[Congressional Record Volume 152, Number 14 (Wednesday, February 8, 2006)]
[House]
[Pages H213-H219]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                       30-SOMETHING WORKING GROUP

  The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. Campbell of California). Under the 
Speaker's announced policy of January 4, 2005, the gentleman from Ohio 
(Mr. Ryan) is recognized for 60 minutes as the designee of the minority 
leader.
  Mr. RYAN of Ohio. Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the opportunity to be 
here, and let me first say to the gentleman regarding his presentation 
here tonight regarding alternative energy sources, not only was it 
impressive and thorough, but I think he hit the nail right on the head. 
I think this is an issue that the next generation is going to have to 
deal with, and I know that our 30-something Working Group is very 
interested in working with the gentleman for alternative energy sources 
and figuring out what we are going to do.
  Our topic tonight, Mr. Speaker, is what is going on here at home 
regarding the budget and regarding the budget deficit that the 
Republican Congress has run on an annual basis, but also the national 
debt.
  The President will be coming back to the Congress to ask the 
Republican Congress to raise the debt ceiling, the debt limit. This is 
deja vu all over again. This Republican Congress continues to borrow 
and borrow and borrow and spend and spend and spend, really, like 
drunken sailors, like there is no end in sight; and our country cannot 
continue to go down this irresponsible path. We would like to talk a 
little bit about it tonight.
  In order to borrow money, the Congress needs to pass legislation and 
the President needs to sign legislation that will allow the U.S. 
Treasury to borrow money; and the more deficits we run on an annual 
basis, the more we have to borrow. So the debt ceiling gets lifted.
  The Republicans went out, borrowed more and more money till they hit 
that ceiling and had to pass legislation to raise that ceiling again to 
allow the Treasury to borrow even more money. That is what is happening 
right now.
  To give you some perspective here, Mr. Speaker, when President 
Clinton came into office in January of 1993, we were running tremendous 
budget deficits. In 1993, a Democratic Congress and President Clinton 
passed a budget without one Republican vote and passed the budget that 
led to the greatest economic expansion in the history of the United 
States of America, created over 20 million new jobs. The stock market 
went crazy. There were benefits for everyone in our society because of 
the tough decisions; and quite frankly, Mr. Speaker, several Members in 
the Democratic Caucus lost their seats over that tough vote. They made 
very difficult decisions in the early stages of President Clinton's 
Presidency in order to balance the budget and do the right thing; but 
even though they made this difficult decision, we were still running 
tremendous budget deficits early in the 1990s, mid-1990s.
  So President Clinton came to this Congress in his 8 years, and as we 
can see here as President Clinton came in, running budget deficits and 
then eventually running surplus into the later years of his Presidency, 
but President Clinton early on, because of the deficits that were run 
up through the Reagan administration, through the first George Bush 
administration, and then into the Clinton administration, President 
Clinton had to come to Congress and ask to raise the debt ceiling.
  Just to give you some perspective, Mr. Speaker, in 8 years, President 
Clinton asked the Congress to raise the debt ceiling twice, two times, 
in order to fix this problem. Then we had economic growth, we had 
balanced budgets, we had surplus money, and we had arguments in this 
Chamber about where the money was going to be spent. Two times in 8 
years President Clinton early on asked to raise the debt ceiling.
  President Bush, current President Bush, has asked this Congress to 
raise the debt ceiling five times already, five times, because there is 
runaway spending from this Congress. I am joined by my friend, the 
gentlewoman from Florida (Ms. Wasserman Schultz). Five times, because 
of the runaway spending, the corporate welfare, time and time and time 
again to the pharmaceutical industry, to the HMOs, to the energy 
companies the gentleman from Maryland (Mr. Bartlett) was talking about 
earlier. We continue to give this corporate welfare, and with a blatant 
and reckless disregard for the fiscal responsibilities that we have 
here.
  We all know now that we are borrowing the money from the Chinese 
Government and Japanese Government, the Saudi Arabian family, the house 
of Saud. So we are not going to the Second National or Sky Bank or Bank 
of America to get the money. This Congress and this President are going 
to the Chinese Government to get it.
  I would be happy to yield to the gentlewoman from Florida (Ms. 
Wasserman Schultz), my friend.
  Ms. WASSERMAN SCHULTZ. Mr. Speaker, I thank so much my good friend 
from Ohio. I am particularly struck by your comments and your laying 
out of the real significance of the problem we are facing here.
  I have only been here a year now. I am a new Member, and I came from 
12 previous years in the Florida legislature. The whole concept, I 
mean, I certainly understand what the debt limit is and the debt 
ceiling, and I have watched the President's brother, Governor Bush, do 
the exact same thing in Florida and asked repeatedly for our debt limit 
to be extended. So there is clearly a pattern running through this 
family.
  But what is so foreign to me as a State legislator, and I know we 
have many former State legislators in this Chamber, is the whole 
concept of debt and operating in the red to begin with. Most States 
cannot deficit spend. Most States have to adopt a budget that balances. 
You do not borrow against next year. You spend what you have, just

