W. Akin

Mr. AKIN

Mr. AKIN. Reclaiming my time, sometimes you can talk about big numbers and when you get past a certain number of thousand dollars, it's hard for me to imagine what we are talking about. But here is a different way to look at it: You go from George to George. That's George Washington to George Bush. And you go through all of that, and they accumulated by overspending $5.8 trillion. That's a lot of money. We shouldn't have that much overspending. I know you gentlemen have voted with me against doing that kind of overspending. But that's the reality of where we are, $5.8 trillion. But now we're taking a look at this President, and just using the numbers he gave us, these are his numbers, and he has got $8.7 trillion he's going to add on top of this. So in other words, he's proposing to spend in the next 7 years $8.7 trillion, which is more than what we had from George Washington to George Bush. Now, that is some serious level of spending. I yield to the gentleman.

Mr. AKIN. Reclaiming my time, I appreciate the gentleman's pointing that out, and I misspoke. You're absolutely right.

Mr. AKIN. I do yield.

Mr. AKIN. In fact, what you just said, I think, gentleman, was we are like twice over it.

Mr. AKIN. Reclaiming my time, that's not a good scenario when Estonia is better on their economics than what we are doing in this country. And I think that's what generated these TEA parties and things. I will tell you people in my district, St. Louis, they were mad. They were very upset about this. I am delighted that we are joined here by Congressman Coffman from Colorado. Colorado is a good solid State, and they have elected a great Congressman here. And I look forward to your joining our discussion here tonight. Congressman Coffman, I yield.

Mr. AKIN. All these people have been talking about the cost of the war in Iraq. They didn't seem to worry about spending more than that in the first 5 weeks we were here. I don't understand exactly how that works. Congressman Coffman from Colorado.

Mr. AKIN. Reclaiming my time, I appreciate your joining us for the discussion this evening. Sometimes people want to claim that Republicans don't have any solutions and are just always complaining about the excessive spending or what we really should do about it. But the fact of matter is that there are proven ways of getting the economy back on track when you start into a recession. And one of the things that's absolutely critical, and it works a couple of different ways, but what it does is it increases the amount of revenue that the Federal Government takes in, and that's a way to get a budget balanced. There are two ways to do it: cut spending or take in more revenue. The only trouble is if you tax too much, you kill the economy and you take in less revenue and you create something that's even worse than what you had before. Now, the way to do it is you want liquidity available for the free markets. You want the people who are the investors and the inventors, the small business people, you want those people to have the liquidity so they can run and manage their businesses. A lot of people don't realize that if you take a business that's got 500 employees down, and that's what we call a small business, they employ half of the people in our country but create almost 80 percent of the new jobs. So you want to make sure those guys have got the liquidity that they need, and that's what the Republicans understand. That is why we are completely opposed to a whole series of things that the Democrats are doing which are going to make it hard for small businesses. It is exactly what you are saying. You have to get off of this spending, and it seems like our administration just does not understand that and we are going to take a recession and turn it into the Great Depression. I don't mean to cut in on you, but what you are talking about is the livelihood, the potential jobs that people in America wouldn't have access to because they were never created, because we have just vacuumed the liquidity out of the private sector. I want to yield to my friend from Texas, Judge Carter, for just a minute.

Mr. AKIN. Reclaiming my time a little bit, first of all, who was it that supported this $410 billion for the omnibus? Was that the Democrat party? Yes. And then this bill here, this stimulus or ``porkulus'' bill for $787 billion, do you recall here in the House Chamber when we voted on this bill, do you recall how many Republicans supported that number?

Mr. AKIN. Not one.

Mr. AKIN. Neither did I, gentleman, and that is why we are here, I believe. So people want to say, well, you know the Republicans, we got a few liberal Members and all that kind of stuff and they want to beat us up for two or three Republicans that might vote for something like this. But there wasn't one Republican that supported that number, is there?

