W. Akin

Mr. AKIN

Mr. AKIN. Gentleman, this is my 22nd year--I hate to admit it--in an elected office, and I have seen 22 years' worth of bills, 12 in the Missouri legislature, and this is my 10th year here. I have never seen a bill like this that is going to affect so many different Americans so profoundly. This is larger than anything we've dealt with before. And I know there are a number of us that believe that if this bill were to pass the way it stands now, not only would it destroy health care in America, it would destroy our budget and would be tremendously detrimental to the lives of Americans from coast to coast. This is a very big deal and it is right for the American people to be very exercised about it.

Mr. AKIN. There just doesn't seem to be a lot of consistency there, does it? We've got 36 States that have legislation they're considering trying to protect their citizens from us demanding that those citizens have to buy the government-approved package of health care. I mean, there are a whole lot of people fighting back, and they're sick of the nanny state telling people what to do. I think, gentleman, when you talk about the Federal Government taking things over, what I have seen in the last year seems to me to be three nets that are being tossed over our economy. The first net is the net that government is going to make all the decisions about energy. And energy is a key component of almost everything, so the government wants to regulate in all kinds of very fine ways the use of energy. The second net says we are going to control all of health care. Now, that affects everybody because everybody has a body. And the third one, which has not received a lot of attention but is equally insidious, is that the government is going to throw a net over all financial transactions. In fact, the bill that was proposed would allow the government to determine the salary of a teller in a bank. So when you put a net over energy, a net over health care, a net over financial transactions, talk about Big Brother looking over your shoulder. No wonder people are exercised.

Mr. AKIN

Mr. AKIN. Yeah, exactly. That's the situation. And I guess the other thing is, I think the American public is worried about this job thing. Excessive taxation is a big deal, because if you own a small business and you tax that guy really heavily, the small business owner is not going to have any money to invest in new equipment or new plants and things, so heavy taxation on a small business owner is going to be a job killer. And yet, this bill on medicine puts a heavy, heavy tax on small business owners. So, in that sense, it's a job-killing bill.

Mr. AKIN. What I was just talking about here on the floor a little bit with this great drama that's supposed to take place tomorrow, the question is, you know, drama, there's supposed to be some element of it being credible. A science fiction movie, it's a cheesy movie if it's unbelievable. And yet what's going on tomorrow is we're going to take $500 billion out of Medicare. Now, and then the idea is that after people watch this 6-hour great debate, that they're going to be happy and they're going to like the bill when they find that they've taken $600 billion or $500 billion out of Medicare. And I'm thinking, I'm not sure that people aren't going to just say that bill is ugly.

Mr. AKIN. That's what I find is almost comical in this whole thing because, you know, you take a look at the American public--and this is my 10th year in the U.S. Congress, and I've got constituents that are reading this stuff, and they know the bill. And you can't tell me these people don't know what's in this bill. People know what's in it, and they don't like it. They think it's ugly

Mr. AKIN. Those meetings seemed to have been pretty exciting this last year.

Mr. AKIN. Did you know there was a report that was done on the Department of Education? I think it was during the days of Ronald Reagan. Their conclusion in the report was that if a foreign country had done to America what the Department of Education had done to education, we would consider it an act of war. I thought that was kind of an interesting report that we're paying money for a department that has done what would be considered an act of war.

Mr. AKIN. Well, I'm not exactly sure of that. My understanding was the bill was supposed to be released 24 hours from the day that they're talking about it, and the only thing I'd seen earlier this morning was outlines, and the outlines, of course, the Congressional Budget Office can't score it. And it appears to be very much the same thing as the Senate health care bill is everything we can tell. We've been told that there aren't special deals in it, and yet as we take a look at it, we find that there are. Somebody managed to take a look at the ones that were there before and a lot of them are still there. The Louisiana Purchase is still in it, as I understand.

Mr. AKIN. Hospital's in--my understanding is the hospital is in Connecticut; Medicaid dollars, Vermont, Massachusetts, New Jersey; drug companies; extra cash for union health care plans. I have a list of some of these. Montana coal miners. Florida seniors don't have to pay that Medicare Advantage. You know, Medicare's being cut, but you don't if you're a Florida senior. It's not cut there, but in other States it is. If you're a union guy, it's not. But if you aren't, you know. And then there's North Dakota Medicare payments. Hawaii hospitals are exempt from the cuts. And longshoremen. I didn't know about longshoremen. But there are, of course a bunch of these special deals in the program.

Mr. AKIN. You go to the head of the class. The whole purpose of the Department of Energy was to make sure we're not dependent on foreign oil.

