John Carter

Mr. CARTER

Mr. CARTER. And then we have national socialism, which is something we should fear.

Mr. CARTER

Mr. CARTER. There is so much to talk about, but the one that just pops off the page is the promise that was made that I will cut taxes on 95 percent of the American people. That's what the President of the United States told us during the campaign. ``I assure you I will cut taxes on 95 percent of the people.'' He also said he was going to raise taxes on the wealthy. You may have heard me talking earlier--one of the indications of social Democrats is class warfare, the hardworking American worker versus the rich man. How many times have we heard that? But now we've got this great energy tax that they call cap-and-trade, which makes no sense at all. Even the name makes no sense. But the reality is, it's a tax on energy, all sorts of energy. And it's a tax on existing energy that's going to make everybody's bill go up because the American people are going to pay that tax, and that means the middle class.

Mr. CARTER. I just want to point out there are a few things we haven't talked about, like apologizing to the terrorists; labeling enemy combatants, they are now foreign detainees; labeling the war on terror as international contingencies; labeling the terror attacks as man-caused disasters; hugging up to the Castro brothers, who tried to make their island a launching platform for intercontinental ballistic missiles within my life; and hugging up to Hugo Chavez, the man who hates this country more than anybody, and taking his book, which is all about venom against this country. These are just a few of many, many other things we haven't talked about tonight.

Mr. CARTER. You've hit upon something that everybody needs to think about. First, you have to start with the premise that the government doesn't make any money. The government takes the citizens' money. That's the way it works. They are not a creator of wealth. They are a taker of wealth and a distributor of wealth. But they are not a creator of wealth. So all this stimulus we have looked at, its purpose is to give a shot in the arm to the economy, if you believe in the Keynesian theory of economics, a shot in the arm to the economy, and make it start creating wealth again. But, in reality, we have seen no real indication. Japan can tell you for 10 years they did that and failed miserably. Most people will point to the Great Depression and say it failed miserably. So the real solution is real wealth for America. You do that by putting more money in the American people's pocket, making it easier for people to be entrepreneurs. For small businessmen, don't tax them. Give them a chance to grow their small business. They employ the vast majority of the American people. What we have got to turn around is real wealth from real jobs from real businesses for real people. That's what we've got to have.

Mr. CARTER. That's what the guy said. I don't want to take credit for that number. I am just telling you I heard it on the television this morning, and it shocked me.

Mr. CARTER. And that's the deficit. The debt is worse than that, because we are borrowing all this money that we are spending right now. And so when you look at all these packages that we put together, and you total them up, that's where your $8.7 trillion comes in right there that you have got demonstrated there. It's the debt. In addition, as Kevin points out, they made false assumptions of the growth of this economy. Based upon those false assumptions, everybody's already told them they weren't going to work. They were told by all the authorities that look at these things, these numbers don't work. They went ahead with them, anyway, and now we're looking at a $2 trillion deficit. So the debt gets even worse. I heard somebody say this morning, somebody ought to tell every graduating senior this year that they can add $156,000 to their school debt, because that's what they are going to have to pay off. That's going to be their share of what they are going to have to pay off in their lifetime.

Mr. CARTER. That's what we are supposed to be doing with them. We have got to wake up and realize what we're creating. We're creating another generation paying for this generation and then another generation will pay for that generation. And at some time when you get numbers like these, it becomes so overwhelming, what are we going to do?

