Tim Ryan

Mr. RYAN of Ohio

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. Right. This is not a game. This is not a game that needs to be played. We switch the numbers here, and we switch them here. This is important, because as of February 8, which I believe is today, $8,200,380,327,202 is the national debt. And we will have a chart next week that is updating this. And the President is going to come and ask to rise the debt ceiling so that we can go out and borrow more money. But your share of the national debt, Ms. Wasserman Schultz, is $27,518. That is what you owe, the debt you owe to the United States Treasury.

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. Goldman Sachs is not a liberal organization?

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. I think the pay as you go is basic common sense. It is the same thing that people have to do at home. You get the checkbook out, you take in so much, you can only spend so much, or you have to end up borrowing money or putting it on your credit card, and we know that is definitely a downward spiral. But exactly what you were saying, I think the President signed it into law today, the Deficit Reduction Act, which is hysterical, because it actually increases the deficit. Now, our Republican friends are saying, well, it cuts $39 billion, the deficit by $39 billion, or there is $39 billion in cuts, but at the same time, they gave $70 billion, or close to it, in tax cuts that went primarily to people who make more than 4- or 5- or $600,000 a year. So it is very simple math to realize that, well, you may cut tell by 39, but if you are reducing your revenues by $70 billion, that there is still a deficit increase. And that is basically what happened. Now, you can check the rolls here as far as what Democrats have voted for. Time and time again, the Democrats have supported middle-class tax cuts. We have supported tax cuts for small businesses. We supported tax cuts and credits for college tuition. But I am not ashamed to say that we are going to ask Bill Gates and Warren Buffett to pay their fair share in taxes, because right now they are getting a free ride. And I am not afraid to say, and the 30-something Working Group is not afraid to say, that we do not want to give public tax dollars to the tune of $16 billion to the energy companies. You got to be kidding me. I mean, you know, Mr. Speaker, people who may be watching this in the Chamber or Members in their offices should be startled that we are going to go out and collect tax dollars from the public. Average people making minimum wage, or 10 bucks or 15 bucks an hour, send money down here to us, and the Republican majority is taking that money and giving it to the energy companies when, you know, Exxon-Mobil is making $39 billion in a quarter, and all of the other oil companies are doing extremely well. Or we are going to take that money, Ms. Wasserman Schultz, we are going to take the public money, and we are going to give it to the HMOs, or we are going to make sure that we are wasting it and giving it to the pharmaceutical companies, without any kind of price controls.

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. The deficit is the annual.

Mr. RYAN of Ohio

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. Well, I just wanted to personally congratulate John Larson of Connecticut, who is our new vice-chair of the Democratic Caucus. We had a great race. It is sometimes difficult within the caucus. Jan Schakowsky from Illinois and Joe Crowley from New York both ran great races, both great members of our caucus. But this was something that really got everybody's juices flowing and ready for the next year. I want to give our e-mail address out. 30- somethingdems@mail.house.gov, so the Members can give us a holler, if they want to. That is 30, the number, somethingdems@mail.house.gov. Send us your e-mails and let us know what you think. You can go to the leader's Web site and find out about our innovation agenda; you can find out about what the Democratic plan is to lead this country in the next few years and in the next few decades. It is exciting stuff, it really is, and I am proud to be a part of it. I want to thank Leader Pelosi and Steny Hoyer and Mr. Clyburn as well.

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. Have you?

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. I appreciate that, my good friend from Florida. We are about to wrap up, and I think what we are saying is, we want a chance. We want an opportunity to lead this country. As we close here, Mr. Meek, I just want to say that our caucus had an election today.

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. Democrats.

