W. Akin

Mr. AKIN

Mr. AKIN. Just from what we've talked about in 10 minutes tonight in terms of this leadership vacuum, we are seeing a threat to 40,000 jobs. Just in your State alone, it's 40,000. We're not talking about the barbers and the restauranteurs and all of the other people who are supported by it. It's just 40,000 hard jobs which are being thrown down the drain when a panel of people who really have studied and know the industry are simply saying, Look, go out to the different oil rigs. Make sure that they're inspected and up to spec because, by the way, MMS, the Federal agency supposedly doing this, has not done that. Make sure that they're up to spec, and then let them go ahead because there is nothing wrong. We have drilled thousands of wells in water, and they have worked fine. Just because one goes bad, you don't shut the whole industry down. So we are threatening 40,000 jobs. Also, in spite of what the panel recommended the President do, we are continuing to endanger the environment, and they are always screaming they care so much about the environment. Though, they are the very ones preventing you from trying to protect the environment. The thing that strikes me is: Why do we put so much trust in the competence of the Federal Government? That's what is striking me. That's part of the reason I thought it was good to take off a little bit and talk about the gulf situation. We've got this proposal now. The President wants to use the fact that a company mismanaged its oil well and that he and his administration have made a complete mess of the management of that crisis to say now what we need to do is to have the Federal Government do this cap-and- tax bill, which is more taxes, more red tape and government regulation. When the last government agencies didn't even do their jobs, now he wants us to buy more of this, not to mention the fact that we've already passed this huge tax increase for health care. Now we're supposed to trust the Federal Government to take care of our own bodies. We took a look at what it's doing down there in the gulf. I sure don't want the Federal Government tampering with my body. I'll end up with two left arms, which would be a pretty terrible fate for a conservative like me.

Mr. AKIN. Wait. The President approved the sand barrier plan that we've been waiting a month to get approved, and now it's been shut down by the Federal Government?

Mr. AKIN. Well, you know, the thing that strikes me--and maybe it's because I'm an engineer and I see it this way. For most Americans I know, if you've got this big hole in the middle of the gulf and if it's pouring out all of this oil all over the place, the reaction of most people is, Well, let's fix it. You know? Let's get the job done. Whether you believe in big government or in little government, what you want to do as Americans is to have this ``can do'' attitude. Well, we made a problem. Now we've got to get in and fix it. We've got to figure out what we did wrong. We've got to make sure we don't make those mistakes again, and we're going to move forward. I don't like being negative. I like fixing problems, and I know you're the same kind of temperament. We've been kind of complaining about the fact of a vacuum of leadership in the administration, and it's a vacuum that's evident in the gulf oil spill. It's evident in Afghanistan, and it's evident in a lot of policies. Let's stop for a minute. I don't want to be negative. Okay. Let's say that we are President and that we have this oil spill. What would be an appropriate response? My thinking is I know the military has these things they call ``fusion cells.'' They're teams of people who get together. It's a clearinghouse for all kinds of information. You get the top resources all over America of what you need in different areas. You put a plan together and say, This is our first attempt to stop this well up. If this doesn't work, we're going to do this. That means we've got to have this, this, and this piece of equipment ready to go. It means we've got to clear this, this, and this with this agency. We've got Governor this; Governor this; Governor this asking for permission. We've got to consider that, take a look at the law, move fast if we have to change the law or change some policy, and we need to get back to them within 12 hours. And you've got a whole team that is on top of it, managing this thing. That's my sense of where we would be going. You have to be able to look at all of the data, get the right people in the loop, and make decisions. We're not seeing any of that.

Mr. AKIN. Mr. Speaker, I think we were just talking a little bit about the situation in the gulf that's gotten everybody's attention. My background is engineering, gentleman, and my first reaction when there's a problem is, how do you fix it? That's the first thing I'm saying. What has puzzled me and actually made me pretty frustrated is it seems that the administration is more interested in affixing blame than they are in fixing the problem. I recall that President Bush took a whale of a beating after Hurricane Katrina because it took him about 2 or 3 days after he had been rebuffed by the Governor and the Mayor of New Orleans, it took him a couple of days before they sort of got going. And then of course our FEMA didn't respond very well; the Federal response was a bit weak in terms of the magnitude of the disaster. And yet, by comparison, what we're dealing with here in the gulf is it took 50 days for the President to call the head of BP. Now, he had the power, if I'm not mistaken, is it right, he had the power to basically declare that a national emergency, get together a team of people, a fusion cell, get the very top resources in America. They could have pulled that together, they could have processed the different questions, sorted through the conflicting claims and started to put this thing together, put together a series of, We're going to do this, this and this. If this doesn't work, this backup plan is already getting set up. We could have managed the process. Instead, after 50 days he calls the head of BP and just wants to ream the guy out. Well, BP did a terrible job, but after the crisis started it was the administration's problem to deal with, and I didn't see it fixing the problem. Am I mistaken in that? I mean, that's just an outsider looking in. I'm up in Missouri, we don't have too much coastline up there.

Mr. AKIN. The Federal agency said they didn't shut them down. Yet, in fact, they weren't telling the truth. They did shut them down.

