[Congressional Record Volume 155, Number 73 (Wednesday, May 13, 2009)]
[House]
[Pages H5568-H5575]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                          ECONOMICS AND ENERGY

  The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. Kratovil). Under the Speaker's announced 
policy of January 6, 2009, the gentleman from Iowa (Mr. King) is 
recognized for 60 minutes.
  Mr. KING of Iowa. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.
  I am honored to be recognized to address you here on the floor of the 
House of Representatives in this Nation's most deliberative body of 
debate, at least it used to be, and I hope it is once again, Mr. 
Speaker.
  Having listened to my colleagues here and identified, I think, the 
centerpiece of this debate that's taking place in this country, I 
wanted to address, Mr. Speaker, this evening the idea of where we stand 
with the broad economic view that is what's taking place in the United 
States of America today, and then I'd like to take us back to where we 
are with the overall cap-and-trade, cap-and-tax, greenhouse gas, global 
warming, climate change debate that's going on. The language seems to 
be drifting and moving a little bit, Mr. Speaker, on this. And I will 
go to the climate change component of this.
  But first, Mr. Speaker, I want to address this situation on where we 
are from a broad economic perspective so that there is a backdrop in 
order to think about how we go forward with policy and what is the 
right policy for the United States of America within the context of the 
world and the globe.
  We are the global economic leader. We are a large percentage of the 
world's economy. We have been leading this world's economy because we 
have, are, or were a free market economy. And the foundations for 
American exceptionalism should be clear to everyone on each side of the 
aisle.
  Of course that foundation is rooted back in the philosophy that is 
the foundation for our Constitution, which is the Declaration of 
Independence. It's rooted in the natural law and the natural rights 
that come from God and that our founders all unanimously recognized. 
And as they took those principles and laid them out in the Declaration 
of Independence and then later on, about 13 years later, were able to 
get that language into the Constitution and get the Constitution 
ratified and give birth to a nation, what made us such a great nation? 
Why didn't we wallow back into the problems that so many other nations 
have had? What distinguishes the United States of America from the 
other countries in the world?
  Now there have been powerful economies in the world. There have been 
powerful cultures and societies. The Founding Fathers studied a lot of 
those. They looked at the Greeks and the Romans, for example. They 
didn't have the opportunity to take a look at the former Soviet Union, 
but they would have taken a lesson from the former Soviet Union. It 
seems as though many Members in this Congress have missed that little 
history lesson, even though they lived it as contemporaries.
  But these foundations of American exceptionalism, many of them in the 
Bill of Rights, the right to freedom of speech, religion, expression, 
assembly, a right to keep and bear arms, a right to property that was 
diminished, I think to some degree, by the Kelo decision in the Supreme 
Court about 3 years ago when they struck three

[[Page H5569]]

words from the Fifth Amendment of the Constitution which says, ``nor 
shall private property be taken for public use without just 
compensation.''
  The Supreme Court struck these three words ``for public use'' out of 
the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States. That's 
the effect of their decision. And that, Mr. Speaker, isn't just me. 
That was my independent conclusion and analysis from reading the 
Supreme Court decision later on after I spoke on the floor on the 
issue, and as I prepared to rebut the now Chairman of the Financial 
Services Committee from Massachusetts (Mr. Frank). So I listened to him 
in preparation to--generally I would disagree with him on most 
everything that comes to this floor. This time he and I agreed 
verbatim. And I read later on Justice O'Connor's dissenting opinion, 
which also was right down the line with the position that Mr. Frank and 
myself and many others--the Supreme Court had undermined property 
rights by their Kelo decision.
  But that is one of the major keys to American exceptionalism, that 
right to keep and own property, ``nor shall private property be taken 
for public use without just compensation.''
  But in New London, Connecticut, they took private property and they 
transferred it over to another private entity, a development 
corporation, for the sake of what they considered to be a better public 
interest because they could collect more tax dollars from the developed 
property rather than the lesser-developed property.
  It was a flawed fundamental constitutional principle that they made 
that decision upon, and now we're seeing an incremental encroachment 
upon other property rights in this country. But property rights being 
one of the pillars of American exceptionalism, I laid out those other 
points. Many of them are in the First Amendment, the Second Amendment.
  But there are other reasons. One is that this Nation was founded by a 
robust people that skimmed the cream of the crop off of the donor 
nations as immigrants came to the United States with a dream. It was 
hard to get here, and yet there was so much to be gained and achieved 
when they arrived here. And they didn't all make it. Some of them 
failed. Some of them went back to their home country. Some of them 
didn't make the cut at Ellis Island. About 2 percent were turned around 
and put back on the boat and sent back to Europe back in those days, 
100 or so years ago.

