Michael Burgess

Mr. BURGESS

Mr. BURGESS. I want to thank my friend for yielding. I should mention, of course, you know we passed out of our committee, the Committee on Energy and Commerce, just 2 weeks ago, H.R. 914, which would have, for the first time, increased the number of primary care residencies available. It was a self-replenishing loan program. Oftentimes, the biggest barrier to entry for a hospital that doesn't currently offer a residency program, the biggest barrier for entry is the cost for getting into that residency program. This will provide an ongoing self-replenishing series of loans. We have been held up a little bit by the Office of Management and Budget. It is one of the weird things that happens to you here in Washington. Last year's Congressional Budget Office said this bill was not a problem financially. Last year's Congressional Budget Office is this year's Office of Management and Budget. And this year's Office of Management and Budget says, Wait a minute. If you make more primary care doctors, they're going to see more folks and they're going to send in more bills. It's going to cost more money. So we can't have that. We've kind of reached a little bit of an impasse there. I hope to get past that. It just underscores sometimes the futility of working in this environment in which we find ourselves. Now, just a few weeks ago I was fortunate enough to be asked down to the White House to participate in the health care summit, and President Obama, to his credit, as he was wrapping things up said, Look, I just want to figure out what works. Well, I'm here to help him. I'm so glad to hear him say that. He says, The cake was not already baked. We would work through this in our congressional committees. He'll provide guideposts and guidelines. At the end of the day, it's going to be a congressional decision. I applaud him if that's the case. I still have some reservations deep down inside that this bill has already been written in the Speaker's office. But I will take the President at his word because, after all, we are charged in the practice of medicine for following evidence-based practice. We are told to practice evidence-based medicine. We as policymakers should also practice evidence-based policy as well. The reform discussion has centered primarily on the number of Americans who lack insurance. That's understandable. It's a good reason. The number is astonishingly high--and growing. But, honestly, we do have to look beyond just the single knee-jerk, silver bullet response to, We want to fix the number of uninsured. Because that may not solve our problem. We have a grand national experiment going on in the State of Massachusetts right now. A great increase in coverage because of an individual mandate. But we have a problem. We don't quite have the number of primary care physicians required to render the care to all those folks who now have that coverage. So, across the Nation issues with the medical workforce are going to continue to loom large and, like my colleague from Tennessee, I can remember sitting in those medical meetings 15 years ago and hearing the stories about how we were over providered. I didn't even know that was a verb, quite honestly. We were over providered in health care in this country, and we needed to scale back the number of doctors we were producing. Now, 15 years later, that sounds like nonsense. When you consider the length of time that it takes to make one of us, those of us who are on the House floor late tonight. I don't know. Certainly, 12 years after college and my professional education, it is not at all an uncommon story. It takes a long time to make one of us. So changes in that pipeline really can have a dramatic effect down the road. It's so important for us to get the policy right. Another point on our Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Health. Last fall, we heard from a woman who's a pediatrician in rural Alabama. It sticks in my mind because she went into practice the same year that I did--1981. She has worked her heart out there taking care of poor kids in rural Alabama. Her practice currently has reached a point where it's 70 to 80 percent Medicaid. And she can't keep her doors open. She's having to borrow from her retirement plan in order to pay the overhead for her office to keep the clinic doors open. Well, I learned that lesson a long time ago with managed care back in the 1990s. If you're losing a little bit on every patient, it gets harder to make it up in volume. The harder you work, the more behind you get. That was exactly the situation that she had found herself in. It's because we require such a significant amount of cross-subsidization. The private sector has to cross-subsidize the public sector--Medicare or Medicaid--or doctors cannot afford to keep their doors open. Precisely the information you have up on your slide. Government-administered health care misleads Americans into thinking that they have coverage. But the reality is they're denied care at the out end because there simply is not the doctors offices there to provide it. Well, you have been very generous with your time. I'm going to yield back so we can hear from some of our other great colleagues who are on the floor with us tonight. I thank you for bringing this hour together.

Mr. BURGESS

Mr. BURGESS. I thank the gentleman for the recognition. Mr. Speaker, the President most recently in his inaugural address said, and I am quoting, ``And those of us who manage the public's dollars will be held to account--to spend wisely, reform bad habits, and do our business in the light of day--because only then can we restore the vital trust between a people and their government.'' Well, I agree wholeheartedly with the President's statement. Now, if we expect the American people to trust the decisions we are making with their hard-earned money, we, ourselves, must be accountable. Now, it is a fact that, as Members of Congress, we earn a base pay. Members of leadership earn an amount above that, essentially a bonus, a performance bonus. If this bill were under a rule, I would have an amendment, and the Burgess amendment very simply would tax that extra pay, the bonuses that we give leadership, on top of their congressional salary. The Democrats' leadership solution is to impose a huge tax on bonuses. But what about raising the tax on their own performance bonuses? Again, Mr. Speaker, how can we expect to be able to restore the vital trust between the people and this government, as the President stated, if we will not first hold ourselves accountable? Amendment Offered by Mr. Burgess of Texas At the end, add the following:

Mr. BURGESS

Mr. BURGESS. I thank the gentleman for yielding. And I really appreciate your energy and enthusiasm with coming to the floor at this late hour of the night. You and I serve on the same committee, and our committee has been extremely active for the past several weeks. I think we spent 10 hours today talking about health care. We will spend many hours tomorrow talking about the carbon tax that is going to be enacted before Memorial Day. And then on Thursday we will have another lengthy hearing dealing with food safety; all terribly important issues to the American people. It's good to be up here doing the people's work. Unfortunately, on the floor of the House this week we're not really doing very much, but at least in our committee there is a great deal of work going on. I will say that I am grateful that this week the President chose to stop talking down the economy and Wall Street, and we perhaps had a little bit of a respite from the inexorable downward spiral that we had seen from Inauguration Day forward. That has been a welcomed respite, I know, to my constituents back home. I so appreciate the gentleman having the poster which shows the differences in the deficit by the time we lost control of the House with the 2006 election. We were told that we lost the election for the majority of the House in 2006 because of spending, because we had a deficit of $160 billion at the end of that fiscal year. Mind you, that was a year that had seen Federal expenditures go up because of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, the continued fighting of two wars in the Middle East. We had a tsunami that we had to help with right after the 2004 election. There were some significant expenditures which were really once-in-a-lifetime expenditures, and our deficit was $160 billion. Now, 3 years later, we are looking at a projected deficit 10 times that much, 10 times $160 billion. And we're told, don't worry, all is well, we can, indeed, spend our way out of this crisis. But I will tell you, I have not been in favor of any of these spending bills that have come through the House of Representatives in the past year. I think, going back to January of 2008, the so-called stimulus bill of $170 billion at that time was an error; it was wrong, and it didn't deliver as intended. The bill to bail out Fannie and Freddie in July that had to be redone in September didn't have the intended result, and then finally the big bailout that occurred right at the end of September, the first of October, in the election process clearly was a spending bill that we should not have undertaken. Now, it's instructive to know if you're spending all this money and you're not bringing it in in tax revenue, we are intending or at least the signals are there that the Democrats are intending to raise taxes considerably on every American, as has already been alluded to, this carbon tax. Yes, you won't pay more tax if you earn less than $250,000 a year, unless you turn the lights on, in which case you're going to spend more in taxes, unless you drive a car, in which case you're going to spend more in taxes. So there will be massive tax increases visited upon the middle class of this country. But if you can't tax enough to cover this much spending, where do you get it? Well, you either print it or you borrow it, and right now we are in the process of borrowing this money. Just a little less than a month ago, I spent an interesting afternoon down at a Federal agency called the Bureau of Public Debt. The Bureau of Public Debt that day was having its third of three auctions. Each auction was to be $32 billion, so roughly $100 billion which was going to auctioned off that day. Each auction lasted 30 minutes. Each auction, fortunately, was fully subscribed, in fact, oversubscribed. So the notes that we had to sell as a country to keep our economy afloat did sell. The interest rate was not terrible. It was 1\1/3\ percent. At the same time, a month ago we were selling about $160 billion in paper every week. A year before, it was a little less than $100 billion, and it has obviously gone up every year, year over year, and will continue to do so. What is the effect of putting $2.1 trillion in new paper on the market in a very short period of time? Well, one of two things can happen: Your interest rates will go up or the paper won't sell. If the interest rates go up, that crowds out the private sector, which is also competing for that money to borrow to expand business and grow business. We're going to make it that much harder to add new jobs because we're going to add to the expense of a business growing or expanding. In addition, the tax burden that we are going to be adding in the energy sector alone will be a job-killing crush that most people at this point, quite frankly, haven't engaged upon. They do not comprehend the danger that is coming their way as we seek to recover our economy and grow new jobs and grow new sources of revenue. One of the things that I have been so concerned about is here we are talking about a very enormous budget, an enormous amount of Federal spending. Have we really corrected the problems that were the underlying difficulties before? And I'm not certain we had. I came to Congress in 2003. I was elected in 2002 and was sworn in in 2003. We had just come through a very significant economic downturn. We had just come through some very significant corporate malfeasance with the implosion of Enron. We had new regulations enacted in Sarbanes-Oxley. And the feeling was that we had done all we needed to do and we had gotten it right. But the reality was there were still problems and we hadn't gotten to the bottom of it. I urged the prior administration to proceed upon a course with engaging--I don't like to use the term ``Special Prosecutor.'' Perhaps we should call it a ``Special Inspector General''--to look into the problems in the financial institution that caused us to be in this place. That did not happen. Within the next 2 days, I am going to be introducing with another member on the Joint Economic Committee, another Member of the House, a bill to ask for a commission to study the problems that brought us to this point. I am not a fan of commissions. I think, in fact, most of the time they detract from congressional power and they are something that we should not do. But in this instance, the stakes are so high and the price we will pay if we get this wrong yet one more time will be so large that I, frankly, do not know if the country can sustain that. So I will be introducing legislation to ask for a commission to study not only what went wrong but who should be held accountable at this point. The same as we did with 9/11. The same as we did with the Iraq Study Group. I was not in favor of those commissions, but I think in this situation it does warrant that type of intervention because we cannot allow this to happen again. And I don't know about you, Mr. Scalise, but when I go down to Denton, Texas, when I go home to Fort Worth, Texas, or Lewisville, Texas, and I talk about these problems, everyone wants to know who is responsible and when are we going to see someone held accountable? And the fact that we see more people receive bonus money for driving their companies into the ground because, oh, I'm so sorry, it's contractual obligation; so we have no way around it. Nonsense. Ask any Delta pilot what happened to their contractual obligation about their pension. Ask any United pilot what happened to the contractual obligation with their pension, and they will tell you what those contractual obligations were worth. These contractual obligations to AIG border on criminal. There is no defense for our continuing down this road, and those need to be stopped. I do hope that people will take a look at the concept of having a commission to study this problem because I do believe that the difficulties are so deep and so entrenched that if we do not correct them, if we do not get rid of the dry rot that's in the system, we will build an entirely new house of cards on an unstable foundation, and we know where that will lead. But I do thank the gentleman for bringing this forward. Again, I know it's been a very long day at least for members of our committee. We will have a long day again tomorrow. We'll have a long day on Thursday. I wish our floor schedule mirrored that. Unfortunately, right now we don't seem to feel the same urgency on the floor of the House that the American people are feeling every single day as they watch the job losses mount in their communities and their area. But I thank the gentleman very much for allowing me a chance to talk on this.

