John Tanner

Mr. TANNER

Mr. TANNER. Mr. Speaker, I rise today to recognize a man whom I consider to be one of the greatest influences of my early years--a man whose guidance helped change the lives of several generations of young people. I rise today to honor my high school basketball coach, a talented, caring educator and my dear friend, Coach Guy Edward Phipps, who earlier this month celebrated his 84th birthday. Coach Phipps was born in Hickman, Kentucky, and, after graduating from Hickman High School, served 3 years in the United States Army. Following his honorable discharge, he attended nearby Murray State University while also raising a family; his daughter, now Janice Phipps Jones, was only three years old when Coach Phipps began his college education. After earning both a Bachelors Degree and a Masters Degree at Murray State University, he began his career as a teacher and basketball coach in Fulton, Kentucky. Four years later, he moved just across the state line to South Fulton, Tennessee, for a new coaching job. Three seasons later, Coach Phipps and his team set school history with an unprecedented 28-0 record in the regular season. That same year, however, Coach Phipps and the Red Devils were beat in the district tournament by Union City High School in my hometown of Union City, Tennessee. Shortly thereafter, in 1956, Coach Phipps made the professional move 14 miles away to Union City High School to take over the coaching duties with the Union City Golden Tornadoes. Coach Phipps helped lead the team to five consecutive district and regional tournament wins and brought the school to its first-ever state tournament appearance. In 1959, I joined the Union City High School basketball team as a sophomore and was honored to train under Coach Phipps for three years. His leadership helped teach my teammates and me sportsmanship, teamwork and maturity that have been important to me throughout my life, and I feel confident that my former teammates are as grateful as I am to have had the opportunity in our formative years to work with such an exceptionally talented leader. Coach Phipps also taught courses in industrial arts and engineering drawing while at Union City High School. He was known in our school district for a special goal he set--to choose a different student every day or every week whom he felt needed a friend and someone to believe in him or her. This approach touched the lives of many students over Coach Phipps' career and is still a tradition among many of the educators in northwest Tennessee. After a brief time working at a local doctor's clinic, Coach Phipps chose to return to Union City High School, but this time as principal, where he continued to serve for 4 years. Later he served as head basketball coach at David Lipscomb College in Nashville and as dean of students at Nashville Tech. Mr. Speaker, I hope you and our colleagues will join me in honoring the 84th birthday of a man who has been a hero in Tennessee and Kentucky for generations. The true measure of a successful educator is how many young people's lives he has touched. As one of Coach Phipps' former players and a good friend of his today, I know he meets that test of being a truly successful teacher and coach.

Mr. TANNER

Mr. TANNER. Madam Speaker, I offer a motion to instruct.

