Tim Ryan

Mr. RYAN of Ohio

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. I think when you talk about accountability and the future of our kids, one of the issues I want to touch on briefly is the issue of security which ties into what the gentleman was talking about before with really all of these issues, accountability, community, national security. Two cops in a town that I represent, the city of Warren, Ohio, will be eliminated because of the cuts that this administration and this Congress have passed through the COPS program and through HUD, two cops in a town of 48,000 people that has four cops on patrol at midnight on a Saturday night. Who is making us more safe? Certainly not the policies of this administration, checking one container out of every 50 that comes into the ports of the United States, which I do not have to explain to the gentleman here or the gentleman here or me, Ohio, even. What are we doing? I mean, Senator Kerry may not have phrased it properly that we want to fight a different war or a more sensitive war, but we are not fighting World War II anymore. This is an intelligence war where you can make a bomb that fits into a briefcase that can blow up millions of people. So the American people have to look very closely at the kind of policies that are coming out of this Congress right now, and we are not offering a very bright future, I do not think. And I am not a pessimistic person; I am probably more optimistic in most instances than I probably should be. But we are not doing things right now, and there is a critical, critical, critical election coming up here that defines that the two parties are clearly in different positions: tax cuts, spending $600 billion more than you are taking in, jeopardizing the future of the country; outsourcing jobs; and trying to say that this war in Iraq, which is the central front of the war on terrorism that we are losing is somehow making us safer; or the Democrats that are saying, let us take care of the United States of America, fund the education programs, fund cops, firefighters, port security, national security, homeland security, get these troops back home as soon as possible and make sure that we are investing in education and health care so our kids and grandkids can have a bright future to create this new economy that we do not know what it is going to be yet, but we know if we educate them everything will be okay. That is our plan, and I want to thank the gentlewoman from California (Ms. Pelosi) and the gentleman from Maryland (Mr. Hoyer) and the gentleman from New Jersey (Mr. Menendez) and the gentleman from New Jersey (Mr. Pallone) and the leadership of our caucus for providing us a message to go to the American people where they can say that Democrats get it, the Democrats have a plan. We saw real people today in the United States Capitol that have real issues, that need our help, and the government is here to help. Maybe sometimes we do not do everything right, but we are here to help, and I hope that we can fulfill what the gentlewoman from California (Ms. Pelosi) wrote in here, that our actions are worthy of the aspirations of our children.

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. Factually based in the American discourse today, in 2004, that they will find that these are facts. We are not making this up. The studies that come out, the two newspaper articles that come out that say the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development are cutting subsidies for poor people to live in the city of New York or in major cities or the banks have got their fingers in the student loans and they are making billions of dollars of money, we are not making this up. This is in newspapers every single day. So the gentleman from New Jersey, as he goes on here, I just want the American people, again, to put in a little bit of context here that we are not just making this up, that it sounds terrible and it sounds terrible because it is, because we have an administration and a Congress that consistently and constantly try to appeal to the lowest common denominator. They always appeal to where they can raise the most amount of money from that industry at the expense of average people who need help. And if we all want to move forward in the 21st century, the government needs to be involved. And I think that is what the New Partnership for America's Future stands for.

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. Exactly, Mr. Speaker. It is like a bad movie or a bad novel or we are demagoging the issues. But if the American people will take the time to not only listen to what our plan is but listen to our critique, which is, I think, is okay.

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. Mr. Speaker, I just want to say, and I have tried to say this when we have come before the American public, that we are not making this up. I mean, I think it has gotten so bad and so much on the wrong track in this country that if they are just sitting at home watching a bunch of Democrats up there talking, they would think they cannot possibly be telling the truth. It cannot possibly be that bad.

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. Mr. Speaker, will the gentleman yield?

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. Mr. Speaker, if the gentleman will yield, I was in college actually at the time of the great Contract With America, of which one of the fundamental principles was that we were going to have this balanced budget amendment. And my God, I mean, when we look at where we are today, reckless, reckless leadership, Congress spending like drunken sailors.