[[Page H214]]

like the concept of PAYGO that the Democrats in the Congress have 
supported for years and continue to support, and then for some reason 
we cannot get the Republican leadership here to go back to that 
concept.
  It is mindboggling. How does a party and a group of people who 
supposedly pride themselves on their fiscal responsibility not support 
the concept of paying as you go? I do not understand. I mean, those two 
concepts are opposites. Fiscal responsibility, yet five increases in 
the debt limit in the debt ceiling. It is really tough for me to 
understand.
  We are borrowing away our children's future, and it is a concept that 
I have not been able to get my mind around. We want to make sure that 
we reduce the deficit, but the President talks about it in his State of 
the Union address. You constantly hear Republican Members of Congress 
profess that they have an interest in cutting the deficit in half or 
eliminating the deficit. Yet, the budget that the President submitted 
does no such thing. In fact, over the next 10 years it ensures that the 
deficit continues to stay significantly high, does not even come close 
to cutting it in half; and, actually, he presented us a budget on 
Monday that includes no assumption that we would spend no money on the 
war in Iraq after next year.
  I mean, to me, I analogize the reality of the budget the President 
gave us on Monday to one that my first graders might sit down and write 
because they have about the same similarity in terms of likelihood of 
success here in this Chamber, the same similarity that my first graders 
would write to the ability to actually meet the needs of the people in 
the country.

                              {time}  2215

  You know what it really boils down to? It boils down to hypocrisy, 
because the same people who accuse Democrats of being tax and spend 
liberals, you know, and I am loathe to repeat that misnomer because it 
is so insulting, but if we are tax and spend liberals, they are borrow 
and spend. They are borrow and spend.
  Because if we say that we do not think tax and spend is a good idea, 
which I think universally Republicans and Democrats would say taxing 
and spending as a way to solve our problems is not a set of solutions 
for the future of this country, how is borrowing and spending any 
different?
  I mean, you are mortgaging our children's future, and that, you know, 
I think if we had some semblance of bipartisan here that some people 
profess to be supportive of, I would love to sit down around a table. 
Maybe Mr. Boehner, the new majority leader, will be different, I am 
certainly hopeful. But I would love to sit down around a table with a 
bipartisan group of Members and find a way to pay as we go.
  I will yield.
  Mr. RYAN of Ohio. I think the pay as you go is basic common sense. It 
is the same thing that people have to do at home. You get the checkbook 
out, you take in so much, you can only spend so much, or you have to 
end up borrowing money or putting it on your credit card, and we know 
that is definitely a downward spiral.
  But exactly what you were saying, I think the President signed it 
into law today, the Deficit Reduction Act, which is hysterical, because 
it actually increases the deficit. Now, our Republican friends are 
saying, well, it cuts $39 billion, the deficit by $39 billion, or there 
is $39 billion in cuts, but at the same time, they gave $70 billion, or 
close to it, in tax cuts that went primarily to people who make more 
than 4- or 5- or $600,000 a year. So it is very simple math to realize 
that, well, you may cut tell by 39, but if you are reducing your 
revenues by $70 billion, that there is still a deficit increase. And 
that is basically what happened.
  Now, you can check the rolls here as far as what Democrats have voted 
for. Time and time again, the Democrats have supported middle-class tax 
cuts. We have supported tax cuts for small businesses. We supported tax 
cuts and credits for college tuition. But I am not ashamed to say that 
we are going to ask Bill Gates and Warren Buffett to pay their fair 
share in taxes, because right now they are getting a free ride. And I 
am not afraid to say, and the 30-something Working Group is not afraid 
to say, that we do not want to give public tax dollars to the tune of 
$16 billion to the energy companies. You got to be kidding me.
  I mean, you know, Mr. Speaker, people who may be watching this in the 
Chamber or Members in their offices should be startled that we are 
going to go out and collect tax dollars from the public. Average people 
making minimum wage, or 10 bucks or 15 bucks an hour, send money down 
here to us, and the Republican majority is taking that money and giving 
it to the energy companies when, you know, Exxon-Mobil is making $39 
billion in a quarter, and all of the other oil companies are doing 
extremely well.
  Or we are going to take that money, Ms. Wasserman Schultz, we are 
going to take the public money, and we are going to give it to the 
HMOs, or we are going to make sure that we are wasting it and giving it 
to the pharmaceutical companies, without any kind of price controls.
  Ms. WASSERMAN SCHULTZ. Essentially what that is is a manifestation of 
the culture of corruption. I mean, that is how you translate the 
culture of corruption which shows itself in individual Members in some 
cases, and people who are under suspicion and investigation, although 
not charged. And that is how you take it, or that is how they take it a 
step further and translate it into policy.
  I mean, when we are providing significant tax dollars for energy 
companies, when we are essentially ensuring that special interests have 
their pockets lined via people `s tax dollars, then that is the 
manifestation of the culture of corruption and how it impacts people in 
terms of the policymaking that goes on here.
  And we talking about third-party validators. It would be easy for us 
to just say what we think standing on this floor. But, you know, it 
would be very easy for us to lay out, you know, progressive liberal 
Democratic organizations to validate what we are saying here.
  I am going to read you a few third-party validators who laid out 
their opinion of the President's budget in the last several days. 
Goldman Sachs, for example. They said that the deficit forecasts that 
were laid out in the President's budget this week were unrealistic.
  Bush's budget proposal assumes that the Federal deficit would jump 
from $318 billion last year to $423 billion in 2006, then slide back 
down to $183 billion in 2010. Those factors led Goldman Sachs 
economists to tell clients yesterday that the deficit forecasts are 
unrealistic.
  Mr. RYAN of Ohio. Goldman Sachs is not a liberal organization?
  Ms. WASSERMAN SCHULTZ. No. And also not a liberal organization is the 
Heritage Foundation, who says that the budget does not deal with 
retirees. Brian Riedl, budget analyst for the conservative Heritage 
Foundation, said that Bush's budget is clearly not enough to feasibly 
solve the most important economic challenge of our era, how to deal 
with 77 million baby-boomer retirees.
  The Concord Coalition, also not a liberal bastion, said the White 
House was working off very unrealistic assumptions. Robert Bixby, 
executive director of the Concord Coalition, said of the Bush budget, 
when you look at the bottom line that they are putting out, it is 
important then to look at the assumptions. And I think there are some 
very unrealistic assumptions there that would probably keep the deficit 
much higher than the administration is showing.
  When I say that my first-graders could sit down and write a similar 
budget that bears the same resemblance to reality, I am really not 
kidding.
  You know, I am not just being tongue in cheek here. The President 
owes the American people the responsibility that he has taken when he 
took his oath to uphold the Constitution, a budget with realistic 
projections that does not just paint the rosiest picture possible so 
that he can coast through the rest of his term.
  Mr. RYAN of Ohio. Right. This is not a game. This is not a game that 
needs to be played. We switch the numbers here, and we switch them 
here. This is important, because as of February 8, which I believe is 
today, $8,200,380,327,202 is the national debt. And we will have a 
chart next week that is updating this. And the President is going to 
come and ask to rise