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. Absolutely. I think you make several very, very good points, and what we are trying to communicate here is that we have better ideas and we want to take the country in a new direction. If you are perfectly comfortable with the way everything is right now, then you probably do not want to vote for Democrats, but if you are having some trouble and you think the country is maybe going in the wrong direction, just listen to what we are talking about and how we are going to actually implement our plan. We have figured out in the past 10 years that we have not always made the best argument, we have not always presented ourselves in the best way. We allowed our Republican friends to define us, and as they defined us, they continued to win elections. But over the past few years, 4 years, 5 years in particular, they have defined themselves through their actions, and we now have the ideas and the commitment and the energy to take this country in a new direction and maybe we needed that time to learn. Maybe we needed that time to figure out exactly what needed to be done, but we are talking about, on the Democratic side, making sure that every household has broadband access in the next 5 years, that the country is energy independent in the next 10 years, by taking some of the savings that we will generate through the prescription drug program, by doing a couple of the things I talked about earlier by saving money, by making government run more efficiently and not being afraid quite frankly to ask Bill Gates to pay his fair share in taxes. The President said again last night, make the tax cuts permanent. I will agree with a part of it, making the middle class tax cuts permanent, but let us ask these people who have been making money hand over fist over the past 10 years, we need your help. You think we want to ask you for more money? You think we like it? No, but we need you to help us. The country is running a $500 billion deficit. We could either ask you for it or we could borrow it from the Chinese, which is what we are doing now. So if we ask you for it, we get it and we hopefully balance our budget, lower interest rates, and that will lead to economic growth. Right now, we are borrowing the money because the Republican majority does not have the guts to ask the wealthiest people in the country for money, and we are borrowing it from the Chinese. It is that simple. We are not making this up. This is not a complicated process. We are spending $500 billion more than we are taking in. So we have got to get it from somewhere, and if you run a deficit at home, you go to the bank and you borrow it and they charge you interest. That is what we are doing right now. We are borrowing money from the Chinese bank, the Japanese bank, and we are paying interest on it, and that is money that we cannot invest, that interest payment. We cannot invest that into education. I told this story earlier on the floor as we were debating the budget reconciliation, and it really hit me. I had a meeting last week with a school board member from Youngstown, Ohio, Youngstown City Schools, and I asked him as we were sitting there what is the poverty rate for these kids that go to Youngstown City Schools, a pretty simple question. Ninety percent of the kids of the 8,000 kids that go to Youngstown City Schools live in poverty. I do not even know why I asked him because it does not really make sense to ask this question, I asked how many qualify for the free and reduced lunch. He said we do not even pass out the form anymore because so many kids qualify, it is more expensive to administer the program by passing things out and trying to figure out who we can give it to than it is to just give it to everybody in the school. Can you imagine that? What we are saying here is that these budget deficits and these tax cuts and these cuts to education and this not funding the No Child Left Behind and not funding Medicaid, which provides health care for those kids, by not funding those programs, these kids do not have a chance. We will have certain kids that pop up and they go against the odds to be successful, but these kids do not have the opportunity that every single American should have. What the Democrats are saying is that we want an opportunity because you know why? I will sit here for 10 hours. I have 12 years of Catholic school in me. I could make every moral argument for doing that that is necessary in the book and in the good book, how many times Christ talked about helping the poor and poverty. We could make all those arguments, but let us set them aside. How are we going to compete with 1.3 billion Chinese workers, 1 billion workers that live in the country of India, the massive advancements that are going on in Ireland and Israel and some of these other countries? How are we going to compete if we have a school district and 90 percent of the kids live in poverty? We need those kids to be on the field with all of us competing in a global economy, as mathematicians, scientists, chemists, engineers, computer programmers, entrepreneurs, artists and musicians. We need them on the field. We do not need them in a cycle of poverty. If this Republican leadership, if they do not have any new ideas, then give us control. Give us the keys to the car because that kid should have access to broadband. That kid should have three square meals a day. That kid should have art programs after school and should have the opportunity to play in an intramural league after school. That is how we are going to move the country forward. We are stagnant right now because we are not investing in kids, and Katrina took the veil off this. We all drive around, go through the suburbs and try to do our thing, go around these outer belts and try to stay away from that. Katrina took the veil off that, and I think that that is not only a moral issue, it is an economic issue that needs to be addressed. We have plan after plan after plan after plan to fix that. The Democrats have ideas, and we just need the opportunity to implement them. I did not mean to get all worked up, but I tell you, when I think of 8,000 kids in my district and there is more because I also represent a lot of other school districts, living in poverty and not having the kind of opportunity that they should have because they are born on this soil here. It gets frustrating.

