Tim Ryan

Mr. RYAN of Ohio

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. Who we haven't heard from in 20 minutes. We are all excited to hear what you have to say.

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. I would reclaim my time, but I forgot what I was going to say. So I will yield to my friend from Miami.

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. We like your passion.

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. I think the good part about this whole first 100 hours and what we have been able to do, Mr. Speaker, is that we are making some structural changes. We are not petering around the edges. I think the people out there that wanted us to be bold, they are seeing bold. The minimum wage, now, obviously it hasn't been done in 10 or 12 years, since 1997, so it is bold.

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. Will the gentleman yield?

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. What I thought was funny today, or yesterday, in one of the local Capitol Hill newspapers, Roll Call or The Hill, the financial sector, the folks who lend money to the students were squawking, and it was blatant right in the article, because they are going to have reduced profits. Well, I am sorry, we are not here to make sure that you get good profits. We are here to make sure that students in the United States of America can afford to go to college and that they can go out and make good profits. This is not an enterprise here for you to tap into and let the money come shooting out. And I am happy to yield to my colleague, Ms. Wasserman Schultz.

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. And the time will come, as you have proven.

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. Ratified by the Democratic Caucus. But what I think is interesting about all of this is that when you look at today we passed the minimum wage bill. Historic. Look at what we have been able to do with the 9/11 Commission report; what we were able to do with ethics reform; what we are going to do with negotiating drug prices; what we are going to do with stem cell research. When you look at what will be done in just a few weeks, the light of government and the power of government over the past 10, 12 years has been used really to take and help the top 1 percent of the people in the country, whether it was for tax cuts for millionaires or corporate welfare for oil companies or energy companies, whether it was for corporate welfare for the pharmaceutical industry, but the resources and the energy of this body were being used and the levers of government were being used to help that very small percentile of the American people who had the ability to invest in stocks, who have the ability to move their investments abroad to China and other countries and ship their goods back here and who take advantage of the tax cuts and make money off of corporate welfare. They just benefitted in every single way. But if you look at what we have done and what we are going to do in the next couple of days, we raised the minimum wage, which will affect millions of Americans, 3\1/2\ million women and children, lifting them out of poverty. And you can pull all the stats you want, but the bottom line is that people who make minimum wage are going to make more now in the United States of America. And that is not saying we have done anything tremendous. That should have been done years ago. When you look at what we are going to do with student loans, cutting the rates for student loans in half for both students and parents, loans that have come out. Cut the interest rate in half. That will save the average person who takes out a loan $5,000 over the course of the loan. So now you have an increase in the minimum wage, now you have a reduced loan payment because the interest rate has been cut in half and you are going to save money on that, and then, if you are parents or grandparents, like Mr. Delahunt, and qualify for Medicare, there is going to be less money out of your pocket to spend on prescription drugs because we are going to use the ability and the power of this program to reduce the cost of drugs for our senior citizens. I will be happy to yield, but just in those three things, those three areas, Mr. Delahunt, average people are going to benefit, and we have only been here 2 weeks.

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. I would be happy to. In the Appropriations Committee, I think we have now maybe 11 or 12 subcommittees, and the chairs of the subcommittees are referred to in the body as cardinals. Well, Ms. Wasserman Schultz, as the cardinal and the chair, carries the gavel for the Legislative Appropriations Subcommittee. So we are very, very proud of our 30-Something member.

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. You are the cardinal, Ms. Wasserman Schultz. WASSERMAN SCHULTZ. No, that is okay. I defer to the senior Member.

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. Long, long, long years.

Mr. RYAN of Ohio

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. WWW.Speaker.gov/30something.

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. We are still maintaining our grass-roots approach here with the legal pad. WWW.Speaker.gov/30something.

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. Wait a minute, I want to clarify, it is the Ohio State university.

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. Now, I can see Ms. Wasserman Schultz, because I have seen the outfit. But you, all of a sudden they win and you are now a big fan. But I want to congratulate you. This is not poor sportsmanship. Ms. Wasserman Schultz, I want to congratulate you as well. Thank you for all your hard work. And I yield to my good friend.

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. All I am saying is that last night he was like a big Gator fan.

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. That is what I said.

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. Miami of Florida.

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. Very diplomatic. I want to make one final point before we close up here. If the elections didn't go the way they were supposed to, or the way they did, I should say, and this was still a Republican-controlled House and a Republican-controlled Senate, just to put all this in context, what would have happened is the President would have said that we want to put 20,000 or 30,000 more troops in Iraq, and this Congress would have got out the rubber stamp, and it would have been a done deal. And in several months there would be a $100 billion supplemental and there would be 30,000 more troops in Iraq, and we would be further down the line. There would be no question that that is exactly what would have happened. So the power and the force of the American people in their statement that they made basically says we are going to have a discussion about this. Now, how this ends up, we don't know. But I know from a personal perspective there is going to be some strong resistance to adding any more troops, and we are going to have a discussion about money and everything else. Now, we don't have a caucus position, but the bottom line is this: there is going to be a discussion. And that is what is great about this country, and that is what is great about the elections. It is not just going to get rammed through this House, and the American people are not going to feel helpless. They are going to feel like they are here. I know we are ready to wrap things up. Mr. Meek, great game last night. You are actually a Miami of Florida fan.

