Tim Ryan

Mr. RYAN of Ohio

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. To further our point, this is real median household incomes as to why we need to do this. The Free Choice Act that we are going to pass out of this House tomorrow, it is not for the employers who treat their workers well which most are. It is for a few people that are obviously getting mistreated and they want to join together. Now that seems to me a basic principle of our democratic society. This is real median incomes from 2000. In 2000, they were $47,500. In 2005, it is $46,300, a decline. This is what we are talking about. Now you can either be in a position of power and say that is fine and you are not going to do anything about it, or you are going to be in a position of power and say we are going to try to help, we are going to try to fix this. Do we have all the answers, no. But we are going to try to raise the minimum wage so this person may get a pay raise. We are going to pass the Employee Free Choice Act, so maybe if you are having a problem and want to join together and try to affect this situation, you can. We are not saying you have to, we are saying you can. And if you happen to be this same family who has seen a decline and you have a kid in school and you are taking out loans, we are going to cut the interest rate loan in half to try to close this gap a little bit because we are in a position of responsibility. We are not here to give away the store, but we are here to say there are issues where we can help people. You know what, if we have to ask somebody who makes a million dollars a year to help us do this, to invest in education, invest in the stem cell research and invest in alternative energy resources, we have to do it. As a politician, as a Member of Congress, I would love to go to all of my constituents and say you all get a tax cut, and we are going to lower your tuition costs, we are going to provide health care for poor kids, we are going to retrain workers, and we are going to build roads and bridges, we are going to provide for the defense of the country to make all this possible, and we are going to have stable financial markets, but we are also going to give you a tax cut. We are going to put a court system in place so that we have the rule of law. You know, one of the most expensive things to do is have a justice system with police and sheriff departments and courts and judges and attorneys and public defenders and prosecutors to make this whole thing go, to enforce contract law. That is all expensive stuff. All we are saying is we are trying to keep this thing rolling, man. We have had a pretty good thing going on. We just want to keep it going, and you can't see the top 1 percent do well and the bottom 99 percent, as I was showing in the earlier chart, not do well, actually see a decline in income by 2 percent. So what we need to do is move forward in a very comprehensive way, not in a radical way, but some of the stuff we have already done.

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. It cannot stand, man. It cannot stand. I totally agree with you. The fact that our friends, and can you imagine our friends on the other side of the aisle, our Republican friends, who are deficit hawks, and they are still talking about it. It is hilarious to hear, Madam Speaker, the contradictory aspects of their words and their deeds. There is still a lot of talk about, you know, being a deficit hawk and balancing the budget. It was the Republican party, Madam Speaker, that started the Medicare prescription drug bill. They originally said it was $400 billion, then it was $700 billion, and then it was a trillion. And the night we voted on it at 3 in the morning, it was a $400 billion bill. That was a good deal. Then we find out months later it was actually a trillion dollars, and that the actuaries that knew it was going to cost a trillion dollars, they weren't allowed to tell anybody. So this Congress voted on legislation without all of the facts, and a major fact was the cost. But the point here is our friends not only passed that bill without telling us all of the information, they also put, as you said, a provision in there that explicitly would not allow the Secretary of Health and Human Services to negotiate down drug prices on behalf of the Medicare recipients. They didn't leave it ambiguous, they stated in the bill you're not allowed to negotiate down drug prices on behalf of all of these millions of seniors who want to participate in this new drug benefit. Now did it have anything to do with the pharmaceutical lobby being up here so much and donating all kinds of money, I will leave that for the American people to decide. But the fact of the matter is, within the first 100 hours that we got in, we changed that provision. Once we passed it out of here, we need to get it through the Senate and hopefully the President will sign it. But in our legislation we allowed the Secretary of Health and Human Services to negotiate down drug prices. We hear a lot about the free market, but what is a better representation of the free market than allowing all these consumers to join together and negotiate down drug prices or anything else on behalf of the recipients.