                              {time}  2030

  But those that stayed, many of them exceeded their own expectations. 
The success of the vitality of newly arriving immigrants in this 
country was another one of the foundations of American exceptionalism 
built upon these constitutional rights, including property rights, 
built upon free enterprise capitalism. That desire to succeed and that 
will to succeed along with a culture that celebrated success, those 
being some of the underpinnings of the pillars of American 
exceptionalism.
  Well, as we look at how this has unfolded, these things happened, 
those pillars that came together at that time flowed from Western 
civilization, became the embodiment of Western civilization. And while 
that was going on, this robust people that had these new rights that 
came from God and this right to property and a right to return on their 
investment, these new rights that were there also matched up with a 
continent that was almost unlimited in natural resources and a 
continent that was being developed by a country that kept taxes low, 
regulations low, and in many cases nonexistent so that the reward was 
there for the entrepreneur. And that culture, that tradition, and those 
rights that are the foundations for the success of this great country 
are being eroded today at a pace faster than anytime in the history of 
the United States of America.
  Now, we saw these lessons of these failed countries, and we saw Rome 
rot out from within and corruption that pulled it down. It couldn't 
hold itself together because of the corruption that was within Rome. We 
saw the nation states arise. They started out to be city states, and 
then to the limits of the languages also went the borders of the 
countries and the nation states of Europe over the last 250 years or 
so. And they fought wars that were clashes of cultures and economies to 
determine the boundaries and the borders of the nation states. But 
still over the last 200 or more years, the nation state remains as a 
very essential successful institution on this planet. The nation state 
that looked out for the interest of its citizens, the nation state that 
had clear borders, the borders that usually went out to the limits of 
the language itself because that's what defined the common interest of 
the common people, and to a lesser degree that does so today, but it's 
been a foundation of a nation state.
  And this nation state of the United States of America, this unique 
experiment that brought people from all over the world and put them in 
here on this country with these nearly unlimited natural resources, 
with the low taxes and the low or no regulation, and a culture that was 
rooted in religious freedom that had at its foundation Christianity and 
the work ethic that comes from the Protestant work ethic and the 
Reformation, those things that flowed within that culture, this country 
became a giant petri dish that was teeming with success. That's 
American exceptionalism. It's who we are. That's why the rest of the 
world has had trouble keeping up with us. That's why the rest of the 
world doesn't match up with us in patents or trademarks or copyrights. 
That's why the rest of the world hasn't matched up in the growth of 
their economy, they haven't matched up militarily, they haven't matched 
culturally, because we have this robust freedom. And sometimes there's 
a price to be paid for that. But we lead the world. We are a nation 
that leads the world with freedom. And the rest of the world looks on 
full of awe and respect and sometimes some trepidation because they are 
really not sure what's coming out of the United States of America. And, 
Mr. Speaker, I will tell you that I'm at the point now where I am not 
very sure either on how this has drifted.
  But as I watched this economy that needed to take a correction 
because there was a housing bubble in this economy, Henry Paulson, then 
Secretary of the Treasury, came to this Capitol on September 19, 2008, 
said, I have got to have $700 billion. I've got to have it right now, 
and I've got to pour it into the economy, and I'll pick up this toxic 
debt and we'll do what we can to stop this impending free-fall of this 
economy. Well, after more than a week of running around this Capitol 
and out to the White House and doing press conferences and pressing 
this Congress to appropriate the $700 billion, we sure saw the economy 
go into a tailspin in a hurry, and some of it accelerated by that kind 
of activity. And I would have preferred that that would have been back-
channel discussions that could have been kept at a low key so that we 
didn't see this economy react the way it did. But it did. And when we 
saw the stock market spiral downward, a correction that at least in 
part needed to be made, and globally as the world lost its confidence 
in our financial institutions, we had the real risk of our financial 
institutions going under during that period of time, September, 
October, November, December, January of this year, and into February. 
As that instability hung in there, while that was going on, we were a 
nation that I think overreacted, Mr. Speaker.
  Some of the things that happened as the economy spiraled downward 
were people on the floor of this Congress and in our committee and back 
in our meetings and talking to the press beginning to tell America, 
Well, I guess that tells you what capitalism does for us, arguing that 
capitalism had failed and that's why the economy was spiraling 
downward.
  Mr. Speaker, no economy has ever matched this economy in the United 
States of America. We have overcome far greater burdens than this one 
we're under today. The Great Depression of the 1930s was a larger 
burden than the one we're under today, at least by any measure that we 
can do currently. We don't know what's going to happen tomorrow, next 
week, next month. By this time next year, we'll look back and we ought 
to have a pretty good idea. But this free enterprise economy has 
recovered and bounced back in the face of difficulty after difficulty. 
It took us through the recessions of the 1800s. It took us through the 
Civil War. It brought us through the Spanish-

[[Page H5570]]

