Steven LaTourette

Mr. LaTOURETTE

Mr. LaTOURETTE. Well, just taking back my time for a minute. They say we have 5 minutes left. So we are going to be okay, and we'll get to Mr. McCotter for a closing thought. But there was a focus group in Massachusetts the night of the election, run by a pollster named Frank Luntz, and there was a physician in the focus group. He mentioned that exact point. He said, Why don't you have malpractice reform? Why don't you stop this needless double testing to make sure that you don't get sued? Actually, when our proposal was put forward, the bean counters indicated that that would save to the system $56 billion a year. Now to the gentleman's point about the high-quality plans: Why wouldn't you take that $56 billion a year out of frivolous lawsuits so that these folks that have negotiated for good-quality health care for their families don't have to pay a 40 percent income surcharge on income that they're not receiving?

Mr. LaTOURETTE. Thank you. And I yield to the gentleman from Michigan for his closing thoughts.

Mr. LaTOURETTE. I thank both the gentlemen for participating. I will just say that in light of this election in Massachusetts, I have hoped that the administration will push the reset button, and we would take the President at his word when he came here to this House. Let's get a bill. Let's get something done on the 80 percent that we can agree about. We can fight for the rest of the couple years on the 20 percent we don't. But let's get something done for the American people. And not to use percentages, but as our friend here in the Operation game, my folks back home are saying, We need to take care of the things that, Doc, you've talked about. Why though, in order to take care of the 15 percent of the people we have to deal with--that's the estimate--do we have to mess with the other 85 percent? We have to mess with the people who have good quality health care? We have to take $500 billion out of Medicare? People don't understand it. And I don't blame them for not understanding because I don't understand it either. And I just have to say again, you've got to be kidding. I thank you both for participating, Mr. Speaker. I thank you and yield back.

Mr. LaTOURETTE

Mr. LaTOURETTE. I thank the gentleman for yielding. I am going to break the mold here and say something nice about five pages of the bill, this bill in front of me--I think those pages are right here--and say something nice about Mr. Obey as well, and Mr. Serrano is waving in the back. By way of history, people know that the auto industry in this country got into trouble, and this administration made a decision to use leftover TARP funds to bail out Chrysler and General Motors. Both car companies submitted reorganization plans in February of this year and both were rejected by the auto task force. The auto task force was kind of a strange collection of people that didn't have any experience in the auto industry at all. Most of them didn't own cars. Those that did own cars owned foreign cars, but they determined that the car companies had to be more aggressive when it came to dealerships. As a result, about 800 Chrysler dealers were closed and about 2,000 GM dealers. The problem with that is, with rampant unemployment, about 60 people work at each car dealership across this country. Car dealerships don't cost the car companies any money, and it was a strange way to do business and potentially take 200,000 people and put them on the street. A couple of young, fresh-faced Democrats, Mr. Maffei of New York and Mr. Kratovil of Maryland, launched a legislative effort. But as a grizzled veteran, having been here for the last 15 years, I know that the one piece of legislation or pieces of legislation that have to leave town are the appropriations bills. We drafted some language and put it in Mr. Serrano's bill, and Mr. Obey took it. They didn't have to--they probably got in trouble for taking it--but that became the 800-pound gorilla that had to be dealt with as General Motors and Chrysler have moved forward on how to deal with this dealer situation. I also want to say something nice about the majority leader, Mr. Hoyer. He took up the mantle and said we are going to solve this problem. As a result, the five pages that are here in the bill indicate that those aggrieved dealers now have the opportunity for binding arbitration, and the facts need to be brought forward, and hopefully fairness will prevail. But that wouldn't happen without something good and bipartisan happening in the United States Congress.

