[Congressional Record Volume 153, Number 174 (Friday, November 9, 2007)]
[House]
[Pages H13514-H13520]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]


                              IMMIGRATION

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of 
January 18, 2007, the gentleman from Iowa (Mr. King) is recognized for 
60 minutes as the designee of the minority leader.
  Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, again I thank you for recognizing me 
to address you here on the floor of the United States House of 
Representatives; that never is an event for me that goes without 
profound appreciation for the privilege to stand here in this place 
that so many have stood in and engaged in this great deliberative body 
that we have.
  I appreciate this opportunity that we have with technology that's 
available today to address you at the close of business, in fact, at 
the close of the week, and to be confident that the messages that flow 
forth from the floor of this Chamber echo not just in your ears, Mr. 
Speaker, but across this country.
  And I would submit that, in this Nation that we have today, we have a 
greater opportunity to have a more representative form of our 
constitutional Republic than we had, perhaps, when the Founders 
established this country and drafted our declaration and used that 
foundation to draft our Constitution. At that time, the communications 
were limited to word of mouth and letters and newspapers that couldn't 
be produced at anywhere near the rate that we can produce 
communications today.
  Today, we are real-time communications globally. And when we speak in 
this Chamber or do a press conference and talk to a radio or television 
station, or when any of the leaders do across the country, that echoes 
sometimes around the world. If the President holds a press conference, 
it echoes around the world.
  And here we have that opportunity to speak to and address the issues 
of our day in a fashion that we can be confident that the American 
people, those that are interested in the subject matter that we raise, 
are having this conversation amongst themselves as well. And it takes 
place with cell phones and e-mail and Web pages and telephone calls and 
across the coffee table and at work and at school and at play and at 
ball games and at church, the aspects of our lives where we interchange 
with our ideas.
  And we need to remember, as Members of Congress, that we come here to 
stand for and stand up for and represent the principles that have made 
this a great Nation, and that our debate needs to be a debate always 
with the idea in mind of what's the best policy for the United States 
of America, not necessarily what's the best politics for any individual 
Member of this Congress. And we have great appreciation and respect for 
this national conversation that takes place.
  I would point out, Mr. Speaker, that the best example that I can 
think of in my time here in this Congress has been the national 
conversation that we've had on immigration. And of course we've had our 
debates that have gone on here for some years, and they have gotten 
very intense here on the floor of the House of Representatives, but the 
pivotal moment actually came over in the Senate several times this 
year, but late May is the one that stands out in my mind.
  And as the discussion took place, the Wall Street Journal would write 
one thing and the New York Times would sometimes mirror that, and the 
Washington Times would have a different opinion and the National Review 
would have a different opinion. And as these opinions were merging, 
Americans were reading those articles. They were listening to the news 
stories on CNN, Fox News and the other major networks. And as these 
subjects came up and this discussion of what we're going to do, as 
Congressman Poe spoke about the need to secure our border and enforce 
our immigration laws, that debate was taking place on our airwaves, on 
talk radio, in the print media, on television. It was taking place here 
on the floor of the House of Representatives, and it was taking place 
in those workplaces and all the way across the spectrum of American 
life.
  And what we were having was a national conversation, a national 
conversation that often turned into an intense debate and sometimes a 
shouting match from one American to another. But as that went on, we 
tested our ideas. And as we raised up issues that we said were facts, 
and those facts were raised up with an opportunity for those who 
disagreed to challenge those facts, maybe present their own, Americans 
came to a consensus conclusion. And when it came to the consensus 
conclusion, that was when the crucible of the comprehensive immigration 
bill was before the United States Senate.

                              {time}  1430

  As it came before the United States Senate, the American people, 
having had a national conversation throughout all that media that I 
talked about, person-to-person, face-to-face decided we do not want an 
amnesty plan. We don't want a comprehensive immigration plan. I call it 
often a comprehensive amnesty plan. We want to make sure that we defend 
the rule of law, and whatever we do with legal immigration needs to be 
predicated upon the requirement that we establish the rule of law and 
that those who might be beneficiaries of a change in immigration law 
would be those people who have not violated our laws.
  That was the principle that caused the American people to weigh in, 
that was the principle that shut down the switchboards in the United 
States Senate, that is the principle that has gotten their attention 
over there a couple of times since then, and it is this national 
conversation where we are able

[[Page H13515]]