American War, World War I, World War II, the Korean War, Vietnam, and 
the Cold War.
  In fact, Mr. Speaker, of all those things that we had been through, 
including the Great Depression, which I briefly mentioned, the Cold War 
itself is a perfect model of what this free market economy can do 
because Ronald Reagan looked across at the Russians, called them an 
``evil empire,'' which they were and are increasingly becoming again, 
and he went to Berlin at the Brandenburg Gate and he said ``Mr. 
Gorbachev, tear down this wall.''
  We didn't know at the time how much was going on behind the scenes, 
how much was going on back channel. But we know, looking back in 
history and this being reported in the news, that in the nuclear 
defense negotiations that were to take place in Reykjavi, Iceland, 
Ronald Reagan walked out of those negotiations because he couldn't get 
a settlement with the Soviet Union. And the press excoriated President 
Reagan for being--I don't remember the exact language. Today they would 
say ``cowboy diplomacy,'' if they called it diplomacy at all. They 
believed that Ronald Reagan had put this world at risk by walking out 
of those negotiations. But Ronald Reagan wasn't about to give up our 
national security for the sake of getting along with people who had 
lined themselves up against us to be our opposition in the world, to 
challenge the United States for the title of this world superpower. And 
for a long time, we went along running in parallel with the Soviet 
Union competing against the United States for which nation would be the 
preeminent superpower.
  Jean Kirkpatrick was Ambassador to the United Nations during the 
early part of the Reagan administration. And I believe after 2 or 3 
years, she was preparing to step down from that role. And as she 
retired as Ambassador to the United Nations, she explained something to 
America that when I read that on Page 3 or 4 of the paper that day, a 
tiny little clip, actually, it settled in for me the picture that Jean 
Kirkpatrick had drawn, Ambassador Kirkpatrick had drawn, and it was 
this. Now, remember we are in the middle of the Cold War. We're perhaps 
at the height of the Cold War with the maximum amount of tension that's 
being brought to bear because Ronald Reagan is doing the thing that the 
leader of the free world would do, and that is playing some negotiating 
brinksmanship but knowing the card that he holds and having a pretty 
good idea of the cards that the Russians are holding. But Jean 
Kirkpatrick described this conflict of the Cold War this way: She said, 
What's going on is the equivalent of playing chess and Monopoly on the 
same board, and the only question is, will the United States of America 
bankrupt the Soviet Union economically before they checkmate the United 
States militarily? That was the question that she laid out as she 
stepped down as Ambassador to the United Nations.
  Mr. Speaker, when you think about this and come to a realization that 
a country like the Soviet Union that was in an arms race, building 
missiles bigger, more of them, and building them faster than they ever 
had before, pouring a high percentage of their gross domestic product, 
which is an all-controlled economy in a socialist/communist economy--
I'll just call them a communist nation. Their communist economy was 
trying to produce enough wealth that they could match up against the 
United States and enter into an arms race and defeat us in an arms race 
so that we would be looking at so many nuclear-tipped, multiple 
nuclear-tipped warheads that we couldn't hope then to defend ourselves 
against the Soviet Union and we couldn't hope to mount enough missiles 
to provide a deterrent to them. Mutually assured destruction. The 
Soviet Union was determined that they were going to be in a position 
where they would assure our destruction and, with the power of that, 
they would then cause the United States to back down and recede 
diplomatically and that the Soviet Union would be able to advance 
themselves around the world and exert their influence into country 
after country and begin to dominate the world because of the military 
threat that they would be to the free world, particularly the United 
States, the military threat that they were in Europe itself, lined up, 
remember, with the Berlin Wall standing. It was another 5 years before 
the Berlin Wall came down.
  All of this dynamic is going on, and the Cold War is being fought, 
some say without firing a shot. That's really not true, but without 
firing a lot of shots in relation to the billions and billions that 
were invested. The Cold War was not a shooting war. That's why we 
called it the Cold War. But it was a clash of civilizations. It was a 
clash of cultures. It was a clash of economies, Mr. Speaker. And as the 
economy of the United States competed with the communist economy of the 
Soviet Union, and it has still a vast amount of resources and should 
have had enough people to produce enough wealth to be able to match up 
against us in an economic/military contest, the United States economy 
dominated that of the rest of the world and produced enough wealth that 
we could grow our economy and at the same time take on and compete with 
the Russians in the development of our military capabilities globally. 
And at a point the weight and the burden of trying to compete against 
this United States economy brought about the economic collapse of the 
Soviet Union, which brought about the political collapse of the Soviet 
Union and their satellite states, which softened and prepped the 
landing zone, so to speak, or softened the area so that the Soviet 
Union could no longer hang on in their satellite states like Germany 
and Poland and Romania and the Baltics. And all the way across Eastern 
Europe, country after country, Czechoslovakia, became free. Most of 
that bloodlessly.
  The Berlin Wall began to come down November 9, 1989, the date that 
the Russians stopped requiring the East Germans to defend the wall. And 
they started to take hammers and picks to chop that wall apart, and 
people climbed over the top, and they were on both sides and they were 
celebrating, and families were reunified. The liberal media in this 
country saw that as family reunification. What they didn't see, and it 
took them a very long time to understand it, was that the Berlin Wall 
represented the Iron Curtain. It was literally the Iron Curtain. It was 
a concrete wall that went around the people that lived in West Berlin 
and trapped them in, a cage, a fence around the people that lived in 
West Berlin. But it was literally the Iron Curtain. And when it started 
to come down, when the Berlin Wall crashed, so did the Iron Curtain 
crash. And as it came down, people realized the Soviet Union can't make 
East Germans shoot East Germans for crossing that line any longer. They 
can't enforce it themselves because they don't have the economic 
capability to do that. They couldn't sustain their military. Their 
military was rotting out from within as their economy had rotted out 
from within because you can't have a managed economy that can compete 
with a free market economy, Mr. Speaker.

                              {time}  2045

  That's the difference, and that's the essence of the victory that the 
United States, with some of the help of the rest of the world, brought 
down the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union collapsed. The satellite states 
claimed their own independence, and there was some blood in a place 
like Romania when Ceausescu was executed, if I remember, he and his 
wife executed by the mobs of Romanians who desired to have their 
freedom, finally.
  But most of Eastern Europe was bloodless. It was essentially 
bloodless in Germany for the wall to come down and free people, to 
welcome people that had been in slavery, in the slavery of a Communist-
controlled managed state for all those years, since the end of the 
1940s, and until such time as you had the Berlin airlift.
  And one of the things that happened on one of my trips over there 
into Berlin, we had a tour guide who I will call her a young lady, 
younger than me. She was a young lady when the wall came down in 1989, 
and she told us how when they were able to go over the wall and go into 
West Berlin and go into the shops and stores and see what they had, see 
the food that they had, the clothing that was there, the appliances, so 
many things that they didn't have as part of their lives in East 
Germany or part of their lives in West Germany.

[[Page H5571]]