Mr. AKIN. The Congressional Research Service is a bunch of professionals that are paid by the U.S. Congress and they try to be as objective as they can. They're not always right. But they at least have very good access to historical records and the history of the Congress. This statement that the House has never failed to pass an annual budget resolution, that's a historic fact. So what we're seeing here is we're in uncharted ground, at least since 1974, that there is no budget. Well, why is there not a budget? You made reference to it. And here's the nasty little picture. We were told that George Bush spent too much money. President Bush.

Mr. AKIN. I really appreciate you mentioning Star Parker. She is really a fun person. She has a great personality, is a lot of fun. She's cute, and she is very articulate. And she has an amazing story about how the government tried to trap her into all of this welfare stuff and all of the behaviors that would destroy her life. She came out of it through the power of Jesus Christ, started her own business. Now the government gives her trouble. While she is trying to run a business, doing the right thing, the government is taking shots at her. And she says, Whose side are you on, government? You know, when I was doing the wrong stuff, you were encouraging me. When I am doing the right things, you are giving me a hard time. What's the story here? As I said, I started with a picture of that little green wagon and those two kids. One of them pulling, the other one pushing. The guy looking over his shoulder said, Are you pushing or pulling back there? You know, it just seems like, is the government trying to help us or is it trying to destroy us? And it seems like every decision we have seen is more dependency on Big Government. Thank you, Doctor. It's a pleasure to join you, and God bless America.

Mr. AKIN. It is a vacuum of leadership, isn't it?

Mr. AKIN. The question that raises my blood pressure is it seems to me like President Bush was almost accused for bringing on Hurricane Katrina. Yet we've got one of the biggest leadership vacuums in terms of this oil spill every time you hear about something. There was also that moratorium about we're not going to drill any more wells at all. The equivalent would be, if an airplane falls down, we're going to cancel every air flight in America. You know, there were some reasons there was this disaster. From what we're hearing, there were enough coverups and different things, so we don't really know exactly what happened. Though, apparently, the equipment, at least if it's functioning properly and has been properly checked out, should work. So there was some human error involved, clearly, and possibly some equipment that was not properly inspected. There are some problems, but that doesn't mean you shut every oil rig in the gulf down while you're trying to figure out who did something wrong. Wasn't it over 100,000 jobs that were just going to, all of a sudden, disappear?

Mr. AKIN. Is that 40,000 jobs just in the oil industry alone?

Mr. AKIN

Mr. AKIN. We just didn't learn.

