Virginia Foxx

Ms. FOXX

Ms. FOXX. Mr. Speaker, I now would like to yield 6 minutes to the distinguished gentleman from California (Mr. McClintock).

Ms. FOXX

Ms. FOXX. Mr. Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Gohmert).

Ms. FOXX. Mr. Speaker, I would be more than happy to yield 30 seconds to Mr. Langevin.

Ms. FOXX. Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Ms. FOXX. I yield myself such time as I may consume. I know our colleagues again continue to want to rewrite history, but it's just not something we're going to let you do. Our economy was doing great until you all took over the Congress in January of 2007. You keep blaming what happened in the last few months of President Bush's Presidency on President Bush. But you were in control of Congress. You've been in control. And you have to take the responsibility for what happened. The job losses came on your watch. We had a $200 billion deficit when you took over the Congress, and you have caused the deficit to go up. It is Democrat policies which have created the problems, not the Republican policies. On Monday, President Obama took to the Rose Garden to criticize Republicans for insisting that new government spending to extend the Federal unemployment insurance program be paid for by cutting government spending elsewhere. Ironically, in another speech in the Rose Garden last November, President Obama took the opposite position, touting his signing an extension that was ``fully paid for.'' And this is his quote: I would also like to announce I just signed into law a bill that will help grow our economy, save and create new jobs, and provide relief to struggling families and businesses. Now it's important to note that the bill I sign will not add to our deficit. It is fully paid for and so it is fiscally responsible. Those remarks were made by President Obama on November 6, 2009. So he was for paying for spending before he was against it. On June 28, Speaker Pelosi made statements indicating the best way to create new jobs is to hand out more unemployment checks. This is her quote: This is one of the biggest stimuluses to our economy. Economists will tell you this money is spent quickly. It injects demand into the economy and it is job-creating. It creates jobs faster than almost any other initiative that you can name. This is news to a lot of economists. I wanted to share also a portion of a Wall Street Journal article from Tuesday entitled, ``Stimulating Unemployment.'' This is the quote: ``Only last week, Vice President Joe Biden was hailing the stimulus for saving and creating three million jobs. This week the White House says we need even more stimulus in the form of jobless checks to make up for the jobs his original spending stimulus didn't create.'' The one possibility the President and congressional Democrats won't entertain is that their own spending and taxing and regulating and labor union favoritism have become the main hindrances to job creation. Since February 2009, the jobless rate has climbed to 9.5 percent from 8.1 percent, and private industry has shed two million jobs. The overall economy has been expanding for at least a year, but employers still don't seem confident enough to add new workers. The economists who sold us the stimulus say it's a mystery. But maybe employers are afraid to hire because they don't know what costs government will impose on them next. In the immediate policy case, Democrats are going so far as to subsidize more unemployment. If you subsidize something, you get more of it. So if you pay people not to work, they often decide not to work or at least to delay looking or decline a less-than-perfect job offer holding out for something that may or may not materialize. The economic consensus which includes Obama administration economists in their previous lives couldn't be clearer on this. In a 1990 study for the National Bureau for Economic Research, labor economist Lawrence Katz found that the results indicate that a 1-week increase in potential benefit duration increases the average duration of the unemployment spells of unemployment insurance recipients by 0.16 to 20 weeks, 16 to 20 weeks. A March 2010 economic report by Michael Farrell of JP Morgan Chase examined several studies and concluded that lengthened availability of jobless benefits has raised the unemployment rate by 1.5 percent points. A 2006 NBER study by Raj Chetty of U.C. Berkeley on a related subject begins: It is well known that unemployment benefits raise unemployment durations. President Obama has said that this is a misguided notion and that attitude reflects a lack of faith in the American people. Yet Democrats have consistently passed legislation which takes away the choices and freedoms of the American people. That is the true reflection of a lack of faith in the American people. And with that, I reserve the balance of my time.

Ms. FOXX. Mr. Speaker, I will just point out again to our colleagues across the aisle that the reason we had a surplus when Bill Clinton was President was because Republicans were in charge of the Congress, and the reason we had a deficit the last 2 years of the Bush administration is because Democrats were in charge of the Congress. We'll continue to remind you of that. I now would like to yield such time as he may consume to my distinguished colleague from California (Mr. Dreier). (Mr. DREIER asked and was given permission to revise and extend his remarks.)

