[Congressional Record Volume 154, Number 60 (Wednesday, April 16, 2008)]
[House]
[Pages H2434-H2440]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                          IRAQ AND THE ECONOMY

  The SPEAKER pro tempore (Ms. Tsongas). Under the Speaker's announced 
policy of January 18, 2007, the gentleman from Florida (Mr. Klein) is 
recognized for 60 minutes as the designee of the majority leader.
  Mr. KLEIN of Florida. Madam Speaker, good evening. It is a pleasure 
to be here tonight on behalf of the freshman class. It certainly has 
been an honor to serve here this last year, and to be joined by Mr. 
Hall of New York, and a number of other Members who are going to join 
us tonight.
  What we are going to talk about tonight is something that I think is 
weighing very heavily on the minds of Americans right now, and that is 
the economy. We understand because the United States is the most 
resilient, optimistic, innovative country in the world, that we will 
persevere and we will work out the issues that have caused some of the 
problems in our economy right now.
  But that being said, as we speak today, there are people all over the 
United States who are hurting. They are hurting because their jobs may 
be threatened or they have lost their jobs or lost confidence that 
their job may be here in the next weeks and months. They are hurting 
because their home may be threatened from foreclosure or difficult 
terms. They may be hurting because gas prices have shot up. If we think 
about what the cost of oil was not that long ago, literally back in 
2002, it was $28 per barrel. And we know as of today, it hit $114 per 
barrel. Shame on all of us for allowing that to be the case today and 
for having this dependence on oil. We have leadership in this House 
that is working on that.
  Americans may be hurting because their health care is a threat, 
preexisting conditions, things that are not covered by their policies, 
and the cost of insurance is just beyond their means.
  There are a lot of things that people are thinking about that are 
weighing them down. At the same time, we have a war in Iraq and in 
Afghanistan. And a fight that we, as Americans, obviously understand 
that when America is challenged, we will fight back. But I think there 
is also a broad recognition that the war we are in, at least in Iraq 
right now, we may have gotten into for some of the wrong reasons, and 
without justification.
  With that being said, I want to thank the men and women who serve 
this country and put their lives on the line every single day in Iraq 
and Afghanistan and around the world. And their families that are back 
home, persevering and doing the necessary things to carry on while 
their loved ones are gone. I know this Congress has taken upon itself 
to be certain and put all of the dollars on the table that have been 
promised in the past but not delivered, to make sure that every man and 
woman when they come home from service in the armed services, that they 
are given all the medical services, mental health services, physical 
health services, and a lifetime of care if necessary. We are committed 
to doing that as Congress.
  But the question today is what should we be doing about Iraq, and how 
does this interplay with the economy. That is the subject of what we 
are going to talk about tonight. Are there things that we should be 
doing to help us as Americans, help us in our daily lives in the United 
States, help us make sure that we have the future, a better future, as 
our parents wished for us, that my children who are in college right 
now, that they will have a better opportunity than I did. That is 
something that is the American dream, and it has been around for 
generations. And yet people today are questioning if that is where we 
are going.
  We have to say what do we have to do to make sure that Americans come 
first and also protect our national security and evaluate this foreign 
policy, this fight in Iraq and other places, yes, is it in fact making 
us safer at home and on our streets. Or is it a disastrous situation 
that has cost us $600 billion up to this point, over 4,000 lives of our 
brave men and women, and 30,000 to 40,000 brave men and women who have 
come back with severe injuries and will require lifetime care.
  We are going to talk about those issues, engage each other on the 
floor, and we are going to continue to invite the American people to 
work with us and come up with some good solutions.
  I am joined by the gentleman from New York (Mr. Hall) who has been a 
strong leader and very focused on the fact that our security is 
important, but our economy is equally important, and I turn the floor 
over to Mr. Hall.
  Mr. HALL of New York. Madam Speaker, it is good to be here with Mr. 
Klein and Congressman Braley.
  Before I talk about Iraq, I have to respond to a couple of things 
that were said a few minutes ago by our friends from the other side of 
the aisle who used the word ``truth'' frequently and talked about their 
children and grandchildren. And I am sure they are sincere, but to 
those of you Americans out there listening, I am sure you can remember 
that when President Bush took over with Republicans controlling both 
Houses of Congress in the year 2001, he had a surplus delivered to him 
by the Clinton administration.
  In the years since then, these folks you just heard talking, who 
profess to know what is best for our economy, have delivered to the 
United States, from a surplus when we were paying down the national 
debt, now the biggest deficit in the history of our country, the 
biggest balance of trade deficit, the biggest individual debt by 
Americans that is held, whether it is credit card debt or home second 
mortgage debt, and now we have the housing crisis, the subprime crisis, 
and various big box stores I was reading today are getting ready to 
file for or have already filed for bankruptcy, including some that we 
have seen proliferating around the country and have assumed that they 
were on solid ground.
  So I would take all the proclamations you just heard and the fancy 
charts that you just saw from the Republican hour before us with a 
grain of salt.
  The tax increase that they claim we are voting for is actually 
something that they, when they installed their tax cuts early in the 
Bush years, they installed it by putting in a sunset provision that is 
their creation, not ours. So I stand here and say that we have not in 
fact voted for anything like this biggest tax increase in history. It 
is a theatrical and dramatic presentation,

[[Page H2435]]

well acted, and possibly even believed by them, but it is not the 
truth.
  As far as Iraq goes, we are spending $12 billion a week in Iraq, and 
I have started to look at the needs of our country and my district in 
particular in terms of how that money could be used here because we are 
basically running on fumes financially. I just visited 13 bridges that 
are on the dangerous faulty bridge list that came out after the I-35 
bridge collapse in Minnesota, and the estimate of the New York State 
Department of Transportation is that it will cost about $60 billion to 
fix all of the deficient bridges in the State of New York. That is 5 
months in Iraq.
  I just came back 2 weeks ago from visiting a Nogales, Arizona, 
checkpoint on the Mexican border. Congressman Braley was on that trip, 
along with Congressman Arcuri. And we asked at every step of the way 
the Customs and Border protection officials what they need from 
Congress and what would their wish list be.
  They said basically if it was Christmas and they could have 
everything that they wanted in terms of infrastructure, primarily what 
they need is more loading docks to unload the bales of marijuana that 
are stacked in front of an 18-wheeler behind a load of watermelons, or 
more bandwidth for more computers so they can get 10 fingerprints 
processed faster to establish somebody's identity. All of it, northern 
border, southern border, all ports on both coasts, $500 million a year 
for 10 years. That is $5 billion.

