[Congressional Record Volume 155, Number 78 (Wednesday, May 20, 2009)]
[House]
[Pages H5875-H5882]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                          IRAN'S MISSILE TEST

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of 
January 6, 2009, the gentleman from Missouri (Mr. Akin) is recognized 
for 60 minutes as the designee of the minority leader.
  Mr. AKIN. Thank you, Mr. Speaker. It is a pleasure to be able to join 
you this evening and my colleagues on a couple of very interesting 
topics. I think the first thing that we will talk about is something 
that has been on the minds of people since this morning. That was when 
we got an announcement from Iran that they had just fired a missile 
some 1,200 miles. That is what they claimed.

                              {time}  1930

  We don't know the details. We're waiting for a brief on the Armed 
Services Committee on exactly what it was that Iran did, the nature of 
the missile that they fired. But this is something that has captured 
the attention and the concern of Americans because you have coming 
together here a combination of three things that we find to be of high 
level of concern.
  The first is the ability to make these long-range missiles; 
particularly, we're talking about solid fuel missiles that have 
multiple stages. That allows a missile to go some considerable distance 
and therefore target larger areas of the Earth's surface.
  The second thing is nuclear energy. That is a weaponized nuclear 
energy in the form of a warhead. So now you have a missile that can go 
some distance; it has a nuclear warhead on it. That becomes extremely 
dangerous.
  And now when you add the third element, that is radical Islam, to 
that, people who think it is their destiny and their duty to destroy 
other people who don't think the way you do, you put those three 
together and you have something that has indeed captured the news for 
the day. So I thought that would be important today to look a little 
bit at what do you do when you have an adversary that has a missile, a 
nuclear warhead, and a will to use it against you.
  That was the question that was faced historically some years ago by 
Ronald Reagan. Up to that time, there had been a whole series of 
treaties and different things had come along, and we had gotten to the 
point where we said, Well, they have got missiles; they can blow us up. 
We've got missiles; we could blow them up. And that would be so crazy, 
we will have a Mexican standoff. We will call it mutually assured 
destruction. But that really was a very, very foolish idea.
  I'm joined tonight by one of the foremost authorities in the U.S. 
Congress on the subject of missile defense and strategic missile 
defense, my good friend, Congressman Franks. And it's a treat to have 
you here on the floor, and talk about a timely subject, Iran just 
having launched a missile.
  And surprisingly, this has been a matter of a great deal of partisan 
division and a lot of debate on this subject, and if you could help us 
with a little bit about the logic and the history. I would like to do 
the background on missile defense so we can understand what is going on 
today in context.
  I would yield.
  Mr. FRANKS of Arizona. I thank the gentleman for yielding, and I 
appreciate what you're doing here tonight, Congressman Akin.
  Ever since mankind took up arms against his fellow human beings, 
there has always been an offensive capability that essentially, in 
time, has been met with the defensive capability. And first it was the 
sword or the spear and the shield, maybe, and then--
  Mr. AKIN. Or a rock and somebody had a shield to stop the rock or 
something. So one offense, one defense.
  I didn't mean to interrupt. Go ahead.
  Mr. FRANKS of Arizona. When we came to having firearms and bullets, 
we came to find armor and came up with a tank, and it has been an 
ongoing back-and-forth for a long time. But now that we face the most 
dangerous weapons in the history of humanity--that being a nuclear 
warhead borne by an intercontinental ballistic missile which can reach 
thousands of miles with accuracy--all of a sudden there became a debate 
whether we needed a defense for something like that. Now, for a time, 
there wasn't really the technological ability to defend against 
something like that.
  And as you said, when the Soviets had thousands of warheads and 
hundreds of missiles that were capable of destroying every city that we 
had that was of any size, we had to come up with this equation to where 
they knew that if they attacked our cities and they

[[Page H5876]]

