Tim Ryan

Mr. RYAN of Ohio

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. That is exactly right. We are not going to let that happen.

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. It almost brings up the point, whether it is black or white or whatever, number of electoral votes the way this group operates. You know, if you have got a State that has enough electoral votes, we will maybe even be there before anything comes. But if you do not have enough, you know, you are on your own, and we are going to absolutely roll the dice. And as we are kind of creeping into the final few minutes here, I want to just touch upon what the gentlewoman from Florida (Ms. Wasserman Schultz) has just said, that I hope the ultimate point that we can all carry out of this whole tragedy that is still going on for thousands and thousands and thousands of people, and I hope when New Orleans is rebuilt and we are all down there, you know, hanging out again, that the point that we all remember is this: this tragedy highlighted the clear disparity between many people in this country and many others in this country. Whether it is black or white or rich or poor, there is a huge, tremendous rift between those people who have a lot of money and those people who do not have anything. And we saw it today, or this past week because people were saying, well, why did they not leave? Well, 35 percent of the African Americans, I believe, in the city, did not have cars. Now, regardless of how the whole thing was structured, and we will have arguments about everything else, they were at a clear disadvantage. They were reliant upon someone else. And you go through education and health care and basic skills that kids test on, it is unbelievable how poorer kids do so much worse. And this is going on in Youngstown, in Akron, in Cleveland, in Milwaukee, in Detroit. Pick a city, as the gentlewoman said. And I hope that after all this we realize that that is unacceptable and to give millionaires trillions and trillions of dollars and see what the end result is, whether it is through kids, education, health care or levees being built, the government has a role to play, and those people who benefit from society have an obligation to meet their responsibility to everybody else. And that is really, I think, the ultimate point in this. And I hope that the reaction to this is the same reaction that we had in 1927 when the big flood hit in 1927, which eventually led to a very progressive era in government and into the 1930s and 1940s and, quite frankly, into the 1980s. So I hope that we all realize that, you know, we are pretty lucky, most of us. But there are some people that we need to reach out to and find ways to reform government and put the money in the right places to make sure that those people have the kind of opportunity that many others have.

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. 30somethingdems@mail.house.gov. We are going to be trying to recruit college kids to go down and help with the clean up too. So it is 30somethingdems@mail.house.gov

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. They have proved they are not the party.

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. Say that again.

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. Mr. Speaker, if the gentleman will yield, I agree 100 percent with the gentlewoman. And to look back and hear all the information that FEMA had beforehand, an article here from Cox News and the New Orleans Times, Dr. Max Mayfield, Director of the National Hurricane Center, was talking to FEMA. They were going through simulations on what exactly could happen and what the worst-case scenario could be, what the storm surge capabilities were for overtopping levees. I think it is important, if this is not pointing fingers, we get paid to oversee administrative government, and that is what we are doing here. The thing that is outrageous is that the people who are in charge and who are incompetent for those early days are the same people that are running the operation now. Thank God we have got some military in there now to actually fix some of the problems. But I think it is important that we share with the American people, not to be critical, but so the problem gets fixed. This is our responsibility here. This is our constitutional responsibility here. Dr. Max Mayfield, and you can get this on the Internet, the Cox News article said, knew storm's potential. Just to read through here a little bit and share with you, there were briefings by this Dr. Mayfield who told FEMA that the strength of the storm and the potential disaster it could bring were made clear during both briefings and an informal advisory which warned of a storm surge capable of overtopping levees in New Orleans and winds strong enough to blow out windows of high-rise buildings. ``We were briefing them way before landfall, Mayfield said. It is not like this was a surprise. We had advisories that the levee could be topped.'' These guys had the information and they failed to respond. And the most insulting part of this whole thing is to have the President say days afterwards, ``I do not think anyone anticipated a breach of the levees.'' I mean, it is just not true. It is just not true because the FEMA people knew, and there were these advisories and there was all this information that FEMA had, and it is unacceptable that this is the way the government is supposed to work. Because after 9/11 the American people charged this Congress, reelected this Congress, reelected this President because he had the capability supposedly to keep us safe. I do not think there is one American out there now that would even feel close to safe if something happened here. I do not know, and it seems like the goals that we wanted to try to communicate, intraoperability where people could communicate with each other because they would have the proper communication equipment, the predisaster mitigation which they used out West for an earthquake where they actually went in early and secured buildings and spent $20 million, which ended up saving $500 million out there, that program that Mr. Witt started was called Project Impact; and the day the earthquake hit on February 28, 2001, was the same day the President cut that program. This was a lack of foresight for many, many, many years.