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. That is exactly it, what do we do day in and day out to improve the lives and improve the position politically of our country? And the Democratic idea is to get our idea to become self- sufficient, self-sustaining with energy in the next 10 years. And you cannot tell me that if we marshall all of the intelligence and the wealth of this country that we cannot do it in the next decade. As I said, we went to the Moon in a decade. And look at not only the economic impact that we would have in this country, the jobs that would be created with ethanol and biodiesel, and all of the hydrogen engines and hybrid cars and all of these things that we could create an economy back in the United States that we are actually producing, which I think is very positive, but let me make this final point. Imagine the political position the United States would be in, the Secretary of State would be in, if we told all of those oil producing countries we are done. We do not need you. We do not want you. We will deal with you and help you along the way, but we are not tied to you. We are not addicted to your oil. So we do not need to get in all of this international political stuff that we have been getting in for the last 30 years. It has been nothing but bad for the United States, to be in these different countries playing with their internal politics and puppeteering who is coming in and who is going out, and Saddam Hussein needs to be here because he is a Sunni, and we have got the Shiias in Iran. Hey, we are going to take care of home first. A stronger America begins at home. And the Democratic idea is to take the resources of this country, the intelligence of this country, and become energy independent in the next 10 years. And no one can convenience me that it cannot happen. Got a chart. And this chart is the gasoline prices and oil company profits. The bars, the grey bars are the profits starting in 2002. And as you can see, every year 2003, 2004, 2005 the profits have skyrocketed. And look what happens to the price of gas. It has gone up as well. So the profits go up, the cost goes up. Unbelievable. These people continue to make money off a basic resource that everyone is dependent on. That is why we got to get away from this. Exxon, I think it was Exxon that made $36 billion dollars in their last quarter. $80,000 per minute. Come on. It is time for the Democratic ideas to take center stage in this country.

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. Can I ask a question? I thought of this last night as I was sitting right over there as the President was giving his speech. It is almost amazing to me, I think, that the speech that was given here last night was dealing with the same issues that we were dealing with today. Last night the President was talking about investing in education and research and development, and we are going to make these great investments. We came here today and did this Budget Deficit Reduction Act that actually increases the deficit, and we are cutting education, we are cutting the investments. So that was kind of perplexing to me. But I was over there listening to him talk about energy independence and how we are addicted to oil. And I thought, wow, he actually said it, which I thought was great. It is a big first step to admit that there is a problem. So maybe it has taken 5 years, but we have now admitted, the administration has now admitted that we have a problem. And then I was waiting for, you know, all right, this is it. And he says, and we are going to reduce our dependence on foreign oil by 75 percent by 2025. And I thought, my goodness gracious, we went to the Moon in 10 years. Where is the urgency?

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. Forty-six million don't have anything now, and millions of others can't afford it, or can barely afford what they have. So our goal on the Democratic side is to figure out how to reduce the cost of health care. And we tried to do that, Mr. Meek, when we had the prescription drug bill here. The Democrats, this bill started out at $400 billion, and later after the vote we found out it was $700 billion. But all the seniors that are out there, Mr. Meek, will qualify for this, $700 billion worth. What the Democrats wanted to do to save the taxpayer money, to be accountable for the money that we spend here, the Democrats wanted to put two provisions on to that Medicare part D, the prescription drug bill. We wanted to allow the Secretary of Health and Human Services to be able to negotiate down the drug price on behalf of all the Medicare recipients. We didn't want to create a new program, a new bureaucracy. We just wanted to give the Secretary of HHS the ability to go to Pfizer and negotiate down the drug price. You want the Medicare contract? Fine. We got to talk price. Knock 15 to 20 percent off the cost and we will give it to you. Boom, we save money, Democrats. That is our idea. The Republican majority shot it down in the dead of night. The other idea, we wanted to allow for reimportation of pharmaceuticals, to allow these prescription drugs to come in from Canada to create real competition in the pharmaceutical industry in the United States and drive down the cost. We would save the taxpayer money, we would lower the cost of prescription drugs, and maybe we could start reducing our deficit and eventually make some investments in the education and research and development and other things. The cost of the pharmaceutical industry giving the Republicans $100 million is higher drug prices for average Americans and the taxpayers not getting their money spent wisely because there is not the accountability here that we need.