Mr. AKIN. Thank you very much, Mr. Speaker. I appreciate a moment here to get our charts lined up and to talk about a subject that we have been talking about for some time but which is very much on the minds and hearts of people in America, and that is the situation of jobs, the economy, and the condition of our solvency as a nation, and the challenges to leadership and the way forward. Now in order to try to get a perspective on where we are, it's helpful to look back a little bit and to see where we have come from. Those of us perhaps who have been paying a little attention to what has been going on over the last couple of years, there have been some changes, changes of a recession that has come, changes in terms of unemployment, people having trouble making their mortgage payments, people having trouble keeping or getting jobs, and also a sense that the economy is not all that it should be. These things didn't happen just by accident. They were a result to a large degree of government policy. Many of the problems that we are experiencing actually were caused by decisions that were made right here in this Chamber, and some of those decisions now turn out to be not wise at all. I would like to go back a number of years to part of what created this entire real estate bubble which then collapsed our economy and put us in the condition that we are now. I hope to conclude with some very positive suggestions as to what we have to do to go forward. America is not in someplace that we haven't been before. We're not in over our head, but we're getting close to it. There are things that we can do to mediate and to take care of some of the problems that have been created, but we must act decisively and we're going to have to act immediately. Going back a little bit, it became popular over a couple of different administrations to allow people who couldn't really make their mortgage payments to get mortgages to buy houses. So what we did was we created a law that actually said to bankers and to people who were going to give people home loans that you have to give loans to people who can't afford to pay some of them, or who may be a bad credit risk would be a better way to state it. And so we had these laws saying that a certain percent of loans have to be given to people who were bad credit risks. Over a period of time, what happened was those percentages were increased. In President Clinton's last year in office, they increased those percentages up. In the meantime, the economy had a series of different things that occurred with Greenspan creating a great deal of liquidity because of the recession in 2000-2001. So what you had was this real estate bubble where a lot of people were putting money into houses, the housing prices were going up rapidly, everybody was flipping these home loans and making lots of money. As long as the music continued to play, everybody was happy. When the music stopped, there were a lot of people without chairs to sit down in. Well, this tremendous bubble that ended up bursting in the home mortgage area was not something that took everybody by surprise. Many people took advantage of it. Many people were hurt very badly by it. But it was not something that people didn't understand was going on. In fact, on September 11 in 2003, which goes back quite a number of years now, President Bush saw this coming; and so he is recorded here in the New York Times, not exactly a conservative oracle, saying that ``the Bush administration today recommended the most significant regulatory overhaul in the housing finance industry since the savings and loan crisis a decade ago.'' What the President wanted was more authority to regulate Freddie and Fannie because he saw that Freddie and Fannie were out of control. But that's not such an easy thing to do to control Freddie and Fannie. They were quasi-private agencies that were loaning money like mad to people that wanted to buy houses. The trouble was they had just lost a billion here or there, so things weren't going quite right for Freddie and Fannie. But Freddie and Fannie had a way to fight back. They had many, many lobbyists in Washington, D.C., and they gave lots of money away to Senators and other political people. So the President is asking for authority to control Freddie and Fannie. The President got the bill through because Republicans controlled the House at the time, got a bill through the House, it went to the Senate. But because the Republicans did not have 60 votes in the Senate, the bill was killed by the Democrats in the Senate. In the meantime, the congressional Democrats disagreed with the idea of regulating Freddie and Fannie more. And of course Congressman Frank, who is now the one in charge of this committee, saw it very different than President Bush did. He said, these two entities, Freddie and Fannie, are not facing any kind of financial crisis. The more people exaggerate these problems, the more pressure there is on these companies and the less we'll see in terms of affordable housing. So he did not want to regulate Freddie and Fannie. He didn't see a particular financial problem; he said they're just fine financially. This is the same article, New York Times, September 11, 2003. Of course as it turns out, through the eye of history we can look back and say of course Congressman Frank was completely wrong and President Bush was right; we should have done something about Freddie and Fannie. So you start to get this real estate collapse and mortgage problem. So the economy starts to go down and a lot of people blamed President Bush for it. But anyway, the economy starts going down, it's because of this congressional policy of allowing these mortgages to be made to people who couldn't afford to pay. What happened was of course Wall Street took them, chopped the mortgages up into little pieces, packaged it all up into these mortgage-backed securities and sold them all over the world. The whole crisis was compounded by the different ratings agencies like Standard & Poor's and Moody's, giving them all Triple A ratings--in fact, these things were not Triple A at all; they were a lot of trouble waiting to happen. So the real estate crisis then drug the rest of the financial market into trouble, along with some accounting rules that were so rigid and strict that they couldn't deal with the situation that occurred. Following that, of course, President Obama is elected and the economy is going down. And so he proposes a series of solutions and things that hopefully are going to make things better. Part of his solution, of course, was a whole lot of taxes and a whole lot of spending. And so his policies started out, first of all--actually, it started out with the stimulus package. The stimulus package was one of these things that were supposed to help us get some jobs. He told us what we were going to do with the stimulus package, we were going to spend--it was originally $787 billion, but as it turned out it was $800 billion in the stimulus package. And here's what was said by the President about it. Our stimulus plan will likely save or create 3 to 4 million jobs. Ninety percent of these jobs will be created by the private sector, the remaining 10 percent mainly public sector jobs. So this looked like a pretty good deal. We were told if you don't pass the stimulus bill, what's going to happen is you may get 8 percent unemployment if you don't pass it. And so because the Democrats were totally in charge, we passed it. The Republicans all voted no. We had seen this before. It was not even a legitimate stimulus package. It was a whole lot of big spending on a lot of giveaway government programs, but it was not going to do anything to improve the economy, we believed. Now we've had a chance to see how did that $800 billion go? Well, it went to pay the pensions of a lot of States that had been irresponsible and had not managed their pensions properly. And so now we've seen how that worked. Well, the private sector has lost nearly 8 million jobs since 2008. The government has gained 656,000 jobs--mostly the census-type jobs--and there was very, very little job creation in the private sector. Well, is it because Republicans were such wizards that they could figure out it wasn't going to work? Well, no, we just know something about history. In fact, we would have hoped that the Democrats might have learned from history from the days of FDR, who took a recession and turned it into the Great Depression. These are the comments from a Keynesian economist in a way, he was somebody that was about the same time period historically as Little Lord Keynes. His name was Henry Morgenthau, he was FDR's head of Treasury. He said, We have tried spending money. We have spent more money than we've ever spent before--this is after 8 years of the Federal Government spending lots of money--it doesn't work. I'd say after 8 years of the administration we have just as much unemployment as when we started, and an enormous debt to boot. So, so much for the stimulus bill. It wasn't even FDR kinds of concrete and asphalt types of pork; a lot of it was just giveaways to various States that had mismanaged their budget. So that's what happened. So we could have learned. And the Republicans did know that the stimulus bill didn't work, we didn't vote for it. And what was the result of it? Well, we should have learned at least from Henry Morgenthau because here's the results. This is when the stimulus bill was put in. It was projected that we're going to have unemployment going down. If you pass the stimulus bill, it's going to go down here; if you don't pass it, it may get up to 8 or 9. In fact, we passed the stimulus bill, it gets to 9.7. If you take a look at the other graphs--I don't know that I have that graph here today--what you find is that the employment in the private sector has been going steadily down and the government employment has been going steadily up. So, so much for the first step of economic policies in the administration. That was followed, of course, by all of these different nifty big tax increases. Now, that says something's wrong when you have a recession and you're doing tax increases. I'm joined in the Chamber tonight by a fellow that is very aware of how these things interact, has done a fantastic job for his district, and I'd like to invite him to join me in our discussion tonight, Congressman Scalise, please.

Mr. AKIN. Maybe I should just interrupt for a moment and recognize, gentleman, you have really studied up on the whole oil spill situation and shown tremendous leadership there. I'm very thankful for the fact that you have stepped into what appears to many Americans and many conservative Congressmen as a leadership vacuum. You have really stepped in, and I'm very thankful for you doing that. I would encourage you to make the connections here.