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. Cheers, brother. I couldn't agree with you more, and we want to thank you too for your leadership. We have had a good couple of years where one of us is inevitably tired and cranky, maybe hungry, and the other one has said, we have to go. We have to go do it. We have to keep going. But when you look at what we are able to do, and I was just glancing over at the minimum-wage stuff, 13 million people would likely benefit from the increase. 7.7 million women, 3.4 million parents, and 4.7 million people of color will benefit, with an average family of three getting $4,400 more a year in their pocket. That is why you do what you do. That is why you get into public life. You start looking at some of the funding streams for community health clinics and safe and drug-free schools, and the Pell grants, and we are not going to be able to wave a magic wand, because we are in a heck of a hole, so it is going to take us a few years to get out of this, but we are going to start bringing some balance to this process. And I think average people are going to start being represented here under the dome. We are not perfect. We will probably make some mistakes along the way, but I think they are going to be mistakes of us trying to do the right thing and make things happen. This is an incredibly complex system we run, with 435 Members from different walks of life, different States and different regions to try to make things happen. Then to go across the hall and try to agree with 100 people from 50 States, and balance that off the President and the executive branch is difficult, but I think we are laying down some good framework here that we can work in the next few weeks and hopefully in the next few years that will affect average people's lives. So, cheers. And now to my Gator friend.

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. When we are here early, he comes to the floor.

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. Unheard of in the 108th Congress, unheard in the 107th Congress.

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. Mr. Speaker, just to be fair, these numbers have been shifted and I have seen different numbers for China, India and the United States. But the bottom line is no matter which ones you are looking at, they have a significant advantage on some of these. You look at our math and science scores, they have gone up a little bit, I think in the fourth grade range, but not nearly where we want them to be. We still have a tremendous gap between the wealthiest and poorest districts. We have a tremendous gap between minority districts and white districts. We have got a lot of work to do. The No Child Left Behind Act is coming up this year to be reauthorized and hopefully funded at the levels. Hopefully we can make the kind of changes that we always hear about on the campaign trail when it comes to education, teachers grabbing us about No Child Left Behind. We have a brutally competitive world out there waiting for us, and these changes need to happen, and some of them need to happen in the first 100 hours.

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. When you talk about PAYGO, and we were talking earlier about the college loan interest rates and in cutting these interest loans in half for both parent and teachers, the bottom line is we are going to cut those interest rates and make college more affordable. You are also talking about the minimum wage and the stem- cell research which we want to talk a little bit about tonight. We are talking about bread-and-butter issues, investing in science and cutting interest rates in half, making sure the bottom is lifted up. I think we have a lot going on.

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. Mr. Speaker, the gentlewoman is right. Last week during all of the Speaker ceremonies, one of the things was a mass up at Trinity College where the Speaker went to college. There were two pictures up on the altar. One was a picture of a kid in Darfur and the other was a kid from Hurricane Katrina. There were pictures of these kids from New Orleans and Darfur all over. I think that kind of symbolized where this Speaker is taking this House of Representatives, that is, we are going to act in the best interest of those kids to protect them by implementing these recommendations. I think the frustration we see on the other side of the aisle, and there is always a level of frustration because you are in power and then out of power, but the one level of frustration from the other side of the aisle is this stuff isn't brain surgery. We have been waiting years to implement some of this stuff. The minimum wage, 10 years. The 9/11 Commission report has been out for a long time. Some of these other things such as negotiating drug prices, we are actually going to get this stuff done in the first 100 hours of legislative business we are doing here. I think there is a level of frustration on their side because some of them wanted it and it couldn't get through, or they don't want it and we are implementing it. But this agenda has the support of the American people. In some ways, these are broad parameters for us. But take the PAYGO rules. We are going to make sure that we are only spending money that actually comes into the Treasury. We are not going to go out and borrow from China. I know our friends who were here before were talking about we are going to get rid of all of the tax cuts. We are going to implement middle-class tax cuts, and we are going to ask some of the people who have been making millions, if not billions, of dollars over the past couple of years to pay more. If you are making millions of dollars a year, we are going to ask you to pay more in taxes. And the reason we are going to do that is we are either going to ask you or we go and we borrow it from China. You are benefiting a great deal from the economy that we have here, from the political system we have here, and we need your help in balancing our budget. Now, there is nothing that has more of an effect on average people than increased interest rates. As we borrow money and borrow money, money becomes scarce in the market, and interest rates go up. If you try to buy a house or car, interest rates have gone up and you are paying more. We are going to keep those tax cuts for the middle class, and we are going to ask the wealthiest to pay a little more. And by balancing the budget, we are going to try to reduce interest rates, and that will lead to another economic boom like happened in 1993 when President Clinton and a Democratic Congress balanced the budget. That is the way it is going to be. We are proving to the American people, and this is the exciting part, I think the American people took a leap of faith on us. In the last few days, we have actually done what we said we were going to do. Later this week we are going to continue to do what we said we were going to do, and next week we will do what we said we were going to do. And when the President gets here to give his State of the Union, he will have a Democratic agenda lying on the table to have to discuss, and that includes the war in Iraq.