  And the contrast in the western part of Berlin versus the eastern 
part of Berlin was so stark, she told us that they went out and bought 
all of the wild colorful clothes that they could find, the reds, the 
oranges, the greens, the bright yellows, all of those bright colors, 
and they dressed themselves in the brightest colors possible. They 
didn't have access to those. They were wearing drab, bleary clothing.
  But all this bright clothing was available. Anybody could dress in 
the West any way they wanted. They could have access. You would find in 
the stores whatever the free market would demand, because the free-
enterprise economy produced the kind of clothing people wanted to wear. 
And the East Germans surely were so glad to have an opportunity to go 
into West Berlin as the wall went down on November 9, 1989, and buy up 
this bright clothing and proudly wear this bright clothing wherever 
they went.
  Because it was a symbol that said, I have my freedom back, a freedom 
back they weren't born into. They had been born since they lost their 
freedom. They had their freedom back, and they gloried in the 
demonstration of that to be able to wear colorful clothes.
  Wherever they went that sent the message, I'm free, and I can dress 
as I like. I can do as I like. I can speak as I like. I am free to 
succeed. I am free to achieve, free to be educated in the way I want to 
be educated.
  You know, the people who have achieved their freedom most recently in 
that part of the world are the ones that love it the most. The Czechs 
went to the square in Prague and stood there by the tens of thousands 
and held their keys up and rattled their keys. Tens of thousands of 
them rattling their keys, Mr. Speaker.
  And that noise, that persistent noise, Vaclav Havel and others 
brought about freedom in Czechoslovakia in a bloodless fashion. They 
achieved that freedom later on. They separated the country in the 
Velvet Revolution, a bloodless revolution.
  And they are quite proud of being able to come to these conclusions 
by the voice of the people, emulating the freedom that we have had here 
since 1776, ratified in 1789, Mr. Speaker.
  So I look at that part of the world, the part of the world that has 
been the part that has generated the utopian philosophers, those 
philosophers that shaped the ideas of socialism and communism and 
national socialism and fascism. These utopian philosophies emerged from 
that part of the world, thinkers that came from there.
  But they believed that they could set up the perfect society and 
control it and manage it. And the part that's always been missing on 
the part of the utopianists, those managers, those elitists, they think 
that they know best for people and that they think that an average 
common person, they believe, doesn't have the capability of making 
decisions for their own job, their own business, their own health care, 
their own education.
  So they want to take that all out of the hands of the individuals of 
this country and put it into the hands of the liberal bureaucrats who 
know best, the nanny state managers.
  And the great lesson throughout history has been, even if you have 
smart people at the top, if you have smart people at central planning, 
and they come out with a 5-year plan--and in the collectivist state of 
the Soviet Union, they had collective farms. And so they just simply 
made a 5-year plan and they said, all right, here is what it's going to 
be, 5-year plan. This field will be wheat. This one will be barley. 
This one will be hay. This one lays fallow. I don't think they raise 
much corn over there, Mr. Speaker. I would bring that up.
  And they managed it with as good of a skill as they could produce. 
But out of the government management comes some corruption, a 
tremendous amount of inefficiency. And if people are not rewarded for 
their labor--we learned this in the first settlements of the United 
States--then if they are not rewarded for their labor, they are not 
going to work the same way they do if they get to achieve the different 
fruits of their labor.
  And so the Russians began to take their labor and let some of the 
crops rot in the field. Where I come from, on an October night that's 
clear and still, and if the humidity is right, you can drive across 
that flat countryside at night, 9, 10, 11, 12 o'clock, 1, 2 in the 
morning.
  And if it's the right night, the humidity will make it so the 
soybeans aren't too tough and you can look from horizon to horizon. And 
you can see the yard lights of the farms that are there, and you can 
see the combines that are running in the fields, with the trucks that 
are out on the roads taking the grain off, and the tractors with the 
grain carts that are shuttling those soybeans over to the trucks, 
sometimes in the field, sometimes in the road.
  But you can see they will run all night. They will run till the beans 
get too tough or the bin is full and their storage is full. They have 
got to stop and process and then go back again.
  But the Russians did it a different way. They didn't let the people 
have the fruits of their labor. And so when their 8-hour shift was up, 
or whatever they worked, they would park the combine, park their 
tractor, park their truck, and they wait until the clock ticked again. 
And then they would start to work again, if they showed up. And a lot 
of them didn't.
  But the inefficiencies that grow when you start guaranteeing a people 
a living and they are not tied into having a share of the profit are 
the kinds of things that we are starting to see in this country more 
and more and more; less accountability for production and more demands 
on the labor of somebody else.
  But the human nature component of this, the component that realizes 
that if you don't work, you shouldn't eat, that was how we settled 
our--the Pilgrims settled it here. They would have starved to death if 
it hadn't been for that. So they let the people keep the proceeds of 
their own labor. And then those that were needy lived off of the alms 
of those that were good producers. And they were helped in proportion 
to their effort by the alms of the producers, and it made this a far 
more productive Nation.

  And our job here, Mr. Speaker, needs to be, it needs to be to improve 
the annual average productivity of all of our citizens. If we do that, 
if we raise our average annual productivity of all of our citizens, we 
will raise the gross domestic product of the United States.
  If our productivity goes up, if mine goes up, if my neighbor's goes 
up, then that wealth is accumulated into our economy, and it spills 
over and it blends into other businesses, and it lifts their 
profitability. And if they are working and producing, they will have 
more opportunity at success.
  But if they are not, if they are hanging back, if they are not 
responsive, if they have a bad attitude about how they do their work, 
the customers will stay away from them. Their businesses will not 
thrive. The bosses who are able to hire good people because they want 
to pay good wages and good benefits to good people can go off and 
cherry-pick from those bosses that don't pay good wages and don't 
provide good benefits and don't respect their employees.
  I have been in this business, in the construction business, for 
nearly three decades writing payroll checks and investing money in 
heavy equipment and going out and doing jobs, and we have always looked 
out across the available labor pool and tried to find the best people 
we could find.
  And we wanted to pay them a good, going wage, and we wanted to give 
them the kinds of benefits and the package so they could have what they 
needed. They wanted a job that they can go to, that they can take pride 
in, that they can continue to develop their skills in, and they want to 
have the kind of environment where they can raise their family and take 
care of them and have some time to spend with them so that it's really 
worth the trouble.
  This is what a free enterprise economy does. If you allow the 
businesses to succeed, they will then take advantage of that and 
succeed.
  If this Government taxes them out of existence, that's exactly what 
will happen. Our businesses will diminish, and they will spiral 
downward out of existence.
  If we regulate our businesses too much, then we will diminish their 
effectiveness and put a burden on the overhead that is a fixed cost 
that weighs down everything they do and makes it harder for them to 
compete against their domestic competitors