Ms. FOXX. Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

Ms. FOXX. Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague from Florida for yielding time, and I yield myself such time as I may consume. You know, he mentioned that we have no problem on one day voting for tax decreases and then the next day voting against unemployment benefits. Unfortunately, our colleagues across the aisle haven't given us an opportunity to vote for tax decreases in this session of Congress. Would that we'd had that opportunity, we certainly would have, because the money that the hardworking people of this country earn belongs to them. It doesn't belong to the government. That's what our colleagues across the aisle think. They want to control everything in this country, including all of the money that the good citizens of this country work hard to earn. Mr. Speaker, today I rise in opposition to this same-day rule on unemployment insurance. When the White House economic advisors released their report back in January 2009, they concluded that if we just borrowed $1 trillion, the stimulus would stop the unemployment rate from increasing beyond 8 percent. Here we are with a 9.5 percent unemployment rate, the largest deficit in our history, and the national debt at almost $14 trillion. The response of the liberal Democrat leadership is to add $30 billion more to the deficit by not offsetting another extension of Federal unemployment benefits. The American people want real economic growth and private job creation. If job creation is the number one priority for the Democrats, I'd hate to see what the number two priority is, given the dismal numbers that they've created, particularly in the last 18 months. During consideration of H.R. 5618, the Democrats' $34 billion unpaid for Restoration of Emergency Unemployment Compensation Act, before the July 4 recess, Democrats opposed the Republican motion to recommit, which would have paid for the extension. Specifically, the Republican motion to recommit would have used $34 billion in unspent stimulus funds to cover the cost of extending expired unemployment benefits through November 30. This was a fiscally responsible motion which recognized that the American people want Washington to stop spending money we don't have. Adding insurmountable amounts of spending to our soaring deficit helps no one. Painting Republicans as being unfeeling and uncaring about those who have lost their jobs is inappropriate. We are very concerned with those people, and we want to do everything that we can to help them. But putting us more and more into debt and increasing the deficit is not going to do that. And our colleagues across the aisle should have learned that by now with their very, very bad policies. Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

Ms. FOXX. Mr. Speaker, I urge my colleagues to vote ``no'' on this same-day rule, reject the liberal agenda that continues to distract from private sector job creation and getting our economy back on its feet. I yield back the balance of my time.

Ms. FOXX. Mr. Speaker, I would point out to my colleagues across the aisle, Mr. Speaker, that Democrats are totally in control of Congress. They have been since January of 2007. In the House, the number is 255- 178. There are two vacancies. In the Senate, it's 59-41, so the Democrats are clearly in charge, but they continue to blame Republicans who are very much in the minority. The American people are seeing through that, Mr. Speaker. They understand who has the responsibility. And I think, what the quote from Mr. Kyl is saying is that the money belongs to the citizens of this country. I thank my colleague from Florida for bringing it up. It proves the point. Our friends on the other side of the aisle think that all the money in this country belongs to the government and that it's up to the Members of Congress to decide who is going to get that money. They joined in with President Obama in believing that they should spread around the wealth, take from some and give to others. I think we have heard that philosophy before, but that isn't what the American people believe. They believe that they worked hard for their money; they should keep it. And I would also say to my colleague across the aisle, is it right and decent to saddle the American people with debt that is going to haunt us for many, many generations? Children not yet born are going to be given this debt while our friends across the aisle fund their pet projects and take from those that they wish to take from and spend where they want to. There wouldn't need to have been any kind of wait because, again, you are in the majority. You could do this. I want to say again, Republicans are very sympathetic to those who have lost their jobs, but the problems came when our colleagues across the aisle began irresponsible spending when they took over the Congress, adding rules and regulations. We know what drives jobs away. It's increased government spending and it's increased rules and regulations. I think that we have to point out the liberal Democrat agenda has failed. Our friends across the aisle need to go back to the drawing board and come back to the American people with real solutions to their real problems. We are in touch with those folks. I go home every weekend and I talk to the people in my district and they tell me they are very concerned about the future of this country. I can't tell you, Mr. Speaker, how many people tell me every weekend, I am frightened to death for the future of this country based on what is happening in Washington these days. This isn't the time to dither and blame the Republican minority for the disappointing collapse of governments we have seen since the liberal majority seized control of Congress in 2007. As I said, my colleague from Florida said earlier that job creation is the number one priority for Democrats. Well, obviously, they are missing the mark. Their spending programs have destroyed, not created, jobs. Albert Einstein is credited with saying the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. Well, our colleagues keep doing the same thing over and over again and expect different results. They are not going to get different results as long as they have these irresponsible policies. With that, I reserve the balance of my time.

