W. Akin

Mr. AKIN

Mr. AKIN. Reclaiming my time. I appreciate you being a medical doctor. You've seen first-hand examples where government intervention in the marketplace is driving up costs for everybody. And the more areas we get into--just like the Soviet Union, when we get into food and clothing and housing and education, the more the government gets its nose into all of those areas, and the size of the government grows, as we've just seen--it wasn't just 8 percent today, but you add the 8 to all of that before from the ``porkulous'' bill, we're talking about a massive increase in government. And the Republicans did make some mistakes. We spent more money than we should have, but it's nothing on the scale of what we're talking about here. We're joined by a very distinguished colleague of mine from Louisiana. And, Congressman Scalise, we'd appreciate if you could join us. And I yield time.

Mr. AKIN. Reclaiming my time. One of the things that strikes me and is of great concern to me is something that I believe was in the dustbin of history in our thinking for many years now, and that was the old Soviet Socialist Republic, the USSR. If you think back before the Berlin Wall fell--some of us are old enough to remember--that was a formidable--and we were concerned about the USSR, but we didn't ever believe that its economics were any good because we knew they were a bunch of socialists over there. That's what the ``USSR'' part was all about. So, in a way, when we saw the Berlin Wall come down, we could kind of catch our breath, but we kind of laughed at them as saying, ``See, we knew that old socialism wasn't going to work.'' And what was that country based on? The basic assumption was that the government is going to provide you what? Well, I guess one of the first things would be the government's going to provide you with education. And then another thing the government's going to provide is health care, which I know, as a couple of medical doctors, this is something that we know a little bit about when the government decides to get in the health care business. And then, of course, we're going to have the government provide you with food and housing, you see. And then the government's going to give you a job. And that was the heart--aside from being just sort of antireligious, the USSR, that was the heart of their program. The government is going to do all of this stuff. And now, just a few weeks ago, the cover of a major news magazine in America, it says, ``We're All Socialists Now.'' When I saw that, I felt a little frustrated, because I'm not a socialist. And the people I represent are not socialists. And they didn't like socialism, and they don't want the government running everything in their lives.

Mr. AKIN. Reclaiming my time. The American people, in a way, have a way to vote. The people that have money vote on the stock market, and the stock market has been saying, ``We're not buying all of this stuff that's coming out of Congress. We're not convinced.'' And the stock market, every time we do another one of these massive spending bills, the stock market goes down even farther. So that's some kind of an indication that all is not well. I yield to my friend from Georgia.

Mr. AKIN. We were going to have 48 hours because there were 1,000 pages, and there were all kinds of things in there. Doesn't it make sense to allow the staff and different people to read over it before they take the vote? Everybody said ``yes,'' so we voted unanimously for 48 hours. The bill comes out. We get our first copy at 11:30 on Thursday night, and of course we have lots of staffers sitting around the office, waiting at 11:30 at night. The next day, we went straight to a vote on this. And we're told that this is going to be transparency and openness, and it does tend to make you a little bit cynical when we say one thing and we do something else. Now, the promise has been made here, if there's an earmark, we're going to veto it. Now, do any of you want to make any bets as to what's going to happen to this little puppy? I don't mean to cause you trouble, Congressman Broun.

Mr. AKIN. Well, reclaiming my time, I guess what can happen down here--and we should guard against this--is we can get a little cynical. I believe it was the week before last that this House unanimously passed a resolution that was saying that we were going to have 48 hours to take a look at this 1,000-page bill that was coming down the pike.

Mr. AKIN. So, reclaiming my time, what we're saying is one simple solution would be to freeze the discretionary budget. That would probably be the first step of a supply side solution to get the economy going, wouldn't it, if we'd just simply freeze discretionary spending? Then if what we did was we allowed certain selective tax increases in a very short period of time, you'd see the stock market jump, and you'd see jobs being created, and the whole economy would start to move again. I mean this isn't something that's too complicated. It's just several of us talking this evening. There are a number of ways it could be done. It's not that complicated. One of the places that you might start would be with the fact that the corporate income tax in America is the second highest in the world. You could get rid of all of the little bells and whistles in that corporate tax and just knock it back a good number of percent, and that in and of itself could have a great influence in creating jobs. If you on top of that were to freeze the government spending and were also to maintain dividend and capital gains, I don't know how many months it would be, but you'd see a neck-snapping turnaround. There are solutions to these problems, and the fact of the matter is that the people who are in charge now are unwilling to look at those solutions. I yield back to Dr. Gingrey.

Mr. AKIN. Reclaiming my time, gentlemen, I see my congressional friend from Georgia. Dr. Gingrey, I yield to you.

Mr. AKIN. Reclaiming my time, you offered an amendment. It said we want to cut 10 percent out of this bill. When you made that amendment, did you bring that amendment to the floor, and did you have a chance to vote on it? I yield.

