Steve King

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from California for bringing H.R. 3722 here before us and before the floor. We have already a jobs magnet. The jobs magnet that is there is what draws so much illegal immigration into this country. The disincentive has not been put in place. This is not the first administration that has not aggressively enforced our immigration laws. This jobs magnet exists, and we have added to that a new magnet. The new magnet is called free health care for illegals, and then we tap into the American taxpayers. Now, I hear my Democrat colleagues over on this side continually railing about overspending, overspending. This is overspending. And it is not just a billion dollars. That responsibility comes to $9 billion a year, and it is growing. So we add to the jobs magnet the free health care magnet. And by the way, I want to point out that the system the gentleman from California (Mr. Rohrabacher) addressed, where an employer has an ability now, and will have by December 31 everywhere in the country, to verify the hiring and the legal status of a prospective employee, is called the SAFE Act. It has been in six States now. I have run that system myself. It is Web-based, as well as a phone call, but Web-based, and it is as close to infallible as anything we can put out, and it is going to get better. Employers can guarantee that they are hiring legal employees. We do not need to be subsidizing the health care for illegals. That is another way of subsidizing employers who are taking advantage of the cheaper labor that sets our hardworking Americans back and puts them in the unemployment lines. This is a national security issue, it is a national budget issue, it is a cultural continuity issue, and it is a commonsense issue. I thank the gentleman from California for bringing the bill, and I enthusiastically support H.R. 3722.

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. I thank the gentleman for yielding me this time. Mr. Speaker, not too long ago I got on an airplane ride. Across the aisle from me was a young woman holding her 7- or 8-month-old daughter. This young woman was also an OB-GYN. She began to talk to me about the practice that she has invested in had a 600 percent increase in the premiums in one single year. That is the worst I have heard of, but there are many out there that run 200, 300, 400 percent increases in premiums. I represent a part of the State of Iowa. Iowa is last in the Nation in Medicare reimbursement rates. Now we are seeing an increase in medical malpractice premiums. Good things do come out of California. This is a good idea. It is a good model, and it is a good pattern. I am happy to follow the lead of the gentleman from California (Mr. Cox) on this issue. We are losing access to health care in Iowa because of the cost of premiums, because Medicare reimbursement rates are the last in the Nation. Our issue is access to health care. We must reform this practice. Three percent of the gross domestic product of the United States of America is being consumed by litigation. Here is a place to start. I would like to do very much more.

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for yielding me this time. I appreciate the opportunity to say a few words about this issue of H.R. 4279. I am a former employer. I started a business in 1975; and I met payroll for 28 years, 1,400-and-some consecutive weeks. I was one of the first employers in my industry to provide health insurance for my employees. It was a difficult thing to do because of all of the Federal constraints that made it difficult for a small business to compete with large business. This is rooted back in World War II when there were wage and price controls, and employers that tried to find a way to offer additional benefits or wages to their employees were able to deduct health insurance benefits for them as an expense and then offer that as a quasi-raise or in the form of a benefit, an increase in compensation for their employees. The legacy of that remains today in Federal law. We have legislation that continually makes it difficult to have the flexibility necessary for businesses to work with their employees so that they can have a legitimate health care plan. We have had to find ways around Federal regulation to do that. H.R. 4279 helps us so that we do not have to jump around that one or find another way to get things done. I remember a Congressman coming into my district in the early 1980s making a pitch for a national health care act. And I remember in that room of about 80 people, in the end I was the only one of the employers in the room that provided health insurance for my employees, and I remember fighting off that effort of going for a national health care because we need more individual responsibility so that we have more individual decisions made, in the vision of Adam Smith and the invisible hand. We have today evolved into a health care system that has more and more HMOs, fewer and fewer entities making decisions about more and more people, to the point where the patients now have gotten the mindset more of sheep of submitting themselves to the process rather than making decisions on their health insurance and on their health care. H.R. 4279, again, short-circuits some of that, gives us a little more freedom and puts flexibility into the process. I remember when the previous President was elected in 1992 and the First Lady came out with a plan that many of us have described as the Hillary Care Plan. I have that flow chart on my wall in my office in Iowa that scares me half to death as an employer looking at a national health care act versus individual flexibility. We have two choices here, and the people that are against this bill are the ones that are preserving what they can of the opportunity to build a Federal health care Canadian-style plan. Mr. Speaker, H.R. 4279 helps us get more decisions in the hands of more people so that they make their individual decisions in an efficient fashion, the way that the gentlewoman from Pennsylvania (Ms. Hart) described. It gets rid of that perverse incentive of spending the money at the end of the year because you cannot roll those dollars over. So I applaud the authors of this bill, the people who worked so hard on it. I appreciate the opportunity to speak in favor of H.R. 4279.

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, if the gentleman will continue to yield, that is the answer to charitable contributions. There is an answer to every single aspect of this. Every time we look at this Rubik's cube it looks better and better and better. Also, the corporations that have moved offshore to avoid the taxes in United States of America will come back to this country, many of them, and other corporations will move to the United States. An example would be Ireland. They untaxed corporations in Ireland for a period of 10 years, and they ended up with 560 American corporations domiciled in that little island of 4 million people. So imagine multiplying this across this huge continent of almost 300 million people.

Mr. KING of Iowa. The economy will grow faster. So when we look at it from that perspective, there are easy answers for the retailers. More money in the hands of people. They will spend that money. The other question out there is the one that has to do with large investments, annuities, life insurance, and those kinds of issues. And at first I will say the tax structure around those kinds of investments is a tax structure that has been built and evolved around our income tax system. It is a distortion. It is more akin to something today that is not really economic reality. And I think we can take our $1 trillion and inject it into our economy and find a way to transition our way through making adjustments through annuities, life insurance, and those other kinds of long-term investments and tax deductible investments. And by the way, another concern will be the dollars that go into charitable contributions. Statistics show that 70 percent of the charitable contributions are not itemized deductions anyway. People find a good cause and put their dollars in there without regard to the tax.

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the gentleman yielding to me and to the contributions of my colleagues here tonight on this subject matter. It occurs to me as I listen to the gentlemen from Georgia, the offices that I can go to and always get the right price on a small complimentary bag of peanuts, that a person would have to be nuts not to go for this program. And you all know that in Georgia. It is endemic down there. You have had campaigns on it politically and you know the public in Georgia understands how important it is to eliminate the IRS and go to a consumption tax. We will get most of the questions answered here tonight, but the balance of the questions can be answered at fairtax.org on the Web.

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, when I put out that Web page, it is important to go there and take a look. There is always another question and another question. Myself, I would like to announce how I got to this position. It is almost 25 years ago. The gentleman from Georgia (Mr. Burns) addressed how simple and obvious it is. Twenty-five years ago, I got audited one too many times. That one too many times caused me to go back to work fuming after all the time I had lost and money that I had lost, and I still to this day believe I filed everything exactly correctly and honestly and legally. But I went back to work and started with the premise I want to eliminate the Internal Revenue Service and I want to eliminate the Internal Revenue Code. I did not think too much about how to do it, I just wanted to get rid of it. So I looked at how do we replace that, how do we replace the revenue stream? And there is only one way, and that is a fair tax, a national consumption tax on sales and service. We have heard about that here tonight. The simplicity of it is impressive. And after weeks and weeks of working this through, answering these devil's advocate questions that I asked of myself, and trying to find people around my neighborhood in 1980 that could answer this, and my colleagues that could answer this, and no one had been thinking about it. They looked at me and said, well, that sounds like a good idea, Steve, but we never heard of that before, therefore it must not have a lot of credibility. I finally concluded they must know something intuitively about this that was wrong with it that I could not begin to comprehend, so I set it on the side shelf of my mind. I always kept it there as something to think about, but I moved along. In 1993, I picked up a book and the title was ``Fire the IRS,'' written by Dan Pilla, a former IRS agent. He had done all the research and compiled all the data that I had speculated on myself, and that book clicked with me just exactly. So I will take you back to the biggest reason why I think we need to eliminate the IRS, and that is this over $1 trillion anchor we drag through our economy. These numbers go back to references in 1985 dollars in Dan Pilla's book. He took the dollars that we have to fund the IRS with, the dollars that we pay our tax preparers, the dollars we pay some people to compile the numbers to go to our tax preparers, and then pay ourselves about $10 an hour to sit up most of the night on the 14th of April, and then the dollars we spend to enforce the Internal Revenue Code. We also go through the litigation process. And then add to that the cost to our economy of people who make a decision that they are not going to risk any more sweat or any more capital or any more equity, and to try to earn more money for that year because the tax risk is too high. So they make a decision they are going to pick up their golf clubs or their fishing pole, or spend a little more time with their family and not make that extra sales call, not work those extra overtime hours. Add all those dollars up that I have described; the disincentive dollars to the actual literal cost, and those 1985 dollars were $720 billion a year. Billion with a B. And if you index that for inflation, that number rolls up to over $1 trillion a year. That is trillion with a T. And no one, no one has an equation that can evaluate the positive impact on our economy when you take those millions of people that are now working in the regulatory sector, enforcing the IRS and keeping the books and putting the data in. All those bright, creative, productive people out there that are producing something in the nonproductive sector of the economy. They will go find something to do. They are creative. They will come out of that nonproductive sector of the economy and they will do something in the productive sector. They will produce a good or a service that has a value that also is a multiplier in our economy. And that contribution today cannot yet be measured. So we have this anchor of over $1 trillion. Then, when you add to that the part we cannot measure, it is an anchor that is substantially over $1 trillion to our economy. To give you an idea of the magnitude of that, in 1992, when Bill Clinton was elected President, he called for the United States Congress to issue a $30 billion economic incentive plan. Some will remember that request that the President made, because we needed to jump-start the economy, by his argument. Well, Congress negotiated that $30 billion request down to $17 billion, and then he decided, well, that is not enough to make a difference and so he decided to drop the proposal. But it was an idea like we would consider AmeriCorps to be today; make-work projects where you put borrowed money into the hands of people that would be spent in the economy to stimulate the economy. Well, if $30 billion made a difference to this economy, at least in theory in 1992, borrowed money, think what over $1 trillion injected into our economy in the real productive sector of the economy would do. Not borrowed money, real money, multiplied not just one time borrowed at $30 billion but every year over $1 trillion. We cannot, with our normal on-the-street minds, comprehend the contribution to this economy, the jobs that would create. And when we look around the world and we see where we stand with this Nation, this economy that is growing thanks to the President's jobs and growth plan, but we are also seeing a balance of trade that is a minus $503 billion a year, and we are seeing our industrial base slide off to overseas where they are paying 68 cents an hour, and they are buying lathes and punch presses and training their people to run them. Those jobs will be hard to get back, but we get to discount 22 percent on average of everything we sell to these foreign countries when we untax our companies that are producing export products as well as our domestically consumed products. That discount keeps us in that market longer and it holds our industrial jobs here in this country longer. That is good for our blue collar jobs and that is good for the sector of our economy that is starting to decline. And on the other side of this coin, on the high-tech side, we incent capital formation. We no longer punish productivity or capital formation or savings. So when we untax corporations, businesses, your wages, income of all kinds, interest income, dividend income, pension income, no tax on Social Security income, we untax all of that, and we untax also inheritance tax, that means there is an incentive for capital formation. It will not be sewn into a mattress, it will be invested in something that returns on its investment. And that return will result in increased productivity of the American worker. So whether that money goes into research and development or capital investment so we get more technology in our factories and in our plants, or whether it goes into higher education, or whether entrepreneurs are able to borrow that money and roll that into a new business, all of these things may be temporarily delayed gratification for the retailers, not much, maybe a little, but in the end it is more money in their pockets. So when I look at the things we are up against here, this idea ultimately makes so much good sense. Every time I take this Rubik's cube of H.R. 25, or you can find out about it at fairtax.org, and I turn it around and I look at it another way and another way, it looks better, and better, and better. It makes so much sense that I am just going to illustrate the two sectors of the economy that need to take a look at this thing and actually be convinced. One of them are the retailers. They have a study out, and the gentleman from Georgia (Mr. Linder) and I have sat with people on that study. I think the study shows that about 5 years down the road, there is maybe a half percent decline in total gross retail sales. The premise on that study, it is a 5-year-old-study, by the way, or 4\1/2\ anyway, some of those premises I will take issue with. I think it starts with a pessimistic base. Even if they are right, and I disagree with them, but even if they are right, is $1 trillion in the economy not more than enough to overcome that? They assume that money is not going to come out of research and development or higher education.