to reach out and listen to and understand and benefit from the wisdom 
of the American people.
  Our judgment is endorsed by the virtue that we have been elected to 
represent our constituents. But we need to use our most sound judgment. 
We also need to listen to our constituents and listen to this national 
conversation and make a decision on what is good for this country, the 
State that we are from and the district that we represent, and most 
likely we are better off if we go through it in that order.
  Well, that issue, Mr. Speaker, has several times come to a conclusion 
in the Senate and they haven't had the votes to move that comprehensive 
immigration reform plan that I called comprehensive amnesty. I bring 
that up to illustrate how a national conversation brings us to a 
consensus. Sometimes we haven't reached a consensus here on this floor, 
and that is when you will see the divisive votes, the contested votes, 
and sometimes we do reach a consensus, and that is when the board is 
all green up here behind us, or almost all green when there are a few 
dissenters. That is generally the policy that is the best policy to 
follow. Meanwhile, some of us will stand on principle; some of us will 
be unwilling to move because we have taken our stand.
  Well, I am watching also a dynamic here in America, Mr. Speaker, and 
this dynamic is such that the division of the American people looks to 
me like occasionally it's brought out because of legislation that is 
introduced and brought to the floor of this House. Now, when a baby is 
born anywhere in the world, they have kind of an equal chance of coming 
up on one side or the other of this philosophy, when they ask the 
question, Is your glass half full or is your glass half empty? In some 
places, teenagers start to answer that question for themselves. If they 
believe their glass is half empty, chances are they are going to look 
over at someone else whose glass has more in it and point to them and 
say, But if they hadn't gone ahead to fill their glass, mine would have 
filled automatically.
  That is the class-envy side, that is the ``poor me'' side, that is 
the side that thinks that this economy and the privileges and the 
rights of being an American citizen are a zero sum game and that 
somehow there are only so many benefits to spread around so you always 
have to take from those that ``have'' and give it to the ``have-nots.'' 
It's kind of the Robin Hood theory of how they approach the tax policy 
or the benefits policy.
  Well, Mr. Speaker, I would submit that here on the floor of the House 
today we had one of those issues. This issue was the tax relief, the 
alternative minimum tax patch, this patch that was brought by Chairman 
Rangel. The oddest thing, the oddest thing that I have seen is that, 
first of all, the alternative minimum tax is the tax that was brought 
in decades ago to make sure that those who were the wealthiest among us 
paid a little more than their fair share; and because it was an index 
for inflation, more and more people earned a little more and picked up 
through the inflation factor a higher income and found that they had 
crept into the alternative minimum tax bracket. Common, ordinary, 
middle-income, slightly upper-middle-income Americans ending up paying 
the alternative minimum tax.
  The irony is that we have an SCHIP bill out here someplace waiting to 
come back and land again here on the floor of the House, the State 
Children's Health Insurance Program. That is the program that taxes 
American taxpayers to subsidize health insurance benefits for mostly 
children, but not exclusively children, in America, and the policy that 
was passed off the floor of the House of Representatives advanced by 
Speaker Pelosi and most, if not all, Democrats was that 400 percent of 
poverty that we would subsidize out of the taxpayers' dollars, up to 
400 percent of poverty the health insurance premiums for children in 
this country, most of whom had health insurance and all of whom had 
access to health care.
  Well, the irony of that 400 percent of poverty piece was that there 
were 70,000 families in America that would be receiving the SCHIP 
benefit because they didn't have enough money presumably to pay the 
health insurance premiums for their children, but they had 70,000 
families that were so wealthy that they would pay the alternative 
minimum tax.
  I find it utterly ironic that here on this floor, within the same 
month, within the short compressed period of time, that might be days, 
certainly won't be longer than weeks, which is that to subsidize health 
insurance premiums for families making 400 percent of poverty, which, 
in my district would be, even at 300 percent of poverty, at $77,625, or 
very close to that. At least it's over $77,000. At 400 percent of 
poverty, it's over $103,000. We would subsidize health insurance 
premiums for those kids whose parents have plenty of money to pay the 
premium in order to crowd them off the private insurance roles and put 
them onto a government-funded taxpayer roll; and at the same time we 
would do that, 70,000 families would be the families that would also 
have to pay the alternative minimum tax.
  If you want to look at the spectrum across which you have to go to 
close the gap on socialism, one can argue we are only helping the poor 
amongst us. So it's not socialism until everybody fits into the same 
category and we provide socialized medicine, socialized health care. 
Look at some of this things that have happened in Great Britain, 
nationalized utilities, for example. Those kind of things that would 
make Karl Marx happy, if you start from the poor and work your way up 
to the rich. I would argue that those that were paying the alternative 
minimum tax would, by definition, not be the poor among us. That is the 
reason for the alternative minimum tax, to tax the more wealthy among 
us.
  But if they didn't have enough money to pay for the health insurance 
premiums for their children, is it because the alternative minimum tax 
took too big a bite out of their paycheck? Presumably so.
  So we have to subsidize the health insurance premiums of those 
families that are paying the alternative minimum tax, the tax on the 
rich, because by the time we get done taxing them, they don't have 
enough money to buy the health insurance for their kids. That closes 
the gap on socialism, Mr. Speaker. I don't know that there is an 
argument left that this Congress hasn't advanced this to the point 
where there's a majority of votes in this Congress that would take us 
all the way, all the way to please the Marxist philosophy of 
``from each according to his ability, to each according to his need.''

  Let me quote one who was not known as a conservative, but a President 
from Georgia, Jimmy Carter, who said, ``I believe that people that work 
should live better than those that don't.'' It's interesting that a 
person of my persuasion would remember Jimmy Carter saying something 
like that. I remember it because he was in Iowa campaigning for the 
Presidency a generation ago, and I believed him. I don't know what he 
has done to demonstrate his belief in that statement. But, Mr. Speaker, 
I want to state in the Record I believe that those that work should 
live better than those that don't. If we take from those that work and 
give to those who don't, we need to take care of those people that 
can't help themselves, we need to take care of them to a minimum 
standard; but we don't need to raise them up to a level to those that 
work the hardest or most productive, not because it isn't a nice, fine 
and shining ideal that makes us feel good and makes me feel all warm 
and fuzzy inside, but because we destroy the motivation of the most 
productive people among us.
  The key to America's success has been that you could pull yourself up 
by your bootstraps; that you could grow up in a poor family and have 
access to a good education, whether it's public or private, a good 
education, and in this country, if you want to go to college and have 
the ability, you can go to college and you can ply your trade and you 
can go from the soup line, all the way up to be a CEO on a Fortune 500 
company. If you don't like that path, you can start your own business, 
be an entrepreneur and create your own Fortune 500 company. You can go 
from sweeping the floor to owning the floor. That is America.
  But if we take away the incentive, if we reward the people who don't 
produce equivalent to those who do produce extraordinarily, then we 
have killed the goose that lays the golden