Ms. FOXX. Mr. Speaker, when asked on July 4th are we headed in the right direction, Vice President Biden answered, ``The economic initiatives that we took, they're working. They're working.'' Vice President Biden's repeatedly touted the failed stimulus package, and has recently coined what he calls ``the summer of recovery.'' Yet when asked about concerns that the stimulus is not working he acknowledges that unemployment remains, ``unacceptably high.'' You know, if we are in a summer of recovery, we can't quite understand why we continue to have high unemployment in this country. When asked by ABC's This Week host Jake Tapper in an interview aired Sunday if the administration ``is getting enough credit'' for the Wall Street bill, the health care bill, and the economic recovery act in light of polls showing the majority of Americans believe the country is on the wrong track, Mr. Biden said, ``The vast majority of the American people and a lot of people really involved don't even know what's inside the packages.'' On the contrary, for the first time in a long time the American people are taking a very strong interest in what Congress is doing, reading the bills and voicing their opinions. Eighteen months after President Obama's $862 billion so-called stimulus, which really cost $1.2 trillion if you include the $347 billion that the Congressional Budget Office estimates for interest payments on the borrowed money, as my colleagues said across the aisle, there are still five job seekers for every job opening, and we have a 9.5 percent unemployment rate. I appreciate my colleague from Florida helping me make that point that we still have a problem despite the fact that there have been so many policies passed here and so much money spent. We have a 9.5 percent unemployment rate. Instead of facing reality, we are hearing that everything is going great. That is, everything except that which they might be able to somehow blame on the previous administration. Ignoring that virtually all of the jobs they are touting are government jobs, this misleading statistic doesn't represent net job growth, thereby omitting all the jobs lost since the liberals seized complete control of Washington. Doesn't it really seem discordant to be promoting unemployment benefits when Democrats are touting this as the summer of recovery? If the Democrats' stimulus were so successful, why do we need to increase our debt by $30 billion more for additional Federal unemployment benefits? Rather than acknowledge their stimulus plan failed and the American people were sold a bill of goods, the President and his administration continue to propose new government programs that increase the deficit. This is wrong. The American people know it. I reserve the balance of my time.

Ms. FOXX. Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent to reclaim my time.

Ms. FOXX

Ms. FOXX. Mr. Speaker, one business organization after another has made it clear: The policies of this President and this Democrat- controlled Congress are creating uncertainty all throughout the private sector. Whether it's the Chamber of Commerce or the National Federation of Independent Businesses, the message is the same: Washington is giving them no reason for confidence in the economy. All across this country, business owners are looking at higher costs for health care, the potential for higher energy costs, the threat of more taxes, and the reality of oppressive, costly government regulations. It's no wonder the private sector isn't hiring. The only sector of the economy that's really growing is government. The endless deficit spending in Washington is expanding government and sucking the life out of the private sector. This has to stop. House Republicans have commonsense solutions. We need to rein in out-of-control spending, cut taxes and get a massive Federal Government off the back of free enterprise.

Ms. FOXX

Ms. FOXX. Madam Speaker, there is an interesting new development on the ObamaCare front. Remember the penalties on families that do not purchase health insurance, the ones that will top $2,000 for many families? Remember what President Obama said about this individual mandate penalty? He said it was ``absolutely not a tax increase.'' Well, I guess times have changed. Now the Obama administration's Justice Department is defending this penalty in court as part of the government's ``power to lay and collect taxes.'' At least the truth about this $4 billion a year tax is now out. Too bad Washington Democrats didn't come clean until months after ObamaCare became law. Madam Speaker, the American people deserve better.