                              {time}  2030

  That's a little bit less than 2 weeks in Iraq to secure both of our 
borders and all of our ports. That sounds to me like it would actually 
make our country more secure; not that we want to shut the borders 
down, but we'd like to know who's coming and who's going, what's coming 
in and what's going out in terms of drugs, in terms of agricultural 
products that might be infested, in terms of currency smuggling. So 
anyway, there's a real cost to all these things.
  And I would just say, after hearing General Petraeus and Ambassador 
Crocker for the second time, it's clear that the goals in Iraq that 
we're spending this $12 billion a month on have been changing, that the 
goal posts have been moving, that 5 years after the initiation of this 
war and the death of 4,017 of our mothers, fathers, sons and daughters, 
brothers and sisters, I have a figure of 29,676 wounded, the estimate 
before the VA, Veterans Affairs Committee, last summer was that if the 
war stopped at that point we'd be looking at $1 trillion for the 
lifetime care of grievously wounded soldiers returning from Iraq. 
That's four injuries primarily, traumatic brain injury, PTSD, spinal 
cord injuries that cause paralysis, and amputations.
  And these are, fortunately, men and women who we're able to save 
today in the battlefield because our battlefield medicine is so much 
better than it was in Vietnam, for instance. The ratio is about 16:1 
wounded to killed where in Vietnam it was about 2\1/2\:1. That's the 
good news is that we're saving more of these mostly young lives of 
brave Americans who've gone over there and fought and carried out their 
mission.
  But the bad news is that the American public has not been told yet 
that, on top of the figures you mentioned, there's at least $1 trillion 
lifetime care for the wounded from this war that we're already looking 
at being responsible for. And we have to take care of these wounded 
warriors. You can't pay for the war and forget about the warriors.
  So I would just say that we need to look at this in terms of a broad 
view of national security and a realistic, clear-eyed view of where we 
are financially and whether we can afford it.
  And with that, I yield back to Mr. Klein.
  Mr. KLEIN of Florida. Thank you, Mr. Hall. And again, exceptionally 
well-stated. I think we all understand the costs of war. I think we all 
understand, as Americans, there are going to be times, historically, 
when we have to be prepared to fight and to make the necessary 
commitments.
  There are also times when we recognize that, you know, we have to 
look and say, is this the right thing? Is it really achieving our 
national security interests?
  I think we've heard over and over again, and I'm on the Foreign 
Affairs Committee. I know many of you are on the Armed Services 
Committee, we've heard about the fact that we have, the real problem, 
the terrorist threat is in Afghanistan or Pakistan or Iran. And 
unfortunately, the strategy that continues in Iraq is one that puts all 
of our resources and assets and our men and women in one location where 
al Qaeda was not a problem initially. There may be some al Qaeda there, 
but we don't have to deal with them necessarily with a 160,000 troop 
contingent.
  I'd like to now just bring into our conversation another esteemed 
member of our freshman class, the gentleman from Iowa (Mr. Braley).
  Mr. BRALEY of Iowa. I'd like to thank my friend from Florida and also 
my friend from New York. We did have a very enlightening trip to 
Nogales, Arizona, and the Border Patrol and Customs agents that we 
spoke to were all, I think, doing a fantastic job of trying to deal 
with a very difficult situation.
  But one of the things that trip emphasized to me is we often talk in 
this body about the cost of providing border security, the cost of 
providing national and international security.
  And what we know is that the Pentagon traditionally publishes reports 
that provide this body that we serve in their estimate of the cost of 
the war in Iraq and Afghanistan. And we've seen those figures. We've 
viewed some of those figures with skepticism. And we've talked about 
what the published costs of this war are.
  But what we don't talk enough about is what we talked about in 
repeated hearings in the wake of the Walter Reed fiasco. And I was 
fortunate enough to be serving on the Government Oversight and Reform 
Committee, when we had that first hearing out at Walter Reed. We talked 
to the highest ranking Army and Department of Defense medical officers. 
We had a follow-up hearing after the independent review group chaired 
by General Togo West presented its recommendations for the wounded 
warriors project. And I repeatedly pressed the top ranking Army medical 
officers on that very question; what are the hidden costs of the war 
that the American people aren't hearing about?
  And I'm glad my friend from New York brought this up, because there 
is so much going on beneath the surface that the American public 
doesn't hear about.
  If you take the average life expectancy of a 19-year-old male, which 
is representative of who we're sending to Iraq right now, you will find 
that under the published U.S. life tables, those young men have a life 
expectancy of approximately 55 years.
  Now, when they come back in unprecedented percentages with life-
threatening injuries that we will be responsible for caring for the 
rest of their lives, there is an enormous economic cost that we aren't 
hearing about. And so I look forward to the opportunity to discuss with 
my colleagues tonight what some of those hidden costs are, and what the 
American people need to be thinking about as we look at the overall 
economic impact, not just throughout our economy, but on the long-term 
burden we're placing on our children and our grandchildren to provide 
these deserving veterans with the best possible medical care that we 
can.
  Before I get to that though, I want to talk a little bit about what 
we're giving up right now, through the amount of funding that we are 
committing every year to the conflict in Iraq because, just for Fiscal 
Year 2007, we know that this war is costing, under the most 
conservative estimate, $137.6 billion. So the American people may 
wonder, well, what would that actually provide if it wasn't going to 
Iraq?
  Well, for 40 million people in this country, that would provide 
comprehensive health care. Now, think about that. We know that right 
now there are nearly 47 million Americans without health insurance. So 
that cost alone would almost completely eliminate that gap.
  We know that that cost that we're spending this year in Iraq would 
hire 2.2 million elementary school teachers, provide affordable housing 
for over a million different housing units, and provide 142 million 
homes in this country with renewable electricity.
  And to break that down into a smaller level, I represent the First 
District of Iowa. The taxpayers I represent in the First District have 
paid, to date,