[[Page H215]]

the debt ceiling so that we can go out and borrow more money. But your 
share of the national debt, Ms. Wasserman Schultz, is $27,518. That is 
what you owe, the debt you owe to the United States Treasury.
  Ms. WASSERMAN SCHULTZ. Now, Mr. Ryan, is that just adults?
  Mr. RYAN of Ohio. No. That is yours, your kids'; each one of your 
kids, every citizen in the United States owes $27,000 for the national 
debt. And the President is going to ask Congress for the ability to go 
out and borrow even more so that each citizen can owe even more.
  Now, what we are trying to say here in the 30-something Group is that 
we have got to be responsible, we have got to balance the budget. We 
have got to make sure that we stop borrowing money from the Chinese 
Government, because ultimately it is going to lead to each citizen 
having to pay more of their paycheck in taxes to fund the debt, and we 
do not want that to happen.
  So our friends on the other side can talk about tax cuts all they 
want, but as they continue to go out and borrow money with the full 
faith and credit of the United States Government behind it, it means 
our taxpayers are good for it. So if you are home, you are good for it. 
We can count on you to raise your taxes so that you can give the 
Republican majority more money so that they can pay the bills.
  Now, would not it be nice, you know, if you are at home and you get 
your credit card statement, your credit card only allows you to borrow 
$10,000. Whew. Boy, I am at $10,000. I am at $9,990. Would it not be 
nice if I could just call up the credit card company and say, you know, 
I realize I am not making any more money, I am probably making less, I 
realize that health care costs have doubled, tuition and everything 
else, can you give me another $10,000 so I can borrow more?
  And really the worst thing that can happen is the credit card 
companies says, yes, go ahead. Then you owe them more. And you owe more 
interest. It is this downward spiral that we are in right now. It is 
ultimately robbing the future of our country.
  I want to kick it to you, but I just want to share one more statistic 
here that we have been using that I think is astonishing, astonishing. 
In the first 224 years of this country, from 1776 to 2000, we borrowed 
as a country $1 trillion from foreign interests. Okay. They were 
foreign holdings of U.S. debt, $1 trillion dollars in 224 years.
  President Bush and the Republican House and the Republican Senate in 
the last 4 years have borrowed $1.05 trillion. They borrowed more money 
from the Chinese, the Japanese, the Saudi Arabians in 4 years than this 
country has borrowed in 224 years.
  That is unbelievable to think that our friends on the other side, who 
many of them are friends, can say with a straight face, we are fiscally 
responsible. We are the party of fiscal responsibility. We want to cut 
taxes and reduce government burden. Reduce government burden? My 
goodness gracious. Borrowing money from the Chinese Government is 
somehow being fiscally responsible to the tune of $1 trillion?
  So this all adds up to a real cost of the kind of corruption that we 
have down here, because you give tax cuts to your rich friends, you 
give subsidies to the energy companies, you give subsidies to the 
pharmaceutical companies, but you are borrowing the money on the backs 
of your kids.
  Ms. WASSERMAN SCHULTZ. To take that a step further, and, Mr. Ryan, 
before I do that, we have used this chart repeatedly because it is so 
illustrative of the stark ineptitude, for lack of a better term, of 
this administration, you know, compared to all of the other previous 
administrations combined.
  I am wondering, sometimes people catch this Special Order hour, and 
sometimes they do not. I know we have a Website, and we have recently 
revamped it, and my understanding is that the charts that we use are 
going to be available on our Website in the event that people want to 
go and look at them more closely. Is that right?
  Mr. RYAN of Ohio. That is correct. Www.housedemocrats.gov/30-
something. And this will be the Web page that pops up, 30-something 
Working Group. Then you go to the bottom and it says, our posters. So 
you will be able to get to our posters here.
  Ms. WASSERMAN SCHULTZ. They can peruse them at the their leisure.
  Mr. RYAN of Ohio. Yeah. And they are really good, because we have 
taken all of the information that Tom Manatos here, who is our go-to 
guy with the 30-something Working Group, kind of boiled it down, and 
you will be able to see our third-party validators.
  Now, for example, this poster here, now we have added the pictures, 
obviously, to help make our points to see that this is President Bush, 
he is responsible for the last 4 years, and all of those pictures of 
all of the other Presidents, Andrew Jackson, President Kennedy, there 
is Taft, Lincoln, they are all here. But at the bottom it says, source, 
where we cite our source, is U.S. Treasury. We are not making those 
numbers up. So go to the Website and you will be able to see this 
poster that our crack staff has put together.
  Ms. WASSERMAN SCHULTZ. We have sort of interchangeably been talking 
about two different things. There is the debt, and then there is the 
deficit. Both things are startling when it comes to this 
administration's record. Under this President the deficit and the 
national debt are out of control.
  Mr. RYAN of Ohio. The deficit is the annual.
  Ms. WASSERMAN SCHULTZ. Right. The deficit is the annual ongoing 
difference between the revenue we take in and the money we spend. And 
then the debt is what we have to borrow in order to stay afloat.
  Over the last 5 years, it is clear that President Bush has lost 
control of both. Under this President we have gone from a projected 10-
year surplus of $5.6 trillion to a projected deficit over the same 
period of $3.3 trillion, which is an $8.9 trillion reversal.
  Under President Bush's budget, when omitted costs are included, we 
have deficits for as far as the eye can see. You have a projected rise 
in the deficit to $556 billion by 2016. And when we talk about omitted 
costs, people might say, what do you mean by omitted costs? Like the 
fact that this budget does not include any spending on the war in Iraq 
and Afghanistan after next year.
  Now, I wish, oh, were that to be true, that we would now be in a 
position where Iraq would be, and the Iraqi people would be, able to 
sustain themselves without our assistance. Unfortunately, we have 
created a situation in which that continues to be impossible, and it is 
a virtual certainty that we are going to need to spend money after next 
year in Iraq and Afghanistan, despite the President's claims.
  When omitted costs are included, the President's budget does not cut 
the deficit in half by 2009 as he continues to claim that it will.