killed our women and children, that our missiles would leave almost 
shortly after theirs left the launching pad and they would suffer the 
same fate. And it was such an unthinkable scenario that there was this 
grim achievement that said we will have mutually assured destruction 
and, therefore, each will be afraid to launch against the other.
  In a sense, as frightening as it was, it gave us a real tense time 
when we could have a chance to feel relatively safe because we placed 
our safety in their sanity, as they did with us.
  Mr. AKIN. And just to reclaim my time.
  I recall--and even that was a very troublesome kind of truce, because 
one thing we found was they cheated on every treaty that they signed, 
and we didn't cheat. And we had made an agreement that we were not 
going to develop a defense against nuclear missiles, and then that 
whole idea was challenged.
  Now, why don't you run through----
  Mr. FRANKS of Arizona. That was the ABM Treaty that you speak of. And 
fortunately Bush, this last George Bush, was wise enough in this day 
and age recognizing that the coincidence of jihadist terrorism and 
nuclear proliferation gave us a different equation than we had with the 
Soviets because all of a sudden deterrence wasn't enough. We were 
dealing with an enemy that was willing to see their own children die in 
order to attack our children.
  And so he knew that we needed to discard this outdated ABM or 
antiballistic missile treaty, and he did that, and unfortunately, 
tremendous strides seemed to be made very quickly in the area of 
missile defense.
  Mr. AKIN. Reclaiming my time.
  I think the one thing that I really recall--and I think it's 
something we historically skip, and that is really the guy--we have an 
awful big ``thank you'' to say to Ronald Reagan. He had the imagination 
to take a look at this mutually assured destruction and say, This is 
nuts. I mean, as you said, all through history of mankind, somebody 
picks up a rock and somebody picks up a garbage can lid, you know? I 
mean, there's always offense and defense. He said, If we're saying 
we're not going to defend ourselves, we're crazy.
  So we start talking to scientists and came up with this idea that we 
could use different kinds of technology to stop those missiles so they 
wouldn't come and hit our children and families. And then he went a 
much more gracious step and said, What's more, we're going to share our 
defensive technology with our opponents so that mankind does not have 
to live under the threatening shadow of the nuclear mushroom cloud. And 
he sold that idea to the American public. And, of course, the liberals 
all made fun of him. They said, You can't do it. It won't work and it's 
too expensive, and all of those kinds of things. But he hung on and 
kept talking about it, but he actually didn't build it, did he?
  Mr. FRANKS of Arizona. The truth is that Ronald Reagan was, indeed, 
the father of modern missile defense. And there is a great irony there 
because, while we owe him everything, in a sense, to where we are, he 
said, Isn't it better to protect our citizens rather than to avenge 
them? And I thought that was the quote that, in my mind, started it all 
out.
  But the tragedy is that somehow now the modern-day liberals who 
disdain Ronald Reagan as much as they do, sometimes they are biased 
against missile defense simply because it was Ronald Reagan's idea. And 
we don't discuss it in the realm that it should be discussed, which is 
what is best for the country rather than we don't want to give Ronald 
Reagan too much credit. This is the ironic tragedy of it.

  Mr. AKIN. You know, the funny thing was--I was elected in 2000, came 
here in 2001 and started right off in the Armed Services Committee. And 
we had these debates in the Armed Services Committee in those long 
hearings, and every year for about 4 years or 5 years when it came to 
funding missile defense, it was a party line vote. The Democrats never 
wanted to do anything with funding missile defense. And yet, because we 
had a majority, we voted for it.
  And President Bush became very unpopular in Europe and with Russia. 
He went over and he gave them their 6 months' notice. I think the 
treaty required, give us 6 months' notice. So he went over and said, 
Okay, guys. The clock's running. We're going to start developing 
missile defense in 6 months. And the Russians just had kittens, Putin 
went nuts, and the Europeans were all upset about this. They thought he 
was some kind of cowboy from Texas. And yet at the end of that 6 
months, we started funding it in the Armed Services Committee, totally 
party line vote, and we started on the path of actually building the 
dream that Ronald Reagan had passed down to us.
  Mr. FRANKS of Arizona. Two things have happened since then.
  First of all, Democrats in Congress have begun to see that missile 
defense does indeed have a very, very important role to play in this 
age of nuclear proliferation. That's a good thing. It's a good thing. 
The downside, of course, is that the Democrat President in the White 
House right now is incredibly, in my judgment, naive as to the danger 
that we face and to his approach with our allies.
  He has now, under his budget, submitted numbers that would cut the 
European missile defense site by 89 percent, nearly 90 percent, which 
is effectively killing the program. And this was the system that we 
were putting in place under the Bush administration to protect the 
homeland of the United States, to protect Europe and our forward-
deployed troops against an Iranian missile.
  Mr. AKIN. Wait, wait, wait. Reclaiming my time.
  What you just said is pretty important. When Bush left office, the 
setup was there was--we were going to build a couple of sites. One was 
a radar site and one was an actual place to launch these ground-based 
missiles. The radar site, was that in Romania?
  Mr. FRANKS of Arizona. No. The radar site is in the Czech Republic. 
That was the X-10 radar there, and they went through tremendous 
political machinations to accomplish that overcoming a 2-1 dissent 
among their public. And yet they had the leadership to say, This is 
important to us, this is important to the world, and we're going to 
move forward. And they put tremendous capital in that, and now they're 
being betrayed by the country that asked them to do it.
  Mr. AKIN. So the Czech leadership responded to our initiative, said, 
We'll put the radar site in the Czech Republic. The leadership of 
Czechoslovakia had a public that was not that enthused about that idea, 
but they sold it to them. We are going to move ahead. And so you had 
the Czech Republic was going to have the radar and the actual missiles 
were going to be loaded--was it in Poland?
  Mr. FRANKS of Arizona. Yes. The intercepter field itself, with 10 
intercepters, it would have been in Poland.
  Mr. AKIN. This has been, with the new administration, President Obama 
has traded that away to the Russians, is that correct, or do we know 
what the deal was? Because he's cut all of the money out of it.
  Mr. FRANKS of Arizona. The tragedy--and this goes back to the 
statement that I said about the naive way of approaching this--because 
the Russians said that somehow they could exert influence over Iran or 
over other countries, that we would give up defending our homeland, our 
physical mechanism to defend our homeland in order to gain the 
influence of the Russians over Iran. Well, this is unbelievable.
  Mr. AKIN. Reclaiming my time.
  Now, wait a minute. This isn't supposed to be funny hour. We're here 
talking about missile defense because Iran just launched a missile. Is 
that the sort of influence that Russia has over Iran, that it's going 
to help them launch solid rocket loader multistage missiles that can go 
1,200 miles? Is that what we traded away in order to give up missile 
defense for Europe? Wait a minute. I don't see--the logic of this is 
incredible.
  Mr. FRANKS of Arizona. Unfortunately, the Russians have sold us their 
influence over Iran about a dozen times now and never have really given 
us anything of substance to be helpful. And I think this is incredibly 
dangerous.
  Iran has continued to go forward and defy the world community. This 
solid fuel rocket that they have used today is something that you said 
was very,