Mr. AKIN. He said, if it has earmarks in it, he's going to veto it, but what do you think they'll say--that those really aren't earmarks? Those things that look like earmarks and that smell like earmarks aren't earmarks? Is that what we're going to hear? I yield.

Mr. AKIN. Reclaiming my time, gentlemen, I heard it was 7,500 earmarks.

Mr. AKIN. Reclaiming my time, what you're really saying is what we passed on this floor today, in and of itself, was an 8 percent increase, and that 8 percent increase is the biggest we've had in these categories since Carter was President, but that 8 percent is deceiving because you can add to it all of the stuff in the porkulous bill or a lot of what was in the porkulous bill, and that's going to run it up to an 80 percent increase. So what we're really talking about is a massive increase in government programs. I see my other doctor friend, Congressman Broun, from Georgia. I yield to the gentleman.

Mr. AKIN. Yes. Reclaiming my time, you could also look at it from this point of view, which would be that the interest we pay on that amount of money in this porkulous bill would buy nine new aircraft carriers every year, just the interest on that money, or you could look at it another way. You could say all we've been hearing about is how expensive the war in Iraq is. Well, add up every day of the war in Iraq. Add it all together. We're talking way more money in the first 5 weeks than what we spend in Iraq. In the House version, you've put Iraq and Afghanistan together, and it's still more money. So this is a pretty good chunk of change. What you're saying, gentlemen, is that a lot of that had nothing to do with jobs. It was just putting more money into government programs. So the chart that you show there didn't really show an 8 percent increase. What it really showed was way up there. What did you say? I'll yield. What was the actual number when you added it up?

Mr. AKIN. Reclaiming my time, you make an excellent point. So what's really going on here is there are two bills that are influencing those categories that you show on your bar graphs. The first bill you call the ``spendulous.'' I'm maybe not quite so kind. I call it the ``porkulous.'' They've rather nothing to do with job creation at all. They had to do with a whole lot of expansion of government programs and government spending. So, first of all, we took this about $800 billion. Now let's just stop for a minute and put that into perspective. One of the things that's really big that we buy, if you want to think of big things, is aircraft carriers. We have eleven aircraft carriers in our Navy, and we protect them. We put ships around them. We don't want people to sink our aircraft carriers because they're expensive. Now, if you take the average cost of our eleven aircraft carriers and divide this into these porkulous or spendulous bills, you've got 250 aircraft carriers. I mean I don't know if that would go all the way across the State of Georgia or not, but those are a lot of aircraft carriers--250 of them--when we only have eleven in the Navy. Now, if you want to get you one of them Cadillac kind of aircraft carriers, the extra long version with the super electronics and better planes and all, well now, you'll only get 100-and-some aircraft carriers.

Mr. AKIN. I will yield.

Mr. AKIN. Reclaiming my time for just a minute, I'd like to highlight what you just said. Because a lot of times what we hear our opponents, the Democrats, saying is, ``Well, you don't have an idea. You don't have a plan. What's your idea? You're just always saying negative things about ours.'' Well, that's not true. I mean, just starting with what we did today, the number I saw was that there was an 8 percent increase in a whole series of categories, an 8 percent increase. Now, the average household in my district has not had an 8 percent increase this year in their paychecks, and yet the government is going to push this 8 percent. So let's be specific. I don't want to be negative here. I would like to say positive things.

Mr. AKIN. Reclaiming my time. There is a little bit of a gap between the rhetoric and what's actually going on here, isn't there? And so what you've made reference to is--and this is easy for people to get it confused a little bit because this has been happening so rapidly. The end of last year, we had basically a Wall Street bailout bill at $700 billion. That is a lot of money. That puts us into uncharted territory. I know you voted against it. I voted against it. And the reason we voted against it was because it wasn't going to work. Quite simply, it was not going to work. We spent $350 billion of that, came back, and people said, where's the transparency? What happened? You know, this thing hasn't been working very well. And then, on top of $700 billion, just this last week, or week before last, we spent another 800-something billion dollars. At least in the House it was 840. They backed it off a small amount. Now, when you put $700 billion, $800 billion together, we're talking some change, aren't we? I notice we're joined by another doctor--this must be doctors night-- from Georgia over in the Chamber, my good friend, Dr. Gingrey, Congressman Gingrey. I just would yield some time to you.

