[Congressional Record Volume 154, Number 19 (Wednesday, February 6, 2008)]
[House]
[Pages H610-H617]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                              {time}  2145
                      THE BUDGET AND NATIONAL DEBT

  The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. Arcuri). Under the Speaker's announced 
policy of January 18, 2007, the gentleman from Kentucky (Mr. Yarmuth) 
is recognized for 60 minutes.
  Mr. YARMUTH. I want to thank my freshman colleagues for the very 
insightful and compelling arguments they raised concerning our budget, 
the budget proposal by the President for the 2009 fiscal year.
  Mr. Speaker, I will say that what we are dealing with here is a 
situation in which those of us who were elected in 2006, freshman 
Members, so known as the majority makers, came to this Congress because 
the American people in that election of 2006 thought that the country 
was going in the wrong direction, and it wasn't so much one thing, I 
know a lot of people think that we were elected because of the war in 
Iraq, and certainly that was a factor.
  I think more than anything else, the American people collectively 
decided that the priorities that have been established by the 
administration that was in office, beginning in 2000, we were taking 
the country in the wrong direction, that we were spending money, that 
we were emphasizing things that did not represent the best interests of 
the majority of the American people. They sent us here, therefore, to 
set a new pattern of doing business, a new way of setting priorities.
  They wanted us to put the American people first. They wanted us to 
recognize the true needs of this society, to recognize that government 
is a way of reorganizing and organizing our responsibilities to each 
other, that we could, as a government, actually create an economy that 
worked for everyone and not just for a very few, but that we could, 
again, set the country on a different direction, that we could use the 
tax revenues that were flowing to the Treasury to empower all people to 
make the best of their lives, to contribute to a more dynamic society. 
We really have set a different direction in this Congress, and I think 
we need to do much more.
  But let's think back to 2006 and think about what the American people 
were confronted with when they looked at Washington. They looked at 
Washington and they said, we have a government there that is arrogant, 
that tends to favor the richest people in the country, that tends to 
favor global corporations, that thinks that if we allow the wealthiest 
and most powerful people to do as well as they possibly can 
financially, that there will be a trickle-down effect and it will, 
quote-unquote, float everyone's boat, and that this is what the proper 
role of government should be.
  The American people said, no, we don't buy that. We've tried that. We 
tried it under the Reagan administration. We saw then that trickle-down 
economics does not work. We tried that for a few more years under the 
Bush administration. We found that, no, that doesn't work because, in 
fact, what we have seen is that from 2001 to 2006, 100 percent of the 
income growth in this country accrued to the benefit of the top 5 
percent of the population, that, in fact, 95 percent of the people in 
this country did not see their standard of living increase despite the 
fact that they are working harder, they are working longer.
  The average family has been working, the average household, 95 hours 
a week. That's two people working more than full time and still not 
getting ahead. So the American people said to us, we want to go in a 
different direction. We think that government can be a tool for 
progress, it can be a tool to create a society that distributes its 
benefits more broadly, and that we ought to take the position that 
rather than trying to let this trickle-down theory flow to everybody's 
boat that we ought to make a society in which everybody has a really 
good boat, and that everybody can swim on their own. In fact, the way 
to create a society that truly works over the long term is to empower 
every individual to be productive, to contribute to society and to have 
the power and the freedom and the support to improve his or her way of 
life.
  Now we are confronted, once again, with a budget from the President 
of the United States which does exactly the same thing that they have 
been trying over and over and over again with very

[[Page H611]]