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent to have my name removed as a cosponsor of H.R. 1078.

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, I move that the House do now adjourn.

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the opportunity to address the body and an opportunity to address the American people. This period of time that we have here this evening is a way to get a message out that sometimes does not get out. I also appreciate the remarks by the gentleman from Florida with regard to Haiti and promotion of freedom not just in this hemisphere but around the world. I think it is something we all agree with. I would like to start out tonight by talking about an issue that is fundamentally important to the United States of America from an economic standpoint, something that I think affects us not just fiscally but socially and how we develop ourselves as a Nation, and I think it is an issue that will establish our American and national destiny for a long time to come. We sit today with a lot of years of experience with an Internal Revenue Service that is too big, it is too intrusive, it injects itself into our private lives, and it slows down our business and our commerce. So I want to start out with how I got to this point, and I want to conclude with why we ought to eliminate the entire Internal Revenue Service code and why we ought to eliminate the Internal Revenue Service entirely and why we ought to give people back their freedom and why we should cease taxing our productivity and remove the first lien that exists on everyone's wages in this country and replace it with an opportunity to decide when they pay their taxes when they go and purchase. So for me it works in this way: in 1975 I started up a business. I went out and bought a bulldozer and began doing custom work on farms, building terraces and dams and waterways. And as I did that work, all I really wanted to do was simply run my business, provide a service and collect a fee for that and pay my bills and raise my family. That was the American dream. Maybe I was simplistic in my aspirations, and maybe I should have realized how complicated it could get. But as the years went by, I began to realize that I did not get to spend every waking moment, I did not get to spend every sunshine day out there doing something productive, working and moving earth and preserving soil and water quality. Instead, there was a day I finally had to pull in and park a machine on a sunny day and go in and start filling out more Federal forms. On that first day that that happened that I could not any longer have energy to meet the Federal regulations at night or on rainy days or on weekends or on Sundays, that was the first day I lost real productivity in our small little business. Well, it was also about the time that I was audited for the first time by the Internal Revenue Service, and I thought I had that behind me. A couple of years later, along came another audit. The second audit was for the year 1979, and I remember that clearly. The IRS did let me know that they wanted to do an audit on a certain date, and I accommodated them in every way possible. But we did not have copy machines in those days, and I did not have staff in those days that could pull these records out of my files. I had done the records myself, I had built the bookkeeping system that I had, and it was accurate, and it was precise, and it was thorough, and I had excellent records, and I could document where every single penny went without hesitation. What I did not have was a copy machine where I could have copied a lot of records, handed them to the IRS and said, I will come back and see you tonight when the sun goes down, and we will see if you need any more information for your audit tomorrow. So I made a decision that I would not allow them to rummage around in my files, pull records out. They did not know my filing system. I could not be assured that they could put them back in the filing system the way they were. Not being able to copy them in any efficient fashion without a copying machine, I insisted that I will sit here with you, and any record you want, I will pull it out of the file. I will show it to you, you can take your notes, do your documentation and due diligence. Then when you are finished with those documents, I will put them back in my file and get you the next ones. So I did that. I did that for 4 days, 4 days of being scrutinized by the Internal Revenue Service, believing all the time that I had done everything within the law, everything exactly right, not just legally but also ethically, filed my taxes on time, paid my taxes. And at the ends of 4 days, 4 days of lost productivity, the IRS agent finally sat down with me, and we went through these numbers that she had evaluated. There were subjective decisions that were made, and I got hit for a loss in interest, in penalty and principal for taxes that to this day I do not believe that I had a legal obligation to pay, but if I had gone to court to defend myself against this behemoth of the IRS, it would have broke me. I could not afford any more days of not being out making money, because I had bills that I had to pay, so I made a very, very difficult decision for me, and that difficult decision, for a person who believes in standing on principle, almost no matter what the cost, I made the decision that the principle of preserving my business was more important than the principle of going to court to defend I will say the subjective and arbitrary decision by a single IRS agent. So, I had to set up a time payment, but I paid the principal and the interest and the penalty, and it hurt financially, but it hurt a lot more as a matter of principle. So here I was, starting a business, creating jobs, doing the things that are within the parameters of the American dream, and I was being punished and penalized by an IRS service. So that next day, on the fifth day when the sun came up, I went out to work, climbed in the seat of a bulldozer, and I began to build terraces. Well, there it is not the most exciting and thrilling thing a person can do. I have enjoyed a lot of it and built many thousands of feet, but while you are there, you are looking at the top of the hill, the machine is loud so you cannot have a radio, and that means that there is no entertainment there except what work is in front of you and what is going on around you, which is not a lot, and what goes on, the entertainment and the things that go on in one's own mind to keep you entertained. Well, it was not entertainment that I was after. I had smoke rolling out of my ears from the IRS audit. So I began to day by day think about how do we go about eliminating the IRS? I mean, I did not work up to that premise, I just started with here is a basic premise, I wanted to eliminate the IRS. I came to that conclusion from the beginning and did not consider the political difficulties of that. I simply considered what the world would be like if we had our freedom back and if we did not have this intrusive agency that was entering into my life and obstructing this thing, that all I wanted to do was run the business and raise a family. So, day by day I sat there and began to think, well, we would have to replace the revenue. If we eliminate the IRS, how do we replace the revenue? And it did not take very long. I looked at what about an excise tax? What about import-export duties? What about user fees? And it does not take very long of considering those alternatives before one can easily conclude that you cannot raise enough revenue in that method to fund this large Federal Government that we have, and the only alternative to eliminating the IRS and eliminating the tax on our income would be to establish a national sales tax that would be established at a rate all across this country, for 100 percent of the sales and service for the last retail stop for the dollar. So I began to work that through, and I worked it through day by day, hour by hour. And I looked forward to going to work every day so I could sit there on that dull bulldozer and think about how we could get rid of the IRS. That was in a way my therapy. I had no idea in 1980 I would end up in the United States Congress in the year 2003 and 2004 and have an opportunity to come here and advocate for something that had taken place clear back then, that 20-plus years ago. But that was what was taking place. Many days I was establishing a philosophy for a lot of things, not just the taxes. But as I worked through the problem of resolving this and eliminating the IRS and replacing the revenue, I asked question after question, the devil's advocate question of what goes wrong when we make a decision like this? How many things will change? What do we do about people that smuggle goods over the border to avoid the tax? What do we do about tax evasion? How do we get the States to comply? How many States already have the tax policy? Well, I worked those things through, and I worked every one of the questions that I could come up with over weeks and weeks. I worked that all through in my own and had an answer back for all those questions that I could ask. And yet I would stop in town, the first one in the coffee shop in the morning, and the next one that would show up, I would begin to talk with them, what do you think about eliminating the IRS and going to a national sales tax? Nobody had thought of it before. It seemed like a concept that there should have been a few million people thinking about, but I could not find anybody that had thought about it before. So as I went around my circle of friends and coworkers that I had and associates, I could get them to answer me, and it would be things like, well, I do not know, but it must not be a good idea, or we would be doing it. I had all the answers to everything I could think of, so I would go to the library and look. I could not find anything on eliminating the IRS and going to a national sales tax. I thought there must be some economic study. I did not have the Internet, so I could not simply do a Google search and come up with whatever has happened out there in the Library of Congress. It was not available. Finally, after weeks of trying to find a conversation with someone who knew something about this, someone who had at least thought about it before, had an opinion on it after I told them what I worked on, and trying to find some research, I finally told myself, well, Steve, you know, this makes ultimately so much sense to me that it should make that much sense to everyone else. Surely the rest the world must intuitively know what is wrong with it, they know that, and it is something I simply cannot comprehend or figure out, so that is the only reason why we are not doing it. And I put it on the side shelf of my mind. I never put it away, it was always something that was there, but I was not as active on it for a number of years. But I always wanted to get rid of the IRS, always believed it was the economic stimulus, and I always believed there was a solution to any problem that anyone could raise that might be a reason not to move forward with what today is the bill that we call Fair Tax, or H.R. 25. Well, this took place and began in 1980, and as those years unfolded, along about 1993, I get mailings that come into my office, and I always send out a little letter, make a phone call, so publications would come in, and I would send off for a book here and there. As I built this little private library at home and this filing cabinet at home of all the things that interested me, which, again, was the foundation for the philosophy that I think gave me this great privilege and honor of serving in the United States Congress, I saw an advertisement for a book that caught my eye right away, and the name of the book was Fire the IRS. I ordered this book, Fire the IRS, by Dan Pilla, copyrighted 1993. As I devoured this book, word by word, page by page, read it through forwards and backwards, marked it up and highlighted it, Dan Pilla had documented all of the things I had considered and more, and he also had some words for us from some economists. Dan Pilla was an IRS officer who understood this clearly. This book, by the way, has been in my bookcase now for almost 10 years without me touching it until just a couple of days ago, I happened to see it peeking out of the rest of the books, reached in and grabbed it. There was a reason why it popped out and into my hand. But this book, Fire the IRS, by Dan Pilla, documented all of these things that I believed, and it gave me confidence that I had gone down a path that really was a legitimate path from an economic standpoint, a legitimate path where the best economists in America could stand up and defend a philosophy like this. Now, I have only raised one issue with the IRS, and that is the intrusiveness of it and the burden of it. But we have a huge burden with the Internal Revenue Service, and it is not that they are not good people working for the agency. They have their job to do, and I do not take issue with that. It is that we need to establish good public policy here. We need to take the load off of tax collection. It adds like this: When you add up the cost of funding the IRS, paying their wages, their overhead, their buildings and all the maintenance on those buildings, and their transportation, and all the things that go on to fund the IRS, you take that number; then you add up all of the dollars that we pay our tax preparers that take the data that we give them and put it together in a report that goes to the IRS and its tax filing, you add up that number; and you add up the number for all the tax lawyers that are out there that are working with tax avoidance, and that is the legal term, working for tax avoidance, and it is legal, the costs we are paying them; and our accountants, all the people that compile and process that data that gets that April 15 date turned in; and then you add to that the loss of income for people that have decided that my tax rates are too high. I do not want to work any harder this week. This 40 or 50 hours a week I work and this offer of 10 extra hours of overtime, I am not going to take it up, I am not going to do the overtime because I do not get to keep enough of the money that I earn. The IRS takes too much of it. So they make a rational decision, and they decide I am not going to work the overtime or I am not going to make the extra sales calls, or I am not going to start up that production line on my plant I have going here, because I can make the same cash flow, and I am happier living on the income I have got, rather than taking on all of the responsibility and burden of trying to make a little more money with the IRS taking a bigger and bigger chunk out of it as you go up the ladder. So, the people make a rational decision and decide, well, I am going to pick up my golf clubs or my fishing pole and take a little time off. There is nothing wrong with that either. But when you add up all of these costs, all of these costs, 1985, by an economist in this book called Dr. Payne, $720 billion a year, that is with a B, to fund the IRS and the revenue shortfall that is there. He also has calculated that for every $100 collected by the IRS, it costs another $65 to collect that $100. But if it is $720 billion in 1985, and I have not extrapolated the inflation factor on this to take us to the year 2004, but $720 billion, and we would know it would be substantially more in today's dollars, but I will tell you it adds up to over $1 trillion a year because of the inflation factor on the $720 billion. And another factor that is so huge in its implications that there is not an economic model that can evaluate that, and that is what happens to these millions of people that are out here collecting data that goes into the IRS and into the tax policy? There are millions of people out there that at least in part, and of them as a whole, make their money with taxes. Those people would go to work in the productive sector of the economy as opposed to the nonproductive regulatory sector of the economy. So you add up all those numbers, the $720 billion from Dr. Payne by 1985, add an inflation factor to that, and then add to that the economic impact of the people that are now in the regulatory sector, the nonproductive sector, and they would be shifted over into the private sector, the productive sector of the economy, it is easily over $1 trillion a year the size of the anchor we drag along behind this ship chugging along here, which is our Nation's economy. We are dragging that anchor across the bottom, and that anchor is at least 10 percent of our gross domestic product, and probably significantly more than that. We have about a $11.4 trillion economy, and over $1 trillion of it is the burden of the IRS. If we eliminate them, we can cut the chain on that anchor, and we can sail this economic ship free, and it will sail pure, and it will sail fast, and we will do a lot of good things. Now, one of the things that we have is a negative balance of trade. Today our balance of trade is a minus $503 billion a year. That means when we are buying $503 billion more of goods than we sell to foreign countries. Foreign interests then own half a trillion dollars of our assets more every year. Each year that goes by, that number gets bigger, and they own more and more of the United States of America. We cannot go on indefinitely mortgaging our assets and letting them be held as collateral by foreign interests because we have got a negative balance of trade. We need to turn that to the positive. If we are able to pass H.R. 25, the Fair Tax, and if we are able to substitute then for that tax a national sales tax, consumption-based, that means that we untax all of these entities out here that are paying income tax today. Now, it might come as a shock to some Americans that corporations do not pay taxes. Does it sound outrageous? Corporations do not pay taxes. They send the check in, all right. They fill out their tax forms, all right. But they do not really pay taxes. No one in this place has ever been able to figure out how to get a corporation to actually pay a tax. They have to pass the tax through, and they pass it through to real people. People pay taxes; corporations do not. So we untax corporations. We do not ask them to go out and collect them anymore, is the essence of it. By the way, many of them are spending hundreds of millions of dollars just filling out the forms and paying their attorneys to do the tax, the legal tax avoidance. And it is so effective that 61 percent of our domestic corporations in America paid no taxes at all for last year, and 71 percent of the foreign corporations doing business in the United States filled out their forms but did not pay taxes. So we are down to 40 percent, 39 percent of the domestic corporations, and 29 percent of the foreign corporations are all that are actually paying any taxes whatsoever. But, nonetheless, they are all passing it off to their customers. They are not digging out their asset base. So the cost in the goods of everything that we see on the retail shelf, the retail sales and service, that is the tax component that they are passing along to you, to the citizens of the United States, ranges from about 20 percent on up to 35 percent depending on how intensive their labor is and what their tax burden is. And we can, by taking the tax off of our businesses that are providing the retail products and the service products, by taking that tax component out, that averages 22 percent. So that item that will cost you $1, 78 cents of it is actual cost of the production and 22 cents is the cost of the built-in tax. That is the tax, the corporate income tax and the payroll tax that they have to pay their employees and a few other assorted taxes that accumulate along the way. If we quit taxing everyone's productivity, of course, we quit taxing corporate and business productivity as well. That means that the retail costs of goods go down by 22 percent. When that happens, that does a lot of great things. But what it really does with our balance of trade is it discounts the price of what we are selling to foreign companies, foreign countries by 22 percent. So, for example, if we have a sign up like everybody else, back when I did the math, gas was $1.50. So if we put our neon sign up that says gas is $1.50, our competition overseas, they are selling theirs at the same price, we are selling goods into foreign countries as far as we can compete and no further. When we cannot get the price down any lower or the label of the United States is on it, that is the static line by which we are not going to sell any more goods overseas, and that line is different for every commodity, and it is different in every country; but it is competition that sets that line. We can get an advantage by untaxing the cost of the products made by American companies. Taking the burden of that tax out, that will bring the cost down by 22 percent. So now both of us today have a sign up that says gas is $1.50; ours go to $1.17. That is the equivalent component now for our competition for our prices of the goods that are going overseas. And it also it says ``Made in America,'' which helps to sell it as well. So we know what will happen. We will sell that competitive good, that product that is made in America into foreign countries until such time as they match our price and our quality, or they put up some kind of trade barrier, which is another can of worms that we need to address. That changes our balance of trade. It shifts our balance of trade from minus $503 billion a year to a plus number. That is a great number, but I do not know how great it is. I know it is solid, and I know it is substantial. That means more jobs here in the United States of America. That means more American products sold overseas. That means we bring back our balance of trade. Now, another thing that is happening is we are losing industrial jobs overseas. And it is going to happen. If they are paying 68 cents an hour equivalent in China and they buy a punch press or a lathe or whatever kind of industrial product, they are upgrading their productivity with that technology. And as they train their people to do that, we are not going to be able to hire people at 68 cents an hour. We cannot compete with that indefinitely. But what we can do is by discounting what we are selling to those countries is we will keep those jobs here longer. We will be competitive longer by taking the 22 percent out, that cost of the tax component of everything we sell, we take that out and we are more competitive longer which means we keep those industrial jobs here longer. The gentleman from Georgia (Mr. Linder) believes that we will get some of those jobs back again. And I believe that we will get some, and I think we will lose some. I think it will be a slow loss, but we will dramatically slow the loss at a minimum. And it is essential that we hold industry in this country and put tax and regulatory structures in place so that we can. One of the reasons would be national security. It is not just our economy. But we have to produce things that are competitive in the world for our economy. But from a national security standpoint think, for example, that there is a foreign country over there in Europe that produces a guidance piece of technology that guides our missiles or our bombs. Think that that foreign country disagreed with our policy in Iraq when we went in there militarily and think what happens when they stop shipment of that guidance technology and we are not able to use our missiles or our bombs in that same fashion. It puts our national security at risk. That is a fact, by the way, that that did happen. We need to hold our technology here. We need to hold our industry here. We need to hang on to our blue collar jobs. We need to slow this loss of our industry overseas. If we can push it around and bring them back, we can do that. For example, Ireland untaxed new corporations that would move there. A little island of 4 million people. And they now they have about 12\1/ 2\ percent flat tax on their corporations, far more competitive than the rest of Europe, at any rate. But when they untaxed corporations that would come and stay for 10 years, they ended up with today 560 American companies that are established on the little island of Ireland. We should untax these companies that are here. We have lost a lot of American companies overseas. A lot of them would come back home again because of the new tax policy. We have foreign corporations that moved to the United States because of our new tax policy when we untaxed them. That means we have more jobs here in the United States, and that means our productivity goes up and it will be producing those kind of goods that will go overseas, and it improves our balance of trade. Now, Ronald Reagan said what you tax you get less of. He also said what you subsidize you get more of. I will not go down the subsidy side tonight, but I will go down the tax side. What you tax you get less of. We are taxing everyone's productivity in this country. The Federal Government has the first lien on everyone's labor, on everyone's productivity. That means that they reach into your check, they reach into your check at the end of the week and they take out what they want, and they let you take home the rest. That is called take-home pay. We have been so numbed by this that a lot of us do not even think about the money that we