Mr. LaTOURETTE

Mr. LaTOURETTE. Well I thank my friend from Oregon for yielding. And, in fact, that is a representation, and most people will recognize the United States of America. And each of the pushpins represents an area where the administration has reported jobs being created or saved. And it's kind of interesting, saved is a tough thing to analyze. And I'm going to talk about that in just a second. But created or saved. And each of those pushpins represents either a fictional place that didn't exist, as the gentleman's been talking about, or where the jobs that are claimed on recovery.gov, were, in fact, not created and/or saved. I just want to digress if you let me for just a second though because, you know, the gentleman's pointed out that, in 2006, the Republican majority had done such a bang-up job that it was replaced by a new Democratic majority, and it became historic in that we have the first woman Speaker in the history of the country, Mrs. Pelosi. And so for 3 years they have been basically directing how the legislative process in the House of Representatives works or doesn't work. And we have been saying on our side of the aisle for a pretty long time now, when we go back, when I go back to Ohio, I assume when the gentleman goes back to Oregon, people are saying, where are the jobs? Why don't we have any jobs? You gave $700 billion to the banks to lend money. They're not lending money. You created and passed an almost $800 billion stimulus bill to create jobs, and there aren't any jobs. And I think that they rightly ask, what is it that the Congress, this Democratic majority, has been doing with themselves to help stimulate the economy and create jobs? I have a chart here that I like to use, and I want to be fair to them because they do have a rejoinder. But at the beginning of this year you had the Democrats in the majority in the House, Democrats in the majority in the Senate. And of course the President of the United States, President Barack Obama, was inaugurated on January 20. And this shows just through March of this year how the unemployment rate has increased. And the gentleman will recall that we were told that we had to pass this $800 billion stimulus bill or else unemployment would hit 8 percent. And now it's over 10 percent. If you look at the construction trades, the people that build buildings, roads and bridges and other things, it's 18 percent; 18 percent of the people that work construction in this country are currently out of work. But just taking what--we'll get to the stimulus bill and the President's participation in a minute--but just what our Democratic colleagues have been thinking have been the most important issues facing the country, as this unemployment rate now has spiked to 10 percent. On the opening day of this Congress, which was January the 6th, you had kind of a modest, unemployment rate. Out here on January 20th you have unemployment is increasing. But then you get out here to, towards the end of January, the beginning of February, and again, when Americans by the thousands and tens of thousands are losing their jobs, the most important thing that the majority here in the House could put on the floor was a resolution supporting the goals and ideals of national teen dating.

Mr. LaTOURETTE. National teen dating. You know, when people are losing their jobs in steel mills and auto manufacturing plants, the House of Representatives is talking about the importance of teen dating. Now, I'm the father of some teenagers, and I want teen dating to go smoothly. But more importantly, I really want the people that I represent to have jobs so that their teenagers can afford to go to school and buy things and eat food and things like that. Well, unemployment continued to spike. And now we get in the middle of February. The President now has been installed only for a month, and so we certainly can't criticize him at this moment in time. But again, as unemployment rises, the most important thing that this majority could bring to the floor, and people have to recognize, bills only come to the floor when the majority says they come to the floor. So what we did on that day was commend Sam Bradford for winning the Heisman trophy. And again, just like teen dating, I'm sure that the Bradford family's very proud of Sam, and I think it's quite an accomplishment to win the Heisman trophy. But again, tens of thousands of people are losing jobs. So now we get out towards the end of February, people continue to lose their jobs. Every jobs report that comes out, it's hundreds of thousands of people are being displaced and out of work. And so surely, at this moment in time, you know, with complete control of the government, you would think we would be doing a jobs bill. But the most important thing that they could come up with was the Monkey Safety Act, to debate the Monkey Safety Act here in the House of Representatives.

Mr. LaTOURETTE. And I want to be clear because when I mentioned this earlier, the Humane Society got upset with me. I'm not saying that this is a bad piece of legislation. But what I'm saying is, for crying out loud, when people want to know where the jobs are, why are we debating the Monkey Safety Act? I don't get it. But you get down into March now. And so again, hundreds of thousands of people are out of work. And you would say, surely, we're going to talk about a jobs piece of legislation in the House of Representatives. But when we get into March, the most important thing that they could come up with was the Shark Conservation Act. And, again, I like sharks. I don't like to swim with sharks, but sharks are nice to watch on television. But, again, where are the jobs, and where's the legislation? And then we get out to where this chart ends at the end of March. I'm working on a new one that'll take us to where we are today. But you get out and, again, bad jobs report, tens of thousands more people have lost their jobs. And the most important thing that the majority leader could put on the floor was supporting pi.

Mr. LaTOURETTE. Supporting Pi Day.

