John Carter

Mr. CARTER

Mr. CARTER. President Obama promised the people at Caterpillar that if the stimulus bill passed, they would start hiring soon. The reality is they started laying off again because it wasn't the solution to the problem. I have got another friend that's here to join us, Mr. Westmoreland from the great State of Georgia, and I am going to yield him so much time as he may wish to consume.

Mr. CARTER

Mr. CARTER. When we saw voodoo accounting in the Enron case, look what it has done to accounting principles and to accounting firms. That makes no sense, but then there is a lot of this thing that doesn't make an awful lot of sense. That surprises me, but it's kind of the old shell game. Look under this shell. Now, which way is it going? Which way is it going? There it is. We gave it to you. No, wait, what is this? That's what this whole thing is about.

Mr. CARTER. Not one.

Mr. CARTER. If the gentleman will yield, let's not forget all the taxes you just rattled off, who is really going to pay those taxes? They are going to be put in the price of goods and services that are provided, and then those goods and services are going to go to the American people. So they are going to wake up in the morning and they are going to get delivered to their house this month's electricity bill, and, holy cow, where did all this come from? Everybody in America. It is not going to discriminate on whose bill is going to go if you are making $250,000 a year. No. It is going to every American that is burning electricity, every American that is consuming gas, if they have natural gas in their home. The American public is going to pay the price. And this cost that we have added to the manufacturers or to the retailers, these small business owners, they are going to put that on the price of their goods and services, and guess who is going to pay that? The people that need and purchase the goods and services. So the price of shirts and suits and shoes and T-shirts and baseball gloves and all of the things we want for our family are going up by the cost of that carbon tax, which that means who is paying the tax? The American people. All of the American people.

Mr. CARTER. Well, I'm very sad to say that, to learn that Debt Day, the day we don't have any money that we raise from taxes, is my daughter's birthday. I wish her a happy birthday. But, quite frankly it's coming up this weekend. And you know, it's mind boggling that taxes are paid on the 15th, and basically we'll have spent all the money that we've gotten from tax revenues by the 26th. That's spending some money, folks. That's doing it better than anybody's ever done it.

Mr. CARTER. And they are taxing energy. If you look at that map, you see that the energy-producing States, right now I am from Texas, my neighbors Oklahoma, Louisiana and New Mexico are all energy-producing States, as is Mississippi to some extent, until you get over to the blackout area around Florida on the coastal offshore productions. And so we're looking at those States that everybody's been calling, you know, the evil monsters of the oil and gas industry, that that's who we're going to get even with. The tax burden on those States is going to be less than the tax burden on our Midwestern States and some of our Southern States. This has been conceived with a program of attacking people that you can--it's easy, they think it's easy to get mad at. And the reality is this is going to hurt the very people that they're calling upon to get mad. It's going to hurt the Midwest and the Southern States. It's embarrassing how much the public is being fooled by this particular tax. This is just the beginning. We're talking about carbon, not necessarily energy. There will come a time when we figure out other carbon producers that we will tax.

Mr. CARTER. That's right. They have no more than 3 percent of gross domestic product and we're bumping up against 6 with the Obama plan here.

Mr. CARTER. So basically the last four lines are bigger than anything that we've seen since 1980.

Mr. CARTER. By the way, I didn't support that first one either, or the one before that.

Mr. CARTER. None.

Mr. CARTER. This spending and this debt record, I am sitting here thinking and contemplating while you all were talking, my children haven't rewarded me with any grandchildren yet, but they will. They don't even come close to taking care of this while my grandchildren are alive. We are talking about my great-grandchildren. In fact, there are people that estimate with the amount of interest that we will have to bear on this debt, that this goes on for generations not even conceived of today. It could be generation after generation after generation. When you take what we already considered a troublesome debt of $5.8 trillion, there was an amazing amount of criticism of the Republican administration under George Bush when that number popped up. Of course, they blamed it all on George Bush. He did certainly increase it, but I am not here to go into that. But that number seemed to concern the Democratic now-majority quite a bit when they were in the minority. But their President, the new President, Barack Obama, our new President, $8.7 trillion on top of $5.8 trillion, and this means that that number that we were talking about could be the downfall of humanity is now almost tripled. People have to just realize what is happening.