Mr. AKIN. If I could reclaim my time, piggy-backing on what you said, we should take a look at what you said. You said using the financial crisis as an excuse. Of course, that is what we have been doing here. We said, oh, look, there is this mortgage crisis that was created where all of these Freddie and Fannie mortgages were made to people who couldn't afford to pay and the Wall Street community played some funny games with the securities business and we end up in this big mess that was really started by this mortgage crisis. So now we have got the recession started. So there are really two schools of thought as to what you do when you got a recession going. One of the schools of thought is, and it goes back to FDR and Little Lord Keynes, he was a little weird, he had this idea if you spent enough money you could ``stimulate demand'' and everything would be fine. It was a little bit like reaching down, grabbing your bootstraps and lifting yourself up and flying around the room. So they tried this theory about the Federal Government spending tons of money. It was called Keynesian economics. And at the end of 8 years of this experiment of the Federal Government spending tons of money, this guy, the fellow who was FDR's Secretary of Treasury, comes before the Congress, the Ways and Means Committee, and he made this statement. This is exactly his words, Henry Morgenthau. He says, ``We have tried spending money. We are spending more than we have ever spent before and it doesn't work.'' It also shows that we don't learn much from history. ``I say after 8 years of the administration, we have just as much unemployment as when we started, and an enormous debt to boot.'' Now, this theory is what we are doing, the idea we can fix a recession with excessive Federal spending. If that were such a good idea, with the amount of debt we just saw at $5 trillion, we should be doing great anyway, if lots and lots of debt is what makes things better. Yet, here we have Henry Morgenthau speaking to us from 1939 like he is out of the grave saying, hey guys, this doesn't work. The other solution, of course, is that you could do what we said, which is get the liquidity into the hands of the business people. Let's talk just for a minute about small business. One of the worst things you can do for small business, let's sort of tick the things off. The thing you want to do is you want to tax them so much they can't run their business, right? So where would you start if you were trying to harm small business? I yield to my friend from Colorado.

Mr. AKIN. First off, you are going to increase their taxes. So what is the first thing that the President said he is going to do? Anybody making over $250,000 a year, he is going to increase their taxes. I don't know if he realizes that more than half of the small business owners make over $250,000 a year. So if he increases their taxes, then what are they going to have to spend money to help build up their small business? So, right off the bat, he is doing one of the first things to hurt a small business person. There are other taxes he is proposing. Do you recall some of the others? What else would you do? I yield.

Mr. AKIN. Reclaiming my time, what you are saying is absolutely fundamental for us to understand. What we are talking about is that the President has said that he is going to increase the cost of energy. He also said he wouldn't tax anybody making less than $250,000. He said that. But then he turned around and said, oh, no, but we are going to tax energy. How much are we going to tax energy? They call it cap- and-trade. It is really cap-and-tax. So he is going to tax energy. So who is that going to affect? Well, the MIT people took a look at the proposal and said we are talking $3,100 for the average household in America. The average household doesn't make any $250,000. So he is going to run the tax of energy up. And what else is that going to be? Of course, as you are absolutely right, the astute gentleman from Colorado points out that small business, if it costs more money for energy, it makes it harder to do the business. So we are going to do that. First of all, we are going to tax them if they are making over $250,000. Then we are going to tax their energy. Any truck driver or anybody that has to bring supplies to their business is going to pay more money for it, because that is going to be taxed. So have we let off there or not? No, in fact they thought of some other innovative things.

Mr. AKIN. Reclaiming my time, there are kind of two scenarios, aren't there? Let's say you have a small business that is making a product in this country. They are paying an increased cost of electricity, so they have to raise the price of their product. One of two things happens: Either the American consumer buys the higher cost product or they buy a foreign competitor's product that the foreign competitor didn't have to pay that tax on, so they can sell it cheaper. So then what happens is a foreign job replaces an American job and the jobs disappear in this country. Either scenario is not good policy for our country. I yield to the gentleman from Colorado.

Mr. AKIN. Reclaiming my time, I'd just like to try and tick off--I should have a list of them here tonight. Let's tick off what we're doing for our small business people. First of all, if you're making $250,000 a year or more we're going to increase your taxes. That's more than half the small businesses. So first we're going to increase the taxes of the people that own the small businesses. The next thing we're going to do is we're going to tax heavily energy, not only the energy they use to run their own homes, but the energy used to run their business and to buy supplies and things for their business. Next thing we're going to do is we're going to let the death tax come back. So now we have the death tax so that the guy that creates a business can't pass it on to his kids, and so he's going to have to sell his business in order to pay taxes when he dies. So some guy dies. The business needs a certain amount of capital goods and equipment to work. You've got to sell the business in order to pay the tax. Now the business isn't viable and the business goes away. Oh, that's wonderful for business, for small business. And then we're going to do--what else are we going to do with the thing? Well, the other thing we're going to do is dividends and capital gains. Now we reduced dividends and capital gains tax to put liquidity into the small businesses at the beginning, in 2003. And the whole recession turned around to a very strong economy for a number of years, greatly helped by the dividend and capital gains money being plowed back in to investors and inventors and small business people. Now, that tax it is going to go away. So we're hammering them on the $250,000. We're hammering them on the energy; we're hammering them on the death tax; we're going to get them on dividends and capital gains. I mean, how can a small business survive? And then people are going to wonder, gosh, gee, I wonder where all the jobs went? We're doing the wrong things, and yet we don't have to. We can learn from history. I yield to the gentleman from Colorado.