                              {time}  2230

  What continues to be mind-boggling is that we could fix this if you 
go back to the pay as you go rules of the 1990s, which is what turned 
the deficits into surpluses, tough votes that people took. Like you 
said, there were Members that lost their seats, but at the end of the 
day, it has to be more important to do the right thing than to continue 
to be here for each one of us, and that is something that we have to 
internalize. This is a good job. This is a job that we all really 
enjoy. I have not met a Member of Congress who does not like the job a 
lot, and that is why many of us, most of us, fight hard to keep it 
every election cycle. But at the end of the day, you have to be willing 
to look yourself in the mirror and say you did the right thing and be 
willing to walk out of this Chamber and know that you may not come back 
after you did the right thing.
  Unfortunately, we do not have enough people who serve in this body 
that are willing to do that. And unfortunately, it appears to be a 
little lopsided when it comes to the partisan breakdown of that 
willingness.
  This is literally the worst reversal, the worst fiscal reversal, in 
American history. We have never had the kind of turnaround from a 
record surplus to a record deficit like the one we have had. And the 
national debt, as you said, continues to skyrocket. They have had to 
raise the debt limit five times, but total combined it was $2.2 
trillion that the debt had to be raised since President Bush took 
office. I mean, it really is astonishing.

[[Page H216]]

