W. Akin

Mr. AKIN

Mr. AKIN. Wow, that's a lot of borrowing.

Mr. AKIN. Not going to do it. Hey, you know, I'd really like to pick up because, as you said, there are people sitting around having dinner in America. In fact, I'm a little hungry myself. I'm going to look forward to getting some chow. But they're sitting around there talking about the same things you and I are talking about here tonight. And we've talked about one solution, which was the government takes $800 billion. That's what the Democrats did with their stimulus bill, and they said, if you don't pass this stimulus bill, do you know what's going to happen? We might get unemployment as high as 8 percent if you don't pass this stimulus bill. So the Republicans didn't vote for it, but they pushed it through anyway. Spent $800 billion. And it really wasn't even good old FDR, you know, ``stimulus.'' It wasn't concrete to build hydro-plants or roads. It was basically taking money from one State, like in the State of, I don't know about Georgia, but Missouri, we're fairly conservative and we have a balanced budget, and we're not overspending. And yet you've got Illinois or California, they're overspending on the pensions of a lot of, like, teachers and things. So they take money away from our States, and I assume Georgia is probably a little bit more cautious fiscally. They take money away from our constituents and send them to the other States where the governments have been out of control spending. Well, anyway, so they get this idea.

Mr. AKIN. The old wealth redistribution. The old socialism deal. So anyway it is $800 billion. And here is what actually happened. This is putting people back to work the big government, Democrat way. Look what happens to the employment in the private sector. It's this white line. So 2007, 8, 9, 10, you see there is unemployment. And yet if you take a look at the red line, that's the Federal Government. It's hiring all right. Instead of letting the businesses keep some of their money and hire people, instead they're hiring government workers. So that's how it works.

Mr. AKIN. The trouble is really the government can't stimulate the economy. The whole assumption is silly, because all the government does is takes money and spend it. But if you hire a government employee, does that create a job? The answer is no, because for every one government employee you have two jobs you have lost from the private sector because you are sucking money out of the private sector. So when you have the government spending a lot, you take jobs away. That's what's going on. That's why the jobs are going.

Mr. AKIN. Now, does that make sense? Is that logical? Now, you know, I was talking to a bunch of people, too, as I went around my district. And you know, people make economics way too complicated. I said, look, it's not that complicated. It's like a lemonade stand. Just picture you run a lemonade stand. It doesn't have to be complicated. And if you want a little business, if it's a lemonade stand or a machine shop or whatever it is, you want to make some jobs, you want to do some jobs, what you want is you have got to allow the guy that owns it to make enough profit from it so that he will add another wing on it, and he is going to sell tea mixed with lemonade, and then he is going to have peach lemonade, and different things and different products, different people. So as he expands his business he hires more people. But in order to let him do that, first of all he's got to keep enough of his profit to be able to invest it back in his business. I mean it's isn't complicated. Don't make economics so hard. And so I am sure you are talking to your constituents. My constituents are nodding their head up and down, yeah, I understand that. Not that complicated. So if you want to know what's going to kill jobs, the first thing is excessive taxation. It's just a killer to jobs. Where does the government get all its money? Taxation. Did you talk about that back in Georgia?

Mr. AKIN. Good.

Mr. AKIN. You are absolutely right. I think you are hitting a couple of different points in this chart. The first one I am talking about is excessive taxation. But taxation also creates an economic uncertainty. And if you have got that lemonade stand and you don't know what's going on, you think maybe a tornado is coming, or maybe there is a tornado coming from Washington, or whatever it is, what you are going to do is you are going to hunker down. In Missouri, we use the word hunker down. I don't know if there is a verb to hunker or not.

