W. Akin

Mr. AKIN

Mr. AKIN. I appreciate the gentleman yielding. It has been such a beautiful day here, we have got the cherry blossoms in full bloom in Washington, D.C., and yet we are talking about a very, very serious and very difficult problem with a government that is really out of control in spending. And I appreciate the gentleman from Ohio, Congressman Jordan, talking about the discipline. We don't have the discipline. But, you know, part of it is that we have forgotten some of the lessons that the founders that came to this country understood. And I have thought back a little bit, how is it that we got off track? And if you will allow me to just wax a little bit philosophical. This country was put together, and unlike any other country in the world America is a Nation that was founded on a creed. There are many things that are distinctive about America. We have the oldest Constitution. We have won a number of wars and ceded no territory. We have named no emperors, crowned no kings. And what we did was we taxed ourselves to rebuild. America is a very unique place, and there are many reasons why Americans could be proud of this country. But America also is a Nation that has, if you will, a political or religious creed, and that is stated in our own Declaration of Independence, why we went to war. And the sentence says: We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights. And it goes on to say: Among these is life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Earlier versions of Jefferson's documents were life, liberty, and property. And then it goes on to say: Governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers essentially to do, what? To protect life, liberty, property; life, liberty, pursuit of happiness. So if you take a look at that formula, what it is saying in simple terms is, there is a God. God grants all human beings certain basic rights, and the job of the government is to protect those rights now. Now, fast forward from 1776 to 1944, to the inaugural address by FDR. He said, well, that first Bill of Rights--which wasn't a Bill of Rights; it was a Declaration of Independence, life, liberty, pursuit of happiness--was okay for a while. But it wouldn't be any good if Americans are hungry or if an American needs a coat, or if some American is not secure. So we propose a second Bill of Rights, and that is that the government should give you jobs and education and health care and things like that. You note the clever twist here. The first rights are things that naturally occur to all people under God, the right to free speech, the right not to be killed, the right to own some property. These other kinds of things we are talking about now have a strange, strange parallel. We laughed some years ago in my past when we watched the Berlin Wall fall down and we said, we knew those commies or the USSR, that system would never work, communism, socialism. It won't work. Why was that? Well, because the government is going to give you your health care, the government is going to give you your food and your housing, the government is going to provide a job, the government is going to provide an education. And don't talk about God, because if you talk about God then you know you have natural rights from God, not rights that come from a government. So what we are doing in America with this kind of budget? What we are doing in America is the government is going to give you health care, the government is going to give you a job, the government is going to give you food and a place to live. The government is going to give you an education. How are we so different from the system we just watched fail? That is why the Europeans are laughing in their beers, looking at us and saying, has America been smoking those funny cigarettes or what? What are we doing? And I think that is the question we are trying to raise. I don't mean to be too philosophical, but where did we got off track? We got off track on the road to socialism, to the idea that the government is going to be all things to all people. And it does a lousy job of doing that. What we should be doing, quite simply, is protecting life and protecting people's basic liberties. And what are we talking about doing? We are talking about saying we are going to have a bureaucrat in D.C. to monitor what you put on your radio program. We are going to call that The Fairness Doctrine. We are going to take away your right to be able to vote without being compelled or feeling pressure, because we are going to get rid of the secret ballot election when it comes to joining a union or not. We are talking about taking away people's freedom to own a piece of property because some local government wants to take it and turn it into a strip mall so you don't have any private property rights. I mean, what is going on? How come we are giving up freedom? I don't think we are on the right track. I appreciate the gentleman with this hour, and I just felt like it was important to get back to what is basic in America, which is limited government that provides and protects our life, our liberty, and our property, instead of doing this institutionalized theft.

Mr. AKIN. Well, I thank you very much. And I appreciate your calling attention to the fact that we are on the wrong track financially here. It is true that doing the wrong thing financially impacts our freedom in America. And particularly it impacts something that is precious to every red-blooded American, and that is the American Dream. If you think back in the beginning of our country there were all these crazy people that came to America, starting with a group called the Pilgrims. They came to this land, and they had the idea of building an entirely new civilization on a different set of principles. And after they had been here about a month, half of them died. And the captain of the Mayflower comes to them and says, ``Things haven't gone too well. Maybe it is time for you to go back to jolly old England with me.'' So he gives the commands. The boatswain squares the yardarms, the anchor cable is wound up from Plymouth Harbor, at first large and then small, that Mayflower sails out and beyond sight. And here on the shore, with the wind blowing across the pine trees, is a little group of 50-plus people that had a dream of a new country based on new principles. It has been that way all the way along. There have been these crazy people that came to America with some crazy idea, and then it became maybe a vague possibility. And then they wrote something down, and eventually it became actually reality. And it happened so often that we gave it the name the ``American Dream.'' But it happened because there was a rarified environment of freedom in America where people could succeed. But they could also fail. They understood that there was a discipline that the gentleman from Ohio was talking about. Congressman Jordan understands discipline. There is a discipline. If you want to have freedom, you also have to have responsibility. And that is part of the American Dream. And that is being stomped out by this budget. We won't take it. And I appreciate your taking the leadership and scheduling this hour and particularly your leadership financially here on this floor, Congressman. Thank you.