[[Page H5572]]

here in this country and harder for them to compete against foreign 
countries as well.
  And if we weigh down existing businesses with taxes and regulation, 
the emerging entrepreneurs, the budding businessmen and women, the 
people that have the idea, the people that have the dream, the people 
that want to someday be the one that signed the front of the paycheck 
instead of the back of the paycheck, create as many jobs as possible, 
pay as many people as possible, that group of people takes a look at 
the regulation and the burden of government and too often they decide 
the juice isn't worth the squeeze, that going to work for the 
government is the better choice because, after all, the government 
check will always be there, the benefits will always be there. The 
stress load there is probably not going to be as great.
  Probably you can't measure your achievements the same way you can 
measure them in the free market system, but if you want to raise your 
family and come back home and crack a beer and watch the news at night, 
maybe a government job is for you. We need good people in government, 
too. But when we raise the salaries and benefits package and we lower 
the responsibility level, and when we fail as a government to measure 
the productivity, the output of government employees, then we are 
creating a scenario by which people are not excelling to the level that 
they might if they were in a competitive environment.
  But business has to produce in a competitive environment; government 
does not. Government has a monopoly.
  Now, to thread an analogy in here, or I should say an anecdote, in a 
fairly recent trip down to Mexico City, and I sat with a number of 
government officials and business leaders there, at one point I was 
sitting at a diplomatic table. And as I looked around the room and each 
one introduced themselves, I realized that there were many 
representatives of the monopolies in Mexico sitting at the table.
  And they all wanted to make sure that they were not a political 
target, but the richest man's name in the world is Slim, S-l-i-m. 
Doesn't sound like a Mexican name to me, but he is from Mexico. The 
reason he is the richest man in the world is because he has a monopoly 
on the telecommunications in Mexico. He gets paid for every phone call 
that gets made in that entire country.
  And with the capital that he makes from that, he can invest in other 
telecommunications in other places around the world. So he's got a 
protected market that's a monopoly.
  And some years ago the Mexicans understood that their state-run 
enterprises were a burden and that they were inefficient because they 
were monopolies. They were government monopolies. So I would look at a 
situation like that, and I would follow the Margaret Thatcher model.
  I would take it further than she did. I think she took it as far as 
she could in that environment at that time. I would follow the Margaret 
Thatcher model, and I would start to privatize these government 
monopolies. Well, that first part of the equation worked for the 
Mexicans. They understood that.
  They understood that they needed to privatize the government-run 
monopolies like telecommunications, let's say cement manufacturing, 
certain retail outlets, the list goes on, utilities. I think utilities 
of all kinds. They came to the conclusion they wanted to privatize 
because government itself was inefficient, how a government monopoly 
was utterly inefficient, that it begged for corruption--and they had 
plenty of corruption, still do--but they only went half as far as they 
needed to go.
  When they privatized, they privatized the government-run monopolies 
into private-sector monopolies so that people like Mr. Slim could run 
the entire telecommunications industry in Mexico and take the capital 
and invest across the world.
  Now, the shortfall of this is that a government-run monopoly is 
almost the most inefficient kind of a business model that you can 
produce if you want to provide services to people at a competitive 
price so that they can live a good lifestyle and they can have some 
disposable income to spend somewhere else.
  The second to the last thing you would ever want would be a 
government-run monopoly, because they are inefficient, and there is not 
an incentive there to compete. But the Mexicans stopped short of where 
they needed to go, and they just transferred these government-run 
monopolies into private-sector monopolies, which is the only thing I 
can think of which is worse than a government-run monopoly.
  If you hand someone a monopoly in a market that is not a regulated 
market and he has the entire market, he has cornered everyone, and he 
can set the price for a phone call, or they can set the price for a 
cubic yard of cement, or they can set the price for the electricity 
that's generated without any check or balance on it.
  And so a privatized monopoly is worse even than a government-run 
monopoly because it incorporates so many of the--there are no 
restrictions there, and the desire for profit, actually the need for 
profit, gets added on to the government entity.
  So we are here now with an economy that is being shifted dramatically 
by a majority of Democrats in the House of Representatives, a majority 
of Democrats down this hallway in the United States Senate, and a 
President who was elected, I think, with having been rewarded for the 
most masterful skills in the history of America, of the language of 
ambiguities.

                              {time}  2100

  As I listened to the President speak here in this Chamber, not that 
long ago, speaking before a joint session of Congress, and as I 
listened to him speak before our conference, I looked through the 
speech, and as I marked it up, sitting back here about 20 feet from 
where I stand right now, Mr. Speaker, I found seven or eight clear 
ambiguities in the President's speech--the kind of phrase that, if you 
believe we ought to produce energy in order to have an economy that can 
compete, you could hear in the President's words that's what he wants 
to do.
  But if you believe you wanted to shut down the energy production in 
America in order to drive the prices up so that industry would use 
less, the consumers would use less, so that our economy would be 
constricted and chase the jobs overseas and all of this fallout that 
some of the people on that side of the aisle don't seem to understand 
but cannot hardly deny, but if you're one of those environmental 
extremists that wanted to shut down energy production, you could find 
that in the President's speech, the same phrase that I could find that 
we need to produce more energy.
  Now that's just one example. There were seven or eight of those. The 
master of ambiguities is now the resident of the White House and the 
leader of the Free World and the Commander in Chief of our military and 
the mastermind behind the economic changes that are taking place here 
in the United States. The man who said that--well, he said that he 
wants to reach out--here's what he said, Mr. Speaker--one of the things 
that he said.
  He said, ``Under my plan of cap-and-trade system, electricity rates 
would necessarily skyrocket. That will cost money. They will pass that 
money onto consumers.'' Necessarily skyrocket, Mr. Speaker, my plan of 
cap-and-trade. It's the President's plan of cap-and-trade. These are 
exactly the words that he used back when I don't think he expected to 
be elected President, in January of 2008, meeting with the editorial 
board of the San Francisco Chronicle.
  Now I can imagine what that's like. You would be sitting in San 
Francisco, tempted to say things to the San Francisco Chronicle that 
you thought the people in San Francisco would agree with and probably 
that the Speaker of the House from San Francisco would agree with. And 
I'm convinced that our Speaker of the House would maybe not agree with 
this analysis but would agree with the plan of cap-and-trade system.
  But here's what's predicted: Electricity rates will necessarily 
skyrocket, and that will cost money. And it will be put onto the backs 
of consumers.
  Well, that wasn't an ambiguity. That was before the ambiguities had 
been completely mastered by the now-President of the United States.