Mr. BURGESS

Mr. BURGESS. Madam Speaker, I rise today to congratulate Texas Wesleyan University on their efforts for the Rosedale Revitalization Project and the completed renovations of the Maxine and Edward L. Baker Building. A historical building located at the corner of Rosedale and Wesleyan Streets, the $1.2 million renovation of the 5,000 square-foot-space provides a community meeting room, offices and a cafe. The building has been named in honor of Maxine and Edward L. Baker, parents of Wesleyan Trustee Louella Baker Martin. She and her husband Nick Martin, Fort Worth philanthropists, have been generous supporters of the University. Ed Baker served as chairman of the Texas Wesleyan Board of Trustees fifty years earlier and his father, James B. Baker, served as a trustee beginning in 1894, extending the Baker family commitment to service for over a century. And with the help of federal funding that I secured which acted like a down-payment, and local efforts to multiply that funding, the university is now using the money to renovate locations like the Baker Building The project was made possible through the Rosedale Revitalization Initiative. Founded in 1890 in Fort Worth, Texas Wesleyan University is a United Methodist institution dedicated to the education of students in the region and beyond. The University offers a wide range of degrees for undergraduate and graduate students and educates international students from 29 countries. I congratulate Texas Wesleyan University as it continues to progress as a distinguished and diverse educational institution assisting with the revitalization efforts of Rosedale Street, and I am proud to represent them in Congress.

Mr. BURGESS

Mr. BURGESS. Madam Speaker, I rise today to congratulate the Fort Worth Transportation Authority, who celebrated their Silver Anniversary in November. This outstanding group of people has made the city of Fort Worth a leader in Texas transportation. The ``T'', as it is commonly known, was officially formed on November 8, 1983, when Fort Worth voters approved its passed a referendum on its creation with over 55% support. Over the years, service was extended to other nearby townships. In 1991, Lake Worth joined The ``T'', and in 1992, Blue Mound and Richland Hills joined. In 2001, the Trinity Railway Express (TRE), a joint effort with DART of Dallas, connected the two cities, allowing riders to travel the 35 miles from one downtown to the other on a single train, and also connecting the two cities to DFW International Airport. The TRE is currently the tenth- most ridden commuter rail in the country with nearly 9 million annual passenger trips. The ``T'' serves Fort Worth and the surrounding partnering communities with 36 bus routes operated and maintained from their facilities at 1600 E. Lancaster Avenue at the entrance to the 26th District. It also runs a carpool and vanpool service, allowing people who live close to one another to reduce the cost, and the exhaust emissions, of their daily commutes. Finally, it operates a Mobility Impaired Transportation Service, which provides vehicles, drivers, and passenger assistance to those who require it. With the completion of the Intermodal Transportation Center (ITC), The ``T'' has provided the downtown connection between bus service, the TRE, and Amtrak and an instrumental resource to the thriving business core of Fort Worth. Future plans for new Commuter rail for Southwest and Northeast Tarrant County will further connect participating cities with DFW airport. Also, development to address congestion in communities such as Arlington and the explosive growth found in communities in the Alliance area provides further support to The ``T'' in providing additional commuter rail routes and other transit solutions. Again, I commend The ``T'' for its leadership in improving public transportation in and around Fort Worth. I am proud to represent its management and employees in the 26th District of Texas, and I wish them continued success with local and regional transportation solutions over the next quarter century as they transform Fort Worth into a worldwide leader in comprehensive public transportation.

Mr. BURGESS

Mr. BURGESS. Madam Speaker, I stand before you today to recognize New Source Broadband for their far-sighted provision of high speed Internet services to rural areas. New Source Broadband Company is a pioneer in the high speed Internet industry as they are reaching customers that larger companies have deemed unprofitable. This company has earned my respect for remembering that rural communities should not be left behind in the Information Age. Farmers, ranchers, lake-area inhabitants, and other country dwellers now have immediate access to online communities and knowledge databases thanks to the innovation and concern of this company. New Source Broadband Company will be opening their third office and continues to expand their service capacity to rural areas. Madam Speaker, I commend the management and employees of New Source Broadband Company for the positive professional contribution they have made to rural communities, notably constituents within the Twenty-Sixth District of Texas. I warmly congratulate New Source Broadband Company upon the opening of their third store and wish them continued business growth.

Mr. BURGESS

Mr. BURGESS. Madam Speaker, I rise today to acknowledge Wen Chyan, from the 26th District of Texas, who was the winner of the Siemens Westinghouse Competition in Math, Science, and Technology. Wen Chyan's curiosity about chemistry was sparked by his parents, both scientists, at an early age. Wen's astuteness has earned him recognition from the U.S. National Chemistry Olympiad, U.S.A. Biology Olympiad, and the Texas Science and Engineering Fair. His ambition and desire to contribute to medical advancements prompted him to create an anti-microbial coating for medical devices, a development that has the potential to save lives. Wen is the first TAMS student to advance to such a high level in this competition, which features the research of more than 1,000 students. Wen's hard work has earned him high recognition and a $100,000 scholarship. I am proud to recognize Wen Chyan for the stunning research he has accomplished, the award he has received, and the promise he holds for the future of American science. It is a privilege to represent Mr. Chyan in the 26th District of Texas.

Mr. BURGESS

Mr. BURGESS. Madam Speaker, I rise today to honor the Denton Chamber of Commerce, which will celebrate its 100th Anniversary on April 21, 2009. The Denton Chamber of Commerce is an alliance of businesses, professionals, and organizations working to support and promote the principles for a prosperous economic environment. Established April 21, 1909, the Chamber has grown to involve over 860 members. In its 100 years of operation, the Chamber has a record of promoting, supporting and expanding the Denton business community. Small businesses have long benefited from the efforts of the Denton Chamber of Commerce and have also found it an avenue to give back to their community. Many members are not only successful in business, but also volunteer and serve on boards of local charity and community groups. The Chamber has played a significant role in the community's economic health, establishing an Economic Development Partnership with the City of Denton focused on helping create new jobs, supporting existing career opportunities and expanding the property tax base. A prime example of this success was the partnership's work to attract the largest local employer, the Peterbilt Motors plant, and later, Peterbilt's division headquarters. Helping in the efforts to secure the sites for the Denton State School, and the sites for FEMA's underground center and National Teleregistration facility, the Denton Chamber of Commerce's contributions have gone beyond just helping the business community. With programs such as Leadership Denton, Chamber members have learned the inner workings of policy. It has worked to supplement communications with state and federal officials with the initiation of county wide events such as Denton County Day in Austin and the Washington Fly-In. A tribute to their role in community service and leadership development is evidenced by the dozens of members that have served on local city councils, school boards and in other elected positions. It is with great pride that I stand here today to join others in celebrating the 100th Anniversary of the Denton Chamber of Commerce. I wish the membership, staff and board all the best and I am proud to represent them in the U.S. House of Representatives.