[[Page H2436]]

$770 million in one congressional district alone, as their share of the 
cost of this war. What would that mean back in the First District of 
Iowa?
  Well, it would hire almost 19,000 public safety officers. It would 
hire almost 17,000 music and art teachers. It would provide 126,000 
full tuition university scholarships at public universities, and build 
86 brand new elementary schools. So when we talk about the actual 
financial burden that we are facing every day because of the rising 
cost of this war, it is enormous.
  And Congressman Klein, maybe you could talk a little bit about what 
you've heard from the people you represent in a different part of the 
country, where there are different needs, but also very similar 
problems that taxpayers you represent are facing.
  Mr. KLEIN of Florida. I thank the gentleman from Iowa for explaining, 
not only the aggregate cost, but certainly what's happening in Iowa. I 
know one of our colleagues in our freshman class, Mr. Space from Ohio, 
he has explained to us the impact in his district in rural parts of 
Ohio and how important it is for him to help the local people get 
beyond this.
  I'm going to explain it a slightly different way, because, again, I 
think it's the tangible side of this thing that people need to 
understand. The cost per day that we are currently spending, and this 
is independent information; there's no question that this is accurate. 
It comes from the Library of Congress Research Service.
  The cost per day that the war is costing us, if you will, $339 
million per day. That is a staggering amount of money.
  Now, again, I'm not here to say that we don't have to fight wars, or 
don't have to do the necessary things to protect Americans. But when we 
come to the conclusion, as most Americans have, that the strategy of 
keeping the men and women in place the way they are is not advancing 
our national security, we should question whether that money is being 
well-spent.
  But I've introduced something today in the House, which I'm going to 
begin to talk about more actively, and I'm sure the gentlemen here 
tonight will chime in on this as well, and that is, whether people 
support the war or not, and I know there's differences of opinion on 
this, I think every American understands that at $339 million per day, 
it's about time that the Iraqi government step up and pay its fair 
share.
  And whether we're talking about the cost of fuel for our operations 
over there, whether we're talking about the cost of rebuilding, whether 
we're talking about the training of their military, after five full 
years and $600 billion, now coming out to $339 million more every 
single day, for all the reasons that Mr. Braley has already mentioned 
about the savings and what could be applied in the United States, or 
maybe dealing with reducing the deficit or dealing with taxes, any 
number of different strategies to make life better for Americans, it's 
about time the Iraqi people step up, and if they want us there, the 
government, pay their fair share.
  And I'll just throw out a few facts as to why I believe this is so 
important. First of all, our President, Mr. Rumsfeld and others, when 
the war was presented to us in the first place, they told us that this 
was a war and a rebuilding effort that was going to be paid for by 
Iraqi oil money.
  Iraq sits on the second largest quantity, second largest quantity of 
oil reserves in the world. They've got tens of billions of dollars in 
bank accounts, as we speak, that are not being applied toward the 
rebuilding effort. That is unacceptable.
  As an American, as a taxpayer, I hope every American understands this 
and joins us. This is not a Democrat issue. This is not a Republican 
issue. This is an American taxpayer issue that we need to all band 
together and say, you know, whether or not you're for the war or not, 
absolutely, every American should say, enough is enough. We've paid our 
fair share. We've put our men and women on the line, and it's time for 
the Iraqis to pay for the cost of this continuing effort to the extent 
it continues into the future.
  So I've offered House Resolution 1111, which was filed today, and I'm 
looking forward to discussing this with many of the Members. I've 
already spoken to a number of Members, and they're very interested. 
It's being offered in a bipartisan way in the Senate, and I think this 
has the opportunity of finding some common ground in changing the 
dynamics of who's paying for this, the American people or the Iraqi 
government, who wants us, for whatever reason, to continue this effort 
in this way.
  And I would suggest to you, and rightfully so, that 1 day of the war 
could provide for 48,000 homeless vets to have a roof over their head, 
men and women who served in Vietnam and other wars.
  2,000 new Border Patrol guards. And Mr. Hall just told us, and Mr. 
Braley, about how they were down on the border and saw what's going on. 
We have border patrol needs. And just again, just 1 day, 2000 more 
Border Patrol guards for a year.
  We talked about health care. We can go on and on and on. But the 
bottom line is, it's time for a change. It's time for a change with the 
policy, it's time to re-look at this whole effort. But certainly, at a 
minimum, it's time for the Iraqi government to pay for the cost of this 
operation.
  Mr. Hall, I know that you've got some thoughts on this as well, so 
please join us in this conversation.
  Mr. HALL of New York. Well, in fact I do. And I thank the gentleman. 
You know, I saw 60 Minutes, I think this last Sunday, and they had an 
interview about the topic you just mentioned, the Iraqi windfall due to 
the price of oil, and how those tens of billions dollars are sitting in 
accounts. And the Iraqi officials interviewed on the TV show said they 
can't get at them to pay for their own reconstruction; and the American 
taxpayer has to keep paying the way we are because they don't yet have 
the systems in place or the infrastructure or the banking technology to 
be able to transfer the money.
  Now, either that's a really lame excuse, or we've been missing the 
boat by not helping them set that up. Or both.
  But you know, I have to just, not to be, not to carp on an old topic, 
but to hearken back to the previous hour and the other side of the 
aisle, our friends' presentation about budgetary truth. I would point 
out that the President's budget that he sent down to us this year shows 
no money for Iraq after the first of the year. So that's obviously not 
an honest document.
  It also assumes the AMT, the Alternative Minimum Tax which was 
supposed to be a tax on the richest of the rich and has become instead 
a tax that's been digging deeper and deeper into the middle class, and 
we've been working to change that. Our budget does change that and 
pushes it back up to the wealthiest 4 percent or so of Americans.
  But the President's budget assumes all the money that will be scooped 
out of the middle class, if nothing is done, will be available. So I 
just had to say those couple of things about that.
  Mr. BRALEY of Iowa. Would the gentleman yield for a question?
  Mr. HALL of New York. Yes, please.
  Mr. BRALEY of Iowa. One of the things that we face every year is 
something called an emergency supplemental, which is a request from the 
President for billions of dollars of additional funding to fund the 
ongoing war in Iraq and Afghanistan.
  Now, I would just ask my colleagues, and I'll pose this first to you, 
Mr. Hall. Where I come from in Iowa, an emergency is something that is 
unexpected and unanticipated that you can't plan for. But I am at a 
loss to understand why, after being in Iraq longer than we were engaged 
in the Civil War, after being in Iraq longer than we were engaged in 
World War II, we continue to face emergency supplemental funding 
requests for these wars, when the Department of Defense and the 
Pentagon and the President have to know how much they anticipate when 
they send their budget down for us to consider.

