want the government to confiscate it. Anyway, we are going to be talking a little bit about the conditions in our economy and where we are. Why is it that we have a problem with jobs? Why is the economy flat on its back? Why do we have a sense that things are not well in America? And there are some answers to those questions. It's not complicated. We simply look to the people who have gone before us and see what those are. I am joined here this evening by a new Member of Congress, a young man that shows tremendous promise and is joining us here on the floor tonight from Georgia. Georgia seems to be a good State for growing congressmen. And my good friend Congressman Graves is joining me on the floor here tonight from the State of Georgia. We are here early enough that it may be that even some of your constituents will have a chance to say, Hey, that's my guy. We sent him to Congress, and he's doing a great job. Welcome, Congressman, and we are going to get into things here in just a minute. I thought I might start, though, by going back a little bit to how did this economic problem come to be. And of course history just kind of continues to go along. But if I had to pick a point, this is kind of an interesting one. This is September 11, but it's not 2001, it's 2003, 2 years after the attack on New York City, September 11, 2003. This is the New York Times, not exactly a conservative oracle, is reporting some news and this the news. It says that the Bush administration today recommended the most significant regulatory overhaul in the housing finance industry since the savings and loan crisis nearly a decade ago. And it goes on to say that under the plan disclosed in the congressional hearing today a new agency would be created within the Treasury Department to assume supervision of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Why? Because they just lost about a billion dollars, and they weren't running their house very well. Now, Freddie and Fannie are not government organizations. They're quasi-government. And when Freddie and Fannie started doing some wild and wooly things economically, the problem was that the assumption was the Federal Government would come and bail them out. And so Freddie and Fannie are getting out. This is 2003. Real estate market's booming. President Bush says, watch out, Freddie and Fannie are getting in trouble. I need more authority as President to control Freddie and Fannie. Freddie and Fannie, paying many lobbyists up here on the Hill, dishing out hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars, thousand dollar bills, just passing them out all over here. So there's Freddie and Fannie. They're starting to get in trouble. President Bush says we've got to regulate them. Now the Democrats, on the other hand, the guy who is now in charge of taking care of regulating Freddie and Fannie because he's in the majority now, this is Congressman Frank, the Democrat, he says, these two entities, Freddie and Fannie, are not facing any kind of financial crisis. Well, that's interesting. We, of course, 20/20 hindsight we say, well, obviously you were wrong. I'm sure he would admit he was wrong. They were facing a financial crisis. And as Freddie and Fannie start to crash and collapse, we start to see the recession that's upon us. And so that was a piece of it. Now, Freddie and Fannie, their whole concept was that we're going to require banks to make loans to people who really can't afford to pay the loans. Now, how that's compassionate I'm not so sure because I wouldn't want to be in debt to some loan for my home that I couldn't afford to pay the mortgage payments on. But many people were encouraged to take loans out on houses because they're going up in value so fast during those years. You just go ahead and take the loan, postpone paying any interest payments. Five years later turn the house over, you doubled your money. It sounded good for a while until the music stopped, and then you didn't have a chair to sit in. And so we have the beginning of this financial problem that was based on liberal social policy that said that banks have to loan money to people who can't afford to pay those mortgages, and we'll just sort of sweep it under the carpet. Well, then as the economy crashes, what happens? Well, we go back to the same old mistake we've made in the past. Unfortunately, with the stimulus bill the Democrats didn't learn from their mistakes. I wish they would learn from other Democrats. They may not want to learn from Republicans, but at least learn from other Democrats. This guy, Henry Morgenthau, is Franklin Delano Roosevelt's Treasury Secretary, and he's the one that started with the recession which turned into the Great Depression because they did the wrong things. So he says now, after 8 years--their idea was that if you grab the loops of your boots and pull hard enough, you can fly around the room. The idea is if the government spends enough money, it will make the economy do really well. And so they tried it for 8 years. And this is his report to Congress. He says, We have tried spending money. We're spending more than we've ever spent before, and it does not work. I wish they heard those words: ``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. You want to know why we've got unemployment? Because we haven't learned from going back even to FDR's Treasury. This was Keynesian economics. It says if the government hires a whole lot of people, spends a whole lot of money, it's going to make the economy okay. But the trouble is, it doesn't work. I'd like to ask my good friend from Georgia now, Congressman Graves, if you would just join us. Let's talk a little bit about this whole situation because I don't want to be just critical of the Democrats. I will be critical of them, not because I don't like them, but because they're wrong. Their economics are wrong. They're doing the wrong thing. They're hurting the American public. People are out of jobs, and what we need to do is say, that's not the right way to do it. But we have to have a good solution. We have to offer something constructive. And let's talk about that. I yield.

Mr. AKIN. It sounds like the people from Georgia got their nickel's worth out of their Congressman. Thirty-one separate meetings?

Mr. AKIN. I wouldn't want to be your car.

Mr. AKIN. You're saying $167 billion of indebtedness just up to the time of just before the 4th of July?