Mr. BURGESS

Mr. BURGESS. I thank the gentleman for yielding. And as always, it's a pleasure to join him on the floor of the House. He has such good ideas. And, certainly, the concepts talked about tonight are something that have perplexed me, perhaps not the individuals involved, but the concepts involved have perplexed me for years, because our Tax Code is complicated. It turns out it's so complicated the chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, the committee that's charged with writing our tax laws in this country, they've written laws that are so complicated they can't understand them and they cannot follow their own law. Now, the judge very kindly has introduced legislation that if we're going to grant dispensation to the chairman of the Committee on Ways and Means, perhaps we ought to grant that same dispensation to others who are at a less high station in life and perhaps find themselves just as unfortunate when trying to deal with our very complicated Tax Code. The fact is, Madam Speaker, the Tax Code does not need to be so complicated. There are great ideas out there for simplifying the Tax Code. The good news is that 80 percent of the people in this country think that Congress ought to do something. They don't identify whether they think the Republicans ought to do something or the Democrats ought to do something, but Congress ought to do something about the complicated Tax Code that people have to follow. We've got the chairman of the Ways and Means charged with writing the tax law, cannot follow the tax law because it is too complicated. We've got perhaps the smartest financial mind in the world, the man that was chosen as the President's Secretary of the Treasury, who has been charged with dealing with this very harsh financial environment in which we find ourselves, who, in spite of that high station in life and in spite of that keen, incisive intellect that is going to allow him to chart that course through these very turbulent economic waters, can't fill out his income tax, even when aided by TurboTax. But I'm all about solutions, and I'm here to offer the solution that is going to uncomplicate the lives of these two very powerful and important public figures, public figures that we know we need to get us through these turbulent economic times. Madam Speaker, I spent my life in health care. And we were deprived of one of the bright lights in health care, a former Senator, Tom Daschle, who had to withdraw his name from consideration because of difficulties with reporting taxes. And, quite honestly, it is difficult to know you have a car and driver that someone gives you, is that something you have to report as income? We could simplify this process and eliminate these problems that would allow us many more great public servants to be able to come to the fore and help us with these vexing problems, economic turbulence and the difficulty with our health care system. Now, I was a doctor back in Texas for over 25 years. You know, the old saying goes, ``There's nothing as certain as death and taxes.'' But I will tell you that sometimes the taxes seem a lot more complicated than death. The Tax Code was created in this very body some 96 years ago, back in 1913. And it has grown from--you know, we talk about the length of bills today. In fact, we had one on the floor that stretched up halfway to the ceiling. But the initial Tax Code was 400 pages. Now the Tax Code stands at well over 67,000 pages, and the complexities are well-known. But they don't need to be there. Part of the problem is, over the 96 years since the Tax Code was introduced, men and women on both sides of the aisle who were well- meaning have attempted just a little bit of social engineering into the Tax Code, and the result is this very complicated, complicated 67,000- page structure that we have in front of us today. And it's creating problems for those of us who want to be in compliance with the law. We're desperate to be in compliance with the law. And every single American simply trying to comply with the law and fill out their taxes by April 15th is supposed to be familiar with all of those 67,000 pages of the tax rules. Again, you consider a man as brilliant as the Secretary of the Treasury, Timothy Geithner. He couldn't understand and had difficulty filing his taxes. Well, you've got to wonder does your own tax attorney understand everything that's in those 67,000 pages, because when it comes to the Tax Code, ignorance of the law is no excuse. So we must fix the Tax Code. Americans don't always see eye to eye on every issue. In fact, you saw evidence of that here last night, but again, 80 percent of the American people, according to American Solutions, think that the system of the way we go about filing and collecting our taxes needs major change. Everyone knows the problems. Every year, Americans waste billions of hours and billions of dollars complying with the complex Tax Code. In 2005, the average taxpayer paid almost $2,000 in household compliance costs. That means, you know, you've got to work several days a week just to pay the cost of paying someone to fill out your taxes because you don't want to make a mistake because things could go very badly for you. You might lose an opportunity to serve your government at the very highest level if you don't do this correctly. I brought a little poster to share with the Congress. Again, I'm doing this in the spirit of generosity in offering a possible solution. I realize there are other solutions out there, and by no means do I intend to disparage other solutions that people are willing to talk about, but this is just one idea that's out there. It was developed by my predecessor, Congressman Armey, when he was in the House of Representatives here for many, many years. He wrote a book called the Flat Tax, and I remember buying the book in 1995. I believed in the book. I thought, certainly, by 1996 or 1997 that Majority Leader Armey would have had that enacted into law. We sit here now over a decade later. It's time. It's time for just this type of change. Let's go through it. It's so simple, Madam Speaker. It's just a little bit of personal information: Name and Social Security number; a spouse, if you have one, and the Social Security number; you write down your income, your personal exemptions; you add a couple of lines; you calculate the tax; you multiply it by the taxable income calculation--17 percent in this legislation that I introduced last week that, interestingly enough, is called H.R. 1040. It makes it easy to remember. So, if you're following along at home and are wondering what is this panacea for our tax problems, H.R. 1040: calculate your taxes; calculate the refund; send it in. What did it take? All of 30 minutes-- 30 seconds. I beg your pardon. We have trouble with zeros here in this Congress. It takes all of 30 seconds, and you're done. You don't have to keep that shoe box full of receipts. You don't need to go online and download a program that you don't understand. You don't need to have the concern that you filed a tax return that is in error and that you're going to be held accountable for that. No more expensive tax attorney bills. The hours of stressful research into preparing your taxes, think of what Americans could do with those hours if they were no longer bound to their desks in their houses, really, literally between now and April 15. There's no telling how many nice spring weekends are going to be spent sifting through that shoe box full of receipts. No more of Congress' picking one special interest group over another to reward in the Tax Code, and no more potential leaders of the free world who'll be having to pull their names out of contention because they can't comply with a very complicated Tax Code. So, again, I come here tonight in the spirit of goodwill, in the spirit of offering solutions. We should be about solutions. One of the things on the bill that I introduced, H.R. 1040, is a flat tax, but I'll have to say that Congress doesn't always know best, and I trust the American people to know best in their situations. If a family has constructed its finances around the IRS code, it would be wrong for Congress to simply come in and change all the rules of the game all at once. So this tax would be optional. People would have a period of time when they could opt into a flat tax. If they'd constructed their family's finances around the complicated Tax Code and they wanted to continue to file under the Tax Code, they could do so, but boy, if they're ready to kick that shoe box of receipts over into next week and take that weekend off that they were going to spend doing their taxes, that would be their choice. We should give Americans the power to choose, the power to make that choice as to whether or not they would like to opt into a fair or flatter tax. A flat tax would be much less costly. Taxpayers could save $100 billion a year just on the cost of compliance. The result in increased personal savings would be a stimulus package that could have an immediate effect on the American economy. Well, Madam Speaker, we live in a very political time, and this concept that I'm offering tonight is done in the spirit of offering solutions, in the spirit of cooperation to Members on both sides. I encourage people to look at H.R. 1040. Give me your ideas. Certainly, the bill has been introduced. Cosponsors are on the bill even as we speak, so there is an opportunity for other Members of Congress to cosponsor this legislation. Again, you think of the difficulties the judge has already pointed out. He has had to introduce a bill called the Rangel Rule so the poor, little guy in his district who gets caught in the tax trap can at least have the same consideration in the tax courts that we gave to the chairman of the Ways and Means Committee. We've got the Geithner getaway. We've had the Daschle dodge. All of these issues could have been avoided if we would have simplified the Tax Code. It is within our power to do it. The American people are looking to us for solutions. They're not looking for partisan rhetoric. They're not looking for one side to gain an advantage over the other. They want us to work together on big issues like this. Eighty percent of the American people feel that the simplification of the Tax Code is something that is well-nigh due for the American landscape--filling out your taxes on a postcard, making it simple, giving that time back to your families. Yes, people need money nowadays, and the economy is rough, but boy, if you can give people back time, that is extremely, extremely significant. So we're going to give back money and time with a simplified tax form. Madam Speaker, I am so grateful to my friend from Texas for yielding me time to talk on this very timely and important subject. We're just a few weeks away from the tax filing deadline, and many of us are going to lie awake at night and are going to wonder: By golly, am I going to have to file for the Rangel Rule because I made a mistake on my taxes, and now someone may be coming after me? Fortunately, they've got Judge Carter looking after them, and the gentleman from Texas has introduced his very forthright legislation, so we're trying to protect you on both sides. Maybe this is a preventative medicine flax tax where you won't even have the problem, but the judge has the remedy if you've gotten into difficulty with the Rangel Rule and with the Geithner getaway. I appreciate the judge's holding this hour tonight.

Mr. BURGESS. If the gentleman would yield, I love the spirit of forgiveness that he has embodied within this legislation. Again, my purpose in being here tonight was to offer a possible solution. I think Members of Congress should be about solutions. The American people want to see us be about solutions. This is one that is widely embraced and polls very well, but I would yield the floor back to the judge, and would certainly, again, thank him for his forthrightness and for his leadership in holding this special hour tonight.