Mr. CARTER. You asked what that two consecutive quarters of 6 percent negative growth means. That means, I believe, and I know my friends talk about this all the time on the Ways and Means Committee, I believe that means recession. Two consecutive quarters is the definition of recession. So we are now in the Obama recession. So it's one of those things you've got to think about. As we keep blaming other people, at some point in time you have to take credit for what happens on your watch. I heard two Members arguing today, an interesting argument: How long is it going to take us to pay off this debt we are accumulating? One of the Members said, well, it's estimated 3,000 years. The other one said, no, that's not right. It's maybe perpetuity. He said, how do you get that? He said, the only way you get that 3,000 year number is you've got to show a surplus. And there is no surplus projected within a couple of lifetimes, based upon what we are doing right now. So, therefore, it's like this never-ending debt. And another one said, well, that's like a Ponzi scheme. You get one bunch of investors to invest in your product, and this is like our boy that's in jail right now, and then you get another bunch of investors and you pay these investors from these investors, and then you pay these investors from these investors. Why isn't this a Ponzi scheme?

Mr. CARTER. Not only has this administration cut missile defense, but they are also cutting the F-22 fighter, which, by all analysis, we need a new fighter because of some real technological advances that the Russians and the Chinese have made in their fighting planes. And we have had fighter pilots telling us this for years. The F-22 has now been scrapped, the missile defense, as you point out, has now been scrapped. So you can't accuse this budget of overspending in the area of defense because it actually is going less in the area of defense and is spending in other areas. Many of which, I would argue, are some sort of voodoo economics. But that's my personal opinion. But make it clear, missile defense we need.

Mr. CARTER. Oh, yes. It's like that college debt. It's going to go on forever. That's something that we ought to be thinking about as we run these things up. I find it phenomenal that we can, in actually less than a hundred days, spend more money than everybody else spent in 200-and-some-odd years, including George W. Bush. Add them all together and sure enough, this Democrat Congress and this Democrat President managed to outspend them all. I mean, I tell you what, that's breaking some records right there.

Mr. CARTER. These are really not the kind of records we like to have. We don't try to set these kind of records. These are records that we will be paying for for generations to come. I want to remind you that this is 100 days of Democrat dominance. So the President had some help on these things, and that is the Democrat majority and the House and Senate certainly helped to move this along-- in record time, I might add. Sometimes those things just completely almost bypassed the whole process and just came popping up on the floor kind of like a Jack-in-the-Box surprise. ``Here we are. Let's vote.'' And sure enough, we managed to break all kinds of existing records. And I have to point this out because my daughter, I promised her I would. The last time I talked about this Debt Day, I failed to say that was my daughter's birthday. Danielle Carter. Her birthday is on the 26th day of April. And she probably, in her lifetime, has probably not gotten the biggest present in the world because it was so close to tax day that maybe she didn't get it. So she understands how close her birthday is to the day we pay our income taxes.

Mr. CARTER

Mr. CARTER. Madam Speaker, recently I read an article by Gene Edward Veith entitled, ``A Kinder, Gentler Marxism.'' He begins his comments by saying, ``Barack Obama is not a socialist, explained Eric Etheredge of The New York Times, he is a ``social democrat.'' The administration's attempt to control private companies and the free market should not alarm us, according to Etheredge and other pundits. European nations do this all the time. It is simply an application of the European political and economic theory known as ``social democracy.'' We were promised several things by our President during his campaign. He promised us government reform, a renewed and repaired economy, and more ethical business practices. And he did all this as we watched our economy crash. After these 100 days in office, we need to illuminate the path that this administration is actually taking us down. It could be the path that leads us from limited government, that stimulates our economy naturally, to a government mostly aligned with social democracy like the social economies of Western Europe, with massive taxes and chronic high unemployment. An objective definition of social democracy from Merriam-Webster's online dictionary is as follows: ``A political movement advocating a gradual and peaceful transition from capitalism to socialism by democratic means.'' Or a second definition, ``A democratic welfare state that incorporates both capitalist and socialist practices.'' So this political and economic system either moves from capitalism to socialism or combines both capitalism and socialism to form a welfare state. We need to know more. Here is the first paragraph from the Encyclopedia Britannica about social democracy. ``A political ideology that advocates a peaceful, evolutionary transition of society from capitalism to socialism using established political processes. ``Based on 19th century socialism and the tenets of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, social democracy shares common ideological roots with communism, but eschews its militancy and totalitarianism. Social democracy was originally known as revisionism because it represented a change in basic Marxist doctrine, primarily in the former's repudiation of the use of revolution to establish a capitalist society.'' These definitions, paired with some of the actions we've seen so far in the administration, cause us concern that they may be indicative of gradual movement towards social democracy. We've got the stimulus bill, we've got the bank bailouts, now we've got the proposal that they will own 50 percent of General Motors, along with a 39 percent share for the unions, a 10 percent share for the bondholders, and a 1 percent share for the stockholders. As a result of these actions, the Federal Government's outrageous spending now equals almost 90 percent of gross domestic product. The GDP for last year was 14.2, and now 12.8. So the question is, did we elect a President because we wanted to have a social democracy system? When Americans cast their vote for Barack Obama and they cast it for the Democratic Congress, did they also intend that this country should adopt social democracy, that lesser form of Marxism? These are issues we need to talk about. And if this is the place our country is going, then maybe we need to amend or adopt new founding documents that more fit this form of government. These are thoughts we ought to all think about. I know I'm thinking about them. I hope you are, too.