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. And who are we borrowing it from? We are borrowing it from banks in Japan and banks in China. So here we have China cleaning our clock in the manufacturing sector in the United States of America, stealing all our jobs, not paying their workers anything, no environmental regulations, no human rights, no religious freedom, all the things that this Chamber and this Capitol and this Congress hold dear, that we get a lot of speeches about now, in election time, is going to China, and we are borrowing money from them. We are paying them interest on the money that we are borrowing from them. They take the interest and they invest it back into their state- run manufacturing businesses and steal the jobs in the United States of America. What a deal for China. And we do not have anything. We are losing on every end, which is mortgaging the future of our kids and our grandkids. We are losing our manufacturing, we are losing good paying jobs. The jobs that are replacing the jobs we have now are $7,000 or $8,000 less than the jobs we have that we are losing. And China, which is going to be the greatest economic competitor to the United States of America, is winning. American people, we are losing. We are making bad decisions every single day in this Chamber. This President is making bad decisions. And the kicker, the kicker, is this: that we want to deal with North Korea. This gets into the war and everything else. We want to deal with North Korea. But we cannot deal with North Korea. And we want to deal and play tough with China with their 40 percent currency manipulation, to try to put our business at a little more of an advantage in the international marketplace. But we cannot, because we are bogged down in a war. So instead of talking tough with China, we have to go to China and say, hey, China, can you help us with North Korea, because we just have too much political capital and money and soldiers and everything invested in the Middle East. So instead of confronting China, we are in a position of weakness, and we have to ask China to help us with North Korea. What a bad position this administration has put us in.

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. If the gentleman will yield further, that is the issue. It is the fact that over the course of the last 2 years this Congress and this President have said we need to give trillions of dollars back to people who make more than $1 million a year. We just cannot give it away. The downside is, we are taking it away from somewhere. It almost is a zero-sum game. We are taking it away from that senior citizen in your district and thousands of others, probably millions of others across the country, who are going to suffer because of that. So ask yourself, as a voter in the United States of America, do you want the governmental policy of your government to be, we are going to give tax cuts to people, $100,000 or $130,000, back to someone who makes $1 million a year or more? Or are we going to have them pay their fair share of taxes, they are obviously doing well, they are making $1 million a year, and use that money to make sure that people in your community or people in my community or people in the city of New York or any major city have affordable housing? Unfortunately, we have an administration and a Congress here, they do not understand that $70 a month means a lot to some people. $100 a month means a lot to people. We are lucky. We get paid okay. We are never going to be in that position, thank God. But there are thousands and millions of people in this country that that affects their lives. They end up going to the food bank because they do not have $70 a month or $100 a month. When is this Congress and this President going to begin to understand there are American people that need their help? And they turn their back, and they come to our communities and say, hey, the economy is doing great. It is doing great. So maybe someone can get a job in this great economy and pay for their grandmother's prescription drug, or that extra $70. They are just so out of touch, they are in fantasyland. I just want to say, yes, there is a cost. The money comes from very, very wealthy people who have been given a break and have had a free ride over the last few years at the expense of those people. It is not for free.

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. Just to clarify, if a student defaults on a loan and takes out $10,000 worth of loans in Columbus, Ohio, or Youngstown State University, bolts town and moves to Oregon, who picks up the tab? The government. So the bank only benefits. If they pay the loan back they make the 9.5 half percent interest when they loan it out at 3.5 and if the guy bolts town, the Government picks up the tab. Great deal.

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. The beautiful thing, I do not know if it is beautiful or not, but the craziness that we have operating now in the United States Congress. We have a thousand kids dead in Iraq. We have thousands upon thousands of kids that we have probably all visited up at Walter Reed that are injured. We have 1.5 million kids moving into poverty. We have 5 million more people that are uninsured. We have subsidies for housing getting cut, so poor people cannot afford their rent any more. We have Medicaid going up. We have no cost controls for the prescription drugs. We have a million kids that will not, or 250,000 college eligible kids that will not, go to college because they cannot afford it. We have the Pell grant that is 40 percent of what it was when it started in the 1970s; and tomorrow we are voting on the Pledge Protection Act, to protect the pledge. Now, we know it is the end of the session. Whether you are for it or against it, we know it is not going anywhere. The Senate is not going to take it up. It is divisive. It is a reason not to vote on anything of major policy substance in this Congress. The Democrats have a plan that is going to move the country forward. My colleagues are out campaigning too. People are tired of the politics. The divisive issues that we bring forth today, we do not want to talk about student loans, because then we cannot raise money from the banks. We do not want to talk about Medicare costs because then we cannot raise money from the insurance companies and the pharmaceutical companies. So what do we talk about? The Pledge of Allegiance. What is going on? If you are sitting at home and you lost your job and you cannot send your kid to school and tuition is going up and there is a local property tax on for your local school district, there is a mental health tax on, there is a tax on for your police and fire because we have cut the COPS program and the Congress is talking about the Pledge Protection Act? How disconnected are we?

