[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.
____________________