Mr. TANNER. Madam Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume. Madam Speaker, this motion is very, very straightforward. It is a motion asking our conferees to basically apply what is known as PAYGO rules to the tax reconciliation bill that is coming over from the Senate. Just today, this morning, in The Washington Post, we are reminded that President Bush said in March of 2001, ``Future generations should not be forced to pay back money that we have borrowed. We owe this kind of responsibility to our children and grandchildren.'' Madam Speaker, since that time this Congress and this administration have borrowed about $1.5 trillion in hard money in new debts. I have been talking about this and writing about it for the last 3\1/2\ years. We are facing a debt ceiling again and we will be forced to raise the debt ceiling for the fourth time in the last 5 years since that statement was made by our President about borrowing money that loads the debt limits of all of us, including our children and grandchildren. This new debt limit will raise how much money this country has borrowed in additional new debt $3 trillion. I wish I was making some of this up. But you can go to the Treasury Department's Web site at www.PublicDebtTreasury.gov and see for yourselves. This is real. This is happening. It is happening now. And if the budget that has been proposed is adopted, we will go to $11 trillion dollars. Now, Madam Speaker, I have got some more things to say about this but last year, this is almost unbelievable but it is happening and I wish the American public would focus on it because if they do they will be I believe not only shocked but outraged at what the financial mismanagement of this country has done to the financial balance sheet. Last year the Federal deficit for 2005 was $319 billion. If you break that down it means we here in public life in the name of every citizen in this country borrowed $26 billion a month, $886 million a day, $36 million an hour, $615,000 a minute, and $10,200 a second. Contrast that with what our President said back in March of 2001, as quoted in the Post this morning, when he said, ``Future generations shouldn't be forced to pay back money that we have borrowed. We owe this kind of responsibility to our children and grandchildren.'' I could not agree with that statement more, but the facts absolutely belie what that sentiment that was expressed back in 2001 was meant to convey. Now, if that was not bad enough, last year almost 90 percent of the money that we had to borrow to operate the government of this country came from overseas, came from foreigners who do not see the world as we see it. We are doing in this government, on behalf of the people of the United States, something that none of us who were taught, like I was as a young man, three things to live by. One is live within your means, two is pay your debts, and three is invest in the future, whether it is your own retirement, your kid's college or whatever. This government, under this leadership, is doing none of those. We are not living within our means, we are not paying our debts, and we are certainly not investing in the future. The more that we borrow, the more we degrade the tax base in this country. We are now paying at 4 percent, since that statement was made in 2001, we are now paying more than $55 billion a year in additional interest checks, almost 80 percent of which is not even staying in this country. This is not only outrageous, it is the most irresponsible financial conduct of the fiscal affairs of this country that any political leadership in the history of this country has engaged in such a short period of time. That is without question. So what is actually happening here is a weakening of our collective ability, as expressed through the Federal Government, to do two things, to keep this country strong, safe and, most importantly, secure. Strong safe and secure, what do you mean when you say that? First of all, there is no country in the history of recorded civilization that without the ability to invest in infrastructure and human capital remained safe, strong and secure. Infrastructure, that is what the government must do to give private enterprise the ability to congregate around clean water, sewer systems, highways, bridges, roads, all of the things that go into the infrastructure of a Nation. We are not being able to keep up with not only new infrastructure that is needed but to repair the infrastructure we have got. If you do not think that is important, go to any country on the planet earth that has no infrastructure and see how many people are doing very well. Nobody is because there is no infrastructure for private capital to invest and to create jobs, to create the economy we all want. Human capital, what do I mean by investing in human capital to keep our country strong, safe and secure? I mean education and health care. There is no country in recorded civilized history that has had an unhealthy, uneducated population that was safe, strong and secure. It is not possible. It will never happen, and the more we degrade the tax base, the more we are less able to make sure that the future is invested in, as I said earlier. One of the things that is not hard to figure, it is common sense, and that is, we had in March of 2001, when the President said we owe it to our children and grandchildren to pay our debts, basically, we had $55 billion out of the tax base. Without raising a dime in taxes, we had $55 billion to do these investments that we do not have today because we have engaged in such frivolity when it comes to spending habits, when it comes to all of the things that go into sound financial practices, we are doing none of them. So I am at a loss to see how anyone could say when you are going to do this tax reconciliation bill, you simply do it in a way by cutting wherever else one needs to to be of a lower priority to make sure that we do not dig this hole deeper. The chairman of the Federal Reserve today said, ``I am quite concerned about the intermediate-to-long-term Federal budget outlook. By holding down the growth of national saving and real capital accumulation, the prospective increase in the budget deficit will place at risk future living standards of our country.'' These are not my words. These are the words of the new chairman of the Fed. There is no question every reputable economist knows that the more we engage in deficit spending the more the tax base is degraded, the less able the country is to meet the challenges to keep us strong, safe and secure. We voted earlier today about the Dubai ports deal, and that was a matter of national security. We are going to turn around tonight, if we do not adopt this motion to instruct and the conferees do not adhere to it, we are going to turn around and continue to mortgage this country to anybody on the planet earth that will let us have money on the cheap. I believe it is a national security issue, as I have said many times on this floor. At some point our creditors, particularly the Chinese and perhaps the OPEC countries, the Caribbean banking center, at some point they are going to get tired of taking our paper, and I believe this Dubai thing is one of the first signs of it. They are going to stop buying our debt, and they are going to want to buy equity, and they will have the ability to do it because of the profligacy of this Congress and this administration in refusing, absolutely refusing, deliberately refusing to balance the books. Let me say one other thing. The GAO reports that 16 of 23 Federal agencies cannot produce an audit. You know why? Because there is no check here. You have got a compliant Congress, a friendly administration, money's leaving Washington through a fire hose, and Congress is not even asking the administration what are you doing with the money. If they did ask, they could not tell you. There are four agencies of the Federal Government where the IG, Inspector General, says on the front page of the audit, we disclaim any knowledge as to whether or not what we are telling you is true. We cannot balance the books. We cannot even tell how much money is being spent for anything. Do you think Congress is investigating any of that? No, not one hearing with an Inspector General drug up here and say what did you do with the money. The Blue Dogs have a 12-point plan because the budget process around here is so broken. I will not go into all 12 of them. Some of them are less important than the others, but there are two that are particularly important. One is accountability. Accountability, what did you do with the money? If you cannot tell us, you are not going to get it next year. Every businessperson in this country knows what I am talking about. When they go to their comptroller and say here is a $10,000 expenditure, what is it; if the comptroller said, I cannot tell you, he would not be there and that company would not be in business. That is what is happening here. Why would you not put up with that in your private business, and yet the people of this country not only tolerate it but, in some cases, encourage the behavior of this irresponsible government as it relates to keeping up with the money we are already taking away from the taxpayers involuntarily in the form of taxation and not even asking what happened to it? Replete, replete with instances of total incompetency. FEMA, Hurricane Katrina, $10 million to rehab a military barracks and house six people. This is insane, and that is what is going on here. So all we are asking in this motion is whatever you do on the tax bill, for goodness sake, do not continue to borrow money to cut taxes. That is a sure ticket to financial ruin, and not only that, it is not a tax cut. It is a tax increase because next year we will begin to pay interest on that, and that will add to the $55 billion. I tell you, it is a road to financial ruin what we are on. Madam Speaker, I yield such time as he may consume to the gentleman from Georgia (Mr. Scott), my dear friend.

Mr. TANNER. Madam Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. TANNER. Madam Chairman, I yield myself such time as I may consume. We do agree on some things, but part of what we heard is Lewis Carroll: What is up is down and what is down is up. This is Alice in Wonderland. When he says the budget deficits are going in the right direction because they are less than the projection, they are the largest budget deficits in the history of the United States. Let me read something. He talks about spending. The Republicans have had total control of the Federal Government here for the last 5 years. This is from the CATO Institute. President Bush has presided over the largest overall increase in inflation-adjusted Federal spending since the late 1960s. Even after excluding spending on defense and homeland security, President Bush is still the biggest spending President in over 30 years. His 2006 budget does not cut enough spending to change his place in history, either. Total government spending grew by 33 percent during Bush's first term. The Federal budget as the share of economy grew from 18.5 percent of GDP on Clinton's last day in office to 20.3 percent by the end of President Bush's first term. The Republican Congress has enthusiastically assisted the budget bloat. Inflation-adjusted spending on the combined budgets of the 101 largest programs they vowed to eliminate in 1995 has grown by 27 percent, and yet somehow they say spending is a problem. They have total control. The Democrats have not spent any money in this House in over 10 years. We cannot. We do not have enough votes. This motion says nothing about raising taxes. It says offset whatever tax revenue reduction you are going to make by spending cuts. That is what has not happened. In fact, it has gotten worse. When President Bush came to town in 2001, in July of that year this country embarked on President Bush's economic plan for the country. Based on a series of assumptions over the next 10 years that would yield a $5 trillion surplus. Well, 2 months later, we had 9/11. Instead of readjusting the economic game plan because every assumption that was made in July of 2001 was suddenly not valid months later in September of 2001, instead of adjusting, what has happened, a compliant Congress and a friendly administration have simply borrowed the difference. We are doing something that people have tried to do since the dawn of civilization and that is borrow themselves rich. It is impossible. When you cut taxes with borrowed money, you are actually raising taxes. We have raised taxes $55 billion a year every year from now on under this economic game plan because it is interest that we have to pay, and we have to pay it off the top. It is not unlike a credit card. You run your credit card up, you can live pretty good for a little while. But when you have to pay that monthly interest and your monthly payment is only covering the interest, suddenly you cannot invest in anything using that credit card because the service charges are eating you alive. That is exactly what is happening with this government. All this motion to instruct says, whatever you do with the tax reconciliation bill, do not add to the Federal deficit and do not pile more money on the debt of our citizens. It is that simple. If they cannot figure it out, maybe they should not be running the place. Mr. Speaker, I yield such time as he may consume to the gentleman from Georgia (Mr. Scott).

