Tim Ryan

Mr. RYAN of Ohio

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. Can I say something. What we are trying to do here is move away from a country that says if you are born in the right neighborhood, with the right family, you are going to be fine, and if you are not born in the right neighborhood to the right family, the heck with you. That is what this is all about. I mean, if we have got to boil this down 30-Something-style and lay it out there, that is what it is. You cannot cut Medicaid. You cannot cut food stamps, foster care, child support enforcement, raise the fees on student loans. What are we doing? This does not make any sense. We are a bit younger, on average, than most Members here, but this makes no sense. I do not know any other way to say it than this is crazy, what we are doing here. This makes no sense, at the same time we are giving half a million people, making half a million more here, huge tax cuts.

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. You would think a deficit reduction bill would reduce the deficit.

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. Supposed to be. The words at the top are supposed to identify what is happening.

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. Sure.

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. One of the things, among others, what we would try to do, as we try to reconcile the budget, is not give $70 billion in tax cuts that go primarily to the people who make more than half a million dollars a year. The whole idea of this whole thing was to somehow find in the budget $50 billion to pay for Katrina, and instead, they found the $50 billion to pay for Katrina supposedly, but they also gave $70 billion in tax cuts, which means their deficit, this is what is great about Washington, their deficit reduction package actually increases the deficit by $20 billion because they just cannot resist giving people who make more than $500,000 i.e., their campaign contributors, a tax cut.

Mr. RYAN of Ohio

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. Medicare, the health care program for our senior citizens, our grandparents, our parents. And the gentleman is talking about the Senate making $40 billion in cuts.

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. Amen.

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. That is why we want the independent Katrina commission, so we could make sure we figure out what we are doing, but we fear that when we start pulling off the onion piece by piece by piece, that we are going to end up finding out what is going on in Iraq, and it will be a tremendous waste of the taxpayers' money.

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. Mr. Speaker, the end result is not a good one. It is not an effective use of the taxpayers money.

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. No-bid contracts. They just get money thrown at them.

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. Especially when Halliburton stock has doubled. I mean, all this is going on and Halliburton's stock's doubled.

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. Mr. Speaker, I am almost afraid to have this outfit that we have in charge here, Republican majority and the Republican running the executive branch, I am almost afraid to have them go out into the international community to try to rehab our relationship because their solution is to just throw money at the country and just give them grant money, taxpayer money. That is their only solution. A stronger America begins right here at home. We need to do this together because it is only together that America can do better.

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. This Republican leadership.

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. And at the same time we are giving money away, and I know my good friend from Missouri (Mr. Carnahan) wants to make a point. At the same time we are giving this money away to Iraq, it is not like we have it. We are borrowing money from other countries. This President has borrowed more money from other countries in the last 4 years than this country has borrowed from other countries in the last 224 years. So let us get this straight, the Republican majority in the House, the Republican majority in the Senate, and the Republican President, who have all been in charge the last 4 years, have borrowed more money from foreign countries and then they give it to foreign countries. They give it to Iraq. That is unbelievable to me when at the same time we have American citizens who need a little bit of assistance on college tuition, but they got to go borrow the money.

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. So we are cutting health care, we are increasing the copays, increasing the premiums, but yet giving, we have created a welfare state in Iraq, in which we are not even asking the Iraqis to pay a copay or pay their premium.

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. I do not think there is a copay or anything

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. Over 10 years. I wonder why they would not go to the oil companies and ask them to give back their billions and billions and billions in subsidies. I wonder why they would not go and ask the pharmaceutical companies. But what really strikes me as odd as you talked about the premium going up and the copay going up. I wonder if the health care we have given to Iraqis, I wonder if they are asking them for a copay. I wonder if they are asking the Iraqi citizens who are getting free universal health care in Iraq for a copay. Does anyone know? Because I do not know.

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. I wonder, I wonder why they would cut Medicare to the tune of $200 billion.

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. The gentleman is talking about the Medicare cuts to our seniors.

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. We are not setting good records.