Mr. CARTER. I was in Estonia, which is protected by NATO but wants to join the EU, and their problem is they are 1 percentage point above 3 percent of their gross domestic product. So they're cutting programs and reducing taxes because they've learned they get more revenue that way so that they can get to the point that they will be able to be admitted to the European Union. It's embarrassing that Estonia is doing better on debt than the United States of America.

Mr. CARTER. It is certainly enough of a percentage of our gross domestic product that if we were a nation trying to join the European Union, we would be above their joining point.

Mr. CARTER. If the gentleman would yield.

Mr. CARTER. If I may answer, of course, the stuff above the line, the surplus, is a little different. But on the below-the-line side, it's clearly the last four lines because there's this one gigantic line which looks like it's this year and then every year thereafter is bigger than the other lines all the way going back to 1990 or something. What year is that?

Mr. CARTER. Actually that's just it. I wouldn't, after having these conversations, classify them as socialist nearly as much as I might classify the administration we are dealing with today as socialist because their ideas are more that we've got to let the free market work; so we are, meaning the Europeans, cutting taxes, we are cutting spending. Then, amazingly enough, I think this should be a surprise to everybody: The United States of America could not join the European Union if they wanted to. Why couldn't they? Because our debt ratio is too high. And it's going higher.

Mr. CARTER. I thank my friend for yielding. I'm proud to join my colleagues in speaking up against this horrendous amount of spending that's going on in the country today, and it's all done by the Obama administration. They're calling it ``stimulus,'' they're calling it ``save the economy,'' all these things. But I just got back from a trip where I was meeting with some parliamentarians from the European Union. And, you know, I will admit, I will confess that I viewed the European Union--my wife is from Europe. In my experience, the fact that my wife is from Holland, we have visited Europe on many occasions, and I really thought they were much more towards the socialist side of the calendar and that their ideas were much more leaning to the left. And then I went to listen to these folks talk about what they called an economic stimulus package in the EU and what they were calling upon their member countries to do for economic stimulus. And, amazingly enough, it was exactly what the Republicans have been saying we should do to have an economic stimulus. And that is cut taxes, especially on those categories of people that create jobs like employers and business taxes, and cut spending.