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. Mr. Speaker, that was the same, almost the same identical phrase that we heard from the Secretary, the new Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, about 9/11 when she was National Security Adviser: Who would possibly think anyone would take a plane and fly it into a building like a missile? Well, we found out later that people knew that was going to happen. They knew that was an option. It is the same old rhetoric with these people over and over and over again. It does not make any sense. It just does not add up. Now, all of a sudden, the spotlight is on, and we have all of this information here, and we have pages and pages and folders and folders full of how much they knew beforehand and played dumb.

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. Because why?

Mr. RYAN of Ohio

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. Madam Speaker, I thank the gentleman from New York for yielding me this time. As always, the devil is in the details. Ladies and gentlemen, this law guts the countervailing duties provisions that we have been living by. Check this out: traditionally, the data that we use to determine whether or not a subsidy takes place is used by basing that data on comparable market economies. So we want to trust, but we want to verify. This bill requires the administration to use data from China. We are going to be basing our decisions on data that is gathered by the People's Republic of China. If China's data says there is no subsidy, well, then, there is no subsidy, regardless of what the other comparable economies might say. We are going to trust an administration that has brought one WTO case since 2001, and we want to try to compete with the Chinese? Last week in the Education Committee, we cut $11 billion from Pell grants. No Child Left Behind is underfunded. We have millions of kids living in poverty. Meanwhile, the Chinese graduated 700,000 engineers last year. We graduated 35,000. Healthy, educated children and enforce international law, that is how you compete with the Chinese.

Mr. RYAN of Ohio

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. I just want to kind of expound on that point a little bit. It is not like there were not people in the country saying we know you are going to go to Baghdad. We know you are going to win the war. We know you are going to defeat the enemy. A lot of us were saying then what? Then what are you going to do? And there was never any hard answer on what this administration was going to do. So, you know it is not like they went in blind. You are preparing for a war. Sit down and figure out all the options. What if they do not hand us flowers and Hershey bars? You know, then what do we do? And if that does not work and something else, then what do we do. You should have four or five plans. This is just a lack of preparation, and it was that rush to war that I think caused all the problems that I think you already stated.

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. Will the gentleman yield?

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. I am stumped as well. I have no good answer for the gentleman. What I would like to do is the gentleman from Hawaii (Mr. Abercrombie) was throwing out some pretty large numbers to the tune of $1 trillion, if not more. In Ohio alone only $240 million is being spent on homeland security and $700 million on No Child Left Behind which is underfunded by $1.5 billion. We are talking trillions. And I think it speaks to the fact that we are not meeting the needs here at home while we are spending a tremendous amount of money abroad.

Mr. RYAN of Ohio

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. Trying to stand up.

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. Madam Speaker, $26,436.78, and counting.

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. Send us an e-mail if you would like to-- www.30something dems@mail.house.gov. That is 30somethingdems@mail.house.gov or you can get us at democraticleader@mail.house.dot/ 30Something. Send us your e-mails. Let us know what you think. One of the things you need to send us is what you think the priorities in your family are or your friends or the people that you hang out with. What are your priorities? What should we be doing here? Let us know. We would love to hear it.

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. Madam Speaker, I think it is important, the gentleman makes a tremendous point. We have to ask ourselves, not only in this body but around the country, why? Why would Karl Rove do that? Why would he out a CIA agent? We know why. Because her husband was the ambassador that went to Niger that basically blew up the whole idea that the Iraqis had a nuclear weapons program. He eliminated that from the argument of why we should go to war with Iraq. So he had information that was going to blow it out of the war. They stuck it back into the State of the Union address that the President gave from right up here, and so the response was to try to destroy these people. Is that what we want? Is that how this operation is supposed to run, who can destroy who? And now this woman cannot work in the same capacity that she used to work in. But the reason goes back to the war and the build-up and the drum beats that were going for us to go to war in Iraq. And here we were trying to say, wait a minute, all of the sudden Iraq is North Korea. All of the sudden Iraq is Iran. All of the sudden Iraq has all of these nuclear capabilities. No, they did not. And the administration manipulated the data and then tried to destroy any person or couple that tried to prove otherwise. That is the bottom line and that is not a Democrat or Republican issue. That is the fact of the matter.