Mr. AKIN. Is it? Okay. Anyway, if you are talking about economic uncertainty, if you don't know what's going on as a businessman, what you are going to do is you are going to be very cautious, very conservative, and you are not going to hire a bunch of extra people. But let's take a look at these job killers. Excessive taxation. Lets's take a look at what's coming down the pike. You have to be able to see. This is the largest tax increase in history unless Congress is going to act to deal with it. First of all, for married people the standard deduction decreases if you are married. And then parents, you have a child tax credit, it will be cut in half from a thousand to 500 per kid. If you die this year and you have an estate, you pay nothing. Next year if you die, 55 percent tax on it. You are a small businessman. You have gotten to be 80 years old. You got your business all going, it's really doing good. It's actually a farm. It's 1,000 acres with some big pieces of equipment. It's worth $10 million, your farm is. And you up and die this year, and you pass that farm on to your son and he runs it, no problem. Next year same thing happens, you got the nice farm, got it all set up, you die, the government says, hey, taps your son on the shoulder, I need 55 percent. But he says wait a minute. If I take half the land of the farm then it doesn't make the thing work economically. I can't run the farm on half the land and half the equipment. If I have to sell 55 percent of it, you are going to put me out of business. They say you don't understand. You owe the IRS 55 percent of the cost of that farm. And so that small business closes down next year because of this policy. Because what are we doing? Largest tax increase in history. Take a look at some of these tax increases. If you are paying 10 percent, you are going to be paying 15 percent next year. Those who are paying 25 percent of what they earn, they are going to be paying 28 percent. Those paying 28 are going to go to 31. Those paying 33 are going to go to 36. Thirty-five is going to go 39. Capital gains, dividends, death taxes. All of this stuff is going up.

Mr. AKIN. Same cycle again. So basically what you are saying is, let's say that you don't make hardly any money at all. And so you are saying to yourself, hey, I am not making much money, so I am not paying any income taxes. So do I care? I like it if the taxes go up. Oh, no, you don't, because what happens if you have excessive taxation? You get no jobs. You know, you can't just beat up on businesses, say all businesses are bad and then complain there aren't any jobs. So if we keep soaking the owners of businesses with excessive taxation, we're going to have a problem with jobs. So what the solution to these problems is--we're making it sound complicated. It shouldn't be complicated. It's simply that you've got to back off on taxes and back off on government spending. It's as simple as that.

Mr. AKIN. Right. And that's the thing. People get really upset. In fact, the Democrats that were talking before we came on tonight, they're very upset that all of these jobs went overseas. And I'm thinking to myself, Well, who's pushing all of the jobs overseas? You create an environment in America that is hostile to business and the jobs are going to go overseas. It is as inevitable as water running downhill. And what do we do? We keep increasing taxes, increasing government spending, and the smart executives and corporations in America that have plants and facilities all over the world, they keep creating jobs. It's just the jobs aren't here. The jobs are going overseas because they've created such a hostile environment that the jobs aren't going to be here. And how do they make the environment hostile? Well, first of all, by too much in taxes, and the second thing, of course, is too much spending. Here's a containment dome. We've had some trouble with oil leaking out of containment domes. And here's one. This is a containment dome. There's another containment dome, and it's not working either. It sure isn't working. Take a look at the rate of the spending that we've been doing. And the spending is always followed by, of course, a whole lot of taxation. And so the first thing is, if you want to get this thing back on track, if you want to do the opposite of job killers, you want to create jobs, then what you need to do is you want to cut your taxation. This is one of those things I started out by saying I wish the Democrats would learn from the other Democrats, and one of them they could learn from was JFK. JFK had a bad economy and he did the right thing. He cut taxes. And when he cut taxes significantly, guess what happened? More jobs, stronger economy. And the funny thing is--now this is sort of odd. If you cut taxes, the Federal Government will actually take in more money in revenue than if you didn't tax it. Have you thought about that? It's almost counterintuitive.

Mr. AKIN. So let's do that again, because these numbers are interesting. You're saying Georgia basically did a little experiment along these lines. It was a specific tax on one product--that is, tobacco--and they increased the tax on tobacco.

Mr. AKIN. I was trying to explain that to some--because I give some of these talks to my constituents, and one of the ways I try to explain it is let's say that you're king for a day and your job is to tax a loaf of bread and you want to get as much tax revenue as you can by taxing bread. And so you go through this little exercise in your mind and say, I can tax the bread $10 a loaf or one penny a loaf. If I taxed at one penny a loaf, nobody would notice, and I would get a penny times all of those loaves of bread. But if I got $10 on a loaf, wow, I could make a lot of money, but then maybe nobody would buy any bread because it's too expensive. So common sense would say somewhere between a penny and $10 you're going to come to an optimum place where you can get the most tax on it and people will still keep buying bread. If you increase it, you actually lose revenue; If you decrease it--so there's an optimum spot. And what's happening is the government is taxing people so much, by increasing the taxes, it basically stalls the economy and so their revenue drops. Now, if I were a happy socialist, if I were really one of these guys that wants the government to do everything for everybody----

