W. Akin

Mr. AKIN

Mr. AKIN. I think it was 140,000 direct jobs. These are not the barbers and the restaurateurs and stuff. This is just the hard jobs that it's going to kill.

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.

Mr. AKIN. That's really discouraging.

Mr. AKIN. I'm not sure about the intent. Yes, your whole idea about little Lord Keynes and his idea about spending one's way into prosperity strikes me about like grabbing your boot loops and trying to fly around the room, you know? I don't know if he was a boot loop kind of guy, but anyway, he was certainly different in his view of economics. My good friend from Arizona.

Mr. AKIN. I think he also promised that nobody making less than $250,000 would be taxed, right? Yet, if you flip on a light switch, you are going to get taxed. How do you square those?

Mr. AKIN. Gentleman, you expressed that in good scholarly terms about your debt being as high as your GDP. But just trying to put that as a family--if you're a family and you make $100 a week and your credit card bill is $100 a week, you're in trouble. That's what you're saying. In fact, you're more than in trouble. And I think that's what you're talking about

Mr. AKIN. I don't think they want them to see that graph.

Mr. AKIN. I thought it would be appropriate to talk about what these bars mean. It's pretty straightforward. These were Republican years under Bush, and this shows the deficit. We're not proud of this deficit. Shouldn't be any. The worst year under Bush was this one where Speaker Pelosi ran the Congress. So this was Bush's worst year for deficit right here. So we go from 2009 to 2010 with President Obama, and he's three times the Bush level of deficit and this year is even higher. Now, one of the ways to measure these things is this deficit is a percent of our gross domestic product, all of the stuff that we make in America. This is running at about 3.1 percent. This is about 9.9 percent right here. Now, these numbers have consequences, and the consequences are your children and your grandchildren. But it also could precipitate a crisis a lot sooner, and we really don't know what that crisis looks like. What happens when you go to the bank and your ATM doesn't work? You worked all of your life and you have savings in the bank and there isn't any money in there because you can't get any money out because the dollar bill isn't worth anything. Have we ever experienced that before? We've seen some high inflation that's not pretty. What happens if the banking system just stops working because we pushed this too far? What is the civil unrest? What happens with our just-in-time food inventories when there is no more food on the shelves and when there is no more gasoline at the gas pumps because we have pushed this too far? How far is too far? I don't know, but I know this: This isn't the right direction that we are going. I yield to my friend from Georgia.

Mr. AKIN. Was it you?

Mr. AKIN. Yes. And that's one of the factors that totally destroys jobs--and that is the uncertainty factor. So if you want to ruin jobs, raise taxes a whole lot, create a lot of uncertainty, and then spend way beyond your means. That's what we're doing. It's a war on business. There are a couple of different things. We talked about these tax increases that the Democrats did. Here's something they didn't do at all. They haven't fixed the problem with Freddie and Fannie. These are two timebombs ready to go off again. They started the big crisis before when we mismanaged Freddie and Fannie. As much as people go ``boo'' and ``hiss'' at George Bush, in September 11, 2003, he was asking for authority to regulate Freddie and Fannie because they were out of control. And the Democrats blocked that legislation in the Senate, and now we have a meltdown on our hands. So there's some things that are taxes, some things that are spending, and some things that are no action at all that all feed into this problem. So this sounds kind of boring.