Mr. TANNER. Madam Speaker, on that I demand the yeas and nays.

Mr. TANNER

Mr. TANNER. Mr. Speaker, under rule XXII, clause 7(c), I hereby announce my intention to offer a motion to instruct on H.R. 4297, the tax reconciliation conference report. The form of the motion is as follows: I move that the managers on the part of the House at the conference on the disagreeing votes of the two Houses on the Senate amendment to the bill H.R. 4297 be instructed, to the maximum extent possible within the scope of conference, to insist on a conference report which will neither increase the Federal budget deficit nor increase the amount of the debt subject to the public debt limit.

Mr. TANNER

Mr. TANNER. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for yielding to me. I have been here before with the Blue Dogs because it is about the only opportunity we have to discuss what we all believe, as Mr. Matheson said, a trend line that is leading us to a financial Armageddon. There is no other way that one can look at it. I have been talking about and writing about the fact that our country is currently borrowing more money faster than any previous political leadership in the history of the United States. To give you some idea, and I wish I were making some of this up, but if anyone cares to go to the Web site of the public Treasury, www.publicdebt.treas.gov, you can see for yourselves there what I am about to talk about. What happened in this country, basically, is two things: one is we embarked on an economic plan for America in June of 2001 that assumed various things that would happen in the future. In so doing, the outlook was for a $5 trillion surplus over the next 10 years. We all know what happened on 9/11 in the year 2000, some 2\1/2\ months after this economic plan was adopted. The economic plan has not changed, but everything else in the world has. So what we did was we reduced revenue in 2001, and we have increased spending; and we have not gone back and tried to adjust for this new world that we live in. So what is so disturbing about this is since 2001 the debt held by non-governmental agencies has increased by $1.4 trillion. Now, if that were not bad enough, you know how much of it we borrowed from foreigners? Almost 90 percent: $1.16 trillion has been borrowed from foreigners, primarily Asia, China and Japan, who together own over $1 trillion worth of IOUs from Mr. Matheson's little boy and others, me, everybody else in this country that is a citizen. So what we are trying to alert the American people to is that this country has a broken economic game plan, and we do not like the remedies that are being prescribed for this deal by the current administration and the current Congress. Now, I said the other night, half jesting, it is so bad now and getting worse by the second, I am going to tell you in a minute how much we are borrowing every second, that if China attack Taiwan, we would have to borrow the money from China to defend Taiwan. I say that tongue in cheek; but if you look at where we are, we do not have the money, and we do not have the ability to seemingly right this ship of state. Now what are the consequences? There are consequences to actions. What are the consequences of this unprecedented borrowing that has taken place here in the last 48 to 60 months? Unless one is able to repeal the laws of arithmetic, interest rates must go higher. Every reputable economist says that. What does higher interest rates mean? Well, it means more finance charges on every American's credit card. It means cars and homes cost more. All of the things that we buy on time will cost more. And it crowds out private investment that creates new jobs in this country, because the interest rates cripple one's ability to invest in new plants, new equipment, modernization, all of those things. That is the consequence of a willful and deliberate plunge into debt that is taking place here in Washington, DC. It eventually will mean higher taxes. Did you know that $16 out of every $100 that comes to Washington now goes not for health and education and troops, it goes to pay interest? Now, this inability of the government to invest is going to catch up with us. There are three things, basically, American families, my friend the gentleman from Kansas (Mr. Moore) says, three things, basically, that American families live by: one is live within your means; second is pay your debts; and the third is invest in the future. In other words, save money for your kids' college education or for your retirement or something. Your government is not doing any of the three. We are not living within our means, deficit spending every year for the last 4. We are not paying our bills; we are borrowing the money. We are borrowing the money to fight the war in Iraq and Afghanistan, and giving the soldiers who return home the bill with interest. If that is not immoral, I do not know what is. These guys and women, too, are giving their lives sometimes, their legs, their arms, everything else. And what do they get from us? They get a bill when they get back with interest for what they did for this country. And the other consequence of this is what our friend from Nebraska (Mr. Osborne) said earlier tonight. We are having to zero out the drug task forces in this country that are the front line to try to keep our young people from getting hooked on these drugs like methamphetamine and so forth that will rob not only them of their future but will rob this country of their ability to contribute to a free and strong land. The other thing is, when we continue to do this, we degrade the tax base so that more and more money that comes here is not available for any investment by the government in infrastructure or human capital. What do I mean by that? I mean infrastructure, that only the government can do, whether it is dams, roads, bridges, airports, all of the things that allow private enterprise to move in and around the infrastructure and create jobs and create opportunities for our citizens. That is not being done because there is no money for it. It is going to pay interest on the national debt. And when we do not do that, just go to any country on the face of the Earth that has no infrastructure and see how many people are doing pretty well. Nobody is, because there is nothing for private enterprise and entrepreneurship to build to. The other thing we are not doing is investing in human capital. If this country is going to remain strong and free, the citizenry of this country must have a good education and must have good health care. We are robbing ourselves of the ability to invest in education and health care because of this ever-growing burden of debt and interest that takes away from the tax base of the taxes we all pay. There has never been, if one reads history, there has never been a country that is strong and free with an unhealthy, uneducated population. It is not possible. And yet as this trend line continues, as Mr. Matheson said, this is exactly where we are headed. Now, again, you can go to the Treasury Web site and see what I am talking about. Last year, the deficit was $319 billion. To put that into something that hopefully we can all understand, that is $26 billion a month, $886 million a day, $36 million an hour. By the time we finish this hour, this Blue Dog hour, we will have borrowed another $36 million. It is $615,000 a minute, and $10,200 a second. That is how much money we are borrowing. Last year, the fiscal year 2005, the net interest last year we paid was $184 billion. Do you know how much interest checks are? That is $15 billion a month in interest, $511 million a day in interest, $21 million an hour in interest, $354,000 a minute in interest, and $5,900 a second that we are paying in interest because of this growing debt. I was trying to put this in some kind of context; I guess this is about the best I can do. If you have $1,000 bills, $1,000 bills, and you stack them like that, to get to a million dollars, it will be about a foot high. To get to a billion dollars, $1,000 bills stacked like that, it is as high as the Empire State Building. And a trillion dollars is 1,000 bills, 1,000 times the height of the Empire State Building. It is staggering. It is the most unaccountable, irresponsible activity that I know any political leadership in the history of this country has engaged in knowingly, willfully, and deliberately. And it is going on tonight, and it will go on when this budget is presented on the floor here. Because there is no accountability. We do not have any hearings particularly on holding people accountable. You have heard a lot about that. Well, the Blue Dogs have tried to do a couple of things. The first thing we did, or tried to do, to fix it was to reinstitute PAYGO rules. That is something every American family does. If you decide you want to spend some money, you either have got to raise the money to pay for it or you have got to cut the budget somewhere else that is of a lesser priority and fund it that way. PAYGO rules were allowed to expire. The majority will not let them come back here, and that is one of the reasons that we keep digging deeper. The other thing we have recommended, or tried to recommend actually, is that in addition to the PAYGO rules, and we are going to do this, we are going to unveil an accountability plan, the Blue Dogs are, that is going through every Federal agency, the IG reports, to pick out the programs that are ineffective, duplicitous, or otherwise do not work and cut them. And we will have that coming out. We are working on it right now. The lack of accountability here, the lack of responsibility here, cannot go on; and the American people need to really pay some attention to this. We have a birth tax of $27,000. That is hideous. It is not right. And this generation has got to bear most of the blame. My generation has to bear most of the blame because we are simply not doing the three things that American families do every day, and that is live within our means, pay your debts and invest in the future. If we do not change this, Mr. Speaker, then I fear more tonight for my country's future than I ever have in the 60 years I have been on this earth.