  Mr. RYAN of Ohio. What is interesting about the $2.2 trillion is that 
is more money than this country borrowed from the inception of the 
country to the beginning of Ronald Reagan's Presidency. So just in the 
Bush administration alone we have had to raise it $2.2 trillion, which 
is more than whatever the math would be from Reagan back to George 
Washington. This Republican Congress is setting records here on this 
issue.
  Ms. WASSERMAN SCHULTZ. There is something else I want to bring up, if 
you do not mind. I think it is important to compare words and deeds. 
And we both sat in this Chamber during the State of the Union and 
listened to the President lay out his vision for America. I want to 
read out from one of the paragraphs from the State of the Union and 
compare it to a couple of weeks later when he introduced his budget.
  He said in the State of the Union that ``our economy is healthy and 
vigorous and growing faster than other major industrialized nations. In 
the last 2\1/2\ years America has created 4.6 million new jobs, more 
than Japan and the European Union combined. Even in the face of high 
energy prices and natural disasters, the American people have turned in 
an economic performance that is the envy of the world.''
  Now, during my time in the legislature, and I spent a little bit of 
time in leadership in the statehouse in Florida, one of the things that 
the party leadership generally engages in is choosing words carefully. 
You choose the words as carefully as you can so that what comes out 
actually reflects the reality on the ground. Now, I can see why the 
President would have chosen to say that our economy is growing faster 
than other major industrialized nations, because he probably could come 
as close to the accuracy as possible when it comes to the economy.
  But just take this AP story, again, a third-party validator that we 
like to use, just from January 27, which talked about the economy grows 
at slowest pace in 3 years. The economy grows by just a 1.1 percent 
pace in fourth quarter, slowest in 3 years. The annual rate in the 
fourth quarter of last year was 1.1 percent amid belt-tightening by 
consumers facing spiraling energy costs. The 1.1 percent growth rate in 
the fourth quarter marked a considerable loss of momentum from the 
third quarter's brisk 4.1 percent pace. The fourth quarter's 
performance was even weaker than many analysts were forecasting. Before 
the release of the report, they were predicting the GDP to clock in at 
a 2.8 percent pace. The weakness in the final quarter of last year 
reflected consumers pulling back, cuts in government spending, and 
businesses being more restrained in their capital spending.
  This is not a columnist that wrote this. This is an actual story that 
is reporting facts on the ground.
  I just feel resentful when I sit in this Chamber and I listen to the 
President respectfully, and I expect on behalf of my constituents to 
hear accurate statements, to hear a true reflection of the state of our 
Nation. And instead what I felt like we got was a lot of partisan 
rhetoric, a lot of rhetoric that was not matched up with action as I 
would have liked to have seen it reflected in the budget.
  He turned in a budget that actually gives us $36 billion in Medicare 
cuts. I mean, in a State like mine, I represent the State of Florida, 
as you know, that is going to significantly disproportionately impact a 
vulnerable senior citizen population when they are already reeling in 
the midst of this disastrous Medicare Part D prescription drug benefit 
that was handed to them by this Republican leadership.
  So it is just kind of one insult after another. When is it going to 
stop? When are we going to actually have some true commitment to back 
up the words?
  Mr. RYAN of Ohio. Absolutely.
  Just to continue to reinforce your point on the PAYGO, on the fiscal 
responsibility. We call it PAYGO. It means pay as you go, which means 
you have to have the money to pay for it. If you have a program, you 
either have to raise taxes or cut the money from somewhere else to pay 
for it. Cut the energy subsidy if you need $14 billion or whatever to 
pay for Medicaid; find a way to control spending with the prescription 
drug program that is $700 billion and not doing anything to control the 
costs by allowing reimportation or allowing the Secretary of Health and 
Human Services to negotiate down the drug prices for the Medicare 
program and take that money and pay for what you want to pay, whether 
it is some of the Medicaid cuts that came up, or whether it was some of 
the college PELL grants or students loan cuts that were made in this 
recent budget.
  But just to reinforce the PAYGO, the Democrats have supported PAYGO, 
period, and we have tried to get it reinstated time and time again. We 
will talk to our staff to make sure this gets up on our new Website. 
March 30, 2004, Representative Mike Thompson, a Democrat from 
California, tried to instruct the budget conferees to include pay as 
you go requirements in the 2006 budget resolution. The Republicans 
voted, almost in lockstep to a number, 209 to 209, which I think every 
Democrat voted for it, to block it and to reject the pay as you go 
requirements to be included to instruct the budget conferees, it is a 
lot of mumbo jumbo. But Democrats were for pay as you go; the 
Republicans blocked it. That was March 30, 2004.
  On May 5, 2004, Republicans voted by a vote of 208 to 215 to reject a 
motion by Representative Dennis Moore, a Democrat from Kansas. Again, 
we tried to get PAYGO established in the budget. Vote number 145. Then 
on November 18 of 2004, Republicans voted to block consideration of Mr. 
Stenholm's amendment from Texas to the debt limit increase. Last time 
they tried to get the debt increased, we wanted to say that if you are 
going to increase the debt, you better put the PAYGO requirements in. 
That was in 2004, and that was vote number 534. Three times Democrats 
have tried to institute fiscal discipline in this Chamber, and it has 
been rejected every time from the Republican majority.

  So, Mr. Speaker, if you hear a Republican come up here, although 
there is a handful that have been supportive, but the leadership on the 
Republican side has time and time again rejected our amendments, 
Democratic amendments, to try to put in place fiscal restraint on this 
runaway spending that is going on, mortgaging our children's future by 
borrowing the money from the Chinese Government in order to fund their 
huge and their runaway spending, and we are trying to fix this.
  We are just asking for an opportunity to implement some of these 
restraints that, as you stated earlier, were implemented in the '90s. I 
think George Herbert Walker Bush implemented them; Clinton; the 
Democratic Congress; the Republican Congress earlier that actually 
believed in fiscal discipline. This is a different outfit that we are 
dealing with now.
  Ms. WASSERMAN SCHULTZ. And it is not like there are not Members on 
both sides of the aisle who have not lived under this before. I am not 
sure if it is the majority, but there is a significant plurality of 
Members in this Chamber who served in their State legislatures. And you 
talk to any Governor, talk to anyone currently serving in the State 
legislature, that is what they live every day.
  Really, it is like you get to Congress, and you become a drunken 
sailor. You are suddenly freed from the restraints of fiscal 
conservatism. You do not have to think about operating in the black 
anymore. You can spend to your heart's content and not think about 
fiscal restraint and not think about how you are going to pay for it. 
It is essentially like, oh, I get to Congress, and I get this humongous 
Visa or Mastercard, and I get to do whatever I want with it. Well, that 
is not how it works for the American people on an everyday basis. If it 
does, they end up ultimately declaring bankruptcy.
  Do we want to continue to travel down that path in the United States 
of America and be in a position where we cannot pay our debt one day? I 
mean, I am raising little kids. That is literally the future that we 
are planning for right now for the next generation.
  Again, I want to draw some comparisons to words and deeds here, if 
you do not mind. The President again, as I said, talked about how our 
economy was healthy and vigorous. I do not know how you have a debt 
like this, bigger than any combined in the last 224 years, just in the 
last 4 years, and say that the economy is healthy and vigorous, but I 
guess we all use a different dictionary from time to time of health and 
vigor.