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. There is no doubt about it. You have been down to Guantanamo. I was down to Guantanamo last week. You know, we have soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan. These are the people who are going to come back and use the VA system. And just to wrap up the VA portion of our program, some people may be sitting at home and may be saying, well, maybe we just do not have enough money, maybe we just do not have the resources to provide for the veterans. And I want to show this graph, which the last graph was just too jammed up; there were a lot of words on there. But I think this is just where we are at. Permanent tax cuts way on the left. What is the cost in trillions of dollars over the next 10 years? We are going to spend $1.8 trillion over the next 10 years to make the tax cuts permanent. We are going to spend $800 billion to make the tax cuts permanent for the top 1 percent; $800 billion for people who make $400,000; $500,000; $600,000; $700,000; $800,000; $900,000 a year, over a million dollars a year, not begrudging people who make a lot of money, God bless you, but we are going to spend $800 billion giving them their tax break, and we are only going to spend $300 billion on veterans. And all we are asking for here is a billion dollars for the next year, or $2.7 billion for 2006, and $3 billion or $4 billion maybe for 2007. We are giving $800 billion away to the top 1 percent of the people who live in the country. We cannot come up with $3 billion for our veterans? Almost 2,000 already over in Iraq and Afghanistan who have been killed. I mean, this is just a priority. It should be a priority for the country. So it is not that we do not have the money, it is an issue of choice. It is an issue of priority. And right now, it is obvious that we are not making the veterans a priority. You know, quite frankly, I know the gentleman from Florida (Mr. Meek) has and I have, many Members in this chamber have been to the funerals of our soldiers who have been killed. And I think the least we can do is make sure those who get injured or those who serve this country can come back and know that their veterans health care is going to be there for them. So the money is there; it is just not a priority. Again, the Democrats tried on several different occasions to put amendments on to spending bills. The gentleman from Texas (Mr. Edwards) has taken the lead on this. The gentleman from Wisconsin (Mr. Obey) has taken the lead on this, to try to put that billion dollars in there to make sure that everybody is covered. And it was clearly rejected. So it is an issue of priority. The money is there. We have chosen not to do it.

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. I love my charts, because I think they lay it out for us. Now, I want to just talk about for a couple of minutes exactly what the scenario was. We have been talking about, and I was on the Committee on Veterans' Affairs last Congress, how underfunded the VA was and is. On the VA committee, the gentleman from Ohio (Mr. Strickland) was always down here talking about these issues, the gentleman from California (Mr. Filner), we had a great committee. The gentleman from Illinois (Mr. Evans) has done a great job as the ranking member, talking about how the veterans are not getting the proper funding for health care. They are raising user fees. They are raising their copay. It went from $2 to $7 to $15. More veterans are moving into the VA system, especially in places like northeast Ohio where people are losing their health care benefits, so veterans go into the VA system. So we were complaining about this and arguing that we need more funding. So was the gentleman from New Jersey (Mr. Smith), the chairman of the committee. He tried and tried and tried to get more founding in there. Bang, leadership knocked him out, stripped him of his chairmanship and of his committee assignment on Veterans. So, on June 23, the Bush Administration acknowledged a 2005 shortfall for the VA of a billion dollars. Now, they knew in April, but they announced it in June. So what did the Democrats do? Why are we different? We are different because 1 day later, the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Edwards) offered an amendment to eliminate the billion dollar shortfall in the VA health care for 2005 and put another billion dollars in through the Labor, Health and Human Services Bill and in the Education Appropriations Bill. The Republican majority refused to allow that amendment. Let me repeat that. The Republican majority refused to allow us to offer an amendment that would put $1 billion more back into the veterans system. On June 28, the President and the Bush administration acknowledged, in fiscal year 2006, the shortfall would be $2.7 billion. The Secretary also acknowledged that there will be a shortfall of $1.5 billion in 2006, which would reach $2.7 in the fiscal year of 2006, way too many details. The bottom line is, there is going to be a shortage of money in the out years as well. So on that same day, the Democrats tried again, the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Edwards), tried again to add a billion dollars in. The Republicans refused to allow us to do it. So there, on a couple of different occasions, we had tried to fix the billion dollar shortfall in veterans health care, and we were not allowed to bring it up for a vote here in the House of Representatives. It is not brain surgery. And the way this body works, you do not have to be a Philadelphia lawyer to figure it out. But that is how things transpired. The Democrats wanted to offer a billion dollars to close the gap in veterans spending, and we were not allowed to do it. So my point is that if we were in charge, these are the things that we would be doing. These are the kinds of initiatives that we would try to implement in the country. And, you know, we come here, and we come to the floor, and we try to do as much as we can to try to talk about veterans and a lot of other issues. But quite frankly, we continue to run into stone walls. As I said, the Majority Leader said there would not be a shortfall. That is just simply not what the numbers tell us. So I appreciate it. This is great. But I think this veterans component fits into the kinds of decisions that are being made, the kind of leadership that we are getting here out of this body, out of this chamber.