[[Page H5877]]

very important. And the ability to stage is incredibly significant 
because it ultimately means that if they have the guidance systems--and 
they've already proven that they do by launching the satellite--that 
they will have almost an indefinite range across the world, because 
once they learn to stage, they can do almost anything in terms of 
reach.

  Mr. AKIN. Reclaiming my time.
  These are some of the missiles. This picture was taken before the 
launch this morning. And then we have a picture, I believe--I believe 
this picture was one released of the actual launch this morning. So you 
can see this appears to be a multistage kind of a missile, but we don't 
know the details on it yet because we haven't had the brief on it.
  Mr. FRANKS of Arizona. This is a Sager, a solid fuel rocket that is 
something that we've known about for some time, and we knew the 
Iranians had it and at some point they would test it. But the danger 
of--
  Mr. AKIN. Just reclaiming my time.
  Is this a multistage, do you believe?
  Mr. FRANKS of Arizona. Yes. I'm convinced that it is.
  The danger, of course, is that Iran is not only a dangerous enemy, to 
have these types of weapons, but they can sell and proliferate this 
type of weaponry. And when they prove that it works, it makes the price 
go up and it makes other countries who are trying to gain this 
technology much more interested in the technology. And I believe that 
it's important that we do whatever is necessary to prevent them from 
having successful tests in the future, including--and this is a big 
statement--including shooting those missiles down with our own missile 
defense capability, our Aegis capability when they come over 
international waters.
  Mr. AKIN. We have a few more minutes to talk about that. I think 
people might be interested in how did this--how does this technology 
that we have work, because for years, people are saying, You can't do 
it; it is impossible.
  I'm an engineer by training, and what we have developed in America--
basically on the dream of Ronald Reagan--is an incredibly elegant 
solution. And from a physics point of view, this is the kind of thing 
that should inspire kids in school to be studying up on physics. And I 
didn't know if other Members want to join us.
  We have Congressman Bishop here. We'll talk a little bit about the 
way the thing works, and then we'll jump in.
  And what we have when you talk about missile defense is you've got--
basically you've got the boost stage where the enemy's rocket here, if 
this is aimed at our country or one of our allies, this is taking off. 
It's called a boost stage. Then as the missile starts to go more 
horizontally, it goes into what's called midcourse. And eventually, 
when it comes down on the target, and that's where it's reentering--if 
it's a very long-range missile, reentering the atmosphere.
  So we kind of break missile defense into these three areas, and we 
have different technologies to try to shoot the thing down before it 
hits us. And our thinking is, well, the more shots you can get, the 
better, because if you miss with the boost phase, you may get it in 
midcourse. And if you miss in midcourse, you may still stop it in 
reentry. So we have different kinds of technologies.
  But the main one that's been developed that's just incredible, from a 
physics point of view, is a metal-on-metal kill. We don't use any 
explosive in it. We just send the missile up, and the guidance is so 
accurate, and the head-on collision that we energize generates so much 
energy that it just literally vaporizes the missiles. And I would 
encourage my friend from Arizona to just sort of flesh out how it's 
done.