Mr. AKIN. Could you hold that right there for a minute because I think you're on something that I think we ought to be exploring a little bit here tonight, but we do have an item of business. I yield to the gentleman from New York (Mr. Arcuri).

Mr. AKIN

Mr. AKIN. Madam Speaker, today I wish to congratulate Mr. Jeff Theerman, Executive Director of the Metropolitan St. Louis Sewer District (MSD) on his election as the new President of the National Association of Clean Water Agencies, NACWA. Mr. Theerman is an accomplished leader and committed environmental steward. He has dedicated his career to the improvement of the environment and public health in Missouri, and throughout the Nation. Without a doubt, he is ideally suited for this national leadership position with NACWA. Mr. Theerman has served Missouri through his work at MSD for over 25 years. In October of 2003 he was named MSD's Executive Director, willingly and ably accepting accountability for all aspects of the utility's operations. As MSD's Executive Director, Mr. Theerman leads one of the nation's largest wastewater and stormwater management utilities, providing services to approximately 1.4 million people in the City of St. Louis and St. Louis County. Under his leadership the MSD currently operates seven wastewater treatment facilities, treating an average of 330 million gallons of water per day and maintaining 9,649 miles of sewers. Since joining others in founding NACWA 40 years ago, the Metropolitan St. Louis Sewer District has benefitted from its active engagement with the organization. A member of NACWA's Board of Directors since 2004, Mr. Theerman has served as the organization's Secretary, Treasurer and Vice President. It is fitting that his election as President coincides with the 40th anniversary of NACWA's advocacy on behalf of the nation's clean water agencies--and the environment we all value so much. When I hear the terms like ``accountable'' and ``responsive,'' I think of public servants like Mr. Theerman. Under his able leadership NACWA looks forward to proactively and effectively addressing the complex 21st century water quality challenges we face as a nation. It is my sincere pleasure to congratulate Jeff Theerman on becoming President of NACWA. I am certain his actions will ensure continued water quality progress for St. Louis, Missouri, and the Nation.

Mr. AKIN

Mr. AKIN. A lawyer. This is almost like one of those jokes, you know. But anyway, what is it that kills jobs? I've talked to my businessmen in my district, and I've heard this over and over: The first thing is excessive taxation. You take a look at the stimulus bill, huge amounts of Federal spending. You've got the socialized medicine bill. You've got the cap-and-tax bill, all those massive tax increases, capital gains, dividends, death taxes, all these, more and more taxation, heavy taxation. And what does that do? It kills jobs. Well, why would that be the case? Well, if you're a businessman and you're going to get taxed a lot, it takes your money away from investing back in your own business. And 80 percent of the jobs in America are with companies with 500 or fewer employees, and so if that guy that owns the business, he looks like he's a rich guy. Maybe he's making more than $250,000 a year. You say, let's tax that guy. But if you tax that guy, then he can't put the money back into building a wing in the business, putting new machine tools in it, or whatever the new technology is, and creating the jobs. And so this taxation inevitably works to create unemployment. The funny thing is the Democrats can't have it both ways; they can't have a war on business and say they're worried about unemployment, because it's businesses that employ people. They act like there isn't a connection between businesses and the people who get hired by the businesses. So if you tax a business out of business, there won't be any jobs. It's not that complicated. So the solution to these things isn't that complicated. You can't hammer the guys that own the businesses with all these taxes. Of course, the other problem that we've created economically is that the regulations on the banks are so tight that the small businesses are having trouble getting access to capital. There is a liquidity problem, and that's part of the regulation of the banks and the finance industry, which they've also managed to mess up. Then, of course, economic uncertainty is a factor, which is where people don't know what's going to happen next. What crazy scheme are we going to do next? Well, it means you're going to hunker down, and you're not going to hire people. Then, of course, red tape and government mandates--all of these things--kill government jobs, and we're doing every one of these things. It's like we've declared war but not on radical Islam. We haven't declared war on Iran, on Iraq or on North Korea. We're declaring war on U.S. businesses.

Mr. AKIN. Here we go, $1.4 trillion. Now, there are different ways of looking at this. When you talk about billions and trillions, for poor little people like me, those numbers are very hard to understand or make much sense out of it. But one way to take a look at it is this deficit as a percent of gross domestic product; that is, all of the goods made in America, what is the ratio? This one, the worst, was 3.1 percent of GPD. President Obama's first year here, where you have total Democrat control, one party rule, you've got $1.4 trillion, which is, as I recall, 9.9 percent of GPD, which is the highest since World War II. So this stuff is unlike anything we've seen before. And this is part of the reason why the Democrat Party doesn't want to make a budget, because they're really proud of those numbers. If those were my numbers, I'd be scared to death. And I think the American public is concerned about that level of spending. I was going to jump just to a little bit--I mean, we've been very critical of the fact that we're doing two things wrong in this one- party rule run by the Democrats, and that is too much spending and too much taxing. It shows a tremendous faith on their part of what the Federal Government can do in terms of solving problems. They believe that there isn't any problem that can't be fixed with more taxing and spending; that's where we seem to go. But let's talk about some stuff that's just so basic that many, many Americans understand this, particularly kids in Georgia or New Jersey or Missouri that have ever run a lemonade stand, just to understand a little bit about how businesses go. And so I put together a list of some of the main things that are job killers because the result of too much spending and too much taxing is there is unemployment. So what is it that kills a job? What is the solution to this problem? I'm an engineer. You're a doctor. And gentlemen, I don't recall----

Mr. AKIN. I yield.