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. And this is not by any stretch of the imagination are we saying that workers don't need to be flexible, unions don't need to be flexible. We are now competing with the globe. And our workers now, as we have seen in large measure through the suppression of wages and everything else, this is a global workforce where just from 1985, where it was 2.5 billion people, now it is up to almost 6 billion in the global workforce. So that in and of itself increases the level of competition for our own workers, which has led to the wage issue that we have to deal with and everything else. So we are not saying that unions don't need to be flexible. I come from an area of the country where we had a lot of steel mills. Now there is just one or two left of the integrated variety, and the tremendous, tremendous changes that the steelworkers have gone through. And I have a good friend, Gary Steinbeck, Madam Speaker, a friend back home who is subdistrict director for the United Steelworkers in Ohio, and the tremendous changes in work rules that the steelworkers have made in order to keep the industry afloat. These folks are ready to sit down and figure this out, and they know that. But our point is look what has been happening here. This is a chart, ``Change in Share of National Income from 2003 to 2004.'' The bottom 99 percent has had negative 2 percent change in their share of the national income; the top 1 percent has seen almost a 2 percent increase in their share of national income. This is a structure that cannot stand, man. It cannot stand, man. This cannot stay the way it is. This cannot continue. You can't have this separation where the top 1 percent is increasing their share of the pie and everybody else is getting reduced. You can't have it. And so what we have tried to do here is bring some equity to the system and, since we have been in Congress, increasing the minimum wage; cutting student loan interest rates in half; investing in stem cell research to try to open up another industry where we can create jobs for our kids, the next generation; making sure we repeal the corporate welfare for the oil companies and invest that money in alternative energy sources so we can open up a new sector of our economy with research and health care and biotechnologies and alternative energy sources. We have a long-term agenda here by helping people today and open up these two new sectors. This can't go on. We can't continue like this, Mr. Murphy, and call ourselves the greatest democracy in the world. And when you go around the world and you are trying to sell democracy and capitalism, that is not a very good argument. You know, that is kind of what a lot of countries in a lot of other parts of the world look like, where the top 1 percent get all the benefits, and the rest of the rest of their country doesn't see the progress. Can I make one final point, because I am getting worked up. We only have 300 million people in the country. We don't have the luxury of having a billion people like they do in India. We don't have the luxury of 1.3- or 1.4 billion like they do in China. We only have 300 million people. So we need to make sure that everybody is on the field playing for us, educated, skilled, and moving the country forward. This cannot stand, man.