Mr. CARTER

Mr. CARTER. Mr. Speaker, we celebrate today, shortly, I think in 2 days, we celebrate 100 days of President Obama's Presidency. His rankings are way up there, and we all respect him on his first 100 days, but I am going to talk about those 100 days because I have a little bit different viewpoint than others might. I highly respect the man but, in turn, you can view the world differently, and I certainly view the world differently than Mr. Obama and the majority party. I am going to talk, and I hope I will be joined by some of my colleagues, a little bit about the way I look at the last 100 days and actually farther back than 100 days, the way I look at the last 6 months of what's going on in this country and where we are going and what concerns I have. Now, I want to make it very clear that I am not doing this to get on Ms. Napolitano's hit list. I am just doing this to express my opinion. The first thing, when you start trying to look at this new administration and the direction we are taking the country, you have got to start, I think, with our foreign policy. And I think, literally, the first thing or almost first thing that the President of the United States did when he became President of the United States was to order the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay to be closed down and, of course, we are now having the debate as to what we are going to do with the prisoners that were there. As a result of putting the spotlight on Gitmo, we put a spotlight on the argument of whether or not certain behavior is torture or not torture. And, clearly, this is a matter of opinion. And then we, as of yet, have not had official release of documents that tell us what resulted from these various procedures like waterboarding, as far as information gained by our intelligence folks. But the argument is that this was a great thing to do, to close down Guantanamo Bay. I disagree. I actually think it was almost the perfect place for us to keep those folks because, quite frankly, I haven't seen anyone, certainly none of our European allies have stepped up yet and said that they were willing to take them. We have had a few that stepped up and their political leaders said, whoa, time out, we are not going to do that. A fellow has got a private prison somewhere in the country said this morning he would take them, and then--I am not sure who the official was, who said, oh, no, you are not going to take them. So right now we don't have anyplace to put them. I would volunteer the Williamson County jail, because I know that they would wish they were back at Gitmo, but I don't think they are willing to take them. So we are at a dilemma on that, and we are at a dilemma on whether or not what has happened to these folks that are in this detention facility is, in fact, torture. I think that the general consensus in the press is that it is. But did it result in something that saved the lives of Americans, that's a good question. Hopefully that information will be released in the very near future. I know the President and Senate requested it. And I hope that we get that full information so we, as Americans, can get a good picture of whether or not this is really a good thing that we did. We certainly closed down something that was all over the news, it was all over the talking points of the Democratic Party. And, of course, that being the President who was elected from the Democratic Party, and as he says, he won, and he gets the opportunity to do that, and that's the first thing that he did. Other things in foreign affairs that he has done, he has made some trips overseas to Europe, was very, very warmly received by our allies in Europe, and they cheered for him and patted him on the back. But they didn't give him what he asked for. He asked for some help, some real help, in Afghanistan. Let me say, I just came back from a meeting with the EU myself, and there are a lot of folks over there that certainly are standing in harm's way in Afghanistan. Most of those are Eastern European countries, but there are a few, like Great Britain, who certainly stand in the gap. But the President didn't get what he was looking for in the way of assistance over there, and, quite frankly, I think the Europeans should step up for him. I do support their participation, and not just the participation, as I told them when I was over there. The way we look at it where I come from, when you are making ham and eggs, the chicken is involved, but the pig is committed, and we are looking for some folks that are committed. That