make; we think about the money we take home as the money we make. So we can let you keep all of the money that you earn and no longer have to take a withholding out of that check. And then we are incenting the capital formation. We are not taxing either. Here are some of the taxes that we get rid of. I said corporate business tax, income tax, your personal income tax all goes away. The payroll tax on Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, that is the most regressive tax we have in America. Everybody pays that on the first dollar and all the way up to $87,000, and then after that you do not have to pay any more of the Social Security portion, but you do Medicare and Medicaid. That is a regressive tax. It is an extraordinarily regressive tax. And we eliminate that. So we are going to eliminate income tax of all kinds. We eliminate inheritance tax. The death tax goes away. We eliminate tax on interest income, dividend income. We eliminate the tax on capital gains. The tax on your Social Security income, the tax on your pension all goes away. The tax on your interest in dividend income, as I said. So who are the winners in this? Senior citizens are winners. And they are some of the people that I have to think of first because I represent the 5th district of Iowa. And they are in the western third of the State. I have 32 counties. We in Iowa have the highest percentage of our population over the age of 85 of any of the States in the Union. We are arguably the oldest State in the Union. And in this possibly the oldest State in the Union. And of the 32 counties that I represent, I have 10 of the 12 most senior counties in Iowa. I would only advocate a policy that was good for the seniors in this country because it is good for the district that I represent. But what we are able to do with a fair tax is take away your tax on your Social Security income, tax on your pension income, tax on your interest income, your dividend income. We eliminate the tax on capital gains that will let you, if you own a house that you would like to sell, that maybe you bought it for $10,000 now it is worth $110,000, you do not have to pay the capital gains on that any longer if we pass fair tax H.R. 25. You can sell that parcel of real estate without a tax burden. It does not have to be part of the equation, part of the calculation in making a decision. So if you want to go in and lease a duplex or apartment or independent living, if that is your decision, sell your farm too if you choose to do that. Maybe you paid $100 an acre for the farm and today it is worth $3,500. The capital gains on it would be tremendous. That is why we have people hanging on to real estate and hanging on to assets, because they cannot afford to sell them because of the capital gains burden. Senior citizens make out very, very well on this because we untax their income stream, and we let them sell their assets without penalty and they can manage their retirement, and we eliminate the damage tax so they can pass what is left over on to the next generation, which is a part of the American dream as well. Seniors also get along, get another advantage here, that is part of what everybody gets and that is we have to remove the regressive nature of a sales tax. And that regressive nature comes with having to pay a tax rate for everything that you buy. The less income people have, the greater percentage of their income will go to taxes. So we need to address that. That actually is the hardest problem to fix. But the solution is actually very simple once you come to that. That is this: we send into every household in America a rebate check at the first of the month to compensate each family in advance for the amount of money that they will pay in a Federal sales tax in the necessary items on up to the poverty level. So, for example, a family of four would get a check the first day of the month, or wired to their account is more likely going to happen, for an amount of $479 for that month. That is actually a pretty good check. That is the tax portion of what they would spend. Senior citizens get that check; so does the poorest family in America. So does Bill Gates, by the way. Everyone gets untaxed up to the poverty level. Then from there on, you start to pay your tax at a rate that would then be calculated. The average family then would pay less in taxes when the bill is passed than it does today. Senior citizens make out very well. The poorest people in America make out very well because we untax them. And they do not have any tax burden. They get the check for the first of the month for the necessary items. And then neither are we taxing capital formation. We are not punishing you when you save money, when you invest money. You can invest money and earn income off of that without a penalty. So we incent then, we provide for and promote, capital formation. There will be billions of dollars that flow into all kinds of investment accounts. These investment accounts, they do not get sewed into a mattress. That money goes to some good, gets put to some use. Say someone decides I make a lot of money and I only want to spend a little bit of money. So I will take this money and save it, and I will put it into maybe a time deposit at the bank, a CD, certificate of deposit. Well, the bank will take that money and roll it into another investment or loan it to a young entrepreneur in the community that is starting up a business or maybe wants to buy that real estate that has primarily been tied up because of a capital gains bind. That is released. Start that up and maybe we have got young people that go in and buy a farm where they could not do that otherwise or they start a business that they could not do otherwise, or maybe that money goes into research and development. And that is going to produce more items out here. And we use the creativity of America to bring more things to the marketplace. Or the money gets invested by companies to put capital investment in that does improve the productivity of every American. If it is a research and development that produces more of those innovations or higher education, all of those things, where the future of America's economy is, that future up there in the high-tech side, the development side, the investment side where it takes dollars and education and technology, we will incent that and those dollars will be invested there. Those dollars, by the way, improve the productivity of the American worker who will then make more wages. There will be more demand for the American worker. The American worker has then more money in their pockets. They spend that money in the retail counter which then drives this economy. We watch how our economy is when we go up towards Christmas. We say are sales up or down; that tells us a lot about how strong our economy is. There will be more money in the end spent at the retail level. By the way, all those things sold at the retail level get cheaper. They get 22 percent cheaper. If you are wondering how it works, if you are a businessman, again I am from Iowa so we always put it into farming analogies, if you are a farmer and you go out and spend $250,000 on a brand-new combine, and you are thinking I do not want to pay the tax on that, well, you do not pay the tax on that. You do not pay the tax because that is a business input. It is not a last retail stop for personal consumption. So there would be no tax on the combine or the new tractor or the parts that go into it, or the seed or the fertilizer or all the other inputs that are there. Or if you are running a retail store, and you are purchasing inventory for that store, say, for example, you run a grocery store, you do not pay the sales tax on your wholesale cost of those goods. You collect it when you sell. Or if you are running a jewelry store and you happen to be buying jewelry that gets purchased at the inventory level, you put that inventory in the store, you are not paying tax on that inventory. But when the person comes in and purchases that brand new diamond engagement ring that starts out that unique family that hopefully has a lot of children to participate in the American dream, that that new diamond ring does not get income tax on if when you purchase the diamond as a wholesaler or as a retailer, but the person that does it at the resale level from the retailer does pay the tax. But if you are selling it, you get the discounts on average of about 22 percent because the tax burden is off, and all the people, the people that you are paying to work in the grocery store or in the jewelry store or in the grain elevator, wherever it may be, you are no longer paying the payroll tax out of the wages, the 15.3 percent that you take out of the wages and send off to the Federal Government for Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. Many times I have sat there and made payroll out for over 28 years, 1,400 and some consecutive weeks, and I do not know how many different payroll checks I signed, but I met that payroll, and I sat there with that calculator, and I punch out .0765, multiply it times the gross wages, take it out of the employee's wages, add it. As an employer it is 15.3 percent. That does not get withheld any longer. You get to keep that in your payroll as well. Most people think that that half of that 15.3 percent, .0765, can be added to the employee's wages because, after all, that is the cost of the employee. So wages will go up by 7\1/2\ percent. Now, this is, every piece of this policy is a good thing. Everything rolls around to the positive. And when we are finished with this, it adds up this way. What is the rate? You all have to be asking and wondering what is the rate? Well, the rate adds up this way. Remember we are discounting everything you purchase by 22 percent, so compare it with that. We have to put the rebate check into every household to make sure it is not regressive, to make sure we can untax the poor and untax the people on fixed incomes. We will untax Bill Gates if he wants to live at the poverty level, and I am sure he will not. But when we do all of that, that cost is 3 percent. And then when we replace the payroll tax, and that is Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, that .0765 times 2, 15.3 percent of your payroll, that replacement costs 8 percent at the retail level. So now we are at 11 percent as a tax rate, but the replacement portion, then that takes us up to the revenue-neutral number, that number that just generates the income that is coming from the income tax today, that takes 12 percent. So when you add the numbers up, it is 3 percent plus 8 percent, which is 11, and you add 12, so you are at 23 percent; 23 percent embedded tax. But we discounted the same items by 22 percent. So you will ask, how can we do that? That sounds almost like something for nothing. The reason that this works out this way, and we have over $20 million of research on this that supports this, the reason that it works out so well is, first of all, we have a broad tax. It is all sales and service. We allow no exceptions or exemptions of any kind, because if we do, that opens the door up for this big machinery here in Washington, D.C., this monstrosity of a lobby that about half of it is all here because they are looking for a tax discount, the tax credit, the way to minimize the tax liabilities of these companies. And actually individuals only at 61 percent are paying taxes. Remember, as I said, domestic companies, and 61 percent, 71 percent of foreign do not, 61 percent of domestic do not. So this whole component that we have here is the economic model that stimulates the maximum amount of economic growth. So we have incented this capital formation on the high-tech side. We have saved this loss of jobs that drain into overseas. We kept the blue-collar jobs that are here. We have fixed the balance of trade. We put money into investments. We put money into research and development, into high tech, into higher education. All of these are the good things we need to do on the top side of the economy and on the bottom side of the economy and on the balance of trade. And we have done that by changing this retail price by a little bit, because the price goes down by 22 percent when you take the tax out, but the tax rate is embedded at 23 percent. We will tax all sales and all service at that. That is why when it is broad, we can keep the tax cheap. That is an essential component of this. Now, another thing that I think about is today about 44 percent of Americans do not pay income tax. Now, I said corporations do not pay taxes, and they do not. People pay taxes. People producers pay taxes. If you are making an income high enough and do not have discounts or do not have deductions that make sure that you do not, but 44 percent of the Americans are not paying income tax today. That means that that number is growing. That number has grown dramatically in the last few years. If that number grows up over 50 percent, as soon as 51 percent of the people in this country figure out that they can go to the polls and elect themselves members of Congress and elect Members of Congress that will then tax the producers and send the money to the people who are not paying taxes, we have lost. We have lost this freedom. We have lost this constitutional Republic. We have lost this democracy if we let it get that far. It only takes another 6 percent plus 1 for the nonproductive sector of the voting populace, those who are not paying income tax, to have a majority control in this country. Then the only thing that keeps them from voting themselves benefits out of the Treasury may be lack of organization, and maybe it bothers their conscience. I want everybody to have some skin in the game. I want everybody in America to pay some taxes. We will send the rebate check into every household so we untax the poor, but when the poor goes out, when everybody goes out and purchases anything at the retail level, any sales or any service, then they are paying their taxes. That means they understand every day that they do a transaction how expensive the Federal Government is. Every little kid when they grow up in America and they go to buy their baseball cards, let me see if I have them here, buy their baseball cards or buy their Barbie doll clothes, and they have to reach in and pull a couple of dimes out for Uncle Sam, that will hurt a little bit every time they have to do that. They will think about where that money goes. They will know intuitively from the time they are 4 or 5 years old that they have to fund this government. When they do that, I think they will understand when they get old to vote and participate in public life and old enough to hopefully serve in this United States Congress someday that there is such a thing as personal responsibility. And today we have created this dependent society where many of them look at government as the first solution instead of the last resort. I want generations of Americans that look at government as the last resort and come up with their own first and second solutions and do everything they can to resolve their own problems at home. We need to have more independence and more freedom. This bill does that. H.R. 25. You can find information about all of the statistics and data I have given you at fairtax.org. We today have some 46 or so cosponsors on the bill. The gentleman from Georgia (Mr. Linder) is the lead. The people in Georgia understand how important this is. They support a fair tax. They know this is the most dynamic thing we can get done. As I said earlier, the economists out there do agree. The only question is the political difficulty, not the economic difficulty. We are here to solve this political difficulty, and I am here speaking to this tonight. I have done programs in Council Bluffs and in Sioux City. In Council Bluffs it was sitting room only. In Sioux City it was standing room only. I did not find anyone that could come up with a comment or question that would be a reason why we should not do this. I believe everybody in America is a winner when we replace the IRS and the Income Tax Code with a fair tax, a retail sales and service tax, an embedded cost of 23 percent; discount those retail prices on sales and service by 22 percent because we are able to untax the businesses that produce those sales and service. And by the way, when you look around this country, there are some people that do not pay taxes, and there are some people I would really, really like to tax, and I am looking around at the drug dealers in America. They are living in a black market, illegal economy, and they are dealing in cash. Do you think that they call up H&R Block and say, I brought in $1.5 million this year, and I had a 67 percent profit margin; therefore, I must have a tax liability on $1 million? They are not doing that. These people live in the shadows, but they take their cash out, and they go to the retail, and they buy things. That is why they are doing what they can do so they can buy things off the shelf. Clothes, cars, and entertainment and all the things the rest of us do, they are doing it tax free. Their business is in the shadows. We get to tax them not through the income tax, because we cannot catch them with that, on their cash income, but we will catch them at the retail level when they purchase things from the shelf. So we get to tax drug dealers and prostitution. There is about a trillion dollars worth of illegal economy going on in America. We get to tax it all. So that is about $230 billion in our Treasury there that ups the ante. That allows us to take the rest of your taxes down a little bit. Tourists come into this country. They do not mind taxing me when I go into their country. We seem to mind taxing tourists in this country. If we can tax the tourism industry that comes in here, people from foreign countries that are using our infrastructure, they drive on our roads, they flush our toilets, they use the electricity, all of these things that are part of our system in this country flowing and going so well, if we can tax them on what they spend in this country, that would be $50 billion a year added to the $230 billion that I mentioned earlier. We are up to where we have $3 billion in revenue from the illegal side of this thing and from the tourism side, the prostitution, the drugs and all of that. So it is nice to have those people carrying part of the burden. They have not carried any of their fair share. The fair tax will require them to carry their fair share. There are other things that we need to do to bring them in line. That is the big picture on this. Every aspect of our economy gets better and better and better as we look at this policy and program. So we tax the tourists. We tax the drug trade. We tax the prostitutes. We tax the illegal industry that is in America and generate a number approaching $300 billion a year. We untax the poor. We untax the senior citizens on fixed incomes at least, and the middle-American family that will get that rebate check in their households at about $479 a month for a family of four. That makes that number around $40,000 a year. They will find their tax rate at about 15.6 percent. So they get a cheaper tax rate, too. It helps everybody in America, and, by the way, there is a political dynamic to this. When we started selling American products into countries that have not been competitive before, the European Union comes to mind, when that happens, they have to look at their own tax policy when they cannot be competitive any longer. That means they have to go back into their Parliament and make a decision on what their tax policy will be in order to compete with the United States of America. And that policy will be closer to a fair tax policy than the 70 percent income tax they have today that goes to, and that was Denmark, for example, where they take that income tax and provide all kind of things for people that take away their personal responsibility, create a dependency, grow a socialistic philosophy, and puts the burden on the economy that does not allow them to be competitive unless they raise the taxes so they can subsidize the things they need to, like our egg products, so it is harder for us to compete with them. At some point our competition in this country breaks their bank, and they have to buy into our policy. When they do that, the European countries, the rest of the countries in the world will be more free than they are today. There will be a lower tax rate. People will be able to keep all the money they earn instead of having to give up 70 percent of it, and that means they will be more productive. And they will advocate for the same things we do. And the center for political gravity in Europe, for example, shifts to the right. When it does that, they are a closer friend to us, and they become more allies than they are today. And they have been good allies over the years, but we can improve that with the fair tax policy. So H.R. 25, fairtax.org, embedded tax costs of 23 percent, reducing the cost of everything we sell by 22 percent. We repair our balance of trade; that minus $503 billion a year in balance of trade goes to a plus number. We slow the loss of unskilled jobs or lower-skilled jobs going overseas, and we promote capital formation that grows our economy on the high-tech side. And we lower the taxes on middle-income America, and untax the poor and the senior citizens on fixed income. It does everything that a tax policy can do. Additionally, the costs of compliance gets reduced by 95 percent. Forty-five States in the Union today have a sales tax in place. They already have the collection system there. They already have the audit system in there. So only five States have to put in place a sales tax system. They will grumble and groan about it a little bit, and they will be the five States to oppose this, and yet the best thing overall for America. So, when they do collect those taxes, it will just be the State treasurer sends the check to the U.S. Treasury. It is that simple, and the audit systems are there now, and we can contract with them to continue to do the audits as they have, and we also want to pay \1/4\ of 1 percent to the States for collecting the tax and to the retailer for collecting the tax. Have you ever had the government send you a check for collecting taxes before or did you just send it in and be glad you can keep the little bit that is left? We change that. So April 15, that day when people stay up all night long pulling their hair out to make sure they can file the forms, make sure they can meet their tax obligations, and there are millions of Americans that go to borrow money to pay their taxes on that day or the day after, April 15 is the worst day on our calendar, and it can become just another day when this Congress passes the fair tax, H.R. 25. The time is right. The majority leader understands this. He has been a supporter of the fair tax for a long time. We know we need to bring tax reform. We know we need to bring a dynamic energy into this economy. No one, no one in their right mind, that is, would advocate that we would take the internal revenue code we have today and modify it and amend it and try to somehow get tax reform out of this monstrosity of pages and produce something that provided equity for the American people. It is not possible with that monstrosity. If we went to the flat tax, as Steve Forbes advocated some years ago and as Dick Armey, who was the majority leader in this chamber, advocated some years ago, that postcard, if you put your taxes on, still keeps the IRS intact, still requires an audit. That postcard is your income tax the way it looked 90 years ago when this monstrosity first began. If we could cut it back to that with a flat tax, it would still grow into another monstrosity again. Over time, we can eliminate the IRS, we can eliminate the tax code, and by the way, we must amend the Constitution so that income tax is unconstitutional again and repeal the amendment that established and legalized the income tax, and the American people will be ready to do that; they will get confidence in. We will pass the bill and introduce a constitutional amendment and watch this dynamic economy jump, but the piece that is most important is a $1 trillion anchor on our economy imposed by the IRS today. That $1 trillion anchor can be cut. H.R. 25 cuts that anchor chain. That anchor can stay in the bottom of the ocean, and we can sail this ship of our economy free, and we can take these people that are now involved in the regulatory sector of the economy, the IRS workers and all those people who are so busy working for tax avoidance or tax compliance, I mean, we have got this whole competition going on out here. They can all go to work in the private sector producing a good or service that has value, that they can cash a check for, and they can go out, too, with the money they earn, keep all the money they earn, spend it at the retail level, decide when they pay their taxes. It is freedom; it is fair. It is fairtax.org. It is time this Congress moves. It is time we have a conference to debate and discuss this and get off the dime on what is the best policy. This is the best policy. I believe that should be settled with the American people. We need to move forward and get past this indecision. So with that, Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the opportunity to address the chamber tonight, and I look forward to some action on this issue and many others as this time unfolds.