Mr. AKIN. Mr. Speaker, I come here this evening to the floor to talk about a subject that is arresting the attention of Americans everywhere. It arrests their attention because it very much involves their futures, their future hopes, and the hopes of their children and grandchildren: that is, the economics and the economic situation that we now face. Over the past, we have, over the past 6 and 7 years, heard repeatedly in our media the tremendous cost, particularly of the war in Iraq. We were told every day not only of people that were dying there but also of how it's just draining and siphoning money from the American economy. And so, we come today in a curious situation. If you were to add all of the money that was spent in Iraq in the war there, add it all up for 6 years, and then take the money that was spent in the war in Afghanistan, add it up for 7 years, and you put those two sums of money together, you would come up with less money than this U.S. Congress spent in the first 5 weeks that we were in session when we passed the supposedly stimulus bill. That, perhaps, casts a certain amount of light and helps to put in perspective what $840 billion in taxes that we actually don't have, but $840 billion dollars in spending that we approved here on this House floor. What has happened since that time is we have spent other money, and there have been other large chunks of change, and I think it gets a little bit confusing in people's minds exactly how much is the Congress spending. And so I have here immediately to my left a chart that talks a little bit about some of the money that we have spent in the past, and we do this on the eve of the fact that we have the new budget coming up which will be discussed and debated tomorrow. That budget is a whopper of a budget, but first, let's put it into context. First of all, in the fall of last year, as Wall Street was becoming weaker and as there were demands for money to bail out Wall Street, the Congress approved $700 billion for the Wall Street bailout. The first $350 billion were spent last year, with an additional $350 billion this year. Theoretically, this money was supposedly offered with transparency, so we could know what it was going to be used for and how we were getting something good from it. However, in spite of the fact that we spent the first $350 billion, we saw the stock market sliding and sliding. Then we spent the second $350 billion, and people continued to ask whether this money was really an effective tool. As we asked many questions, even last fall on this subject, what we found was that particularly some people that worked on the savings and loan crisis some more than 10 years ago said that there was a way to help deal with our financial crisis, and particularly the toxic mortgage and bad loans that had been made, there was a way to deal with that without spending a lot of money. In fact, during the savings and loan crisis, we did not spend any of this kind of money, even though the situation was not dissimilar. That involved things like mark-to- market and other accounting kinds of principles that could have been followed rather than going into the American taxpayers' pocket for $700 billion. Well, this year we spent $350 billion of that. Moving forward to this economic stimulus--I call it the porkulus bill--we spent another $787 billion. Let's put that into perspective. In an area that I work, which is on the sea force committee, sea power committee, and one of the big ticket items that we deal with are aircraft carriers. People that know something about the Navy know that aircraft carriers are expensive, and we protect them by putting other ships around them. We only have 11 of them currently in service, and they average about $3 billion historically. That's what we paid for them. And so if you were to divide the $3 billion into this $787 billion, what you'd find out is that you have got, you know, over 200 aircraft carriers. Picture 200 aircraft carriers tied end-to-end. That's a whole lot of money that we're spending that we don't have. Or if you want to put it another way, just the interest and the debt service on this money that we don't have that we're spending would be enough to buy nine new aircraft carriers every single year. And what is there in this economic stimulus package that's so important? Well, as it turns out, it isn't even the good old Keynesian, the good old FDR, ``government spend its way out of trouble'' kind of package. It doesn't have those kinds of things in it. You'd think it would have in there hard manufacturing kinds of jobs, building ships, pouring concrete to make hydroelectric plants or nuclear power plants. You would think it might have a lot of money for roads, something for small businesses to get them going. It turns out it's not. It turns out what it is, it's a whole lot of spending on items that are just budgetary items of the Federal Government. It's just a whole lot of spending on social programs. It does include some money to protect an endangered mouse in Speaker Pelosi's district. It contains things about education for HIV. It has some money for ACORN and things like that. These are regular old social government programs, but nothing that's really stimulative particularly. And so this tremendous amount of money added to the debt is something that has very much captured people's attention, but we haven't stopped there unfortunately. We have seen no sign in the economy or in the stock market that this money is doing any particular good. In fact, all of the evidence economically would suggest that it won't. In fact, when you take a good look at the people that came up with this whole idea of stimulating the economy by government spending money, it doesn't even make much common sense. Think about your average American family. Hey, we've got hard trouble with the budget this year, what are we going to do? Oh, let's go buy a brand new car and spend a whole lot of money. Nobody's that dumb in our country except for the Federal Government, and of course, we want to spend a lot of money. There isn't any economic justification. In fact, Henry Morgenthau, who was the Secretary of the Treasury under FDR, after they did this lovely theory of spending tons and tons of money-- and this is all through the 1930s and 1939--Secretary Morgenthau comes before the House Ways and Means Committee. He said, We have tried spending a whole lot of money and it doesn't work. He's pretty straightforward. It doesn't work. Our unemployment is as bad as it's ever been, and we have a tremendous amount of debt to boot. So, so much for little Lord Keynes' theory. It was tried by the Japanese back in the 1990s, and the Japanese economy was sick because they just kept spending more and more government money, and it didn't help their economy at all. So, so much for the theory of a whole lot of government spending is going to make the economy go well. Actually, considering the number of trillion dollars in debt, if the government spending was what made things went well, why we would all be millionaires ourselves if that theory worked. Of course, it doesn't work, and this of course, does not work. Then we have the appropriations for 2009 which was another $410 billion, and you start putting this together, and it starts to add up to real money. And now we have the new budget that has been proposed, a $3.6 trillion budget, and that includes some different, interesting items. One that I think is of significance, the President promised us while he was in this very Chamber, he promised us that if you were making under $250,000 you didn't need to worry about taxes because he wasn't going to raise your taxes any. I thought, I'm glad because I don't make $250,000 a year, so I don't need to worry about tax increases. Well, you better hang on to your wallet in Washington, D.C., because what is this cap-and-tax? This is a tax on electricity and heating fuel, propane, natural gas, things like that. And what's that going to mean? Well, some economists took a look at what that was going to cost, and this is a very credible organization. I believe it was MIT. I forget which university it was. Their estimate was $3,100 for every household in America. So, so much for the $250,000. Sure, we're going to tax those guys that own small businesses, but we're going to tax every household in America on an average of $3,100 every year. I see a good friend of mine from Indiana, a very respected statesman on this floor, and I would yield to my good friend, Congressman Burton.