little success. We have a budget, deceitful in many ways because it 
pretends to reach a budgetary balance when it really doesn't, and they 
do it by very deceitful mechanisms, but it sets the wrong priorities.
  It takes the money away from programs and policies that actually do 
empower individuals to improve their lives, to make a better society, 
to make a stronger economy, and it sends the money once again to 
basically nonproductive activities. We have, once again, a budget that 
minimizes and disguises the cost of our involvement in Iraq and 
Afghanistan. Many of us differ very strenuously on our priorities in 
Iraq and Afghanistan.
  We all understand that we have some serious problems in Afghanistan, 
and we need to focus there. We also understand that we are spending $3 
billion a week in Iraq, most of which we will never see. It never 
represents any investment in our future. It is money that is down the 
drain.
  When you try to compare the benefits of our tax dollars being spent 
again to promote a vibrant and healthy economy and to help people who 
need to get their feet on the ground to become productive citizens 
versus spending money overseas in ways that do nothing to enhance our 
own standard of living, that we know we have a skewed sense of 
priorities.
  That's what we are going to talk about for the next few minutes, and 
I am very proud to be here with one of my freshman colleagues, someone 
who is passionate about the need for this country to work for everyone, 
someone who is as passionate about working for working families as 
anyone in this Congress, John Hall from New York.
  I am proud to be his colleague, and I would like to recognize 
Congressman Hall to further this discussion.
  Mr. HALL of New York. Thank you, Congressman. It's my pleasure to 
join you tonight.
  I wish I had as much pleasure looking at the budget the President 
submitted as I do discussing it with you, and all of us, of course, 
earlier this week received a copy of the President's budget. Like all 
of us, I was disappointed by the questionable accounting and fiscal 
irresponsibilities contained within this budget. I wish I could say I 
was surprised, but unfortunately it represents the same missed 
opportunities and misplaced priorities that have highlighted this 
administration.
  First of all, I would have to say for a President and an 
administration that claimed to be fiscally responsible and who 
constantly accuse Democrats of being fiscally irresponsible, it's 
really shocking and deserving of mention that this President, George W. 
Bush, has been responsible, his administration, responsible for the 
five biggest deficits in American history. Here they are. We all 
remember, of course, at the end of the 1990s when President Bush took 
over from President Clinton that we had a surplus, and we were, in 
fact, paying down some of the national debt for a change.
  But due to his tax policies and his overspending and his penchant for 
borrowing, our President and his administration have run up, in 2003, a 
deficit of $378 billion; in 2004, a deficit of $413 billion; in 2005, 
$318 billion; 2008 actually is the next figure here, $410 billion; and 
for 2009 is a projected $407 billion budget.
  We can't keep this up. Any family knows that they can't keep 
spending. In fact, too many families are finding this out, that the 
chickens eventually come home to roost. I, as a former school board 
president and school board trustee who had to balance the budget every 
year know that you can't go on spending more money than you take in 
without some kind of disaster befalling you.
  Unfortunately, what's happening in terms of the value of the dollar, 
in terms of our exporting jobs, in terms of foreign interests buying up 
pieces of the United States or corporations or infrastructure in the 
United States, in terms of our weakened markets, and volatile and 
declining markets, all these things have to do with the basic 
foundation, the underpinning of our country being massive debt.
  The other thing about the President's budget that I was surprised to 
see and disappointed to see, it does nothing to fix the alternative 
minimum tax, or the AMT, a tax which was originally designed, when it 
first took effect in 1970, to affect only 155 households, the most 
wealthy, the most affluent households in America who were using tax 
loopholes to avoid paying any tax at all. Congress wrote, in the late 
1960s, this bill which the AMT took effect in 1970, to hit the very top 
of the most wealthy people in the country.
  Now because it was never indexed to inflation, it was never given a 
cost-of-living increase, it was never allowed to float as the cost of 
living and the average salaries and income in the country changed, that 
AMT has dipped every year deeper and deeper and deeper into the 
American tax-paying public and dramatically increasing the tax rate 
paid by millions of middle-class families who were never intended to be 
hit by the AMT, over 20 million of whom will be forced to pay it next 
year.
  Without a permanent fix, half of all taxpayers in this country will 
pay this AMT that was originally designed to hit 155 of the wealthiest 
households in the country.
  But the President does nothing to stop this. Instead, he calls for 
more than $1 trillion in tax cuts for the top 1 percent of all 
Americans.
  Once again, we have 5 years in a row of record increases in the 
poverty rate, we have record increases in personal debt, we have record 
increases in national debt, we have record increases in our balance of 
trade deficit. Strangely enough, at the same time, I read in the paper 
that ExxonMobil has declared 40 point some billion dollars in profit, 
the largest single yearly corporate profit in the history of the world, 
breaking the previous record which was held by ExxonMobil themselves.
  Some people in this economy and in this current fiscal and business 
financial scheme are doing very, very, very well and will continue to 
do very well. There are others, mainly the middle class and lower 
income Americans, who are being squeezed from all sides. Believe me, 
they are not being squeezed up, they are being squeezed down.
  The middle class is having their options and their opportunities cut, 
whether it's the cost of sending their children to college, whether 
it's being the cost of purchasing health care for their families, the 
cost of property or property tax, the cost of fuel for their cars or 
for their homes. I mean, even the fact that the President in this 
budget slashed the low-income heating assistance program, LIHEAP, is 
scandalous.
  At a time when we have families and seniors who are struggling to 
heat their homes in the northern parts of this country, I wouldn't have 
expected the President, a so-called compassionate conservative, to be 
so discompassionate as to cut heating assistance for low-income people 
in this current climate of economic uncertainty and astronomical fuel 
costs.
  I would just say that I am happy to be here to discuss this, and, 
more importantly, to talk about how we are going to move to a real 
budget, not a fake budget that's based on some platitudes and some kind 
of ideological belief, some faith-based budgeting that has nothing to 
do with reality and nothing to do with the well-being of the American 
people.
  Mr. YARMUTH. I want to thank my colleague.
  He referenced the annual profit of ExxonMobil that was reported last 
week. And I was struck last week on February 1, when I looked at The 
New York Times on the online version, the list of the headlines of the 
day, and I thought it was striking because I think it painted a vivid 
picture of where we are in this world and in this country. The first 
story was, ``Microsoft Bids $44.6 Billion for Yahoo,'' a lot of money, 
two corporations vying for each other.
  The next story, ``U.S. Economy Unexpectedly Sheds 17,000 Jobs,'' the 
worst jobs report in several years. Then, ``Dozens Killed in Worst 
Baghdad Attack in Months,'' then ``Kurds' Power Wanes as Arab Anger 
Rises'' and, then, finally, ``ExxonMobil Profit Sets Record Again.''
  I think that was just an incredibly vivid picture of where we are in 
this world and where this economy stands and how out of whack the 
priorities of this administration have become. That's why I am so 
thankful that we are, at least, in control of this House of the 
Congress so that we can help to set the priorities of this country on a 
much more sound course.

[[Page H612]]

  I know that I have had so many opportunities to stand on this floor 
and discuss these issues with my colleague from Florida (Mr. Klein). I 
am proud to recognize him now.
  Mr. KLEIN of Florida. I thank the gentleman from Kentucky and the 
gentleman from New York. I certainly agree with all the statements you 
have made and would just share a few of my own thoughts on the budget.
  A budget is a statement of our values, as Americans, collectively. We 
are not Democrats, we are not Republicans, we are not independents, we 
are Americans. We all are putting a lot of money, hard-earned money 
into the government. The question is what's going to be done with it. 
What is the best value that can be used to help people achieve a better 
life, help our economy, help job creation and all those things that are 
important to our communities.