Mr. AKIN. You're absolutely right. I like the idea of being positive. And the solutions, one of them was JFK. He cut taxes, and the recession, after a period of about a year, turns right around and things go along well. Ronald Reagan did the same thing. Massive tax cut. As soon as he did that, the economy--takes a little while--the economy turns right around because there's money now being invested not in more big government but the businessman puts that money into different new ways of creating, buying another milling machine, another wing on the building, more money for research and development to come up with a better way to make a product. And all of those things together, when the money goes back to the small business man, they start to hire people. I think--what is it?--companies with 500 or fewer employees employ 80 percent of Americans. So if those smaller businesses from 500 employees on down, if they got more money to spend on their own business, that's part of the solution. And everybody does better when that happens. Of course, another thing that kills jobs is this insufficient liquidity. The businessman can't borrow money because it's all tied up in banks. Of course, we've got that problem going on now, too, and part of the reason is the government is gobbling up so much money with their incredible, incredible level of Federal spending which, once again, we point to this chart. This is what's happened under Obama the first 2 years of his Presidency. It's three times more deficit than Bush, in his worst year, had. So this liquidity is a big deal to the businessman. And the banking rules right now make it hard for small business men to get liquidity. And as you mentioned, the economic uncertainty. Who is going to take a risk when you see the lineup of what's happened to us? First of all, you've got Wall Street bailout, and then you've got Cash for Clunkers, and you've got this stimulus bill where we waste $800 billion. And then we passed cap-and-tax at three o'clock in the morning. It was supposed to be about how bad CO2 is, and what's the solution to the bill to keep CO2 down? You guessed it, a whole lot of taxes and a whole lot of red tape and government regulations

Mr. AKIN. We are glad to have you, too. We wish we had some more people who would vote along the lines of getting these jobs going and getting the economy going.

Mr. AKIN. But you haven't mentioned Georgia peaches yet. You've got some good peaches down there.

Mr. AKIN. That's what it boils down, too, isn't it? Two different visions for America. One of them is there are all these people who are victims and the government has to take care of them and you don't have to be responsible and you are just going to be part of this permanent welfare idea. And I don't think Americans by and large really want that. I think Americans really like the idea more of having the courage to live some dream that God puts on their hearts. You know, the way that this country was founded, they believed that every single person that God created in this world had some purpose, some job that God had in mind for them to do. So what they did was they came up with the idea that the only thing that you got in trouble for up in New England was if you didn't work. You see, over in Europe they had all these classes and they had certain people who didn't want any calluses on their hands because they didn't like the idea of working. But the people that came to this country said, no, your job is to work hard because God made a job for everybody to do. In the process of doing that, they created almost a classless society because how can you look down your nose at somebody else if God made one person to be an accountant, another person to be a blacksmith, another one to be a farmer? How could you look down your nose if somebody is doing what God called them to do? But it was always the idea of hard work and being honest and so people could be free and chase the dreams that they had in their heart. But I don't think people are happy when the government is dishing them out, you know, always dependent on the government, you see, and I don't think that's what America is all about. I don't think Americans are happy with the system where they're just constantly going to be dependent on the government. I think people love freedom in this country. As you talk to people around your district, I ask people if you had to summarize what is America all about--I love to ask that question. Let's say somebody from some foreign country came and they had a bunch of TV cameras and put it in your face, and you've lived in America. Can you tell me just in a sentence what is the basic secret of what makes America such a special place. And the word that I always hear is freedom, freedom. It is not like, no, that the government's going to take care of me. No, it's the idea of being a free person, and that's something that's so precious to us in this country.