[[Page H13516]]

egg, we have destroyed the motivation, and the people that would be 
superachievers will either stop being superachievers and sit back and 
go golfing or fishing the rest of their lives, or they will go to a 
country that does reward their kind of excellence and their kind of 
performance.
  So I believe, Mr. Speaker, that we need to always preserve a climate 
that is good for entrepreneurs, always preserve a climate that is low 
in taxation, low in regulation, that has faith in the good of humanity 
and recognizes that Americans are the most giving people in the world, 
that we donate a greater share of our income and we contribute a 
greater share in however you want to measure it, by percentage or by 
dollars, to other countries in foreign aid. We send more missionaries 
throughout the world and we follow them with our dollars and support 
them with our dollars because we care about humanity and we want to 
export our values to those corners of the world so they can have the 
opportunity to excel and live the kind of life that we have had the 
privilege to live here.
  But to destroy this, to pass a piece of legislation in the 
alternative minimum tax, it does another thing that is unique, Mr. 
Speaker. What it does is it pays for a tax cut with a tax increase. 
That is something new and unique to the debate and the dialog here on 
the floor. I have the data here that shows that there are $82.5 billion 
in permanent tax increases that are incorporated into this alternative 
minimum tax, AMT, patch, and temporary relief turns into $82.5 billion 
in new tax increases, Mr. Speaker. It has a marriage penalty that is 
included in it as well.
  This bill that passed off of this floor today is inconsistent with 
American values and undermines American values. It rewards people with 
the wrong incentives and it misses the opportunity for the right 
incentive. In fact, we should repeal the alternative minimum tax. We 
should do so on the spot, without regard to recovering any of that 
revenue because it's not revenue that was calculated to be part of our 
revenue stream today. It's an additional tax, a tax recalculated on a 
tax.
  I have gone through that. I have gone through that process of getting 
that surprise years ago when I was actually a struggling business, 
trying to make a go of it; and because my income jumped from a meager 
existence in a couple of years to a pretty reasonable existence the 
following year, I got hit with the alternative minimum tax and that is 
when it was brought to my attention, and it was clear out of the 
intention of this Congress to do that on the alternative minimum tax.
  We need to get rid of the AMT, we don't need to just patch it, and we 
surely don't need to put a permanent tax increase of $82.5 billion on 
the books and then say somehow that we are solving the problem. When 
you pay for a temporary tax cut with a permanent tax increase, that is 
not a tax cut, that is a stealth tax increase. I said it out loud. It's 
no longer stealth.
  That is something that divides Americans. Why are we pitting 
Americans against Americans here in this Congress, Mr. Speaker? 
Shouldn't we be about unifying Americans, shouldn't we be about pulling 
ourselves together, finding ways that we can reach an agreement and 
setting up a policy and tax in particular that rewards people that 
work, gives them an opportunity? The philosophy that flows from the 
Speaker's gavel on down on the other side of the aisle, Mr. Speaker, is 
a philosophy of class envy, meanwhile, all the while, while the deep-
pocket people that fund it are elitists.
  So as I watch this unfold, it's an effort I think that divides us and 
doesn't unite us. I want a tax policy that pulls us together. You can 
listen to some of the philosophers in the early years of America's 
existence, and Alexander Tyler comes to mind. Some of the quotes that 
have been attributed to de Toqueville come to mind. But the idea that 
when Americans figure out that they can vote themselves benefits from 
the public Treasury, on that day our constitutional Republic ceases to 
exist.
  You see reports that will show, this is some years ago, I haven't had 
it refreshed in the last few years, only 44 percent of Americans pay 
taxes and the rest may or may not file a tax return but aren't actually 
paying taxes. The number that I have in my memory is 44 percent of 
Americans don't pay taxes. That is some years ago. As that number 
grows, and it's surely larger today than it was then when I first read 
that quote, as that number grows and gets to that point, the tipping 
point across the other side of that great divide of 50 percent is when 
a majority of Americans realize I am not paying these taxes; why do I 
care about my taxes, I am on the benefit side.

