Tim Ryan

Mr. RYAN of Ohio

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. And the agenda the gentlewoman has been articulating over the past 20 minutes or so I think separates us from even how our party used to be. Everybody has their crosses to bear, and I think we had been labeled many times as just a tax-and-spend party who never came up, at least in the last few years, with any really great ideas. Most of the Democrats over here voted yesterday for the alternative minimum tax, to make sure that average people will get a tax cut and they will not be burdened. So I think we are moving away from that. And I would say most of us have voted for middle class tax relief on a variety of occasions. But what we are saying here is that this is the broadband and the engineering. And our approach to this thing, research and development, tax credits, our approach to this is a new approach that neither party has had, but we have it now. The Democratic party is offering a new approach to this. And it is, in many ways, having broadband penetration for every single student and for every household in the next 5 years is an anti-poverty program. It is a jobs-creation program. These kids who live in poverty, we need to help them with heating oil and we do need to make sure these kids have the proper diet and the proper nutrition and all that. That is stuff that still needs to happen. But if that kid is caught in the digital divide, caught at the wrong end of the digital divide, that kid will never have an opportunity to hook up to any kind of economic growth that we may have because of this. That is why it is so important to get it everywhere. And what we are saying is we want that kid, who is somewhere in rural America or somewhere in some inner city, to have access to this. Because with a quality education, access to the technology and the proper community support, that kid will become a wealth creator. They will be creating wealth and paying taxes, instead of asking can I get qualified for the earned income tax credit, am I going to be on Medicaid, or what do I need? We want to propel people. And America needs to be a country of opportunity again, Debbie. It needs to be a country where people can say, I can be anything I want, I can do whatever I want because the proper infrastructure was in place when I was a kid to help propel me into a bright future.

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. I think that has been the focus of our friends on the other side. They have been so focused on taking care of their friends in particular industries that we have gotten away from the mission here, which is to strengthen the United States of America in a $323 billion budget deficit that the Congressional Budget Office, a nonpartisan organization, is saying we are going to have. That is less money that we are able to invest in the country, and a stronger America begins right here at home.

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. We are in the process, I think everyone would agree, of creating a new economy. No one really knows what direction it is going to go in; but we know some of the fundamentals, like broadband, are a very important part of that. So why not make it accessible to everybody, just like we did with roads? That was a huge subsidy for the auto industry for years. I mean, where is the auto industry, where are the car manufacturers without roads? Where are the great railroad companies without the railroad lines? These are the kinds of things that I think we need to do. Water lines, sewer lines were the key in the industrial age; and in the high- tech Information Age, that is the road and the bridge.

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. Think of the ripple effect. Throughout our society, from wages to new inventions, new patents, the whole 9 yards, the ripple effect throughout the community. We have a business incubator in one of our towns, in Youngstown that is, whether it is computers or science or whatever, creating jobs in our urban centers; and you begin to put together a program where you have research, you have engineering graduates, you have business incubators, you have the arts. One of the things that I want to add to that, when I was in China, I went for 2 weeks in August. The two things that the Chinese were saying that American engineers have that those 600,000 do not have, they really do not have the skills that we have. We are more creative and we work in teams better, and they were saying that they just cannot teach the Chinese how to do these things, no matter how hard they try. One party system, Communist system, everything is very narrow. You always look to the hierarchy. It is just very narrow thinking. It occurred to me that the very two things, in addition to not creating enough engineers, but the very two things that give us our competitive advantage around the globe are the first two things that we usually cut in our schools, the arts programs and the team programs, the pay-to-play, where kids get boxed out. It is basketball season now for high schools, 12 varsity kids, 12 junior varsity kids and a freshman team, and that is it. No one else gets to play. We need to have an agenda that promotes teamwork, the arts, these things that create our advantage.