Mr. TANNER. Now you have got a part of another $36 million that we have borrowed since we started talking, and 90 percent of that is coming to us from overseas.

Mr. TANNER. Mr. Speaker, I want to talk about accountability again. Another consequence of what we have done in the last 48 to 60 months with this unprecedented borrowing has not only degraded tax money coming here that could have been used for foster children, the poorest, most neglected and abused citizens in our society, but what we are doing is we are not fulfilling the congressional role in the scheme of things in this country. We do not have any hearings about accountability. I saw on television the other night on one of the shows bundles of money that they were handing out in Iraq. They played football with them, and they asked the guy, well, where is the audit for that. He said it is nonexistent. We do not know where the money has gone. We see Katrina. We see in Hope, Arkansas, 12,000 house trailers sinking in the mud at the Hope airport. That is total incompetence. What is really disturbing is the Government Accountability Office reports that 16 out of 23 Federal agencies cannot produce an audit. What we want to do, if we are allowed the opportunity to do so, we want to get every one of those Inspector Generals in here and make them tell us what they did with the money. The Congress does not even ask, now what you did with the money that we appropriated to you to the executive branch. We have got basically a one-party government here. They do not ask them; and if they did ask them, they could not tell them. This is outrageous. There is not a businessperson in America who would go to their comptroller and say here is an item of $20,000, what is that for? I could not tell you; I do not know. Nobody will put up with that, and yet the American people are putting up with it in this town every day. We just borrowed another $18 million, by the way, since we have been talking.

Mr. TANNER. Certainly it is the right thing to do. We take money involuntarily away from people in the form of taxation and appropriate it to the executive branch and then do not even ask them what they did with it. If we ask them, they could not tell us. That is outrageous, and the American people ought not to put up with it, and I hope they will not for too much longer. Let me say one other thing about the consequences of these deficits. We have raised the debt ceiling, and we are going to have to raise it again either this month or next month. It will be the fourth time we have raised the debt ceiling in 4 years, and the consequences of this, not only are we degrading the tax base because we are diverting more and more to interest, but 90 percent of these interest checks are now being sent overseas, not even staying in this country. When one is dependent upon foreign interests that do not see the world as we do for their finances, that creates a vulnerability, a financial vulnerability, for our economy, number one; but, two, I think it is a national security issue. If one reads history, as we all do from time to time, one will see that there are two things that a country cannot survive if they allow themselves to get into that situation. One is for a country to remain strong and free it must have the inherent ability to feed and clothe its citizens, agriculture. If one is dependent upon a foreign source for one's food supply, one is necessarily at risk when that supply chain is interrupted. We know that. You read history. The second is economics. When one is dependent upon someone else for their funding, any interruption in that supply will sink that country economically. Someone in the administration testified that it was naive to think that China, which holds $300 billion worth of our paper now, Red China, they say it would be naive to think that the Chinese would do anything to hurt their economic short-term interests. I think it would be naive to think they would not. That would be the cheapest war they ever fought against the United States. My dad told me one time, I tell you something, Son, he said, It is easier to foreclose a man's house than it is to shoot your way in the front door. When we are dependent upon China and China can say to us, U.S., back off, whether we are demanding that they conform to trade standards, we know what the trade imbalance is with China, or whether or not they make a move on Taiwan and we say you cannot do that, they are getting themselves in a position to say, U.S., stay out of it, or we are going to roll Wall Street and we can do it. That is the financial vulnerability that puts this country in grave jeopardy. If we lose control of our own economic self-interests, we have lost part of our freedom; and this mortgaging of our country to anybody on Earth that will let us have money on the cheap, 90 percent of last year's deficit was financed from offshore. When we allow that to happen, we are playing Russian roulette, so to speak, because anytime they want to, when they get a critical mass, they can really put the squeeze on us, and there is not a thing on Earth we can do about it.

Mr. TANNER. The other thing that the supporters of this economic plan for our country say, well, do not worry about it; as a percentage of the gross domestic product, it is not historically too high. Well, when it was higher was World War II, and we did deficit spend and we borrowed a lot of money; but you know who bought the debt then? Americans, the war bonds, the savings bonds. They are not buying it today. They do not have the money to buy it because the middle class you talked about earlier is shrinking, not growing. It is shrinking. So we are not even financing our own debt. I had a fellow call me on the phone the other day and said, I am afraid we have gone from the greatest generation to the greediest generation, and if our forefathers had borrowed money like we have seen in the last 48 to 60 months, at this pace, I guarantee you we would not have the standard of living that we have enjoyed in this country up to now. You said it pretty well awhile ago when you said this country was built with investment in infrastructure and human capital, and we are robbing ourselves of the ability to do that. We do not have the drug task forces. If there is anything on Earth we need to do in this country it is to try to alert the young people to the dangers of that, and the gentleman from Nebraska (Mr. Osborne) spoke, I thought, very eloquently about that. It is zeroed out. We are eating the seed corn, so to speak, with regard to our investing in the future. I go back to three things every American family does: live within your means, pay your debts, and invest in the future, whether it is for your retirement, kid's college education or something. Leave the place better than when you found it. This is the first time I can remember when people who are in power of this government are knowingly, willfully, and deliberately leaving this country worse off than they found it financially.