                              {time}  2200

  The biggest concern that I have with the budget that is being 
proposed by the administration is to me it is more of missed 
opportunities. We know that we have a difficult economy right now. 
Certainly in Florida where we have had tremendous growth over the last 
number of years, all of a sudden things have stopped. The real estate 
market and all of the various businesses that are affected, and 
homeowners that are affected by a real estate market that has slowed to 
a standstill, we need to help people through the foreclosures and 
various other things. But what does this budget do, something that all 
of us said we were going to change.
  In this body we have PAYGO, pay as you go. We can only pass 
legislation that is paid for in advance. My two friends here are fiscal 
hawks. We believe in a deficit that has to be brought down and a 
balanced budget. That is the way we live our personal lives. In the 
State legislature, we had balanced budgets. That is the way you run 
your business.
  What does this budget do? First of all, it is over $3 trillion. The 
amount of money going into the Federal Government is extraordinary from 
an administration that said they wanted smaller government and less 
spending.
  Put that issue aside for a second, this continues the budget deficit 
and increases it by another $400 billion. This is after, as the 
gentleman from New York said, this does not stop the biggest tax 
increase, the alternative minimum tax, which we tried to fix. We had a 
very good way of fixing it this year, and the President refused. Some 
people on the other side of the aisle in the Senate refused to do it. 
It has to be fixed.
  The President in his proposal cuts Medicare and Medicaid. I don't 
know about you; I am sure you are hearing the same thing I'm hearing. 
Our doctors, our hospitals, our providers, they are taking care of our 
Medicare population in our communities, and they are feeling it. They 
have been cut and cut and cut, and it is not keeping up with the cost 
of operating a practice. We know that they need to receive fair 
compensation. That is unacceptable. I don't think that is something 
that this Congress is going to support. So again, an assumption that 
doesn't have any bearing on where things are going.
  The President, who has been a big supporter of the Iraq war, as we 
know, and has continued to ask for more and more money, hundreds of 
billions of dollars, interestingly enough, in this budget sets it up 
for $70 billion of additional expenditures only through January 20. 
Now, what is January 20? That is Inauguration Day of a new President, 
whoever that may be.
  But boy, is that an unrealistic way of looking at it, particularly 
after he has been criticizing Members of Congress saying that you can't 
put a date at the end of funding because you are going to cut off our 
troops, cut off funding of the bullets and all of the necessary 
support, which we are not prepared to do, but he is doing.
  He is saying on January 20, if you pass this budget, there is no more 
money after that date to fund the Iraq war, not because he doesn't want 
to fund the Iraq war, but that is how he is creating a smaller amount 
of a big deficit. Instead of $400 billion, it would be $500 billion or 
something like that.
  So the question is what can we do, because I think there are a whole 
lot of assumptions here that are incorrect.
  I have a chart here that I have talked about before, and I think this 
is totally unacceptable. The lack of fiscal discipline of this 
administration over the last 6 or 7 years has resulted in increasing 
debt to an unacceptable amount in terms of us bringing our budget in 
line.
  So, although the financing of the war, which has been off the books, 
the financing of all of these various things that the President wanted 
to fund, instead of cutting spending or being a little more fiscally 
responsible, we have been borrowing, and borrowing from foreign 
investors. Those are foreign countries. We are a debtor country to 
China and Mexico, and the list goes on and on.
  Under this administration, in trillions of dollars we are talking 
about, in 2001 the amount of foreign-held Treasury securities was $1 
trillion. That is a massive amount of money. In the last 6 years, it 
has now doubled to $2.3 trillion. Just to put it in perspective, the 
amount of interest that we are paying this year, strictly interest, not 
principal, not amortizing of the principal and interest together, just 
interest is over $300 billion. To me, that is money we are just 
flushing down the drain.
  If there was some fiscal discipline like the House leadership has 
been pushing, we could take that money and do a number of things. We 
could take care of Americans first. How about all of us, whether it is 
health care, job creation, job training, so many infrastructure issues 
in our communities; these are the issue of our day.
  And instead of sending that money overseas to pay interest, not even 
principal, that is $300 billion that is being thrown out the door 
offshore to some other country because we don't have the wherewithal, 
as we do in this House, because the President hasn't been willing to 
work with us in bringing this budget in line.
  Mr. Speaker, there are many Republicans as well, but certainly the 
Democrats have stood together on this, and we welcome everyone as 
Americans to focus on this together. We have to get the budget in line. 
The budget that is being proposed by the President right now is 
something that is relying on a lot of unrealistic assumptions that will 
never pass because the American people don't want them to be cut, 
whether Medicare and a number of other things, and we have to find a 
way to get the budget deficit under control. That is essential. We 
can't mortgage the future of our country. We cannot allow our children 
to have to pay and our grandchildren to have to pay for something that 
this generation wasn't prepared to stand up and say, Yes, we can live 
within our means. Yes, we can have a strong economy and fight wars when 
necessary. And yes, we will take care of Americans when there are 
natural disasters, and it can all be done under a fiscally responsible 
way, and that has not been the record of this administration. We are 
going to work hard in a bipartisan way to get this under control.
  I appreciate the fact that the gentleman from Kentucky brought this 
to us, and I look forward to working with him and the gentleman from 
New York on fixing this problem.
  Mr. YARMUTH. One of the things that is most disturbing to all of us 
is when you hear deceitful discussion of the financial situation of 
this country. We sat and listened to the State of the Union address in 
which the President said if we were to not renew the tax cuts that went 
into effect in 2001 and 2003, that the average tax increase for an 
American would be something like $1,200 a year. That is a very clever 
way of saying what the average tax increase would be. The problem is 
that the average tax increase would be very large because you are 
taking all of the people who are making a million, $5 million, $10 
million a year, and if we reinstituted those tax rates prior to 2001, 
the 39.6 percent tax rate, some people at the very highest level would 
pay $40,000, $80,000, $100,000, $2 million a year more in taxes. So 
when you average that with the normal taxpayer, yes, it comes to about 
$1,200 a year.
  If you phrased it another way, and that would be the average American 
taxpayer would have his or her taxes increased by, it wouldn't be 
$1,200, it would be like $40 or $50, because the average American 
working family earns $55,000 a year. And that family, if we did not 
extend the Bush tax cuts, would see their taxes raised by a very small 
amount. The people at the higher end would pay a lot more taxes. So the 
average tax increase, yes, it would be a