means, if necessary, they will go there without restrictions in their ability to perform, as some of our allies have done when they have gone to the battle areas that we are fighting terrorists in. Oh, by the way, one of the things that the Obama administration has done through Mrs. Napolitano is we are not supposed to call these folks ``terrorists'' anymore, but I have a hard time remembering what I am supposed to call them, so I am going to call them that until I can remember what the new politically correct term she invented is. The President went to visit with the Central and South American leaders. He has opened the doors, or is attempting to open the doors, to a regime that has been a very, very evil regime since I guess I was a freshman in high school, and, believe me, that is a long time ago. Fidel Castro, we all thought he was going to be the savior of mankind when he came to the United States in, what was it, '56 or '57, until we got to know him and realized he was nothing more than what all dictators seem to be and they are, and that is a tyrant who totally and completely persecuted any opposition that might arise in his country of Cuba. He has slaughtered innocents for 50 years, and his brother doesn't seem to be moving in any other direction but backing up Fidel. Yet we have opened the doors now to Cuba. We are saying we are going to let tourists go down there. We are going to work with these people. Of course, we asked them if they would release the political prisoners down there, some of whom have been there forever, and President Obama thought that he heard Fidel Castro say yes, he thought we could work something out. But now they have come out and officially said they thought maybe the President misunderstood what Fidel said, so we didn't get anything out of that. But let's hope that maybe this will be good for us. But I always have a problem that when you acknowledge tyranny and you legitimize tyranny, then how do you fight against tyranny? It is an interesting dilemma to be in as a leader. We have got Hugo Chavez, who has been probably the biggest hater of this country since he came into power of anybody in my remembrance. I don't believe that the dictators of the Second World War that we fought against said as many bad things about the United States of America as Hugo Chavez has said. He has written a book called ``Open Veins of Latin America,'' which is a venomous attack on the United States blaming every woe that Central and South America has ever had on the United States of America. I think he gave an autographed copy of that book to the President of the United States when he was there, and they shook hands in agreement, not about the book, I am sure, about acceptance of the book. From a foreign policy standpoint, I don't think we laid a good foundation there, not a foundation of being the voice for freedom in the world. But then good men of good character can disagree, and I certainly think that the President of the United States disagrees with that position, and certainly he is an American citizen and is rightfully able to do so, just like I am. When the President, when we had visitors here from Great Britain, it was about the time we sent the bust of Winston Churchill back to England, which was supposed to be a permanent gift to this country, but somehow it got sent back. The President met the Queen. He shook her hands with both hands, and then bowed to the leader of Saudi Arabia, King Abdullah. The view of the world is just different from the heights that the President views it and from the lowly position here in Congress that we view it, at least from my standpoint. That is enough to talk about the foreign policy. But the truth is we are trying to be open and we are trying to reach out to folks and we are asking them to let's all be friends, and hopefully we all will be. If there is one thing that you have to look at this 100 days that the President has been President, that defines this 100 days more than any other thing, it is the new way we are going to handle an old problem that has been in the economic cycles of this country, that has been coming up for many, many years, and that is the idea of a recession and the possibility of a depression and how do you handle it. The best guidance that some think we have ever had is the guidance that was given to us by Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who was elected in 1932 and served the longest of any President of the United States, which brought about the limiting amendments that we have had that limited