Mr. AKIN. Reclaiming my time. What you're saying is that somehow or other people have trouble making this connection. But if you've got a business that's doing well, they hire people, and that makes jobs. Now, if you're jealous of the guy that owns the business, say you're too rich and I'm going to take you down a peg, and you take all the money away from everybody who owns businesses, then don't be surprised when you don't have as many jobs. And so one of these things that people, you know, if they want to get real covetous and don't like their neighbor having a fancy-looking car in their driveway, think about it a little bit, because you're really a lot better off if you live in a neighborhood where there's a lot of businesses that are doing well than if you're in a neighborhood where everybody is unemployed. And you can't let it get you upset that somebody else is doing well if you really want jobs, because if you want to have a job you've got to work for somebody. But anyway, let's take a look at this. The point of the matter is there's no reason for there to be doom and gloom in America. There's no reason for us to be really upset or kicking our lips around. There are ways to fix the problem we're in. We made some very, very foolish mistakes with poor government regulation and basically misguided socialism that put us into the recession. But it can be fixed. America has come through a lot of challenges, and this is another challenge, and we can do okay with this. But we can't do it by doing the wrong thing. So what are the examples of what do you do in this situation? Well, here's an example. Actually, when I was here in Congress in 2001, when we started--and we did a bunch of tax cuts, and people thought tax cuts help make the economy do better. Well, but that's not entirely true. It's certain kinds of tax cuts that make the difference. So here you have a picture of what's going on in 2001; this is the year that I came here, and you see we were in the recession. And before this tax relief, right here at this line in the second quarter of 2003, we did a particular kind of tax cut which had a very strong effect. But going before that, we did some tax cuts here, and we still had an average GDP of 1.1 percent. So it wasn't just any tax cut. You just want to send a $1,000 check to everybody in America, people like it, but it's not going to fix the situation that we are in. No, you have to use your tax money wisely. So what did we do? In the second quarter of 2003, we did a dividend capital gains tax cut, and we took it from--it had been quite a lot higher--we took it down to 15 percent. And when we did that, let's take a look at what happened. Now, the effect of that, of course, is dividends capital gains is not something that just helps everybody on the street. This is something that really affects people who own businesses, particularly, or people who own money, and you want them to get the money freed up so they will use it to invest and create this productivity. So here's what happens. We do the tax cuts second quarter 2003. Look at what happens to gross domestic product. We're chugging along at 1.1, it's kind of spotty, and all of a sudden it jumps to 3. And this is going all the way over to 2007. So the effect--now, you could say, well, is that what caused that? Well, if you take a look at this point in history, this is the main thing we did economically. So you say, well, does that show up anywhere else? In fact, it does show up in some very, very important places. Let's take a look at the second chart, which is what we're very concerned with today, and that is the problem of job creation. These are all--all the lines going down are jobs that are lost, and so we're losing jobs at an average of almost 100,000 jobs a month. That's what's happening, 100,000 jobs a month being lost. Now, these lines going up are where we actually had some job creation. But this is an average here. Now, we do this tax cut, and take a look at what happens on the right side in terms of the gain of jobs: 147,000 jobs a month being gained with this one particular cut. So this isn't rocket science. We did it before. JFK did it. Ronald Reagan did the same kind of thing. And here we go, right in our recent past we did the same thing, and look what's going on. Now, here's the last thing. Let's say that you really do, as my friend from Georgia was just saying, using the word ``socialism.'' Let's say you really are a happy little socialist and you really want the government to slot money around and redistribute wealth and everything. If you want to do that, one thing you want is a good economy because it gives you more money to play with. Look what happened here. This is Federal revenues. Federal revenues are going down, just as they've been going down this year because the economy's in bad shape. You turn the economy around with the right kind of tax cut, and take a look at revenues. They're jumping. So this says everybody wins when the economy is doing well, and this supply side kind of idea of letting money be invested by the productive private sector, just as my friend from Georgia was saying, this is what works. And there's no reason for Americans to be out of work if we just do the right thing. Instead, what we're doing is we're going to allow this tax cut to expire, and the math that drove these charts is going to go into reverse, and it's going to make the situation worse even than what it is right now. I yield to my good friend from Georgia.

Mr. AKIN. Reclaiming my time for a minute. What I think I'm hearing you say was something that I just think it's so much common sense and so many Americans understand this. And it's about productivity, isn't it? If you really look at, just look at your own life, and if you really want to do better, you become more productive. You produce more product. You're more efficient, and you get more stuff done, and therefore, you can earn more money that way. And that's the same thing. It's not like this is really complicated. You know, there's economists who would like to make it seem complicated so they get to keep that Ph.D. and have a nice job. But it's not that complicated. When a business or an investor or an entrepreneur puts some money out and makes a good gamble or makes a good investment, it works well, or maybe it doesn't work quite right and then they adjust it a little bit, and then they come up with a better way of doing things, we call that productivity. And in order for that process to work, you have to have, just like oil inside a machine, you have to have a certain amount of liquidity and capital out there for these investors to be investing. And so the whole logic of what you're saying is, you've got to prime the pump a little bit and let people keep some money so that they can invest it. And of course the thing that kills it is if you start to suck all the money out of the economy, now you don't have anybody investing, and so you start to run into this condition of joblessness. And we understand what that's like. There's all kinds of people. I yield.