Mr. AKIN. Well, I appreciate your thoughts on that. And again, where we're coming from in this deal is this faulty idea that somehow we could fix the economy by excessive spending. And Henry Morgenthau really shot that thing full of holes. But if he didn't, certainly the Japanese in the 1990s did the exact same thing and it just didn't work. It's really crazy. And you know, you talk about people suffering. You know, sometimes you think the upside down world in Washington, D.C. just doesn't seem to get it. Here's a letter I got from one of my constituents, and it just kind of reflects a little bit of the tone. This is Shannon from Baldwin, which is part of St. Louis County. ``You asked how I would be affected by the Obama budget. I'm self-employed with my own small business, professional organizer, personal assistant. I do not earn a large amount of money, but it's been enough to live a simple but comfortable life. I do not have credit card debt, and I have always made it a point to live within my means. Yes, my business has been affected by the economic downturn of the last year. Many of my clients have cut back on their spending, which means less work for me. So whether it be increased taxes, spending that affects me directly, or increased taxing of my wealthier clients, it reduces my overall income. But more than anything else, I think the most negative effect of all the spending, bailouts, irresponsibility, etc cetera, has had on me is that I no longer have any faith in my own government to do what is fiscally right for the country.'' We are destroying the faith of our constituents that this government is in any kind of control whatsoever fiscally. That's what she's saying. ``The government produces nothing. It has no money to spend except for what it takes from taxpayers. I am disgusted with the enormous spending and bailing out of irresponsible or downright negligent behavior. It seems that while I have worked hard to be responsible and follow the rules, I'm now being punished by being forced to clean up the mess of those who choose not to with my tax dollars.'' There's a sense of anger. There's a sense of resentment out there. I think you're absolutely right. And it's interesting that you're sensing that in Colorado. We also have our very distinguished Congresswoman Foxx from North Carolina. She's maybe not huge, but powerful things come in small packages like atoms, and I would like to yield some time to my good friend, Congresswoman Foxx.

Mr. AKIN

Mr. AKIN. Madam Chair, there have been people that are saying that America as a nation is going down the path of socialism. We are becoming a socialized nation. But, you know, that isn't really quite fair. Not like the socialized nations of Europe anyway. Because, according to the standards of the European Union, they would not accept America with the budget that is being proposed here this very day. Now, the spending that we are looking at is unprecedented. We have heard about the Bush administration spending money. They spent too much. We have acknowledged that. But let me tell you, what we have seen here in just 3 months makes the Bush administration look like mere pikers. The Wall Street bailout, we did half of that this year, $350 billion. Then we added to that this economic stimulus, or as I would prefer to call it, porkulus, $787 billion. Let's understand what this number ``a billion'' means. You have heard that the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were really expensive. Day after day we have been told, hey, this war in Iraq is just draining money out of America. Yet, add up every day of that war, add it to the war in Afghanistan, and that number is smaller than what the House approved for this stimulus bill in the first 5 weeks that Congress has been in session. And then you have got the omnibus, another 400-some. So what happens with this level of unprecedented spending? Well, the theory is supposed to be that if you spend enough money, it will make the economy better. Now, I don't know very many American families who would buy something as silly as that. If you are in trouble financially, do you go and buy a brand-new car and spend money like mad? No. You hunker down a little bit and you try to be careful what you are spending. And yet somehow there is this theory that if we spend money, it is going to make everything okay. They tried that in the days of FDR. The Secretary of Treasury, after 8 years of trying that foolishness, came before this Congress in 1939 with the quote, ``We have tried spending. The unemployment is as bad as when we started.'' And it didn't work. It didn't work for Japan, and it won't work for us if we keep down the spending. Look at the comparison. We have heard about Bush spending. This is his average annual deficit, $300 billion. This is proposed by the President. The budget we are looking at here is even more, twice as much. If you take a look at the highest deficit, this was Bush in 2008 with the Democrats in Congress, $459 billion, and yet we are looking at $1.2 trillion. Our new President makes President Bush look like a piker. Now, did you ever go to first grade and they said, what is it that doesn't fit in in this picture? Take a look at the deficits that have been run or the actual surpluses of all of these different years. And here we go along. These are the Bush years. And guess what line doesn't fit? I mean, we are talking about absolutely radical levels of spending, and here on the floor right now is being proposed even more than that. Then we hear that the Democrats are saying, oh, this is really good because, look, we are going to take this great big spike and we are going to spend it at half the rate. It is like somebody has been smoking funny cigarettes around here.