Mr. AKIN. You know, when people make a mistake--we were talking quite a bit about socialism, and liberals really just hate it when you mention that word ``socialism,'' but really an awful lot of Americans don't know socialism when they see it. And it is very dangerous, it's deadly, and it goes to the idea of what's the job of the government. And if you go to our Founders, right off the bat the Pilgrims had socialism imposed on them by the loan sharks from England, and they pitched it out. They knew it wasn't any good. They knew that socialism was really a system of stealing where the government would take from one person and give to another person. If you go to the founding of our country, it was built on a bright vision. There was a fresh air; there was a vibrancy and enthusiasm because you could fail. There was an incentive to do well. The understanding was that the job of the government was limited and limited in a particular way, and that was, the job of the government was justice. And Lady Justice was depicted--they chipped her out of marble, you know, and she's sitting there and she always had this blindfold over her eyes and she held up the scales, and the scales were what the law says and your own actions. But she always had that blindfold on. Well, what did the blindfold mean? Well it meant when you came before the government, before Lady Justice, she didn't peek whether you're black or white or male or female, rich or poor. She just said this is the way the law applies evenly to all people. But socialism does something different. Lady Justice peeks and says this one's rich, this one's poor. I'm going to take from this one to give to this one and then we get sophisticated and we steal from everybody and pass it around to everybody else in the government. It gets more and more inefficient, but Lady Justice is peeking. That's socialism. It's wealth redistribution. It is institutionalized debt. It's morally wrong, and worst of all, it doesn't work.

Mr. AKIN. Which really kind of wraps back around. I promised when we started we'd ask a couple of these really basic questions, that is, Can the government steal? A lot of kids say, well, the government can't possibly steal. The fact of the matter is the government can steal when the government does stuff that it's not its job to do. And one of the things it's not its job to do is to take something from one person and give it to someone else and that's, of course, what the President said that he wanted to do with the government. He announced that before he was elected that that was his plan, to take money from Joe the plumber and give it to someone else. And, of course, he said he wouldn't tax anybody that made less than $250,000, and yet that silly cap-and-tax bill that we passed in this Chamber before you were here--you don't have the shame of having that having gone through here--but if you flipped a light switch, you start paying a tax. You know, it isn't a matter of 250,000 bucks, you flip a light switch you're going to be taxed. And that socialized medicine bill, wow, is that ever a disaster. They've got taxes in there on wheelchairs. I thought I saw a taxing on everything that moves or doesn't move, but they've even got taxes on wheelchairs in that thing, and of course the problem is that's what kills jobs. It's messing the economy up, adding to the insufficient liquidity, the economic uncertainty and of course the red tape and government mandates. You put this package together and you can go both ways. You can have a vibrant economy, people free and prosperous and out there chugging along, good economy, or you can just keep on dialing in more and more government interference, more tremendous levels of spending, and basically what you're doing is you're killing freedom.

Mr. AKIN. I think you're absolutely right. The idea, though, that we can bring the level of spending that we've got going on under control by just trying to get efficiency, I think that's probably optimistic. I think what we have to do is decide that there are some things that Washington, D.C. should not be doing in the first place. We shouldn't cut it; we should just totally eliminate it. It should just stop. None. We need to take a good look at our Federal spending and say, What are the things the Federal Government has to do? We have to defend our Nation. We know that much. Because the States aren't going to do that. We have to make sure there's no pirates on the high seas. There used to be a law, it was one of the few Federal laws against piracy on the high seas. There was a Federal law when America started that was against counterfeiting, because that was not a State job; that had to be a Federal job. There are very few jobs that originally started at the Federal level. And then everything else, we have to push them back to the States. I would be happy to say, look, if the people of California, or Massachusetts, or Tennessee want to have socialized medicine, let them try it and see how it works. They could learn from Massachusetts. It didn't work well. They could learn from Tennessee. They about shut down medicine in Tennessee. If States want to try these things, let the experiments begin at the State level. But at the Federal level, we have got to basically stop a lot of stuff. The first place I would start with would be just what Ronald Reagan said, shut down that Department of Education. I had a group I was talking to down at a Honda dealership just a couple of days ago and I asked them, How much benefit do you think you've gotten from a whole bunch of Federal bureaucrats that work in the Department of Education? Has it helped your kid any at all? There were these blank looks. No, I don't think it's helped a whole lot. So what happens if you sell the building and just shut down the Department of Education at the Federal level? Why can't that be done at the State or local level? I think we have to ask those tough questions. Maybe you could make a case, gosh, it would be nice if; but we can't afford it. Here's a number: Debt and deficit as a percent of GDP. This is deficit. Here's the United States. We're right alongside of Greece and Spain and the United Kingdom. We're right in there with these European countries that are struggling, and we're not much better off than they are. We're way overspending. Here is debt as a percent of GDP. You've got the United States. There are only two other countries that are worse than we are, that's Greece and Italy.