Mr. AKIN. I appreciate the gentleman and the additional point that you are making. I think it is a very persuasive point, because Henry Morgenthau tried this idea for 8 years and it didn't work worth a hoot. In fact, those were his words, we have a lot of debt to boot. But in addition, we also had the Japanese. They tried it, and it basically was like taking an entire economic decade out of Japan. They had a whole lot of these tax-and-spend fellows over in Japan, and they just went at it hammer and tongs for 10 years. The Japanese economy bumped and bumped and bumped and it never could get off the ground. It is like the plane that didn't have enough propulsion to be able to pull it up in the air. And it was because of the fact that they were just sold on this idea that if they spent enough government money, something would be okay. It kind of reminds me, I am an engineer by training and they probably shouldn't let us into a political body like this, but it reminds me of somebody grabbing their shoelaces, lifting up and trying to fly around the room. This is just foolishness. I think most Americans, most of our constituents that are out there, I think they have to look at this idea and think what sort of funny stuff are those people smoking up in Washington, D.C. to think that when you get in hard times economically that what you are going to do is just spend money like mad. I don't think there is anybody in my district dumb enough that when they are in hard times economically they go and buy a brand new big car and spend money like mad thinking it is going to fix the problem. It is almost insanity to look at it that way. The thing is, as well as the bad examples that we have, you have mentioned one of those, Congressman Broun, we have good examples, good examples of the right way to solve the problem. It is not like we are just hopeless and we are in a graveyard spiral with an airplane and there is nothing you can do to fix it. The fact is, there are all kinds of examples of the right thing to do, and that is not the Keynesian model but it is more what people call today a supply side model. I yield to the gentleman.