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. Mr. Speaker, it was interesting talking to Leader Pelosi the other day, and some of her conversations that she had were about she and our leadership team actually went out and engaged the technology community and sought their recommendations. They were saying we need to do this in the next 2 years. Our friends on the other side do not have a plan at all. We have a plan to do it in the next 5 years, and many people in the high-tech community are saying we need it done in the next year or two years. This is something that we cannot wait on, and I think the difference here is that we are showing very specific proposals here, very specific goals that need to be achieved in order for America to push forward in the 21st century. It does not happen with the same old rhetoric of the supply side voodoo economics. It is just not working. Last night, you know how you get on your computer and you just start floating around, and God knows where you end up. We got out of here late, and I could not fall asleep. So I got on my computer and I was floating around, and I got into some space stuff from the space program. Then I made my way to the space speech that President Kennedy gave in Houston in the early 1960s; and I tell you what, they have the audio version which is very cool. If any American wants to think about where we should be and the kind of leadership that they deserve from us, they just need to read that speech or listen to that speech. That was about just taking things to the next level.

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. Mr. Speaker, I yield back my time to the gentlewoman from Florida (Ms. Wasserman Schultz) as I have to step off the floor for a moment.

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. A big piece of the American pie. And I think we were talking the other day, it is over $300 billion a year this country pays just in interest payments on the debt. The average American, the average Member of Congress is not paying attention to our $8 trillion debt that we have. That means $27,000 per American citizen. So if a baby is born today, I had a nephew that was born a couple of months ago, 9 weeks ago tomorrow. That young man, Nicholas John Ryan, owes $27,000 to his government, and this young man is 9 weeks old. The gentleman from Florida (Mr. Meek) and the gentlewoman from Florida (Ms. Wasserman Schultz), the gentleman from Massachusetts (Mr. Delahunt), they each owe $27,000 to the United States Government because of the reckless spending that we have. So, you know, we have really got to get our house in order. We need to balance the budget. Ladies and gentlemen, Members of Congress, my friends from Florida, you just cannot do it by giving away $80 billion to the wealthiest people in the country in the form of a tax cut. We also have two wars going on.

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. It is a real issue. So we are borrowing money from a country that we are in direct competition with. They are taking billions and billions of dollars of investment that is coming from the United States and going into China, whether it is Delphi that has filed bankruptcy, General Motors which has significant investment in China now, Ford just announced that they are going to cut 30,000 jobs in 10 plants in the United States. And we are borrowing money from the country that they are making the investment in? Now, China is not in a bad position right now. Check it out. I mean, they are getting investments from Delphi, General Motors, General Electric and Ford and a lot of the automakers; and at the same time they are loaning us money that we are paying them interest on.

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. The Chinese Government. The Japanese Government. The House of Saud in Saudi Arabia. I mean, we are borrowing money from China. I do not even want to get into the whole manufacturing and the rise of China and the competition that we have right now.

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. 1.05 trillion we have borrowed from foreign interests in the last 4 years.

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. This is the Congressional Budget Office. $128 billion surplus in 2001 due to the fiscal policies, the fiscal restraint, the fiscal discipline that the Democratic Party had at that point. But check out when Mr. Bush and the Republican House and the Republican Senate started getting in charge here, we have a $323 billion budget deficit going into 2006, and we are borrowing the money from foreign interests. We are borrowing the money to pay for these deficits from the Chinese, the Japanese, and the Saudi Arabians to plug this deficit hole. And we are trying, Democrats are trying, to say, why would you give $80 billion in tax cuts to the wealthiest people in the country when we are already running a $323 billion deficit in 2006, we already have borrowed $1 trillion from foreign interests in the last 4 years, more than any President has borrowed from foreign interests in the past 224 years?

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. There are a lot of people who make more than a million dollars a year or a few hundred thousand dollars a year that are going to be very happy with what we did here today.