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. I agree. Not only the culture that you talked about, let's talk about what the cost is. Let's connect the dots. Let's talk about what happens here. We talked about the Health Savings Accounts. This is the President's idea to solve the health care problem, and it allows individuals to take money, extra money that they have at the end of the month, spare money, and put it in a side account. Well, that is great if you have got spare money at the end of the month to put in a side account. We have millions and millions of people in this country who do not have that extra money to put in a side health care savings account to address the health care issue, so there is going to be millions and millions of people. I am not saying it is a bad idea. Maybe it is a good idea for those people who have money and they can set it aside. Great. But the vast majority of the people who live in this country do not have the luxury of having an extra $500 at the end of the month to put in a side account.

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. It has been wrong for 10 or 12 years now.

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. Shakedown Street.

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. A job interview.

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. In the last 4 years, this President and the Republican House and the Republican Senate have borrowed more money, $1.05 trillion, than any every other President before him and Congresses before this one in the last 224 years. We are borrowing money to give rich people a tax cut, period, dot. And when we talk about accountability, this is what we are talking about because this has long-term ramifications to our potential economic growth because the money we are spending to pay down this debt and to pay the interest to the Chinese government is money that we are not investing into the COPS program, we are not investing into our veterans, we are not investing into research and development, we are not investing into making sure that every household has access to broadband communications. We are not investing that money into public venture capital that will lure private investment like they are doing in Israel, and they have a lot of innovative things going on in Ireland. These are the things that we need to do, but it all starts with balancing here in budget in the United States Congress. Mr. Meek has two beautiful kids. He cannot ask his kids to be responsible and then his example is to be irresponsible. It just does not work that way. He works hard and his kids see him work hard. So at the end of the day, they are going to learn a lesson from him. I appreciate the gentleman's yielding to me. I appreciate his allowing me to use his chart because this has been his chart for the last few months.

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. I appreciate you sharing, and I bet when you were in grade school that your teachers put on there ``Kendrick Meek plays well with others.''

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. Mr. Speaker, it is good to be back with the gentleman again. I think the word that needs to be applied to this conversation is ``accountability,'' and this is something that the 30-Somethings have talked about since we started. Being Democrats, we want to talk about accountability. We have a responsibility when we get the taxpayers' money that we are not just going to spend it and not ask any questions. And if the program is not working the way it is supposed to work, we are not for just throwing more money at the problem because that does not work. We want to talk about accountability. But before we can even begin the conversation about accountability with programs and local communities, the COPS program, schools and everything else, there needs to be accountability here in this Chamber. And I believe that the Republican majority in the House and in the Senate and in the White House has really not been held accountable for what they have been doing. If you look at the budget deficits that we have right now, and the 30-Something Group cares about this because this is our generation that is going to have to foot the bill for this thing, $500 billion more spent last year than we took in in tax revenue. So we borrow it from the Chinese, from the Saudi Arabians, from the Japanese. We have borrowed more money in the last 4 years, and Kendrick will show this, from 2000 to 2004.