Mr. AKIN. Mr. Speaker, through the period of the last 6 years, one of the things we have heard pretty commonly in the media has been the tremendous cost of the war in Iraq, and that every day we hear there are more and more millions being squandered on the war in Iraq. So it is an interesting fact to add up all of the spending in the war in Iraq and all of the spending in the war in Afghanistan and add it together. What you find is that there is less spending there than there was in the first 5 weeks of this new year, particularly with the new stimulus bill. Well, how is was it that we got into such a fix, into such a problem, that our economy seemed to dictate these kinds of draconian solutions? That story actually starts back some number of years. It goes back to the Carter administration, the Community Reinvestment Act and the idea that there were some people that couldn't get a decent home loan. So we were going to tell banks that they had to make some loans to people that were riskier, and maybe even risky enough that some of them couldn't make their loan payments. That started under the Carter administration, but over a period of time we then developed a couple of organizations called typically Freddie and Fannie, Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae. Those organizations are neither quite government, but really not quite private either. Their objective was to create a source of innovative financing so that people could afford home loans and the average person could have a piece of the American Dream and own their own house. Well, over a period of time Freddie and Fannie were established and they took more and more different loans, underwrote various loans for people's homes. By the time we got well through the Clinton years as President, President Clinton demanded that the Freddie and Fannie corporations, if you would call them corporations, had to change their rules, that they had to release more and more loans to people who in effect couldn't pay. So the percentage of these loans that were more marginal were increased. In the meantime, you had some other things going on. You had the government policy under Greenspan. The Federal Reserve had reduced the interest rate down quite low to about 1 percent, so you had the money being flooded as we moved on with more and more very low priced capital at 1 percent, so people tended to think, hey, this is a pretty good idea. Let's put some of this money in the real estate market, because the real estate market started to boom. In fact, it was in a bubble. When I came to Congress in 2001, real estate was starting to go up, and by the time 2004 or 2005 came, most of us around here that thought we knew a little bit about economics were kicking ourselves, how come we didn't buy the very biggest house we could possibly find and let the thing double and then quickly sell it. Of course, there were a lot of people that were doing that. There was a lot of speculation going on. Speculators took advantage of the situation and real estate continued to expand and to expand. In the meantime, what was going on on Wall Street was the fact that because there really weren't any rules, Freddie and Fannie were quasi- governmental, it was assumed that they were going to back people up and back up these loans, and so it became kind of a free ride. You had all kinds of mortgage brokers traveling around the country saying to people, hey, you want to get a loan? Well, how much do you need? Half a million dollars? Fine. I don't really care whether you have got a job or whether you can pay it back, because I am going to turn the loan right on over. It is going to go over to Freddie or Fannie or to the Wall Street market. They are going to chop it up in pieces, repackage it and sell it all over the world. So it was one of those situations where we made a very big mistake in terms of government regulation. And we allowed this process to continue to run for some number of years without the proper regulations and control on Freddie and Fannie. So most people have read and understand that what got us into this recession was the fact that we allowed a whole lot of mortgages being made by people who could not pay those mortgages back. So that is how things got started. Now, you say, well, didn't somebody figure this out? Didn't somebody ring a warning bell or let us know that things weren't going the right way? Well, in fact they did. What you have here, and this is an interesting day to remember, in The New York Times, not exactly a right-wing oracle, The New York Times, September 11th, 2003, you have reported there that the President, at the time President Bush, was asking for greater authority to regulate Freddie and Fannie because he believed that what was going on was going to cause a whole lot of trouble. There were all kinds of mortgages and loans being made where it was not at all clear that people would pay them back. Of course, in the past years, many years before when somebody was going to get a home loan, you would go to your local bank and the banker would take a look and say, ``I am not going to loan him money if I don't think he can pay it back.'' But what we did was we separated the person that was taking that loan, we separated him from the person that was getting the money, and the end result was there wasn't any accountability anymore. So the President said, hey, this is a big problem. So you have September 11th, 2003, The New York Times. The President is saying in there, hey, we need to get some controls on these crazy mortgages that are going on, and he asked Congress to take action to regulate Freddie and Fannie. At that time, or a year or so later, Congress and the House passed a bill to do that. It went to the Senate and it was killed by the Democrats in the Senate. But in that same article, September 11th, 2003, you have the words of the gentleman here in the House now who is in charge of rewriting the rules, and this is what he said about Freddie and Fannie. ``These two entities, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, are not facing any kind of financial crisis, said Representative Barney Frank of Massachusetts, the ranking Democrat on the Financial Services Committee.'' So the ranking Democrat on the Financial Services Committee is saying Freddie and Fannie are doing just fine, September 11, 2003. The President is saying we need more regulation, there are going to be problems. Then Congressman Frank goes on, ``The more people exaggerate these problems, the more pressure there is on these companies, the less we will see in terms of affordable housing.'' Well, this doesn't look like very good prophesy here. Certainly this problem was caused by a lack of regulation. It was caused by the Democrat Party, as is reported in this article in The New York Times. Now, there are people today who want to say that this is a failure of free enterprise. This has nothing to do with free enterprise. This has to do with socialistic government meddling in the real estate market and an unwillingness of the government to be responsible in what the government says it is going to back. What has happened here is you have got Freddie and Fannie that could do anything they wanted, and we are supposed to, the taxpayer, you and I, are supposed to back up Freddie and Fannie when people make all of these lousy loans. So that is the quick rundown on how we got to where we are with the recession. Now, when you have a recession, there are a couple different ways to handle a recession, a couple of theories. One of the theories is what FDR did back in the 1930s. Their idea was that if the government spends enough money it stimulates demand. Of course, everybody has been taught this for years in college economic classes, that if the government stimulates the economy by spending enough money, why, then it will just make the recession go away. That sounds like a pretty cool idea, doesn't it? The government just spends more and more and more money and the economy is going to get better. The only trouble with that is if that really worked, where we have the amount of debt that we have at this time, trillions of dollars of debt, don't you think we would have a great economy? So we have to ask, what is this theory? It was called Keynesianism. Little Lord Keynes was proposing this idea about the same time Henry Morgenthau, who was the Secretary of Treasury under FDR, was making this proposal. So we have had in the laboratory of history this idea of the government spending a whole lot of money to make the economy better. So we had a chance to do that for 8 years, and Henry Morgenthau tried this whole thing out. At the end of 8 years, he appears before the House Ways and Means Committee and in 1939, and this is his quotation before the House Ways and Means Committee. ``We have tried spending money. We are spending more than we have ever spent before, and it does not work. I say after 8 years, the administration, we have just as much unemployment as when we started, and an enormous debt to boot.'' So this is the author, this is the first guy that tried this theory over in this country, just spend a whole lot of money to fix a recession, and he says it doesn't work. You take a look at the numbers and the tremendous amount of joblessness when they started, and when he got all done, they still had a whole lot of unemployment going on. And he said we have tried it and it doesn't work. Yet there are people who still want to hang onto this warmed-over Keynesian idea, and it doesn't work. So, what does work? It is important for us to not be negative and just say what doesn't work, but what does work. And what does work is more of a supply side kind of model, and we are going to be talking about that in just a minute. I am joined here on the floor by a very good friend and a gentleman who has lived a number of careers in this world, one as a medical doctor, a guy with a very bright mind, but also a U.S. Congressman from the State of Georgia. I would yield to the gentleman from the State of Georgia, Congressman Broun.