[[Page H613]]

lot, but the average taxpayer would not see his or her taxes increased. 
Of course, we are not proposing that in any event.
  We have been talking that when we do revisit those tax cuts that we 
look at the highest income levels. But the point is, when we are 
getting all of these projections from the administration about what 
would happen in future years, as my colleague said, if we fix the 
alternative minimum tax and don't pay for it, and we don't have that 
additional revenue, yes, we can underestimate the deficit that we will 
be experiencing during those times. We can make the projections look 
good 4, 5 years out into the future, but that will not be the case.
  One of the things I would like to talk about because Mr. Klein 
mentioned this, the cost of interest on the national debt, which has 
increased by an extraordinary amount. According to this budget, it 
would be $4 trillion just since 2001; $4 trillion based on a $5.7 
trillion starting point. So we basically have almost doubled the 
national debt, the entire history, 220 years of this Nation, we have 
almost doubled the national debt just in the last few years.
  But here is where we really get a vivid depiction of what this means. 
We are talking about interest on the national debt of $300 billion a 
year. The entire expenditure on education from the Federal budget is 
$100 billion a year. Veterans care is less than that, and homeland 
security even less than that. This is what has happened to the 
priorities in our budget because of the irresponsibility of this 
government over the last 7 years.
  So this is what we are talking about. This is what we are 
confronting, and this is why I think all of us in the majority party in 
the Congress say we need to speak honestly, openly, and intelligently 
about what confronts us, about the challenges that we face, but also 
about what has happened over the last few years.
  All we ask of the administration is be honest about what you are 
saying, what you are telling the American people. We will have a 
legitimate debate with you and discussion about where our priorities 
should be. But first and foremost, we need to be talking about things 
in absolute terms and be honest and transparent as we discuss how we 
are going to spend the taxpayers' dollars.
  I am also proud to be joined tonight by the gentleman from Minnesota 
(Mr. Walz), the president of our freshman class and a great spokesman 
for the working families of America.
  Mr. WALZ of Minnesota. Mr. Speaker, I had an opportunity to be at 
home and watch some of our colleagues speaking on this earlier. I think 
last night I saw in my State of Minnesota where we had caucuses, and we 
had four times the record number of people turning out. The American 
people are starting to listen. They start to understand the 
consequences of what we have been living under, and I think all of what 
has been highlighted has been spectacular.
  I will also say that each of us who have read this budget have no 
problem being up here late at night because it is hard to sleep after 
you see it. Each of you have highlighted critical issues and the things 
that we are getting done and prioritizing.
  The idea of government is the collective will that we can do 
together, and our job is to prioritize the things that this country 
needs to do. I think Mr. Yarmuth's chart that he just showed shows that 
this Nation under this President has not prioritized. This President 
has set out an agenda that told us we could have something for nothing. 
He told us we can give tax cuts, and I appreciate you clearly 
illustrating the President's creative use of facts and statistics which 
he quite often does to theatrical effect but to huge detriment to this 
Nation.
  I want to talk about this for a couple of minutes. We have done a 
wonderful job of highlighting the overall principles. I want to talk 
about how this impacts individuals. I want to talk about the idea of 
fiscal discipline and the incredibly shortsightedness of this 
administration, even in cases where they may be able to cut something 
to save a little bit, the incredible cost not just in the suffering and 
what it is doing to the Nation, that aside, what it is doing in terms 
of just plain poor financial decisions.
  In my southern Minnesota district, which stretches from the plains of 
South Dakota over to the Mississippi River, and Minnesota as the Land 
of 10,000 Lakes is very diverse. The southwest corner of my State that 
borders Iowa and South Dakota was the place where the glaciers never 
reached, and it is one of the few places where you don't find a lot of 
the prairie potholes and lakes, and the shortage of water is important 
and on people's minds. This is the area of Laura Ingalls Wilder's 
``Little House on the Prairie.'' This is the land where people want to 
raise their children. We have prosperous communities that are 
incredibly diverse that are leading the Nation in things like biofuel 
production. We are the fifth leading district in wind production. These 
are innovative people, but the one thing that they are missing and what 
makes life so difficult is the lack of drinking water.
  We have places where people are living in 2008 where they have 
cisterns to collect water in order to drink good water. Well, these 
communities got together in Iowa, South Dakota, and Minnesota and they 
came together with a creative solution. They were going to use, where 
the abundance of water was along the Missouri River in South Dakota, 
they were going to use the engineering skill of this Nation to provide 
drinking water and the lifeblood of communities for 300,000 people in a 
bipartisan manner.