Mr. LaTOURETTE. No, it's not P-I-E, which as you can tell from my girth, I enjoy pie. This is pi, the math formula, 3.14 or whatever it is. And we needed to recognize the importance of the number 3.14, rather than dealing with the people that are out of work in this country. So then, you know, to be fair to the majority, they will say, well, wait a minute. That's not all we did. We also passed the stimulus bill. And the stimulus bill, just south of $800 billion, and it was advertised as creating 3 million new jobs across country. It's now been in place for about 9, 10 months, and my constituents, at least, are continuing to ask, where are the jobs? And I think the gentleman has correctly pointed out that not only have the jobs not materialized, because they have not gone to job- creating activities; instead, and on top of that, they continue to issue press releases taking credit for jobs saved or created. I can just tell the gentleman, in my district, and here's under the heading of ``press releases I would never send out,'' I represent the 14th District of Ohio. The White House sent out a press release saying that they had spent $100 million in the 14th District of Ohio of stimulus money to create or save jobs. And I guess I'd ask the gentleman, you know, so that sounds like a lot of money. It is a lot of money. It's borrowed money, as the gentleman said. But then in the next sentence they say how many jobs they created and/or saved. Does the gentleman care to guess what we got for $100 million in my Congressional district?

Mr. LaTOURETTE. I'm sorry. It was 126. And so, again, with a straight face----

Mr. LaTOURETTE. No. What we could have done is everybody could have gotten maybe $800,000. But, no, the problem is as I go about the district, nobody knows where those jobs are. And I think, you know, the gentleman's talked about not only the difficulty of false claims of jobs, but jobs that have gone to places that don't exist. In Ohio--the gentleman's talked about Oregon--in Ohio, there was $7,960, not billions, but still a lot of money, if you're paying taxes, for a basketball system replacement in Ohio. And they claim that as a result of that, they created three jobs. Now that's a little bit better than the hundred million, because that's only a couple $3,000 a job. The problem, and basically, it was a grant to repair a basketball court in a park in Cincinnati, Ohio. But it was identified as Ohio's 0 district. Now, we have 18 districts.

Mr. LaTOURETTE. Well, we have Ohio 0. And I'm sure that next fall in 2010 the Republican and the Democrat running in Ohio 0 are going to have a very tough race because nobody's going to be able to figure out where it is, because it----

Mr. LaTOURETTE. So we clearly have some difficulties. I know the gentleman, if the gentleman's talked about this, I apologize. But down in Texas, this fellow who runs a public housing authority got $26,000. But if you go to the Web site, it says that they reported creating 450 jobs, which is pretty----

Mr. LaTOURETTE. 450 jobs for $26,000, which is pretty good. I mean, that's about $500 a job. The problem is when they contacted this fellow, whose name is Bob Bray, he said, Boy that's great. You did a great job with that 26 grand, creating 450 jobs. He says, oh, no, no, no, no, no. He told the government that he had created six jobs, basically five roofers and a fellow to inspect it. But when he was asked to do some reporting, they said, well, that's not enough jobs. And so the 450 doesn't represent jobs, it represents the hours that these six people worked to replace the roof. So we really didn't get a whole lot for that $26,000.

Mr. LaTOURETTE. Well, for 450 hours. It was for 450 hours, all six of them. You know, it's a couple weeks work is what you're talking about.

Mr. LaTOURETTE. I'm sure with the rainy season coming, I'm sure they're all nice and dry down there in Texas. But the fact of the matter is they put a new roof on, and now those people, I would assume, are unemployed or fixing roofs somewhere else. So clearly, this is a problem.

Mr. LaTOURETTE. I think the message is--and the gentleman from Louisiana I think laid it out very well--is we don't claim to have all of the best ideas on how to do this. I think that in the House we represent about 47 percent of the American people. And as you move forward with sort of--it's like going to a bad movie, Stimulus 2 or Stimulus 3, about to rear their ugly heads around here. We would just like to have the ideas that we have--the gentleman's a former business owner, too--to say, Hey, I have an idea how to create a job. And I think if they were more receptive to that, you wouldn't have to report phony stuff, and people wouldn't be asking where the jobs are because the gentleman mentioned the health care debate. One way to make sure that health care is less of a problem in this country is to have people working with health care, with retirement security. One way to solve the problem with the foreclosure crisis in this country is to have people working so they can pay their mortgages and their insurance and raise their families. But just two quick examples. I don't understand why they're bragging about this stuff. The government claims to have spent $1,047 to buy a riding mower from the Toro Company to cut the grass at the Fayetteville National Cemetery. I'm all for cutting the grass at the Fayetteville National Cemetery, but the Web site claims that the purchase of that single lawnmower helped save or create 50 jobs.

Mr. LaTOURETTE. We've got a lot of shift work going on there.