Mr. TANNER

Mr. TANNER. I would say that we see time and again the rule resolution that comes to the floor and is passed basically on the party line; what you see is that in the rule, all points of order are waived, which means that the budget rules that we try to put in place are meaningless. Because if you are going to waive them on virtually every bill now that comes to the floor, we really do not have any enforceable mechanism, and this will change that. And we think that is a commonsense idea.

Mr. TANNER. Mr. Speaker, I thank Mr. Ross for yielding to me. And I am pleased to be with him here tonight and with Allen Boyd and Dennis Cardoza. We all talked a little bit about our small town origins. I am from a small town in Tennessee. And I tell people, when they ask me where I am from, I say, well, let me put it like this: In the town I live in, you do not need a blinker signal on your car because the guy behind you knows where you are going to turn off. So I think probably Prescott, Arkansas; Monticello, Florida; and Dennis lives out in California, but there are some small towns out there as well. I say that only to highlight the fact that a lot of the values that we hold dear in this country have been characterized from time to time as small-town values, where people know each other, where families live and so forth. And I think the Blue Dog Coalition reflects a lot of that commonsense philosophy. And we come here to Washington and we band together as the Blue Dog Democrats and try, as best we can, to project this message, this message of values, of small-town camaraderie and all the rest. And I know we are going to get to the 12- point plan, but I want to say just a couple of things very quickly. It is very hard for me, and I know it is very hard for people who are listening to this discussion to relate to $8-plus trillion. I mean, how much is that? It is mind boggling. And to give some idea how much it is, if one took $1,000 bills and just stacked them like that, one after another, $1 million would be about 1 foot high. That is 1,000 $1,000 bills. One billion dollars would be as high as the Empire State Building. And $1 trillion would be 1,000 times as high as the Empire State Building in New York City. That is how much money we are talking about. And what has happened here in the last 4 or 5 years is we had the debt where it was static, it was not growing. As a matter of fact, we were actually paying some down. And as the economy grows and the debt stays static, it becomes much less of a drag on our economy. But we did not stay on that course, and in 2001, we embarked on an entirely different course, a financial course here, and so what has happened is the debt ceiling has been raised, the amount of money this government can borrow, almost $3 trillion, and we have actually borrowed in hard money over $1.3 trillion in a matter of about 48 months. And what does this mean? If that was not bad enough, borrowing $1.3 trillion, the interest rate that we now are having to pay every year at 4 percent on just the money we borrowed in the last 48 months is some $50 billion a year. If that was not bad enough, what is worse is 85 percent of this money that we borrowed in the last 48 months, 85 percent of it has been from foreign interest. So not only are we mortgaging our country, but we are mortgaging it to people who do not see the world as we do. Primarily, the biggest gainer of the debt that we owe is China. Now, I say that there are two problems here. One is the financial vulnerability that this country now has to people who do not see the world as we see it. It does not take a rocket scientist to realize that China has designs on taking Taiwan. The President said we will defend Taiwan. If China moved on Taiwan and we said, You cannot do that, it is not fantasy to think that China would not tell us to stay out of it, U.S., or we are going to roll the value of the dollar, and we can do it. We can make your interest rates go up. We can wreck havoc on your markets if we want to because we have your debt. And as my dad told me one time, he said it is easier to foreclose on a man's house than it is to shoot your way in the front door. And that is what we are talking about, a financial vulnerability of this country that is being created, as we speak here tonight, by the deliberate, intentional financial policy of this country as passed by this Congress and endorsed by the administration. A financial vulnerability that is every bit a national security matter. That is the first thing. The second thing is when I was talking about this $50 billion, we are eroding the tax base in this country by transferring moneys that come here that people pay taxes, hard-earned taxes; we are not spending it on human capital, investment in human capital in this country, and infrastructure, which they are paying their taxes for. We are transferring those taxes and that sort of spending to interest for which we get nothing. And 85 percent of the interest checks that we are writing now that we borrowed in the last 48 months have not even stayed in this country. Human capital, investment in human capital, exactly what do I mean by that? I mean basically human beings, citizens of this country, who must be educated and healthy for this country to be strong, free and competitive in an increasingly globalized world marketplace. There has never been in all of recorded history a country that was strong and free that had a population that was uneducated and unhealthy. It has never existed. It never will. And by transferring the tax base that people send the money to Washington for interest rather than education and health care, we are absolutely forfeiting the people's right to have a country and a government that is interested in their welfare. The second thing is infrastructure. We have a lot of crumbling infrastructure in this country. We are losing the ability to invest in that, and if you do not think that that is important, go to some country that has no infrastructure and see how many people are doing well. Nobody is. And let me close with this: The Blue Dogs have endorsed a bill that we drafted earlier this year that basically does away with partisan political redistricting of the congressional seats. We did a lot of work on it. We have briefed it through all of the legal pitfalls, and the Blue Dogs have endorsed this bill. And there was an article in the Wall Street Journal today, this morning, talking about it. What we are seeing in this country is an increasingly polarized House of Representatives that is rendering itself, in the opinion of the moderates here, the people who want to work across the aisle, it is rendering it impossible for this House of Representatives to address the real problems of the country because of this blind allegiance to party first and constituents second. We have seen just egregious examples of the abuse of that power by the professional politicians. I am under no illusion. We are asking people to give up a lot of power because they really carve their own districts out now with computers and so forth. And we are asking them to give up a lot of power. But our country is losing the middle, and the middle is where the problems are solved, politically speaking, in our country. And I wish everybody would take a very serious look at this because if we can take it out of the hands of professional politicians and give the voice back to the people, I think, one, we will be able to respond better. But, secondly, if our House of Representatives becomes so polarized and so gerrymandered by the process that we are living under now that people at the ballot box cannot change the direction of the country when they want it to change, the majority want it to change, and they cannot at the ballot box, we will either wind up with a dictatorship or a revolt. I really believe it is that serious. So I wanted to mention that in passing. It is not one of our 12 points, but it certainly is part of our Blue Dog philosophy because the Blue Dogs have endorsed it, and I appreciate that very much. So, again, I thank the gentleman for yielding to me, and we will go through the 12-point plan.