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. Madam Speaker, I appreciate the opportunity to be here on the House floor to kick off another segment of the 30-something Working Group Special Order, soon to be joined by a group of 30- somethings in the Democratic Caucus to address issues pertaining to not only young people throughout the country, but citizens of our country and the kind of leadership that the Democratic Congress is providing here. So I appreciate the opportunity to be here. Several issues that have been discussed prior to this by our friends on the other side that I would like to at least comment on. The first one is: The economy is going great. I read an article with great interest today out of The New York Times. The title is ``Growth in U.S. Economy is Slower Than Thought.'' This economy is only growing at 2.2 percent, in large measure, due to the fact that we haven't balanced our budget. We are nowhere near balancing our budget because of the Republican leadership in the House since 1994, and in the Senate and also in the White House. For many, many years, the Republican answer to balancing the budget or trying to make our payments is to go off to China and go to the banks in China and borrow money from the Chinese government in order to fund the increase in spending that the Republican House, Republican Senate, and Republican White House were pursuing. And one friend, Madam Speaker, the gentleman from Texas, said that the economy has created 7.2 million new jobs. When President Clinton was in and the Democrats balanced the budget in 1993 without one Republican vote, the expansion years under President Clinton, we created 20 million jobs. Welfare rolls were the lowest they had been. So you have to balance your budget, so you stop borrowing money from China. And we have got a lot of other issues dealing with China as well. They are manipulating their currency, Madam Speaker, and we are starting to generate some support in the Democratic Congress for addressing this issue. China is not giving the proper alignment to their currency, and it gives them a 40-percent advantage to goods that they ship over here. And so if you have a company in the United States of America, like I do in Warren, Ohio, called Wheatland Tube, and Mr. Altmire, who may join us here later, their raw materials cost as much as the product from China when it hits the shores of the United States, final product, because there is a 40-percent advantage that the Chinese have, Madam Speaker. So because these issues haven't been addressed, Wheatland Tube is laying off 30 or 40 people, white collar jobs. So our friends have not addressed any of the issues. But they have been talking about an issue that is near and dear to my heart, and that is the Employee Free Choice Act. This is a wonderful piece of legislation that is going to allow members of a workforce to merely sign if they want to start a union or not. And I hope that our friends recognize why. And I am from Youngstown, Ohio; so I find it funny when our friends start talking about these big labor bosses, to try to portray good, hardworking Americans who want to work for a decent wage and have health care, that somehow that is wrong and somehow that is unAmerican. So this Employee Free Choice Act will allow our folks, our workers, to merely sign a card. And if half sign that they want to start a union, it is basic democracy at the workplace. You will be able to start a union. Here is the reason why there is so much anxiety in the United States of America: We have had economic growth, but if you are not in the top 1 percent, you are getting squeezed. If you don't have a lot of money in the stock market, you are getting squeezed. And it took us almost 10 years to raise the minimum wage for average workers, and one of the first things the Democratic Congress did under the leadership of the Speaker, Speaker Pelosi, was to raise the minimum wage to try to get everybody in on the game. But here is what has happened: This is from 2000 to 2004. The red line that is increasing is productivity, the change in productivity, the growth in productivity percentage-wise from 2000 to 2004. You see a tremendous increase in productivity. Median income is the black line. It has actually gone down. So for the first time in history, increased levels of productivity have led to the decrease in median income. That means that our globalization, although it may benefit certain people and certain sectors of the economy, is leaving a lot of people behind. So if workers want to join together to say how do we be a part of the solution here, how do we try to increase income? I think we should allow them to do that. We are not saying they have to. There is nobody intimidating anybody. And my friend from Tennessee made a mistake, Madam Speaker, when she spoke. She was saying that the National Labor Relations Act and the National Labor Relations Board were there so workers didn't intimidate other workers to join unions. The whole premise of the National Labor Relations Act is because business folks in that time had a tremendous advantage on firing workers and threatening workers. So we don't run from the fact that we want to allow people in the workplace to be empowered, and this is the reason we need to do it. Now, as we do this, we also need an expansion of our international standards that we have. We have clean air in the United States, and it