Ms. FOXX

Ms. FOXX. Madam Speaker, my colleague again is very selectively using statistics. He knows that he cannot back up the data that says that in the first year of President Obama's administration he has created more jobs than in all the Bush administration. I have this chart which shows the unemployment rate under President Obama, under President Bush; and, again, we had many more jobs created under President Bush than have been created under President Obama, because all we've done is lose jobs under President Obama and create government jobs. That's the whole issue here, Madam Speaker. We've lost four million jobs since President Obama took office. That's it. And, you know, my colleague across the aisle says we need to be consistent. Well, he should be consistent. This will bring savings immediately, what we're proposing. What he's talking about might bring savings 30 years down the road. In fact, the study that I asked him to talk about, there's no study, Madam Speaker. I asked for a copy of the study. You know what it is? An article that was in the newspaper last February when we shut the government down, or the Democrats shut the government down for a week. They were losing $100 million a day. But they found out 30 percent of the people were logging into their computers, so they call that a savings of $30 million per day. Listen, the American people are tired of that kind of thing being passed off as a study. There is no study. Madam Speaker, this bill does not need to be passed. This rule does not need to be passed.

Ms. FOXX. Madam Speaker, I ask unanimous consent that the text of the amendment and extraneous material be placed in the Record prior to the vote on the previous question.

Ms. FOXX. Madam Speaker, I will invite my colleague from Massachusetts, when he speaks again, to give us the citation for the study that he's talking about that shows that this bill will save tens of millions of dollars. I have done a little research on it myself, and I will be talking about that study. But I would invite him to prove to the American people that this will save money. And I want to point out to him that he's poking fun at Republicans on recommending that we save money on signs, but what he was really doing is poking fun at the American people. It wasn't the Republicans on this side of the aisle who came up with this. It's the American people who voted on this, and the American people understand the biblical admonition, If you are a good steward of small things, you will be a good steward of big things. We should start where we can save money. And I agree with the people. This is a good place to start. With that, I yield 3 minutes to my colleague from Illinois (Mr. Schock).

Ms. FOXX. Madam Speaker, I now yield 4 minutes to the distinguished Republican whip, the gentleman from Virginia (Mr. Cantor).

Ms. FOXX. Madam Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume. I can assure my colleague across the aisle that I wasn't one of those people who went home to take credit for the Stimulus Act. So he needs to take that issue up with those who have done it and not paint us all with the same brush. Madam Speaker, the underlying bill proposes spending $30 million creating a variety of initiatives promoting telework opportunities to allow Federal employees to work at home. This bill would require each Federal agency to create a teleworking managing officer. But there are many people who wonder if creating this kind of a situation is going to improve efficiency among Federal employees, and it may even reduce the productivity of the Federal Government. While the 3 million Americans who have lost their jobs since President Obama took office are asking, Where are the jobs we were promised, the Congress is pushing this initiative to make it easier for Federal employees who already have it much better than the rest of the country to avoid coming to work. So why is this bill so popular with the ruling liberal Democrats? Perhaps it has something to do with their longstanding subservience to labor unions. New data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics show that a majority of American union members now work for the government. That's 52 percent of all union members now work for the Federal, State, or local government, representing a sharp increase from the 49 percent in 2008. A full 37.4 percent of government employees belonged to the unions in 2009, up six-tenths of a percent from 2008. This shift toward representing government employees has changed the union movement's priorities, as unions now campaign for higher taxes on Americans to fund more government spending. These changes in union membership are certainly not surprising, as unionized companies do poorly in the marketplace and lose jobs relative to their nonunion competitors. Government employees, however, face no competition, as the government never goes out of business. The recession has left union bosses looking for new membership targets--and where better to look than in the government, which they see as having the deepest of all pockets and a host of sympathetic liberal Democratic politicians eager to please their political base. In fact, as reported by USA Today, overall, Federal workers earned an average salary of $67,691 in 2008 for occupations that exist both in government and the private sector, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics data. The average pay for the same mix of jobs in the private sector was $60,000. These salary figures don't include the value of health, pension, and other benefits, which average $40,785 per Federal employee in 2008 versus $9,882 per private worker, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis. So the average Federal employee's benefits are worth four times what the average benefits are worth in the private sector. A March 26, 2010, Wall Street Journal editorial entitled ``The Government Pay Boom'' reveals that ``the real windfall for government workers is in benefits.'' And it goes on to talk about how these benefits are growing, growing, growing. We know that the number of Federal employees making over $100,000 has increased by almost 5 percent since 2007, since the Democrats took over in Congress. Currently, there are more people in the Federal Government making in excess of $100,000 than those making $40,000. Since the recession began in 2007, public worker pay has risen 7.8 percent, while private-sector wages remain stagnant. The 2010 pay increase for Federal civilian employees was 2 percent. In 2009, the average Federal employee received a pay raise of 3.9 percent, and an average pay increase of 3.5 percent in 2008. In 2007, the Department of Transportation had only one employee making over $170,000. At the end of last year, it had 1,690 employees making that amount. Madam Speaker, we are growing the Federal Government while we have a 9.7 percent unemployment rate in the private sector. This is unacceptable to the American people. That's why we should vote ``no'' on this rule and ``no'' on this bill, because we are not heeding what the American people want us to do. I reserve the balance of my time.