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the gentleman bringing this up, because I think whether we are talking about trade with China or what we are going to do, I mean, I think everyone agrees in the country on investments in education, whether it is K through 12, actually funding No Child Left Behind, which would be a nice idea, or making sure that average citizens in the United States of America have access to our colleges and universities. I just want to share a couple of examples. Today, in one of the New York newspapers, they did an editorial. Basically, what is happening with the college students, and this just illustrates how egregious the infiltration of the money folks in this town can be, there is a provision in the Department of Education that guarantees banks a 9.5 percent return interest for a loan that they make, 9.5 percent. Well, they are now currently lending out student loans at 3.5 percent, but the government is reimbursing them for 9.5 percent. So if we do not fix this, for example, in the next 6 months, there will be $3 billion wasted that will go right to the banks. I am not making this up. This is crazy. Mr. Speaker, $3 billion that will go to the banks. So, all we are saying on the Democratic side is that we believe that that $3 billion should be put into the Pell grants. We believe that that should be, maybe, used to actually lower the interest rates that average students would need to be paid so they would not have to pay and invest that money to increase access and opportunity for people. How are we going to compete with China and Japan and India and all of these countries that are stealing all of our jobs if we are not willing to actually fund the education programs in the United States of America? We need more people competing. We need more entrepreneurs. We need more scientists. We need more mathematicians. We need more engineers. We need more math and science teachers. We need more people wanting to be astronauts and move the country forward in the 21st century. But if we do not invest, we are not going to see the return on that money. But we would rather give the $3 billion to the banks. Again, I am not making this up. I do not have anything against banks. They own my house, and they own my car, so there is nothing personal here, but it is just as a policy decision, we need to spend that money in a different way, and it is the same thing with No Child Left Behind. In Ohio alone, all of the new mandates that the No Child Left Behind Act instituted for local school districts, Ohio alone in one year, are underfunded by $1.5 billion. Now, Ohio had a provision; 75 percent of the kids needed to graduate. No Child Left Behind came in and said, you need 100 percent, so we are going to have the tutorials, the after- school programs, the summer programs, everything else; never sent the money. So, good idea, right? We want the next 25 across the finish line so that they can compete and create wealth and value in our society. Great idea. But if you do not fund the program, and you put it on the backs of the locals who do not want to vote for property tax levies as it is, where is the progress? So, again, we are saying that, if we want to move the country forward, we have to make these kinds of investments. And to the American people who are out there, President Bush promised to increase the Pell grants when he first ran. He did not do it. He promised to fund No Child Left Behind. He did not do it. This Congress made the same kind of commitments. They did not do it. Who has flip-flopped? Who has flip-flopped?

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. I think it is exciting what we have to talk about here. I think we have outlined pretty much what the problems are and the problems we face. The beautiful thing about this system is, it is self-correcting. We have elections every 2 years. So the American people will now have a choice, and the choice to elect, hopefully, in this instance, a Democratic Chamber that has an agenda. I think that is going to be great for the future of the country. I yield back to the gentleman from New Jersey to explain what our agenda is.

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. I am sorry. That is true. I apologize to all of the sailors out there. But clearly, there is no concern for these budget deficits that we are running, putting our country in a position of weakness with some of our foreign competitors. So I think it is important that the American people just at least see the duplicity of some of the comments that we are getting here today, a party that was clearly for fiscal responsibility. I have to be honest with my colleagues. When I go back home, and I live in a pretty strong Democratic area in northeast Ohio, I am running into more and more Republicans that are very, very frustrated with the behavior of the Congress and the President running these deficits, because they have always been fiscally conservative. That has been a cornerstone of the Republican Party for many years, and now, they are looking and saying, wait a minute. And here we are as Democrats trying to put in the PAYGO provisions, that if you provide tax cuts or any kind of spending increases, you have to pay for them. And I think we have evolved as a Congress over the last 10 or 15 years, and we recognize how dangerous these deficits are. But a Republican House, a Republican Senate, a Republican President, $600 billion deficit, unending war in Iraq, borrowing from Social Security, borrowing from the banks in China; very, very dangerous proposition.