Mr. AKIN. I very much appreciate you bringing that up. Actually, I should pay you a few dollars for helping me get to the next slide because I've got a picture of where Greece and Italy and some of the European nations are relative to the U.S., but I will get to that in a minute. But I think, just before you joined us, my good friend from New Jersey mentioned the level of this deficit spending. And I think it's important to take a look on a bar graph as to what we're looking at here. I know that President Bush--and as a Republican, I heard this frequently--he was criticized for spending too much money. And I voted against some of those things and think, yeah, we did spend too much money because we had a deficit. But on the other hand, he argued that we had a couple of wars and a bad economy kicking things off. As you can see, the amount of deficit during the George Bush years here was coming down because of the things that they did by reducing taxes. They had the right formula for getting us going in the right direction. Here was President Bush's worst spending year, his very far worst when Speaker Pelosi was in charge of Congress, so he wasn't getting any help from the Republicans in the House at that point. This was Bush's worst spending year. And then you come to the first year of President Obama, and he triples the deficit. From about $450 or so billion of deficit, we go to $1.4 trillion of deficit right off the bat in the first year. I mean, this is absolutely skyrocket, smashing, incredible levels of spending.

Mr. AKIN. I don't think he added that little piece, did he, until you can't keep it? You can keep it. He didn't add, ``until you can't keep it.''

Mr. AKIN. I appreciate it, Doctor. Certainly as a medical doctor you have been looking very closely over the last year at one of a whole series of these taxes. These things effectively work as taxes. Let's just take, if you will, health care out of the equation, whether people are healthy or get good health coverage. The point of the matter is that this cap-and-tax is a huge tax that the House passed on the use of energy, which affects anybody who uses energy. You don't have to be very well- to-do to have a pickup truck and have to drive a long way to a job, and you spend a lot of money in gas or some type of energy. So this is a big tax on energy. This is a big tax on health care. There is going to be a huge, huge amount of taxes. They tried very hard to make it look like this is a trillion-dollar increase in taxes, and the numbers continue to come out that it's a lot more than that. So there's another tax. And then you have got the death tax, as you mentioned; you have got the capital gains dividend tax, which is one of the main things that helped get the economy going before. All of these things are boomeranging around, and you finally, when you get done with the whole thing, you end up with a cartoon that some humorous fellow put together here: ``Now give me one more good reason why you are not hiring.'' And you see these bulls coming into the china shop; and you have got cap-and-tax, or cap-and-trade, the health care reform, which is, of course, the biggest, probably the worst, bill we have seen; and then of course the various other taxes that are coming into this. And he says: ``Why are you not hiring?'' And of course what's happening is we are doing two things, basically, in the economy. It's very simple. We are spending a whole lot of money, and we are taxing a whole lot. And, historically, that's exactly the wrong thing for us to be doing. And you have all of these taxes, and of course people don't even begin to realize how much that socialized medicine program is going to cost. Other nations have tried it. It's a total budget buster, even though it ruins the quality of health care as well.

Mr. AKIN. You know, there's a certain point where if you spend too much money and you try and put a budget together, the train is going to come off the track. I think that's where we are, and that's, I think, the reason why the Democrats said, yeah, you have got to budget. We always had a budget when the Republicans were in the majority and we always had a budget here in the House. It didn't always get through the Senate necessarily, but we had a budget in the House. We're also joined, as you can see, my friend, by another good friend of ours coming from the State of New Jersey, and that's Congressman Garrett. And, you know, I have to say that the State of New Jersey has been refreshing in the last year or so with their new Governor showing some fiscal responsibility, just giving heartburn to all the big spending people that want to spend that State into oblivion. And Congressman Garrett is a good friend of ours, a good, solid, fiscal thinker, and I'm just delighted that you've joined us in our discussion this evening. I yield.

Mr. AKIN. I'm going to get to that, but one of the things when you do what you're talking about, that bull-in-the-china-shop mentality of just spending money out of control and it's a bailout for big businesses, bailout for Wall Street, bailout for various States, bailout for individuals that didn't save money and we're going to give this and this and this, when the government starts getting into the bailout business--of course it's choosing winners and losers--there are lot of people that are not getting any bailout. They're being expected to pick up the tab for other people's financial errors. What happens is you start spending all this money, of course if you're running any kind of a responsible operation, you've got to have some sort of a budget saying, you know, how are we going to make this all work, because pretty soon you're going to start giving away more money than you have. In fact, I think somebody was quoted one time saying, the trouble with socialism is pretty soon you run out of other people's money. So budgets are necessary, and some of our leaders here on the floor, some of the Democrats said they recognize the fact budgets are necessary. The Democrat whip, Congressman Hoyer, said the most basic responsibility of governing was a budget. The most basic responsibility of governing. I have to agree with Congressman Hoyer. Here's Congressman Spratt, the head of the House Budget Committee, said, if you can't budget, you can't govern. Those are strong words and they're true words.