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague, the gentleman from Indiana (Mr. Pence), for yielding to me to address my colleagues and America on this issue. For many years now, this Congress, in response to the people of the United States of America, have fought diligently to end the most ghastly and ghoulish and gruesome procedure known to modern man. And as we have done so, this Congress has held hearings in the 104th, 105th, 106th, and 108th Congresses. That is over 8 to 9 years if gathering information and data and analysis of the concept of what we call and have defined in this Congress as partial-birth abortion. Now, for myself, as I thumb through the phone book in the Washington, D.C. yellow pages, I can find in there ads for abortions up to at least 22 weeks, and I believe there are one or two that advertise up to 24 weeks. And if the advertisement goes to that, then you can be confident that those partial-birth abortions are taking place beyond the 24 weeks. And, in fact, in this country, there is a Supreme Court decision that allows for such a thing up until the very last minute before birth. The circumstances around this law that we have then in this country come to Congress finally passing a ban on partial-birth abortion that was signed by our President. And that was something that was difficult, in fact impossible to obtain under the previous administration. We have it today. I sit on the House Committee on the Judiciary, and we held hearings and we gathered facts, did fact-finding, due diligence, and gathered data that reaches out all across this country into all of the experts, the best experts that we can find, to bring them forward to testify before congressional hearings. There were people to testify on each side of the argument, both pro and con on this procedure that we know all across this Nation as partial-birth abortion. And when that happens, these expert witnesses testify, they are cross-examined by nearly every member of the Committee on the Judiciary. At the end of that period of time, then we debate the relative merits of the issue. As that debate flows through, we bring the bill for a vote, and generally through subcommittee, full committee, and then out to the floor. The same procedure takes place over in the other body. That gathers all of the best expertise that can be gathered, it draws it all out of the United States of America, and then we have the administrative branch that also has their staff and their expertise, and they do their fact-finding. So when the House of Representatives votes overwhelmingly and the other body votes overwhelmingly to ban that ghastly, ghoulish, and gruesome procedure of partial-birth abortion, and when Congress comes with findings that declare that a partial-birth abortion is never medically necessary to preserve the health of the woman, there is no system of fact-finding or data-gathering that exists in this country today that can begin to match the due diligence of the United States Congress. So, when word came to me late Good Friday that a judge in Lincoln, Nebraska, had made remarks during the last witness' cross-examination in the case that is one of the three jurisdictions that the gentleman from Indiana spoke about, that the attorneys in the case had done more due diligence than Congress had, that echoed into my ears an hour or two, if not within minutes. When it did, it looked to me that the preparation was at least there to declare that Congress had not done due diligence, that the attorneys in the case had, and that would be reason or justification enough to overturn our congressional ban, our Federal ban on partial-birth abortion. So the decision was made late that Friday afternoon, and I was in Lincoln at 9 on Monday morning. I make one minor correction to the gentleman from Indiana (Mr. Pence): It was round-trip miles rather than one way. It was a little bit to adjust it into my schedule. I walked into the courtroom at 9, and I am confident most of the actors in the courtroom knew I was coming, judging by the reaction in the courtroom. I listened to that case between 9 and almost up to 12, nearly noon, just stepping out for a couple of message exchanges. At noon I went down there outside the Federal building in Lincoln, Nebraska, and held a press conference. I made the statement describing how Congress comes to their findings, what due diligence Congress uses, and that there is no substitute for the due diligence of Congress. For a single judge to substitute his opinion for the collective wisdom of the United States of America is the height of arrogance. It also exposes judicial activism. It turns the law on its head. There is nothing that we could pass in this Congress that would meet that kind of standard that would allow a single judge to substitute his judgment for the wisdom of the people of America. That is what that press conference was about. It echoed across this Nation from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean and points in between, and I am hopeful that it echoes into that courtroom and the courtrooms of San Francisco and New York where any activist judge in this country realizes that the legislative power belongs to the United States Congress. That is defined in the United States Constitution. If we allow judicial activism to run its course, there is no point in this body existing. They will have taken away all of the legislative power of this Congress if we do not draw the line. I would have said a year ago that the line was blurred between the judicial and the legislative branch of government. Today I will say it is obliterated. It has been obliterated in a number of cases not particularly relevant to the ban on partial-birth abortion. We have the authority as Congress to rein in the run-away judiciary, to slap the wrists of judicial activism. In fact, all Federal courts, with the exception of the Supreme Court, exist because they have been established from time to time by the Congress. Whatever the Congress establishes, they can take away. So it is conceivable that any of these Federal lower courts are not a requirement of Congress, we could do with them as we wish. We want to do what is prudent and appropriate, but we also have an obligation to preserve the separation of powers. I will continue to do that. Mr. Speaker, I want to speak to the fetal pain issue as well. I do not think that is hard for any of us to understand. We have heard testimony during hearings of this Congress of a baby that was almost to the last moment of its life reaching its arm out with that fear-of- falling reflex. It is unrealistic to believe that baby did not feel the pain at that moment, at that moment when they are trusting into the hands outside the womb instead of the protection of the womb, to have those hands take the life and drain the brains from that innocent, most innocent little child. If Members have seen the pictures that have been up on the Internet, particularly on the Drudge Report, during intrauterine surgery, a little hand reaching up, grabbing ahold of the finger of a doctor. Imagine a little hand grasping the hand of the surgeon that is there to protect and save its life, and that little hand and that little body cannot feel pain? Of course it does. For a doctor to say, I have never thought of such a thing, it did not occur to me whether there was pain there, that would not be the case if this were happening with an animal. There would be a national outrage, and there should be a national outrage on this. We have to play this out in the courts in New York, Nebraska and San Francisco. We are going to see these three inferior courts come with a decision. Those decisions will find their way to the United States Supreme Court where the Supreme Court will in the next year or so be obligated to makes a decision on whether Congress can actually declare findings and declare fact. We have done so. There are only two questions before the court, I understand. One of them is do congressional findings determine that a partial-birth abortion is never necessary to protect the health of the woman; and the other question is did we define partial-birth abortion accurately and precisely enough that one who is providing that procedure, and that is hard for me to say, understands clearly at what point they would be breaking the law? I think we have a precise definition of partial-birth abortion. It is clear whether it is a head delivery or whether it is a breech delivery. We define that moment when it becomes a partial-birth abortion, and Leroy Carhart or any of those practitioners understand that, and they are simply trying to confuse the American public. I will stand for life. I stand with the gentleman from Indiana (Mr. Pence) and the hundreds of people in this Congress and the millions across this country that understand that innocent life begins at the instant of conception.