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. People want us to solve problems. They do not want us to sit here and be partisan. The fact of the matter is this. These are facts. The Democrats are not in power. It hurts me to say it. I do not like saying it, but when you are analyzing the direction of the country and both Chambers and the executive branch are all run by one party, and they come out with privatization schemes, tax cuts, primarily for people who make over $400,000 a year, corporate tax rates are the lowest they have been in the history of the country, all of these things, and then we are here trying to say, well, wait a minute. You are not funding veterans. Wait a minute. The American people do not want to privatize Social Security. In fact, we have the poll here of the rural voters: Are President Bush's proposed changes to Social Security mainly consistent with the values of the people in your community or out of step? Mr. Speaker, 61 percent of rural voters say that the privatization scheme is out of step with their values, because we have guaranteed benefits. We have a system that works, has worked, will continue to work with minor adjustments, not a privatization scheme. That is not the right way to go. If you look at the decisions that have been made over the past few years, they have not been good for the country: losing hundreds of thousands of jobs in Ohio alone, millions of jobs throughout the country, and the jobs replacing the jobs that are leaving are $10,000 less, $11,000 less a year, without health care benefits. Wal-Mart is basically getting corporate welfare because so many of their employees are on Medicaid. So they think, why should we give our people health care, they could go on Medicaid. Who pays for Medicaid? We pay for Medicaid. The country. The public pays for Medicaid. Why is the public subsidizing the wealthiest company in the country? It just does not make any sense. And the decisions that are being made, the lack of attention to the issue of China and what is going on with the manipulation of their currency and the lack of trying to implement democratic reforms in China, all of these things add up to say, we are going in the wrong direction. Now, I would like to bring up one point, I say to the gentleman from Florida, if I can, because we started talking a little bit about the veterans. I just want to kind of lay out, and the gentleman knows I like my charts.

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. Mr. Speaker, he was not only removed from the chairmanship, he was removed from the Committee on Veterans Affairs altogether.

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. Wait a minute. You are contradicting a statement here. The majority leader said, veterans need to know that no veteran will be without their health care in 2005 and no veteran will be without their health care in 2006. Is the gentleman saying that that is not the case?

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. Why?

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. Madam Speaker, $26,436.78. So to every citizen that can hear me, this is what they owe, and to every citizen that cannot hear me, this is what they owe. And to run the country, the Republicans, a few months ago, had to lift the cap on the debt. They had to lift the debt ceiling because they are running high deficits. And to come down here in 2005 and tout supply-side economics, which the first President George Bush called ``voodoo economics,'' is hilarious, absolutely hilarious, when we have kids going to school all over the country that live in poverty; 50 to 60 percent of the kids in Youngstown City School District live in poverty; 85 percent qualify for free and reduced lunch. And we are talking about how great the economy is going? I would like to live in some of these places. And I think it is offensive, quite frankly, in many ways to somehow suggest that, by a slight decrease in the budget deficits because a loophole was closed and the stock market had a halfway decent run for a few months, that that somehow suggests that everyone is doing well is just out of touch really, out of touch with reality. This is the reality: $7.8 trillion this country owes. I love how the President says, well, if Congress would just rein in spending. The Congress is Republican. A Republican House, Republican Senate, Republican President; and they are blaming each other about who has got to rein in spending; $26,000 you owe to the Federal Government. And they play this game, well, the President says Congress has got to restrain spending; the Congress says, well, the President has got to do his thing. They are all Republicans. This whole Chamber is controlled by the Republican Party. The Senate is controlled by the Republican Party. The White House is occupied by a Republican. And one of the issues we talk about all the time here is at the same time they are passing all of these corporate tax breaks and they tell everybody how great everything is going, veterans are underfunded by almost $3 billion. We have enough money to give tax cuts, but we do not have enough money to fund our veterans.