needs to be a lot cleaner, but we have made great progress. We need clean water in the United States. I am from the State of Ohio where the Cuyahoga River caught on fire because there was so much industry and pollution that it literally caught on fire. We need to make sure that these standards that we have here in the United States somehow are transferred to the global economy so that when we are dealing with China, when we are dealing with India, when we are dealing with some of the Asian Pacific countries, we try to lift up the standards. It doesn't do us much good to clean the air in the United States of America and have dirty air in China. We are not making progress. So we have a long way to go. And I think what we are doing this week is making sure that our workers in the United States of America are allowed to do what we all do on election day, and that is join together and vote, and they should be allowed to join together and to vote as well. One of the myths that we have with the Employee Free Choice Act is, well, you are going to have to sign a card and someone is going to know. If you want to sign a card or a petition to even have an election, you have to sign a card or a petition in order to even have an election to start a union anyway. So we are not doing anything that is not already going on. You are either going to sign a petition to vote on it or you are going to sign a petition to actually create a union. And if you are willing to stick your neck out to have the vote, you are certainly going to be willing to stick your neck out to sign the petition in order to cast a ballot to create a union. So I think we are dealing with very troubling times. We need to make sure that we are representing all of our country because, quite frankly, Madam Speaker, for the longest time in this country, the last decade or so, at least from this institution here that we represent in the House of Representatives, there has been such a tilt, such an emphasis on cutting taxes for the top 1 percent. And you are not going to see the Democratic Party raise taxes on the middle class at all. But if we have a choice to make between borrowing the money from the Chinese in order to fund our government or asking people who are billionaires to pay a little bit more in taxes so that we can provide health care for children, we are going to ask the millionaires and the billionaires in the United States to pay a little bit more and to meet their obligation and to meet their responsibility to society. They have benefited from the United States stock market. They have benefited from the protection of the United States military. They have benefited from the infrastructure. They have benefited from the Internet, which was developed from public research. They benefit from the vaccines. They benefit from the Centers for Disease Control. They benefit from public education. So if we ask the wealthiest to meet their obligation and their responsibility, as a beneficiary of this great society, to put back into our society in order to keep the game going, we are going to need to do that. And if you question the priorities of the Democrats, all you need to do is look at what is going to happen in our supplemental, where there is going to be an additional millions of dollars, to the tune of $750 million, for health care for children, Children's Health Insurance Program. Do you want to talk about priorities, Madam Speaker? Under the Republican leadership, 6 million children were eligible for the SCHIP program, but weren't registered. So all we are saying is we are going to take every opportunity we can possibly get to make sure that those kids get the kind of health care that they need and they deserve in the wealthiest country on the face of this Earth in the entire history of our planet, Mr. Murphy. And we don't shrink from these. I would be happy to talk about our decisions that we have made here in this Congress since we started several months ago to anybody who wants to listen. We passed the minimum wage increase out of this House with $1.3 billion in tax credits for small businesses so that they can reinvest back into their companies to keep the game going, to keep the economy going. We reduced and cut in half the interest rates on student loans, which will save the average person who takes out a student loan almost $4,500 over the course of the loan. That is what the Democrats did in the first 100 hours. We increased the minimum wage. We cut student loan interest rates in half. We repealed corporate welfare by about $13 billion. We are going to take that money and we are going to invest it into alternative energy research. We put PAYGO on because we are signaling that we are going to make a balanced budget a priority in this House. Got to be done. Got to be done. We have implemented some of the recommendations from the 9/11 Commission report to make the country safer, and we allowed the Secretary of Health and Human Services to negotiate down drug prices on behalf of the Medicare recipients. That is what you call governing. That is what you call moving an agenda forward. And that includes making sure that these workers who work every day, work hard every day, go to work every day, work overtime, lead increases in productivity, that they can at least benefit a little bit from it. And I would be happy to yield to our fearless leader from Connecticut, the fighting Irishman, Mr. Murphy.