                              {time}  2045

  Mr. HALL of New York. Not only do they know, but the President, as we 
speak, is negotiating, or his representatives are negotiating a status 
of forces agreement to keep our troops in Iraq for some unknown time. 
So they obviously are planning on it. They're just not putting it in 
the budget.
  And I agree with you that the first year you could call it an 
emergency, but after that, this should be on budget. We're building up 
enough debt that we're passing on to our children and

[[Page H2437]]

grandchildren with interest anyway, and in order for the public to know 
what is really being done in their name, this should not be a 
supplemental; this should be in the budget.
  I would also like to comment about my trip to Iraq last October. When 
I slept in the Green Zone in one of Saddam's pool houses next to one of 
his mansions, which, by the way, I think we should give back to the 
Iraqi people at this point. He was a tyrant, but he was their tyrant, 
and he built the mansion with their money and it might help us lose 
that image that some of them have of us as occupiers if we gave them 
back their property.
  But at any rate, when I slept in the Green Zone, we were told, use 
the bottled water, don't drink the water out of the tap; if you hear a 
siren, there's a concrete bunker over there; go jump in it because 
we've had a few mortar rounds coming in. But that was basically all the 
warning we got.
  Last week when the fighting was going at a higher level of intensity 
when the battle of Basra was on and the Green Zone took so many mortar 
and rocket rounds that we lost two soldiers dead and 17 wounded in the 
Green Zone, they were telling people then and since then to sleep in 
your body armor and your helmet. So October, we were not told that. 
Last week and the week before, they were telling our diplomats and our 
traveling Members of Congress that. That's not progress; that's back-
sliding.
  And Albert Einstein, I think, was the guy who once defined insanity 
as trying the same thing over and over again expecting a different 
result. That's where we're at now.
  There's a friend of mine who's a sheriff in one of the Upstate 
counties of New York who is a West Point graduate and a classmate of my 
brother-in-law, 1969 West Point grad, who told me a couple years back 
that one of the first things they learned at West Point in officer 
training class is never send a military force to do a job that is not 
militarily achievable.
  And this is to say nothing critical or to overshadow the 
accomplishments of our forces. Our men and women in uniform have done 
an extraordinary job and we should all be extremely proud of them. They 
have been creative. They have been extremely loyal not just to our 
country but loyal to each other. They have been energetic and 
committed. They will do anything we ask of them and anything their 
commanders ask of them.
  But our responsibility as a civilian government, the kind of 
government that our Constitution sets up where the civilian government 
and the President, ultimately, is Commander in Chief, but Congress as 
well has the right to not only declare war but also to fund Armies. And 
we need to be careful that we use them responsibly. These are not 
chattel. Our men and women in uniform are human beings that are 
stressed out with record rates right now of suicide, divorce, and 
bankruptcy among veterans that have returned from this war, as well as 
among veterans of previous conflicts.
  And I think that it's time for us to reevaluate whether this is 
really making our Nation more secure and whether it is worth the $12 
billion for nation building that we might better use for rebuilding the 
Nation of the United States.
  Mr. KLEIN of Florida. And these are certainly the questions that our 
country is wrestling with right now, and as I turn it back over to Mr. 
Braley, I will just mention again that on the economy side of this 
thing, and I think about the people back home and what they're thinking 
about as they're looking towards the next election and just thinking 
about the next week's expenses. And one statistic jumped out at me when 
I was hearing about gas prices. Gas prices in the United States are 
about $3.39 per gallon, extraordinary, at a time when the oil companies 
are still going to be making historic profits.
  The United States military is paying $3.23 a gallon in Iraq. That's 
$153 million per month. At the same time, Iraqis, when they can get 
gas, are paying $1.30 per gallon of gas. What is wrong with this 
picture? Our military is paying $3.23 to buy gas in Iraq on our dime, 
and Iraqis are getting it at $1.30.
  So again, it's this question of as Americans, and being the great 
people that we are and trying to do what we can to help here and there, 
what can we do differently to help protect Americans deal with their 
daily lives and, at the same time, protect our country?
  Mr. BRALEY of Iowa. Well, as our good friend and colleague from 
Arkansas Marion Berry would say, That dog don't hunt. This is a classic 
example of what we've seen over and over and over again from 
procurement decisions that are being made that have an adverse effect 
on American taxpayers. And I think if you go back to the beginning when 
they set up the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq, that it was 
set up with the intent of using Iraqi assets to rebuild the country and 
to shift the dependency from the government or from the United States 
back to the Iraqi people through the oil revenues that we're talking 
about.
  And we've seen in committee hearings here photographs of Ford trucks 
full of pallets that had $250 million in cash per pallet that were part 
of a $2.1 billion one-day transfer of cash to the Iraqi government, the 
largest single transfer of cash in U.S. history. And that was part of a 
transfer of cash that led to $9 billion of missing money that was 
supposed to be part of the initial reconstruction of Iraq.
  Then the idea was to use those Iraqi oil revenues to pick up the 
responsibility and complete the work of rebuilding Iraq. And instead, 
we know that one of the big challenges the Iraqi government has faced 
is coming to some agreement on the division of oil revenues, and that's 
been a major obstacle to rebuilding the country and bringing about 
national reconciliation. And who is paying the tab for that? U.S. 
taxpayers.
  That is why the issue we're talking about is so important. Because 
when U.S. taxpayers are bearing the burden of this war, it has an 
enormous ripple effect throughout our economy because one of the things 
we know is that when we have these ever-growing trade deficits with 
countries like China, which is our principal creditor, it makes it very 
difficult to keep the economy in this country rolling along providing 
the types of goods and services at a reasonable rate; and that has an 
enormous impact throughout the economy. And I'm sure as we get further 
into this, we will have some real examples of the enormous impact on 
various sectors of the U.S. economy from the burden that we are all 
responsible for.
  But I have to tell you, the idea that you mentioned about shifting 
the burden in H. Res. 111, I can tell you this is an enormously popular 
bipartisan idea. In fact, last weekend in my home State of Iowa, the 
Des Moines Register interviewed every member of the Iowa congressional 
delegation, Republicans, Democrats, Senators, Representatives, and 
everyone was unanimous in their sentiment that is exactly the one you 
expressed in your resolution.
  It is time for the Iraqis to pick up the tab for their own well-being 
and let the American taxpayers focus on the enormous economic problems 
we're dealing with at home: The bailout of Bear Stearns, the subprime 
mortgage crisis, all of the things that you work on every day in the 
Financial Services Committee. And because of that unique role that you 
play here in Congress, I think you have some special insights that 
probably would be very enlightening to the people watching tonight and 
the people of this country about what you're dealing with on a daily 
basis that's being impacted by this ongoing financial commitment.
  Mr. KLEIN of Florida. I thank the gentleman, and being from Iowa, and 
obviously one of our farm States, you have a direct understanding of 
what the cost of food production is and for farmers, the cost of fuel 
and the cost that is just driving the inflation numbers in the United 
States. And most Americans aren't even aware of the fact that when you 
hear this inflation discussion that energy prices, that's gas prices at 
the pump, and food prices, are not even part of that discussion. That's 
not factored into these inflation numbers. It's everything else.
  And the story we're given is, well, those fluctuate too much. That's 
not a reliable factor. Well, you know something? That's the bottom 
line. When people go to the grocery store every week, I know back in my 
town, and they see a dozen eggs cost this and all of a sudden they're 
up 80 cents for a dozen eggs or a gallon of milk or bread or 
vegetables, no matter what it is,