                              {time}  2215

  They got together and they started doing this. It is incredibly 
important. In fact, it was so important that in 2001, on White House 
stationery that I might have, President Bush himself went to South 
Dakota and said, a priority is to work with States on important 
development projects, and the Lewis and Clark rural water project is a 
project that will be in my budget, and something that we can work on 
together.
  Well, it sounded good, especially in South Dakota. The reality has 
been we have fought tooth and nail every step of the way. The good news 
on this is, whether it be Republican or Democrat, the bipartisan 
commitment to this has been absolutely unbreakable. The local 
communities have even done something that I think our constituents are 
asking us. We always hear when we're spending money, oh, you tax and 
spenders and all that. I think something that's important for people to 
know, Mr. Speaker, is that those of us who are here have paid taxes 
before, too. I'm a school teacher, and 2005 was the first year in my 
life that I filed taxes right at the $50,000 a year range. I'm the 
person who takes pencils when they're available to make sure I can use 
them in my classroom. I use both sides of every sheet of paper. I want 
to see us get our money's worth, too. This project did that. Seventeen 
of these communities and municipalities and States decided what they 
would do is they would pay ahead to cut down on the inflationary value 
of this project. The project was scheduled to last approximately 15 
years. It's a major reconstruction project, a major thing that's 
happening.
  Well, the project got off and going, started running. People are very 
excited about it. Everything is going great, until we started running 
into the last 7 years of the Bush presidency. Last year in President 
Bush's budget he cut the funding for this project down to $15 million a 
year. To give you an idea of what that would do, instead of the 
completion date of 2016 that was scheduled, and remember, States, 
municipalities have paid ahead. They have asked their taxpayers to pay 
taxes ahead to save money in the long run, and overwhelmingly they said 
that. And President Bush promised them that he would be there every 
step of the way. By the way, this is when he was sending off South 
Dakota's soldiers to go fight the war in Afghanistan. He promised them 
that he would be there for their families. By his budgeting cutting 
back to $15 million last year, it meant that the project would not be 
finished until 2051, and the cost would go from about $527 million to 
nearly $900 million.
  Now, this was the President that came to us with an M.B.A. He was the 
CEO president. And what he's saying is that he is not going to be able 
to make the same fiscally responsible decisions to keep these 
communities alive.

[[Page H614]]

  Well, what we did, as a joint delegation, between Iowa, South Dakota 
and Minnesota, Republican and Democrat, said that is wrong. And we went 
and asked, guess what, one of those awful earmarks appropriations to 
put the Federal Government's responsibility back to where it was 
supposed to be or near where it was supposed to be at $27 million.
  So now we're approximately 5 years from completion of this, and this 
wonderful document that the President sent out this week set his budget 
for the Lewis and Clark rural water project, zero dollars. He shut the 
project down. So I guess what he's telling us is, the $300 million 
we've spent, the 300,000 people, communities, where, in my district, 
they cannot issue another building permit in their cities because they 
don't have enough water. He is telling them, leave the pipes half 
finished. Let the people move elsewhere. And you know what I said in 
2001, I didn't really mean it because I've got other priorities.
  Now, remember, this is the same President that told us that our 
fiscal crisis now is simply being caused by our inability to make 
permanent the tax cuts on 1 percent of Americans that actually aren't 
expiring until 2011.
  Now I stand here in front of the people, Mr. Speaker, and with my 
colleagues to ask in a totally bipartisan manner, what sense does this 
make? What sense is this about prioritizing? What do these mayors tell 
their people when they made this decision based on what good government 
is? And if this President is going to think you're going to do this 
alone, who's going to dig the 400-mile long trench from the Missouri 
River to feed these areas of Iowa and Minnesota and South Dakota?
  I guess the President's message has been what it's been all along, 
whether it's been SCHIP, whether it's been our veterans, whether it's 
been anything. I'll be there until it comes time to make some 
prioritizing decisions. At that point you're on your own. He's given us 
his ownership society which truly does mean you're on your own, and now 
we have a situation where we're going to go as a delegation and have to 
fight for every dollar of something as basic as infrastructure to 
deliver water.
  So I will have to tell you on the sacredness of this House floor, 
it's been an overwhelming challenge to keep my tongue on some of this, 
and I applaud my colleagues in the same way.
  But I can tell you, Mr. Speaker, and tell my colleagues, I will not 
rest for 1 minute until this budget starts to reflect the priorities of 
this Nation. There is nothing in this budget that reflects the 
priorities of this Nation. There is nothing in the people of my 
district, and I don't care what political party they belong to, that 
reflects their values. And there is absolutely no vision in this. I 
don't know if maybe this is just a cruel joke on the way out, leaving 
the White House; we'll see what can happen if we do this. But I can 
tell you this: The people of Iowa and South Dakota and Minnesota aren't 
laughing about it. And I can darn sure guarantee you that each of us is 
going to fight to make it right.
  I thank you for indulging me on this, Mr. Yarmuth. You've done a 
fantastic job. You always lead a very important discussion. And I thank 
you and my colleagues for their open-mindedness.
  I agree with you. I'll have this discussion. I will debate with any 
member of this administration or this House of Representatives on why, 
after the investments that we've made, the importance of this project 
and the agreement of constituents and the promise that was made by the 
President, why I'm just supposed to accept this, and why people say, 
can't you all just get along and get something done?
  If there was some sanity coming from the administration, I would say 
yes. But right now at this point I think the answer is no because this 
is going to be fought tooth and nail until this wrong is corrected.
  Mr. YARMUTH. I thank my colleague and want to yield again to Mr. Hall 
from New York. But before I do, I just wanted to add that, again, 
sitting and listening to the State of the Union address and talking 
about the honesty that we need to have when we have this discussion, 
and all of a sudden the President for the first time in this State of 
the Union address takes on the question of earmarks. And all of a 
sudden he's critical of the Democratic Congress because we had 11,000 
or something earmarks. But he never said a word for 6 years while the 
earmarks expanded to somewhere in the realm of 16,000.
  Now we can have debates over earmarks. I happen to think, as my 
colleagues mentioned, that there are some very valid reasons to have 
earmarks. And I think they have been demonized probably unreasonably. 
But all of a sudden the President finds fiscal religion this year under 
a Democratic-controlled Congress when he was silent for 6 years. And 
the same is true of his passion now for balanced budgets when over the 
first 6 years of his administration with the Republican-controlled 
Congress, he never issued a veto, never threatened a veto of any 
spending bill as we accrued $3.7 or so trillion more in debt, and he 
was silent.
  All of a sudden now you have to suspect that the only reason is 
partisanship. That's what we're trying to get away from in this 
country, and that's what we are trying to get away from as we discuss 
the priorities of the country. Because, as you said, we're interested 
in where the rubber meets the road, programs that help the American 
people, doing the best for the American people and not necessarily what 
means doing the best for a particular party.
  I think what we're seeing, as you mentioned, in the turnout in voters 
in primaries throughout the country is that's what American people 
want. They want people who are going to deal with our problems and not 
deal with partisanship.
  With that, I will once again recognize my distinguished colleague 
from New York (Mr. Hall).
  Mr. HALL of New York. Thank you, Mr. Yarmuth. I appreciate your 
leading this discussion. I also want to acknowledge my colleague from 
New York (Mr. Arcuri). Thank you for serving as Speaker pro tem during 
this period of time.
  I'd just like to respond to Mr. Walz's comment about what kind of 
sense does it make for this cut in the water program in your district. 
Well, I can say it makes about as much sense as the President's 
completely eliminating the Byrne Grant program and the COPS program, 
both of which are vital to my district to provide cops, additional 
policemen on the streets in the 19th District of New York. It makes 
about as much sense as cutting the important programs that provide 
local and State law enforcement agencies with funds to fight terrorism 
and crime, including almost $140 million that were cut from 
bioterrorism preparedness. They make as much sense as the President 
cutting Medicare and Medicaid at a time when health insurance costs are 
skyrocketing, when more and more Americans are forced to live without 
health insurance. This budget cuts $200 billion out of health insurance 
from Medicare and Medicaid. At a time when we're facing one of the most 
damaging housing crises in our history with foreclosures and evictions 
due to the subprime mortgage crisis, it makes as much sense as this 
President cutting the Nation's largest rental assistance program. It 
makes as much sense, as I mentioned before, as cutting the Low Income 
Home Energy Assistance Program by almost 25 percent, preventing people 
in the lower income segment of our economy from being able to heat 
their homes during the winter.
  We were talking about your district. I'll talk about something 
specific to mine. We have, many of us think due to climate change, 
suffered from three 50-year floods in the last 3 years in the 19th 
District, the Delaware River, the Wallkill River, the Ten Mile River, 
all flooding farms, homes, businesses, golf courses, which might not 
sound too important, except they do employ people and they're a source 
of economic input into the local economy. And, but as importantly, 
lives were lost. In Congressman Hinchey's district in Sullivan County, 
there was a drastic, catastrophic flood shortly after the April 29 
nor'easter, which was the third in 2007, the third in a row of our 50-
year floods that came within 3 years.
  So last year, when I was new, I was a freshman, wet behind the ears, 
just been sworn in for my first turn, we got into the appropriations 
process. And you know what it's like. People come into your office from 
different departments of the government asking to