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, I am introducing the Know Your Vote Counts Act of 2004, legislation which will amend the Help America Vote Act of 2002 to require voting systems to print a paper record for each ballot that the voter can verify for accuracy before the ballot is cast. This makes a recount possible in the event that a state determines one is needed. Without a paper trail, a recount is impossible. Current law permits precincts to print ballots for the first time after the polls have closed. Therefore, voters might never get to see their ballots. This creates a risk that the computer record may differ from the voter's true intentions, without the voter ever knowing. Moreover, computer malfunctions or insider hacking might occur between the time of voting and printout, defeating the goal of the paper record requirement. The Know Your Vote Counts Act eliminates these possibilities by clarifying to states that a ballot must be printed at the time of each vote, thus ensuring the achievement of HAVA's goal of electoral integrity. Electronic voting systems are supposed to increase voter confidence in election results. Without this safeguard, they seem to do anything but. A prominent fear has developed that these machines will facilitate a cyber version of dumping ballot boxes in the river. Software could be set to record votes with no regard to how the votes were actually cast. It is instructive that the Pentagon scrapped an Internet voting project because officials there determined there was no way they could guarantee that voting records could be kept secure. This issue should be a major concern for all of us. The new Election Assistance Commission has plans to disburse $2.3 billion as early as next month to states for technology upgrades in voting equipment. Complying only with the upgrades required under current law, however, poses future problems for states. Presently, states could purchase machines without the capability of printing ballots for the voter to verify for accuracy. States have already experienced problems that illustrate the problems created by voting machines without an auditable paper record. In Indiana, a glitch resulted in 5,352 voters casting 144,000 votes. Virginia machines subtracted votes rather than adding them to a candidate's total in some cases. In Florida, 10,844 votes were cast; candidate won by 12 votes, but there were 137 under-votes. Florida state law requires a manual recount of all under-votes in a race with this tight a margin, but no paper trail was available and the recount was impossible. A recent study of Maryland electronic voting machines found that they were all equipped with one of two locks, which keys to the other machines could open. Finally, in Georgia, on Super Tuesday, ten voting terminals were found sitting in the lobby of a Georgia Tech building unattended, in unlocked cases. These machines easily could have been altered during this time. This legislation protects the integrity of electronic voting systems by requiring a voter-verified paper audit record for each ballot. The voter can verify the ballot at that time, and the paper record created can be used if state determines that recount is needed. To preserve ballot secrecy and prevent voter intimidation, this bill prohibits voters from copying or removing the record from a polling place. The Know Your Vote Counts Act respects principles of federalism and defers to state law, allowing states to make their own decisions about when to require recounts while preventing computer error or deliberate fraud from altering election outcomes. This is not a partisan issue. It is an American issue. All Americans must know that their votes count. I urge my colleagues to co-sponsor the Know Your Vote Counts Act of 2004 in the 108th Congress so that we can ensure that the votes cast are the votes counted.