                              {time}  1945

  Mr. FRANKS of Arizona. If you will permit me, I can get through this 
just briefly.
  You know, the age-old argument against Ronald Reagan's perspective is 
that this like hitting a bullet with a bullet. Well, as General 
Obering, the former Defense agency head said this, he said, We don't 
just hit a bullet with a bullet. We hit a dot on the side of a bullet 
with a bullet consistently.
  And interestingly enough, in recent days, you know, now they say 
well, there's so much fratricide, if there's some type of collision, 
that if there are multiple reentry vehicles or multiple vehicles, we 
wouldn't be able to hit all of them. But just recently we, in a test 
down in Hawaii, we shot a Scud missile off of a destroyer and it went 
218 kilometers into the air and then, off of a THAD battery in one of 
the islands there, we shot two interceptor missiles 16 seconds apart to 
try to intercept this. The theory is if the first one hits, the second 
one will fly on by, and it's no big deal. If the first one misses, the 
second one will hit.
  But here is the amazing thing that occurred. At 218 kilometers into 
the air, literally exo-atmospheric, into space, the first THAD 
interceptor hit the target dead center and blew it to smithereens. 
Fratricide was everywhere. And the second missile, they had it almost 
coordinated at that time to only 2 seconds apart, it picked the biggest 
piece, which was a little over a meter long, and hit it.
  Now, let me suggest to you, if that doesn't light your fire, your 
wood is wet, because this was an incredible accomplishment by our 
missile defense agency, and it showed that our sensors have the 
capability of finding that most important target, even in an 
environment of that kind of fratricide, and it was an incredible 
accomplishment and you didn't hear it on the news.
  Mr. AKIN. Reclaiming my time, it's interesting that you just 
explained something that really put a little spring in the step of a 
lot of Americans and should give an awful lot of our kids that are 
reading Popular Science and Popular Mechanics, that should fire them 
up, jazz them up a little bit, and there's not a word about this. All 
we hear is, oh, it won't work, it won't work, and the amazing thing is 
I've seen some of those pictures where here comes the enemy missile. 
These things are taken in fractions of a second, and you see basically 
the thing is creating through a sighting mechanism a target on the side 
of the enemy missile, and it is literally picking a spot, as you said. 
It's not hitting a bullet with a bullet. It's hitting that spot right 
on the missile where they want to hit it.
  And to be able to do that--I've always been awfully skeptical as an 
engineer about when people say you can't do it. You know, when you tell 
Americans you can't do something, it's like, oh, yeah? Well, the fact 
of the matter is, we did, and as you said, not only did we hit the 
first missiles dead-on, we just picked off the biggest piece of scrap 
metal that was left after.
  We've got our friend, Congressman Bishop from Utah. If you would like 
to join us, we would love to have you in our discussion this evening.
  Mr. BISHOP of Utah. I'd appreciate that because we have been talking 
about so many upbeat messages right here on what we can do, that I want 
to be the downer of the group and present the fear that we have simply 
because the administration budget for missile defense has been 
submitted.
  And I'm grateful my friend from Arizona is still here, because in our 
land-based--maybe you can add and flush this out--our land-based 
interceptors, we have 30, and as short as nine months ago, every expert 
was telling us we need to have at least 44, and a backup site from the 
Alaska site down in California to be expanded at the same time. And yet 
mysteriously in this particular budget, somehow we have now changed the 
expert opinion that we only need 30 of these instead of 44. Even though 
in Alaska, where the site is, they are ready to start in the short 
construction period to building the extra silos that they may need. In 
fact, one person said it might be cheaper just to build them and use 
them as storage bays until we're ready for something else.
  But maybe the gentleman from Arizona can talk about how significant 
this issue in the budget is and what this does to our potential 
defense, not just from Iran but from especially North Korea at the same 
time.
  Mr. FRANKS of Arizona. Well, the gentleman speaks of a system called 
GMD, or ground-based mid-course defense, and it is our only system 
capable of defending the homeland against an incoming intercontinental 
ballistic missile from either North Korea or, in some cases in the 
United States, from Iran.
  And the significance, as he said, just a year ago, there was a 
conviction that