Mr. AKIN. Let's try and speculate a little bit. Let's say the income for the whole year, they make a hundred bucks. So what does this mean, 91 percent? If their income is a hundred dollars for the year, what does that mean? That means they've got an incredible level of debt. They're not going to get back out from under it hardly.

Mr. AKIN. That's the problem.

Mr. AKIN. Yes. So the point is, what do we do here in America? We basically have to stop thinking that the Federal Government is God and that it's going to solve every problem. We've got the Federal Government now, they're into the automobile business, the insurance business, the student loan business, they're in the flood insurance business, they're in the food business, they're in the housing business. It kind of reminds me, there was this country that I grew up paying close attention to in the U.S., and it had this philosophy that the government is going to give you food, and it's going to give you a place to live, some shelter, it's going to give you an education, the government's going to give you a job and it's going to give you health care. We looked at that country and thought, That's not going to work. And it didn't work. The whole country crashed economically. It was called the USSR. Here we are today, and what does the Federal Government try to do? Give people housing and food and education and a job and health care. How are we different? What we have to understand is the Federal Government has to be reined in to do just what it's supposed to do, which is justice. That is, provide a set of laws where everybody is equal before the law and a national security that protects us from terrorists and other people that wish us ill. So that Federal Government is just going to have to go on a diet.

Mr. AKIN. I think you and I have a pretty good idea what they're liable to say, because they have enough business sense to know what's happened historically. They know socialism doesn't work, and they know what you've got to do is as the jobs and wealth and freedom, those are things that come from free people. It isn't the government that makes jobs. It's the businesses. It's all of the innovative Americans that are out there, that are living that dream in their heart. From the beginning days of this country, there are these people, these crazy people that came to this land with some dream of something they wanted to do. I remember there was one guy that had this idea, he wanted to build light bulbs. He built a hundred of them and none of them worked. His attitude was, now I know a hundred ways not to build a light bulb. These crazy people came with these dreams in their hearts, the dream became a vague possibility and eventually it became a reality, and America was built, one dream at a time. It got to be so common, we called it the American Dream. I know, gentlemen, as you travel in Georgia and you talk to those people, that you really get to love them out there, and you hear the stories: ``Well, my wife and I were sleeping under a park bench, but we had this idea for a little business. That was 20 years ago. Well, now, my goodness, we've done pretty well. The kids are in good shape. We've got a nice house. I think I might be selling the business.'' We do this, this, or that. Who would have thought it? We've got one guy in Missouri. He started a little company called Innoventor. I love this story. Talk about somebody with some imagination. He had grown up on a hog farm. Some of us that are from suburbia, we're not too fond of the by-product of those hog farms. But he had a lot of that by-product kicking around trying to figure out what to do with it. And so this guy took all this pig manure and he put it into a tank and he ran the temperature up and the pressure up in the tank according to some basic principles of the way that we work with petroleum products and figured out a way to turn all that pig manure into this thick oily sludge which they then use to make asphalt. And so he's got a section of road in the State of Missouri that's paved with asphalt made from pig manure. Of course the first question is, does the road smell? He says, No, when you get it up to this temperature, all the ammonia and things that you associate with smell is gone. But here's a guy that took something that nobody wanted, people looked at it as a liability, and he's got an invention that's going to turn that pig manure into asphalt to pave our roads with. That's the kind of thing that makes America. I thought that was a colorful example. I know you've got stories of your own from Georgia. My brother was a Ramblin' Wreck from Georgia Tech. I know they've trained some good engineers down there.