Mr. AKIN. You're a pilot. I think we used this analogy the other day on the floor, because I remember as a kid the biplanes and the early days of flight. My science teacher flew glider planes and designed some of the glider planes that were used in the D-day invasion. He was a guy that hated what he called ``fizzle ed'' because he wasn't in great shape and he didn't like the football jocks. But the ironic thing was he got an award to the National Hall of Fame of Glider Pilots, which is an athletic type of thing because he could do all kinds of aerobatic loops with his glider planes. And he taught me some basics about flying. And what caught my attention was, in the early days of flight you get in an airplane and you do one of these deals where you don't have enough power and you pull the airplane into a stall and the airplane falls over backwards and it'll start to spin. And it was called a graveyard spin, I guess. When pilots got into those things, they kept flying the airplanes into the ground, which ruined their whole afternoon. Finally, somebody realized--I guess a smart pilot decided to gamble his life. He said, I think there's a way out of this problem. And it's counterintuitive. And that is, when you're in that spin, the temptation I guess of pilots is to pull the stick back and try to get the nose of the plane up so you don't fly into the ground. And that just makes it worse. So this guy, when he's in this graveyard spin, he says, I'm going to do it. And everybody is watching him, Here goes another guy who is going to fly his airplane into the ground. And instead, he kicked the rudder to stop the spin, pushed the stick forward until the airplane stabilized. And then he pulled the stick back and pulled it right out and made it look easy. You know, the solution is JFK, Ronald Reagan, and George Bush all understood the solution to this problem. It doesn't have to be doom and gloom. The solution is, stop Federal spending, stop the high tax rate; and pretty soon we'll come out of the graveyard spiral. And we don't have to do another Great Depression. We've done that before. I don't want to be too doom and gloom about this, but the fact is these numbers are hurting people. This is the President. He says, Now give me one more good reason why you're not hiring, and you've got this great big socialized medicine bill, which is well calculated to destroy the economy, and then this goofy cap-and-tax excuse for global warming. I asked my constituents, Which is more important to you, our dependence on foreign oil or global warming? And it was an 80/20 type thing. Let's get practical. We need to be doing something about our energy business in this country is what they're telling us. But it isn't all doom and gloom. There are solutions to these things. My good friend from Arizona.

Mr. AKIN. I very much appreciate your starting off on a very sobering kind of note because I wanted to get to that question about, well, maybe budgets sound boring, but what does it mean? And I think you put that in graphic terms. You are saying it's more damaging than some war that some foreign conqueror could wreak, more havoc than a war.

Mr. AKIN. That doesn't sound too complicated.

Mr. AKIN. Unprecedented.

Mr. AKIN. Unusual. And what are the implications of all of this? You know, the Congress didn't pass a budget, but the administration sent us a budget. This is kind of a complicated looking chart. But this isn't very complicated in a lot of ways, because this thing is receipts. This is the money coming in. And this is outlays. Now, this is the sort of chart that you need to have some first-graders, because they could give us some real wisdom. We could say which one of these circles is bigger? Is it the red one or the blue one? The red one is bigger. So we're spending more than what we're receiving. That says your budget's in trouble. That's not very complicated. And it's so much in trouble that the U.S. Congress doesn't want to acknowledge that fact. They say, well, if we don't see it, maybe--it's like at night, you know, when you have a bad dream. If you pull the covers up, maybe it will go away. That seems where we are. My good friend from Arizona.

Mr. AKIN. I would like to jump in, if I could, because I think that's where we got to ask the question. This is, I guess, when the Republicans were in the majority, 2006. And they are saying the most basic responsibility is governing. This is Congressman Hoyer. And now we don't have a budget, and he is one of the leaders. Here we have the ranking member on the House Budget Committee, and he says, ``If you can't budget, you can't govern.'' Well, that's what they are saying in 2006. But it seems like that's not where we are today, is it? Here's ``Where Is the Budget?'' This is something that was in The Hill newspaper. But it's kind of telling. ``Skipping a budget resolution this year would be unprecedented. The House has never failed to pass an annual budget resolution since the current budget rules were put into place in 1974.'' That's why I am saying this is a little bit like one of those full eclipses of the sun. You have to wait for a certain number of years and be just in the right place to see it. This is unusual. We haven't seen this before. Unfortunately, it is not a good omen exactly from an economic point of view. According to what? The Congressional Research Service. They are the ones that keep records of all of this kind of stuff. So there isn't any budget, which does beg the question.