Mr. RYAN of Ohio

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. Mr. Speaker, it is entirely possible and welcomed under the Constitution of the United States to have disagreements about how we need to handle troops deployments, how we need to handle our situation in different wars. And it is not to be said that because one party or one group of people have a different philosophy and a different strategy, that somehow they are not supporting the troops. Now, your party and your President, the Republican Party, Mr. Speaker, and the Republican President are the ones who sent our kids to battle without armor, without body armor. And it took Jack Murtha months to uncover it, and then to finally get it paid for and distributed. It was the Republican Party, Mr. Speaker, who sent kids into battle without up-armored Humvees. Now, nobody questioned the Republican Party's patriotism, and nobody asked them if they supported the troops. Again, we called you incompetent, we said you were incapable, we said you were derelict in your duty, we said you should have provided oversight and you didn't. But we never called you unpatriotic.

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. As I was watching the debate prior to my speech, I wrote down a quote that was stated by the gentleman from Indiana looking at the Democrats saying, How can we say we support the troops? Question mark. Now, if that is not questioning the patriotism of our side, I don't know what is.

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. Would the gentleman yield?

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. Mr. Speaker, we never called the other side unpatriotic when they sent our soldiers over without enough body armor. And when they didn't send enough up-armored Humvees, we never called anybody unpatriotic. And now, when the next batch goes over without the proper jammers or up-armored kits, we don't call you unpatriotic. Now we have called you incompetent. We said you are incapable, and we said you are derelict of your oversight responsibility. But never, Mr. Speaker, have we called anyone in this House unpatriotic. Now let me speak to the resolution. This is very simple. It says two things: We support our troops and we do not support the escalation. It is very simple and here is why. We have already done this, Mr. Speaker. We have already done this. We have already tried the escalation and it has not worked. From November to January of 2005, we escalated by 18,000 troops, boots on the ground, and the number of daily attacks increased by 17 percent. From June to October of 2005, we increased by 21,000 boots on the ground, and the number of daily attacks increased by 29 percent. And from May to November of 2006, 17,000 more boots on the ground, and the number of daily attacks increased by 80 percent. This escalation has not worked and it will not work. The number of insurgents have increased from 5,000 in 2003 to between 20,000 and 30,000 to October of 2006. So this is very simple. And I want to make just a few more points, Mr. Speaker. One is this. With the last vote for the war, regardless of what party you were in or how you voted, we assumed that the President and the Secretary of Defense would send our troops over there with the proper equipment. But with this escalation, Mr. Speaker, we know that the 21,500 troops that are going to go over there will not have the proper Humvee kits, the up-armor for their HUMVEES. They won't have the proper jamming devices or enough of them, and they won't have the number of trucks that they need. You now know it. So if you vote against this resolution, you are voting to send our troops over there without the proper equipment before it could be excused because we trusted the President, assumed, but now we know. And, finally, Mr. Speaker, we have heard a lot over the last couple of days about the American Revolution and the Civil War and World War II. Well, Mr. Speaker, our President today is not Washington, he is not Lincoln, and he is not Roosevelt. So I think our Republican colleagues should take the advice of the Secretary of Defense, and that is you go to war with the President you have. You don't go to war with the President you wish you had. Announcement by the Speaker Pro Tempore

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. Mr. Speaker, as we approach the final day of the debate on this resolution, I have enjoyed the debate thoroughly. I have found it humorous at times. Our friends on the other side have tried every argument they could possibly muster. They have talked about President Clinton, they have talked about Vietnam, they are trying to bring up Israel, and my friend from Indiana also mentioned the issue of consistency. And I find it funny that the pro-life, self-proclaimed pro-life party is the party that wants to keep extending the war. I find it ironic that all of the great budget hawks in the Republican Party want to throw $8 billion a month to keep going and going and going as we borrow the money from China. But I have also found the debate, at times, disappointing, where Members of the other side have questioned our side and they have said, whose side are we on? And how can we say that we support the troops, and that we are, somehow, unpatriotic. And I would just like to say that when the Republican Party and this President didn't send enough troops, we didn't call you unpatriotic. And when you sent our young soldiers over there without the body armor, we never called you unpatriotic. Announcement by the Speaker Pro Tempore

Mr. RYAN of Ohio

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. Madam Speaker, on Thursday, February 8, 2007, I was attending the funeral of the father of a member of my staff and missed rollcall votes No. 81-92. Had I been present, I would have voted ``aye'' on rollcall votes No. 81, 82, 83, 85, 86, 87, 88, 89, 90 and ``aye'' on final passage of H.R. 547, the Advanced Fuels Infrastructure Research and Development Act (rollcall vote No. 92). I would have voted ``nay'' on rollcall votes No. 84 and 91.

Mr. RYAN of Ohio

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. In spite of your age discrimination, we will take it under consideration.

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. I appreciate the gentleman making the offer. Last year or 2 years ago, we were asking for opportunities to speak on the floor. We weren't given that opportunity, but I will take it to the leadership, and we will take that under consideration.

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. You are welcome to respond to that.

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. I appreciate the gentleman's opportunity. Those decisions are made above my pay grade, but I can honestly say that we have numerous debates on this floor, which I think have been significant and monumental, especially in the first 100 hours, as we have talked about here. I don't exactly know how to respond to you. I think we do have adequate debate here, depending on what the issue of the day is, both sides getting an opportunity to do that. We get our hours and talk about the things that we want to talk about, and you get your hour to talk about what you want to talk about. There can be, I am sure, some discussion. If there is room for us, as we push certain policies, that is what we are here to talk about. That is the issue of the day.

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. Not necessarily together, but on the floor. Not necessarily together.