[[Page H5878]]

we needed at least 44 interceptors, and as you go through the war 
colleges here in the area, nearly always when they go through their 
scenarios, they say we need even more than the 44. But now all of the 
sudden--and we only have 26 actually now. We're capped at a number of 
30. Now all of a sudden we're going to cap it at 30, and I think that's 
very dangerous. Because keep in mind, this is not just one interceptor 
per incoming missile. We want to do everything that we can to have some 
redundancy where we sometimes shoot three and perhaps even four to one 
where if we have one missile coming in, we want to make sure we get as 
many shots off as possible to make sure one doesn't land. Because if a 
nuclear missile lands in one of your cities, it will ruin your whole 
day.
  Mr. AKIN. No doubt about that. I yield.
  Mr. BISHOP of Utah. If I can go back, though, I want to make this a 
little bit worse than it is, because not only is this program capped at 
30 when we need at least 44, the KEI, kinetic energy interceptor, a 
program where the contracts were let only in 2003, they have gone 
through seven static tests. In fact, they are on the launch site and 
ready to do the first flight tests, and the Secretary of Defense has 
decided to cancel that program, even though the admiral in charge of 
the Chiefs of Staff says we need more research and development.
  This is a remarkable idea to try and catch these missiles coming at 
us at a different stage in the game, where with the technology that is 
being developed, it's working, it has been successful in the static 
tests. We should at least go forward and see how far this program can 
go. But this program has also been chopped, and at the same time, the 
old traditional defense of the Minuteman 3 has been stopped and capped. 
We will no longer refurbish or rebuild these particular rockets.

  And indeed, what is scary to me is the Russians have already said 
they are going to rebuild and redo their ICBM projects so that by 2018, 
80 percent of their ICBMs are going to be brand new with new 
capability, and we do not have the capability in our defense budget to 
actually meet any of that future need which may be there.
  Mr. AKIN. I yield to the gentleman from Arizona.
  Mr. FRANKS of Arizona. The gentleman is correct on a number of 
different points. Once we don't build those, not only are they not 
there for the defense capabilities, but we also eventually lose our 
industrial base to build them at all. We can't just go out in the 
street and find someone on the sidewalk and say come on, we would like 
to build a missile defense capability; we'd like to have you come in 
and be one of our rocket scientists. It takes a great deal of time and 
energy to have that industrial base which is in place now, and I think 
we make a terrible mistake.
  Mr. AKIN. Reclaiming my time, let's take a look at what this budget 
is doing because the gentleman from Utah has brought up some good 
points.
  What's happened is the Democrats are basically cutting component 
parts of missile defense. They know it works. They have seen the tests. 
They know the stuff works. They can't say it doesn't work, but they are 
not going to fund it. They're funding some of it, but they're not 
funding some of the key programs that are important.
  The first thing they're cutting is the number of what's called 
ground-based missiles. Those are the ones, if you think about a missile 
and how far it can go, the missiles that go the farthest, we call them 
intercontinental ballistic missiles, and those missiles, the only way 
you stop them is with that ground-based defense. And so we're going to 
freeze the number of those ground-based defenses, but that's not all 
that we're cutting.
  What we're also going to do is, we're going to stop the kinetic kill. 
Is that in the reentry aspect? Is that what that was for, or is that a 
different part?
  Mr. FRANKS of Arizona. No, sir. The KEI is an extremely fast missile, 
and it was made to intercept other missiles in the boost phase, and the 
airborne laser and KEI were our only boost phase systems, and both of 
those have been cut precipitously, and that's the most important place 
to try to interdict a missile because it's moving slower. There are no 
countermeasures. There are no decoys deployed, and of course, if you 
have an impact, then the fratricide falls back upon the offending 
Nation. So this is the most important phase that we could ever attack 
or intercept an enemy missile, and we're essentially doing away with 
both of those programs, leaving only the ABL in place as an experiment, 
as a research project.
  Mr. AKIN. So what's happening, though, are they cutting the funding 
for the airborne laser, also?
  Mr. FRANKS of Arizona. The airborne laser has been cut precipitously 
and is now essentially a research project, rather than a deployable 
future system.
  Mr. AKIN. So, in other words, what we're doing is we've got the three 
stages where you can shoot at a missile: when the missile is being 
launched, which is in some ways the place where the missile is most 
vulnerable and where you turn it into junk, it falls on the 
country that launched it at you. Then you've got the mid-course and 
we're limiting that. And then you've got the reentry part of it. So 
what you're saying is we're doing some serious cuts in all of those 
areas.