[[Page H2438]]

there is a huge inflationary factor tied into the cost of food at a 
time when wages are not keeping up. So people are feeling stretched and 
pushed and stressed.
  So it is important for us to focus on this, and again, I appreciate 
the gentleman's comments on our House resolution because I think it is 
going to be something that all of us, and everybody has been talking 
about this; this is certainly not my idea. I think we can all work 
together in changing the direction of how this is going to play out.
  And yes, it will probably be a new President before there may be some 
major changes in the military strategy, and I would hope and I know I 
have heard a lot of good generals talk about some of the different 
ideas that they have on changing that. But at a minimum, I think most 
Americans would say that wow, I thought they were already paying for 
it, and if they're not, they should be. And that's something that I 
hope that we can find common ground. That's what Americans elected us 
for, not to be Democrats or Republicans, but to come together as 
Americans and say how do we solve this problem, just like we started 
the discussion tonight.
  Mr. Hall maybe can share with us some of the economy and the economic 
issues that you're hearing from your neighbors and friends and how we 
can try to address some of these.
  Mr. HALL of New York. Well, yes. I would just tell you that we are 
way behind on our infrastructure in this country in terms of keeping it 
maintained to a level of safety or efficiency just to keep traffic 
moving.
  I had a construction worker tell me yesterday that he was working 
with some of his compatriots on the Tappan Zee Bridge which, as you 
know, crosses the Hudson River just north of New York and carries the 
New York State thruway and millions of cars a day commuting to and from 
the New York metro area.
  Twelve years ago they were replacing and welding plates to repair 
potholes and damage that has been done by the salt and acid rain, and 
pigeon droppings, if you can believe it, are a major cause of corrosion 
on bridges. And at that time 12 years ago, he and his men that were 
working on the bridge said if they did not have to drive across it to 
go to work to feed their families, they would not drive across it 
because they felt it wasn't safe then. And they told their kids if they 
could help it, please don't drive across that bridge. 12 years ago.
  Now we're finally getting down to the point where the thruway 
authority and the State of New York are looking at building a new 
Tappan Zee Bridge because the support pilings of the bridge are either 
being undercut by the tide or eaten by aquatic worms, if you can 
believe that, or both. There are so many kinds of damage that has 
happened in a bridge that only had a 30-year life span, and it was 
built more than 30 years ago, and nothing's been done to get ready to 
build its successor.
  As I'm sure you both do, I'm approached in the district every week by 
town supervisors or mayors or what have you asking for help with a 
sewage treatment plant, for instance, in the town of New Windsor, New 
York, that's 60 years old. It's well beyond its design life, and when 
it breaks down, if there's a heavy storm rain event and it becomes 
overtaxed with capacity from the storm run-off, you get raw sewage 
running into the Hudson River, which we've been trying and pretty much 
succeeding in trying to clean up in terms of sewage. The river is much 
better. It's actually swimmable, and to some extent, some people eat 
fish out of it, but I think that disregards the PCBs, which is another 
issue.
  But every one of these water treatments for drinking water, sewage 
treatment for disposing of wastewater, bridges, tunnels, roads, rail, 
which we are so far behind the rest of the world in, Japan, the 
European Nations in the EU have a so much more advanced rail system 
that it actually substitutes for a short hop air travel in this 
country, what we would consider to be flying from New York to 
Washington or New York to Boston. They do that by train on a high-speed 
train that takes virtually the same time or less because it delivers 
them from inner city to inner city. It eliminates the taxi ride out to 
the airport and back in from the airport at the other end.