Mr. AKIN. It's a treat to be able to join my colleagues this evening as we take a look at, once again, some of the fundamental questions that we face as a Nation: the questions that center around our budget deficits, the world economy--particularly unemployment in America--and the various policies that are involved in some of these questions. These are things that have absorbed the attention of our Nation now for some period of time because the economy has been very tough. There are many Americans that are hard workers that are out of work, and the condition of our country overall, even particularly various States, is troubling at best, and dire probably would be more accurate. I think that it's appropriate sometimes just to look back a few years to see where we have come from and also to develop a little wisdom from the past and the lessons that we can learn from the past. I have chosen just to jump in at a particular point, an interesting point in history that I think a lot of people don't know. This isn't really old history. This is things most of us have lived in our own day. This was September 11, just 2 years after the attack on the Twin Towers, September 11, 2003, the situation chronicled by The New York Times, not exactly a conservative oracle, yet accurately reflecting a proposal, in fact, a plea, from President Bush. This is what the actual text of the article says: The Bush administration today recommended the most significant regulatory overhaul in the housing finance industry since the savings and loan crisis a decade ago. This is 2003. This is not 2008, when the housing crisis came crashing down upon all of our ears and destroyed the stock market and our economy. It says here: Under the plan disclosed at the congressional hearing today, a new agency would be created within the Treasury Department to assume supervision of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the government-sponsored companies that are the two largest players in the mortgage lending industry. Freddie and Fannie, for people who have just gotten a little hazy in their memory, of course, were quasi-governmental. They were really private companies, but they were created with almost the implicit assumption that if anything goes wrong, the Federal Government will step in. And what was going on was that going back even before 2003, you had Federal policies. This is closely tied up with the ACORN organization and our President. You had Federal policies that said that banks had to give loans to people who were a very poor risk. There were certain areas of the country where it was very hard to get mortgages and for individuals to buy a house. We felt that home ownership was a good thing, in general. And so the banks, the Congress decided that the banks should be required to make loans to people who may not be able to pay those loans. So what you have here is social engineering. It reached its height almost under President Clinton in his last year. And he changed the percentage, saying that the banks have to up the percentage of loans which, by most other economic standards, would be just considered risky or poor loans. Well, what happened was the different bankers and other people who sold the loans took these loans and offered people money to buy houses, even though their credit or perhaps the job they had showed that they could not support that rate of mortgages and mortgage payments. So they sold all these things. But guess who picked up the tab? Well, it was Freddie and Fannie. And Freddie and Fannie got into a huge business of underwriting people's home mortgages, and this grew and grew and grew. Well, by 2003, even while we were in the height of the real estate boom and it seemed like housing prices were doubling every few years, Freddie and Fannie lost a few billion dollars or so, or a lot of millions of dollars, and that reflected the fact that Freddie and Fannie, in the President's estimation, were in trouble. So the President wanted more authority from Congress to regulate Freddie and Fannie, who were largely private, and the President had no authority to do that. So he is requesting authority. The response of the Democrats--in this case, particularly the top Democrat in the House at the time was Representative Frank. He said these two entities, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, are not facing any kind of financial crisis. The more people exaggerate these problems, the more pressure there is on these companies, the less we will see in terms of affordable housing. Now, of course, 20/20 hindsight, you look back and say, Well, yeah, this isn't a very smart thing to have said because Freddie and Fannie were in huge trouble. They continue to be in huge trouble. They're extended way beyond what they have any means to pay for. They've got lots of debt that they shouldn't have. So there is a huge problem with Freddie and Fannie. But Freddie and Fannie were very popular here in Washington, D.C., because they had hordes of lobbyists with many, many thousands and hundreds of thousands and millions of dollars which they gave out to political people in Washington, D.C. So Freddie and Fannie were very popular, and it was quite a number of people, particularly Democrats, said, No, there's no real problem with Freddie and Fannie. As we know, Freddie and Fannie did have a problem and they're in a tremendous crisis. As that crisis developed, what happens is not only does ACORN and the social engineering threaten just the housing market, but it affected not only just our economy but the entire world economy and created this crisis which started in housing but, unfortunately, did not stay contained just to the housing market. So we see the beginning of the economic problems that we're experiencing now started with ACORN, started in the housing market. Now, there are people who say sometimes that this is evidence of the failure of free enterprise. I bristle a little at that because this is not a failure of free enterprise. This is a failure of government social engineering. The loans that didn't work, I suppose that those loans were made in the name of compassion, although I don't know what is compassionate about asking somebody to take a loan and giving them a loan that they can't afford to pay and slowly they get farther and farther behind in debt and eventually get evicted from their house. That doesn't seem, to me, very compassionate. Anyway, it was this social engineering that got us into trouble. People could not afford to make these loans. And for a while there it got to be a pretty good deal, because you could get a loan where you wouldn't have to make any payments for a couple of years. You could buy a house for $300,000, make no payments for a couple of years, sell it just about the time you're going to have to make this huge, big mortgage payment, and double your money. That worked okay for a while until the bubble popped. Anyway, we start to get into serious economic problems. Now, as that continued, it affected other parts of the economy. As people are aware, we had the great big TARP or the big bailout of $700 billion, something that I did not vote for and many other conservatives did not vote for. We believed that that problem could have been solved by changes in accounting rules, but I won't go into the details of that. Following that, then, is President Obama is elected, recognizing there were some difficulties in the economy. We had unemployment that was getting up there, 7 and 8 percent unemployment. At that time, the President came in and told us that we needed a big stimulus bill. Now, I have to say that many conservatives are skeptical about ``stimulus'' bills. Just the premise of the whole idea is flawed. The government cannot stimulate really the economy; the government can only just create an environment where the private sector can be productive, can produce jobs, can create wealth. But the government cannot create wealth, and it cannot really stimulate. It can only simply take money and spend it. So this stimulus bill was put together at about, not $700 billion like the big bailout for Wall Street; this was an even bigger bailout of about $800 billion. This is what we were told before the bill was passed: Our stimulus plan, this is the Democrats speaking, will likely save or create 3 to 4 million jobs; 90 percent of these jobs will be created in the private sector, and the remaining 10 percent are mainly public sector jobs. This is President-elect Obama January 10, 2009. And then the Romer Report estimated unemployment without stimulus is 8.8 percent in 2010. So, in other words, we were told, If you don't pass this stimulus bill, what is going to happen is you are going to get unemployment that is going to go as high as 8 percent, so you need to hurry up and pass this big stimulus bill. Now the stimulus bill was not a stimulus bill. It was an