[[Page H615]]

have funding restored to these different important programs that have 
been cut by the administration. One of those who came to my office was 
the general who is the Army Corps of Engineers director of the 
Philadelphia district, which includes the Delaware watershed. Now, the 
Delaware Corps of Engineers offices go by watersheds, not by State 
lines or any kind of political jurisdictions. Her district, the 
general's, ran from Philadelphia up to Delaware and into New York from 
Pennsylvania and all the way up to the reservoirs that feed New York 
City's drinking water system. This is one of the rivers that has had, 
at that point in time, three 50-year floods in a short span. She came 
in to ask if I could help restore funding. And I said, well, what was 
it cut to? And she showed me in the President's budget it was cut to 
zero. It was a goose egg.
  Now, flood control, in the days after Hurricane Katrina, we all know 
is a serious matter. This obviously is not a serious document any more 
than last year's budget was a serious document. This document is a 
fictitious document that is aimed at pretending to balance the budget 
in 2012. And we all know that can't be done. And, in fact, the general 
and others who have come from different departments to my office and 
others have said, off the record, that it's done with the knowledge 
that the Democratic majority will restore some of these funds at least 
to be able to keep the programs going and to protect people, and then 
we'll get blamed for being big spenders.
  Well, in terms of being big spenders, I just want to bring out this 
chart which I happen to have here which shows the surplus that was the 
United States budget surplus when, in 2001, the Bush administration 
began its term. There was a $5.6 trillion surplus. In the time since 
then, there's red ink of $8.8 trillion, so that at this point in time 
we're at a $3.2 trillion deficit, including omitted items.
  Now, we all know there are items that are not included in this. For 
instance, the war is off budget. We fought wars in the past, World War 
II or the Korean War or the Vietnam War, World War I, during which time 
people were asked to sacrifice. People were asked to pay for the war as 
they went.
  This is a war that we're borrowing money to pay for, and Congressman 
Klein's chart that he showed before, of the increasing foreign 
ownership of our debt, I think, is really important and really 
interesting for several reasons. Obviously it's not healthy for us to 
have this much debt and to accumulate an ever-growing interest payment 
that eclipses anything we can do for education or for housing or for 
veterans or for homeland security and that we're going to pass on to 
our children and our grandchildren.

