W. Akin

Mr. AKIN

Mr. AKIN. Gentleman, just a minute. I can't help but interrupt. Thirty percent has been nationalized if you just add up those big corporations?

Mr. AKIN. I can't help but jump in when somebody is defending the cause of free enterprise. I guess there's different ways to describe or explain the phenomena that you're talking about. And one of them is that one side of the aisle tends to be much more in favor of free enterprise and the other one is much more in favor of having the government do things. I guess what we start to get to is a question that's kind of a fundamental question, really the biggest thing that we divide and talk about and argue and debate about on this floor is, what is the proper function of the civil government, particularly the Federal Government? What should the Federal Government be doing? Should it be baking bread or should it not be baking bread? Should baking bread be left to citizens out on the street? Should it be the job of the Federal Government to be giving food away to people? Should it be the job of the Federal Government, according to Joe the Plumber, to take money from one person and give it to another person? Is the job of the Federal Government to be the big sugar daddy, dispensing favors? Is it the job of the Federal Government basically to be Big Mama, taking care of everybody? Or is there a different purpose for government, which is simply justice, simply creating a level playing field so that everybody can go out and use their God-given potential as they're directed to do it? And it seems to me, gentleman, that you can make the case of Federal control of everything versus free enterprise, or you could just say, What's really the legitimate job of the Federal Government? Now we had some liberals in this Chamber some years ago, and they discovered there were people in America who were hungry. Of course there have been people in America who have been hungry for a long time. But they came up with a bright idea that we're going to socialize a little bit, we're going to steal money from some other people through taxes, print food stamps, and give food stamps to people who are hungry to take care of the problem of hunger. In fact, they declared war on hunger, and hunger won, of course. That was their approach. What's being proposed here today, gentleman, is an entirely more radical agenda. This would be the equivalent of somebody discovering that there is hunger in America and the government taking over the farms, the grocery stores and the distribution houses in between, taking over the entire food industry. That's what's being proposed with this socialized medicine. It's not a matter of just giving somebody Medicare or Medicaid who can't afford to pay for medical care. It's about the government taking over one-fifth of the economy. This is a whole radical step more in the direction of a challenge to freedom and free enterprise. It is fundamentally un-American is what we're dealing with.

Mr. AKIN. Gentleman, you just jumped out of the realm of free enterprise, didn't you? You jumped into the realm of government planning.

Mr. AKIN. So there's no failure of free enterprise at all. It wasn't a failure of free enterprise, was it?

Mr. AKIN. It was a failure of another government socialized scheme is what it was.

Mr. AKIN. What I was getting at even more so was Freddie and Fannie, because you had the Reinvestment Act. But parallel to it was Freddie and Fannie. And Freddie and Fannie were encouraged to make all of these loans to people who couldn't pay. But then the bankers got smart, and they cut the loans up in lots of little pieces and packaged them up and sold them all over the place. The thing that is interesting was, people were really getting down on Bush for making such a bad economy and it was free enterprise's fault, it was George Bush's fault. In reality, you go in The New York Times and you see President Bush in 2003--I remember because it was September 11, 2003, New York Times, not exactly a conservative document. And this is Bush saying, Hey, I've got to have more authority to control Freddie and Fannie. They're out of control. They're making loans that are going to become a huge disaster. And at the same time you have a quote in that article of Barney Frank from the floor of this House, who is now the chairman of the committee that runs all of that saying, Freddie and Fannie are fine. You can read the quote.

Mr. AKIN. It was September 11, 2003, New York Times.

Mr. AKIN. Of course, obviously, September 11, 2001.

Mr. AKIN. I just appreciate the gentleman, I am not a big fan of pie charts, I love pie, but I don't like pie charts. But this chart, I think, is a good graphic. It depicts something which almost defies reason. What we are seeing is, we are going to take all of that green area, if you can point to that green area with your pointer, there--but I am talking about the turquoise area, the whole thing. We are going to change all of that. We are going to scrap our whole health care system, have it taken over by the government in order to address that little sort of orange-red sector. What that suggests to me is that somebody has an agenda, and it's more federalizing anything than it is really solving a problem. And this is something that I find, from an integrity point of view, really distressing, particularly as an engineer. I mean, we just passed the biggest tax increase in the history of our country because we are under the premise that CO2 is such a bad thing that we have got to tax everybody in order to put a tax on CO2. So in spite of a promise--if you are making $250,000 or less, you won't be taxed--in fact what we have passed in the House is, if you flip a light switch, you start getting taxed. So the simple problem is, though, if you want to get rid of CO2, all you have to do is take the nuclear power plants--that's 20 percent of our electric generation in America--take the 20 percent and double it. So we have 40 percent of our electric coming out of nuclear. If you do that, you would get rid of all the CO2 from every passenger car in the country. And yet we have come up with this complicated, tremendously intrusive, huge tax increase, when you could just simply say in a page or two, just double the number of nuclear. Now, here what you have got is, you have got all this folderol about health care, we have got to take it over, the government has got to do all this stuff, and you have got 4 percent of people who are uninsured. It just seems like, it seems like we have made our conclusion ahead of time that we want our government to run everything, and our excuse is that little tiny 4 percent wedge. Even I like cherry pie. If all I got was 4 percent, it isn't worth it. It just plain isn't worth it. That's the obvious conclusion of your chart. And I appreciate you just taking us into the world of free enterprise and what's really going on with our Federal Government. I appreciate your leadership. The gentleman from Iowa is really a saint, and we are thankful to have some good old midwestern commonsense values here on the floor of the U.S. Congress.