[[Page H217]]

  The President said that in the State of the Union, and let us just 
detail some facts related to the economy. President Bush, despite what 
he says about the 4.6 million new jobs that were created, still has the 
worst record on jobs since President Herbert Hoover. He added 108,000 
jobs in December. He has lost a total of 2.8 million manufacturing 
jobs, 2.8 million manufacturing jobs. At this point in the last 
recovery, the economy had created about 5 million more jobs than we 
have seen in this supposed recovery, and millions of Americans who want 
to work still do not have jobs.
  Now, last week I was sitting at home. I was on my couch watching CNN, 
and I saw the head of the Ford Motor Company announce plans to cut up 
to 30,000 jobs and close 14 plants. I was dumbfounded. I had just heard 
from the President not 10 days before that the state of our economy is 
healthy and vigorous, and he created 4.6 million jobs, and now Ford 
Motor Company is cutting 30,000. General Motors just announced plans to 
eliminate their set of 30,000 jobs. Adelphia, now in bankruptcy, is 
asking workers to accept a 55 percent pay cut. Verizon is phasing out 
its defined benefits and pension plans for about 50,000 management 
employees. We are not talking about management employees who are on the 
high end of the pay scale; management employees like middle management, 
regular people, people who are living close to if not paycheck to 
paycheck every single day. And IBM recently announced it would freeze 
pension benefits for its 117,000 U.S. workers.
  In 2005, U.S. employers announced more than a million job cuts, which 
marks the first time since 2001 that annual job cuts increased. Now, 
like I said, I understand that leaders often use the words that paint 
the rosiest picture or paint the picture that they would like to see or 
that they would like people to perceive. I think it is pretty clear 
that the jobs record, the health of our economy, the vigor of our 
economy, the debt we are saddling our children with, the deficit that 
continues to balloon compared to the surplus that we had just 3\1/2\ 
short years ago, there is no resemblance to the reality that President 
Bush has painted and the reality that our constituents are living every 
single day. None. It is wrong.
  Mr. RYAN of Ohio. And I just found out, too, today Wal-Mart is going 
to open another 1,500 stores. Now, Wal-Mart one way or the other. Now, 
that is not economic development. That is not economic growth, Wal-Mart 
jobs. Now, they may have a place in our society. You can argue it one 
way or another. That is not what we are talking about.

                              {time}  2245

  We are talking about this President saying that we are having real 
economic growth; and Wal-Mart is opening up 1,500 stores is not, to 
average Americans, actual economic growth.
  And as you stated with the budget and the deficits, let's just look 
at what this President has done. We saw the numbers here, that he has 
borrowed more than the previous 200 years. He has run up the four 
largest deficits in the history of the United States of America, an 
annual deficit of $378 billion in 2003, a deficit of $413 billion in 
2004, a deficit of $318 billion in 2005, and a projected deficit this 
year of $423 billion.
  We are going to be spending more than we are taking in, and we are 
borrowing the money from the Chinese Government. Now, we are putting 
ourselves in a very difficult position, not only because we are 
borrowing money and we have to pay interest on it, which is reckless as 
could be, but strategically trying to deal with the Chinese Government, 
how can you be firm in your foreign policy when the Chinese Government 
is your bank? You can't go to your banker and negotiate from a position 
of weakness. If you have a lot of money and then you want to borrow 
some, you are in a good position. But if you go and you owe and you owe 
and you owe the bank, eventually the bank has the knife at your throat 
and you have got to deal on their terms, not on your terms. If you 
really need the money, well, then, the rate is going to go up because, 
hey, you're a little risky here. It is a risky loan to make.
  My point is that although we may have good credit, the more we borrow 
from the Chinese Government, then the weaker our positioning is when we 
need to deal with the nuclear situation in North Korea or we need help 
in Iraq or we need to deal with the Russians or we need to work on the 
human rights violations that are going on in China, as they are totally 
suppressing freedom of speech and they are arresting journalists, with 
Google and a lot of our American companies helping them. There is 
religious persecution in China. No human rights, no labor rights, no 
environmental protections in China. They are just dumping things in the 
river, like we did 30 or 40 or 50 years ago.
  So all of this borrowing is putting us in a real weak position to 
negotiate on a lot of other fronts.
  So we are weakening ourselves at home and weakening our position 
abroad. And if we want to be helpful in the world, we have to be strong 
at home. A stronger America starts right here in the United States.
  Ms. WASSERMAN SCHULTZ. I am just looking at some of the facts and 
figures that our staff has put together for us, and sometimes I have 
difficulty thinking about the size and scope of what it means to have 
the largest deficit in American history and a debt that combined with 
the previous 224 years is greater than the debt from those years. It is 
easier to deal with that information in nuggets, so let us talk about 
debt and its impact on individuals for a moment.
  And since this is the 30-something Working Group and we often try to 
highlight the difficulty our generation is having or what our 
generation lives through, let us just go through some facts and figures 
comparatively for our generation through the years.
  Since 1992-93, the average college grad student loan debt has grown 
from $12,100 to $19,300 in 2003, just 10 years. Over 25 percent of 
college graduates in 2003 had a student loan debt higher than $25,000, 
which is a 7 percent increase from 10 years ago. In 2002, 14 percent of 
young adults reported that student loans caused them to delay marriage, 
which is up from 7 percent in 1991. One in five said their debt had 
caused them to delay having children, up from 12 percent in 1991. Forty 
percent reported they delayed buying a home because of their loans, 
compared with 25 percent in 1991. And 17 percent significantly changed 
careers because of their debt, about the same as 1991.