investment in big government. It was an investment in socialism, and it was never going to work. We stood on the floor, I and a number of other Republican colleagues, a year ago and said, This will not work. And it is not because we were geniuses that we knew it would not work; it is just because history shows that this approach is flawed. It doesn't work at all. So, now as we take a look, the private sector has lost nearly 8 million jobs. They claimed it was going to create three to four in the positive. We have lost 8 million since 2008. The government has gained 656,000 jobs of government employees. A lot of these are temporary Census workers. And in May, only 5 percent of the job creation was in the private sector. In fact, the May unemployment rate was at 8.7 percent, approaching 10 percent. So this stimulus bill didn't work. Now you could say, how is it you know it wasn't going to work. Well, we know because it has been tried before. It was tried by FDR. In fact, his Secretary of Treasury, Henry Morgenthau, tried this same basic idea. And as a former engineer myself, it is like the concept of reaching down into the loops of your boots and lifting hard and attempting to fly around the room by lifting your own boots. What they decided to do was, when the economy was having a hard time, with a little bit of coaching from dear little Lord Keynes from England, that what we would do is have the government spend a ton of money, and when the government spent this money, it would get the economy going. It would, quote, stimulate it, and get us back onto a sober track. Well, of course, that is pretty appealing to politicians because you get to be the guys to hand out all of other people's money in giveaways. That is what the stimulus bill included, a lot of handouts to various State governments so that their pensions could be propped up when the State governments had irresponsibly spent pension money that really wasn't there, and promising all kinds of retirees that they could have a much fatter pension than what the government can afford, that and a whole series of other things. But this bill was not even a classic FDR kind of stimulus bill because that would have been lots of cubic yards of concrete and hydroelectric dams and also lots of roads and sort of public works projects. This stimulus bill was much longer in increasing sort of welfare-related type of giveaways, giveaways to various States and buttressing and increasing various government handouts. And it was not as long and concrete in those types of jobs. Be that as it may, we can learn from Henry Morgenthau, if the leading and liberal party in this Capitol can learn from history, but they didn't. This is Henry Morgenthau going way back to 1939 after the Great Depression, and he appears before the House Ways and Means Committee and he says, We have tried spending money; we are spending more than we have ever spent before, and it does not work. Now we have read this here on the floor many times, but people in politics don't want to hear it because they like dishing out other people's money. He continued, I say, after 8 years of the administration, we have just as much unemployment as when we started, and an enormous debt to boot. It sounds hauntingly familiar; doesn't it? We did the stimulus bill. We created that much more debt, spent $800 billion, on top of the $700 billion for the Wall Street bailout; the one was a bailout for big Wall Street firms, the other was a bailout for States and other individuals who spent more money than they should, and so we are supposed to bail them out. How well did it work? Well, Henry Morgenthau said it didn't work. And what do we find? Oh, my goodness, it doesn't work. Our unemployment is higher now than when we spent the money. So we are saying, okay, is this a failure of free enterprise? No, it is a failure of government to be able to straighten the economy out by taxing people a lot and spending all of their money. That just doesn't work. It may make you popular with the people you give the handouts to, but it does not get the government going. Unemployment, of course, skyrockets. Now here is the logic of how this thing works. Here is a picture of it graphically. This white line is the private sector level of employment. You can see the drop in employment coming down here in terms of the number of jobs on this axis, and the red line is the increase in government employment. So, as private sector jobs are going down, which means that is where you get tax revenue by people who are making income in their jobs, as the private sector is flat on its back, you see the red line here is government spending for hiring all kinds of different people who work in government. In fact, some statistics came out the other day saying people who work for the government now on the average are making twice as much as the people working in the private sector. That sounds hauntingly like what is going on in Europe. Obviously, you can't have a whole lot of people working for the government making more money per person than the people in the private sector because pretty soon, there just isn't going to be any more money in the private sector. Not only will you slow the businesses down that create the jobs, you will kill the businesses dead, and then we will really be going from a recession to more like a great depression. So here we have the big government Democrat way. We see that this whole plan of stimulating the economy really is a failed scheme. You could say, well, you have your theories; everybody has their theories. But the fact of the matter, we just did this $800 billion experiment with your money, the taxpayers' money, and it hasn't worked. And the economy has not responded. That shouldn't be anything surprising because in a few minutes, we will get into the logic of how that works and why it doesn't make any sense. As we continue along after the big proposal for the stimulus plan, we have other major initiatives that the President and Speaker Pelosi and Senator Reid have been proposing. The first was this cap-and-tax deal. We saw that last spring a year ago, and that, of course, was to deal with global warming. The theory was, of course, in that, that CO2 was a very, very bad gas, and it is making the planet heat up at a terribly alarming rate, and we have to reduce the amount of CO2 that is being created because that is actually going through a feedback loop in our weather system. The CO2 has a disproportionate amount of leverage and is creating global warming. That is the proposed idea anyway. If you assume that is true, which as an engineer, I don't believe that is true, certainly the data does not support the radical claims of global warming that we have seen from that community. In fact, we have seen evidence in some of the e-mails of the cheating that was done, where the lab was being fudged and the facts were being skewed in order to make it look like global warming was a bigger problem. But even if you believed that were true, if you really want to get rid of CO2, all you have to do is close down some coal-fired power plants and replace them with some nuclear plants. In fact, in America, if you just took 20 percent of our coal-fired plants and changed them to nuclear, it would get rid of the CO2 produced by every passenger car in America. Was that what this big old cap-and-tax bill did? No, this bill was huge amounts of government bureaucracy, and it was a huge taxation. It was a big taxation scheme. It was a big power grab by the Federal Government. Would it really reduce CO2? Probably not. It just increases the power of Washington, increases taxes. It's of course breaking the President's promise. He said, I will not tax anybody who makes more than $250,000; and yet this is a tax every time you flip your light switch. So this was one of his initiatives, and he has a whole bunch more. And every one of these initiatives is carefully crafted, whether they were done intentionally or not I am not saying, but every single one of these things has the effect of further destroying jobs and ruining our economy. I am joined by a good friend of mine from down in Georgia, my good friend Dr. Gingrey, and we are going to talk a little bit about some of these problems. And then as we start to conclude this evening, we are going to talk about the positive things, the things that can be done to fix this problem. These problems are not things we haven't seen in America. We have not seen this much gross uncontrolled Federal spending, this much lack of discipline, fiscal discipline in our country any time that I recall. It's been this bad, but that doesn't mean that there aren't solutions and there are things we can do. But we need to do them rapidly and soon. I would now recognize my good friend, medical doctor and U.S. Congressman from Georgia, a good friend, and a very bright fellow, Dr. Gingrey.