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. Let us break this down. If people are saying that Members are doing things or former Members, I want to correct myself, former Members were doing things that would cost the government money or would spend money that otherwise would not be spent, that is a problem. And I think we have to look no further than the Medicare prescription drug bill that came out of this Congress. We were told the night at 3 in the morning, when we were voting, that this bill was going to cost $400 billion. We find out later that the actual cost of the bill is $700 billion, $300 billion more; and there is nothing in the bill to reduce the cost of prescription drugs. The Democrats, I know you remember this, the Democrats wanted to put a provision in the bill that would have allowed the Secretary of Health and Human Services to negotiate down the drug prices on behalf of the Medicare recipients, so the Secretary of HHS would go to Merck and Pfizer and some of these other big drug companies and say, you know, if you want the Medicare prescription drug contract, we need to sit down and talk price. And not only did our friends on the Republican side not put that provision in, put the Democratic provision in there, they actual explicitly put in the bill that the Secretary of Health and Human Services is not allowed to negotiate down the drug prices. The Democrats also with what we thought was a $400 billion Medicare prescription drug bill that ended up being, months and months later the truth came out, over a $700 billion bill, we also wanted to allow, the Democratic Caucus wanted to put in a provision that would allow for reimportation from Canada and some of the other G-7 countries to drive down the costs of prescription drugs here in the United States, to basically free-trade pharmaceuticals with countries who have the proper health and safety standards like we have here in the United States of America. That was not allowed in the bill, Mr. Speaker. So two basic provisions that would have saved the taxpayer billions of dollars were not put in because it would have maybe hurt the profits of the drug companies. And the drug companies raised millions and millions and millions of dollars for our friends on the Republican side. Now the average American is left to put two and two together.

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. Shakedown Street.

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. What the Republican Party did today was make a lot of rich people very happy. That is the answer.

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. Allegedly.

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. We should put it on our Web site, and I think we will have to do that. It was about here is the vision, here is why and here is why it is our call at this moment in history; and I think when you talk about something like broadband, you talk about alternative energy sources, you talk about research and development, whether it is into the human mind or the human genome or whatever it may be. It is about setting these lofty goals for our country, not to go shopping, which is the great call from this administration.

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the opportunity to be on the House floor here tonight with my good friend from Florida (Mr. Meek) to continue our discussion that we have been having with the American people and with Members of Congress from all over the country the past few months and even few years. Today, Mr. Speaker, the Republican-led Congress has once again taken a step in a direction that I think moved it and this Congress away from mainstream America. Today, the majority has passed another wealthy-focused tax cut in which $60 billion, up to $80 billion, over the next 10 years will be spent subsidizing the wealth of the people in this country who make millions and billions of dollars, an average tax break of $32,000 to wealthy millionaires who have already received more than $103,000 in tax cuts. More than half the taxpayers making less than $100,000 a year will receive less than $30 back from this tax cut. This is a tax cut that has clearly been focused on the wealthy Americans. And coincidentally enough, a couple of weeks ago, our friends, our good friends on the Republican side, have said that they passed a budget deficit reduction package which made cuts of $50 billion; and then they passed a tax cut which took away $80 billion, which is a negative $30 billion deficit in the hole. Only in Washington is that deficit reduction. And before we get going here, I want to just share and read into the Record, if my friend does not mind, a letter that was sent, and I know I received one of these and a statement on behalf of several religious organizations. Bishop Frank Griswold of the Episcopal, Anglican, Church USA, together with leaders of four other mainline denominations, has called on the United States Congress to defeat the 2006 Federal budget once and for all because it betrays the poor. And I just want to say to Bishop Griswold and the Anglican Church in the United States of America and the other denominations that are there, Dr. Kirkpatrick of the Presbyterian Church; Reverend Thomas, general minister and president of the United Church of Christ; Mr. James Winkler, general secretary, Board of Church and Society for the United Methodist Church, thank you for speaking out against this. Because in this day and age, morality and values have been such a strong topic of conversation in the United States, I want to commend these folks for stepping out front and saying that this budget and tax cuts for the rich while we are cutting food stamps; free and reduced lunch; child support enforcement payments; money for college, Pell grants; cutting those programs and then giving tax cuts to the wealthiest people in the country is something that goes in direct contradiction to what they are trying to teach. And if I could just take a minute or two to read some of these comments into the Record, if my friend does not mind: The church leaders declare: ``At each stage of the complicated legislative process, we have viewed the budget through the lens of faith and our values and found it wanting. Now we ask that it be defeated once and for all.' ``Despite the exposure of poverty in the U.S. revealed in the aftermath of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, the statement says, `Congress continues to make decisions which benefit the rich but are paid for by the poor and most vulnerable in our land.' ``The leaders criticized the budget's potential compromises which would cut funding for food stamps, heating subsidies, Medicaid, and child support enforcement. ``They will seek to find compromise where there should be no compromise, that is, with the lives and future of the poor of this country.' ``They asked that Congress reflect during the season of Advent, reject the budget and join with the President to craft a budget that will reflect `our Nation's historic concern for justice and the least among us.' '' This is not Tim Ryan. This is not Kendrick Meek. This is not the 30- something Working Group. This is a group of bishops and church leaders all over the country who have stepped out front and stated that cutting taxes for the wealthiest people in our country and doing it on the backs of the poorest among us is not consistent with the values that they teach in their churches every week. Here is Cal Thomas. Cal Thomas is one of the most conservative columnists. I do not even know if he is a Republican, but he is a conservative columnist with the Washington Times. When we are finding all this money to balance our budget, Cal Thomas says: ``Here's a suggestion: Don't start with the poor. Start with the rich.'' We passed an energy bill several months ago out of this Chamber that had $16 billion in subsidies for the energy companies and the oil companies, the most profitable industries today. This Congress took your tax money that you send to Washington and gave it to the oil companies to basically subsidize and increase their profits. There is something wrong with that. And the 30-Something Working Group is here and we will have charts later, talking about some of our ideas that we have and some of the ideas that Leader Pelosi has and the Democratic Party has and what direction we want to move this country in. And we believe that what is going on here is not only contrary to what we believe in, but also contrary to what the American people believe in. We should now be making investments in education. I mean, why would we give millionaires a tax cut and not have enough money to actually heat homes in the wealthiest country in the entire world? And I know my friend from Florida wants to get in here and talk a little bit. But just today, this just happened, we were cutting taxes to the tune of $80 billion over the next 10 years. At the same time a few weeks ago, we were cutting food stamps and increasing the cost of college tuition. Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from Florida (Mr. Meek).