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. An environmental tax. Mr. Speaker, I would now like to yield to the gentleman from New Mexico (Mr. Pearce).

Mr. KING of Iowa. I yield to the gentleman from New Mexico.

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, first, I would like to thank my colleague on my left, the gentleman from New Mexico (Mr. Pearce), who has pointed out quite accurately and correctly that if one side of the aisle is down here carrying a message to the American people relentlessly, if not logically, day by day by day, that is the only subject matter that Americans have to discuss. As I sat in here for the last hour preparing, apparently, for this Special Order hour, and I have considered that I really did not have to do that, it was great preparation to sit and listen to the rhetoric that came from the string of Members, I think probably not coincidentally, from Ohio. So I am just going to start up working backwards through the list of things that were raised here while they are freshest in the minds of the people that are listening, the Members of the other body, and those in this Chamber and the people that are listening around the country. The first is with regard to OPEC and the criticism of OPEC for the position that they have taken to limit the supply of hydrocarbons to the United States. Certainly that has been a factor in the 1970s. It was a factor in our Presidential elections after that, and we came out of that. Our dependency has increased on foreign oil, and I regret that. But OPEC has taken a position that is going to be reflected by the Saudi Arabians who ruled more of the OPEC oil than anyone else. I have with me a document that I will just read some quotes. Prince Bandar has made some remarks speaking for the increase in supplies because he says the President and the Crown Prince have been in touch on this subject for a while now. Both leaders feel strongly that higher energy prices have a negative impact on world economy. So I happen to know that there is a delegation on its way over to Saudi Arabia right now to thank the leadership in Saudi Arabia for their efforts to increase supplies as a way of holding down increases in costs of gasoline in the United States and thank them for the efforts that they have gone through to help us in the war on terror. There have been significant improvements in that country over the last couple of months. So these remarks that are made on the floor of Congress are not conducive to us solving the oil supply problem and I think are not conducive either for us solving this problem of worldwide terror.

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, I would like to give a perspective of No Child Left Behind that is a little bit different perspective for some of the other States, those States that may not believe there is a significant advantage to them. I have the privilege of being from the State of Iowa, and we rank in the top three every year in ACT tests; and we have for years put out Iowa basic skills and Iowa tests of educational development, that analysis that we do of students every year, comparing them against their growth from year to year, in a number of different subjects and a composite score that we do, something that goes back to the time that I was at least in grade school, and that is some years ago, and before that actually, and those tests have been given around the world, places as far away as China. So the credibility that the Iowa public school system has worldwide is high, and our competitiveness in our graduates, particularly measured by ACT test scores and also the success of our young students as they go off and go on to higher education, is also high. Arguably, the public school education in K-12 in the State of Iowa ranks in the top three, maybe as the best in the country; and so because of that long-standing tradition to education that we have, we have those kinds of results and standards, and yet we are faced with a No Child Left Behind policy that is a one-size-fits-all. Those States that have high excellence in education may not see a significant marginal improvement, but we really do need to help those students in those States like Mississippi and Arkansas. We really need to lift them up and get them back into this educational stream. I yield to my colleague from New Mexico. The Shocks to Our Economy

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, I yield now to the gentleman from Colorado (Mr. Beauprez).