                              {time}  1445

  Now, if 51 percent of Americans are on the benefit side and they're 
collecting more in taxes than they're paying, then it's to their 
interest to lobby and pressure and leverage their Member of Congress to 
increase the benefits out of the pockets of somebody else. That's the 
transfer payment.
  And so we get down to this point where this constitutional republic 
gets closer to being a pure democracy. And a pure democracy is best 
described as, you will remember the Greek city-states where all 
eligible males of age could go and vote and that was their definition, 
and each vote counted the same, so that was as close as we've seen in 
history to a pure democracy.
  But a democracy by definition, Mr. Speaker, and I'll give this 
definition, is the equivalent of two wolves and a sheep taking a vote 
on what's for dinner. You know what's going to happen. The sheep is 
going to be for dinner. So just having the majority doesn't make it 
right. That's why we have the Bill of Rights. That's why we have 
protections for people that are guaranteed in the Constitution, because 
if it were a pure democracy, it would have been easy to set up a pure 
democracy. The Founders saw that. They studied the Greek city-states. I 
recall going to the National Archives and walking through a display 
where they had the pottery from the Greek era, from, say, 2,500, 3,000 
years ago, and how they actually would banish a demagogue from the 
Greek city-state because he was so effective in selling the things that 
he believed in that the people got all swept up in the demagoguery--
that's where the term comes from--and they would vote something that 
was perhaps irrational but they believed that they were in the momentum 
and they would cast the votes and the city-state would go the wrong 
direction. When they recognized what the demagogue had done to sell 
them the bad package, then they had the black ball system, whereby each 
one who could vote in the city-state could walk by with a white marble 
and a black marble, one piece of pottery, one vessel, was to vote in 
and the other one was to discard. And if a demagogue, one that was 
labeled to be a demagogue received three of those black balls, then he 
was banished from the Greek city-state for 7 years. They did that to 
protect themselves from those skilled orators that could move the 
populace. When they saw that, that's the thumbnail sketch of the 
studies of the Greek city-states in the pure democracy, our Founders 
concluded they wanted a constitutional republic, not a democracy. 
That's why we have this constitutional representative republic today.
  But in order to get the republic established in the Constitution, 
they had to write in the protection of the rights, the Bill of Rights. 
Those rights are there to be constitutionally protected, because the 
Founders knew that two wolves and a sheep taking a vote on what's for 
dinner wasn't going to yield a nation that could subsist very long. 
Well, if our constitutional republic, our representative form of 
government, has now devolved down to the point where it is more a 
democracy and it is less a constitutional republic and if Members of 
this Congress don't see their job as a duty to stand up for those 
principles and those rights and have a long-term vision on what's good 
for America, but if they simply vote their constituents and come what 
may with any kind of long-term plan or based upon any principles, or if 
they can come here to the floor and vote for something that they know 
to be unconstitutional because that's what their constituents want, Mr. 
Speaker, I will submit this republic will not very long last.
  As I see what's happening with the alternative minimum tax and we are 
taking from those that produce to spread those dollars across others 
who are, I think, pretty well taken care of at the time, we've taken 
away the incentive to produce and we've reduced this down into a pile 
of spoils in the

[[Page H13517]]