Mr. AKIN

Mr. AKIN. Thirty-two thousand years? Now, wait a minute. What year is this? This is 2009 and you're saying 32,000?

Mr. AKIN. And how well is it working?

Mr. AKIN. This is taxing too much, spending too much, and borrowing too much.

Mr. AKIN. It strikes me as it may be worse than that. What we're doing here, we're killing the American Dream. That is what's going on. We're killing the dream for people that wanted to come to this country, own their own house, be able to send their kids to get a better education than they got before. This is a country that is so unlike anything else in the world. We are such a special country. We are unique in so many different ways. Whenever you see there's a tsunami or hurricane, you see our people out there helping. We've been a bastion of freedom for people all around the world. They look at America and say, Hey those Americans have got it down. You could live the American Dream over there. They come flooding into our country. We're worried about the immigration because they understand what this country has always been about. It's never been about this kind of stuff--this irresponsible, runaway government spending. This is killing the dream that Americans have always come to believe in. I yield to my friend from Louisiana.

Mr. AKIN. I guess you could say we are spending too much, we are taxing too much, we are borrowing too much. That is kind of a summary of it. If you just take a look at these bar charts about the budget imbalance, you can see that. This is not the equation of how to fix an economy that's in trouble. That's not what JFK did. That's not what Ronald Reagan did. That's not what Bush II did to stop those recessions. This is even worse than what FDR did. The problem we have is if something doesn't work, it just doesn't work. It's not like you're being negative. You're saying, Look, it's never worked in history. What we have to do is go back to the time- tested principles of the country we love--and that's just to trust the Americans, the inventors and the investors, the entrepreneurs, the people who love this country, who live the American Dream, who come here with some crazy new idea, give it a try and, by golly, the thing works. They wake up some day and they've been sleeping under a park bench 10 years before and some guy and his wife realize they're millionaires and they didn't even know it was going to happen to them. That's what this country is all about. The government can never create any wealth but, boy, we can sure keep other people from ever doing any by overtaxing them.