us to two terms for President. He served many more than two terms for President, but he served from 1932 until basically 1940 when the world and the whole subject matter of the world at that time was the Great Depression. The Great Depression, however, got overshadowed by the German invasion of Poland in 1939 and the beginning of the Second World War. So the periods as you define the Presidency of Franklin Roosevelt, you take the Great Depression, '32 to '40, and then the next phase in which the American soldier did an excellent job and the American President did an excellent job of defeating tyranny around the world. I guess going back to a little bit of the history of the Great Depression, the interesting thing was that in 1932 the unemployment rate, and I am not good at getting figures, but it was double digits, somewhere in the 20s or 30s, something like 25 or 30 percent of the population was unemployed. In 1940, that same number was still unemployed. Yet we had gone on, we had adopted the Keynesian version of economics and we had leaped forward with the Keynesian version, and the biggest spending spree in the history of the country took place from 1932 to actually 1946. But this administration has managed to have spent more than all of that and more than all the other Presidents combined in the first 100 days. Now, I don't want to be totally unfair, because part of that came at the tail-end of the Bush administration with the Democrat Congress, and so I don't think it is completely fair to lay all that off on President Obama. But the facts are just that the President's budget is going to create the largest single deficit a budget has ever created in the history of the Republic. You know, one of the things that we discussed, there is a long debate, it was debated out pretty heavily in the Presidential election, was whether or not we were going to have earmarks. We still debate to this day in this Congress what is an earmark, is it good, is it bad. Everybody has got an opinion. We haven't resolved the issue. But the President said he would veto any bill that had an earmark in it, because he didn't believe in earmarks, and he is in a large crowd of people that continues to believe that way. And we have this debate on this floor, in committee, and elsewhere right now we have this debate. It goes on continuously. But the President did sign the omnibus spending bill, and he signed it with 9,000 earmarks in it. So as we look at this 100 days, we have got some promises, promises made and promises kept that we need to look at, and there is just a lot of different ways to view what is going on. I will say this. I will tell you that the President has got as good a popularity rating as anybody that has ever held the office in the first 100 days, so I will give him absolute credit for that. He certainly knows how to be popular, and he is popular. But, you know, we had thousands of people take to the streets, I guess it was last weekend, the weekend before last, with the TEA parties, and although it was probably targeting the Congress as much as it was targeting anybody, but they were certainly not happy with the state of affairs in the United States. We signed the stimulus bill with $787 billion. Obama's inauguration cost the taxpayers $49 million, which was triple the amount of money that was spent on the Bush administration's first inauguration. There is still a $50.5 million budget shortfall on the Democratic convention in Chicago. So spending has become something that identifies this Presidency; $1.5 trillion is this year's budget. Now we are looking at a new budget, $3.6 trillion. We talked about $1 trillion before on the floor of the House; $1 trillion is a stack of brand new $1,000 bills somewhere between 63 and 65 miles high. That is a whole lot of money, a whole lot of money. So as we look at this 100 days, you can look at it in different ways. I will say this: The President has certainly kept his cool. He is an excellent speaker. He dazzles our allies and he makes people feel comfortable, and that is a lot that we need in this country. My problem that I have with President Obama most of all is that I fear the kind of overwhelming expenditure that we have to deal with from the Obama administration. We are getting so far in debt that our great-great-grandchildren are going to have problems paying this bill. I see I am joined by one of my colleagues, Kevin Brady. He is one of the people that I look up to in this building because he has always got good things to say. I will yield to the gentleman.