  And so here you have Iran just this morning launches this, and their 
technology is moving fast, moved to solid rocket, multiple stage. 
They're busy putting the centrifuges together to make the nuclear 
devices. Let's take a look at what a range of 1,200 miles would mean.
  Here from Iran, as you come out in these circles, what you are saying 
is, first of all, you can hit all of Israel, and second of all, you can 
threaten sort of the southwest part of Europe with that range missile. 
Is that correct, gentleman from Arizona?
  Mr. FRANKS of Arizona. That is correct, and of course, the other 
irony here is that there's really only one payload that makes any sense 
to put on a missile like that, and that's a nuclear warhead. The other 
applications don't make a lot of sense.
  Mr. AKIN. And yet our President has negotiated away, from what we 
know, putting the radar that we need and the battery of missiles to 
protect Europe and eastern United States.
  Mr. FRANKS of Arizona. Well, that's correct, and of course, to try to 
make the rhetoric they say, well, there are other mechanisms that we 
have potentially to defend Europe, which may be a land-based SM-3 
system with the augment of Aegis, but there are two things wrong with 
that. Number one, it's more than twice as expensive to do that, and 
number two, those systems do not protect the homeland of the United 
States against any ICBM from Iran.
  Mr. AKIN. I'm going to reluctantly recognize the gentleman from Utah. 
He's been bringing a lot of bad news tonight, but still I guess we 
better know what the truth is.
  Mr. BISHOP of Utah. I appreciate that, and I'm sorry to be the downer 
in this party night. This is one of the ironies. Not only did the 
Iranians launch something today, but when the administration announced 
their budget cuts for the missile defense program, on the very day, 
7,000 miles away, North Korea's Kim Jong Il was shooting another 
missile. Now, admittedly this one landed in the Sea of Japan, but it 
threatens Japan and it was on a trajectory toward the United States. 
They are not backing down, and they're not backing off, and I want to 
put in perspective what we're talking about because all of the 
discussion we've heard so far is these are very expensive programs, we 
may not be able to afford them.
  The entire savings for these programs in 2010 is $1.7 billion, 
roughly. Now, that sounds like a whole lot of money, until you remember 
on our stimulus bill we spent $800 billion, supposedly to create jobs 
we're now cutting here. And what's even worse in that bill is $5 
billion for government organizations like ACORN. Now, I'm sorry, that's 
not my priority list.
  Mr. AKIN. Reclaiming my time, now you're stopping the preaching and 
getting on to meddling.
  What you're saying is in the first five weeks that this Congress met, 
we passed this porkulous bill or stimulus bill or whatever you want to 
call it at $800-something billion, and you're talking about cutting 
missile defense by less than $2 billion. Did I understand the number 
correctly?
  Mr. BISHOP of Utah. That's what I said.
  Mr. FRANKS of Arizona. The total missile defense budget, in total, is 
less

[[Page H5879]]

than $9 billion, and the administration wants to cut it almost $2 
billion more.
  Mr. AKIN. So we're talking about less than 1 percent, a minuscule 
part of our defense, to protect our cities from being turned into dust. 
I don't understand the logic of that.
  Also, this is a North Korean ballistic missile threat. So it's not 
just Iran, and Iran threatening Europe. We're also talking about North 
Korea developing longer and longer-range missiles, and as they stack 
more--as you have said before, you take these solid rocket motors and 
you stack them up into multiple stages. You get the velocity to get the 
distance to start threatening the continental United States from North 
Korea. And he hasn't shown any signs of backing off. He's still busy 
making nuclear weapons and still busy working on his warheads. And even 
if he doesn't use them, he wants to sell them to other people. So why 
would we want to be cutting our missile defense at this time? It just 
seems like about insanity.
  I yield to the gentleman.
  Mr. FRANKS of Arizona. The thing that's important to remember is that 
Iran gained most of its missile technology from North Korea, and Iran 
has actually outpaced North Korea now in their missile capability, but 
North Korea has nuclear warheads now, and if North Korea sold Iran 
missile technology, is it unthinkable to think they might sell them 
nuclear warheads at some point? It may not be even necessary for Iran 
to build their own warheads.
  And here's the really astonishing tragedy about this. Rhetorically, 
some of the liberals say that the reason that we should cut our GMD 
system is because we need more testing. Well, under this system, where 
they're cutting down on the number of interceptors we have, we won't be 
able to test this system again until after 2014.
  Mr. AKIN. So we're talking out of both sides of our mouth here again. 
What you are saying is, on the one hand, they're saying we need more 
testing, and second of all, they're cutting the budget so we can't 
test.
  Mr. FRANKS of Arizona. That's exactly right.
  Mr. AKIN. It just comes back out to the same thing. There's this 
hostility to developing the defense that we need to protect our 
homeland, and the excuses that it won't work have been proven--test 
after test, these things are working extremely well, and the fact is 
that if there's any function of this Congress that we should be paying 
attention to, it's protecting our own citizens. And so I just find it 
impossible to understand the decisions that are being made in cutting 
the missile defense.