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

Mr. RYAN of Ohio

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentlewoman for yielding me this time. This is kind of funny. It keeps happening. Any time we are having this debate, we hear words or phrases like ``fiscal integrity'' and how we are making these cuts because we are going to ``balance the budget.'' No one is balancing any budget here. Who are we kidding? We are borrowing the money, billion upon billion upon billion, from the Chinese to fund tax cuts that are going primarily to the top 1 percent of the people. You are making cuts that are hurting middle-class and poor kids. That is the fact. I am not making this up. But if we try to talk about cutting the energy subsidies or cutting the subsidies to the HMOs or asking simple things like having the Secretary of Health and Human Services negotiate the drug prices on behalf of the Medicare recipients, or asking for reimportation for drugs coming in from Canada to help lower the price, we cannot even hear a word from the Republican majority on these issues. I had a meeting the other day with a school board member from Youngstown city schools. And I asked him, I said, how many kids live in poverty in this school district? He said, 90 percent. Ninety percent of the kids that go to school in Youngstown city schools live in poverty. And I asked him how many qualify for free and reduced lunch, to maybe get another number. He said, we don't even hand out the form any more because it costs us more to administer the form and the program than to just give it to everybody. Ninety percent of the kids in Youngstown and you are cutting $12 billion from giving these kids an opportunity to go to college? No Child Left Behind is underfunded in Ohio $1.5 billion a year, just in Ohio alone, while some of these other countries are graduating much higher percentages of kids in math and science. Let us wake up. We need these kids on the field competing in a global economy, and you will not get them there by cutting education and cutting health care. You want to compete with China? You want to compete with India? Fund these programs. We are not saying you don't need to change some things, and we are willing to work with you to do it, but for God's sake don't cut programs to kids living in poverty and middle-class kids. You are cutting their health care, you are cutting their education, and you are giving tax breaks to rich people. Period, dot.

Mr. RYAN of Ohio

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. Mr. Speaker, when you are having your Christmas party or your Chanukah party or your Kwanzaa party or your holiday party or whatever you call things these days, because I even get nervous wishing somebody a merry Christmas anymore, when one of the billionaires, one of the millionaires are around the party table in the next week or two and they are holding up their glass, they should say, thank you, Chinese government; thank you, House of Sahd; thank you, Japan, for loaning my country the money to be able to give me a tax cut. Do not thank us. Thank the people we are borrowing the money from. Thank them, because we are borrowing money from the Chinese and the Saudi Arabians and the Japanese to give a tax cut to the wealthiest people in the United States of America. Not only are we borrowing it, but the money we do take in, look what we are spending it on in Iraq: $1.5 billion a week. Look at these Iraqi projects: Transportation and communication, $508 million. Look what we are cutting over here in the United States: $500 million to our student loan programs. In Iraq: Electricity projects, $4 billion for electricity projects in Iraq. In the United States, we are cutting $4.9 billion from child support to go after deadbeat dads; $1.72 billion in Iraq for oil infrastructure. What are we cutting back here at home? Farm commodity and conservation programs, just about the same number, $1.76 billion, we are cutting here at home. We are borrowing from China. We are giving that money to the richest people in our country, and then we are putting the cuts that we have to have over here, because this administration and the Republican majority cannot get the economy up and running; we are cutting here child support, student loans, free and reduced lunch. All these things are happening on the backs of the American people.

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. And also Mr. Tom Manatos, who keeps us all together down here. Tom, you are the man.

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. Have a very happy, joyous holiday season, because we are all Americans. And I would like to now give the e-mail address here: 30somethingdems@mail.house.gov. That is 30, the number, somethingdems@mail.house.gov. Does the gentleman from Florida have any final words to share with the American people and his colleagues?

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. There is no doubt about it, and here is where not only the Dow is not growing at the clip we need it to, this is where the tax cuts are going. And I think we have to make this point. We talk about health care and education, and the Democrats have talked about how we have reformed those systems, not talking just throwing money at them, but we need new innovative progressive ways of educating our kids and delivering health care. The Democrats have a plan to do that. These are good investments. The gentlewoman was talking about the millions of kids who do not have health insurance and how people in her community are smart enough to know we need to do that. Those kids end up in the emergency room much sicker than they would be if they had some preventive care. What we are advocating for is to make sure we provide this kind of care for those kids, to make sure we save the taxpayer money in the long run. So as this is probably our last 30-something for 2005, Happy Chanukah, Kwanzaa, Merry Christmas.