Mr. CARTER. That's what they're trying to do. But the reality is our spending is not working, and now the worry we have to be worried about is the fact that we may be looking at inflation, maybe 10 percent a year. Now, young people who have lived through the last--grown up since the 1990s, which would fit a great deal of the young people that are out there today, they really don't know what we're talking about when we say ``runaway inflation.'' They really don't get it.

Mr. CARTER. Reclaiming my time, and I thank the gentleman for his comments. And let me say, so that everybody understands where I come from, when this all started, President Bush was President of the United States. And we had a Treasury Secretary come running in here and say, oh Lord, oh Lord, oh Lord, the sky is falling. I need you to give me three-quarters of a trillion dollars, roughly, and I need it now. Don't ask any questions. Trust me. Well, when that all happened, I thought to myself, now, the folks in Round Rock and Georgetown, Texas, are pretty decent, hardworking, honest people. But I don't believe, if a guy came running into their place of business in a big hurry and said, the sky is falling, the sky is falling, the world's going to hell, I just gotta have a couple hundred bucks. Give it to me. I'll pay you back. Trust me. I think they'd say, whoa, wait a minute. What do you need this $200 for in such a big hurry? At least they'd say that: What are you going to do with it if I loan it to you, and I'm not going to get it back? That might be their best friend to whom they might be able to do that; but I believe any normal- thinking American would ask that kind of question. We were talking about three-quarters of $1 trillion that he was asking for, and all he was saying was: Trust me. It's too complicated for you to understand. Trust me. So I voted against it because, quite frankly, I think that the man on the street manages his money with more commonsense than the Congress does in managing that money. Now I hear this story from you, and you would know because you're on the Ways and Means Committee, which looks into these things. It shocks me to think that we are being told very clearly that the use of this money could be used for money laundering--that word jumps off the page--and they're not even doing it? Something is wrong. There's something wrong. I've got friends who have arrived. My friend Phil Gingrey has arrived here from the great State of Georgia. He was the first one here, so let's let him talk a little bit about the first 100 days.

Mr. CARTER. Reclaiming my time, the issue of bipartisanship is one that every American wants, including every American, I believe, in this House. But the facts are that you have situations where some things are just so diametrically opposed to what you stand for that there's no place you can go there. When you're talking about bipartisanship, you've got to come in and try to move to a compromise middle position. Most of the legislation that we've seen in Congress in the first 100 days hasn't really even been vetted with the committee system. It just almost comes directly from the Speaker's Office to the floor. So we don't have any input into all that. To get bipartisanship you've got to sit down and talk things out, work things out. That's why we have committees. That's why we have the smaller units that discuss these things. You know, I was on, when I was, my first term in Congress I served on the then called Education and Workforce, now it's called Education and Labor Committee. And we had a group of African American women, and mostly women, but a few men, mostly grandmothers, but a few mothers, who came to express their desire to make sure that the voucher program that had been created before I got here for the D.C. schools was kept in place because, and they testified over and over and over how it was saving the lives of their children and grandchildren; that it was allowing them to select the school of their choice, and to put an effort forward to excel and be a superior student, because they were able to have gotten into the lottery system to get one of these vouchers for 1,700 students as an experimental program. But I had never, I've never been up here where I saw just ordinary folks come in and, I mean, I saw a grandmother stand up there and cry: Please don't take this program away. This program is saving my grandchild's life. Please don't take it away. And we didn't. But, unfortunately, the administration has eliminated that program. Now, this program was just what a bunch of poor people wanted. It's just a shame we couldn't expand that program so that we could do something about the failed D.C. school system, to make sure that good, hardworking kids, no matter where they live or what their circumstances in life are, would have a place to go to have a chance to have a better education. I don't understand that. I don't understand why that would happen. But it has to do with, something to do with politics. But when you're talking about little kids and their chance to go to a safe school and their chance to learn something, and you have a program that's giving them that chance and every one of their supervising parents and grandparents are there saying it's the greatest thing that ever happened to us, why in the world would you take that little token thing away, when you're spending trillions of dollars on other things?

Mr. CARTER. I will yield.

Mr. CARTER. That's the word. That's the word.