middle, the general fund, that's being squabbled over by an ever 
divergent group of minority classes that are lining themselves up to 
demand more from the taxpayers of America.
  It has only been just a little over 40 years since John F. Kennedy 
said, ask not what your country can do for you but ask what you can do 
for your country and here we are squabbling over how we're going to run 
a tax increase for $82.5 billion, permanent, in order to say we did 
something about the alternative minimum tax right within this same 
period of time that we're dealing with an SCHIP program and having 
passed off of this a 400 percent of poverty benefit, negotiated it down 
thankfully out of the Senate to 300 percent of poverty, that's still 
way too much, that is irresponsible and again pits Americans against 
Americans and the depth of the debate that the other side can go on 
SCHIP is, it's for the kids.
  Well, that's nice that it is for the kids. We're all for the kids. So 
what's your other point? I'd like to hear it. Is it more than for the 
kids? Yes, it's for the politics, Mr. Speaker, as well as the kids. And 
those who believe that they should lay the cornerstone of socialized 
medicine and see to it that children in America are all covered by the 
taxpayer's dollar rather than the responsibility of the parents and 
with the help of, in most cases, their employers.
  If this becomes a responsibility and entitlement for the taxpayers to 
fund health insurance for kids, then pretty soon there's no distinction 
between a health insurance subsidy out of the taxpayers and just simply 
funding the health care for children. The distinction blurs and at some 
point there's no distinction, then, between Medicaid, which provides 
for those kids in poor families and adults, and providing health care 
for all kids in America. If you pay their insurance premium, you're 
paying their health care.
  This majority on the Speaker Pelosi side of the aisle wants to pay 
for almost all, if not all, of the health insurance premiums for the 
kids in America. And if you do that, you know that there will not be 
private health insurance any longer in this country, and you know that 
eventually there will not be, either, insurance plans. It will just 
simply be government-funded health care for all kids in America.
  Bill Clinton knew that. He knew that when he stood on this floor on 
September 22, 1993, and addressed a joint session of Congress and laid 
out his strategy and health care plan. And if you'll remember from that 
address that he gave to the Nation--it was essentially unprecedented, a 
joint session of Congress to speak about health care--from that address 
to the Nation, he convened the Hillary Hearings and those meetings, 
some of them in public, some of them in private. And that was another 
case, Mr. Speaker, where the American people started to pay attention. 
They didn't get to see everything that went on. A lot of it was behind 
closed doors and a lot of the staff work that went on was certainly 
behind closed doors. We still can't get that information. It's still 
locked up in the Archives and we're still waiting for President Clinton 
to issue a letter request to release that information so we can 
evaluate what went on behind the scenes.
  But the American people knew this. They did not want socialized 
health care in America. They understood what happened in places like 
Great Britain and Canada and they want to have a private system that 
will allow individuals to make some of their own and they should be 
able to make all of their own health care decisions. And so the 
American people rose up even then and rejected the plan that came out 
that has become known as Hillary-care. That's another example of a 
national conversation, Mr. Speaker, that went on at that time not with 
the benefit of very much e-mail, not with the benefit of the Internet 
in an effective way but with the benefit of television and radio and 
print media and telephones and conversations that were going on at 
church, at play, at work and across this country. The American people 
came to a consensus and said, we don't want Hillary-care, rejected it, 
and so preserved a measure of the private care that we have today. 
Another example of how a national conversation comes together.
  We are engaged in this right now, Mr. Speaker. The alternative 
minimum tax is not a fix, all in the same environment as the SCHIP 
debate which is designed to lay the cornerstone of socialized medicine, 
bring people over to the dependency side of this and whenever we make 
people more dependent, they become less self-reliant by definition and 
when that happens, we lose the vitality of the American people. We need 
to understand why we have this vitality. The vitality of the American 
people comes from a number of things. I call them the pillars of 
American exceptionalism. Some of this vitality is because we have an 
excellent educational system in this country. Perhaps I'll return to 
that a little bit later, Mr. Speaker.
  But I would point out, also, that we have a culture here, a culture 
where we raise our children to study hard, to work hard, to save, to 
invest, to be creative, to be risk takers, to be entrepreneurs. All of 
that fits within the umbrella definition of working to achieve the 
American Dream. Each of us has a different definition of what that 
American Dream means to us. My sons have a different view than I had. I 
have a different view than my father had. But that's something in our 
culture that we raise our children to. And I will define this American 
Dream this way: to leave this country and this world a better place 
than when you found it. To always build, build, build, work to improve, 
grow this economy, improve the infrastructure, build the systems here 
that give our children more opportunity than we had. And every 
generation of Americans have had that opportunity that's been greater 
than the opportunity that their parents had, which was better than the 
opportunity that their grandparents had and so on back to the 
beginnings of the Founders. That's the American Dream, to create and 
build a country that's better than it was.
  So this vitality that we have, it's tied into our Judeo-Christian 
values, it's tied to western civilization, it's tied to free enterprise 
capitalism and property rights, not just the property rights to own 
your house but the right to invent a widget or a gadget and take it to 
the patent office and get it patented, to protect your copyrights, to 
protect your trademarks and those things. Solid currency, property 
rights, constitutional rights, a tradition of free enterprise 
capitalism, all of that ties together to make this the best place in 
the world to do business and the best place in the world to raise your 
children. And when we pass policies that diminish that, that would 
punish people for producing and then reward people for not producing, 
yes, it's good to take care of the kids but those kids don't need that 
help when their parents are making $103,000 a year. And they probably 
don't need that help if their parents are making $77,000 a year. And 
they may be doing just fine if their parents are making $51,625 a year. 
They're not coming to me saying, I can't make it on only $51,000 a 
year.
  But we would push them off their private health insurance, we would 
crowd them out and we would say to their parents, Don't work so hard 
because we're going to tax you if you produce too much.
  So I submit, Mr. Speaker, we need to get to a tax policy that 
recognizes the merits and the uniqueness of American exceptionalism, a 
tax policy that recognizes that when 51 percent of Americans are no 
longer paying taxes but they're voting for the people that will give 
them benefits out of the public Treasury, maybe on that day our 
constitutional republic will cease to exist.
  But maybe we've passed that point now and maybe there's a way to get 
back. So I'll submit here's a way to get back. Let's pass the FairTax. 
Let's take a look and understand this. Ronald Reagan once said that 
what you tax, you get less of. He also said what you subsidize you get 
more of. So if we subsidize dependency, we're going to have more 
dependency. But if we tax production, we're going to have less 
production.
  And this might be a revelation to some people on the other side of 
the aisle, Mr. Speaker, but the Federal Government has the first lien 
on all productivity in America. If you walk into your factory and punch 
the clock at 8 o'clock next Monday morning, as soon as you punch that 
time card in there, Uncle Sam's hand goes out and he's standing there 
waiting to get his

[[Page H13518]]

due. He taxes your work, your labor, your productivity from the first 
second of the first day of the week and he will tax it until such time 
as he gets his due. Then he puts it in his pocket and you can go off 
and go to work for the State, then for the county, then perhaps for the 
city, and some time pretty late in the week you get to make a little 
bit of money to feed your kids.
  The first lien on all productivity in America is Uncle Sam, hand out, 
you punch the time card. Maybe you put that savings that you have 
that's left out of what he doesn't tax and you put that in a bank 
account or invest it maybe in the stock market, maybe in a mutual fund. 
Well, there's the interest. There's the dividends. Guess what. Uncle 
Sam's hand is out for that, too. Maybe you invest in a business. You 
decide you're going to manufacture automobiles or widgets or computers, 
or sometimes we say in my part of the district, layovers to catch 
muddlers. If you do that, Uncle Sam is there to tax the profit on it 
and he'll tax the labor that goes into it.
  We have a real misunderstanding here when we decide we're going to 
tax corporations or businesses that provide goods and services, because 
something that we know, Mr. Speaker, is that business, and particularly 
corporations--let me put those both together without drawing a 
distinction between them--businesses and corporations do not pay taxes. 
They have to pass those taxes along to people. Consumers pay taxes.
  But the government has a first lien on all productivity. So we tax 
that productivity, whether it is capital gains, if you buy a farm for 
$1,000 an acre and sell it for $2,000 an acre, Uncle Sam wants to tax 
that thousand dollars profit. And if you sell some stock shares and you 
paid $5,000 and they had a good earnings and you collect $10,000 for 
them, Uncle Sam wants to tax the difference, the $5,000 in profit.