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. Mr. Speaker, reclaiming my time, I think the gentleman makes a tremendous point that we try to present here. The way our friends on the other side run the government is not with an understanding of, really, what day and age it is. It is 2005. We are an information technology age. Government needs to be integrated, and our policy on alternative energy sources will strengthen our position in foreign policy. They are not two separate smokestacks. They are one coherent policy that we are trying to integrate here and say they are all connected. And I think this brings up a tremendous point about leadership, about the corruption and the cronyism, but directly to the incompetence. Here we have, directly after 9/11, a terrorist attack on the United States of America; and everyone in the country was looking to the President for leadership, and no one really knew what to do. It was this great moment in history, but every American citizen wanted to give something. They wanted to be a part of the solution. And many people will remember, Mr. Speaker, that the American people were going to blood banks. They wanted to give blood. They wanted to do whatever they needed to do. They were donating money to organizations. And the Red Cross had to say, We have enough blood. Thank you, but we have enough blood for now. But the American people still wanted to give. And there were nonprofits and foundations and all kinds of organizations opening up so that the American people could donate money to help the families and the victims of 9/11 and the policemen and the firemen and the emergency responders. The American people wanted to give. And the best challenge this administration can come up with, not walk to work or get a bike so we can reduce our dependence on foreign oil so we can reduce the chances of this happening again. Do my colleagues know what this administration asked the American people to do? The great challenge after September 11 from this administration was go shopping. If that is not incompetent executive leadership at its best, I do not know what is. And I get upset because I think that tragic situations like that, as painful as they are, there is a glimmer of possibility within that. And we could have made it a national commitment to search for and get to a point where we are no longer dependent on foreign oil. The American people could have been rallied to that cause, to conserve. And to have the Vice President say that conservation is just a personal virtue, but has no place in the public discourse is an outrage. So why not, with all the political capital that this President had, why not say this country is going to have an Apollo project for alternative energy sources, for hybrid engines, for biodiesel, for wind and solar and everything else? We know we cannot do it today, but America is not about what we can do today. America is about what we can do tomorrow and next year and 10 years from now. And we could have laid out a long-term strategy of all the great possibilities that this country is so good at throwing out as a goal and then going after it. And it is a shame. It really is incompetent leadership. And that is one of the reasons that we come here every night. We could be sitting in our offices. We could be going out to dinner. But we choose to come here because we want to ask, Mr. Speaker, the American people to give us an opportunity to take this country in a new direction, to change what we are doing, to get this Congress and make it independent of all the special interests, and to end this incompetence, this inability to govern.

Mr. RYAN of Ohio

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. Mr. Speaker, we are ready, and we have a game plan to find the money. Why can we not go to the oil companies that we just gave $16 billion in corporate welfare to, why can we not have the courage, why can the Republican leadership here not have the courage to ask the oil companies to give back their $16 billion in corporate subsidies to help pay for some of these priorities? Why can the President of the United States and the Republican leadership in the Senate and the Republican leadership in the House, why can they not go to the pharmaceutical companies and ask for reimportation for the Medicare program to help save our country billions of dollars? Why can they not allow the Secretary of Health and Human Services to negotiate down drug prices with Merck and Pfizer on behalf of the Medicare recipients who are going to now be eligible for Medicare part B? The Democratic Party has a plan to get that money back from the corporations instead of giving it to corporate welfare and investing it in the United States of America so we can have more scientists, more engineers, more investment in research and development. Mr. Speaker, the average taxpayer gives us money and they trust us with it. They work hard. We see the top number at the top of the check and you see the number that you actually get to take home. There is a big difference whether you are on the bottom or top scale. You give us your money; and we need to honor that by making sure that when we spend it, we give that taxpayer the best value they could ever get. We need to assure them we are running an efficient, effective government here, not just wasting money and giving to our political friends, like the oil companies. Can you imagine with gas prices what they are now, we are giving oil companies $16 billion in subsidies.

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. Mr. Speaker, that is what our generation is going to change when we take the country in another direction. It is time for us to start saying that we want the best and the brightest to come and work for our government. There used to be a day and age when government service, assisting your country, coming from the private sector for a few years and helping out and giving your time and talents to the government was a respected endeavor.

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. And some change. And we are continually running these structural deficits at over $400 billion to $500 billion, with a war and natural disasters. So we are borrowing money to pay for this.

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. Let us lay this out real quick before my colleague puts the cherry on top. So we have $17,500 in student loan debt and $3,000 in credit card debt. Run that out 20-some years. A child born today owes $27,000 to the debt that we have in the United States of America, the $8 trillion. Every citizen owes $27,000.