Mr. AKIN. I think that Congress has tended--our job is to spend money. That's what Congress is designed to do. Of course we do too good a job of it. And the question is we have been overspending for a long time. We overspent when President Bush, we Republicans, when he was in. And I know you gentlemen joined me in some very tough votes in saying, no, we can't do that. But we have overspent to a degree all the way along. But what happened is we've taken this thing to an entirely new level. And I have some charts that I think explain that. But I want to hear from my good friend from Georgia.

Mr. AKIN. This then resulted in Republicans in the House passing a bill. Where's it go then? We sent it to the Senate. What happened in the Senate? You needed 60 votes to pass it. And so what happened? The Democrats killed this in the Senate, just like they killed the energy bill in the Senate that was designed to help us with gas prices; just like they killed, as you know, gentlemen, the tort reforms in the Senate to reduce health care costs; just like, as you know, my friend from Arizona, they killed the associated health plans that we passed time after time here on the floor to try to allow small businesses to pool their employees to get a better price on health insurance. Now we were accused of doing nothing. We didn't do nothing. We sent a lot of legislation to the Senate where they didn't have 60 Republican votes, and it was killed by Democrats. Here's what happens here. But have we done anything about Freddie and Fannie? No. It's still hugely in debt, and we're just basically bailing it out all the time. What's the result of that going to be? It's going to be a lot of trouble. Here's one of the pains. This is what hurts, one, is unemployment. Look at the private-sector employment numbers here. Look at the red line. That's the public-sector employment. Have we created jobs? Sure have. We hired a whole lot of census workers. But the jobs that pay for the government are going down because these policies make a difference in peoples' lives. Whenever I think of unemployment--you gentlemen are both gentlemen. Both of you have wives and kids. And I suppose that somehow wired back in the back of our minds, certainly in the back of mine, when I have a wife and kids, I need to take care of them. That's the fundamental thing that I'm supposed to do as a dad. If I fail at that, then I'm a miserable failure in my own mind. And I'm picturing a set of policies that the Democrats proposed to put people into houses they couldn't afford to pay for, so they're going to default on their mortgage, and they and their kids are going to be sitting on a sofa out on the street as they have been thrown out of a house. That, to me, is kind of a nightmarish thing. And that's that unemployment. It looks like a boring number on a chart, but it's people who are hurting. It's people who are living back with their parents. It's parents who are digging into their savings to take care of their kids because there are no jobs. So these things may be boring, but they sure have a lot of pain associated with them and a lot of consequences associated with them. This was a promise that if we gave lots of money to different States that had been mismanaging their budget with this supposed stimulus bill, I think it was supposedly $787 billion, but turned out to be $800 billion. And we spent all this money. And this is what's supposed to happen. It's supposed to reduce unemployment. Here's what the unemployment really is. Because we didn't learn from Henry Morgenthau. You have can't spend your way into prosperity by spending Federal money. These things have consequences. They hurt people. This isn't just boring numbers on a graph. That's actually what the actual unemployment is. So there's a consequence to these policies. The tragedy is there are solutions to this stuff. It isn't that hard to do. What we ought to do is just learn from JFK. We can learn from Ronald Reagan, but try to be a little charitable. JFK got it right. There's a solution to this. We don't have to do this. All we've got to do is simply cut spending and cut taxes. Everybody knows that. I've used the analogy--were you a pilot, Congressman Franks?

Mr. AKIN. This doesn't say Rush Limbaugh here. This says: The New York Times. This is the New York Times. Not exactly a conservative newspaper. September 11, 2003, the headline is: The Bush administration today recommended the most significant regulatory overhaul in the housing finance industry since the savings and loan crisis a decade ago. Under the plan disclosed at a congressional hearing today, a new agency would be created within the Treasury Department to assume supervision of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. So this is 2003. They saw it coming.