                              {time}  1500

  And he wants to tax your passbook savings account, and does. And he 
has a first lien on your Social Security income, on your pension 
income, earnings, savings, investment dividends, capital gains. He 
taxes everything that is indexed to productivity in America. A first 
lien on all productivity in America. And why?
  Don't we understand here in this Congress that what you tax you get 
less of. Why wouldn't we consider the idea of taking the tax off of all 
productivity in America and put it on consumption? I won't say that we 
have too much consumption, because that keeps the economic wheels 
turning; but we have too little savings and investment. If we tax 
consumption, we will get more savings and more investment and we will 
have more capital and we will be better positioned to take care of our 
own retirement and our own health care through our working years and 
perhaps on through retirement.
  If we do this idea of totally reforming our Tax Code and shifting it 
over to a fair tax, a national sales tax, a consumption tax on all 
goods and services in America, why would we not do that? That would be 
the fairest way. I am reluctant to use the word ``fair'' because 
anybody who has raised two or more children knows there is no such 
thing as ``fair.'' You will begin to understand that fairness is in the 
perception of the one who utters the word.
  Going to the fair tax, the national sales tax, H.R. 25 does this: it 
untaxes the poor and it makes everybody in America a taxpayer at the 
same time. It preserves our constitutional Republic because every 
little kid growing up in America, when they buy their baseball cards or 
Barbie Doll clothes, they will have to put a couple of dimes up for 
Uncle Sam.
  If you wonder how this works within the mind-set of young people, I 
will tell you a story of a young little man, Michael Dicks. And he can 
be very proud of his father. He was 8 years old when I heard this story 
so I suspect he is 9 or 10 right now.
  He had saved money to buy some Skittles. He went into the store with 
his money, 89 cents. That was the price. He got the candy Skittles off 
the shelf and put them on the counter. And the lady rang it up and 
said, 96 cents.
  He said 96 cents? But I only have 89 cents. They are 89 cents. It 
says on the box.
  Yes, but you have to pay the tax, so that is 96 cents.
  The tax? And he turned to his father and said, Dad, I have to pay tax 
on Skittles?
  Mr. Speaker, yes, this young man, Michael Dicks, learned he had to 
pay tax on Skittles because that is the sales tax in Iowa because we do 
tax candy and not other types of food. So he understood it costs money 
to fund the government. The 7 cents that got added on was a 7-cent 
lesson that rang up in the mind of Michael Dicks who now knows you have 
to fund the government. He learned at the age of 8. He will probably 
remember for a lifetime.
  I don't know the balance of the story, but the next time he reaches 
in his pocket to buy something, he will know he has to pay the tax. 
That factors into his transaction on whether he will spend the money.
  I will submit, Mr. Speaker, if every little kid growing up in America 
has to reach into their pocket for a couple of dimes for Uncle Sam, if 
they have to dig the 7 cents out for the tax, if they turn to their 
father and say, Dad, I have to pay tax on Skittles, these young men and 
women will grow up understanding that government is expensive and they 
will put less demands on government, and they will put less demands on 
their Members of Congress, less demand on their Governors and State 
Representatives and State Senators and less demand on their county and 
city governments, and they will be more personally self-reliant and 
they will be more generous in their contributions to society because 
they understand it is not somebody else paying the tax, it is they that 
are paying the tax. They have to dig in their pocket to pay the tax.
  And those billions of transactions laid across millions of kids 
growing up eventually percolates into this Congress where we will have 
people who come down to this floor and understand that government is 
not the solution to everything. It is not the be all, end all. It is 
not the place to fight out class envy battles. It is the place to ask 
for more personal responsibility. It is the place to show spending 
restraint. We need some restraint on spending.
  It is not a place to grow and blow this budget, to create more of a 
dependency class. It is not a place to say we want to take some funds 
here that seem to be anonymous coming out of somebody else and spread 
them across somebody out here that we claim has a need for the purpose 
of moving us closer to socialism, and it does, Mr. Speaker.
  No, this is the kind of country that is great and was made great by 
individuals who took personal responsibility, who were creative 
entrepreneurs, who were wonderful mothers and fathers who understood 
the dream of our Founders and this gift that God has given this 
country, that is reflected through the work that our Founders did in 
the Declaration and the Constitution.
  Mr. Speaker, we are going backwards in this 110th Congress. We are 
creating more dependency, not less. SCHIP is one, and the alternative 
minimum tax is another.
  While all of this is going on, we passed several pieces of energy 
legislation that takes us in the wrong direction again, that makes us 
more dependent, not less.
  There has not been a piece of energy legislation that has come across 
the floor of this Congress that did anything except increase the cost 
of energy, that made energy more scarce, that made the cost of a Btu 
higher than it was before.
  I have listened to all of the debates and the arguments, and nobody 
really stood up over there and said I think it is a good idea to 
increase the cost of gasoline or heating oil for the homes.
  But what they really say is a convoluted argument that gets this 
goal. As I listen between the lines, I have become convinced that there 
are significant Members on that side of the aisle, Mr. Speaker, that 
really do want to see energy prices higher, energy prices higher, more 
cost per Btu. Why? Because they believe if energy is higher in cost, 
people will use less of it. They will park their car and ride their 
bicycle. And meanwhile, some of the people who are advocating such a 
thing are living in mansions with large carbon footprints, way beyond 
anything I could make in my meager life here.
  So the idea of more expensive energy, you need to come clean on that. 
If you