Mr. RYAN of Ohio

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. I appreciate that. As we are wrapping things up, I found it interesting, I saw as we are talking about budget priorities and the kind of investments that we want to make as a country, looking at what the Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke has to say and what he said yesterday and was quoted in the Wall Street Journal and a lot of other media outlets. Focusing on, and I will say, and I will quote, he said, Ben Bernanke said, The best way to narrow the gap between high-income and low-wage workers in the U.S. would be to strengthen education and training programs. That is our call, and that is the mission for us, to make sure that average people have the skills and the tools and the opportunity with the increase in the Pell Grants, with what we already did by cutting student loan interest rates in half for both parent and student loans, cutting that in half and giving thousands of dollars back to those families. Those are the kinds of things that we need to continue to do, and No Child Left Behind and everything else. So we need to make sure that as we reform these systems, we also provide the resources, as we started this, for the local level to make sure they can get the job done. We are just wrapping up. We only have 1 minute. I want to give out Speaker Pelosi's e-mail, 30-Something Working Group e-mail, 30somethingdems@mail.house.gov, or you can come to our Web site, www.speaker.gov/30something.

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. Will the gentleman yield? I have family members who have Tivo'd, okay.

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. For America.

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. We thank the gentlewoman. As we have been saying in the last few weeks here and the last few days especially, that years ago that budget would come and get greased up and come right through this Chamber and on to the other side of Capitol Hill and get signed into law, with the tax cuts for the top 1 percent and cuts to the kids. And now Nancy Pelosi stands between that budget and the American people, and we are going to make sure, and our friend from Florida. So we thank you for joining us. It is always a special treat for our friend to come down from Texas. And I would be happy to yield to our friend from Florida, who is standing to be recognized.

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. And you are right. In years gone by, they would have greased that sucker up, and it would have flown through the House and the Senate, who knows what kind of changes. It wasn't until in the last year or so that the Republican majority at that point couldn't even agree with each other. So we have had to come in and clean up with the continuing resolution, which we made some great advances with veterans and some other issues that we were able to deal with. But when you look at it, we don't want to get into, and you are exactly right, there is going to be an increase in taxes if the President's budget over the next few years stays, because that alternative minimum tax is going to creep in and is going to creep in to average American families' lives, middle-income families. And so I appreciate you making that point. We have been joined by a special guest who periodically jumps in and joins with the 30-something Working Group, the gentlewoman from Texas. I would be happy to yield.

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. I appreciate your insight, Mr. Meek. You have talked about this, and we have been talking about this for a long time. We would love to come in, as the Democrats did in January and swore in Speaker Pelosi, and come in and bump the Pell Grant up two thousand bucks and eliminate student loans altogether as far as paying interest on them and all kinds of other things we would like to do. But we are limited by the kind of budget that we have inherited from the President in a 6-year presidency and a 14-year Republican control of this Chamber. Here is what they are doing: The 2008 budget authority says that the red on the left, $230 billion or $240 billion a year, is going to be spent just paying the interest on the money that this country has borrowed; not to pay down the debt, but just to pay the interest payments. We are going to have to spend $230 billion because of that. Look how that just dwarfs other priorities in the budget of the United States. The next one is education. The next one is veterans. The next one is homeland security. All pale in comparison to what we are forced to spend to pay the interest on the money we are borrowing. As Mr. Meek has said in his previous chart, this money, over $1 trillion, has come from foreign interests. This President and the Republican Congress borrowed more in 4 years from foreign interests than all of the previous Presidents and Congresses combined. Combined. This is the net result, the interest that we have to pay on the debt. So what has happened is that we have a huge number; $2.102 trillion in 2006 is the amount of foreign held debt, $2 trillion. That is unacceptable in the most powerful, wealthiest country on the face of this Earth. So we have seen what has happened since the Clinton administration had some sanity. We had a $5.6 trillion projected surplus. It went down $8.4 trillion. Now we are in a $2.8 trillion deficit. We have some real problems. So when it goes to making the investments that we want to make in education, the investments that we want to make in health care, SCHIP, the COPS Program, making sure young kids are covered, have some form of health care coverage, Madam Speaker, we are limited by the budget that we have been handed. Unfortunately, we can't start from scratch, but there are some decisions that need to be made, and I can tell you that it is not acceptable to me, and I know it is not acceptable to my friend from Florida, to continue to allow people who make millions and millions and millions of dollars a year to continue to get a tax cut. Some may say they earn it. Maybe they do. Some do. And some work hard. Just because you wear a white collar doesn't mean you don't work hard. But what we are saying is, that group of people benefit the most from the lavishness that this country has given them, the roads and the bridges and the safety and the security provided by defense, the stable markets in which to invest money, in which many, many do, into the stock market. This is all provided for by the stability that comes out of this institution, and therefore they owe a little bit back. Now, even if you don't believe that, our alternative, we have a decision to make: Either we borrow this money from the Chinese, the Japanese and the OPEC countries, which gets us to that chart where there is $2 trillion in foreign-held debt by this country, or we ask those people who are making millions and millions of dollars a year, Mr. Murphy, to pay their fair share, to step up to bat and help us solve this problem that we have so we don't have to put the future of our kids and our grandkids in the hands of Communist China.