Mr. TANNER. We all would like to be big business owners someday, but we are still small business owners.

Mr. TANNER. Thank you, Mr. Ross. The Government Accountability Office in a report this year revealed 16 of 23 major Federal agencies cannot produce a simple audit. In other words, they cannot tell the American people and the Congress what they did with the money that was appropriated to them for the purposes provided in the bill. Now, it is unbelievable to imagine that going on in your business. If you went to your comptroller and said here is an expenditure of $10,000, what happened to it, and the guy said I do not know, I cannot put my finger on that, nobody, no business person in this country would tolerate that, nor should they. Yet 16 of 23 Federal agencies cannot do that. In our plan, in this plan, if they cannot, we do it very simple: They do not get the money next year. It is straightforward, it is common- sensical. People understand it. And, by gosh, when the Congress appropriates money to the administration, whatever administration it may be, and they cannot tell us what they did with it, then they ought not to get it next year. I will tell you one other thing. Not only do we withhold money under our plan, which makes perfectly good sense, but there ought to be some accountability. What we have seen is I think a derivative of the gerrymandered districts that come here in this party allegiance first and the country second. We now have a one-party government here in Washington. The Republicans have the White House, Senate and House. The people elected them. But what you have as a by-product of that is a compliant Congress, a friendly administration. And this Congress has totally abdicated its oversight of the Federal executive branch because they do not even ask them what they did with the money. They do not even have hearings and say what happened to the money we appropriated to you last year? If they did have a hearing, the administration could not tell them, or could not tell us, the American people. So you have a bad by-product of one-party government here with a compliant Congress, a friendly administration, nobody wanting to embarrass each other. So, consequently, we have got a financial house that is not only not in order, but running amuck.

Mr. TANNER. Well, it is a shell game, somebody called it three card monty, when you low ball a bill that you know is going to cost more than that, but you do it to fit it into some preconceived notion of a budget so you can basically fool the American people to make them think you are being fiscally responsible and not doing something foolish financially, and yet you are. And we saw this and we saw the administration, the administration that we are under now, they knew better on the Medicare bill and told the Congress it was going to cost $350 billion over time, and really they knew it was about $750 or $800 billion. That is the kind of thing we are talking about, because then people do not know what to believe. Mr. Cardoza said earlier, We can do better than this. This place is broken and our 12-point plan is our attempt to fix it.

Mr. TANNER

Mr. TANNER. Mr. Speaker, I think the American people just want to hear us try to get along and give them the level, be on the level with them, give them straight talk. What has happened here in the last several years is we have reduced revenues with bills like this and increased spending. Now, you can do that for a little while, and all of us have done it from time to time, I assume, with our credit cards. But you cannot do it forever and every American knows that. To give you some recent history, in 2002, we had to increase the debt limit of money that we could borrow by $450 billion in this country. In 2003, we had to increase it again by $984 billion. In 2004, again, by $800 billion. And in the budget resolution, it is not in this bill, they propose another $781 billion increase in the limit that we can borrow. Now, what that means is, since 2001, the Federal debt has grown from 5.6 to $8.1 trillion. This is available on www.publicdebt.treas.gov. Do not take my word for it. Go, please, look it up. In 2004, 16 of 23 Federal agencies could not provide an acceptable audit. That is available at www.gao.gov. Right now, mainland China and Hong Kong have accumulated over $300 billion worth of our debt. That data is available on the Treasury Department's Web site. Again, this is not an argument. This is fact. Go look it up. I said the other day when I was talking, things are so bad with our borrowing out of control that if China attacked Taiwan, we would have to borrow the money from China to defend Taiwan. 16 percent of all the taxes we collect now in this country go to pay interest. And it gets worse by the minute. Interest on the public debt grew more rapidly than any other spending category in the Federal Government last year. In 2005 we paid in checks $184 billion, in checks. If you assume that we continue to do these tax bills without paying for them, the GAO projects that in the year 2040, every dime collected by this government will go to pay interest on past consumption on interest only debt. Now, what does that mean? Where are we now? This is hard to imagine, but so far, in this fiscal year, we have borrowed $130 billion and spent $39 billion on interest in just the first 2 months of this fiscal year. November's $22 billion payment was the largest ever. Debt interest grew more rapidly in the first 2 months, 38 percent, relative to the same rate last year. The Federal Reserve is raising interest rates and has 12 times. Really, all I am saying is this. We are on an unsustainable financial glide path and every reputable economist will tell you that. We want to work with the Republicans. We want to try to do tax relief when it makes sense and makes more commerce happen and so forth. But we cannot do it because we cannot reach the real problem. You know what the problem is around here? You let the PAYGO rules lapse in 2002. We do not have meaningful enforceable budget caps. We do not have a balanced budget amendment that has ever been voted on. And what we have is a failure of not only communication but a failure of management of the budget process. And we are getting deeper and deeper in trouble by the minute.