  The policy decisions that are made here, Mr. Ryan, the culture of 
corruption that translates into special interests and the wealthiest 
few being at the top of the heap here as opposed to the average working 
family or the average hardworking recent college graduate being put 
first or being considered at least on the same level has caused real 
strife, real difficulty.
  Imagine being in love, finding the person you want to spend the rest 
of your life with, knowing you want to have children, knowing that you 
could potentially buy that house that you would love to live in and 
have the dream of homeownership, essentially the American Dream, and 
you have so much debt that you are saddled with because your 
government, your Congress did not at least provide the ability for you 
to get a higher education because it was more important to provide tax 
cuts to the wealthiest few; more important to provide tax breaks for 
Big Oil and for pharmaceutical companies and ensure that they are first 
in line. That is real life. Those are the real-life decisions that real 
people, our people, have to make. It is just so wrong.
  I used to think about this in the legislature, too. You come up to 
Tallahassee in Florida, which is our capital, and Washington here, and 
we make policy in this body thousands of miles from our constituents, 
most of us, except those who live right around here. Sometimes I think 
that is really a significant cause of the insensitivity that clearly 
goes on in Washington. Because we are so disconnected from our 
constituents when we make policy.
  It is not like a city council people, who has to deal with the in-
your-face aspect of that type of governing. You know, if there is a 
dead dog on someone's driveway, that city council person knows about it 
and they will have to deal with that person in the supermarket or you 
are right up in their face in the dais. We cannot talk to the people 
that come here and are sitting

[[Page H218]]

in the gallery, and so we are insulated from making those decisions. 
And perhaps that is wrong. As a result, we make decisions where the 
people who can get access to us, the people who have the money to pay 
to get in front of us, they get to be first in line; and I think that 
really ruins lives for people.
  Mr. RYAN of Ohio. Absolutely. And when you talk about investment and 
the result of the ripple effect of investment in education, the 
shortsightedness in making these cuts that Republicans have made, 
increasing student loans, or a 50 percent increase in interest rates in 
college loans, where rates will increase from 4.1 percent to 6.8 
percent in dealing with the college loans, if you look at what 
countries like Ireland have done as part of a reform package which 
included some tax cuts, which we are for, but we have to do them in a 
targeted responsible way. But one of the things they did in Ireland was 
they made college education free. Everybody goes. There are no 
barriers.
  I think, why is it so complicated to figure out what the student loan 
process is like? Why can't we just have a form for student loans and it 
says how much you make, how much you get, and sign on the dotted line? 
This should be readily available. Because we know now that investing in 
a kid's education is the best investment we could possibly make in the 
return that we get. Because with a high school diploma you make $20,000 
a year, $25,000 a year. With a college diploma, you make $40,000. With 
a master's degree you make $60,000. You are paying back more in taxes. 
So let us make the initial investment and make sure these students get 
through college, make sure there are no barriers, and long term we will 
get money back.
  I have used this statistic before: the University of Akron did a 
study a few years back that said in Ohio for every dollar the State of 
Ohio invested in higher education, they got $2 back in tax money, for 
the very reason that people with college degrees make more money and, 
therefore, pay more in taxes back to the State. So it is a great 
investment to make.
  Right now, Ms. Wasserman Schultz, we are really being very 
shortsighted in what we are doing. Here is a chart that you can find on 
our Web page. The number, by the thousands of students that will 
graduate with engineering degrees this year. In an economy where we 
want to create jobs, you need engineers in order to create the kind of 
wealth that we need. In China, they will graduate 600,000 engineers. In 
India, they are going to graduate 350,000 engineers. In the United 
States, 70,000 engineers.
  Now, I recognize that there are some population differences here, but 
the United States needs to compete with these folks in these other 
countries. And if we don't focus on making sure we reduce the barriers 
to college education so that everyone gets involved, create incentives 
for our students to get involved in engineering and chemistry and 
computer programming and the new high-tech jobs that are going to drive 
the economy and create wealth and lead to addressing some of the issues 
that Mr. Bartlett was talking about with alternative energy sources, we 
are not going to be able to compete.

  You can't have a tier-one military if you don't have a tier-one 
economy. So these investments that we want to make in education lead to 
economic growth, which expands the economy, which means we are going to 
be able to keep our military a tier-one military and a leader in the 
world. And it puts us in a position of strength, because as we grow the 
economy, we can stop borrowing money from the Chinese Government in 
order to fund our deficits; and then we will be in a stronger fiscal 
position here at home and then better able to deal with the problems 
that we have abroad.
  We need to begin to do the kinds of things we are talking about, 
investing in education and at the same time not just throwing money at 
the problem but making sure that parents and teachers and principals 
and superintendents and local communities are held accountable. This 
isn't going to be we are just going to throw money at the problem like 
our Republican friends are doing. They want to curry favor with the 
senior citizens, they throw money at a $700 billion prescription drug 
program and they do not do anything to contain the costs. They do not 
allow reimportation from Canada to drop the price down, and they do not 
allow the Secretary of Health and Human Services to negotiate down the 
drug prices. You can't just throw money at the problem like our 
Republican friends want to do without having any accountability.
  So the Democrats are looking for opportunities and have ideas to make 
sure we fund these programs. We do it in a responsible way, knowing 
that in the end the long-term growth is going to lead to budget 
surpluses like it did in the 1990s.
  Ms. WASSERMAN SCHULTZ. I want to jump off from what you are saying in 
terms of America lagging behind global education standards with more 
emblematic examples of the difference between their rhetoric and their 
deeds.
  The President, again in the State of the Union, talked about our one 
commitment being necessary above all in that we must continue to lead 
the world in human talent and creativity. Our greatest advantage in the 
world, he says, has always been our educated, hardworking, ambitious 
people and we are going to keep that edge. That evening he announced 
what he calls the American Competitiveness Initiative to encourage 
innovation throughout our economy and to give our Nation's children a 
firm grounding in math and science. He proposed doubling the Federal 
commitment to the most critical basic research programs and the 
physical sciences over the next 10 years and a number of other really 
lofty goals.
  Let us match the rhetoric with the reality. Republicans have 
consistently, consistently failed to even come close to matching the 
rhetoric that the President laid out in the State of the Union in their 
deeds and actions in terms of making those words reality. Last year, 
Republicans provided less than one-third of the promised investment in 
the Math and Science Partnerships program, which is designed to 
increase student academic achievement in grades K through 12 in math 
and science. They have shortchanged the Tech Talent Act, which 
strengthens postsecondary education to increase the number of degrees 
in math, science, and engineering, by nearly 33 percent.
  This comes at a time when only 36 percent of fourth graders and 30 
percent of eighth graders tested proficient in math, but our twelfth 
graders scored at or near the bottom of math and science compared to 
other countries.