Mr. AKIN. The point you bring up, gentlemen, I was not a Boy Scout, but we had a bunch of boys that were Boy Scouts. And one of the things that they learned, which we did, because my wife and I were outdoors people and did a lot of backpacking and canoeing and all, is that when you come to a campsite, you always want to leave it better than the way you found it. It was just sort of like a tradition among outdoorsmen. And that tradition very much reflected the mindset of my parents' generation, the people that fought World War II. My father is 89 and was with Patton in the Army. But there was a general way of thinking in that generation. And the mindset was that they were going to sacrifice a lot of things they wished they'd had as kids in order to give their kids something better. They're going to leave the campsite better than it was left for them. And so my parents' generation, if they made a mistake, it was they tended to spoil us. They tended to give us everything we wanted, whereas they had had to really--the other generation, they might not have had a college education but said, My son is going to be a doctor. My son is going to be an engineer. I'm going to make sure they have enough money to go to college, which I didn't have a chance to do. And that was their mindset. And that's what breaks my heart about such a boring subject as budgets is because of the fact that we're not following--we're leaving that campsite look like a dump truck full of litter just got dumped on it. We're leaving litter that our kids can't pick up, our grandchildren won't be able to pick up. And that's just wrong. And it is not the American way. And yet what's it spring from? Our own selfishness politically that we have to appease--which is wrong in the first place. It's theft and we're going to steal money from a lot of people that aren't even alive yet and we're going to spend it and hand it out to people. And that's a sad place to be in. So we're doing two things. So we're increasing taxes radically, but we're increasing spending even more. The ironic thing is that when you increase taxes, you also kill the goose that's laying the golden eggs and you start to take in less revenue. Here's a list of some of them. This cap-and-tax bill that we passed. This thing is supposed to be about global warming. It's supposed to be about reducing CO2. The only thing this thing does is create more taxes and more government regulation and probably more CO2 to boot. If they wanted to stop CO2--if people were honest about stopping CO2--let's assume you're a greenie and that your CO2 is really bad and we've all got to stop breathing. How are you going to do it? You're just going to double the number of the nuclear power plants and you wipe out all the equivalent of all the CO2 burned by every passenger car in America. But that's not what this bill does. It supposedly is about global warming, but in fact it's just more taxes. And the health care tax thing. This deal here, that bill, they had to struggle to keep it under a trillion dollars. The President said, I won't do it if it costs a dime. No. He did it because it costs more than a trillion. So there's another great big tax. Death tax. Capital gains. They're going to expire. So we're going high in taxes. But does that mean we're cutting back on spending? No. This, my friend, is why if I were a Democrat I wouldn't want to put a budget out there. Take a look at that picture. My friend from Arizona.

Mr. AKIN. You know, you have been almost reading my mind, because I have some charts that do compare Greece to where we are economically, and they are spooky charts. I am joined by another one of our good friends, my good friend from Georgia, Congressman Broun. And I have to say I have got a couple of my favorite people to share an hour with on the floor tonight, both very articulate, but both very knowledgeable. Congressman Franks, if you start to talk to him about missile defense and ballistics and all kinds of technical questions, he is a veritable Popular Mechanics walking on two feet. And then my good friend Dr. Broun, who spent years as a medical doctor, also has a whale of a lot of Georgia common sense. And I would like to welcome you, Dr. Broun, or Congressman Broun, or my good friend Paul. Thank you.

Mr. AKIN. Well, thank you gentlemen. I appreciate your joining me. Thank you, Mr. Speaker, for allowing us to talk about budgets, but also about the situation in the gulf. God bless you. Thank you. Good night.

Mr. AKIN. I call it cap-and-tax, tax-and-trade.

Mr. AKIN. Did they deal with cleaning up the mess?

Mr. AKIN. Now wait a minute. Let's get this straight. This is a little confusing. A panel of, more or less, experts is put together. They're asked to come up with a recommendation. They come up with a recommendation, and the administration says, Well, we're going to put a moratorium on drilling because that's what was recommended. And the panel says----