Mr. CARTER. Reclaiming my time, I thank my friend from Georgia. That's exactly what I was talking earlier about. It's easy to talk about bipartisanship, but when you just really believe the policy is wrong, that it's the wrong policy at the wrong time and for the wrong purpose, how can you work in a bipartisan manner on something like this cap-and-tax system that's being proposed by the majority? I mean, I'm going to tell you: unless I just don't understand it--and I'm not saying there's not a chance I might not understand it--but it seems to me that if your purpose is to keep people from putting carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and you've got a plant over here that's pouring out carbon dioxide and you've got a plant over here that's clean and that's saving carbon dioxide and planting 1,000 trees, then you say, well, this guy can loan to this guy some of his cleanness, and this guy will be in compliance, but, hey, he's still putting the stuff in the air. So how does that do anything? Oh, by the way, there's a tax that goes with this that's estimated to raise about $1.5 trillion for the United States, a brand-new tax. Well, that's okay. That tax is going to be on the big oil companies and on the utility companies and all of those people. That's okay. Who cares about them. Do you think those people pay that tax? Go down and get out last month's utility bill. Open it up, and see whose name is on it. Then see what they tell you you've got to pay, and look at the bottom line, and see what it is, and write it down someplace because it's going up, and it's going up by the amount of that tax if they pass this bill. So it is a new way to tax Americans. Believe me, that bill is not going to say, oops, you're middle class, so we're not going to put it on your bill. It's not going to say that. Oops, you're poor, so we're not going to put it on your bill. It's only going to go on the rich people's bills. It's not going to say that. It's going to be on everybody's utility bill and on everybody's gasoline bill and on everybody's fuel bill. It's all going up by the amount of that tax, and you, the American people, are going to pay this. We--my friend Mr. Westmoreland and my friend Mrs. Bachmann--we're all going to pay this. I'd better recognize Mrs. Bachmann. She's one of the bright lights of this conference. We're glad to have her with us. Mrs. Bachmann, I will yield to you such amount of time you wish to consume.

Mr. CARTER. Reclaiming my time for a couple of other facts. It's so nice to have people that are on Financial Services and Ways and Means come in here because you get to see so much more of this stuff than we do. And we're supposed to be seeing it in Appropriations, but when it comes to spending, they sort of bypass Appropriations most of the time when it comes to spending. The 10 days before President Obama was inaugurated, he said there were two different economic scenarios that were coming down the pike, and one was good and one was bad. The good one was the passing of the stimulus bill. The bad one was doing nothing. He said that if we did not pass the stimulus bill, that unemployment rate would go above 8 percent; but if we passed the stimulus bill, we wouldn't see 8 percent unemployment at any time until 2014.

Mr. CARTER. Today, unemployment is 8.5 percent going on 9. And in addition to the spending we're spending, the Fed is printing trillions of dollars into the economy.

Mr. CARTER. They didn't live through the Jimmy Carter times. But when you see your paycheck, you get a paycheck and you realize that your dollar gets--in a year gets worth 10 percent less, and the next year 10 percent less again, and just like interest compounds, so does inflation.

Mr. CARTER. So if it would have cost you $1 to buy this clip when you first started, it will end up costing you $2 to buy that clip--it's the same clip--because inflation is running away.

Mr. CARTER. I thank you. Those were wonderful comments. You know, when you were talking about bipartisanship, I wanted to point out to you that you had it exactly right. It seems that bipartisanship means ``do what we say.'' You know, the worst demonstration of wanting to be bipartisan occurred in February when it was announced that the 2010 census would be moved out of the Department of Commerce and into the White House to politicize the accounting of the American public. Now, why would I worry about that? Well, because we, Members of Congress, are the branch of this government that is represented by a number of people. We have a number of people that we represent. And we divide the population of this country by a number that is expected to be somewhere around 800,000-850,000 people, I understand it, after the next census. And then that decides how many congressmen and -women we get from each State. This has always been done by independent people as nonpartisan as possible because the count matters. And so say you're moving it out of the department that it has been in and into the White House, there is nothing bipartisan about that. Absolutely nothing. The center of the universe of one party is the White House.

Mr. CARTER. Amen.