Mr. RYAN of Ohio

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. Mr. Speaker, we are going to continue the conversation here and switch gears here just a little bit with the gentleman from Massachusetts (Mr. Delahunt) and continue the Iraq Watch and talk a little bit about the foreign policy issues that have been facing this Congress and facing the country for a few years now and trying to figure out a way in which we can try to correct this problem that we have gotten ourselves in. Let me just first say that the whole Congress, Republican and Democrat Parties, Independents, House and Senate, President, we are all very much in support of the troops who are out on the front lines, their families who are making tremendous sacrifices that many of us will never ever know. I have had the opportunity to be up to Walter Reed and visit some of these injured soldiers, and there is nothing more heartbreaking than to see a 19-, a 20-year-old kid who has lost his or her legs, an arm, and just think about all their hopes and dreams that have, in many ways, been washed away. So we are taking this opportunity here as Democrats to talk a little bit about how we got into this position, and I want to start on an issue that I feel extremely passionate about. When this all started after 9/11, the United States of America and an international coalition moved forward in Afghanistan, and we moved forward in Afghanistan because they were housing the Taliban and they were housing or harboring Osama bin Laden, who was the main perpetrator of 9/11 on the United States of America. So many of us are confused, myself included, why we went into Iraq in the first place. The reason is that we have only so many resources in the United States of America, and we attacked and invaded with an international coalition into Afghanistan. We ousted the Taliban government that was harboring al Qaeda and harboring Osama bin Laden, and we sent Osama running into the Tora Bora region on the Afghan-Pakistan border. We had this international coalition, and we were going into Afghanistan and we were going to rebuild this country, and we were going to make it a thriving democracy. We were going to have a democracy in that region. There is a great article in the Atlantic magazine this week, for those of you who are at home who want to read it and get the complete analysis and the timeline of how this happened. Then at one point, all of a sudden, all of the generals and all of the military planners in the United States of America began to shift their attention from Afghanistan to Iraq, and they took in troops. We now have 130,000 troops in Iraq. In Afghanistan, we only have 17- or 18,000. The Special Forces were moved as well, and then even as it states in this article, the satellites that were focused on Afghanistan, that were trying to provide intelligence, were also moved, and they were shifted to Iraq. So how symbolic that we shifted our focus to Iraq and took away from what was going on in Afghanistan. Slowly but surely, Afghanistan began to unravel. We ended up with a full-blown war in Iraq, and here we are, many, many months away from that, stuck in a quagmire in Iraq that many of us have no idea how we are going to get out of. I am glad to see that Senator Kerry has issued a plan on how we are going to get out of there. We have to bring in an international coalition. That is the only way to do this. If we do not get troops in and support and money from the international community, the only thing left is to have a draft in the United States of America. If you ask the American people, would you rather have a draft or try to unite the international community, I think most Americans would say let us get the international community united to put troops into Iraq, but this current President cannot do that. Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from Massachusetts (Mr. Delahunt), who has been a real leader on this issue and more articulate than anyone else in this Congress on the problems and challenges in Iraq.

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. Mr. Speaker, we had the same situation here when we had the President of Afghanistan here, told us how great everything was going in Afghanistan, how there was not a drug problem in Afghanistan, we were going to have elections, on and on and on. I would be happy to yield back, but just the American people need to know that this is almost going to be a repeat performance of what we heard a few months ago.

Mr. RYAN of Ohio

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. Mr. Speaker, I rise today to extend special recognition to the Mahoning Valley Scrappers, a Division I-A minor league baseball team located in Niles, Ohio, which won the 2004 New York-Penn League Championship for the first time in its 6-year history. On Monday September 13, the Scrappers claimed the title after defeating the Tri-City Valley Cats 4-2 in a two-game sweep. The Scrappers finished the year with a 42-34 record, with new manager Mike Sarbaugh at the helm. The Scrappers, an affiliate of the Cleveland Indians major league baseball franchise, averaged more than 4,100 spectators per game this year, placing the team near the top third in its league for attendance. I commend the team for its extraordinary achievements and join with my community to thank the players and the organization for bringing America's favorite pastime home to the Mahoning Valley.