[[Page H5573]]

  This man is driving the reaction to the economic downward spiral. 
This man is driving the cap-and-trade argument. This man is pushing a 
hardcore leftist agenda.
  Cap-and-trade; what is it and why do we have it, and can you find 
anyone on the street who can explain the science? I would like to see 
investigative reporters of all stripes--the San Francisco Examiner, 
Sean Hannity--you name them. Reporters from Chicago or L.A. or Dallas 
or Des Moines go out on the streets with an action cam and carry that 
camera around with a microphone and ask people to explain this idea of 
global warming. Explain the science.
  If you remember, sometimes they will walk along and they will 
interview people--often on the streets of New York City--and they will 
say, Who's the Vice President of the United States? And they will give 
every name except Joe Biden, today. He is a little hard to find. I 
understand why they might not know. But after 8 years of Dick Cheney, 
you think they would have known. A lot of them didn't. They don't have 
the basics there.
  But I'd like to go to Central Park and put the action cam out with a 
microphone, Mr. Speaker, and ask them, I don't understand the science 
around this global warming. Can you explain this to me? And I would 
like to know how many out of a thousand would even try, but I would be 
willing to lay a wager that none of them could succeed in making a 
scientific explanation as to why their emissions of greenhouse gases by 
man can be a significant contributing factor to the Earth's warming. 
Which, by the way, even the global warming people, even the Al Gores of 
the world, have changed the language now. They can't say global warming 
any more because the Earth's been actually cooling since 2002.
  So when you find yourself out there on the end of a limb and you've 
been saying, Global warming, global warming, global warming, and you've 
been doing that for 15 or 20 years, and you find out, whoops, I have 
been making this argument long enough; that the Earth is actually 
cooling, and maybe the scientists who back in about 1970 predicted 
there was a coming ice age that couldn't be averted, maybe they were 
actually right.
  I don't know if they were right or not, Mr. Speaker, but I know one 
of those expert scientists in 1970 that said an ice age is imminent is 
now an expert on global warming, and he is saying global warming is 
imminent, and it will happen. But they don't actually use the global 
warming argument any more. They use climate change.
  That's a safe term. I bet they wish they would have started out with 
a climate change kind of a label rather than global warming, because 
one thing we know about climate, it's always going to change. It's been 
changing for thousands of years, millions of years, and it will change 
again and again and again, and it will change tomorrow.
  But the climate change people that were former global warming people 
that are now climate change people are going to argue that the Earth is 
going to get warmer, and there's all kinds of calamities that come out 
of a warmer Earth. And the Earth can get--what's the most extreme--4.6 
degrees Fahrenheit warmer over the next 100 years. Maybe only .15 
degrees or so. Depends on which model.
  But they didn't make a model 10 years ago that can predict where it 
is 10 years today or they would have never used the term global warming 
in the first place. If they had a model 10 years ago, if they had a 
model in the middle of the Al Gore era.
  Let me take us back to--Al Gore was competing for President in 1992. 
He didn't win that nomination. But when he debated as a Vice 
Presidential candidate, he matched up against--let me see, Dan Quayle. 
Dan Quayle said, You are asking for $100 billion a year to be spent on 
global warming, on environment, on this climate change piece. And Al 
Gore said, No, I didn't say that.
  And I don't remember the page number anymore, but I'm going to guess, 
Mr. Speaker, because I remember former Vice President Dan Quayle 
saying, Yes, you did, Mr. Gore. It's right here in your book.
  And he pulled the book out, ``Earth in the Balance.'' He gave a page 
number. I think that page number was 204. I don't remember for sure. 
But I went out and bought the book. And I went to the page number that 
was pointed out by Dan Quayle, and there was the exact language calling 
for $100 billion to be spent then back in that year, which I believe 
was 1992.
  So the call for this reaction to global warming in 1929 must have 
been modeled on something. It must have been modeled on a computer 
model that had checked the temperatures around the globe and made the 
adjustments for atmospheric and the greenhouse gases that are there. It 
must have had some sound science behind it.