                              {time}  2100

  It eliminates the taxi ride out to the airport and back in from the 
airport at the other end. These are all things that cost money.
  And you know what else? They hire people. They hire construction 
workers, they hire sheet metal workers, they hire engineers, they hire 
electrical workers, they hire plumbers. And just as FDR did back when 
we had the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl, and the incredible 
unemployment and deprivation when schools were closed across the 
country for lack of money to pay teachers, we saw really desperate 
times in this country which I hope we don't see again. And I hope we 
move fast enough to try to take the steps, not just to build assets 
here at home, but at the same time, to put money back into the economy 
by hiring people to build this infrastructure. That's the first place 
that I would start.
  And I think that there's a lot of agreement, when I talk to Members 
on both sides of the aisle, and certainly when I talk to my 
constituents, that that's a good use of the money that we're--whether 
we're borrowing the money or not, and hopefully we will be able to pay 
as we go, as in this Congress, this House of Representatives, under 
PAYGO, we've been trying to do it, but wherever we come up with the 
money, putting it into our own infrastructure here at home is a really 
good place to jump-start the economy.
  Mr. KLEIN of Florida. Mr. Braley, obviously a lot of things happening 
in Iowa and in the Midwest, and the economy and its impact on the 
communities that you represent. Why don't you share with us some of the 
experiences you're having and some of the things we're doing in 
Congress to address them.
  Mr. BRALEY of Iowa. Sure. And I'm just going to pick up where Mr. 
Hall left off. We both have the pleasure of serving on the 
Transportation and Infrastructure Committee here in Congress. And one 
of the things that we hear about every day is not just the benefits of 
having, oh, $137 billion to invest in infrastructure--let's just pull 
that number out of the air--but what happens if you don't address your 
critical infrastructure needs. Because we hear, for example, that for 
every 1 minute delay that UPS drivers have in congested urban areas in 
New York, in Florida, maybe lesser in Iowa, but unique, different types 
of delays, it imposes enormous economic costs in shipping those goods, 
which is then passed on to consumers all over this country.
  So when I fly into the airport in Moline and I have to cross the I-74 
bridge, which is one of the functionally obsolete, structurally 
deficient bridges in my district, and they've got a lane closed down 
either for repair work or because an accident is there, it may take you 
half an hour to drive from one side of the Mississippi River to the 
other side. And all that does is slow down commerce, it slows down 
people. And at a time of rising fuel costs, it adds enormously to the 
prices that we pay to get where we need to go.
  And each of us has unique transportation delay issues. Mr. Klein 
comes from an urban area in Florida where traffic congestion in many 
ways is a way of life. And you're sitting there waiting to move, your 
engine is running, and you don't get very high fuel efficiency from 
that expensive fuel you've got. A lot of my constituents live in rural 
parts of Iowa, and for them to get basic goods and services they have 
to drive to a county seat town or to a larger urban area to get what 
they need. And they have larger fuel costs simply to get what they need 
to buy to take care of their basic needs. And when we ignore these 
infrastructure needs that we've been talking about, all it does is have 
very large ripple effects.
  But one of the other things that we talked about here is our whole 
energy policy. I am very proud of the fact that my State is, I believe, 
pretty much in the epicenter of the renewable energy explosion. Whether 
it's ethanol, biodiesel, wind energy, one of the things we're trying to 
do is create an environment where we can reduce our dependency on 
foreign oil and not have to worry so much about the impact of what's 
going on with the Iraqi oil fields on our domestic fuel availability.

[[Page H2439]]

