W. Akin

Mr. AKIN

Mr. AKIN. You are getting to the point. A laser is like a flashlight; if you could aim it at the right thing and hit it, you don't have to wait for anything; whereas a missile, even if it's a fast one, you still have to wait for it.

Mr. AKIN. So North Korea sold some of the technology to Iran. But Iran has then been able to develop it more rapidly even than North Korea, perhaps because they have more money to put into the project. I don't know. So now you have got North Korea and Iran both that we consider that the leadership is highly unstable in those countries, and they have the capability, or are rapidly developing the capability, of projecting a missile either into Europe or even potentially onto the continental United States with a nuclear warhead on it.

Mr. AKIN. You are giving us a lot of valuable information. You are saying North Korea now has conducted missile tests. The missile, of course, is a delivery system. And the most recent test that they shot just a couple weeks ago went all the way over Japan and went some considerable distance, twice as far as their previous test. So the range of their missiles is going farther. Not only that, they are equipping the missile, or they can equip the missile, with a nuclear warhead, and our understanding is that they are busy developing that nuclear capability. Is that correct, to the best of our intelligence?

Mr. AKIN. Then is the only threat sort of the radical Islamic threat? Because it seems to me that North Korea also poses a threat. Am I mistaken on that?

Mr. AKIN. So what you are talking about is we are not only dealing with something that is not a nation-state, but we are also dealing with a different frame of mind, a different calculus on the value of life. You are talking about, if nuclear weapons fall into the hands of people that have this mindset, this whole thing is really a game changer.

Mr. AKIN. Reclaiming my time, they had a nation-state; and they knew that if they launched at us, the thing was, we might launch back at them. But now you're talking about a terrorist that may not have a nation- state. That is a different formula. Isn't it?

Mr. AKIN. Let me just interrupt a second because you've brought up a couple of really interesting points. The first one, I remember starting to have some interest in politics, and I was really skeptical of the idea of even negotiating that treaty, because what we found was the Soviet Union cheated on all of their treaties. As we look now, as the Soviet Union has collapsed, we find they were busy cheating on this thing all the way along. So we were kind of really out there, weren't we, with this ABM treaty not having any defensive capability. The second thing I would just mention is, now, the equation has changed, hasn't it? It is not just one or two nations. Now we are starting to look at a different scenario, aren't we?

Mr. AKIN

Mr. AKIN. Reclaiming my time, the trouble with the Ponzi scheme is sometime the music stops and there aren't enough chairs and then the proverbial stuff slides down the wall and then there's a big problem. That's part of what started this whole thing, what was effectively a pyramiding scheme in a sense. But some people want to say this is a failure of free enterprise, the problem that we're having in the economy. It's not a problem of free enterprise; it's a problem of socialism. It's a problem of this government telling Freddie and Fannie that they had to make loans that weren't going to work. If you tell someone you've got to do something and they're saying to you economically this isn't going to work and you force it and you keep doing that and then you have a bunch of other people playing along with the scheme and give it a AAA rating and sell it all over the world, pretty soon the music stops. And now what's happening is it's affecting the entire economy. I yield to my friend from Texas, Kevin.

Mr. AKIN. Reclaiming my time, you're saying the budget today that we passed said the economy is going to shrink by 1 percent. Is that per year?

Mr. AKIN. This year. And then how much did we just shrink in the first quarter?

Mr. AKIN. Reclaiming my time, the President made some promises. One of them was there weren't going to be any tax increases if you made less than $250,000. For ``Show Me'' guy from Missouri, that's puzzling, that promise. Here's another promise: He promised transparency. He says, ``I will not sign any non-emergency bill without giving the American public an opportunity to review and comment on the White House Web site for at least 5 days.'' So we are going to have some transparency here. Now, I wonder how much transparency there was in that budget you're talking about that says we are just going to assume it's going to contract 1 percent when this quarter it has already contracted 6 and it contracted 6 the last quarter. What kind of numbers are those? I yield.

Mr. AKIN. Reclaiming my time, let me just summarize and see if I got what you said. What you are saying is we kept hearing from the Democrats that President Bush inherited all of this surplus, and it was somehow because, I guess, President Clinton had done something right. But, in fact, those years, the Republicans controlled the House and they forced President Clinton to balance the budget, and that's why he got his surpluses because you guys made him have a surplus. Did I understand that correctly?

Mr. AKIN. To put that into context, if you go from George Washington to George Bush, and you add up all of the debt that's been accumulated, you are looking at $5.8 trillion. So what you are saying in 1 year, we are going to do not quite half of that, everything since 1770s to now, we are going to burn that in 1 year? My goodness. Judge Carter.

Mr. AKIN. You said $156,000?

Mr. AKIN. Some of these numbers do involve making certain assumptions, and if you doctor the assumptions, the numbers may look better than they really are. We just talked about one where they said the economy is going to contract by 1 percent, and we have already gone through 6 in the first quarter. I yield to the gentleman from Louisiana.

Mr. AKIN. All of us standing here voted for it.