Mr. BURGESS. Well, if the gentleman would yield, he has posed a question that is technically very complex, and as just a simple country doctor, I'm probably not qualified to render an opinion on the title of his legislation.

Mr. BURGESS. You know, Judge, you've asked a very good question. My understanding is it would not. We would simplify his life by his not having to keep up and keep tally. Everything that was offered as part of his compensation package would be considered under the 17 percent flat tax.

Mr. BURGESS. If the gentleman would yield, that is a fair observation. Again, by coming here tonight and talking about something that has been important to me for well over a decade, by no means do I mean to say that this is the only concept that's out there. There are other people who have good concepts. We ought to have the debate as a body and take good ideas from all within the body and come up with the answers to the tough questions. This is what the American people sent us here to do. If we can find a better way, if we can deliver time and money to the American people, then we should do so.

Mr. BURGESS

Mr. BURGESS. Mr. Speaker, as we left town right before the Presidents' Day recess, many of us spoke on the floor of this House about the issue of what was then the issue of the day, the issue before the House, the stimulus bill, the spending bill, the ``jobs bill,'' as it was described, but a bill that unfortunately contained much more Federal spending than anything else. This bill was posted on a Web site late in the night. It was not posted in a forum that was searchable by any Member of Congress. And you heard over and over again on the floor of this House a little over a week ago how no one in this House had been able to adequately peruse the bill--indeed, read the bill--before it came to a vote that Friday before last. The bill came to us late in the night. There seemed to be a great rush about getting it done--after all, the country is in dire trouble, people are needing this legislation to be passed--and then we all took a 3-day weekend; the Speaker took off to points unknown in Italy; the President took a vacation back home. And then finally, the day after Presidents' Day, the following Tuesday, the 17th, the bill was signed into law. We were then informed by several of the Federal agencies charged with dispensing this money and getting it out quickly into the economy to quickly have that stimulative effect that it is purported to have on the economy, well, we're told that many of those Federal agencies, it will take some time for them to promulgate the rules and set forth the rules under which this money is to be distributed amongst the Federal agencies. And it, indeed, may be the early part of the summer before some of this stimulus money actually makes it into the economy. I noticed in my home paper, the Dallas Morning News, today a gentleman wrote in--I assume it was tongue in cheek--he said, being in his advanced stage, he felt that he might be one of those shovel-ready projects that was mentioned in the stimulus bill. I am going to assume that that was a light-hearted remark on his part. But it brings to mind a more serious nature of what we are facing. And we've heard it so many times over the past month's time, the amount of money, $787 billion contained in this bill--more if you factor in the cost of capital, the cost of financing this bill, then the cost goes up to $1.1 or $1.2 trillion. The bill has built-in funding cliffs where if you really were honest about the amount of funding it would require to continue this stimulus bill over the actual life of the bill, we're probably talking about a bill that's closer to $3 trillion. And $3 trillion is $3 trillion that we don't have sitting in the Federal Treasury waiting to be dispensed. This is, in fact, money that will have to come from somewhere. Where is it going to come from? Well, it's going to come from the United States selling public debt. And the good news is that debt is still a saleable commodity on the world market, that people are still willing to purchase our debt. The good news is that they are still willing to purchase our debt and the interest rate has not risen significantly. But those days will only last so long because consider what is just right around the corner. You heard the gentleman from Arizona talk about an omnibus bill that will be on the floor of this House in less than 48 hours. The omnibus bill will spend roughly $410 billion on top of the $787 billion that we just spent toward the end of last week. Bear in mind once again, we're not figuring in the cost of borrowing that money in that figure of $410 billion. And a little more than 24 hours from now the President will stand in this House and address a joint session of the House and Senate--all will be assembled here--and he will lay out his plan, his budget for the next year of the United States of America. At the present time, I do not know what the top number is, but I suspect it will be in excess of $3 trillion. In fact, I expect it to be in excess of $3.3 trillion because that would be a little bit above the number that was approved the last year that President Bush submitted his budget. So we all know it takes a lot of money to run the country over a year's time, and yet we've had TARP I and TARP II, and now stimulus one, we're going to have the omnibus or minibus bill in a few day's time, and then we have our regular spending--our regular spending that we've yet to take on for the next fiscal year; truly an absolute explosive growth in the Federal deficit that is going to be seen between now and the end of the fiscal year, September 30. Mr. Speaker, I had an interesting time at home over the Presidents' Day week when we weren't in session. I talked to a number of my schools throughout my district in north Texas. I talked to the high schoolers in Gainesville, Texas; I talked to a group of home schoolers in rural north Texas; I talked to a group of middle school students in my home of Lewisville; and I talked to a group of students at an early childhood learning center down on the southeast side of Fort Worth. At every location I felt obligated to explain what had just transpired in the United States Congress because I know what it's like when you're a kid, you're not really paying attention to what's going on in these hallowed halls of Congress. And yet every statement we made 2 weeks ago, every dollar we spent 2 weeks ago, every interest obligation we incurred 2 weeks ago is not going to be borne by people my age, it's going to be borne by those youngsters that I was talking to; in fact, likely their children as well. So we have handed off to the next generation an amount of debt, the likes of which no one has ever seen before. And bear in mind, these are some of the best of times that we've just been through, and yet we are handing off levels of debt that have previously been unseen in this country. Now, as I went to the high schools, I did feel obligated to explain the mechanisms that created the need for the stimulus bill, the problems I saw with the bill, perhaps some alternative strategies that were suggested, some by Members of the minority here on the House side, alternatives that were suggested by Members of the other body on the other side of the Capitol. There were alternative strategies out there. There really wasn't any strong chorus of individuals who said we just need to do absolutely nothing. Many of us thought that perhaps by dealing with problems in the Tax Code would be a quicker and more efficient way of returning money to the productive segment of society. But nevertheless, we were cut out of most of those debates because, in the name of speed, in the name of getting this done rapidly, quickly, and getting that money out there--remember, for those shovel-ready projects that are sitting there waiting to go. In the name of getting that money out there quickly we had to forego all meaningful debate and, in fact, just simply had a very short period of time--between a little after midnight eastern standard time on Thursday night until we voted on the bill some 11, 12 hours later here on the floor of the House--to actually make up our minds on whether or not this spending was worthwhile for the country. And then, as we found out, there really wasn't such a rush because at the end of the day the bill languished for several days, then got shipped to Denver, then got signed. Now the Federal agencies are telling us that it may be some time before they actually get the rules written and the details in place for getting the money out there to the people. I felt a need also to tender an apology to the high school students that I talked to because, after all, it was our haste in getting this bill out there so quickly, without fully vetting it, without perhaps fully thinking through the consequences of what this level of Federal debt was going to do to subsequent generations. I felt a need to take some responsibility for that even though I did not vote for the bill in its final form and final passage, but nevertheless, as an institution-- and we just heard Mr. Flake so eloquently talk about the integrity of the institution--because of the integrity of the institution, I certainly bear the responsibility of that bill that left out of here down to the President's desk last week the same as anyone else in this body. And I also thought it was important to talk to the students about the fact that this is America, this is America. And things may be dark today, but they are not going to be dark forever; in fact, in my opinion, they will not be dark for long. In north Texas, in the late 1980s, we were up against severe, severe economical straits. There was a recession in the country that had sort of slowly languished and rolled around various areas of the country. The price of energy dropped overnight. The price of a barrel of oil plummeted to levels unseen previously down to $10 a barrel and even lower. The price of real estate in north Texas plummeted. And loans that were made so businesses could expand were suddenly undercollateralized and those loans were called by the financial institutions. And the people who had made those loans found themselves facing great difficulty in being able to either supply the justification why the loan should be continued or to pay off that loan and settle those debts so that the lending institution would be made whole. And it was very difficult, very, very difficult times back then in north Texas. Many businesses didn't make it. Many small businesses didn't make it, many medium size and large businesses didn't make it. Many banks in north Texas failed. Fortunately, we did have the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, which came in--they didn't nationalize banks, to be sure. If they found a bank that was in serious trouble they came in and examined its books and said you simply cannot make it. They failed a bank and found a buyer. And sometimes that required subsidizing some of the bad debt within that bank, but they found a buyer, they didn't simply own that bank in perpetuity. Banks were sold to other areas of the country that weren't in such bad shape. Some banks were allowed to continue, they were allowed to continue