Mr. RYAN of Ohio

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentlewoman for yielding me this time. And I would also like to take this opportunity to thank the gentleman from California (Chairman Pombo) for the opportunity to do this study. This is a tremendous opportunity for our community. We have had a ton of issues in Northern Ohio and in Northeastern Ohio, and I would like to just thank the chairman for giving me an opportunity to help us try to redefine our community. I would also like to thank the gentleman from West Virginia (Mr. Rahall), ranking member, who has been a tremendous help and support in guidance and his counsel over the past couple of years since I have been in Congress on a variety of issues, but this one in particular. I would also like to thank Jim Zoia on his staff for helping us with the day-to-day operations. I would also like to thank Jennifer Moore on my staff and my chief of staff, Mary Anne Walsh, for their help in making this happen. The Western Reserve, as has been stated already, was the original West. There were many people from the American Revolution who were forced out of their houses and their homes over into the West, just west of Pennsylvania into Northern Ohio, and it was 14 original counties that are still there today; and there have been significant changes. But since 1792, this area has always represented a place that was indicative, I think, of the American spirit, and the people who were there were very industrious, and they came there with that spirit; and we have had enormous success. The Western Reserve has been the leader and has showed great progress since 1792. It has been the foundation of the steel industry. It has been the rubber capital of the world. It had the first African American newspaper. It has the oldest labor newspaper. In the last 25 or 30 years or so, this area has had some great challenges. With the decimation, really, of the steel industry in the United States of America, this area took a great fall, and there have been enormous challenges throughout the whole manufacturing sector in these 14 counties, which I think makes this legislation that much more significant because we need to preserve what I believe to be the real history of these communities, a history of progress, a history of economic progress, a history of participation in the social justice aspects of our society. And I think it is important for us through this heritage corridor to communicate to our children and to our grandchildren that they come from an area that once led the world in the economic and social arenas. This is the area for the first electric street car, the first Warner Brothers film. The first Packard car was produced in this area; the baseball score card; and one of my favorites, the hot dog, was invented in the old Connecticut Western Reserve; also, the American trucking industry. And we want our children to know that they come from a place that had three Presidents, President Garfield, President McKinley, President Hayes; three United States Supreme Court justices; Thomas Edison; John Brown the great abolitionist. And the success of our future depends on our understanding of the past. As the gentleman from West Virginia (Mr. Rahall) said, this heritage corridor in many instances throughout this country provides the economic engine for rebirth of an area, and that is exactly what we need. We are working on regionalization in Northeast Ohio, and we cannot just have economic regionalization. We need the cultural and historic preservations and have all the groups in our community working together, and this is the rallying point for our community. So I want to thank, again, the chairman. I want to thank the gentleman from West Virginia (Mr. Rahall) for helping us improve the quality of life in our community. I would like to thank the gentleman from New Mexico, as well, because I think if these kids and our grandkids know that they come from this stock of Presidents and inventors and entrepreneurs and scientists and many others who have contributed to the economic progress of our country and the social justice of our country that they will be inspired to continue this proud tradition.

Mr. RYAN of Ohio

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for yielding me this time. A couple of points I would like to make as we are having this debate. One, we hear that there currently is a trade surplus with Morocco, but we have to look back just a few years and remember that we had a trade surplus with Mexico before we signed NAFTA. I think when we get ourselves into these trade agreements the argument is we have a trade surplus but things are going to change, and we need to look at that here. What I cannot understand today, not only with this agreement but the legislation that passed out of this House earlier, is what are the priorities? We are trying to strip the Supreme Court of their power that was given to them by the Constitution. We are going off on another trade agreement here. In Ohio, we just lost 14,000 more jobs just in the month of June. The unemployment rate in Ohio went from 5.6 percent to 5.8 percent. What are the priorities of this Congress? In every single trade agreement that has been passed by this Congress, there has been a promise that has been made along with it. We say we are going to open up markets, we are going to export, and we are going to trade. And as we get rid of those low-paying jobs, we are going to invest in education, we are going to make sure our country is competitive, and we are not living up to that part of the bargain. We have 59,000 engineers which graduated from this country in 2001, and over 200,000 that graduated from China. If we do not fix the problem we have with our Pell Grants, our student loans, No Child Left Behind in the State of Ohio alone is underfunded for $1.5 billion for one school year, we cannot keep trading and not educating. That is the problem with these trade agreements. If we are going to compete in a global economy, we have to invest in our students or we are going to lose the middle class in the United States of America.