Mr. AKIN

Mr. AKIN. I think that it's kind of interesting. People have said that America is becoming a socialized Nation, just like the countries over in Europe, a socialized Nation. But that's not a fair thing to say because with this level of debt, the Europeans wouldn't even accept us as part of the European Union. I've noticed tonight that we have spent more time blaming President Bush than talking about the positive solution of a Democrat budget. And that's not a good sign when we spend--at midnight--talking about how bad Bush is when we're supposed to be debating a Democrat budget. I don't think the Democrats are proud of this budget. And if I were the Democrats, I wouldn't be proud of the budget either. While we're talking about President Bush though, I have got some numbers so we can just do a direct comparison and just see what is the difference here. Just in the last couple of months--we're only just finishing up March--we've got the second half of the Wall Street bailout. That's about $350 billion. We burned through the economic stimulus--or the porkulus bill--$787 billion. Now if you were to add will of the cost of the war in Iraq, all of the cost of the war in Afghanistan, and add it altogether, it would be less than this thing. Then you've got the omnibus deal. Hey, we're starting to spend some real money. Let's take a look at a comparison. If we want to talk about Bush, we can blame the hurricane on him. We've already done that. It's really bad when a President brings a hurricane in. Let's talk about this annual budget deficit. This is the average annual deficit under Bush--$300 billion. We're not proud of that. But the current President's budget--this is what they're proposing--has got him beat two to one. I'm not sure I'd be proud of that number. Here's the highest deficit when the Democrats were in the House under Bush, $459 billion. But, oh, President Obama, his projection is $1.2 trillion. Clear winner by more than two to one. Then, the increase in national debt, $2.5 trillion, $4.9 trillion. Again, a two to one. When you take a look at it, here's what it looks like. Every one of these lines going down is a deficit. Now does anybody see something disturbing in this pattern? Now we have heard the gentlelady from New York is bragging about the fact that given some time, this number here, the low number, is going to be cut in half. That doesn't give me any sense of satisfaction at all. If I looked at that, I'd say, Holy smokes, I'm moving to some other country. These people in America have been smoking funny cigarettes. What in the world are they doing with this deficit?

Mr. AKIN

Mr. AKIN. Just reclaiming my time for a minute, let me ask you: on this chart this is the historic budget in balance. Everything below this line, we spent more money than we had. Anything above the line, we spent less than we had. Every single bar is a year going back to the 1980s and 1990s. You come across here. Does it strike you as being a little bit odd that in 2009 we have this tremendous level of spending? Does that look like a good sign to you? You know something about economics. I yield.

Mr. AKIN. Fascinating. So I appreciate you mentioning it. ``The Forgotten Man''?

Mr. AKIN. If I could reclaim my time, you talk pretty fancy words about how this is going to create all this inflation and stuff. I want to just see if that connects to what I'm saying. Back in my district, the poor people are investing in lead, and the more well-to-do people are investing in gold. The poor one, it's the lead shells for different types of rifles, pistols and shotguns; the other one is gold coins. Maybe they're thinking along the same lines as you are, with inflation, you have got to do something to protect yourself, and the government is just running the printing presses.

Mr. AKIN. Reclaiming my time, I have heard great things about that book. My own father read it, and he just said it's something you can read on an airplane. It's fascinating.

Mr. AKIN. Just reclaiming my time, what you're talking about, Ronald Reagan, a lot of times people say that Republicans, well, all we do is say ``no,'' we don't have any answers. But the fact of the matter is that this idea that Keynes had and Morgenthau had about the government spending lots of money to fix the economy, it doesn't work, it's never worked. So we vote ``no'' on what doesn't work. But what does work? Well, what you're saying is, one, you want the government to spend less money, but the other thing is certain types of tax cuts, not every tax cut, but certain types, particularly the tax cuts that put liquidity into the pocket of those small businessmen-- that's 70 percent of the jobs in this country are created by these entrepreneurs, these investors, the small businessmen that get their things going. So that's what Ronald Reagan did, and boy, did it work. He wasn't the only one that did it. JFK did it, didn't he?