Mr. AKIN

Mr. AKIN. I thank the gentleman, and I appreciate your comments. And I think that, as we have been trying to discover more and more what is in the bill; now, it is a secret what is in the bill, in spite of the discussions about transparency and the chance that people will have a 48-hour window to actually read what is in the bill. Yet, the bill we still have not seen it. There have been people out saying, well, here is the deal we cut. But in terms of transparency and 48 hours, that of course was just campaign rhetoric, apparently. But what it seems like, as we look more and more at this thing, is that this is really a form of financial infanticide, because what we are going to be doing is burdening not only our children but our grandchildren. But I would like to back up just a minute on the gentleman from Iowa, a man that has been a small business owner, a great Congressman, and a great commonsense guy, and I want to just sort of back up because there is two theories about how to treat the situation. And I think it is important that we state that, as a Republican, and I believe you as a Republican gentleman, believe that this is a serious situation that we are facing. At a town hall meeting, a little girl stood up and she said, ``My daddy just lost his job from 40 hours to 24 hours. Is there anything in this bill that is going to help my daddy?'' And the answer to that question is, ``no.'' And that is exactly the reason why we have to vote ``no,'' because it doesn't solve the problem. Now, there are two theories about how you approach the situation that our economy faces right now. And one of them, this word Keynesian, which is some old musty historical guy, some Lord Keynes from England, I suppose, and he had a theory that was convenient for government people; and that was, the more government money you spend, the better off you are. And the guy who really tried that theory, worked for FDR. He was Secretary of the Treasury. His name was Henry Morgenthau. Henry Morgenthau went out and, boy, did he spend money. And he did just exactly what the Democrats are doing he said that they want to do, and that is to build schools and to do all of these different public works projects. And at the end of 8 years, he appeared before the Ways and Means Committee. Now, this guy was doing Keynesian economics before Keynes even made it popular. At the end of 8 years he appears in the Congress here before the Ways and Means Committee and he says, ``It did not work.'' He said, ``We have spent money and spent money for 8 years, and I am telling you, it does not work. The unemployment is just as bad now as it was 8 years ago, and, to boot, we have a tremendous debt.'' Now, that was our first experiment with the idea that you just go out and spend tons of money and everything is going to be okay. Now, I don't know too many households in America, Congressman King, that have such a lack of common sense that when their family budget gets in trouble, that they go buy a brand-new car, take out a second loan on their house, buy a motorboat, and just go spend money to make it better. There are not too many people that have that little common sense. And yet, right here in Washington, D.C., we seem to have all of them that doesn't have any common sense ready to jump on this idea that just spending a whole lot of money is going to make the problem better. Now, we haven't even talked about what we are spending the money on yet. The theory is that we are going to do stimulative things, such as building roads and bridges and stuff, which in fact most of this bill has nothing to do with that at all, just expanding entitlements. I really don't understand how millions and millions of dollars spent on sexually transmitted disease education is really going to put people to work. But aside from that, I just wanted to mention one other thing, and that is something that is a problem of scale. Sometimes numbers get so many zeroes behind them that people get a little batty and don't realize what they are talking about. So let's try and put this $800 billion into perspective. And it is not $800 billion; it is going to be more than $1 trillion, because what this does is it commits us to all kinds of additional spending which it is not going to stay anywhere near. But let's just say we talk about $800 billion. What does that mean? Well, one of the things we have heard for the last 7 years is all of the money that we have wasted on the war in Iraq and how much money the war in Afghanistan has cost us. So let's start, first of all, go back to the beginning of the war in Afghanistan 7 years ago, the beginning of the war in Iraq 6 years ago, let's add it all up. Add all of those two wars up from the beginning of when they started, and it is less than what is in this bill. So that 800-some billion dollars, that is a pretty fair amount of money. Let's put it in other terms. Let's picture, we now currently have 11 aircraft carriers in the military. Those are considered the most valuable assets, other than just the American cities that we have. We really try to protect our 11 aircraft carriers. How many aircraft carriers could we build for $800 billion? Well, if we got them at the old price, about 250. Can you picture 250 aircraft carriers end to end? But let's say we get the newest, most fancy brand-new aircraft carriers. Still, even with no discount for buying a large number, we are talking 100 aircraft carriers. The debt service in one year on this $800 billion would buy us 9 aircraft carriers. And so what are we going to do? We are talking about protecting mice in the Speaker's district, and we are talking about all of these things that have nothing to do other than just spending a whole lot of government money. So, first of all, the question is: Does spending a lot of money do any good? And the answer is: Historically, the Japanese tried it and it didn't work for them, either, any better than it did for FDR. They turned a recession into a depression using this theory. And so what the common sense is, the Federal Government has got to stop spending so much money. That isn't too complicated. People are saying Republicans don't have an answer. We have got an answer: Don't spend all this money. What part of ``don't spend money'' don't you understand? It seems so simple. Everybody else in America can figure it out. Why can't we figure it out? We don't want to spend a lot of money. What we want to do is we want to let the capital, the money, remain with the people that actually create the jobs. Don't we? And I see that you have got a number of other really qualified people to join you on this hour. I just thank you for taking the time to try to get the truth out on a bill that is still smoke and mirrors.

Mr. AKIN

Mr. AKIN. Reclaiming my time, I really appreciate the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Conaway) for coming out and for joining us tonight and for adding your perspective and particularly that point, because there is an almost ethical point to what you are saying: We are saddling our kids and our grandkids with a tremendous debt level. Again, let's put this into perspective. We are talking about somewhere between 100 and 200 aircraft carriers end to end. We've got about twelve aircraft carriers. Now, that's what we're talking about. This is a lot of money. This is more money than we spent in Afghanistan and in Iraq during all of those years of those wars. I very much appreciate my colleagues for joining me. Thank you, Madam Speaker. I yield back.