Mr. TANNER

Mr. TANNER. Mr. Speaker, I guess that there is enough hot air that comes from this place to float any balloon, and I wish I was making up what I am about to say. But if you go to the www.publicdebt.treas.gov, you will find the things that I am about to say are there on the government Web site from the United States Treasury. The record is simply this. In 2002, this Congress raised the debt ceiling by $450 billion. In 2003, by $984 billion. In 2004, by $800 billion, and in this budget reconciliation process, there is another $781 billion of debt increase, amounting to $3.01 trillion, all of which is done in the last 4 years. Now, I speak tonight as an American. We only have one dollar. We only have one Treasury. And for either party to claim some sort of mantle of financial responsibility here is absolutely ridiculous. No American political leadership in the history of this country has borrowed as much money as quickly as this Congress and this administration in the last 4 years. This is not an argument. This is fact. Go to www.publicdebt.treas.gov if you do not believe me. And what this means to us as Americans is in 2000, we had $50 billion a year out of the tax base that was available for education, for health care, for veterans. It is not available now because it is going to interest. I say what has happened is we, the Congress, and the administration, or you, the Congress and the administration, have levied a $500 billion plus tax increase on the American citizens over the next 10 years in the form of interest payments that you, in the majority, have built up over the last 4 years. That is not an argument. Go to www.treas.gov. That is a fact. Now, you might not want to admit it, but that is what has happened. Now, if that is not bad enough, 85 percent of this money that has been loaned to us and we have borrowed in the name of every man, woman and child that is a United States citizen, 85 percent of it has come from people that are not U.S. citizens. It is so bad right now that if China attacked Taiwan we would have to borrow the money from China to defend Taiwan. What kind of sense does this make? I am telling you, the Treasury reports that they are going to borrow $171 billion this quarter, the first quarter of 2006. And you come here with a reconciliation process that you say is cutting and then you turn around and stand up and say how much is being increased. I do not know which one it is, but I know that at the end of the day, this reconciliation process increases the deficit, not decreases it. And the American people want one thing, and I do not care whether it is Democrat or Republican, they want a government that works for them, not against them, and they want a government that does not enslave them in debt. What has happened here over the last 4 years is unprecedented. The amount of money that has been borrowed in our name by basically you, the majority, and the White House. It is not an argument. This is a fact. It is absolutely sickening. We are now, February 9, I want the American people to understand, February 9 are bringing back the 30-year bond. We have to because we owe so much money to primarily now foreigners.

Mr. TANNER

Mr. TANNER. That is correct. This recklessness has got to be stopped. The Blue Dogs will work with anybody. But until the President and the United States Congress level with the American people and say we do not just have a deficit that is cyclical that the country is experiencing, until they will tell the American people the truth, we have a structural, institutionalized built-in deficit that is going to sink all of us collectively as Americans, not as Democrats or Republicans, as Americans, and rob our kids and really our citizens of any hope of a better way of life. That is what is at stake here. Until they level with us, we can come down here and do these Special Orders, and I thank Mr. Ross and Mr. Scott and Ms. Herseth and the others, but I tell my colleagues, this is not a Democrat or Republican problem. This is an American problem; and until they face up to it, we have a terrible situation here in Washington. I commend the gentleman again for having this Special Order.

Mr. TANNER. Mr. Speaker, I think that means I am old. I appreciate the gentleman having this special order tonight and inviting us down here. Mr. Scott, many of you may know, but his brother-in-law is the homerun king of baseball, Hank Aaron, and he was nice enough to invite me down to an event where Hank was here. And I appreciate that. I got a picture of me and Hammering Hank Aaron that I cherish very much.

Mr. TANNER. I really enjoyed that. But I want to thank you all for being here tonight. I want to talk about this financial picture of our country maybe in a little different way. And the way I want to talk about it is not as a Democrat or as a Republican, but as an American. We only have one dollar. We only have one balance sheet. We only have one military. We only have one economic opportunity in our lives here. And folks, I have got to tell you, we are in deep, deep trouble. And the financial picture of this country is deteriorating as we speak. I do not know how else to say this. It is not fun to talk about the financial morass that we are in. You know, there are not many politicians that go before the American people and get elected and say, folks we have got a problem. We do not have enough revenue, or we have too much spending. And we have got to do something about it. You do not hear that. You do not hear people saying we have got problems. We have to fix them together. And yet, that is what I think the Blue Dog Coalition is all about. We have done everything we can to reach out to the administration and the Republicans. We have asked the President for a budget summit. We got a letter back saying that would not be the case. We have asked the Republican leadership to consider our 12-point plan, balanced budget amendment to try to get PAYGO back, which is just common sense. If you are going to spend money, you need to pay for it somehow. That has been refused. So we have tried every way we can, and I will tell you, quite frankly, until the President of the United States and the leadership here in Congress, the Republican leadership here in Congress at the moment, levels with the American people about the deterioration of their country's balance sheet, it is going to be awfully difficult, quite frankly, for us here on the floor as blue dogs or any other Member of Congress to convince the American people about how dramatic and how drastically our collective financial deterioration has occurred. Let me just try to put it very briefly in a context. Since 2001, when we embarked on a different economic program, this Nation has gone into debt another $2.3 trillion; $1.3 trillion of that has been borrowed from private sources and, you know, what is so bad about this is that 85 percent of this money has come from people who have loaned us this money who do not live in the United States. I did some figuring today. Just based on what President Bush and the Republican Congress has done in the last 4 years, and again, this is not partisan. You go to www.treasury.gov, the U.S. Treasury Web site. What I am telling you is fact. It is not a political argument. I wish it were. But it is not. You go to the treasury Web site. What has happened to us is that, by these deficits, $157 billion in 2002, we are paying interest at that year at 4.3 percent--2003, $377; 2004, $412, the largest in history. Last year, $319. Anyway, you add all that up, we are now paying $50- plus billion dollars a year in interest that we were not paying before President Bush changed the economic game plan of our country with this compliant Congress--$50 billion a year. What I tell people is, quite frankly, what we have done is we have increased taxes on the American people $500 billion over the next 10 years, and that is on interest. Interest is a tax that cannot be repealed. Everybody out there knows that when you run that credit card through, you do not have to pay for it today; but you know at the end of the month you are going to get a bill, and the bill is going to have interest on it. And where people get in trouble when the bill runs up so high, all they can pay is interest, and when that happens, that is when they get in trouble. The United States Treasury announced the other day that for the first quarter of 2006, they are going to have to borrow a record $171 billion. This is just to finance our government for the first quarter of this fiscal year. On February 9, we need to mark that down on our calendars, for the first time in 5 years, the Treasury will have to offer a 30-year bond. Do you know why they are bringing that back? We did not have it in 2001. We could discontinue it then because we were on the road to some sort of semblance of financial sanity. February 9, 5 years later, we are going to bring back the 30-year bond. Do we know what that means? It means we are borrowing so much money, we have to long-term it, because we cannot afford it in the short term. That is what the economic plan that we have been following for the last 4 or 5 years is doing to this country. Now, if you do not think that is bad enough, consider the fact that we now owe 44 percent of our privately held debt to people who do not even live in America. Said another way, we are writing $185 billion worth of checks every year for interest. We get nothing. We get no health care, no veterans benefits, no anything. We write checks, and 44 percent of those checks do not even stay in this country. This has literally happened in about the last 50 months. It did not used to be this way. In fact, when they got here, we had a $5 trillion surplus. We do not need a surplus, but we need to pay our bills; and we are not doing that.