Mr. AKIN. I am encouraged, Gentleman, and it just seems to me in the last 6 months that many Americans, who are many great patriots--and I'm not talking about rich people. I'm just talking about the people who love our country are getting engaged. They're getting energized, and they're asking the question: What can we do? As they're busy asking these questions, all of this kind of information is coming out, and people are understanding, just as this President said that he was running on a platform of change, and many of us are realizing that there have to be changes inside us. The changes that you and I in a free enterprise system believe in are the changes that come in our own hearts--the changes of how we're going to run our businesses differently and of how we're going to do better for our families. Those are the kinds of changes a lot of Americans are looking at. It's not so much a change of Big Government's telling everybody what they're going to do. Some of the change is going to have to be repairing some of the moral infrastructure of our country, a sense of outrage over a system that has gotten out of control. Particularly as good old Ronald Reagan said, We're buying a lot more government than we can afford. I think there are a lot of Americans, regardless of their political affiliations, who have come to the conclusion that we are buying more government than we can afford, in the order of trillions of dollars of more government. I think the time is coming when there are going to have to be some changes here on the floor in terms of before we can get the changes that we need in policy, we have to rein in a beast that seems to be somewhat out of control, which is the Federal Government, which seems to be more in the business of telling us what to do than in being the servant of the people--the way it should be.

Mr. AKIN. If the gentleman would yield, my memory may be a little weak on this, but we were involved about a year ago with this big Wall Street bailout. My understanding was, of part of that Wall Street bailout money, there was some sort of a tax that was going to be placed on some of those companies that was going to go directly to fund ACORN. Do you know if that part of the bill passed on part of that Wall Street bailout? Do you know whether the funding for ACORN was built in there? I remember there was talk that it would be. If that's the case, my concern is this: that all of these organizations known as ACORN are not stupid. They're changing their names to community organizers so that you'll have all of these people who used to be ACORN still sitting there, still collecting Federal money and yet will no longer have the ACORN name because the ACORN name has been so incredibly disgraced. So I guess my question and concern is--and I think as you're saying-- if we're really serious about dealing with this corruption, then it seems like we're going to have to deal with more than ACORN. We're going to have to deal with all of those organizations which came under that ACORN umbrella. I would yield.

Mr. AKIN. It seems like what we're really talking about is kind of two visions of government. One vision of government is that government is limited and government is interested in justice, and it's a vision that promotes freedom. It promotes people having the freedom to go out and succeed or fail. It allows the individual to take the greatest gamble of their life, to live whatever dream God put in their heart. And America is full of people that came here and they were nuts, they had these crazy dreams, and they worked on them and they worked on them, and those dreams became a vague possibility and then they became a possibility. And finally those dreams became a reality, and America was built one dream at a time. There was some nutty guy that had the idea of making a light bulb. He made 100 light bulbs and none of them worked, and he said that's good because now I know 100 ways not to make a light bulb. His name was Thomas Edison. It became so common, we called it the American Dream. The other view of government is not a rule of law. It's not people equal before the law. It's the special deal society. It's the special deal for me or for you. If you've got the right government contract, you can get a bailout; but if you don't, you go bankrupt. It's a special deal that, for one person, you get treated one way, but for somebody else, the law is different. So the question is: Do we have a rule of law, or do we have basically a political kind of controlled anarchy? That's the question. Where are we going as a country? Are we going to have a rule of law? Are we going to have people equal before the law, or is the government going to be the big sugar daddy that's supposed to take care of everybody and that will reward people for behaviors which will destroy their lives? Is that the sort of government that we want? That's the question before the American public today as they watch what happens on the floor of this Congress. I yield back.

Mr. AKIN. If you would yield.

Mr. AKIN. They learned from his mistake.

Mr. AKIN. The interesting thing was, he was not in the majority party at the time. I think he opposed legislation, but we passed it here in the House. Republicans were in charge at that time. We passed legislation in the House to regulate and to require that capitalization of Freddie and Fannie. It went to the Senate. But because of Senate rules, Democrats in the Senate were able to kill that legislation. And yet they want to blame President Bush, they want to blame free enterprise for what was another one of these socialized schemes where the big government is going to step in and try and repeal the laws of economics.