Mr. AKIN. I promised the gentleman that we did have a chart that was taking a look at these foreign countries. We've taken a look at Greece, and Greece has been in the news because it has just created shock waves in Europe as to how it has been affecting their economic system. This is the deficit as a percent of GDP. I mentioned that, as to where we are in the United States, which is at that $1.4 trillion level that we just saw last year and at another even higher year this year, we are at about a 10.3 deficit as a percent of GDP. Greece is at 9.4. So our deficit, as a percent of GDP, is worse than that of Greece. Spain and the United Kingdom seem to be worse off than we are, but we are the next worse on this chart with regard to the deficit. If you go to debt as a percent of GDP, you've got the United States here. Greece is ahead of us there, and Italy is ahead of us, but we're ahead of the other European countries as well. So this isn't exactly a cheery picture of the job we should be doing in terms of management. We are coming close on time here, and I have one other chart here, which is that of our corporate tax rates. The green one over on the right is the second highest corporate tax of any nation in the country. So what's the solution? I promised we'd deal a little bit with solution. The solution is quite simply that you've got to cut spending and that you've got to cut taxes. If the Democrats could not learn from Ronald Reagan or from Bush when they cut taxes and restored the economy, they should learn from JFK, who did the very same thing. Here is an example of this. It's called the ``Laffer curve.'' You can see that this red is the tax rate. As the tax rate comes down, the bar chart shows the total Federal savings in receipts, so we actually get more revenues in. When you drop taxes, you get more revenue. So the solution has been demonstrated by JFK, by Ronald Reagan, and by Bush. They turned economies around. Instead of doing what FDR did, which is what Henry Morgenthau told us would not work, you can simply do this: what you do is you've got to drop the tax rate and drop government spending. The trouble with dropping government spending is you can't do giveaways to everybody and do bailouts to everybody. So what's going to happen here? America is in the cross-hairs of a choice. We're either going to choose to follow--because there are two U.S.s: one U.S. had the idea that government is going to provide health care and education and jobs and food and housing. The other U.S. said that we believe the job of government is to provide life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That is a very narrow description of government--just national defense and a level playing field. Those are the two U.S.s. The one is, of course, the USSR, and that system didn't work. The other is the one that has worked for hundreds of years. We need to get back to that idea of a limited government, doing just what it is supposed to do constitutionally and not try to be the bailout king of the entire world and of the entire country. I thank my good friend, Congressman Gingrey from Georgia, for your insight, and not only your medical professionalism but the way that you've run your office. And the same thing for my good friend from New Jersey, Congressman Garrett. Thank you so much for joining us tonight. Good night, and God bless all of America.