with a protocol known as a net worth certificate back at the time which allowed a bank to have on its balance sheet some additional collateral provided by this net worth certificate that was in fact backed up by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation--no actual cash exchanged hands--and then when the bank found its way out of that difficulty, that net worth certificate was repurchased from the bank. And as a consequence, many banks are in business in north Texas today that otherwise might have faced closure, or, in our present scenario today, might have faced what is being euphemistically referred to as ``nationalization'' with the Federal Government being the owner. To be sure, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation owned a portion of those banks for a short period of time, but it was never in business to own those banks long term and did its job as it was intended to do, and also to protect the depositors. And perhaps one of the few good things we have done in the past several months is when the TARP bill was passed last fall, the bank bailout bill, the Wall Street bailout bill was passed last fall, we did increase the dollar amount of Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation insurance to $250,000, which, in my opinion, was an important thing to do as far as reestablishing some credibility within the banking sector. But I wanted these students to know, I wanted them to know that I had lived through north Texas in the 1980s. I had seen businesses fail. I had seen friends of mine who owned businesses and had owned businesses for a number of years not be able to make it in those tough economic times. But, in fact, there was no largess coming from the Federal Government. No one came down from the Federal Government and opened up the coffers and said here's some dollars until you can see your way to get your business going again. That did not occur. Tough times, to be sure, but after those tough times that were over much more quickly than anyone anticipated, we had 25 to 28 years of sustained economic growth, sustained prosperity in north Texas. And the reality is it was only until the recession that hit the rest of the country a little over a year ago finally caught up with north Texas last fall, we had been creating jobs every month up until October or November of last year. So north Texas did, indeed, have a sustained period of prosperity, and it wasn't because the Federal Government came in and bailed people out during the 1980s. It was because people recognized the problems that were before them. They corrected their own finances. They corrected the finances within their business. If they couldn't, the businesses failed, the banks failed. But they picked themselves up, they dusted themselves off, to take a phrase from the presidential inauguration address, and they got on with their business. And they got on with their business in north Texas, and north Texas ultimately reaped the rewards of that. Contrast that to the country of Japan, which a few short years after that found itself in a recession. Japan was held up to us during the late 1980s as being the beacon of economic strength, but a few short years later, Japan itself was in great difficulty. Japan's federal government decided that it would spend its way out of the recession. They would spend federal dollars until that economy, by golly, got moving again, and the result of that is what is known as the ``lost decade'' in the country of Japan where economic growth stagnated. And even to this day, even to this day, they are having difficulty facing economic growth in the country of Japan. North Texas, by contrast, through a severe recession, to be sure, many people suffered as a consequence of that recession, but the rebound for that was many people profited from the sustained period of prosperity that followed. So I wanted the high school students to know that although the days may seem dark today and although when they turn on their broadcast news or their cable network news shows and people talk about the dire straits of the economy that this is America and we have not forgotten how to grow and we will again grow and this country will again have that long, sustained period of prosperity that we all know of which this country is capable. But at the same time, the one danger sign, the one red flag out there is that explosive growth of Federal spending that could undermine that ability of our economy to pull itself up out of this recession and take off into the next period of rebound. And I talk about this, it's not just simply an idea in abstraction. Two weeks ago, coming back to Congress, I went with a group of other Members of Congress down to a little known Federal agency called the Bureau of Public Debt. The Bureau of Public Debt is a part of the United States Department of Treasury. The Bureau of Public Debt is in a big tall building downtown. You go down there, and several times a week they auction off Federal paper, the loans that we are willing to sell to other people. The day we went down there, we watched the third auction of that day. It was for $32 billion. These were 3-year Treasury notes on sale at that time. Previously they had sold notes that were of a shorter duration and a longer duration. Each time a similar volume of notes were sold. So we're talking about $100 billion that was sold 2 weeks ago on Tuesday. The auction that we witnessed took about 30 minutes to complete. Again, the good news is there are plenty of people out there willing to buy our debt, willing to buy our paper. Apparently, United States dollars, the United States Treasury note is still a very, very safe place for people to go when they have money and they want to ensure that it stays safe. The interest rate was about 1\1/3\ percent, which seemed like a reasonable amount. But, Mr. Speaker, you must understand later that week we spent another $787 billion. Really $1.2 trillion if you figure in the cost of capital. And we're going to spend another $410 billion this week, and then we're going to have the President's budget, which will be much in excess of $3 trillion. Ultimately, ultimately, that debt is going to be able to be sold only by an increase in the interest rate. And if that happens, the interest rate increases for everyone else across the country. That crowds out private borrowing. That makes the cost of capital that much higher for any small business person in the country. That makes the ability to create new jobs for any small business person in this country that much more difficult. And do we really want to make it more difficult to create new jobs? Do we want to make it more expensive to create new jobs? That doesn't seem like the way to get yourself out of a recession. But we sold this public debt, and, again, the good news is that it did sell. We didn't just have to print the money and hope that it sold at some point in the future. There was, in fact, a willing buyer for the debt. The bad news is we are selling about between $150 to $160 billion a week in public debt. That's not all new spending. Some of that is recycled debt as those notes mature. But it still underscores the volume of dollars that we are having to float out there in the world currency on literally a weekly basis. The amount of public debt sold in contrast about a year ago was about $100 billion a week. Now we are up to $150 to $160 billion a week, which just goes to show the rapid rate with which that has increased. And so far what we have seen out of congressional spending this year, there hasn't been any lack of enthusiasm for spending Federal dollars. Now, some of the things we saw in the so-called stimulus bill last week, some of the markers for what might be described as health care reform, some people might describe as a greater Federal share in the administration of health care in this country, we certainly saw the markers last week in the stimulus bill. Now, the state of health care reform, in fact, the whole question of health care reform, was a pretty big piece of the Presidential campaign last fall. In fact, both presidential candidates, the presidential nominees of both major parties, talked a lot about health care during the course of their campaigns, and, of course, any sort of health care reform did comprise a significant portion of the debates between the candidates as we came through the fall. So there really was not any question that some type of change in health care would be coming with whoever took office, and certainly when President Obama was elected, it became clear, at least clear to some of us, what his ideas were during the campaign, and we expected those to come forward during the course of this year. Now, for whatever reason here we are now nearing the last week of February of this year, the President's having been sworn in a little over a month ago, and as yet we haven't seen the big plans coming out of the White House, the Senate, or the House of Representatives that would signal what type of health care reform is coming down. I noted today after the Economic Responsibility Conference in the White House, a Member from the other body who's chairman of one of the major committees over there stood up and spoke about his vision on the changes in health care and how he still wanted to see a unified position come out of the Senate for consideration, and I still expect that is something we are likely to see. On the House side, at least on the committee on which I sit, the Committee on Energy and Commerce, the focus seems to be much more on climate change and global warming than it does on the health care reform side. Obviously, we had our early debates with the stimulus bill, but there doesn't seem to be the push on the House side, at least that I got the impression, that the other body is going to put behind this. But suffice it to say it will be part of the discussion. It will be part of the landscape here in the United States Congress certainly for the balance of this year no matter what time that it actually comes up. There were some significant changes in health care spending that came about as a result of the stimulus bill. Probably most striking was in the aids to States for Medicaid spending. Currently, the Federal Government takes on about a 57 percent share of Medicaid spending. The States pick up the other 43 percent. Within the stimulus bill, the Federal matching part of that will be increased significantly for some States. It varies in amount from State to State. But this increase in Federal matching for State Medicaid will occur for the next 18 months' time. Now, you don't have to be a math whiz to know that 18 months from now puts us pretty close to the election of 2010. I don't realistically expect this Congress to back off on any Federal spending a week or a month or 2 before election day. It's going to be very, very difficult to throw a million-plus people off of Medicaid rolls a few months before the election day in 2010. So when I talk about funding cliffs, when I talk about funding that is not sustainable over time, this, indeed, is one of those areas where really people need to concentrate on just how much money has been obligated and what is the likelihood that we will behave by the 18-month time