Mr. AKIN. Let me just respond to what you're saying because maybe I'm being too pessimistic about this. But let's take a look at the format. The format is we're going to huddle behind closed doors. We're going to produce a bill. You get 24 hours to look at it, and then we want you to come and tell us how much you like it. That doesn't seem to me to be sort of an open the kimono and let's work together as a team. It's more like, if you don't support me, then my way or the highway.

Mr. AKIN. Of course the Department has grown tremendously as we've become more dependent on Middle Eastern oil. What was it they said? The compassion of the IRS and the efficiency of the post office or whatever.

Mr. AKIN. So the first thing is if you take a look at what we have been doing, we have injected a whole lot of uncertainty into the system to begin with.

Mr. AKIN. Congressman Kingston, I am glad you mentioned that, because when I take a look at some of this uncertainty, I think of three nets that are being thrown over free enterprise. The first was a net on everything that has to do with energy. And as an engineer, energy is very pervasive in everything. So, if the government is regulating energy all over, that's, as you say, a government takeover of a type. The next net is over all of health care. But the third net most people don't know about, and I'm very thankful that you brought that up, and that is the net over all the financial transactions. Now, you put those three nets in place and you don't have very much of free enterprise anymore, because the government is tinkering and tampering and adjusting and fiddling around with the rules in all of those areas. And that really builds that economic uncertainty, and that's a job killer.

Mr. AKIN. My friend, you've mentioned that snow. I heard--I wish you could tell me if it's true. I heard that the snow was going to continue unless Al Gore said ``uncle.'' Is that true?

Mr. AKIN. Government to do more and more things. You know, if we go back to that whole thing you are talking about on that supposedly stimulus bill, this is such basic stuff, and yet somehow the administration doesn't understand it. We have a lot of unemployment, we have a whole lot of Americans that would like to get jobs, and so the question is what can the government do to try to get those jobs going? And I have made a list of all the wrong things to do. These are the things that are job killers. Now, if you take a look at what are the things that kill jobs, first thing off the bat, we score the stimulus bill you are talking about, the health care bill that is supposed to be the centerpiece of this great political drama tomorrow, and it is supposed to be something new, and they are going to open the box and it is going to be the same old ugly thing that was there before. What is it that kills jobs? This stuff is not complicated. Anybody who ran a lemonade stand as a kid is going to understand what these things are. The first thing is economic uncertainty. If a guy that owns a business, because you think all these jobs, most of them are in small businesses, 500 or less, that is 80 percent of the jobs in America, if you take a look at those guys and if you say, hey, I don't know what in the world the future is going to bring, you are going to go, boy, I don't want to take any risks because we just don't know what's going to happen. You've got this huge tax for the socialized medicine bill, you've got this global warming deal, which is a tax on energy, tons of red tape that go along with it, a lot of uncertainty.

Mr. AKIN. Now, one of my favorites there is the Department of Energy. Did you know why the Department of Energy was originally created? Quiz time.

Mr. AKIN. Did you know that there are supposedly 36--I know Missouri is one of them. That's my home State. There are 36 States that have legislation moving exempting the States from having to be required to purchase health care when the government demands that everybody has to buy federally approved health care? There are 36 separate States moving legislation to stop that. That doesn't say something's popular.

Mr. AKIN. Some of us stood here and said, This is not going to work. I was standing on this floor a year ago and I said, This stimulus plan will not work. It wasn't because some of us were such geniuses. It is because we had learned from Henry Morgenthau back in the 1930s, who stood before the House Ways and Means Committee and said, we tried this idea of excessive government spending, money that we didn't have, and we tried to spend money like mad. This is the guy who was Little Lord Keynes's buddy, he was FDR's Secretary of the Treasury, and he said, it doesn't work. Now, I don't think you had to be a rocket scientist to figure that when you and your family are in trouble economically that what you do is don't go spending money like mad. If spending money was going to give us a good economy, boy, we would have a great economy right now.

Mr. AKIN. We did.

Mr. AKIN. What you are saying, Congressman Kingston, a billion here and a billion there, that starts to add up, doesn't it?

Mr. AKIN. Let me just toss that number a different way. George Bush's worst debt year was with a Nancy Pelosi Congress, and that was about $400-something billion. I agree with you that was too much debt. And that was '08. You go to '09 with President Obama, and his very first year was $1.4 trillion, three times more than President Bush. And then they want to say, yeah, but it's Bush's fault. Wait a minute.

Mr. AKIN. Over $800 billion?

Mr. AKIN. I yield.

Mr. AKIN. What you just said, Congressman Kingston, I would wish that that were true. I think the American public is concerned about unemployment. Somebody made the comment that unemployment is an important issue, but it really becomes critical when you are the one that is unemployed. Yet my understanding is that this drama, this political drama, is basically rehashing the same old play, which is, here we go again with this health care situation. You made the comment that they had, I think it was a $787 billion, some people called it a stimulus plan.