Mr. RYAN of Ohio

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. I like this number 7. I had a chance to peek.

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. What position did the gentleman play?

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. Mr. Speaker, the gentleman from Florida (Mr. Meek) is a former football player.

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. Natural sciences, engineering. And I am not saying I was the sharpest knife in the drawer when I went through college, but what I am saying is I know enough and the gentleman from Florida (Mr. Meek) knows enough, and I think the American people know enough of what we need to do to compete. So look at this chart. Percentage of first degrees awarded in natural sciences and engineering: China, 73 percent; Japan, 66 percent; Germany, 59 percent; South Korea, 45 percent; United States, 32 percent. So China is at 73 percent. We are at 32 percent. And how do we expect to compete with all these people if we do not have enough people participating in the sciences and in engineering? One final chart. These are people entering graduate school and engineering, physical sciences, math and computer sciences in U.S. institutions. The green line is U.S. students and permanent residents, 59,000, roughly, as I stated earlier. The red line is foreign students at U.S. institutions, almost 83,000. I do not want to get bogged down in the numbers; but my point is that because we are not investing in education, because this administration, this House, this Senate, this Congress, has chosen time and time again to give tax breaks to the top 1 percent while we have 250,000 students across the United States of America who are college eligible but will not go because they cannot afford it, we have a problem. And we have a problem that we can fix, and this is why I am here at almost 11 o'clock at night. This is why the gentleman ran for Congress. This is why we spend long hours going to parades and shaking hands and working here late at night during the week, because we believe that there is an answer to this problem that is going to make the United States stronger. And what we have been arguing here on the Democratic side, and many Republicans have been arguing this as well, but the leadership, the President, the leadership in the Senate, has not been responsive, the Pell grant now only accounts for 40 percent of one's college tuition. In 1973 or 1974 when the Pell grant was started, the Pell grant would take care of almost 80 percent of a student's college tuition. We had a commitment to education. We had a commitment to make sure that we could keep driving this economy by having engineers and scientists out in the private sector pushing it along, starting a business, working for a business, making it grow, helping it grow time and time again. We did not have the banks involved in the student loan business. Why do the banks have to be cut in on the whole deal? I have nothing against banks. They own my house right now; so I do not have anything against them. But they do not have any business being involved in a student loan. We cannot help them make profits. We are trying to get kids educated, and that is what this country needs to do. We need to make it a priority, and I think this is something that has got to come from the President of the United States. I love John Kerry's plan. He wants to double the Pell grant. He wants to give $25 billion to the States that has to be spent to lower tuition costs. He wants to help kids get low-interest loans. He wants scholarships for math and science students. These are things we need to do. And I went off and I apologize, but the frustrating part is that this is solvable. These are solvable problems, and that is the beauty of this system. And we can fix this. I think we have to fix it because really the future of the country is at stake. When we look at trying to compete with China and they are cleaning our clock in electronics, telecommunications equipment, assembled computers, and the United States workers are losing their jobs and scrambling over to see if they can get to Wal-Mart, we have got a real problem. And I think if we made this a national commitment, and I hope President Kerry would make it a national commitment, but if we do that, I think we still have some time left. And the scary thing is the clock is ticking.