  And so where is that computer model today? If that model predicted 
the Earth would get warmer, and we chugged along, and now we're 17 
years later and the Earth has gotten cooler over the last 7 years. It 
was supposed to get warmer over the last 17. Got a little warmer for 
the first 10 or so, then it got cooler over the last 7 or 8.
  How does this happen? Does anybody go back to the computer model that 
must have been the basis for the science that was driving Al Gore at 
the time? I don't know that anybody did. They keep telling me they have 
got better and better models and they're doing a better and better job 
of monitoring the temperatures on the globe.
  I remember also another book that was published I believe that same 
year, and it was called ``Trashing the Planet'', written by former 
Governor of the State of Washington, Dixy Lee Ray. She starts her book 
out by saying, In the year 1900, the Earth was a very smelly and 
dangerous place. And she wrote about the disease and the pollution that 
was there, the garbage that got dumped out of the windows onto the 
streets, how the sewage ran in the streets, and how disease was 
rampant, and the water wasn't clean, the air wasn't clean, the soil 
wasn't clean.
  But as that all took place, she compared 1900 with the late 1980s or 
so, as the book was put together and drafted and I think published 
around 1990. Dixy Lee Ray.
  She made several statements, God rest her soul, she had a clear idea 
on this. And she said that technology always improves our quality of 
our life and our lifestyle. All the improvements that we have--we 
figured out how to drill for wells and purify water and put it in 
pipes--clean, sanitized pipes, and send it off into all of our houses. 
We didn't have water at the turn of the century, 109 years ago. We 
surely did the latter part of the 20th century.
  And clean water was a big thing that ensured a lot more health 
because people weren't drinking bacteria and nitrates and catching a 
disease from their drinking water.
  I remember going up to Fort Niagara up near Niagara Falls on one of 
the Great Lakes there. We were in a redoubt that had had several flags 
fly over it, including the British flag, and they told about how the 
men slept there in this redoubt, this little fort. The beds were so 
short.
  I said, How come the beds are so short? Well, they were not actually 
as tall as we are today, but the shorter beds were because they didn't 
sleep laying down. They had respiratory diseases, respiratory 
illnesses, so they slept kind of sitting up, propped up.
  Another thing they did, they had a chamber pot. And they sent the 
lowest-ranking troops down the hill to the lake with this chamber pot. 
So that was the one they used at night when they didn't want to go 
outside, and it was cold. So they carried the chamber pot down, dumped 
it out--I don't know where they dumped it out. I presume they washed it 
out. But they used the same pot and carried it back up and they used 
that for drinking water during the day.
  The British, nor did anybody in the world, understand about diseases 
back in the mid to late 1700s. But that water cleanliness was a big 
part. Sanitary sewers were a big part. We got rid of the outhouses and 
flushed it down to the sewer treatment plant.
  I want to thank Lady Bird Johnson. Kids my age grew up shooting rats 
at the dump. We don't do that any more because we have sanitary 
landfills and we cleaned this up. We cleaned up a lot of things. We are 
a lot safer and a lot more healthy because of technology, because the 
modern world has marched along.
  But the technology of calculating global warming doesn't hold itself 
up.

[[Page H5574]]

There was a conclusion that was drawn by Al Gore and others--now he has 
a Pulitzer Prize--there was a conclusion that was drawn by him back in 
some year--some year perhaps in the Eighties, and I do not know, Mr. 
Speaker, what the catalyst was, but I do know environmental groups came 
quickly and strongly and financially behind Al Gore at a certain time 
in the late Eighties--almost overnight. And he drew a conclusion that 
has yet to be shaken by the temperature that's going down incrementally 
on this planet.
  Now this is always mysterious to me, Mr. Speaker. How is it that a 
conclusion can be drawn that the Earth is getting warmer and we must do 
something, cut down on greenhouse gas emissions. We can't really 
explain the science to you because you're just a regular old citizen 
and you can't comprehend this. Instead, you just have to take the word 
of the environmental extremists that the Earth's going to get warmer 
unless we follow them. Follow them down this path of shutting down our 
production of energy in the United States, closing down the 
CO2 emissions, doing the cap-and-trade that is proposed here 
so that it would skyrocket our electrical costs.
  Why is it that no amount of science has shaken them? Why is it that, 
of all the things that we have collected for data throughout this time, 
they haven't really stepped up and said, Well, here's the adjustments 
we have to make now because we know more than we did then. It's as if 
science didn't march on for the last 17 years, but the politics have 
marched together in a huge army of politicians and their 
environmentalist supporters that keep making the case we must do 
something.
  It's as if this Earth is going to keep getting warmer even though 
it's been getting cooler--and the only thing we can do about it is 
reduce the amount of CO2 emissions in the United States. Now 
how does this work?
  And so I have some new numbers that the world has never seen. They 
are just produced in a spreadsheet in my office indexed back to real 
facts. I know the doctor from Georgia is going to be very interested in 
these facts.