Mr. CARTER

Mr. CARTER. Thank you, Mr. Speaker, and thank you for recognizing me for this hour. I'm very pleased to be here. I'm here to talk about a subject that, I think, is very interesting, and I don't think the American people have really gotten their hands on this subject yet, but it's also extremely concerning. It really concerns me a great deal. I happen to serve on the Subcommittee on Appropriations for the Department of Homeland Security. We have spent an awful lot of time and an awful lot of effort trying to make sure that we keep our country safe from clearly identified terrorists who, if you have any question of do they mean us harm, then just look back at the Pentagon and the World Trade Center, and then ask yourself: Do they mean us harm? We have been diligently trying to defend our borders, diligently trying to stop terrorism and trying to catch it before it gets here and trying to deal with these people who have identified themselves and who have told everyone publicly they're here to hurt us. Now we have a new administration, and we have a new memo that has come out from Ms. Napolitano over at the Department of Homeland Security. It would just shock you to know that she is warning not of al Qaeda, not of the Taliban, not of Osama bin Laden. She is warning people about right-wing radical domestic terrorism. Now, this would be almost humorous, but those of us who have a little age on us, like I do, can think back to the Clinton administration and can remember how many times when anybody ever criticized the Clinton administration you would hear the First Lady then and now Secretary of State say, ``Well, it's all a plot by those right-wing extremists, those right-wing extremist organizations.'' President Bill Clinton would say, ``Well, they don't agree with my party and with what we're saying here, but it's really the people you're hearing from who are right-wing extremists.'' They label talk show hosts as right-wing extremists. All this fear was generated about right-wing extremists. Now we're not even 6 months into the Obama administration, and the people who are supposed to be protecting our homeland are warning us against right-wing extremists. This is the intelligence briefing right here. Now, I'm not trying to be mean about all of this. I'm just trying to tell you what they tell me is a right-wing extremist. I just took the things that they tell people who fall into that category, and then I put those classifications in with a poll that we did to identify the nature of my congressional district. Believe it or not, based upon accurate polling data that has been done in my district, 81 percent of the registered voters in my congressional district would qualify as right-wing extremists under Ms. Napolitano's memo--81 percent. They're probably going to come up with a category to cover the other 19 percent. I'm not being facetious about this. I happen to have Fort Hood, Texas in my district. Fort Hood, Texas is the largest military base on the face of the Earth. It has two field divisions of the corps headquarters. One of the things they tell us in this report is very sad in light of what our Army has been going through, which is to watch out for returning, disgruntled military veterans coming back from Iraq and Afghanistan in that they have the potential to be right-wing terrorists. These young men and women, some of whom have done four and five deployments overseas, some of those deployments for as much as 15 months, have served our Nation as heroes, as the next great generation, and our government is labeling them: At the time they finish their service, we should consider them potential right-wing extremists and terrorists. They are defining them as people the government had better keep an eye on. Veterans who have served in other wars are in here. They classify them as right-wing extremists. Are you opposed to abortion? It says right here at the bottom of this page: ``It may include groups and individuals that are dedicated to a single issue, such as opposition to abortion or immigration.'' It's just shocking. It basically says, if you disagree with the Obama administration, you could be a right-wing terrorist. Now, I hate to say that. It talks about people who believe in the right to keep and bear arms: right-wing terrorists. It talks about people who disagree with the stimulus package: right-wing terrorists. It talks about people who disagree with the economic path of recovery that this Nation is taking: potential right-wing terrorists. This is what this report says. I'm sure it's available. It's unclassified. It's for official use. We got it off the Internet. There's more, a lot more. I have friends here who have joined me on this shocking thing that's going on in this country. I'm going to start with my good friend, Virginia Foxx, who was with us here in the last hour, and I'm very pleased to have her again. I'll yield to her what time she may need to consume.

Mr. CARTER. Before we finish here, because we are about to run out of time, I want to say something else. When we are talking about immigration, we are not talking about people who come to this country legally.

Mr. CARTER. Man-caused disaster.

Mr. CARTER. So a person who believes in an interpretation of the Book of Revelations in the Bible is, by her definition, labeled as a terrorist. But a man who, live on television, on videotape, cuts another man's head off on television in the name of another religion is a what?

Mr. CARTER. What was the exact term that you said that he was calling those that are outside the country, rather than terrorists? Now Ms. Napolitano calls them something nebulous.

Mr. CARTER. I do too.

Mr. CARTER

Mr. CARTER. Mr. Speaker, this past work period that I was home, I visited with some folks with Sallie Mae and Texas Guaranteed Loans. These are two private programs that have been providing student loans for our students in Texas and for the rest of the country. Over 80 percent of the students chose a private lender as their choice to finance their school program. But now, the Democratic party is, by their action, forcing us into a government-only program. And I looked into a room that a year and a half ago was full of hundreds of people, it now stands empty, not because of a recession but because of the action of the Federal Government as led by the Democratic majority. It is a shame not to give the choice to our students, and when they make that choice, they choose private industry to the tune of 80 percent. This is estimated to cost 30,000 jobs in the Nation this year. And I don't have a problem with jobs in my district unless the government takes those jobs away. This is a shame. I think they should apologize to those hardworking people, most of whom are spouses of fighting soldiers.

Mr. CARTER

Mr. CARTER. Mr. Speaker, I move that the House do now adjourn.