frame that we have set out for ourselves, 12-month time frame on the increased COBRA benefits that were put forward, and the 18-month time frame on increased aid to States for their Medicaid expenditures. The reality is this is a subprime loan, a subprime loan to the States. There's a big balloon payment due at the end. It's a low interest rate to get you in at the front. You increase the State Medicaid rolls, and 18 months from now, that increase in Federal spending just simply goes away. Again, there is not a person in this body who believes that 18 months from now, just shy of Election Day 2010, that this body is going to withdraw the Medicaid subsidy for a million Americans. It's just not going to happen in a few short weeks prior to Election Day. So, again, if we were really honest about what our spending was last week when we took on this stimulus bill, we would be honest and acknowledge that that spending is, indeed, going to be much higher, much higher than anyone has calculated to date. The actual expenditure, if you were to fund that over the 5-year budget cycle, if you include that plus the cost of capital, it's going to put this bill somewhere between $2 and $3 trillion. Now, there were other health care provisions that were placed into the bill. There was funding a billion dollars for a center for what's called Comparative Effectiveness. ``Comparative Effectiveness'' sounds on the surface like, well, why wouldn't you want to compare treatments and only use the treatments that were the best and encourage those treatments that were the best? But the problem is when the Federal Government gets into that type of activity, it's not just that we make recommendations; we tell people what they are going to do because if they don't do what we tell them, we are not going to pay them. And as a consequence, the role of the Institute for Comparative Effectiveness may loom as a very large player in the delivery of health care in this country. And it's not just me, a Member from Texas, or even Texas newspapers that are concerned about this. The Boston Globe, the online edition, in an op-ed piece from a few days ago by Phyllis Greenberger talked about why one size doesn't necessarily fit all. And let me just read the last couple of paragraphs from this piece in the Boston Globe: ``In Britain the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence has been issuing appraisals of medical treatments for close to a decade. The institute considers both cost effectiveness, which measures the benefits of a treatment against the expense to provide it, and clinical effectiveness, which measures how much better a new treatment is for patients than an older one. The agency then makes recommendations to Britain's National Health Service about which treatments are worth covering.'' That all sounds innocent enough and perhaps a way to get some cost- effective medicine. But remember, Mr. Speaker, Dr. Elias Zerhouni, who recently was head of the National Institutes of Health. When he would come and talk to this body, when he would come and give testimony in front of our congressional committees, he talked about a day when medicine became a great deal more personalized. He talked about the wonder of sequencing the human genome, of knowing so much more about what a person's risks were before those problems ever even had a chance to surface. So, personalized medicine was the holy grail of the future. He talked about medicine that was going to become more personalized and, as a consequence, it would be a great deal more predictive. Because it's more predictive it could be much more preventive and, along those same lines, it would have to be more participatory. But we pretty much throw the concept of personalized medicine to the wayside when we embrace concepts like the Institute for Comparative Effectiveness or Britain's National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence. Let me read from the second to the last paragraph from a Boston Globe article by Phyllis Greenberger: ``Sometimes, though, the agency's findings prevent people from getting the best care possible. Last year, for instance, the institute recommended that the National Health Service not cover the life-extending lung cancer drug Tarceva because of its price tag. Even though the institute's decision was eventually overturned, some British cancer patients were denied their last hope for staying alive.'' Now, think about that for a moment. Here is an agency, albeit from a government from another country, that made a decision that this drug is too expensive. This person has a disease which is not compatible with longevity. Here is a new medicine. It's terribly expensive. We are not going to cover that medicine, and only after they lost the fight did they go back and cover the medicine. But think of the patients during that interval that were denied that newer treatment for a very debilitating disease, their families were denied that treatment and now, of course, the treatment is readily available. But that is the problem when you have a Federal body that has that order of magnitude of power within their hands. The group that is going to be comprising this, right now nobody really knows who that is or what that will look like. For heaven's sakes, we don't even know who the next Secretary of Health and Human Services is here a month into this new administration. We need to be more careful about these types of decisions because they may affect each and every one of our constituents at some point in their lives going forward. These are tremendously important decisions and yet, and yet, they are wrapped up into this great big stimulus bill, rushed through, no chance for debate, no chance for thinking about it, simply this is the way it's going to be, take it or leave it, this is what you get. This is what people find so objectionable about these large bills that come through Congress. And make no mistake about it, they found it objectionable when my party was in power. But it seems like, lately, the bills have gotten bigger, the provisions hidden within them have gotten more varied, more stringent, more widespread, more wide-sweeping provisions, and we are cutting the American people out of the debate when we cut out other Members of Congress, regardless of party. Remember, each and every one of us was elected to serve roughly 650,000 constituents back home. Some of our congressional districts have grown, some have shrunk since that time, but all of us were sent here with an equal mandate with an equal number of people that we represented. So to cut 40 percent out of the body out of the vote, to cut 40 percent of the body out of the debate, rather, is to cut 40 percent of the American people out of the did debate as well. Now, Mr. Speaker, we heard from the previous speaker from Arizona that we will be considering the omnibus bill, House bill 1105, I think it is, on Wednesday of this week. The good news is the bill is up on the Rules Committee Web site, so, Mr. Speaker, if you or I wanted to look at this bill it, indeed, is available for our viewing here 36 hours before we actually have to vote on the bill. So that's the good news. The bad news is the bill is up there as a photostatic copy of a previous bill, so it's got some handwritten corrections on the page. In fact, on a couple of different sections you can see a staple mark up at the top of the page as this bill was photocopied or scanned into some type of scanning reader. The bad news for that is that when you try to search for a keyword on a page or in the bill, you are not going to be able to do it, because the bill is a replica. It's a scan of a previously printed bill. It's not a committee print of a new bill that is, in fact, searchable on line. So, we are left with our staffs, over the next 36 hours, to comb through this bill. As the gentleman from Arizona outlined, there are some provisions in that bill that many of us would not be proud of. We will be voting for earmarks for companies that no longer exist because of questions that were raised about some of their practices. Well, none of us, none of us would want to vote in favor of a bill that contained those types of provisions therein. There may be some provisions, an e-mail I received just taking the floor this evening, a bill that will seriously affect or phase out the District of Columbia school choice program, a program that has been invaluable to many, many families here in the District of Columbia. Why is it necessary to do this on such short notice? Why is it necessary to do this without any debate in Congress, without any public discourse or debate? Why is it necessary to do so so quickly unless you don't want people knowing what you are doing? I will give credit where credit is due. This time the bill is up on the Rules Committee Web site. Mr. Speaker, if you or I go to the Committee on Rules in the House of Representatives, perhaps if we type that into our search engine on our computer, we could, in fact, see the verbiage for House bill 1105 which will be the omnibus or minibus bill on which we will vote next week. This is a $410 billion bill, so it's not insignificant. It may sound significant after TARP 1 and TARP 2 and the stimulus bill, but, nevertheless, it is a significant amount of spending and, in fact, represents one of the largest increases in discretionary spending because this is, after all, spending that we should have passed last summer but decided not to work on before the election because it was politically too dicey. So, again, we simply rolled everything up into one big package, held it until well into the next Congress, and hopefully we are going to pass it very quickly before anyone has a chance to notice what we have done. This year, regardless of the top number that the President comes down with in his budget, this year I hope we will go through the normal appropriations process. I know it's painful. I know it's painful to have an open rule on these appropriations bills. I know that many Members from my side come down and offer endless amendments. Many Members from the other side come down and offer endless amendments, and it seems to drag on into the night day after day after day, but this is the work we were sent here to do. So this year I hope that the House leadership will take it under advisement to do this the correct way, to do this the correct way, to do this the time-honored way, bring these appropriations bills to the floor of the House after they have gone through their markups in subcommittee and full committee, bring them to the floor of the House as an open rule, as an open product, any number of amendments may be made in order, and let's have these bills have a full and fair debate under the intense light of the House of Representatives here. Let's not do it under the cover of darkness, roll them up into a big package and then punt them to sometime in the future when we hope no one's paying attention. That was a dreadful way to govern last summer. I am, frankly, shocked, Mr. Speaker, that the American people did not take greater umbrage to the way we behaved as we went through our appropriations process last year. Not only did we pass a big bailout bill right before we left to go home and campaign and not bother to