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. If the gentleman will yield, I think this is very illustrative of your point. Here we said earlier, the share of the national income went up 2 percent for those people in the top 1 percent of the country. The bottom 99 percent, their share of the national income went down 2 percent. Add on that what you are saying, okay, what you just said about the devolution of taxation. Okay. So now these are the same people who have to vote on property tax issues. These are the same people who have to vote on libraries. These are the same people that have to vote on the penny sales tax to keep their counties running. So I think they are getting squeezed from all sides. Then, when you look at what the top 1 percent have benefited from the globalization of America and the ability to be in the stock market and benefit from that, and get tax cuts and the tax loopholes and everything else, the bottom line is, Mr. Meek, the bottom 99 percent have not benefited from all of this.

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. It is an honor to be with you, Mr. Meek. And I appreciate that you were on the floor today passing legislation commemorating a fine citizen down in Florida, a leader in that community. And I want to thank you for taking the time to come out. There are so many issues that we need to discuss today, Mr. Meek. The President submitted his budget this week to the Congress, and we are going to have to go through that with a fine-tooth comb and recognize some of the mistakes that are in there and correct them. And as I said the other night here, Madam Speaker, the only thing that stands between President Bush's budget, which would have been passed post the election, is Speaker Pelosi. And so we have got a real opportunity here to make things right and to make some real progress. A couple of things that we want to talk about that are in President Bush's budget that we need to fix immediately as we go through the hearing process is the tax increase that is going to be placed on middle-class families. The President's entire budget is balanced on the backs of 33 million American families who will be forced to pay higher taxes through the alternative minimum tax. This was a tax that was put on years and years ago to make sure that wealthy Americans had to at least pay a base level, the minimum level, of taxes. Regardless of how much you make, you had to pay this much. And through that process over the years, that AMT started creeping and creeping and creeping into middle-class families now to the point where it may go past the $100,000 point, meaning that if you make $100,000 or possibly even less, you will be forced to pay this alternative minimum tax. The President did not deal with that. We are going to have to fix that because the alternative is it means a tax increase on 33 million Americans. Cuts to health care and to our seniors, Madam Speaker. The President's budget cuts Medicare and Medicaid by over $100 billion over 5 years, $300 billion over the next 10 years. And these are two key components of our health care system in the United States of America that cover about 80 million Americans. There have also been cuts to home energy assistance for poor families. As cold as it is today here in Washington, D.C., and across the country, the President submits a budget that cuts that by about 18 percent. There are a couple other things I want to talk about here, Mr. Meek, and I am glad you are paying attention and asking me to help you out here today. We have seen this tremendous change in the economy over the past couple of decades where we went from basically a national economy to an immediate global superpower post-World War II. And with that there have been tremendous changes. Here is one of the key components that have affected us, and as capital moves and globalization occurs, whether we like it or not, Mr. Meek, here is what has happened. This is a chart that indicates the new global workforce. And the increase, from the left side, 1985 to 2000, the increase from about 2 billion people that were considered in the global workforce to almost 6 billion people. That means China has been added to the list. That means India has been added to the list. That means Central American countries have been added to the list. And now all of a sudden we have expanded the global labor supply, which has driven down wages for people here in the United States. This is a major issue that we have to deal with. And, Mr. Meek, as you know, Speaker Pelosi was kind enough to appoint me to the Appropriations Committee, and today we had a meeting with our chairman Mr. Obey, and he said we want our committee to be about the future, and we want our committee to solve future problems. And that is really what we need to deal with here. Here is another issue. As we have had the increase in labor, most Americans have been losing ground, Madam Speaker. And if you look at real median household income, and this comes