Mr. AKIN. If you would yield, gentleman, one of the things somebody once said--and I was not a whiz on taking history in high school--but if you don't learn from history, you are bound to repeat mistakes. And I do recall a very threatening and ominous nation that we saw taking over country after country called the Soviet Union. If you were to try to just simplify their philosophy, it was that government was going to take care of food, clothing and shelter. They were going to pay for your education, set you up with a job, and take care of your health care. We laughed when that country collapsed, a little bit with a sense of anxiety because they had nuclear weapons aimed at us and all. We said, you know that Communist/Socialist stuff won't work. Their economy was a mess. They couldn't keep up with us in the arms race because their economy was a disaster. The government can't run all that stuff efficiently. People starved to death over there. Their medical care was so abysmal, people that went into their hospitals would shudder. There was no anaesthetic, no clean bandages. It was a disaster. And when the whole thing went down the drain, we said, Everybody knows Communism/Socialism won't work. So what are we proposing now? The government's going to provide food. The government's going to provide housing. The government's going to provide your education. We just decided to nationalize a whole lot more of that. No more private loans. We're going to have the government take care of all that. And now we're talking about the government--not only the insurance and the automotive, but now the government wants to take over one-fifth of the economy in terms of health care. Now, it seems to me we should learn something from history, don't you think, gentleman?

Mr. AKIN. And of course we are going to use Federal money to pay ACORN to do all of these activities, which has become an interesting topic lately, as well, as we've seen some enterprising young people going in and checking out exactly what the story was in these different ACORN locations.

Mr. AKIN. Now, that's getting millions of dollars of Federal money. So we're using taxpayer money--

Mr. AKIN. Fifty-three million of taxpayer dollars to advertise for a political candidate.

Mr. AKIN. Well, it almost makes you wonder about the Attorney General investigating. I suppose, perhaps, the gentleman has seen some of the various tapes that were cut with hidden cameras as people went into various ACORN locations. It was kind of an interesting phenomenon, nothing that was broken by the big media in America, but it just shows that that underground kind of media, the new Web and the Internet and the bloggers and all--you have an enterprising gentleman and a young lady going in and being very bold at various ACORN offices talking about the fact that they want to open a house of ill repute and want to get some help from ACORN to help them figure out how to buy the house. And they are so candid with what they're saying. And the comments that were recorded in camera I think have been getting a lot of hits, a lot of people watching it. The mainstream media has paid no attention to it, and yet all over America people are looking at this. They have already heard about ACORN and the dozens of violations of this organization that we're paying for with tax dollars. I mean, what in the world is going on? You've got--these two are just actors, you know, but they're entrepreneurs in an information kind of age. They're just going in pretending like they want to open up a house of ill repute so he can raise money to run for Congress. It's almost laughable if it weren't true.

Mr. AKIN. I didn't hear that word somehow or other.

Mr. AKIN. But they were some interesting sets of tapes, and some courageous people that were willing to do that because there is some threat potential there.

Mr. AKIN

Mr. AKIN. Reclaiming my time for just a minute, if Lyndon Johnson, who noticed there were people who were hungry in America, took the same approach, he would have had the government take over all the farms and the grocery stores, wouldn't he?

Mr. AKIN. Mr. Speaker, it's a treat to be able to join you, Members of Congress, and those listening in tonight on a topic that has absorbed the attentions of our country, the topic of health care. This week, the President delivered a major address to the House, to the Senate and to the public about his health care plans. It was really a big debate. There was a lot of discussion, actually some heated kinds of words, some concerns about facts, and what was opinion and what was fact. All of these things have probably been inescapably in the news for many of us to observe. The big debate on the facts calls forth that old quip that everybody is entitled to their opinions, but there's one set of facts. What we're going to try to take a look at this evening are some of these different controversial areas and how you straighten this thing out and why there is controversy and why there is debate over what the facts are, even though people have their own opinions. So when we take a look at this--I apologize. Being an engineer, I may tend to make things a little complicated here. This is a chart of the Democrats' health care plan. If it seems like it's a little complicated, it's because it is a little bit complicated; and something as complicated as this, obviously, is going to make it a little difficult for people to sort out. What exactly are the facts? That's what we're going to be working on. I'm hoping to be joined by some of my colleagues who are experts in certain areas here of the health care plan, but I think just to start with: sometimes a picture is worth 1,000 words. This is a fairly complicated proposal by the House Democrats in their bill. Essentially, it is going to try to take over 18 percent of the U.S. economy, which is the entire health care sector, and put it under government management. Now, it doesn't do that immediately, but that's its net effect over a period of time. So, if there are some debates over facts and questions, it may not be surprising. Now, perhaps, when you take a look at a big government takeover of something in any particular area of our government, one of the things that you worry about is that it may become expensive and that your quality may go downhill. There have been complaints sometimes about the Federal Emergency Act and about the FEMA people. There were concerns about their performance during Katrina. There were concerns about the performance of the post office relative to how much it cost. There were concerns about the CIA, about the kinds of numbers they gave us on Iraq before Gulf War I and Gulf War II. They got it wrong both times. I do yield to my good friend from Minnesota (Mr. Kline).

Mr. AKIN. If the gentleman would yield, if you're talking about a 1,000-plus-page bill and if you're trying to put it on one chart, it's going to look a little complicated. I yield.