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. Mr. Speaker, I appreciate that. He is a generous man. I am getting choked up here with the gentleman's hospitality. Exports from China. And I went over this about an hour ago here, but I want to do it again just in case we have some new people watching. This is out of Wired Magazine, and Ryan Keating on my staff ran across this, and I want to thank him for his insight into these particular issues. Top five exporters of electronics, countries: China in 2002, $8.8 billion in exports of electronics; United States of America, $2.5 billion. Let me repeat. China, $2.5 billion; United States, $2.5 billion exporting electronics. So China is cleaning our clock. Top five exporters of telecom equipment: China, $36.4 billion, United States $21.6 billion. Getting our clock cleaned in the telecom equipment industry. We will go over here to the green. Top five exporters of assembled computers, when we signed all these trade agreements and we said we are going to compete with all these countries, we are going to have to have the high-tech jobs. That is what everyone always told us. Top exporters of assembled computers: China, 3.8 billion; USA, 2.4 billion. Getting our clock cleaned by China for assembled computers. Here is the point I want to make with this pie chart and two other graphs here. Top five sources of engineering graduates, if we want to get the new economy going, if we want to make sure that our economy can compete in this very competitive global economy, one of the things we need to do is we need to have engineers who are creating, finding better ways of doing things, finding more efficient ways of doing things. Engineer grads in 2001: United States, 59,000; China, 219,000 engineers in 2001, graduated from China. 59,000 in the United States of America. And I ask the gentleman from Florida, the Speaker, and everyone else who is listening here tonight, how are we going to compete in the global economy when we have 59,000 engineers graduating, China has 219,000, European Union has 179,000, Japan has 104,000, Russia has 82,000, and the United States of America has 59,000? How are we going to compete in the global economy when we do not have enough engineers out there creating the new economy? And we have talked here before, Mr. Speaker, about the space program and how the goal for the United States was to go to the Moon; but that was the sexy, glamorous part. We are going to land on the Moon and everyone can see it and it is great. But the idea was to make sure that we are educating mathematicians, scientists, engineers, chemists, people who are going to be able to participate. There was a goal there to go to the Moon, but all that was to make sure that we were educating people in the process of getting there. Yes, it is great to get to the Moon. Yes, we can do experiments up there. But imagine all those people who got educated in those specific sciences and never ended up working for NASA. They ended up in the private sector driving our economy. Let me share two more charts here; and I do not like to get too statistical because, one, it makes me nervous, but we have got to wake up and smell the Starbucks. Other countries emphasize science and engineering education. This is the percentage of first degrees awarded in the natural sciences and engineering.

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. Mr. Speaker, the gentleman does not have to apologize. Let us go, after that passionate display, over to our e- mail, 30-somethingdems@mail.house.gov. If there is some kind of voter suppression going on where people are telling them they cannot register at their local board of elections because it is on a college campus or because they are a student or because they live in a dorm, I ask them to give us a call. We will help them negotiate the waters with Smack Down Your Vote, with Hurricane and the Maven and our guys from WWE who are helping us out; we will be happy to help them. I know I just sent around a letter last week contacting all the local members of Congress in the State of Ohio. We are going to send a letter off to the Secretary of State in the State of Ohio. I know the gentleman from Florida (Mr. Meek) is going to do that in Florida. So we start contacting the Secretaries of State in these different States. The National Secretaries of State Association is going to help us also communicate to their local board of elections to let them know that this is something that can really happen with young people. So 30somethingdems@mail.house.gov, send us an e-mail. One of the issues that the gentleman from Florida was talking about, about how this is their future, the future of the country is at stake, and how we need young people to participate in the process, and I will tell my colleagues why. Not because young people are just inherently great, but young people have certain qualities that this democracy needs, and they have a way of replenishing the system here with some new ideas, and so in a way they are great. We need new ideas in this institution. And we are in the process of creating a new economy, and we need them. And the disagreement they have with many on the other side is that they consistently have chosen to give tax cuts to people who make millions of dollars a year and are not invested in the Pell grants, not invested into low, low, low-interest student loans, not invested into the States to allow them to reduce the costs of college and reduce the tuition costs that a lot of these kids will face as they go back to school in the fall. And the gentleman said, You know how I know they are going to have higher tuition? Well, you know how I know? Because they have already said in Ohio State it is going up 13 percent. In Akron it is going to go up 10 percent. So I want to share this, and we did this earlier. We had an Ohio working group that was out here earlier, and I shared some of these graphs, but I want to share these with the people watching here. One of the greatest threats to the United States of America, Mr. Speaker, is China. China. And give me a minute here because I am going to have to segue into making my point.

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. I have had conversations over the past couple of weeks with some people in the entertainment industry whom I think also are going to be willing to take this and promote it to their fans as well. This is something that is really catching on that I think we really need to make sure that everyone knows, ride the wave out and let them know. If you have a particular story like the gentleman who heard us on Friday from Columbus, Ohio, send us an e-mail to 30somethingdems@mail.house.gov. Or you can also e-mail our friends at smackdownyourvote.com. You can e-mail them or studentsuffrage.com, also, a new organization.