from the New Democratic Network Web page, this is from the U.S. Census Bureau. Real median household income: In 1999, it was $47,500, real median household income. It was, in 2005, $46,500. That real median household income is dropping, not rising. And so this is an issue that the President's budget does not address, but we are going to have to address this, and we have already made great strides to do this. Two other charts I want to share with Mr. Meek, Madam Speaker, real quickly is people say, well, if you are productive, you will make more. The top line here in the red is the increase in productivity; the blue line is the median income. As productivity has increased by 15 percent, wages have actually gone down. So the tie between productivity and wages no longer exists because of this new global market that we are in, which is a major public policy issue, Madam Speaker. And then, finally, the share of national income in 2003 and 2004. This is the change. The change. The bottom 99 percent, their share of national income went down 2 percent. The top 1 percent, they went up 2 percent. And the top .01 percent went up 1 percent. So you can see that the bottom, the 99 percent hasn't benefited from what is going on here, and the top 1 percent has. So the question is what do we do, and what have we already done? If you look at what the new Democratic majority has already done, Mr. Meek, they have already, in the first 100 hours, made strides to try to rectify this. Passed the minimum wage to try to give the American people a pay raise to $7.25 an hour, and that means thousands of dollars a year depending on how many minimum-wage workers or how many minimum-wage jobs you perform. It could mean a couple thousand dollars a year. In addition to that, we have cut student loan interest rates in half for both parent loans and student loans, which will save the average person taking out a loan about $4,400. So you add the minimum wage. And in addition to that, we were able, in the first 100 hours, through the leadership of Speaker Pelosi, to also repeal corporate welfare and invest that money in new alternative energy sources. We passed the stem cell research bill, and alternative energy and stem cells are going to open up two new sectors of the economy. And then in addition to that, we were able to pass and give permission to the Secretary of Health and Human Services to negotiate down drug prices on behalf of the Medicare recipients. So this package, the first 100-hour package, has done a lot to try to address some of these problems: Boost the minimum wage, cut student loan interest rates in half, and allow drug prices to be negotiated so that we will actually reduce the burden that is being placed on people. So, Mr. Meek, I think there has been a lot that has been done. There has been a lot that has been done here on behalf of the American people just in the first 100 hours, and we are going to continue to move on global climate change, global warming. We are going to continue to move on alternative energy. We are going to move on research and development. We are going to continue to provide the kind of oversight that the American people deserve in order to fix some of these problems.

Mr. RYAN of Ohio

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. I find this an appropriate time, as we are wrapping up, I think, we only have a couple of minutes left, to remember what happened here in the first 100 hours that is in contrast to that document there. Of all the things we talked about in the last 55 minutes or so, 45 minutes, we should make note of that in the first 100 hours the Democratic Congress raised the minimum wage to $7.25 an hour. We cut student loan interest rates in half that will save the average family $4,400, so you get a pay raise. If you have a kid in school that is taking out loans, we will save you $4,400. We allowed the Secretary of Health and Human Services to negotiate down drug prices so our seniors will have less cost to bear for their drug prices, and then we repealed the corporate welfare and invested that money in alternative energy and passed a stem cell research bill to open up two new sectors of the economy for job growth. Compare the first 100 hours and who we helped, and you take that document there that cuts health care for poor kids. That is the difference between what the American people did in the last election, and what we had to deal with within the last, between 6 and 14 years, depending on how you are counting. Now I get to do this again, show you guys how to do this. If you want to e-mail us, any of the Members, 30SomethingDems@mail.house.gov or you can get on the Web site at www.speaker.gov/30Something and send us your comments. All of these charts that we have here are available on the Web site for other members.

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. Yes, so this is what the President is offering to cut in his budget. And, as we said before, would pass if it was not for Speaker Pelosi.