explain to anyone why we had done it, but prior to that, prior to that when we were supposed to have done all of our spending bills we quite frankly just didn't do it. We gave ourselves an incomplete and said we will get back to it 6 months from now when we have got a little more time. Well, now, that bill has come due and this Wednesday we will have that omnibus bill on the floor of the House. We won't have much chance for debate. We likely will not have many amendments that will be made in order, so as a consequence we will have the largest increase in discretionary spending prior to the TARP last year. We will have the largest increase in discretionary spending for a fiscal year ever to come to this country. We will pass it without batting an eyelash. But the next level of appropriations that start in May, June and July of this year, let's be sure that we do those the correct way. Let's be sure that we have the debates here on the House floor. If we have to take some difficult votes on amendments, and we always do, there are always some amendments from the other side on which I have difficulty. I am sure there are amendments from my side that give other Members on the other side difficulty, but that's what we are sent here to do, take the tough votes, make the tough decisions, go home and explain ourselves to our constituents. That's what we were sent here to do. And to abdicate that responsibility, say it's too tough, we are going to roll it up into a big ball, punt it until the next session, that's not what the American people sent us here to do. And I would reference back to the gentleman from Arizona's remarks, it impacts negatively on the dignity of this House to behave that way. What are we trying to hide? What are we so afraid of that we can't debate these bills out here on the House floor, let the American people see what is contained within these bills and let us vote with the full knowledge that the country is aware of what we are doing to the extent the country wishes to be aware of what we are doing. Mr. Speaker, I would point out that you or I could go to the Internet tonight and visit and read House bill 1105 which will be voted on Wednesday. As the speaker from Arizona pointed out, there are some 4, 5 or 6,000 earmarks contained within this bill. It is not a huge amount of the total dollars in the bill, but it is certainly representative of some of the things that people think are important to push into congressional bills at the 11th hour. So, Mr. Speaker, I hope you and I will spend some time reviewing this bill, House bill 1105, which is now available on the rules Web site. I do apologize, Mr. Speaker, I wish it were searchable by keyword, but unfortunately at the present time we have only got a scan of the bill that was reported back to the Rules Committee from our counterparts in the other body. As a companion bill that's up there--and I have not had a chance to look at this--but, Mr. Speaker, many of us might be interested in looking at it because I think the bill is likely to come to the floor on Thursday, and this is House bill 1106 which is the bill to adjust mortgages that the President spoke about earlier this week, a $75 billion bill, and I do hope that many Members, Mr. Speaker, will take the opportunity to become familiar with that bill before we do vote on it later this week. This is an important concept. I have had many calls from people in my district. I know there is concern because if a bank makes a loan at 4 percent, loans that money out at 5 percent and then is told by the government that it has to reduce that 5 percent expectation of return, how is the bank going to stay solvent if they are borrowing money at 4 percent and they are told they have to accept loans that are going to pay back a lower amount? It does look like something that may play havoc with the lending industry but certainly, Mr. Speaker, I will be open, I will be open to reading the bill. I am glad to see that that bill was posted up on the rules Web site as well. Well, a little more than 24 hours from now, the President will stand in the House and deliver his presidential budget to a joint session of the House and Senate. Additionally, I expect him to talk about some other parameters and other prerogatives that are important to the President. I expect to hear a great deal about health care in the President's address to the Nation tomorrow night. In fact, I am looking forward to that. Certainly some of the comments that came out of the meeting, the bipartisan meeting that the President held with Members of Congress, both the House and the Senate, members of the business community, members of industry, many of those comments were positive comments, particularly as it pertained to health care. So maybe this is the year where the American people see some significant change in the way health care is administered in this country. I hope that we will have the good sense to do that in a rational way and not in a way that undermines the delivery of health care in this country, but that remains to be seen. But, nevertheless, the President did speak about that favorably at the conclusion of his remarks today and many of the other Members, both House and Senate, and members of industry that were present in that meeting of responsibility and spending today voiced similar optimism. So being an optimistic person at heart, I hope to hear some significant words about the future direction of health care from the President tomorrow. It would have been helpful, Mr. Speaker, if Members of the House of Representatives could have received information about the President's budget directly from the White House. My staff has primarily relied upon press reports today in order to get information about the President's budget, that is probably not the ideal way for a budget of this size to come to Members of the Congress. I would encourage, Mr. Speaker, the House to be assertive in its prerogative to receive this information in a timely fashion from the other, from the other branch of government. After all, we are a coequal branch of government here in the legislative branch. It was the same phenomenon we encountered during the stimulus bill last week where we were getting reports from people who had acquaintances on K Street, the main lobby groups downtown, where they were getting reports of what was contained within the stimulus bill before we were privy to those same provisions here in the United States Congress. This is not a good way to go about disseminating information. Again, I trust that we will see more openness from the administration, because, after all, that is what was promised to us during the runup to the election and certainly what was discussed during the President's inaugural address, and openness in government would require that the legislative branch be treated as that coequal branch of government that we all know it to be, and to receive these reports from the administration in a timely fashion. Finally, Mr. Speaker, I want to touch on one last point about the stimulus bill. There has been a lot made of the $19 billion or $20 billion contained within the stimulus bill which is to go for advances in health information technology, the computerization of medical records, Mr. Speaker, electronic medical records, certainly a concept that is a valuable one and one that is worth pursuing. I will just have to tell you, Mr. Speaker, in my 6 years since coming to the House of Representatives since leaving the active practice of medicine for the full time practice of legislation, I have been impressed with the number of medical practices and the number of hospitals and clinics around the country that have voluntarily gone to a system of electronic medical records. Now, the money put forward in the stimulus bill as I have been able to understand it in the writings that I have been able to find on this money actually put the money forward not until the year 2011. Now, 2011, if you do some quick math, is about 2 years from now, so it doesn't really comport with the concept of getting money out there quickly into the hands of practicing physicians. You may think, well, a doctor's office is hardly an area for economic development. But, Mr. Speaker, I will tell you, in the State of Texas where we have revamped and reformed our medical liability laws, we have seen a number of physicians move to Texas from other States, a significant number, and it is estimated that each physician coming to a community will in fact generate between $900,000 to a little over $1 million in economic activity within that state. So this is not an insignificant concept. The important thing is if there is advantage to gain from putting this money in the hands of medical practitioners in 2011, the advantage should be there in 2009 as well. I in fact introduced an amendment when we had the markup of this bill in our committee on Energy and Commerce. It was turned back by the majority. I frankly can't quite understand why. But I think this is something that we might re-look at. There is the ability to make technical corrections, and if indeed it is possible to pay physicians for improving their ability to keep and disseminate medical records and provide them substantial funding for doing so in 2011, it would make good sense to do that in 2009. After all, Mr. Speaker, we have just 10 months' time before we have to deal with a very substantial and to some degree very disturbing 20 percent cut in reimbursements to physicians, as is mandated under current law under the sustainable growth rate formula. We ought to give them at least a little bit of reassurance that we are serious about our approach to the practicing physician and their ability and willingness to take care of Medicare patients in the future by addressing this shortsightedness in the stimulus bill that we passed last week. Mr. Speaker, there is no shortage of things we can talk about when it comes to spending. Certainly the stimulus bill came to us advertised as a jobs bill. It turned out to be a spending bill, and that is a consequence that most of us will have to live with for the rest of our lives. It was an explosive growth in Federal spending. Unfortunately, we are on a pace to continue to see rapid growth in Federal spending. The President, to his credit, says he is going to cut the deficit in half by the end of his first term. That is a very, very tall order for him to have taken on. I intend to be supportive of that to the extent I can. If it is done in a way without harming the productive sector of our society, if it is done in a way without raising taxes on the productive segment of society, you can expect me to be there with him. If his only approach is to raise taxes during the time of a recession or perhaps even a depression, we have seen in the past that that formula doesn't work, and I don't think there is any way that I could be supportive. Mr. Speaker, it has been an interesting hour to be down here and talk about the effects of the stimulus bill and spending. It is something where we will have ample opportunity to talk for many, many months ahead. Suffice to it say, it stands to be a very interesting year here in the People's House. I look forward to future full and lively debate on this subject.