Mr. AKIN. That seems like a whole lot better idea than taxing everybody that uses any form of energy and adding that to the price of everything else. That's just brutal in a rough economy. There's a lot of families in my district that are hurting, and to be doing this kind of budget imbalance, take a look at this, these are President after President after President, you can see, you know, this is the wrong track. This is just not the way to do something. The gentleman from Louisiana.

Mr. AKIN. Just reclaiming my time, you know, the thing I'd like-- we're going to be wrapping things up here pretty soon, and one of the things sometimes that there's some that would like to portray us as being just say ``no'' on everything. I think we need to deal with that for just a minute in our discussion here. It's not that we think ``no'' on everything. We really think ``yes'' on everything, on a whole lot of things. We just don't believe that the solution to the economic problems that have been created by these bad loans and bad mortgages and things, which were a failed socialist policy, there was no failure of free enterprise. We don't think the solution to the economy is just spending tons and tons of money. And so that doesn't make us just ``no.'' There are ways to get an economy that's in a recession getting it going, and we've seen examples of people that have done it. Why don't we copy what works? JFK did it, Ronald Reagan did it, and Bush 2 did it in some of the tax cuts. If you do tax cuts and you cut Federal spending and you allow small business entrepreneurs, investors to have enough liquidity to invest, then you can get the economy going. And so we've got a bunch of different kinds of solutions, but the bottom line is you've got to back off on the Federal Government sucking all of the liquidity out of the economy, and you have got to allow small businesses to invest. And you don't do that by taxing them to death, taxing them on their energy, taxing anybody who makes over $250,000. That's more than half of the small business owners in the country. And so we've got a solution, don't we? It's not like we're saying ``no.'' Our solution is straightforward. You have to allow the investors and the small businesspeople to have enough liquidity to get the free enterprise system going and you've got to get the government in this incredible overspending off of their backs. I wanted to make sure we're talking positively because we love America. This country has been through a lot of crises, and we're in a whale of a crisis now because of mismanagement. That doesn't mean we have to keep going down the same, dumb path that didn't work for FDR. It didn't work for the Japanese. We need to go for the things that work. So what we are saying is we're opposed to stuff that doesn't work. We love our country, and we know how to make it better.

Mr. AKIN. Reclaiming my time, what you're talking about, we see this when you really look at legislation we pass all the time, we pass legislation that's supposed to do one thing, and frequently it does the exact opposite. You know what I'm thinking, if I'm from the good old State of Missouri, we have plenty of guys. There's a lot of oak trees and a lot of chain saws, and you all of the sudden start taxing people's natural gas or their propane or if they have electric heat pumps and things and their family budget gets tight, guess what's going to happen. That old, dead oak tree out behind in the back 40, they're going to get that chain saw, they're going to fire that thing up, and they're going to get themselves a big, old, wood burning stove. And it may not be very efficient, and they're going to really put some CO2 out. And the thing that is supposed to be not making CO2, instead of building a nuclear plant that makes no CO2, which is if you were really serious that you're worried about CO2, well, then you'd want to go with a nuclear because it makes no CO2. But by doing this tax, all that's going to happen, we're going to make more CO2. It doesn't even make a whole lot of sense, does it?

Mr. AKIN. Reclaiming my time a second, what you are saying is you've got some very hard manufacturing jobs. These are the kind that support other jobs in the community. You're talking about steel mill. You're talking about production. You're talking about a lot of investment, good solid jobs in the community, and your competition is not Missouri, is it?

Mr. AKIN. Reclaiming my time. I don't want you to make things too gloomy here. We're not just talking about gasoline and natural gas and propane and electricity.

Mr. AKIN. There is energy tied up in everything. And it's all going up.

Mr. AKIN. If you buy a chair or a table or a microphone, anything that you see sitting around us, you're going to move that by rail.

Mr. AKIN. Three hundred dollars a month.

Mr. AKIN. Reclaiming my time. The special hour that the Democrats did just before we came on here, they were talking about the glories and the benefits of this carbon tax and all the things they're doing with renewables and those kinds of things. But a tax is a tax is a tax. What we're talking about here is this thing that's called cap-and- trade. I would call it cap-and-tax. This is $646 billion. This is another one of these things you have got to be real careful what you hear when you get an address from the President. Because as he was in this Chamber 6 or 8 weeks ago, he gave us a State of the Union or State of the State, whatever the address was called, he said, Look. I am going to guarantee you something. If you're making less than $250,000, I have got good news for you. I am not going to tax you. He said that. We were sitting in here. And then he's proposing this cap-and-trade which really is a tax on the use of energy, particularly carbon. And who is it that uses this carbon? Well, anybody who's got a house that's heated with fuel oil or coal or electricity or natural gas. All of those things are going to get taxed. So this little tax, this $646 billion tax, is going to come from somebody. Guess who? The average homeowner. In fact, it has been estimated by one organization that you're talking about $3,100 per average household. That's some money for a lot of us.