                              {time}  2115

  And it starts out this way, when there is something going on and 
somebody says this is the science of it, I usually go out and I ask, 
what are the big questions so you can lay out the parameters for me, 
Mr. Speaker?
  The first question I would ask is, if we have global warming, and it 
is because the industry emissions are contributing to the atmosphere, 
the first question I would have is, okay, how big is our atmosphere? 
How do you measure all this volume of gases that have settled down to 
the gravitational pull, come out of outer space and settled down to the 
gravitational pull of Earth, all that God breathed on and those little 
molecules added to it, how much is that? Well they measure that in 
tons. So the weight, if you could put a scale on all the Earth's 
surface and weigh this atmosphere, you would find out--we are pretty 
close on this--5 quadrillion 150 trillion metric tons is the full 
weight of the atmosphere of the Earth, 5 quadrillion metric tons. That 
is all the air, the weight of all the air.
  Now we are measuring greenhouse gases in tons, in metric tons. So I 
ask the question, what is the weight of all the greenhouse gas that is 
in this atmosphere that is 5.15 quadrillion tons? Well, let's take it 
to the CO2, because that is the only thing that Waxman-
Markey addresses is CO2. So the weight of all the 
CO2 gases in the atmosphere is 3 trillion, try that, 3 
trillion metric tons. Three compared to 5.15 quadrillion. So I will 
tell you this. If all the atmosphere is 100 percent by weight, then the 
CO2 in the atmosphere is .0591. That is the CO2. 
Now a lot of the CO2 is there naturally. We don't charge 
that against industry in the world.
  So I take this thing down to what do we charge against this? What do 
we measure? So I will just take you to the net CO2 emissions 
in the United States. I'm sorry, I don't have the numbers from 1600 or 
1700. But I do have the numbers from 1800 until 2005, two centuries 
plus 5 years. So that is pretty much the dawn of the industrial 
revolution contributed all the way up this way. The net CO2 
from U.S. emissions over the last 205 years, that is hanging in the 
atmosphere, is 178 billion 792 million metric tons.
  So, Mr. Speaker, if you are listening closely, we have an atmosphere 
of 5.15 quadrillion metric tons, we have a total CO2 of 3 
trillion, and we have the CO2 contributed by the United 
States of 178 billion 792 million, is all that is, so the U.S., this is 
the net, because 45 percent of it goes into sinks, the net greenhouse 
gas that is contributed in the form of CO2 contributed by 
the United States to this overall atmosphere, the net that is hanging 
out in the atmosphere today is .00347 percent of the overall 
atmosphere.
  Now here is the picture I want to draw and put in the minds of people 
just immediately before I intend to yield to the gentleman from 
Georgia, and that is this: if you lay this out in a picture form, in a 
poster form, and most everybody knows what a 4.8 sheet of plyboard 
looks like. For me, if I reach up, I reach about 7 feet, a little more, 
so 1 foot above my hand would be the height of a 4 x 8 sheet of 
drywall, let's put two of those side by side, 8 feet out this way, 8 
feet this way, draw a circle the full diameter of 8 feet by 8 feet, 
that would be a 48-inch radius, whoop that circle around there, a great 
big circle would be the height of most walls in a person's living room. 
That would represent the full atmosphere of the Earth. It is volume 
measured in metric tons of all the atmosphere of the Earth.
  Now what are we trying to control here with Waxman-Markey? How big is 
this piece of the atmosphere that we are trying to affect a part of by 
reducing its emissions? The total accumulation from the last 205 years, 
the industry of the United States comes down to a radius, I will just 
give you the diameter, the diameter would be .56 inches, that is how 
big the circle is, that is all the complete contribution of U.S. 
CO2 emissions in the last 205 years altogether that is 
hanging out there in the atmosphere. You have an 8-foot circle, imagine 
the size of the 8-foot circle, but the little circle in the middle is 
the part that we can control. If you shut it all down, the entire sum 
total of the accumulated total is the diameter of a lug on your tire. 
Not the nut. Take the nut off. It is the stud that goes inside the nut. 
Usually those are a half inch thread. That is what we have got. The 
size of my little finger is the size of the circle that would represent 
the complete volume of the accumulated CO2 admitted by the 
United States inside of that, inside a circle 8 feet in diameter. And 
we are going to try to control the Earth's temperature over 100 years 
by fooling around with that tiny little circle that is a half inch in 
diameter?
  What utter arrogance. What utter vanity. I think we have gone into a 
new level of vanity here. I talked about the Utopian philosophers that 
emerged from Western Europe over the centuries that thought they could 
manage humanity. We have Utopian scientists here who believe they can 
control the Earth's temperature by fooling around with a tiny little 
circle that is just .56 inch in diameter. What does a 50-caliber bullet 
look like? Just about that. A little bit of expansion and you have got 
it. So we are dealing with, if you have an 8-foot circle, and you put a 
.45 caliber bullet into the center of that, you are going to be pretty 
close to the size of the hole that would represent the circle that 
would be all of the CO2 that the U.S. has put into the 
atmosphere that has accumulated in 205 years.
  What utter vanity, Mr. Speaker. And I will expand on this thought 
much more until the American people understand that we cannot be 
handicapping our economy based upon a science that can't be 
substantiated. And we can't find anybody in this Chamber that can argue 
the science even with that single fact that I have laid out there. And 
so, Mr. Speaker, I make that point.
  There is a whole other point to be made on the disaster that will be 
caused to our economy. But there is a significant point to be 
contributed by the gentleman from Georgia (Mr. Broun), Dr. Broun, 
Congressman Broun, whom I would be very happy to yield to and call my 
friend at the same time as much time as he might consume.
  Mr. BROUN of Georgia. I thank the gentleman for yielding. And you 
bring out a great point.
  Mr. Speaker, cap-and-trade is not about the environment. And, in 
fact,

[[Page H5575]]

the President recently said that if this is not passed into law, then 
he will not have the revenue to foster or pay for the Big Government 
that he is trying to force down the throats of the American people. 
This is not about the environment. Mr. King, you brought that out very 
clearly. This is about greater revenue. It is a about a tax, cap-and-
tax. I call it ``tax-and-cap'' because tax is what this is all about.
  And your chart right there brings out a very strong point. Even the 
President says that electricity rates will skyrocket. Every single 
energy source in this country will skyrocket. That means that 
everything is going to go up in price, food, medicine, health care, all 
goods and services are going to go up. Why? Because the leadership in 
this House, the leadership in the U.S. Senate, the administration, 
wants to continue down a road towards total government control of 
everything that people do. There is a word for that. It is called 
``socialism.'' And that is exactly what they are doing. They are 
driving a steamroller of socialism that is being forced down the 
throats of the American people. And it is going to strangle our 
economy. It is going to hurt the people that our Democratic colleagues 
say that they represent the most. Electricity costs and heating costs 
are going to affect the retirees, people on limited income and the poor 
people more than anybody else.

  My good friend from Iowa made some excellent points. And I just want 
to reiterate what you said. It is going to cost the American people a 
tremendous amount of money. The American Association of Manufacturers 
has estimated that every single family in this country is going to pay 
$3,128 more in taxes. Everybody is going to have that tax burden placed 
on them plus the increased cost of all goods and services. And it has 
to stop.
  The American people can do something about it. They can tell their 
Members of Congress, We don't want this tax-and-cap bill to pass. And 
it is absolutely critical for the people all over this country to call 
their Congressman, call their Senators and say ``no'' to this crazy 
cap-and-trade policy that is being forced down their throats. And it 
has just got to stop because it is going to kill our economy. It is 
going to hurt everybody in this country. And I thank the gentleman for 
yielding.
  Mr. KING of Iowa. I thank the gentleman. And I regretfully yield back 
the balance of my nonexistent time.

                          ____________________