                              {time}  2000

  I don't think that's the right thing to do. I can certainly say that 
on the Armed Services Committee, I will not vote to cut missile 
defense.
  And I would yield back to my friend from Utah, Congressman Bishop.
  Mr. BISHOP of Utah. I appreciate that commitment, and you have my 
commitment at the same time. This is a work that needs to go forward. 
We have money to do this.
  One of the things we also--when Secretary Gates talked to us, he 
talked about a zero sum game, meaning that if we wanted to improve this 
missile defense budget we would have to take money from some other part 
of our military needs to put over here. And I'm sorry, I reject that.
  One of the things we need to do is make sure that the military is 
properly funded. It's really the only constitutional role we really 
have to do, and make sure that it's not coming from some other--we're 
not going to cannibalize another area of the military just to make sure 
that this done. That is simply flat out wrong, and I'm not going to do 
it.
  I'd like to add one other negative since I'm on the role of whining 
here about things going on. This administration did something that was 
totally unique in its budget process called a ``gag order'' which 
simply meant that when the Kinetic Energy Interceptor Program was 
canceled, it was canceled during the time of the gag order. There is 
not a single person on Capitol Hill, in any branch of Congress, that 
knew what was taking place because no one in the Pentagon was allowed 
to talk about what the decision was. A stop work order had been 
administered by this administration before anyone knew what was taking 
place.
  And, in fact, when the Secretary of Defense announced his overall 
view, not one word on this missile program was mentioned in that, even 
though, 2 days earlier, the decision had been made to cut it.
  Mr. AKIN. Reclaiming my time, wait a minute now. I recall that the 
President stood on this floor, and one of the things that he made a big 
point about was transparency. I have a hard time understanding the 
transparency of the administration cutting a major part of missile 
defense that's very important, and we're on the Armed Services 
Committee and we didn't even have a clue that that was going on. Is 
that transparency?
  I yield to my friend from Utah.
  Mr. BISHOP of Utah. No, in my definition it's not transparency. Now, 
I know that some people have said the Pentagon leaks like a sieve. To 
be honest, that's what President Nixon said about the White House when 
he came in there, and I hope there's no plumbers left around to try and 
fix the Pentagon situation.
  But it's one of those things that, in a republic, in a republic, we 
are not devowed by those types of secrets that should take place there. 
And the representatives of people who make these decisions should be 
made aware, you can do it in some kind of a system or order in which 
sensitive information is let out.
  But this is not sensitive information. This is what the future 
direction of this country should be. And I'm sorry, before you put the 
stop work order, you at least should be able to tell Congress what 
you're about to do.
  I hope we never, never engage in this kind of gag order in any branch 
of this administration again because, as the gentleman from Missouri 
accurately said, it is not transparency. It was not what was promised. 
And it is simply a wrong problem which allows a whole lot of issues to 
be pushed to the side, which could have been easily fixed, adjudicated, 
simplified had we simply had some kind of communication as the process 
was being developed.
  Congress is now behind the 8 ball on this. If we want to fix this 
problem, and I desperately think we should, our options are severely 
limited because of the way the administration handled this year's 
budget preparation.
  I yield back.
  Mr. AKIN. Well, that's quite an indictment. And you sure had a 
snoutful of bad news for us. I didn't even know about that last one. 
And it's enough to really make you irritated, isn't it?
  You know, we hear about transparency, and yet there isn't 
transparency, and this isn't the way we should be running a country. It 
seems to me that somebody's trying to hide something. That's what it 
seems like, somebody is trying to cover something up.
  Now we're about done with our first half hour so we're going to be 
finishing up on ballistic missile and strategic missile defense. I am 
going to let the last word go to my good friend from Arizona, 
Congressman Franks.
  Mr. FRANKS of Arizona. Ostensibly, the whole purpose of cutting 
missile defense is so that we can use the money somewhere else. But 
sometimes we forget that when we suffer some type of weakness in our 
military system it invites or it provokes some type of attack from an 
enemy which nearly always costs us much more than any savings that we 
had. When airplanes hit our buildings and our Pentagon, they cost us in 
our total economy, around $2 trillion. And so this is not only bad 
defense. It's bad economics.
  And if some day, if we build a system and we don't need it, I will 
stand before the American public and say, you know, we used this system 
every day because it deterred an attack. But I'll still apologize to 
you for spending all the money.
  But God save us all from the day when we have to stand before the 
American people and apologize to them because some type of an attack 
left hundreds of thousands of our people dead in a city or worse and we 
had the ability to defend them and we didn't out of political 
correctness.
  And with that I yield back to the gentleman and thank him very much.
  Mr. AKIN. I appreciate your passion on that subject. Gentlemen, 
there's one point that I always like to make on