Mr. AKIN. Well, you know, that is a heartwarming story, and it shows the basic nature of your 10-year-old son. He understands that somewhere along the line, that he was made to do something, and even that God maybe has a plan for him, and his thinking was, I want to help my dad. You know, there is nothing I think as a Christian that inspires me more than a passage in the Bible that is in Ephesians. It says that we are God's workmanship created in Christ Jesus. That means that each one of us is a unique and special person. But not only that. Here is what exciting. He says unto good work which God prepared for us to do, every single one of us has a purpose in this world, and the purpose is to do some good work, which our Father wants us to do. And it is a pretty exciting thing if you are not cynical to say, you mean I can actually do something that would please my Father in heaven? You see, I think the freedom that we treasure in America was given to us so that we could do that mission that we were created to do. That is what freedom is all about. It is not to abuse, not to have the government take from one person and give to another person. It is about each one of us doing what we were called to do and living that American dream. Then as the country builds and becomes strong and we have this attitude that everybody has a purpose, everybody, there is no one that isn't included in that, and that the freedom we enjoy is freedom so that we can do what we were created to do in the first place. When we have that kind of attitude, it gets contagious, and all over the world people are going to say, hey, look what is going on in America. Isn't that exciting? Those people really do believe in freedom. They understand the difference between socialism, which is big government doing something that is stealing, it is dishonest, and allowing people to follow their god-given direction. That means as you said though that people will fail sometimes. We try, we fall down, we have to get up and try it again. If we didn't understand that, none of us would know how to walk. We fall down the first few times. And I found that out trying to ski as well. You know, there is a part of my anatomy that worked as a brake for quite a while. It got pretty sore. But we keep getting back up again, and that is necessary in a free kind of society. But I think America loves that sunlight and bright light of freedom and that fresh air and the enthusiasm of the challenge, and the fact that every one of us has a purpose that we were put on this earth to do. The Lord has given us the simple commandment, thou shalt not steal, and when somebody takes something from one person and gives it to you and you didn't earn it, you see, that is short-circuiting the way God made everything, and that is why it didn't work. It didn't work for the Soviet Union, it hasn't worked in these other countries. Socialized medicine doesn't work. Yes, you get insurance, but you can't get any health care. That doesn't do you any good. Well, I appreciate your joining me, and thank the good citizens from Georgia for sending up such a great Congressman, Congressman Graves. Is a pleasure joining you.

Mr. AKIN

Mr. AKIN. Mr. Speaker, we're going to talk about an interesting subject here this evening, and one that might seem a little boring to start with but actually has tremendous ramifications, and that is the question and the subject of budgeting. Now, budgets are always kind of an unpleasant thing because there's a natural requirement of a budget to balance a couple of things, balance spending and how much money you take in. So when a family works on a budget, it may be a hard time because you have to make choices between what are you going to spend your money on and how much money do you have to spend. So budgeting is one of those tough things, but it's necessary for organizations in order to be organized enough to try to keep some semblance of economic sanity. We're going to talk about budgeting some. And the subject is of some interest tonight because, if you think about a family, maybe some families budget in a much more formal process, others do it a little bit informally, but more or less what they try to do is keep how much money is coming in pretty close to what's going out. When they don't, they start to get some very high credit card bills. Of course, small businesses, very important for them to budget. So who is it? Which one do you think forgot about budgeting? Fortune 500 corporations? No. Schools have budgets. But we find tonight this curious phenomenon, and this is a little bit like watching an eclipse or something. It doesn't happen very often. Since 1974, when the Budget Act was passed, it's never happened that Congress did not have a budget. And yet, this year, Congress, it's Congress that doesn't have the budget. Kind of an amazing thing. We've heard our floor leader, Congressman Hoyer, he says it isn't possible to debate and pass a realistic long-term budget until we've considered the bipartisan commission's deficit reduction plan which is expected in December. That sounds a little bit like an excuse, doesn't it? It's the first time we've done anything bipartisan in the last 18 months if they did wait for it. And if it were bipartisan, I'm sure they wouldn't be interested in passing it. Is it true that we have to wait until December to pass a budget? I don't think so. There's no excuse. There's a balanced budget resolution here. Here it is, actually, a copy of the front of the bill. Of course, the trouble with this, this has a big problem. This is a Republican budget. This is a budget that's talking about getting the budget balanced by 2020. It's an austere budget. It's a tough budget. It's a budget that you'd argue about, but it's a responsible budget. And I'm joined by some very good friends of mine on the subject of budgets. And we're going to move from budgets. We're going to end up answering at least one question. That is, well, why are budgets important? I'm joined by my good friend from Arizona, Congressman Franks, an expert on quite a number of different subjects, and we're going to talk a little bit later tonight, too, about doing some oil drilling. I believe you were, was it 16 or 17 when you had your first oil rig? But I yield time to my good friend.