Ms. FOXX. Reclaiming my time, I thank my colleague for pointing out the very important issue of the percentage of debt to the GDP because it is an important issue and our friends across the aisle have created much of that problem along with our President. They have been in charge since January 2007, and that's where the problem comes from. [From the Wall Street Journal, July 13, 2010] The Bush Tax Cuts and the Deficit Myth (By Brian Riedl) President Obama and congressional Democrats are blaming their trillion-dollar budget deficits on the Bush tax cuts of 2001 and 2003. Letting these tax cuts expire is their answer. Yet the data flatly contradict this ``tax cuts caused the deficits'' narrative. Consider the three most persistent myths: The Bush tax cuts wiped out last decade's budget surpluses. Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass), for example, has long blamed the tax cuts for having ``taken a $5.6 trillion surplus and turned it into deficits as far as the eye can see.'' That $5.6 trillion surplus never existed. It was a projection by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) in January 2001 to cover the next decade. It assumed that late-1990s economic growth and the stockmarket bubble (which had already peaked) would continue forever and generate record-high tax revenues. It assumed no recessions, no terrorist attacks, no wars, no natural disasters, and that all discretionary spending would fall to 1930s levels. The projected $5.6 trillion surplus between 2002 and 2011 will more likely be a $6.1 trillion deficit through September 2011. So what was the cause of this dizzying, $11.7 trillion swing? I've analyzed CBO's 28 subsequent budget baseline updates since January 2001. These updates reveal that the much-maligned Bush tax cuts, at $1.7 trillion, caused just 14% of the swing from projected surpluses to actual deficits (and that is according to a ``static'' analysis, excluding any revenues recovered from faster economic growth induced by the cuts). The bulk of the swing resulted from economic and technical revisions (33%), other new spending (32%), net interest on the debt (12%), the 2009 stimulus (6%) and other tax cuts (3%). Specifically, the tax cuts for those earning more than $250,000 are responsible for just 4% of the swing. If there were no Bush tax cuts, runaway spending and economic factors would have guaranteed more than $4 trillion in deficits over the decade and kept the budget in deficit every year except 2007. The next decade's deficits are the result of the previous administration's profligacy. Mr. Obama asserted in his January State of the Union Address that by the time he took office, ``we had a one-year deficit of over $1 trillion and projected deficits of $8 trillion over the next decade. Most of this was the result of not paying for two wars, two tax cuts, and an expensive prescription drug program.'' In short, it's all President Bush's fault. But Mr. Obama's assertion fails on three grounds. First, the wars, tax cuts and the prescription drug program were implemented in the early 2000s, yet by 2007 the deficit stood at only $161 billion. How could these stable policies have suddenly caused trillion-dollar deficits beginning in 2009? (Obviously what happened was collapsing revenues from the recession along with stimulus spending.) Second, the president's $8 trillion figure minimizes the problem. Recent CBO data indicate a 10-year baseline deficit closer to $13 trillion if Washington maintains today's tax- and-spend policies--whereby discretionary spending grows with the economy, war spending winds down, ObamaCare is implemented, and Congress extends all the Bush tax cuts, the Alternative Minimum Tax (AMT) patch, and the Medicare ``doc fix'' (i.e., no reimbursement cuts). Under this realistic baseline, the 10-year cost of extending the Bush tax cuts ($3.2 trillion), the Medicare drug entitlement ($1 trillion), and Iraq and Afghanistan spending ($515 billion) add up to $4.7 trillion. That's approximately one-third of the $13 trillion in baseline deficits--far from the majority the president claims. Third and most importantly, the White House methodology is arbitrary. With Washington set to tax $33 trillion and spend $46 trillion over the next decade, how does one determine which policies ``caused'' the $13 trillion deficit? Mr. Obama could have just as easily singled out Social Security ($9.2 trillion over 10 years), antipoverty programs ($7 trillion), other Medicare spending ($5.4 trillion), net interest on the debt ($6.1 trillion), or nondefense discretionary spending ($7.5 trillion). There's no legitimate reason to single out the $4.7 trillion in tax cuts, war funding and the Medicare drug entitlement. A better methodology would focus on which programs are expanding and pushing the next decade's deficit up. Declining revenues are driving future deficits. The fact is that rapidly increasing spending will cause 100% of rising long-term deficits. Over the past 50 years, tax revenues have deviated little from their 18% of gross domestic product (GDP) average. Despite a temporary recession-induced dip, CBO projects that even if all Bush tax cuts are extended and the AMT is patched, tax revenues will rebound to 18.2% of GDP by 2020--slightly above the historical average. They will continue growing afterwards. Spending--which has averaged 20.3% of GDP over the past 50 years--won't remain as stable. Using the budget baseline deficit of $13 trillion for the next decade as described above, CBO figures show spending surging to a peacetime record 26.5% of GDP by 2020 and also rising steeply thereafter. Putting this together, the budget deficit, historically 2.3% of GDP, is projected to leap to 8.3% of GDP by 2020 under current policies. This will result from Washington taxing at 0.2% of GDP above the historical average but spending 6.2% above its historical average. Entitlements and other obligations are driving the deficits. Specifically, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and net interest costs are projected to rise by 5.4% of GDP between 2008 and 2020. The Bush tax cuts are a convenient scapegoat for past and future budget woes. But it is the dramatic upward arc of federal spending that is the root of the problem. With that, Madam Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