Mr. AKIN. Reclaiming my time, I really appreciate your perspective. It's not about doing something fast. It's about doing the right thing. It is the thing that has always worked in history. We are joined by our colleague, and I am just so thankful to have another perspective on what we're talking about. It's not that we don't believe that there are good principles that make things work, but specifically, if people want to say, ``well, what sorts of things would the Republicans suggest?'' there have been different Republicans suggesting ideas. One says, hey, let's just have a moratorium on Federal taxes. Let's go 2 months or 4 months where we just don't charge anybody any taxes. It will cost less than this $800 billion loan and bailout we're talking about. Let's just let people keep their own taxes for a couple of months and see what that does to the economy. I'll bet you would see some immediate results. Yet that is not a Washington-based solution. That is not a big government solution. It is allowing freedom to work, and that is what we are about. There are other solutions which say, hey, let the small businessmen keep more of what they make so they can invest and can create those jobs. That's what happened before that worked fantastically. Why don't we do that kind of thing again? I will yield to my good friend.

Mr. AKIN. Reclaiming my time, you know, what we're talking about here is, are we going to let the marketplace work? Are we going to trust in productivity? Are we going to trust in Americans that have always been able to deal with these situations? We have been through a lot of crises as Americans, and yet there's something very, very special about our country. So many unique things. Aside from just the beautiful land that we enjoy, as soon as there's a tsunami or some huge storm or something, you see the Americans there trying to help all around the world. And you see the Americans in a positive way helping. But then there's some things that we're proud of that they didn't do. We won a couple of world wars at various times, and after we won those wars, after every other Nation in the world wins a war, they claim more territories and more jurisdiction. Instead, we didn't claim anybody's territory. We simply taxed ourselves to help rebuild our enemies. That's what makes us a different kind of country. And we're a country that has always put a premium on freedom. Every time we get a chance to give a talk, Judge, we ask people what's so special about America, the word that just bubbles out of their hearts is it's about freedom; it's about a chance to have a dream and to go out, and you may succeed, you may fail, but we're the land where dreams can become reality. We are the only Nation in the world that is based on a creed, that is based on a philosophical statement: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Earlier versions have life, liberty and property. That means it's not the job of the government to take everybody's property away from them and to slop it around and redistribute it. That is socialism. This idea was tried by the Soviet Union. The government is going to provide you with a job and with health care and with food, and the government is going to give you your education. That idea died in the dustbin of history when the Soviet Union collapsed. Our system is based on the idea of freedom and of allowing people to go out and invest their lives in businesses, not in the government's taxing their great grandchildren into the dirt. I will yield to my good friend.