[[Page H13519]]

believe in that, stand up and say so. I believe you believe in that.
  So as energy gets more expensive, we are going the wrong way. The 
right way to go with energy is to grow the size of the energy pie. 
There are X number of Btus on the market. If you think of that in a pie 
chart, coal, nuclear, solar, gas, and diesel fuel. And then we look 
into some that I like even better, ethanol, biodiesel and wind, those 
renewable energies that get attached to solar, and I think 
hydroelectric should be considered a renewable energy as well because 
it is very environmentally friendly and we could make more of it if we 
could get there politically.
  If you add up all of those pieces of the pie and envision them as 
slices of the overall pie, and there is another slice, and that is 
energy conservation. But we don't need a pie this big, we need a pie 
this big. We need to add to the Btus on the market, the overall energy, 
and change the overall proportion so it is a larger slice for ethanol, 
a larger slice for biodiesel, a larger slice for wind, and where we can 
make a cash flow, a larger slice for solar. And clean-burning coal 
technology has a home here that we have to be supportive of for a long 
time to come.
  All of those things add more Btus to the market. When you do that, 
the laws of supply and demand, and maybe some people on that side of 
the aisle believe they have repealed since they have taken over the 
gavels in this Congress, I will submit it is always supply and demand 
in the end.
  Unless you can repeal the law of supply and demand, we will see the 
Btus get cheaper. The overall cost of our energy per unit of energy 
will get cheaper if we put more of it on the market.
  So we increase the volume of energy we are producing, we put it on 
the market and that will slow the increase in the cost. And if we do it 
effectively enough, it will reduce the cost of our energy.
  I will submit this, Mr. Speaker, we need more gas. We need more 
diesel fuel. We need to drill in ANWR and the Outer Continental Shelf. 
We need to work some kind of transactions so we have access to the 
developing oil fields in the world. The Chinese are doing that in an 
effective fashion. They have built a pipeline from Kazakhstan into 
China. The Chinese are in the Western Hemisphere drilling for oil that 
we won't go get. While we prohibit drilling offshore in places off the 
Outer Continental Shelf within the 200-mile range. Some say with 
Chinese assistance, they are drilling closer to America than we can 
drill to America. I haven't verified that, but I intend to verify that 
particular thing.

  So we need to grow the size of the energy pie. If we do that, the 
cost will be cheaper, not greater. It will take down some of the prices 
of our energy. Energy is interrelated. The cost of gasoline is related 
to the cost of diesel fuel, is related to the cost of ethanol to 
biodiesel, to the overall cost of natural gas to the propane component 
that is there. And the more energy we can put on the market, the better 
off we are. And the more we can increase the conservation, the less 
demand there is for that energy.
  We need to have a coherent energy policy in this Congress, not one 
that is haphazard or one that has a subliminal wish over here that is 
unspoken that we should increase the cost of energy because then we 
will have less people driving cars and more people riding bicycles. 
That takes us back to pre-Garden of Eden standards of technology, and I 
reject that.
  And I will raise the issue, to rebut Cornell University and the 
University of California Berkley who have rolled out a study that 
argues that ethanol consumes more energy than it creates. That is 
simply not a fact, Mr. Speaker.
  I wouldn't know why anyone would go to a place like Cornell or 
University of California Berkley to get their ethanol facts. Come to 
Iowa. We are the number one ethanol production State in the Union. The 
United States of America has surpassed Brazil in ethanol production 
some 2\1/2\ years ago. People think you should go to Brazil to pick up 
on their technology. I wasn't all that impressed with what I saw there. 
But we can be impressed with what we developed in the corn belt. And it 
is not just Iowa. Minnesota took a good lead, and it is flowing into 
States like Nebraska and Illinois.
  We have state-of-the-art technology, and we are improving on it yet 
that brings us a significant amount of efficiency in converting corn to 
ethanol. There will be a limit to the number of gallons we can produce. 
But it works like this. Cornell and UC Berkley took a position that it 
took substantially more energy to produce a gallon of ethanol out of a 
bushel of corn than you got out of the gallon of ethanol.
  Mr. Speaker, it is important that we understand that energy needs to 
be in the kind of composition that we can utilize it. And so if we have 
gasoline that is liquid and we can put it into our tank and drive down 
the road, we can utilize it.
  If we have coal in the ground and it is 100 feet below the surface, 
it is not easy to utilize. But we mine it. Sometimes we mine it and 
sometimes we open pit it. We do harvest that coal. Then we convert the 
coal. We run it through a grinder and run it through a series of plates 
that pulverize the coal and inject it into a fire to turn it heat so we 
can turn the heat into steam and the live steam then is converted into 
kinetic energy which spins the generator that sends the electricity 
down the wires that goes into the electric motor. That is a long way 
from coal underground in Wyoming to spinning an electric motor in some 
place like Georgia. By the way, that coal from Wyoming does get to 
Georgia to do just what I said.
  But that is converting an energy source into a usable form. The 
usable form turns out to be the electricity way on the other end of 
that process. And look how far gasoline has to travel to get into the 
tank. You have to drill a hole and get down into that crude oil. You 
have to pump out that crude oil and send it to the refinery and crack 
that gas out of that crude oil into a form that you can get it up to 
the gas station and into the pump, through the nozzle so you can get it 
into your tank so you can burn the gas to turn it into energy to drive 
your car down the road.