Ms. FOXX. Madam Speaker, I just want to quickly respond to two things that my colleague from Massachusetts said. He talks about the fact that the Federal Government is paying for wars. Well, let me say that the Constitution of the United States says, ``We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare,'' et cetera. It is the role of the Federal Government to protect us in this country. It is the only entity in our country who can do that. It is our role. The other comment he makes is ``tax cuts for the rich.'' My colleague, just like almost all my colleagues across the aisle, have an assumption that all the money that is generated in this country belongs to the government and that if there is a tax cut provided, that that is a gift from the government to the people getting the tax cut. No, Madam Speaker, that is not right. The government is not in control in this country. The people are in control. And for them to have that assumption is the biggest part of the problem that we have here right now. Madam Speaker, I yield such time as he may consume to the distinguished ranking member of the Rules Committee (Mr. Dreier). (Mr. DREIER asked and was given permission to revise and extend his remarks.)

Ms. FOXX. Madam Speaker, I demand a recorded vote.

Ms. FOXX. Madam Speaker, on that I demand the yeas and nays.

Ms. FOXX. I yield myself such time as I may consume. As I have said before on the floor here to my colleagues who want to rewrite history, they can't blame everything on President Bush. They can't continue to do that. And they want to give President Clinton all the credit. But, of course, the Congress was controlled by the Republicans for 6 of the 8 years that President Clinton was in office. It's the Congress that controls the spending. Our Democratic colleagues know that. They simply choose to ignore it when it suits their arguments. Let me quote from the Wall Street Journal article of the 13th of July. It's very recent, so my colleagues may not have seen it. The Bush Tax Cuts and the Deficit Myth--and I won't read the entire article; but, Madam Speaker, I insert the entire article into the Record.

Ms. FOXX. I would be happy to yield to my friend from California.