Mr. AKIN. Thank you, Madam Speaker. It's a pleasure to be able to join you again this evening and to talk about the subject that is certainly on the minds and hearts of Americans everywhere, and that is the conditions in the economy. We find ourselves this time at a unique position. We have heard for the past 6 and 7 years about the tremendous cost--how there's billions of dollars being spent day after day in Iraq and in a costly war in Afghanistan. And so it is a bit of a surprise that we find now that if you were to add the cost of the war in Iraq for the past 6 years, and then add up the cost in Afghanistan, the war there for the past 7 years, and then add those two numbers together, you would find that here, in the first 6 weeks of the administration, we are going to spend more money in 6 weeks than we did in those wars over a 6- and 7-year period of time. How did we get to this curious place? When we start talking about $800 billion, one of the dangers of entering this kind of unchartered territory is that our eyes glaze over. What is $800 billion anyway? Well, there are different ways of looking at it. If you think of it from the point of view of the defense budget, we currently have 12 or 13 aircraft carriers. Those are considered by defense people as very valuable. And you don't want to let people torpedo your aircraft carriers because 12 or 13 aircraft carriers have got a lot of airplanes on them, a lot of people on them. Costs a whole lot of money. How many aircraft carriers could you buy with $800 billion? Well, we are talking about, at the price we paid for some of them, about 250 aircraft carriers. Or, if you buy the most brand new, fancy one and don't discount it any for mass production, you're talking about over 100 aircraft carriers that we are going to spend--kaboom--in the first few weeks of a new administration. So how was it that we got to this curious point that there appears to be a crisis this severe? I have to say as a Republican, I don't disagree that we have our economic problems and that there are things that we should do about them. Fortunately, we have history as our North Star to show us what will and what will not work. First of all, how did we get here? Well, it was something that developed, as you can imagine, over time. It didn't just happen overnight. Going back to the Carter years, there was the Community Reinvestment Act. What Carter and the people that were in Congress at this time said was, Hey, we've got certain areas in some of our cities where banks are not willing to give people loans. And that is not fair because every American ought to have the opportunity to own their own home. So what we are going to do is we are going to tell the banks that they have to give loans around to people all over their communities. Of course, the banks were a little reluctant because the banks' concerns were, Hey, some of these loans may not be paid and we are going to end up picking up the tab. So that was starting with Carter. Then, after Carter, we ended up creating what was known as Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae. And those also were partly government, but partly not government agencies, and their whole purpose was designed to try to provide average Americans with loans for their houses, which is a nice thing to do. They were really not under the administration control, and yet it was implied that these loans would be backed up by the Federal Government. So they were not really public, but not really private. They were half and half. And Freddie and Fannie started doing more and more and more investment. They grew and they started picking up more loans of people in America, to the point that last year Freddie and Fannie had more than 50 percent of the loans of Americans, that Americans had on their houses. So Freddie and Fannie got really big. Well, when Clinton comes along, Clinton, during his last year in office, he changed the rules some for Freddie and Fannie and increased the percentage of the loans that Freddie and Fannie had to make to people who were high risk people that would be getting these mortgages. So that, in combination then with the fact that Greenspan drops the interest rate low, you start to get a combination of more and more people being loaned money that they can't afford to pay back, and speculators who can't afford to pay the money, borrow money, knowing that the housing market is going up like a skyrocket because, who knows, housing has never come down in America, so just keep betting on the fact that housing is going to be going up. So they continued to do that. Well, was this something that nobody saw coming? Not so. You can go to the New York Times, not exactly a Republican right wing oracle, and the New York Times on September 11, 2003, includes an article that says, President Bush is asking for authority to regulate Freddie and Fannie because they are getting crazy with the kinds of loans they are making. He says, We are going to have a big problem if we don't regulate Freddie and Fannie. These two entities. This is a New York Times article. You can look it up. It's September 11, 2003. So, Bush is pushing for regulation of Freddie and Fannie. In the meantime, he is being opposed by who? Well, he is being opposed by the Democrats. Particularly, Barney Frank makes this statement, These two entities, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, are not facing any kind of financial crisis, said Representative Barney Frank of Massachusetts, the ranking Democrat on the Financial Services Committee. That's interesting, isn't it? This is the man who's responsible for fixing the problem, and he's the man that said, There isn't any problem at all. We don't need to regulate these things. The more people exaggerate these problems, the more pressure there is on these companies, and we'll see in terms of affordable housing. He's saying, Well, we're not going to be able to do enough affordable housing if we were to limit any of the activities of Freddie and Fannie. Well, people have said, Well, this whole financial crisis we have got in America, this is a problem of free enterprise. It has nothing to do with free enterprise. This is a Big Government socialistic program that was not regulated properly, and it started to cause trouble. And, as you know, these loans got worse and worse. It was exaggerated and exasperated by the fact that you have got rating agencies in New York that were playing along with a very greedy Wall Street. They were raiding these loans at AAA rating when a lot of people who made the loans knew there's no way people could pay that kind of loan. They weren't asking, How much money do you make; they weren't saying, How are you going to pay it back? You want half a million? Fine. We'll write you the loan. Boom. Give it to Freddie and Fannie and let the government pick up the pieces when it crashes. And so these loans, as the real estate market gets higher and higher and higher because of low interest rates, when that bubble starts to pop, all of a sudden these loans start coming down and it poisons the entire world economy. And that is what we have seen happen. Now, half of those loans are still outstanding. So this is not a problem with free enterprise. This is a simple problem of the Democrats in the Senate killing a bill that the Republicans passed in the House, allowing the President to try and regulate. They couldn't do it. So, this problem is one of another social program, perhaps even sold and marketed as compassionate, yet I don't know how it is compassionate to have somebody borrow money that they can't afford to pay back. And that's how things got started here. Now what we're going to talk about is a couple of things: How bad really is the problem? And I also want to mention the fact that there are really two views at how to solve this problem. What you see on the floor, we just saw an hour ago, the Democrats were saying, you know, our package is fantastic, it's going to fix all the problems, it's really great, we've got to hurry up and pass this thing which, as I mentioned, is the equivalent of more than a hundred brand new, modern aircraft carriers parked in a row. That's a fair amount of money, okay? It's more than the entire economy of Australia. We're talking about spending more money than we will receive in tax revenues for the year 2008 in America. In other words, you take all the money we collect at the Federal Government in tax revenues and add it together, we're spending more than that in the first 6 weeks. This is a fair amount of money we're talking about here. I am joined, though, right now by some very good friends and colleagues of mine, and I think they've got some perspective on this. I would like to go first to Congressman Mike Coffman. Mike brings us some very unique qualifications from the State of Colorado. He was the treasurer of the State of Colorado, so you've dealt some with money, Mike. And then also you ran your own small business. I think that what we need is not a lot of cries of crisis but some cold-blooded analysis of what the problem is, what the proper solution is, and then we need to be moving forward boldly but to do the right thing and not just waste a whole lot of money. I would yield time to Congressman Coffman from Colorado.