Mr. AKIN. There is this transparency promise, that what's going on in Washington D.C., the public should be able to see it. You see this kind of transparency promise. And then when you take a look at what happened, the President first broke the promise of transparency in January when he signed this legislation which was the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act. It was passed January 27. And he since continued the problem with the State insurance, the SCHIP bill. It wasn't 5 days. And the reason I mention this is when we came to that supposedly stimulus bill, our staffs got that thing at 11:30 at night, and we're supposed to vote on a 1,000-plus page bill the next day. Now, I am not a speed reader, and my staff doesn't sit around at 11:30 just waiting for some announcement from the Democrat Party. Now I don't understand the transparency in that situation. But I do understand a little bit, because I don't know what $780 billion is. I started to put it in terms of aircraft carriers, because I understood that. I understood that it was more than the war in Iraq for 6 years and the war in Afghanistan added to it for 7 years. I understand it was more than 250 aircraft carriers. We only have 11 of them. The debt service on it was nine aircraft carriers, and it's all money that we don't have. So we have got a series, again, going to this 100 days, there is a lot of new records that are being set, particularly in the debt area. But there are other kinds of things, I think, that get these people at the tea parties upset. One is, have you ever heard of the President firing the president of General Motors? I have never seen that before. I yield to my friend from Texas, Congressman Brady.

Mr. AKIN. Reclaiming my time, I thought I heard the MIT professor say it was $3,100 per average family. This is something that's a little upsetting because first we have this promise. It couldn't be any more clear: If you're not making $250,000, you don't have to worry about this tax increase. Now, the energy tax hasn't been passed yet; right?

Mr. AKIN. I sure appreciate your making some positive comments. And I think it's important that when we are critical that we also offer a better idea. I was taught that as a kid growing up. If you want to be critical of something, okay, but then say how would you do it better. I think that's an honest way for us all to proceed, and we certainly have a lot of ways to do that. I would like to just take a few minutes and talk about what are some of the better ways to do things. You just mentioned Guantanamo. The numbers I have is that our best estimate is that 61 of those detainees are now fighting against us. After we let them go, they are back again in the battle fighting against our sons and daughters. My recommendation is when you get people that dangerous, don't let them go so easily. Let's talk about some solutions. Let's just talk about how would we approach this situation. The economy has now been shrinking. We see this debt that is really skyrocketing, excessive spending on the part of all the Democrats. Let's just say that working for the day, or we are President, we are responsible for turning this around, what are the steps we are going to take. I think it's fair to ask that question. I will go to my friend from Texas, Judge Carter.

Mr. AKIN. Summarizing what you said, Judge, what you are saying is, first of all, the Federal Government does not create wealth, other than we print money, which just waters down. We tax people, slop the money around. But we never create it. We just redistribute it. So how do you actually take an economy and help everybody to do better? And what you have to do is you have to allow the private sector, the entrepreneurs, the investors, the inventors, the small business people, to get out there and do that, the American dream. Let freedom work and let people go and use their ingenuity and ability to actually create wealth. Wealth is not static. It grows if you fertilize it the right way. So what you are talking about is doing things that are going to help small business. Just an interesting number that someone tossed to me, and that is you take a look at companies with 500 employees. That is what is called a small business, 500 employees. Half of Americans work in a business with 500 or less employees, and those companies create 78 or 79 percent of the new jobs in America. So if you are worried about the people not having jobs and you really want to turn the economy around, what you want to do is you want to fire that engine of small business, you want to get those 80 percent of the new jobs, you want to start getting those things going. And what do you do to do that? You have to have liquidity for those companies to work. I recognize another good friend of ours and an expert on small business, Congressman Brady.

Mr. AKIN. Well, reclaiming my time, you are saying that porkulus bill that we passed, it had more money to buy artwork than it did to help small business that creates 80 percent of the new jobs in our economy? I yield.

Mr. AKIN. That is a no-brainer, gentleman. Keep going.

Mr. AKIN. That sounds like freedom working, doesn't it?

Mr. AKIN. Just reclaiming my time, if I were to list off some things for small business, and you have run a Chamber and run your own small business, it seems like to me there are some things we are doing that I just wouldn't do. The first thing is the death tax. That is a bad idea. We are having that death tax come back so some poor guy loses his business, I mean he dies, and his son is going to run the business, but now he has to sell half the business to pay the tax on it. What is the logic of that? That destroys jobs and destroys small businesses. So first the death tax. The next thing it seems to me like dividends and capital gains, boy, did we see the economy jump when we limited that and allowed people to keep more liquidity in the economy. So that is another thing we could to. Another thing, it seems to me, is when you say you are going to tax people making $250,000, a whole lot of money, those are the guys that own the small business. Do you want them to create jobs, or do you want to suck all the money away from them like some sort of leech until they are so dry and withered up they can't hire anybody anymore? I think there are some things that we just didn't do. Just leave them alone and let them do what they do so well, which is follow the American dream. I yield to my friend from Louisiana.

Mr. AKIN. Reclaiming my time, are you saying that hugging Chavez is not really a national energy policy? Is that what you are trying to say? I yield. I couldn't resist that.