Mr. TANNER

Mr. TANNER. Mr. Speaker, I came over here this morning because I am very concerned about our country. I am concerned about it because we are in a financial morass around here. I don't think that the powers that be in this town are leveling with the American people about just how bad the budget deficit and the debt of our country has become and how rapidly it has deteriorated from the 1990s when we had, arguably, a surplus, and we were digging ourselves out of previous debt. I do not mean this to be political, because we are all Americans first and Democrats and Republicans second, and this is our country's balance sheet, it is not the Republican balance sheet, it is not the Democratic balance sheet, it is all of our balance sheet, particularly our children. In the last 4 years, our country has borrowed over $1.3 trillion. If that is not bad enough, it might interest you to know that 85 percent of that has come from foreign governments, foreigners, who are investing in the bills, notes and bonds of our country. China now owns almost $300 billion of our paper, and the Japanese own almost $700 billion. In Asia alone, we owe almost $1 trillion. What does this mean to us? Well, it means that we are mortgaging our country to people who may not see the world as we see it. We are giving those countries leverage over us in the financial markets, so that we are potentially in danger of losing our economic freedom to people who own our debt and who can therefore dictate the value of the dollar and all the things that go with that. That said, this is an American problem. This is not the Republican's balance sheet, it is not the Democrat's balance sheet, it is all of our balance sheets. In 2004, to put this in some kind of a context, our government borrowed $13,300 a second. Staggering. In the last 4 years, this administration and this Congress have borrowed more money from foreign interests than all 42 presidents in our history up to 2001. Can you imagine that? We have borrowed more money from foreigners in the last 4 years than all 42 presidents of this country up to 2001. We cannot continue to do what we are doing here without jeopardizing our economic freedom. In a few minutes, you are going to hear from another Blue Dog, Dennis Cardoza, about our plan to try to stop this. This whole budget process is broken. You are going to hear a lot of stuff this week about the reconciliation of the budget, and what they are going to say is we are cutting spending. But if you look at it, the reconciliation process will actually increase the deficit, not decrease it. Until the leadership of this country, both here in Congress and the administration, levels with all of us and comes to the American people and says we have got a problem, and we have got to fix it and you have got to help, until they do that, it is just one Congressman saying A and another Congressman saying B, and people lose sight of what is going on here and think it is just another political argument. Well, I am here this morning to tell you it is not a political argument. It is a dire necessity that we face up to the fact that we have a structural, continuing deficit. The President of the United States himself said we hope to cut the deficit in half in 5 years. That is like saying a doctor telling you I have got good news for you, I thought you were going to bleed to death in 6 months. It will take you 1\1/2\ years to bleed to death. That is no solution to our problem. We have a structural deficit problem. We go in the red every year around here. We have got to completely, in my judgment and in the Blue Dog's judgment, take another look at the whole budget process and almost start from scratch, because I can tell you, folks, we are not doing any good the way we are going right now.

Mr. TANNER

Mr. TANNER. Mr. Speaker, I rise today to speak about the tragedy that has resulted from Hurricane Katrina. Like our colleagues and so many Americans, I watched with sadness as this massive storm approached the coast and threatened to wreak unprecedented destruction on anything that stood in its path. Over the hours that followed, we learned that entire communities along the Gulf of Mexico coast had literally been devastated, homes and businesses had been destroyed, churches and schools were in ruins, and floodwaters continued to rise in New Orleans. While the physical damage was restricted to the Gulf Coast region itself, we all recognized immediately that Hurricane Katrina was a national catastrophe that would touch millions and have long-term effects on us all. The people of Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama need strong leadership in Washington right now. The Federal Government can and will stand strong to do all we can until the flood waters recede, homes are rebuilt, families and communities are reunited and normalcy returns. However, it will require the time and efforts of us all. The American people have responded with overwhelming generosity. Citizens from Tennessee and elsewhere across the country have donated their time, goods and money to help in every possible way with the relief effort. Many communities in our State have shown again how we earned our nickname ``The Volunteer State,'' and I know many other communities have also proven their kindness, welcoming with open arms those who have literally lost everything and been forced from their homes. There are countless stories of families, churches and schools opening their doors and taking in these newly found homeless. I am proud of my fellow Tennesseans and our fellow Americans in showing such support for those who need help. Our Nation continues to face unprecedented threats on physical, emotional and economic fronts, and we will fight those battles together. Federal, State and local officials, private industry and charitable organizations must work together to fight these battles and start the process of rebuilding our communities, and I hope our Nation will be stronger. Mr. Speaker, we have watched a terrible disaster unfold, but I am certain Americans will stand together and meet these challenges with the American spirit that has helped us through so many tough times before.

Mr. TANNER

Mr. TANNER. Mr. Speaker, I rise today to pay tribute to a great Tennessean and a dear friend of mine, Mrs. Olee Lewis of Paris, Tennessee. Olee recently completed her 38th year of serving our community at the Henry County Northwest Tennessee Economic Development Council. As a daughter of a local tobacco farmer, Olee dreamed of being a missionary or a nurse, and as an adult, she made her dreams come true. Olee received her nurse's aide certification after high school and then began training at National Baptist Missionary Training School in Nashville. She had to leave missionary school before she was finished but still jumped into a life of missionary work back home. Olee has directed the Henry County Northwest Tennessee Economic Development Council and has helped many people throughout her years there. One of Olee's greatest accomplishments is the ``Sister to Sister and Brother to Brother'' club, which organizes black men and women to meet the needs of the community. ``Sister to Sister'' has been so successful there is now a ``Sister to Sister II.'' She has also found the time to organize the SHARE program, serve as Secretary of the Tennessee Baptist Missionary and Education Ushers Department, and serve as a director of many different projects in her local church. For her extraordinary work in the community, Olee has received the Personalities of the South Award, was appointed to the important Families First Committee and was named a Kentucky Colonel. Married to the late Charles Wesley Lewis, Olee has been a wonderful mother to four foster children and also has five grandchildren and one great-grandchild. Throughout her life, Olee has contributed much to our community, our state and our nation. She has never shied away from work when her skills and efforts were needed and could make a difference. Mr. Speaker, please join me as I recognize Olee's many achievements and contributions, and to say thanks to her for all she has done through the years to make the city of Paris, Henry County, and the State of Tennessee a better place to live.