                              {time}  2230

  That's really unconscionable.
  But the other thing that that does to have that kind of huge debt to 
the Chinese or to the Saudis or to the Mexican or Japanese Governments 
or investors from other countries is it loses our sovereignty when we 
can't talk to China about Darfur or when we can't talk to China 
honestly about human rights violations in their country or about the 
obliteration of the history of Tibet or about whether they're being as 
tough with North Korea about their nuclear problem as we want them to 
be or about lead in toys that are being imported for our children to 
play with or about contaminated food or animal feed or contaminated 
medicine. When we can't talk to the Saudis honestly about human rights 
violations in their country or about their funding of the madrasas, we 
have suffered what I call a loss of sovereignty. When you no longer can 
make honest, diplomatic, economic, military, international decisions or 
really state what is in your best interest because you are afraid that 
your hands are tied for want of getting a commodity from one place or 
the money to pay the debt off from another place, then you have lost 
some of your sovereignty.
  And I'm telling you, in this country, the American people are not 
aware of the extent of it yet, but they better get aware of it because 
this is already a major factor in our foreign policy, but it will be 
more and more of a problem and restrict our options more and more in 
the future if we do not get back to a surplus in terms of our budget, 
if we don't get back to a surplus in the balance of trade, if we don't 
start producing things here. I, personally, am especially fond of the 
options of renewable energy technologies and high tech and computer and 
medical advances and so on that we have traditionally led the world in.
  But we need to invest in education, we need to invest in these 
innovation approaches to technologies and especially to invest in new 
forms of energy to get us away from the billions of dollars a day that 
go to import oil.
  But all of these things are our freedom, and they equate our future 
sovereignty. And I hope we make the right decisions, as opposed to the 
wrong decisions, that are embodied in this budget that the President 
just released so that our children and grandchildren will enjoy being a 
truly sovereign country and a leader in the world in these things 
rather than being subservient to whatever foreign interests happen to 
own our debt.
  Mr. YARMUTH. I appreciate him mentioning the field of education 
because you can have, as I mentioned earlier, two forms of expenditure 
in government. You can have expenditures that are nonproductive, and 
one of those, I think, is the war in Iraq. Interest on the debt is 
another one, because there is no long-term payback to those 
expenditures. Education, investment in infrastructure, as Mr. Walz was 
discussing, those are the types of things that over the long run do 
produce increased revenues for society productivity, and they are the 
type of investments we need to be focusing on.
  And when we look at this budget, the field of education, and I'm on 
the Education and Labor Committee and we are dealing with trying to 
decide whether to reauthorize the No Child Left Behind Act which is 
already $55 billion below its authorized levels in funding. And the 
President, once again, has no increases in funding for education in 
this budget, which means we fall further and further behind.
  So while he called his act No Child Left Behind, where, in fact, we 
are leaving more and more children behind because we are not meeting 
our obligations to make the kind of investments in people and in an 
infrastructure that really will pay off over the long run.
  And I know this is something that is an entire range of topics that 
Mr. Klein has dealt with and has had to set priorities in his own 
legislature in Florida, and I would like to yield to him to advance the 
discussion.
  Mr. KLEIN of Florida. Thank you. I think both of you were talking 
about two priorities of our country and the shortfalls and where we 
need to be, where we've been, and where we are going as a country. And 
I think we look at ourselves, and you hear this in the Presidential 
debates right now about the vision. And any Presidential candidate that 
comes forward and talks about the vision of what our country needs to 
be, where we need to go, the heritage of our country, the legacy of all 
of the great innovation that's happened and the fact that maybe we've 
missed a couple of steps. Not to say we can't regain and continue to 
move forward, because that's exactly what we are going to do. But it is 
going to take some new leadership through the Congress, through the 
Presidency and through the American people, and through our business 
community as well. It is a cooperative effort.
  And I think about a few of the things that are the priorities that 
help us get there. Education, as you just said, is one of them. And one 
of the things that concerned me about the budget was the fact that the 
President had dropped the amount of college grants and the tuition 
assistance programs in the budget. And again, once again, this 
Congress, bipartisan, came forward and increased the Pell Grants and 
increased the college tuition, because if there's one thing I think we 
can all agree on as Americans, every student, every teenager, every 
adult who wants to get a higher level of education and create a greater 
level of workforce training which will only make their lives more 
productive and make their country more productive, that's a good thing. 
It always has been. Education has been the great equalizer in the 
United States, and we ought to be doing everything we can to make sure 
that we are giving that access and that opportunity for every student.
  So, again, a misdirection in this budget which needs to be corrected.

[[Page H616]]