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. A lot of ours are foreign born who will return to probably one of those two countries.

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. I got this chart here. This is the end result. This blue is the Clinton-era budget deficits that by 1997 started turning into surpluses; and by the time President Clinton left, $128 billion surplus. And that was all based on the 1993 vote that was passed, the budget in 1993 without one Republican vote. Now, these are just the facts. I am not making this up. This is not a partisan statement; it is just the facts.

Mr. RYAN of Ohio

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. Mr. Speaker, the Web site is www.30somethingdems@ mail.house.gov">www.30somethingdems@ mail.house.gov, and I want to thank Mr. Meek for his leadership. He is down here every night, sometimes 2 hours a night, dedicating himself. He has two young kids at home, a beautiful wife that you leave to come down here to promote this message. I know it is difficult sometimes to balance work and family, and I want to say I am really thankful for your leadership on this, and you are really an inspiration to all of us.

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. Being evicted. I mean, come on, we can do better than this, Kendrick. And that is what we are saying.

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. But to make these cuts on the backs of the middle class and the poor in this country at the same time, at the same exact time, and this is almost funny, this would be funny if it was not so sad, at the same time we are giving millionaires tax cuts. Now, people at home, Mr. Speaker, who hear this and read about it in the morning newspapers have got to think this place is a mad house, that it is schizophrenic. Two wars, $1.5 billion a week in Iraq, and we are cutting taxes. Tuition doubles, and we are cutting taxes for millionaires. Poverty rate goes up in Cleveland, in the State of Ohio, one of the highest poverty levels in the country. I think it was rated the poorest city in the country. We are cutting taxes for millionaires. Katrina. We have people living in their cars still, over the holiday season.

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. And so did I. We are not going to have our troops in a forward area and have them not have what they need.

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. You voted for probably almost every supplemental for the war in Iraq.