  And so it's very exciting to see the potential, but one of the things 
that's disturbing is when we miss opportunities to do more. So if you 
look at wind energy capacity, most people would be shocked, I think, to 
realize that the State of North Dakota has the highest wind energy 
capacity of any State in the country. So they are a prime location for 
us to sell these wind turbines we're producing in Iowa and start to 
reduce that dependency on foreign oil.
  But they've got a problem. It's the exact same problem Mr. Hall and I 
saw with the border patrol down in Arizona, and that is, it's one thing 
to say we need to secure our borders, but if you don't have 
infrastructure in place to access the border, you can't do your job. 
They've got a problem in North Dakota because they don't have a grid 
right now that can handle the energy capacity they would generate and 
put onto the grid and send out to people in Florida and New York, who 
have high demand and don't have the ability to meet their energy needs.
  So when we're talking about how this war and the funding for the war 
is impacting Americans, I think that the ripple effect is enormous. And 
we're really only scratching the surface.
  Mr. KLEIN of Florida. Well, I would certainly pick up on that because 
one of the first things that this Congress did, with our freshman class 
encouraging the way, was to say that we were going to change the way 
Congress paid for and spent the American taxpayers' money, and we 
adopted something called ``PAYGO,'' pay-as-you-go budgeting. In other 
words, we can't pass a bill without it having been paid for in the 
budget. You've got to find the money somewhere in the budget; you can't 
say, well, maybe we'll have more money next year. That's just the way 
everybody runs their business back home, that's just the way everybody 
runs their personal checkbook. I know that my wife and I operate that 
way, and I'm sure everybody else on the floor here does the same thing. 
You just can't keep spending without having the money to pay it back.
  And the reality is that, if you think about that, if you think about 
that responsible budgeting and the fact that we're spending--the number 
I keep throwing out--$339 million per day, think about the opportunity 
of investing in new energy alternatives. And you hear, well, maybe with 
some of the types of energy alternatives, the renewable energies, 
they're not ready for prime time yet; there are pollution problems with 
this type or some type of hazard. I'm from Florida; we should be 
leading the world in solar power, but there is a battery storage 
capacity issue. Is there an answer? You bet there's an answer. It 
requires our scientists, our business entrepreneurs to sit down and 
figure it out. And with the kind of money that would be available to 
challenge our scientists, our business entrepreneurs to develop solar, 
wind, wave, any number of various alternatives, to make us energy 
independent and then get rid of this oil import of 60 percent of our 
oil from the Middle East and Venezuela every day, which I think every 
American understands is a national security problem and all the other 
things that go along with that, we would be in great shape.
  And that is what we, as Americans, are all about. We think forward, 
we're visionary, and we need to recognize that these opportunities that 
are being presented to us on becoming energy independent over the next 
number of years, as many of us refer to it, the Apollo Project--Mr. 
Hall is a leader in our class on these issues--that this is where we 
need to be moving forward for our future on national security, for our 
jobs, and opportunities that will help us engage in a stronger future 
economy, and for an environment. It all ties together very nicely.
  Mr. Hall, I know you are very interested in this as well, so please 
join us.
  Mr. HALL of New York. I thank the gentleman from Florida.
  And I am happy to tell you that there is a solution to the problem of 
what to do with that power while the battery is being developed, it's 
called ``net metering.'' And most States, New York being one of them, I 
believe have net metering which enables you to, if you're a homeowner 
or a business and you put solar panels on your property or on your roof 
and you don't use all that power, it winds the meter backwards and puts 
the power back into the grid and uses the grid as a battery. So that's 
what most people are doing today who have solar panels.
  In fact, I helped the Action Club at the Arlington High School in 
Dutchess County, New York recently acquire a grant from the Dyson 
Foundation of New York, who were very generous and came up with funding 
for them to put solar panels on the roof of the high school. This is 
leadership by high school students who went first. And NYSERDA, the New 
York State Energy and Research Development Authority, I got part of the 
funding from them, developed a design to produce a certain number of 
kilowatts from, I think it's 123 kilowatts or so, anyway, it's a 
substantial amount of power toward what their school uses.
  And then they came to us. And knowing how the appropriation process 
here in Congress can take so long and it's not a sure thing--last year 
our appropriations were finally signed into law by the President in 
December--I didn't want them to have to wait that long, so I was able 
to find a private source of funding for them.
  But the point is that, it not only works, but the school kids know 
about it and they want their school to be solar. And I told them after 
they get that installed, they should go get the school bus fleet to use 
20 percent biodiesel.
  I'm burning heating oil in my home in the northeast, where heating 
oil is a major expense, especially this last winter, the cost rising 
the way it has has been very harmful to many people, especially those 
on fixed incomes. And I just called up the local dealer for heating oil 
and said, do you have a biodiesel blend? And the guy on the other end 
of the phone said, sure, it's a 20 percent soy/biodiesel blend, and I 
own the company, I burn it at home myself. It burns cleaner than 
regular oil. And so I said, send it on over. And for the last two 
winters now my wife and I have been heating our home with a biodiesel 
blend. And that's 20 percent less that has to come from Saudi Arabia or 
some other unstable part of the world where we're funding governments 
that don't like us, that use that money to buy weapons or to fund 
madrassas that teach young people who don't have much opportunity in 
their country, by the way, to advance economically or educationally, 
they teach them to hate Americans or hate Israelis and to do harm to 
us. And then, as Tom Friedman likes to write in the New York Times, we 
have to pay for the other side of the war on terror by sending our 
troops over there to stabilize these unstable parts of the world.
  So that's a lose-lose policy, the old policy that we've been stuck on 
of oil dependency. The win-win-win policy is the one that we're talking 
about, where we use wind, we use biofuels. I mean, Brazil did this 20 
years ago. They decided that they were going to use sugar cane ethanol. 
And they converted their vehicle fleet in the entire country over so 
that now when they drill offshore for oil in Brazil, they sell it on 
the world market and make money off of it, but they don't use it in 
their own vehicles. I think they're a few steps ahead of us. But we can 
get there. We're the nation that put a man on the moon. We're the 
nation that has been able to lead the way in many areas of medicine and 
technology, and certainly computer and software and Internet 
technology. This is something we can do. And we, in government, can 
incentivize it and try to encourage private industry and encourage 
individuals to do it. And make it patriotic, make people know that it's 
patriotic to drive the most efficient vehicle you can in the most 
efficient way that you can. It's patriotic to carpool, it's patriotic 
to use mass transit when you can, and it's certainly patriotic to let 
your elected officials know at every level of government, whether it's 
snowplows in the winter, school buses or UPS fleets or the thruway 
trucks that drive up and down all the time from Albany to New York, 
governmental fleets of vehicles, if we can buy hybrids, as West Chester 
County has done with their bus fleet, they're running not just hybrids, 
but biodiesel hybrids, they're already pyramiding in West Chester 
County on the B line, as they call it, the county bus route, they're 
pyramiding one new technology on top of another. And the next step 
would be plug-in biodiesel hybrids.
  But we can do this. The technologies are here and available. And the 
sooner