                              {time}  1515

  We do the same thing with ethanol. So this energy that's required to 
convert ethanol, there are several ways to measure it but it comes to 
this. It takes energy to get a barrel of crude oil to the refinery, 
let's say in Texas, and it takes energy to get a bushel of corn to the 
gates of the ethanol plant in Iowa. But once you set that barrel of 
crude oil down at the refinery or that bushel of corn down at the 
ethanol plant, now it takes energy to get it out.
  People say that it takes more to get the energy out of ethanol than 
you get out of it. Mr. Speaker, I'm here to quote into the Record the 
real numbers, and it works out to be something like this. There's 
something about 110,000 Btus of energy in a gallon of gasoline, and 
there's something like 76,100 Btus of energy in a gallon of ethanol. 
It's about a .7 factor. There's less energy in a gallon of ethanol than 
there is a gallon of gasoline. We know that. We factor that in.
  But if you think of a gallon of gasoline or gallon of ethanol, of 
each containing 100,000 Btus, that's kind of in the ballpark of the 
energy you get out of a gallon, and if you compare the Btus straight 
up, then to get 100,000 Btus out of a barrel of crude oil, one of those 
$96 barrel of crude oil, if you factor the energy it takes to convert 
the crude oil to 100,000 Btus of energy, it will take 130,000 Btus to 
convert that crude oil to get 100,000 Btus of energy. It takes 130,000 
Btus to get 100,000 Btus out of a barrel of crude oil in the form of 
gasoline. More energy required to crack it out and turn it into gas 
than you get in the gas itself.
  But on the other side, at the gate of the ethanol plant, if you have 
a bushel of corn, the energy required to convert that corn into 100,000 
Btus of ethanol, roughly a gallon equivalent but matched up exactly to 
the gasoline, is 67,000 Btus of energy to get the corn into 100,000 
Btus of energy in ethanol.
  So those numbers work out this way. Two jugs here, one with ethanol 
in it, one with gas in it, each with 100,000 Btus of energy. The gas 
jug took 130,000 Btus to produce that. The ethanol took 67,000 Btus to 
convert that to 100,000 Btus of energy. So it's roughly twice as much 
energy to turn crude oil into a gasoline equivalent yield result as it 
is to turn corn into ethanol. That's the fact. That's the facts that 
places like Cornell and University of California

[[Page H13520]]

Berkeley don't seem to understand so well, Mr. Speaker.
  I want to make sure that went into the Congressional Record, but 
overall is this, we need to grow the size of the energy pie. We need to 
drill in ANWR because that's our oil, and there's no better place it 
could be. We need to go to the Outer Continental Shelf and drill the 
Outer Continental Shelf where we have 406 trillion cubic feet of 
natural gas. And that natural gas, by the way, is 90 percent of the 
feedstock that's required, 90 percent of the overall cost to produce 
nitrogen, which is the fertilizer foundation for the food we eat. We 
should not be dependent upon the Venezuelans or the Russians for their 
fertilizer that would essentially slow down or potentially control the 
food in the world.
  We should pass a fair tax so that we can take our tax off of all 
production and put it on consumption. And we should not do class envy 
things like a temporary patch for this alternative minimum tax that 
turns it into a permanent tax increase of $82.5 billion. We should not 
pay for temporary tax cuts with permanent tax increases.
  We should not be subsidizing health insurance for kids and families 
that are making $103,000 a year or more. We should be rewarding those 
that work better than those that don't so we can maintain this vitality 
of American exceptionalism.
  And we should be downright grateful that we have had in the past, but 
not today, a logical immigration policy that was designed to enhance 
the economic, the social, and the cultural well-being of the United 
States of America and reached out across the world, and from every 
country, from every civilization, we received the cream of the crop. 
The people that came here had to overcome burdens and hurdles and 
difficulties to get here. That meant they had to have a dream. They had 
to have a dream that sometimes they sold themselves into servitude to 
come here and maybe for 7 years they worked to pay off their passage 
into the United States.
  I have a great-great-grandfather, multiple greats back, that did that 
and landed in Baltimore as an indentured servant. But the people that 
had a dream found a way to come here, and those that sorted themselves 
out from their societies, and maybe it was for religious freedom and 
maybe it was for economic freedom, and hopefully it was for both, they 
came here and established a culture that's a Judeo-Christian Western 
civilization culture that recognizes that this is a great country that 
protects individuals' rights.
  And we have, because we've skimmed the cream off of the Nations in 
the world and brought their vitality here and because we have the 
rights that are identified in the Bill of Rights and in our 
Constitution, because we have a Judeo-Christian Western civilization, 
Protestant work ethic culture that the Catholics have done a great job 
of jumping on board with and a number of other denominations as well, 
we have this vitality here that makes us the unchallenged greatest 
Nation in the world.
  And it's our duty, Mr. Speaker, to preserve and protect and promote 
that great blessing that we have inherited here. That's our duty on the 
floor of this Congress. That's what should come to the floor as the 
policy unfolds, not class envy but lifting each of us up and keeping 
faith with God and with our Founders.
  I thank you, Mr. Speaker, for the privilege to address you and the 
floor of the House.

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