Mr. BURGESS

Mr. BURGESS. I thank the gentleman for yielding back. Again, he points out an excellent point that the level of debt is unsustainable, and the rate of growth of those so-called ``mandatory expenditures'' is in the range of 6 to 9 percent a year. Let me yield a few moments to the gentleman from Texas, Judge Gohmert, to speak eloquently on this subject.

Mr. BURGESS. I thank the Speaker for the recognition. Tonight, Mr. Speaker, I thought it is appropriate that we talk a little bit more about the stimulus plan, the spending plan that we will have on the floor of the House I believe tomorrow. In fact, the actual text of the bill has not been completely released yet. My understanding is that it become available at about 8:00 p.m. eastern time tonight. So we don't have the final wording on the stimulus bill. In fact, the bill as it went to conference the other day was 1,425 pages. As you can see, this is going to be a daunting task for any Member of Congress to read through between 8:00 tonight and whatever time we have our vote tomorrow. But I do hope that many Members will take the time to spend as much time with the bill this evening as is practical, because obviously this is a very, very big bill. It encompasses a great deal of policy, both energy policy, health policy, some health information technology infrastructure policies we heard from the previous hour, and will affect the lives of literally every American over the next many, many years, because the cost of this bill is something that is going to be borne by Americans for the next decades. In fact, many Americans who have not been born yet will be bearing the consequences of this bill well into their adult lives, because the price tag of this bill as has been advertised will be just a little bit under $800 billion. Well, that is $800 billion, $788 billion, in actual spending. One of the things that we never do when we talk about the cost of bills here in the Federal Government, we never talk about it in terms of what someone would encounter in the real world if someone wanted to go out and borrow $788 billion for their business. Well, of course they would have to include the cost of capital, the cost of borrowing, the interest expense on a loan of that magnitude that they would have to carry on their balance sheets. Well, we don't bother ourselves about that in Congress. But if we were honest about it, the correct cost of that bill, just including the interest expense, would likely take it well over $1 trillion, perhaps in the range of $1.1 trillion or $1.2 trillion. Why is this important? Well, it is important because we have got some other big spending priorities to come up this year. We ended the year, the last session of Congress, with a significant deficit of nearly $1 trillion, and now we are talking about adding another $1 trillion in debt onto that. And this is money that we don't have sitting in the Federal Treasury; this is money that we will have to go out into the markets and borrow. And, as a consequence, it is important that we bear in mind what the effect of that borrowing activity will be on our monetary system here at home and, indeed, on the world markets at large. And, indeed, in this stimulus bill, in this spending bill as it is proposed to us as we have heard talked about earlier this evening, there are going to be a number of health care measures that are compressed into this bill. One of the things that we have heard about is the coverage with COBRA insurance. The reason that, when someone loses employment, if they wish to continue their employer-based insurance, their employer-sponsored insurance, obviously the employer is no longer paying the 66 percent that they were paying during that person's employment, so the cost of that insurance increases. So during the time of the stimulus bill, the proposal is that COBRA will be covered, or a portion of COBRA, 60 to 65 percent of that expense will be covered by new spending in the stimulus bill. Other health care spending that is going to be in this bill will include an expanded role for Medicaid and an expanded amount of Federal money that goes into the Federal component of Medicaid, because Medicaid is a shared expense between the Federal Government and the State government. Currently, on average, about 57 cents out of every dollar spent in Medicaid has a Federal origination, and the other component, the other 43 cents is a State origination. But this stimulus bill will change that so-called Federal matching rate, and the Federal matching rate will increase 4 percent, 5 percent, or 6 percent, depending upon where those final numbers come down. Now, that will not be in perpetuity. That will be for a period of time, 12 months to 18 months into the future, purportedly to get us through the time of turmoil within the economy. And while that may be well intentioned, I would just certainly ask people to ask themselves and do a little bit of arithmetic: 18 months from now puts us very, very close to an election day in the year 2010. And if you think Congress has the courage to roll back a Medicare expenditure 1 month or 2 months before election day, I think you'd better think that through again, because that is not likely to happen. So what is the effect of this? We are asking the American people to essentially take out what you might describe as a subprime loan. We are going to loan some money into the Medicaid system for a period of months, but there will be a balloon payment that comes due; that is, Congress will have to continue to fund those programs beyond 18 months. And, again, if we were honest about the cost of the bill, it clearly begins to expand well above that $1.1 trillion or $1.2 trillion, and now probably pushing up closer to the $2 trillion range, because there will be a large balloon payment that occurs at the end. So you might think in terms of the United States Congress as being a predatory lender or offering a subprime loan to the American people on this Medicaid proposal, because eventually, eventually, that money will have to be funded. Funding cliffs are something this Congress likes to do. We see them all the time. When we encounter the perennial problem with a reduction in rate for reimbursement of physicians, we say, ``Oh, no problem. We will fix that.'' But then there is always another cliff. Right now, we have a cliff coming up in December of 2009 which we have failed to address. In fact, I asked if it would not be reasonable, since it seemed to be that there was so much money available to borrow and spend right now, maybe we could just go ahead and fix that little problem early and not wait until December of this year to have our physicians fall off that funding cliff. In fact, in a discussion I had with a reporter from the New York Times, Robert Pear, when I was trying to explain the intricacies of getting some additional money into this program he questioned where that money might come from. And, in exasperation, I pointed out that, ``Money was no object right now. It is raining money. Money is coming from all corners. So why not fix this problem?'' Well, we all understand that that money will have to be repaid. And when that repayment comes, it is going to come at a very steep price. I had an opportunity to go with several other Members to the Bureau of Public Debt earlier this week, on Tuesday, and I watched the auction of $32 billion in debt that the United States Government was putting up for auction to various entities around the world that might want to buy United States debt. $32 billion, these were going to be notes that matured in 3 years. There was a 30-minute auction. All of the notes were sold at a fairly low interest rate, 1.3 percent, and certainly the Treasury had no problem in satisfying that sale. But it certainly begs the question as we continue. This was the third such sale that day, each at a little over $30 billion. You do some quick math and you think, wow, so that was almost $100 billion that the Treasury auctioned off in short-term and medium-term debt this past week. And, in fact, that is going on week in and week out. There are one or two auction days a week that are occurring, and currently we are auctioning off between $100 billion and $200 billion of debt every week. With this stimulus bill that we are enacting, we are going to put additional pressure on that system, on that Bureau of Public Debt in order to distribute that paper amongst the various lenders across the globe who will be interested in buying our Treasury notes. And you have to ask yourself, who is going to be buying those notes, that paper, as it becomes available? Well, typically there are foreign entities who are willing to buy American IOUs. After all, the state of the economy not just in America but around the world is somewhat unsettled, and there is a flight to quality, and dollars are still seen as quality. But as more and more of this debt is sold, what will happen or what could happen is there will be less and less enthusiasm for purchasing that debt; then, the interest rate will of necessity rise to make that debt more attractive to those people who are purchasing. And for all of that money that goes up there, those are dollars then that cannot be borrowed by the private sector because they are being taken up in debt that is being sold by the Federal Government. And of course, then there is the cost, as I alluded to earlier, the cost of capital. And eventually that cost is going to be borne, probably not by people in my age bracket, but by people in age brackets that are younger than myself and perhaps some individuals who have not even yet been born. But this is from where those stimulus dollars are going to need to arise. So bear that in mind tomorrow as you watch the debate and watch the impassioned rhetoric on how important it is that we spend these dollars, and spend them quickly, because action must be taken, something must be done. Mr. Speaker, I understand that the economy is in tough shape in this country. I understand that people are hurting. I understand that businesses, particularly small businesses, are suffering. At the same time, as we roll out this massive spending bill we have to ask ourselves: Are we spending money simply to satisfy political constituencies? Or, are we actually trying to create the jobs that we maintain to everyone that we want to create? The problem is so many questionable items that occur in this nonstimulative spending bill that we have before us. And you have heard it all before: The money for the National Endowments of the Arts. I think in the previous hour we saw a nice little picture of a wetland marsh mouse somewhere out in California, additional money to study climate change, additional money for Pell Grants, money for educational expenses for building schools. A reasonable expense. But does it belong in an emergency stimulus measure; or, should that go through the regular order of title I funding, which we are obligated to do every year anyway? We will do this stimulus bill, but don't forget, we never did eight out of our required 13 appropriations bills last year, so we have got what is called an omnibus bill coming at us. And, oh, yeah, there will be a housing bill where we will have to come back with more money for Fannie and Freddie. And there will likely be another TARP-type bailout coming our way if we are to believe the comments of the new Secretary of the Treasury. And, likely as not, there will be an additional Department of Defense emergency spending bill that will come our way sometime between the end of the spring and the end of the summer. So there is a lot of unscheduled spending that is yet to occur. And remember that all of that spending, all of that spending will come down to the sale of public debt at the Bureau of Public Debt in those auctions that I was describing. I have been joined by some of my colleagues. And in order to be fair with the distribution of the time, let me yield such time as he may consume to my colleague from Texas, the Honorable Judge Ted Poe.

Mr. BURGESS. I thank the Speaker. The remaining Members who wish to speak, help me be judicious with the time, but let me yield a few moments to the gentleman from Nebraska.

Mr. BURGESS. I thank the gentleman for yielding back. He is correct, the hour is late. I am afraid the cake is almost baked, as they say. I have some other Members who wish to speak on this. Mr. Speaker, might I ask as to how much time remains.

Mr. BURGESS. I thank the gentlelady for her comments. I think I heard earlier today that if the total spending in this bill were to be returned to the taxpayers, there would be no tax liability on families earning under $150,000 a year between now and some time in the middle of the fall. Imagine what the American people would do if we would take that type of tax burden off of them, even for a very short period of time. Well, I've been joined by other members of the Republican Conference, and I would like to yield such time as he may consume to the gentleman from Utah, the Honorable Mr. Bishop.

Mr. BURGESS. And I thank the gentleman from Texas for sharing that very personal story with us. As the gentleman points out, Speaker Pelosi does owe, perhaps this body an explanation as to how that debt will be paid. Of course, the State of Texas would be nothing without the State of Tennessee, so I'm now happy to yield such time as she may consume to gentlelady from Tennessee, a fellow member of my Committee on Energy and Commerce, the Honorable Marsha Blackburn.

Mr. BURGESS. The gentleman brings up an excellent point, and maybe the Speaker people perhaps should weigh in on that issue with our leadership.

Mr. BURGESS. I thank the gentleman too. There's no one in Congress who has spoken with more eloquence and clarity on the problems of government spending and government debt. I wonder if the gentleman would maintain his position for one moment, just for the purposes of a colloquy. Of course, as you so correctly pointed out, Democratic leadership did not involve the Republican Members of the House in crafting a solution to the Nation's economic difficulties. But to his credit, our new President did come and spend an hour with us a week or so ago. And it was about exactly an hour more than the Democratic leadership had spent with us up until that time. But in that hour, I was particularly struck by an exchange between you and the President as far as on the issue of that long term debt that we are assigning to those that will come after us. I will yield to the gentleman. Would you share with this body the result of that exchange.

Mr. BURGESS. I actually brought this as a prop. This was a copy of the bill as it went to conference on the 10th. So this is 2 days old. It is 1,425 pages. Knowing how things work around here, I doubt it has gotten smaller in the last 48 hours. I will yield to the gentleman.

Mr. BURGESS. Will the gentleman yield?

Mr. BURGESS. I thank the gentleman for his keen insight into the problems that face us. And I guess being somewhat of a student of irony, I would just point out if you're rushing to get something done before Valentine's Day, you're very apt to pass a very large spending bill on Friday the 13th. And so that is perhaps one of the things we have facing us tomorrow. I also need to point out that Republicans have been very involved in generating alternative strategies and alternative proposals and have put them forth on this floor confidently night after night, day after day. A plan from Representative Cantor's office, our minority whip, detailed immediate tax relief for working families, tax relief for small business, no tax increases to pay for spending, assistance for the unemployed and stabilizing home values. That formed the core of the Republican plan that was offered as an alternative to this massive, massive spending plan that has been proposed to us by the Democratic House leadership. Mr. Speaker, I know many people will wonder if there is anything, if there is a way to interact with their Member of Congress. There always is, Mr. Speaker. There are ways, of course, that people can interact with their Member of Congress or with the leadership of the House. And perhaps that is something that, Mr. Speaker, the American people should consider during this next 24 or 48 hours before we vote on this bill. I see I have been joined by other Members, and not to make this too Texas centric, I will be happy to yield such time as he may consume to the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Hensarling) who is on the House Financial Services Committee and the former chairman of the House Republican Study Committee.