[[Page H2440]]

we start getting on the program and using them, the sooner we will be 
able to tell some of the countries that we've, unfortunately, been 
beholden to, whether it's the Saudis to get the oil or whether it's the 
Chinese to borrow the money to pay for the oil, we will soon be able to 
tell them, we don't need you quite so badly, and by the way, we'd like 
to talk to you about human rights and some other things that right now 
we can't be honest about because, in effect, we've lost our sovereignty 
because of this dependency.
  But at any rate, it's a lose-lose-lose policy on one hand and a win-
win-win policy on the other, and I want to see us go for the win-win.
  Mr. KLEIN of Florida. Well, as we begin to wind down, we started this 
discussion about the impact of Iraq and the economy, and the economy 
and Iraq. And I think we started it from the beginning saying this 
country, we Americans have spent $600 billion on this effort in Iraq. 
And at a minimum, as we've discussed tonight, what could we do, 
certainly in the future, in terms of Iraq, from the right standpoint, 
taking responsibility and making it stand up and step up for itself and 
paying for its reconstruction, its fuel needs that Americans are having 
to pay for right now, and the training of its military.
  And those resources, those American dollars can certainly be applied 
in a way to make us safer in dealing with, as you express, national 
security interests by taking us away from the addiction to oil and 
coming up with wonderful new renewable energy sources. The technology 
is there, it's being developed, it's being refined. We can take the 
question of the jobs and our economy right now, and of course the 
environment.
  And so, as we begin to wrap up, if you can give some final thoughts 
as to how the Iraq and the economy are tied together and how we can get 
beyond this point and do good things for this country.
  Mr. BRALEY of Iowa. Well, I thank my friend for the opportunity, and 
also the opportunity to spend time with two of my good friends tonight 
talking about very, very important issues.
  We've focused primarily on the impact of the war in Iraq and the cost 
of the war on the domestic economy here in the United States. But when 
I look at my friend from New York and I look at my friend from Florida, 
two States that really symbolize a growing connection between our 
domestic economy and the global economy, one of the things we know is a 
lot of the issues we've talked about tonight all come back to something 
we all are charged to do when we swore to represent this country, and 
that is to provide security.

                              {time}  2115

  Now that may be security from harm, from foreign interests. It may be 
economic security. But it all comes together. And we know that many 
developing countries, the addiction to energy needs is what keeps them 
suppressed in reaching greater levels of economic stability, and that's 
why oil and the pursuit of oil has played such an important role in the 
last 100 years in the world economy.
  By exporting our knowledge about renewable energy, about new emerging 
economies that can be shared and applied in the global economy, I think 
we can give a great gift to the American people in the return of a 
safer world, a more secure world, and a world where we have the ability 
to be able to predict with greater certainty what the current economic 
trends are going to be and set economic policies, with the assistance 
of the administration and the Federal Reserve, to address these crises 
before they become the full-blown crises that we have been talking 
about on the floor tonight.
  So I look forward to working with my friends and my other colleagues 
here on both sides of the aisle in trying to provide some guidance and 
direction as we get our hands on this very important subject.
  Mr. KLEIN of Florida. I thank the gentleman from Iowa for 
participating tonight on behalf of our freshmen class.
  And if you would like to, Mr. Hall, take a minute to give a close.
  Mr. HALL of New York. Quickly I would just add about Iraq two quotes, 
one from Ambassador Ryan Crocker. When I was over there with our 
Republican colleagues Tom Cole, Ric Keller, Dave Loebsack of Iowa, the 
four Members of Congress sat with the Ambassador, and he was asked by 
one of us, ``What's the state of reconciliation and peace and resolving 
the conflicts between the tribes and the different religious sects?''
  And I was sitting right next to him; so I wrote down his response to 
be sure I had it right. His response was, ``The Maliki Government is 
somewhere between challenged and dysfunctional.'' Now, that was 
October.
  In March General Petraeus stated on March 13, ``No one feels that 
there has been sufficient progress by any means in the area of national 
reconciliation.''
  So it's my contention that not only do the Iraqis need to start 
paying for their own reconstruction, I think they need to take 
responsibility for their own security as well because as long as we are 
putting our men and women in a police role to try to police their civil 
war and their ethnic and tribal and religious differences, it's just 
going to let them continue to be dysfunctional. And when we phase out 
or pull out or whatever you want to call it and get back to the real 
business that this country faces, the real dangers that we face, which, 
as you said before, I believe, are Afghanistan and Pakistan certainly 
more in terms of terrorism, that they will be forced to come to terms 
with whether they want to be a country or whether they want to be three 
separate groups of Kurds and Sunnis and Shia or whatever it is. But 
that's one thing.
  And the other thing is I am a firm believer that after 5 years and a 
least $600 billion spent and over $1 trillion in veterans' benefits 
that we have incurred that we will have to pay out of responsibility 
and the debt that we owe to the men and women who fought in this 
conflict that it's time for us to start looking at what those dollars 
could do at home for the things that we really need to take care of, 
not just for national security but for economic security, education 
security, health security, and all the other meanings of the word.
  So I thank my friends both, and I thank the gentleman from Florida 
for chairing this session.
  Mr. KLEIN of Florida. I thank the gentleman from New York and the 
gentleman from Iowa. It's been an honor and privilege to serve with you 
and all the rest of the Members of our freshmen class, both Democrats 
and Republicans.
  I know the future of our country, the future of our families, our 
children, and I have got two kids in college right now and I know all 
of you have kids in high school and college, we think about that every 
day as we try to make decisions which will be the best for our country 
both from a national security and economic security point of view. And 
I know that we're going to work together in a collegial way to 
accomplish those.
  So I thank you, wish you a good night, and look forward to seeing you 
next week at this time.

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