                              {time}  2300

  We could listen to the President say it until he is blue in the face, 
but until the Republican leadership here and the Members of Congress 
match what the President is saying with their votes, until he proposes 
a budget that actually reflects what his words said in the State of the 
Union, why should people believe them? They should not. They should not 
believe them because this is another example of how a pervasive culture 
of corruption and cronyism permeates itself all the way through the 
process and results in the reality on the ground in a budget that does 
the exact opposite in terms of producing the competitive talent that 
the President talked about in the State of the Union, because that 
cannot happen if you are slashing and burning the programs that 
accomplish that.
  The American people are not stupid. They understand the difference 
between saying it and doing it. When I have traveled across the 
country, I hear from people that want to believe the things that their 
politicians tell them. They want to believe in us, and their confidence 
in this body, in Congress, in the government is so badly shaken by 
everything that has gone on through the culture of corruption that has 
gone on here. It has shaken the confidence that people have in this 
institution to its foundation. We have to do something about it. We 
have an opportunity to do something about it later this year. I hope 
that in my second term that I hope to serve in this Congress that 
things will change.
  Mr. RYAN of Ohio. If you look at what the Democrats are offering, 
they say the Democrats do not have any ideas. That may sound good, but 
we are the party of ideas. We are beginning to communicate them, I 
think, in a way that is effective. If you look at Ms. Pelosi's 
innovation agenda that we came up with in our caucus by meeting with 
high-tech companies and asking

[[Page H219]]

them what they want, if you look at our competitiveness agenda that we 
have, investments in research and development, R&D funding has stayed 
flat under the President's watch, and it is way below what it was 20 
years ago. If we are going to be competitive, we have to make some 
investments in research and development. We are blowing money by giving 
subsidies to the energy companies when we should invest it in basic 
research.
  I was in Israel in November. They are doing some fantastic things 
with venture capital and business incubators and research and 
development, and the Israeli companies have just surpassed Canada on 
the NASDAQ, and I asked one of the top dogs over there, what do we need 
to do in America to try to imitate what you are doing here?
  He said the biggest mistake you are making in the United States is 
not making investment in research and development, because of the 
tremendous impact that has leading to new innovations. So cutting this 
funding, flat-lining the research and development funding is the wrong 
thing to do, where the Democrats are saying we need to make targeted 
investments into research and development, targeted investments in 
education, targeted investments into broadband penetration. Everybody 
in the country should have access to broadband in the next 5 years.
  The President wants to do alternative energy, and he says we are 
going to become energy competitive, and this is typical of the kind of 
leadership we are getting from this President. We are going to make 
this country energy-independent by 75 percent in the next 20 years.
  It is like, come on, Mr. President, let us go. We want to get things 
rolling in the country. We want to get things moving. We need your 
help, we need your leadership, and the country is dying for an 
alternative energy program; not to say we are going to be 75 percent in 
2025. That is not the kind of leadership we need.
  Democrats have a plan to do it in 10 years. This is the broadband 
penetration I was talking about that is going on. These are broadband 
subscribers per 100 inhabitants as of January 1 of last year. This is 
Korea, almost 25 percent; Hong Kong-China, almost 21 percent; Iceland, 
15.5 percent; U.S., only 11 percent.
  If we want every child to have an access to education, we need to 
make sure that they are not getting left behind technologically, which 
is what happens in many of these neighborhoods and many of these rural 
areas. Kids and families who do not have access to these kinds of 
things.
  Ms. WASSERMAN SCHULTZ. Again, I want to highlight where words did not 
match deeds. The candidate President George W. Bush said before the 
election that we would have ``universal, affordable access to broadband 
technology by the year 2007.'' Well, the Bush administration has had no 
national policy to develop a universal broadband access even though 
building a robust, nationwide network would expand employment by 1.2 
million new permanent jobs in our country.
  This is the House Democrats' innovation agenda, which is available on 
HouseDemocrats.gov. We have a plan laid out how, which includes how we 
would get to universal broadband access within 5 years, and that we 
would make sure that we grow the math and science and engineers that we 
need in this country and make sure that we can match our rhetoric with 
action.

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