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. Madam Speaker, it is good to be back. And I cannot help but thank the gentleman from Florida for all his leadership on this issue and a variety of other issues not only in the State of Florida but around the country. We had our friends here on the other side of the aisle, good people, good Members of Congress, but a little flawed in their data. They were talking about how the President's tax cuts accounted for a 22 percent drop in the budget deficit, 22 percent from the prediction that they had had. And what I would like to say is, all of a sudden, the tax cuts are working now. All of a sudden, they are working. What they forget to tell people is that the decrease in the deficit, and I have news reports here from five or six different news organizations, is the President said that this 22 percent drop vindicates his tax-cutting policies, and I just want to read several accounts here. This is from NBC News: ``An independent budget analyst said that the improvements are almost all the result of one-time events, including the expiration of a 1-year corporate tax holiday. There was also an increase in taxes paid on investment gains from last year's stock market run-up.'' The Wall Street Journal said: ``private- and public-sector analysts remained unimpressed given the fiscal pressures just ahead . . . Private-sector analysts reiterated that the promise was calculated from the administration's 2004 deficit projection, a number widely considered inflated.'' The Washington Times, not exactly a liberal newspaper, reports, the new forecast would ``leave a deficit that is still the third largest in history.'' Goldman Sachs ``in a research note on Wednesday, said it agreed with the administration forecast for this year but not for the longer term.'' The main reasons? ``The jump in tax revenues stemmed largely from one-time gains in the stock market and the elimination of a temporary tax break last year for business to invest in new equipment.'' So we had the stock market, the expiration of a bonus depreciation rule that reduced business tax collections until the end of 2004, and a 1-year tax holiday for corporations. This is a one-time bonus for the government, and it was based on a number that was inflated from last year. And the fact of the matter is this: There are people all over the country who do not benefit from that. They do not benefit from the corporate tax bonus that this Congress passed. And the money that is getting invested is not getting invested in Ohio. It is getting invested in Beijing and Shanghai and all over the world while people are struggling, going out to get a second job and a third job. This is not having the kind of impact we wanted to have here in the United States of America. And that is why the tax cut has not worked. The deficit is going to go back up next year. We do not even factor in the cost of the war, which is at $300 billion. And I am not arguing that a lot of our systems do not need reform because I believe that they do. But to say that we do not need to make investments in education, that we do not need to invest; like today in the Committee on Education and the Workforce, we wanted to increase funding for Pell grant. We could not get it done. We wanted to get it up to, I think, $8,200 by 2013. We could not get it passed through committee. And how are we going to compete with the Chinese? How are we going to compete with the Indians if we are not willing to make the proper investments in the education system in this country? Barriers are being put up, and kids will not go to college because they cannot afford it. Those that do go, the next thing, they owe more money when they get out, $15,000, $20,000 just for a bachelor's degree. So to say that we do not need to make the proper investments, that there is enough money in the system, and to say that those people who pay the lowest corporate tax rates in the history of our country somehow are making the kind of contribution and meeting their obligation to society, I think is wrong. I did not mean to divert from the Social Security debate, but one of the issues that we always talk about during the 30-something hour, Madam Speaker, is that we are running these annual deficits, and the long-term debt, as shown here on this chart, is $7.8 trillion we owe. That is our national debt. Each person who is alive and breathing in the United States of America owes $26,436.

Mr. RYAN of Ohio

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. Mr. Chairman, I rise today in recognition of House Amendment 343 to House Resolution 3010, to restore full funding to the Corporation of Public Broadcasting. The passage of this amendment preserves public broadcasting, a longstanding American tradition. This amendment enables the Corporation of Public Broadcasting to continue providing countless benefits to our society, including unbiased and nonpartisan information and news, educational and developmental programming and services, and arts and entertainment to the American public. I would like to commend my fellow colleagues on their cooperation and nonpartisanship in voting to preserve the American institution of public broadcasting. I was unable to vote on the amendment because I was paying my respects to the family of a brave soldier who made the ultimate sacrifice for his country in Operation Iraqi Freedom. I am strongly against the cuts proposed by House Republicans that were even more severe than the President's suggested budget cuts. While the President recommended a cut of approximately ten million dollars in funding to the Corporation of Public Broadcasting, the House Appropriations Committee and other subcommittees recommended a total cut of $246.2 million, or 44.9 percent of the current funding. While I recognize the importance of fiscal responsibility, especially in the midst of a severe budget deficit, I believe that we must properly prioritize funding provided by taxpayer dollars. The majority of Americans, according to a recent poll, rank public broadcasting as the second most important publicly provided service, after military defense; additionally the majority of Americans believe not only that their tax dollars are well spent on public broadcasting, but actually support an increase in its funding. The proposed cuts to public broadcasting are clearly contrary to public opinion. Moreover, these cuts would result in the loss of invaluable services that Americans trust and rely upon, and would harm local economies in the form of closed local stations and lost jobs. For these reasons, I celebrate the passage of this amendment, and pledge my support to continuing funding the Corporation of Public Broadcasting.