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from Colorado (Mr. Beauprez) for his comments. Picking up on that theme, I appreciate the gentleman's remarks about how sensitive natural gas prices are to the Corn Belt and the fact that the gentleman's background and experience as a dairy farmer and a banker and someone who has been all involved in this economy understands that the very foundation for all economies is that all new wealth comes from the land. In our State, it is corn and beans and oats and hay and grass in our pastures, and we value add to that as close to the cornstalk as we can, as many times as we can; and we need the energy from the gentleman's State and from the State of New Mexico because we are extraordinarily susceptible to natural gas. We use it to dry grain with, we use it for anhydrous ammonia, our nitrogen supply, and we use it for all the other uses that the rest of the world does as well. So I am extraordinarily sensitive to that and the significant point that the natural gas pipeline in the energy bill brings gas down now that is already discovered and already tapped into from the North Slope down to the lower 48 States. The other tax is the outforcing, but I will also declare there is an ``E'' tax on everything we buy. That means there is an energy component. But the ``E'' does not stand for energy, it stands for environmental tax. It has become a cult in this Congress, a religion in this Congress to the extent that we cannot pass drilling in ANWR, as the gentleman from New Mexico (Mr. Pearce) said earlier, which is the most logical place in the world to go get oil. It is up there and identical to deposits on the North Slope. There has not been a single environmental problem on the North Slope since 1972 when they finally lifted the environmental embargo, which, by the way, kept me from going up there and actually actively participating in real jobs up there. So now today that oil sits under ANWR and we have gas on the North Slope that we cannot get here to the United States. We cannot get gas out of the State of Colorado.

Mr. KING of Iowa. I would be glad to.

Mr. KING of Iowa. I thank the gentleman from New Mexico, and I would address some of the cleanup issues here. I would like to point out, also, that as Republicans, we stand here in this Congress together and we work toward a common goal. Those who have been listening here will hear a consistent voice about the progress that we have made, the Jobs and Growth Act, the transportation bill that just passed here in this Congress this afternoon, a number of other initiatives that have been good on balance for all of America. That is not to imply that we think our work is done. It is not to imply that we think our work is perfect. In fact, one of the approaches I have to life is I am always looking back and seeing what should we have done better, the lament I have about how we had an opportunity that could have been better capitalized on than the opportunities that we have had; and those are the things that motivate many of us to go forward into the future and try to perfect a policy that we always recognize is imperfect. Some of the pieces hanging around out here that do need to be addressed is the regulation burden that is on the backs of American businesses. How do we move to another level? We have the strongest growth of any industrialized country in the world right now. We heard that in the President's speech in this city last night. We have the strongest growth, but that is not good enough. Those who rest on their laurels will soon be swallowed up by those who do not. It puts me in mind of a quotation that I recall, I cannot attribute it to an individual, but someone will know and, that is, that history is the sound of hobnail boots storming up the stairs and silver slippers coming down. That is what we are in danger of, is moving into these silver slippers and being complacent and settling into our easy chairs while those folks that are a little more hungry and a little more aggressive, those folks that will get out of bed and go to work a little earlier, work a little later and will maybe work for a little bit less are putting pressure on this economy. We need to do a number of things to improve our economy in the direction we are going. We talked about energy. I am pleased with the animation that comes out of my colleagues on energy. It animates me. I was able to go to Alaska with the gentleman from New Mexico to ANWR. I recall flying over that 19.5 million acres of ANWR. Of that 19.5 million, 1.5 million is the area that has oil underneath it. It is the coastal plain. It is an arctic desert coastal plain. The elevations vary just a little bit from sea level across there. We flew over 1.5 million acres of that coastal plain looking for wildlife. ANWR stands for Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. One would think that place would be teeming with wildlife. In fact, they told us that the caribou come for about 4 to 6 weeks in the spring, have their calves and go back to Canada. The rest of the time they are gone. We looked around for wildlife from that plane ride over and back along that coastal plain, two different routes, all of us searching. I saw two white birds and four musk oxen. I did the math on that. I divided the 4 musk oxen into 1.5 million acres of coastal plain. It comes out to 375,000 acres per ox. I did not see them all. There were some more there, but there is plenty of room for people and for musk oxen and for caribou. In fact, the caribou herd on the north slope, a different herd that has lived now with the pipeline since 1972 when it began, that herd was 7,000 in 1972, and today it is 28,000. Caribou do very well in that kind of an environment. But aside from energy and the policies that we need to promote ethanol, promote biodiesel. I have got wind in my district. Some of that wind is getting cost competitive. It is not just some States like New Mexico or Colorado that are energy States. Iowa and the Fifth Congressional District of Iowa is an energy export center. All of those policies we need to do to move forward with our domestic production puts me in mind of a commercial that I watched on television. I have to phrase it this way. The apparent Democrat nominee for President of the United States has a commercial that ran in Iowa for months and months. It made three points. It said, I blocked the oil drilling in ANWR, and I will never send your sons and daughters over to the Middle East to fight for foreign oil, and I will create 500,000 new jobs. That was the equation. There are some smart people in this Congress, but I have yet to find anybody that can put that equation together and reconcile those three points. Stop domestic production and be proud of that and why, I have no idea. I want to promote domestic production consistent with sound environmental science, not religion, but science. And so blocking that production does not help new jobs except exports them overseas. And then never sending sons and daughters over to the Middle East to fight for foreign oil. If you declare it to be a police action, then you can fight on this country and you will turn this Nation into one huge Israel where we can only then guard every theater, guard every bus stop, guard every school and every hospital and every church and still see our women and children blown to bits. This is not a police action. This is not a law enforcement problem. This is a war on terror, and we are not in Iraq fighting for foreign oil. We are in Iraq having freed 25 million people in Iraq. And so that equation does not work. And creating 500,000 new jobs, well, at the rate this economy is going, in another couple of weeks, we will have that done within the last 6 weeks. I can do the math on that. I did the math. 308,000 new jobs in the last month, times 12, that is just one month of growth, that comes out to be 3,696,000 jobs. That is an annual rate of job growth. I maybe would take issue with a couple of the gentlemen that spoke ahead of me. We do want job growth to go on. If it goes on at this pace, we will soon run out of people willing to do the work at any price. We will not have enough bodies to do it. This is excellent, extraordinary economic growth. I do not know that it is sustainable, but it is awfully good news. One of the things we need to do to sustain our economy is to reduce this burden of litigation and regulation that is on us. I sat in on a presentation by some business executives, it has been about a year ago now, up in New York City. The presentation came down to this final number: 3 percent of our gross domestic product is being consumed by the litigation process, class action lawsuits. If you eat too many French fries, sue McDonald's, those kinds of ideas. The tobacco lawsuits which put a price on the cigarettes that goes regressively against the people that are the greatest users, Mr. Speaker. And so as you add up the cost of the litigation in this country, and it adds up to 3 percent of our GDP, and you think in terms of about 3.5 percent GDP is required in order for us to move forward and grow with our economy and sustain the necessities for the infrastructure that we need to build out, 3.5 percent required for that, but the trial lawyers get 3 percent off the top. That means we have got to grow at 6.5 percent to sustain that, and I think we need to do some things with regard to tort reform. In the Committee on the Judiciary, we have passed a number of them. Nothing broad enough. Nothing broad enough that may have a real impact on this 3 percent. Plus the burden of regulation in this country, just Federal regulations that are on the backs of all those businesses, the gentleman from New Mexico's (Mr. Pearce) business and my construction business before I sold it to my oldest son, actually less than a year ago, and the gentleman from Colorado's (Mr. Beauprez) business as well, the burden of those Federal regulations adding up across this country to over $850 billion a year. That is wasted money. That is not productive. It is not things in the productive sector of the economy where jobs are created. Where we have jobs created in the productive sector of the economy, there are contributions that come from taxes that help to fund government, and when that happens then there is a little money left over for No Child Left Behind, and that is some cleanup. The gentleman from Ohio made a statement that they are underfunded on No Child Left Behind by $1.5 billion. Well, I hope he is sitting over in his office listening to this, because he needs to take a look at the real process here, and America needs to understand it as well. There is authorization, and then there is appropriation. Those two numbers do not match. Authorization says we can go ahead and appropriate maybe up to this amount, cap it there, no more, but use judgment to hold this into fiscal restraint. This number that is being claimed by the gentleman from Ohio on No Child Left Behind, this $1\1/ 2\ billion, I can only assume, if it is anchored on anything, it is anchored on authorization, not appropriation. There is not a way that one can calculate that and make that allegation that we owe $1\1/2\ billion to Ohio unless it has been appropriated, and if it is appropriated the money would be there, and the difference needs to be understood. This claim, by the way, if we look back through the records, the last time the Democrats had a majority in the House and the Senate and the Presidency and they got a chance to fund education to their will, they had an authorization number and then they had an appropriation number, and they did not match. But the folks on the other side of the aisle were not here saying, ``We are underfunded, Mr. President.'' That is the issue here, is the credibility aspect between authorization, appropriation. I yield to the gentleman from north New Mexico.