Mr. AKIN. You talked about the TEA party. We were flushing a little tea down the Mississippi River from St. Louis. We had a TEA party, too, and I don't know whether that's gotten down to Louisiana yet. But we had the same thing. We have people saying, Wait a minute. This spending is out of control. Some of the money that we had on the chart here has already been spent. But there is a tremendous amount more spending that is being proposed. And we don't have to keep spending. We did the $300-some billion bank bailout. That water is over the dam or down the river, however you want to look at it. And that porkulus bill at almost $800 billion, you know, you're talking about more than the war in Iraq and Afghanistan added together. We're talking about just 5 weeks here in the Chamber, and we have gone hugely into debt. I am on Armed Services. One of the most expensive things we buy on my committee is aircraft carriers. We have 11 of them in the U.S.A., and this bill, for $800 billion, we could get 250 aircraft carriers. End- to-end I can't even imagine how many aircraft carriers that would be. We only have 11. The debt service and the money would buy 9 brand new aircraft carriers. We're talking a lot of money, and the American public is starting to get wise to this deal.

Mr. AKIN. Reclaiming my time, these are hard jobs. This is a proposal by a company. I used to be in charge of maintenance in a steel mill. I didn't know if you knew that, but I did. In fact, my great-grandfather started a steel mill. I can tell you one thing about steel mills, they use energy. They use a lot of energy. If you're going to put this big, whopping tax increase on energy, guess what you're going to do. You're going to do the same thing that's going on here. You are sending jobs straight out of our country, and that's not what we should be doing in these economic times. It makes no common sense whatsoever.

Mr. AKIN. We're talking about the price of all of the things that that energy goes into as well. That would affect small businesses, too. I yield to my good friend from Louisiana and I know that you have had some small business experience. Maybe you can share your thoughts about does this make sense for us to be doing this great big tax increase on energy when the economy is struggling? Does that make sense to you? I yield.

Mr. AKIN. We've heard about how bad Republicans and President Bush were, so I just made a couple of real simple comparisons. This is the average annual deficit under President Bush, and it was $300 billion. Now we don't like that. But that was what the deficit was on an average under the Bush years--$300 billion. Now under Barack Obama's proposed budget--these are his numbers; we're not doctoring them--this is what he's proposing. His annual deficit is going to be 600. He's doubled the deficit of President Bush. And we heard all of this stuff about how bad Bush's spending level is. Here is another way of saying it. The highest deficit under George Bush happened to be 2008, and that, of course, was with the Democrat Congress, but that was $459 billion, and the projections by the Congressional Budget Office is looking at $1.2 trillion. That's more than double. And here we got the increase in national debt. Under Bush, he increased the debt, from 2000 to 2008, $2.5 trillion. But take a look under Barack Obama, we're looking at almost double. So everywhere down the line we're doubling. And we are not fighting the war in Iraq, and we're pulling the war in Iraq back, and we're, in fact, doubling everything. So these numbers really need some attention, I think, and I appreciate your sharing. I would yield to the gentleman from Louisiana.

Mr. AKIN. Reclaiming my time. We have a chart here. It is kind of an interesting chart in a way in that these are all of our Presidents. You start over here with George Washington and you end up down here with President Bush. And if you add all of the debt that all of these Presidents all the way through Bush put together every time when they overspent the family budget, if you will, and you keep adding all of that together, you come up with $5.8 trillion, which is bad. We shouldn't overspend that way. But here, take a look at just from 2009 to 2016. That's not so many years. We're only talking about, what is that, 7 years. That's assuming, let's say he were President for 8 years and so this is all during his Presidency. What he's proposing is $8.7 trillion. So he's going to create more debt in 7 years than we have in 232 years of all the previous Presidents. This is kind of getting serious. I have noticed that we're joined in the Chamber here by a judge. You know, judges are kind of sober and straightforward. And this guy is a judge from Texas, and Judge Carter usually has some very interesting perspectives and a little bit of straight shooting and straight talk. Judge Carter, please join us.

Mr. AKIN. Oh, yeah.

Mr. AKIN. Reclaiming my time, that is really clever politically. So, in other words, what you're saying is the first year, you kick it up-- and it is whatever it is, three or four times more than it has ever been for a long, long time--and then you say, ``But I am going to cut it back so it's just a lot more than it has ever been.''

Mr. AKIN. Reclaiming my time, we have gone from $400 billion to $1.7 trillion?