W. Akin

Mr. AKIN

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

Mr. AKIN. 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.

Mr. AKIN. 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.

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

Mr. AKIN

Mr. AKIN. 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. AKIN

Mr. AKIN. 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.

Mr. AKIN. 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.

Mr. AKIN. 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.

Mr. AKIN. 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.

Mr. AKIN. 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.

Mr. AKIN. 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.

Mr. AKIN. 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.

Mr. AKIN

Mr. AKIN. 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.

Mr. AKIN

Mr. AKIN. 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.

Mr. AKIN

Mr. AKIN. 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.

Mr. AKIN

Mr. AKIN. 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.

Mr. AKIN

Mr. AKIN. 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.

Mr. AKIN

Mr. AKIN. 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.

Mr. AKIN

Mr. AKIN. 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.

Mr. AKIN

Mr. AKIN. Mr. Speaker, on July 30, 2010, I was absent from the House and missed rollcall votes 505, 506, 507, 508, 509, 510, 511, 512, 513, and 514. Had I been present, I would have voted ``yes'' on rollcall 505, ``no'' on rollcall 506, ``no'' on rollcall 507, ``yes'' on rollcall 508, ``yes'' on rollcall 509, ``no'' on rollcall 510, ``no'' on rollcall 511, ``yes'' on rollcall 512, ``no'' on rollcall 513, and ``no'' on rollcall 514.

Mr. AKIN

Mr. AKIN. Mr. Speaker, on July 30, 2010, I was absent from the House and missed rollcall votes 500, 501, 502, 503 and 504. Had I been present, I would have voted ``no'' on rollcall 500, ``yes'' on rollcall 501, ``yes'' on rollcall 502, ``yes'' on rollcall 503 and ``yes'' on rollcall 504.

Mr. AKIN

Mr. AKIN. 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.

Mr. AKIN

Mr. AKIN. 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.

Mr. AKIN

Mr. AKIN. Madam Speaker, on July 28, 2010, I was absent from the House and missed rollcall votes 480, 481, and 482. Had I been present, I would have voted yes on rollcall 480, yes on rollcall 481, and yes on rollcall 482.

Mr. AKIN

Mr. AKIN. Madam Speaker, this year marks the 100th anniversary of the Boy Scouts of America. As Scouts from across America gather this week for their 2010 National Scout Jamboree, I rise to congratulate them on their long-standing success, and thank the Scouts for all the work they have done over the years to build our young men into upstanding and trustworthy citizens. Over the past century, the Boy Scouts of America has become one of the brightest and far-reaching youth-development organizations in our Nation with over four million youth members in its age-related divisions. Indeed, the Boy Scouts of America has become part of our national heritage. Since its founding in 1910, more than 110 million Americans have been members of the Boy Scouts of America. Committed to teaching traditional values of trustworthiness, good citizenship, and outdoors skills through a wide range of challenging, participation-based activities and educational programs, the BSA's goal is to train youth in responsible citizenship, character development, and self-reliance. President Gerald Ford, a former Boy Scout himself once said, ``I can say without hesitation, because of Scouting principles, I know I was a better athlete, I was a better naval officer, I was a better Congressman, and I was a better prepared President.'' Part of the reason the Boy Scouts are so successful is because they live by a law and an oath that bind them to the quest for morality and brotherhood. Indeed, the Boy Scout Law is one we can all live by, ``A Scout is trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, courteous, kind, obedient, cheerful, thrifty, brave, clean, and reverent.'' Today we can all say for certain that the Boy Scouts of America have made our country stronger, braver, and more optimistic, as many of its politicians, astronauts, businessmen and other hard-working citizens grew up in the organization--including my own sons. It is a sincere pleasure to stand with the Boy Scouts today, and recite an Oath which for 100 years has marked our Nation: ``On my honor, I will do my best To do my duty to God and my country; To obey the Scout Law; To help other people at all times; To keep myself physically strong, mentally awake and morally straight.'' Congratulations, Gentlemen!