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from New Mexico (Mr. Pearce) for his comments. Mr. Speaker, another subject matter I would like to raise is in rebuttal to the remarks made by the previous speakers from the Ohio delegation, and that would be with regard to unemployment and the very strong statements made on why we need to extend and expand unemployment benefits. We have done that in this Congress, and it has been up for a vote twice in a little more than a year that I have been here, and I will tell the Members that I come to the table with a little bit different viewpoint on that. That is, first of all, the demand on a minimum wage increase and possibly the discussion that has to do with a living wage; and I want to argue that there is hardly a legitimate minimum wage in this country at all. Most people are working for more than the minimum wage. Our economy has grown past that, and the minimum wage itself sometimes keeps people from getting in entry level. I pointed out that it used to be one could drive into a gas station anywhere and some young person would come out there, entry-level job, and wash the windshield, check the oil, check the air in the tires, and fill the gas tank up and bring them their change and send them along their way. That was kind of a nice service, and they learned a work ethic. We do not do that anymore, and one of the reasons is because of minimum wage. But labor is an equation just like any other commodity. Labor is a commodity, and it is like corn and beans or oil, as we talked about earlier, or gold or shares in the marketplace. The value of labor is predicated upon two things: the supply and the demand of labor, just like the supply and demand of gold or oil, controls the price. So when we start to interfere with that cost and we raise that cost of entry level labor up, then we are going to have some people who lose out on jobs. If we can legislate, by the way, a minimum wage, then I would challenge then the next step is legislating a living wage. As I hear about living wages, then I say, well, if we can raise that price up, and living wage used to be claimed to be something like $8.56 an hour. So if we could legislate a living wage, then why in the world could we not just go ahead and legislate prosperity? If it does not cost jobs, if people are not going to get unemployed because of raising a minimum wage or moving up to a living wage, then let us all just be rich and let us set that level someplace at $20 or $25 or $30 an hour, and then we can all just share in this prosperity that would be legislated by the wise people from over here on the other side of the aisle. That does not work, because it is supply and demand. It is working. That is why the real minimum wage is substantially higher than the legislative statutory minimum wage. Transportation, we passed that today. That puts dollars and jobs out there. Transportation is the fundamental, foundational first building block in economic development. Transportation, education, high-speed telecommunications are those components today. Transportation was the first component. It is the most essential component. We have now started down the path of providing for those jobs and building the American economy, but it can be stronger, and the bill could have been better. I cannot leave this closed without addressing some things that need to be better, and that is the environmental burden on the transportation cost. Eighteen point four cents of every American's gas, when they put the nozzle in their tank, goes into this highway fund. But of that 18.4 cents out of every gallon comes about 28 percent just to feed the E-tax, the environmental monster, the cult, a religious type of environmental cultism, rather than a responsible way of dealing with our environment. We cannot even inventory the offshore natural gas reserves off the coast of Florida because of the barrier here in this Congress because of the E-tax that is on us. So there is an environmental piece to this. Then there is a wage scale piece to this, the Davis-Bacon wage scale. That will increase the cost of wages from 8 to 38 percent and actually some statistics show 5 to 35 percent. But I will just say average that all out and that comes to about 23 percent of this; this is higher than it needs to be because of federally mandated wage scales. So we add the 28 percent for environmental, let us say 20 percent for the wage scale. So we are at 48 percent, and we have not even dealt yet with mass transit, bike trails, money for scrubbing the graffiti off the walls. Come on. Do we not have some people in our prisons that we could give them a wire brush and send them out there? Why are we imposing that upon the taxpayers of America to clean off the graffiti? Is that not a local issue? So when we add all these pieces up, I will argue that we can come to 68 percent, maybe 71 percent of this can go somewhere else to be funded if, in fact, we believe it should be a priority whatsoever. I want every dime possible out of those transportation dollars to go into concrete and earth moving and pipe work and transportation that can be used to grow our economy, and I pledge here and now to move forward with this over the next 6 years if they send me back to do so in order to try to turn those dollars in a more responsible fashion for transportation. We are doing a lot of the right things, Mr. Speaker. We need to continue improving on every single component where we claim credit. We will get better, and we have got a lot to claim credit for, including 308,000 new jobs just in this past month alone.

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, I would add to that there is a different philosophy today than there was when your grandparents came here or when mine came here. My grandmother came over from Germany. I remember her advice to my father who went off to kindergarten on his first day speaking German only and when he came home from the first day, walked into the house and said hello to his mother in German, and she turned to him and said, speaking German in this household is for you from now on verboten, because we came here to be Americans, and you are going to learn English in school and bring it home and teach to it me. I wish I could say that in German today, but it conveys a philosophy of buying into this culture and this civilization. Yes, there are many immigrants that come into this country who do buy into the philosophy; but sadly, millions of them are met at the border with radical multiculturalists, the cult of multiculturalism with, I used to say hundreds of millions of dollars funding, and now today I say it is in the billions of dollars, funding this multiculturalism that is infused into every level of our curriculum, every level of our lives, and it rejects a greater American civilization. It rejects the very concept that America is a great Nation or that we have the lead culture, economy, and military in the world, or that we are the unchallenged superpower in the world. They focus on the things that they can be critical of, what they call America's failures. Mr. Speaker, multiculturalism draws a new line. This new line is, everybody belongs to a group, except for the gentleman from Colorado (Mr. Tancredo) and myself and other folks who fit in our category. I went to a college campus, and before I went there to speak, I went to their little search engine on their home page and I typed in ``multiculturalism'' and I hit search. What came back was 59 different multicultural groups registered on campus, starting with Asians, ends with Zeitgeists, and in between, and every one, virtually, a victim's group. As I talked to those young people and I said, look at this. When you arrive here as a freshman on the first day, there might as well be 59 card tables set up out here in the parking lot and you can go down through here and choose your victims group. Start with Asians, ends with Zeitgeists, you will belong to 5, 6, 7, 8, or 10 of them before you get down through this line, and everyone will tell you why you ought to have the sweat off of somebody else's brow, everyone will tell you that you are a victim and you deserve special rights and group rights by virtue of this merit of being a victim. But if I might conclude, then, so your grandparents and my grandparents that came here did not see themselves as victims. They saw themselves as being extraordinarily fortunate individuals that had the opportunity to pull themselves up by their bootstraps. I yield back to my colleague.

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the gentleman's assumption that I came here asking for you to yield and saying that that is where my heart is and my head is. Without preparation, I did want to also listen to your presentation, which I did last night on C- SPAN, by the way, and I know millions of Americans were listening as well. I thank the gentleman for the leadership he has provided on this issue. In this Congress and in politics around the country, whether it is State legislatures or city councils or county supervisors, there is a thing that has to happen in the dynamics in order for good public policy to be formed, and that is that there are always two sides to an issue, or it would not be an issue. As those issues get pulled and tugged and massaged and people in the middle start to weigh in for and against the increments of that policy, over time, that policy is shaped in such a way where you finally get to the point where there is enough agreement where we can pass such a policy. We are a long, long ways from that in this immigration policy in the United States today. I look back to the years when Pat Buchanan was running for President and he insisted that we have a nationwide debate on immigration. I regret that we were not able to move that debate forward at that time, shape this policy before we got to this critical situation that we are in today, with massive numbers flowing over the border and not a policy to deal with it. I understand the President's motivation. I think his head and his heart want to go down that path to help 10 or 12 or 14 million people. The other side of this equation is one the gentleman from Colorado and I agree on, and many, many members of this Congress and even a greater percentage of people across the country that intuitively understand, that an immigration policy which by Constitution is vested within the responsibility of the United States Congress, an immigration policy must be designed to enhance the economic, the social, and the cultural well-being of the United States of America. What other purpose would we have? I look at some things that happened in my State. We have an affirmative action program within our universities that has been approved by the board of regents. It is an 8.5 percent, we cannot call it a quota, it is an 8.5 percent minority ``goal.'' Well, this minority goal almost moved some State legislation that would have imposed the equivalent of a high burden on the taxpayers of the State to try to reach this 8.5 percent. In Iowa, we have about a 3 percent minority, but we would do an 8.5 percent minority goal. Well, in an effort to reach that goal, within one of our regents' institutions, that institution set up a recruitment center down in San Antonio, Texas. I would like to be recruiting those folks of the same ethnicity if we need to do that from Iowa. We have sufficient numbers that are not accessing education, but yet the recruitment office in San Antonio was recruiting Hispanics to meet part of this 8.5 percent goal for minorities, and then they got overzealous and they went across the border and they brought in Mexican nationals from Mexico City to meet a goal for a minority set-aside in Iowa. What is going on, America? I cannot connect my logic with this. I will go back to affirmative action. If we take it back to its inception, it was designed to correct the institutionalization of segregation of American blacks in the South. That was the specific, narrow goal of affirmative action, and it is preferential treatment in jobs and educational opportunities. I do not know how we would have fixed that. That is a sin against this Nation. And maybe there was a better way, but I am not wise enough to tell what we should have done. So I am going to let that one pass for a moment and just say we needed to fix that. And we have, to a large degree, repaired the institutionalization of segregation of American blacks in the South. Now they are coming up in job opportunities. But that affirmative action program that was instituted then, for what arguably was a good cause, now has grown into this monstrosity of a policy that decides that every family reunion has to take place in the United States; it cannot take place in any other country. So we have a repatriation policy that allows someone to reach out and bring their family members into the United States, and that does not fit that equation of what is good for the economic, social, and cultural well- being of the United States.

Mr. KING

Mr. KING. Mr. Speaker, I think I have an anecdote on this scenario that I painted here. That is, some years ago I drafted some legislation, and I began to identify these same things. What is great about this Nation and what are the weaknesses that we have within our educational system that does not infuse this into the minds of young people anymore like it was infused into our mind as we grew up? It was part of our family and educational system, something we learned in church as well. I drafted legislation, and I called it the God and Country Bill. It simply states that each child in America shall be taught that the United States of America is the unchallenged greatest Nation in the world, and we derive our strength from biblical values, free enterprise capitalism, and Western civilization. Now, unless you have been there you cannot imagine how many names I got called, how many nasty letters and e-mails and phone calls came my way for stating something that I believe ought to be obvious to the vast majority of Americans. One particular e-mail came, and I noticed it had an educational e-mail address. It said, ``We get plenty of Western civilization. You are trying to impose something on America, and we do not really believe we are the greatest nation in the world.'' It gave a whole list of these things. By the way, it was not friendly toward Christopher Columbus. I point that out particularly. But, nonetheless, ``We get 2 years of American history. We get enough Western civilization. We do not need to teach anymore.'' I thought, okay, I am going to help this student out. I did not know how to explain it, so I just typed back an e-mail response that said, go see your teacher about Western civilization. Your teacher will explain to you what Western civilization is. The answer I got back was, ``I am the teacher.'' There is the problem, at least one of the problems.

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, initially I would like to thank the gentleman from Alabama (Mr. Rogers) for bringing this bill before us. It is something I have looked at for some time, and it is something that I certainly support. It would be my endeavor to bring individual amendments to the appropriations process if we needed to in order to reestablish the pre- eminence of the military on our campuses across this country. This is something that started back in the 1970s as part of the protests against the Vietnam War; and, slowly, this kind of policy that has been a resistant to recruitment and ROTC on our campuses across this country has used every tool available. Well, I want to announce that this is about discrimination, this issue is; but it is about discrimination against young men and women in uniform. Whenever somebody stands up in a uniform, we will find somebody with another agenda trying to find a way to erode the values that put them in that place; and so the argument was made, for example, the Boy Scouts would be one, and of course, all our men and women in uniform in the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines and the Coast Guard are also victims of an effort that is keeping us from recruiting good people because the campuses have lined up against the recruitment on campus. I look forward to the day that ROTC or any recruiter can set up a card table on the commons at Harvard University on the exact location where George Washington received his commission as commander of the Continental Army. I find that a real offense to the United States, not to have the freedom to do that and to promote it. A statement was made by the gentlewoman earlier that in no other field can a person be fired for being gay. Well, no, probably not; but most people in this country are at-will employees, and they can be fired for no reason or any reason at all. It is not a matter about open discrimination. I would like to relate a little story, Mr. Speaker. State Senator Jerry Behn from Iowa asked the question, when lobbied by the gay lobby, answer me this: Am I heterosexual or am I homosexual? They looked at him for a while and they said, well, we do not know. That is the answer. You cannot tell. Keep it private.