  Another thing that I think is extremely important, and all of us have 
some family history of illness whether it is Alzheimer's, whether it is 
kidney disease, or whether it is cancer or heart disease. And one of 
the things that our government has consistently done working with the 
private sector is research, basic research, which will hopefully find 
cures.
  I know my mother passed away at a young age of 52. She was a very 
vibrant person and developed cancer, and after she went through some 
treatments over a period of time, we lost her. But it certainly gave me 
that commitment, and I know I fought along with many Members of the 
Congress, and the people who are listening tonight have their own 
family histories. And we know that collectively, we have to find ways 
of curing diseases.
  Cuts in this budget to the grants for research, wrong direction. 
Really wrong direction. I feel extremely strong about this that we need 
to have the National Institute of Health grants to work with scientists 
or universities in our health institutions to find the therapies, to 
find the cures, to help make people's lives better. It's also a 
wonderful way of expanding our economic opportunity in exporting and 
licensing and creating technologies to help people around the world and 
selling those products around the world as well. So, again, something 
we need to fix in this budget.
  I think the gentleman mentioned the COPS program, which is something 
that is very much on our streets, and that's, of course, the ability to 
have safety and public safety and security in our communities. I know 
in my local community, $8.5 million in our area would be cut from that 
funding. That's real dollars that affect real people in terms of 
putting police and security on our streets. It is one of the most 
important things our government can do to provide for the public 
safety.
  These are the kinds of things that are misdirections. They can all be 
fixed. It is a question of all of us coming together, putting a budget 
together, hopefully persuading the President that these were mistakes 
and we need to come back and fix them.
  And lastly, of course, I just want to touch on the fact of our 
economy, and the people back home are hurting right now. And we hear it 
every day, whether it is subprime, whether it is foreclosures, any 
number of things; and the Congress is working right now, and we will be 
passing, in the next number of days, an economic stimulus, which is 
designed to be short term. It's designed as a little bit of a prop up 
and a support of people. It will give them some cash and hopefully 
retire some of those responsibilities and pay for some of the 
necessities.
  But long term, we have got to work together on energy issues. It's 
already been discussed. Paying $50, $60 for a tank of gas on someone 
who is earning $30,000 a year is a real issue. And at a time, as we 
already talked about, when energy companies are making incredible, 
historic amounts of money, we need to work together to substitute those 
resources for renewable energy programs, which I know the Congressman 
from New York has been all over and all of us feel very strongly about.
  This is our moment. This is our time. This is our ``Sputnik'' moment. 
This is our putting-the-man-on-the-moon moment. This is the time for 
the American people to work together with the business, private sector, 
and government to create the markets and to do it. But we have to do it 
and start that process now.
  So I think there are long-term and short-term issues on our economy. 
I look forward to working on infrastructure issues with everyone else, 
recognizing, as our Speaker said last week, in 1806 you had the 
Louisiana Purchase period of time, and that was a moment when President 
Jefferson said, This is the time we are going to start building our 
country: the Erie Canal and the canal systems, the road systems that 
got our country going in the industrial revolution.
  A hundred years later, 1908, President Roosevelt coming forward and 
saying, This country is building and developing. Let's preserve some of 
our great areas, and we developed the National Parks System.
  Now 100 years later, to her credit, Speaker  Nancy Pelosi saying this 
is our time to now focus on rebuilding this country: our road systems, 
sewer systems, bridge systems, all of those kinds of things. It has 
everything to do with the economy. It has everything to do with the 
quality of life. Our commerce, people's quality of life, these are the 
things that we need to be working on together. Where there's a will, 
there's a way is my attitude, and I know we are going to do this all 
together.
  Mr. YARMUTH. It's always wonderful to discuss these issues with my 
colleague on the floor.
  And we have just a few minutes left. We have a fundamental decision 
to make in this country, and it is a basic choice, and that is what the 
role of government is, what the role of the Federal Government is. And 
on the one side, I think we have those that believe the role of the 
Federal Government is to get out of the way and to let whatever happens 
happen. And the other side, and I think most of us in this room would 
agree, that there is a legitimate role for the government to try to 
promote the type of progress through investments and the proper 
priorities that will make this a better country, and, basically, 
whether you believe government has a role in setting the direction of 
the country or whether it is basically just to get out of the way and 
let the most powerful people and the biggest corporations decide what 
is going to happen and let kind of a Darwinian atmosphere prevail.
  So I would like to allow everyone to close briefly to whatever they 
have to say kind of related to that fundamental choice we face or to 
talk about the issue of priorities as we look forward to this budget 
process again this year.
  Mr. WALZ of Minnesota. I so enjoy listening to the eloquence and 
thoughtfulness of this. The gentleman did sum it up about the 
priorities, and both gentlemen from Kentucky, Florida, and New York 
focusing on education and seeing it as an investment.
  Of course, being a high school teacher, every chance I get to get 
into a classroom, I jump at it. And Monday I had the chance to teach a 
government class in a small town actually in the area served by the 
Lewis and Clark Rural Water Project. And I will just leave you this, 
and you can decide, again, what sense does this make.
  The teacher was very excited about their first-year teaching job. 
They started out making $28,500 a year. Because of the decisions that 
have been made here and the decisions that have been made in St. Paul, 
the insurance for that family for him to provide for his wife and 
children was $14,100. So before taxes, our schoolteachers are making 
$14,400. If you take taxes out of this, we probably have a violation of 
minimum wage that's happening. That's the decisions that have been 
made.
  But I go back to, once again, the President is not talking about 
that. The President is asking for how can we make tax cuts permanent 
for millionaires, and this Nation needs to decide what is our next 
generation going to do if we're not willing to invest.
  Mr. YARMUTH. I would like to yield to my colleague from New York.
  Mr. HALL of New York. I would like to close by saying as college 
costs rise, this President eliminates programs to help pay low-income 
students for higher education. As health care costs rise, this budget 
proposes a significant cut in both Medicare and Medicaid. It actually 
cuts funding for the Environmental Protection Agency, which would 
endanger the health and welfare of all Americans.
  So to quote from this President Bush's father, the first President, 
Herbert Walker Bush, when he was responding to the invasion of Kuwait 
by Saddam Hussein, This will not stand. I will say, as far as this 
budget being brought to this Congress, this will not stand. It will be 
changed, and I hope the next time around on the floor of the House we 
will be talking about the positive changes that we've made to reflect 
the priorities of the American people which we were elected to espouse.
  Mr. YARMUTH. I thank the gentleman for his comments, and I'd like to 
call on Mr. Klein from Florida for closing remarks.
  Mr. KLEIN of Florida. I am an eternal optimist, like everyone in the 
Chamber, Democrats and Republicans.

[[Page H617]]

I feel the American people are up to the challenge. We are up to 
sacrifice. And we're going to do this. And we will convince the 
administration along the way here that it's the right thing to do. And 
we're going to continue to rebuild our country and be successful. But 
let's put our nose down and work hard. And I look forward to working 
with all my colleagues to accomplish that.

  Mr. YARMUTH. I thank all my colleagues. And I'd like to end where we 
began, and that is that when these majority makers, our freshman class, 
was elected in 2006, we were elected because the country thought that 
the government of the United States had the wrong priorities, that we 
needed a new set of priorities, we needed a new direction. We've 
committed ourselves to that new direction. I think as we approach this 
budgetary process and all areas that we have to do, we will seek a new 
direction for the American people.

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