Mr. LaTOURETTE. It was a riding lawnmower. So anyway, and then to Connecticut. I think again what our constituents ask us to do is what the next story does. And that is, the Police Department up in Plymouth, Connecticut, received a grant, and they used it to buy new computers. And again, law enforcement needs the best tools to catch the bad guys, but the administration is saying that the purchase of these computers created 108 jobs. There's a couple of problems with that. There are only 22 people who work at the police department, and when they called the mayor--they called the mayor up there in Plymouth. They said, Hey, how come you guys are reporting 108 jobs with some computers. He said, I can't tell you. His name is Vincent Festa. He says that--and this is what our constituents want us to do--he said that the town has resorted to counting paperclips to save money but that it had no plans to lay off any police officers even without the stimulus. He couldn't explain the police report, and the town's police chief--unlike the mayor--didn't return telephone calls seeking comment. So, again, we need to be included as we find out not only how can we help assist the economy recover, creating jobs, but we need to do what the mayor, Mayor Festa, is doing in Plymouth, Connecticut, counting the paperclips.

Mr. LaTOURETTE. Maybe they don't have phones in West Virginia.

Mr. LaTOURETTE. Both gentlemen have talked a little bit about some of the other stuff that's been going on. At the same time the economy continues to tank and people continue to lose their jobs, they continue to pile on. This health care discussion that we had a little while ago in the House, one provision in that bill says that at Taco Bell, at every vending machine, in every location you're going to have to have a sign next to it that says what the thing is not only made of but whether it's good for you or not. I'm not a healthy eater, you can tell.

Mr. LaTOURETTE. I think I have a healthy appetite. I don't know if I'm a healthy eater. It's going to cost a lot of money, obviously for not only the consumer--because these signs are not going to come free--but also the people who are going to make all of this stuff. Does anybody think this compliance cost won't be added on? And how do you deal with compliance costs? You either raise prices or you let people go. But anybody that thinks when they go to a vending machine and sees a Twinky, a Twinky filled with that delicious cream, anybody who thinks that that is good for you probably shouldn't be out and about without adult supervision during the day.

Mr. LaTOURETTE. And then on top of that, we had the cap-and-trade bill a little earlier. Again, everybody wants clean air--I come from Lake Erie--clean water and everything else. But the fact of the matter is there was a huge national carbon tax. And again, when you have an economy that is ailing and people are losing their jobs, imposing more taxes on them, the places they work is not the answer. So you sort of have this double whammy going on here. You have no help for the people who have lost their jobs, and by the same token, you have policies to create more job displacement.

Mr. LaTOURETTE. Well, they did. I want to go back just to the jobs business for a minute, because there's a couple of things you can do as a government. The government doesn't create jobs. That's one of the myths around here. It's people who have the entrepreneurial spirit. It's corporations that make investments in not only equipment but product and people. But going back to the health care thing and Mr. Scalise's observation about more jobs leaving, I would think that the first thing would be to be like a physician; do no harm. Let's keep what we've got and then we can build on it. Then we go can grow jobs. But if you look again at the health care bill, how that's financed--and a lot of my constituents don't understand that everybody recognizes in a country as great as the United States we shouldn't have people who die because they don't have quality health care. They should have the ability to have affordable, accessible health care. But no matter what that number is--some people say it's 47 million. The President came here and said it's 30 million. Whatever the number is, even at their number of 47, you're talking about 15 percent of the people in the country. And a lot of people are asking the question: How come we've got to screw up everybody else to take care of this problem that's dealing with maybe 15 percent of the people? And specifically to the jobs issue, the Senate bill that they're now debating across the Capitol has a number of taxes in it. First, both bills cut half a trillion dollars out of Medicare. And how you're going to make the country healthier by taking away half a trillion dollars from people on Medicare I have yet to have explained to me adequately. But on the other side of the Capitol they're debating all these new taxes, and one is specifically on companies that manufacture wheelchairs. Now, I have, not in my district but on the other side of Cleveland, in Lorain, Ohio, the world's leading wheelchair manufacturer. And in talking to the folks that run that company, they're saying, You know what? If this tax comes about--and it's hard to know why you have to tax wheelchairs to take care of somebody who doesn't have health insurance--if this tax comes about, it will completely eviscerate any profit margin that we have, and I'm going to take thousands of jobs and they're going to have to be terminated and I will go to China. I will go to China and employ thousands of Chinese to make wheelchairs and have them imported into the United States. Now, some of our friends on the other side say, Well, that's not patriotic. What are you doing? You're thumbing your nose at the United States of America. Business is business and jobs are jobs. So to disincentivize--not only to do no harm, but to harm--doesn't make sense to folks back where I'm from.

Mr. LaTOURETTE

Mr. LaTOURETTE. Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent that my name be removed as a cosponsor of H.R. 874.