Mr. AKIN. I sure appreciate my colleague from Indiana and his wisdom. He's been in the Chamber for some number of years, keeps an eye on these things, and Congressman Burton is a great leader down here. Mr. Speaker, Congressman Scalise is somebody who hasn't been here as long but is readily and rapidly earning the respect of his colleagues on the floor, particularly for the fact that he is paying immediate attention to the number one top priority, which is what's going on fiscally. Mr. Speaker, I'm going to yield the remaining time for this hour and would hope that Congressman Scalise could then pick that up.

Mr. AKIN. I appreciate the gentleman yielding. There are a couple of things. In spite of how deadly serious this is and the tremendous impact it's having in terms of lost jobs and just hammering people's pensions and people struggling with their payments, one of the things that is so odd about what we do in the government sector is we pass these laws and they have unintended consequences. I'm just thinking about, Here we go again. We're just about to pass another silly law. And I'm thinking about how are my people in the great State of Missouri going to react. We've got this cap-and-tax tax increase that you're talking about. That tax increase is going to be not on people over $250,000, but what this is going to be is a tax increase on the use of energy--of electricity, natural gas, propane, or whatever you're heating your house with. So just think about it a minute. This has been estimated to be $3,100 per family in America per year. That is a pretty big tax increase. That is like my entire property taxes on the house that I have now. So I'm picturing, Congressman, if you think about it a little bit, and all of a sudden your energy is going up at such a tremendous rate and you're having to pay $3,000 more in taxes, what in the world are you going to do? Well, people in my State are going to get that steel chain saw out, they're going to be cutting up firewood, they're going to get themselves a wood-burning stove, and they're going to start burning firewood instead of natural gas. What's the effect of that going to be? Well, not as complete and clean a combustion. So we're going to put more CO2 and other types of gasses in the air by passing this bill and it's going to have the exact opposite effect of what it's supposed to do. It's like when some brilliant genius put this MTBE in our gasoline to make the air cleaner and people figured out that it was ruining the water and the water table because it was washing out of gasoline that was spilled and poisoning the water. So we do something that is supposed to be making the environment better--and we make it worse. Here we go. We're going to tax everybody's use of home energy. And what's going to happen? They're just going to get wood-burning stoves. It's going to smell nice like a barbecue going on all the time. But this is just another really bad idea, particularly in these hard times, to be laying one more heavy tax burden. Now we heard a lot about President Bush spending too much money. As a Republican, I voted against some of those proposals. But let's do a comparison here of exactly where we are because you talk about trillions and billions of dollars, it makes my head spin. But I can do a simple comparison. Here the average annual deficit under President Bush is $300 billion, and what is being proposed by the current President is $600 billion. I can understand the difference. There's twice as much spending going on here as there was under Bush. Here's the highest deficit. George W. Bush, when the Democrats ran the House, that was when there was the most spending going through-- $459 billion. Under President Obama, he's looking at $1.2 trillion. That's two times more deficit spending. Increase in the national debt. Under all of the years of President Bush, $2.5 trillion. Well, that's not good. Again, President Obama has got him beat two to one. So I think it's helpful to try and put numbers in perspective. What we are talking about is unprecedented spending--and guess what the result of that is going to be? You guessed it. Something that none of us like. Jobs lost. That's what's happening. When you start spending too much money, taxing too much, borrowing too much, you start to lose jobs. Small businesses shrink down. The guy that made $250,000, now he's getting taxed and not putting that money back in his business. It's making all Americans across our country hurt. This is something we can talk about numbers. But we're also talking about people, Congressman. I appreciate your yielding some time here because this isn't the way we should be going. What we should be doing is tightening the belt in government like everybody else is tightening their belt. Understand that this is not government money, this is hard-earned dollars not of ours, not of our children. It's our grandchildren's hard-earned dollars that are being spent. We just can't allow this to go on. I'm going to stand here, I know you're going to stand here, and we're going to fight until every American understands what is at stake. I believe when America wakes up to what's happening here, they're going to say: No more spending, no more taxes. Back off, Washington, D.C., and let us do what we have always done so well and that is let America free enterprise and the American Dream pull us out of this mess. I yield back.