[[Page H5880]]

missile defense that it seems like many times people overlook it. And 
what I hear, just talking to people back in my district they say, well, 
couldn't these bad guys basically smuggle a missile into our city and 
just set it off? And they don't really need a missile to do that. And 
the answer is, they can try, but that's not as easy to do as it appears 
because the bombs and things do emit some radiation and there's some 
chance we could catch them.
  But the other main point is that a bomb set off up in the air is far, 
far more deadly, hundreds of times more deadly in terms of casualties 
than one set off on the ground. I think that's part of the reason why 
you see our opponents developing these ballistic and intercontinental 
ballistic missiles because of this high level of threat and a very 
rapid ability to deploy a weapon. And so that's part of the reason why 
this is a very key topic.
  And I thank you so much. The gentleman from Arizona has taken a lot 
of time to understand this, knows it inside and out. He's just about 
like an expert. And Arizona has been doing the right thing sending you 
up here.
  And I think we're going to move on to another topic which is 
particularly of importance to Americans today, and that's the subject 
of taxation and energy. Not so long ago, our President said, under my 
plan of a cap-and-trade system, or that is cap-and-tax system, electric 
rates would necessarily skyrocket. That will cost money. They will pass 
that money on to consumers. This is the President in a meeting in 
guilty January of 2008.

  Well, he is now the President. And they're talking about this cap-
and-tax system that's been the subject of debate now for hours and 
hours in the Energy and Commerce Committee. And from what we're seeing 
and taking a look at what's being proposed, the President was accurate 
in this statement. It is going to be extremely expensive, and electric 
rates are going to skyrocket indeed.
  The interesting thing about this though was he stood here at the 
beginning of this year and said, I'm not going to tax anybody that's 
making less than $250,000. And yet what's being proposed here is every 
time you turn a light switch on, you're going to get some more 
taxation.
  How much taxation are we talking about? And what's the logic of this?
  Well, the logic is supposed to be that the Earth is getting too hot, 
and that's really a serious problem for us. The Earth is getting too 
hot. And so I thought it was interesting to take a look back 
historically over the last hundred years, not at the temperature of the 
Earth, but at what the scientists have been saying down through the 
years.
  In 1920, the newspapers were filled with scientific warnings of a 
fast approaching glacial age, 1920s.
  1930s, scientists reversed themselves and they said there's going to 
be serious global warming in the 1930s.
  In 1972, Time magazine, citing numerous scientific reports that 
imminent runaway glaciation is what the Time magazine called it. And by 
1975, Newsweek, scientific evidence of an ice age. And so people were 
being called to stockpile food, and the question of whether we should 
use nuclear weapons or some method of melting the Arctic ice cap.
  1976, U.S. government: ``The Earth is heading into some sort of mini-
ice age.''
  And now we've got global warming. And so over the period of the last 
hundred years, well-meaning scientists and, supposedly majorities of 
scientists, even, have changed their opinion about this global warming 
about three times or so.
  Well, the complaint now is that we've got this CO2 that's 
being generated which makes the Earth warmer and, therefore, we want to 
tax the CO2. When the government wants to tax something, 
usually you'd better hang on to your wallet. We're talking about a lot 
of tax.
  And tonight we have probably one of the most foremost experts in the 
House on the whole subject of this what's called cap-and-tax. A man 
who's been in the middle of these hearings for hours and hours is 
joining us. It's a treat to have Congressman Shimkus from Illinois. I 
yield time, gentleman.
  Mr. SHIMKUS. Thank you. I appreciate the time. As stated, we're in 
the, in essence, the markup of the bill right now. And so I thought I'd 
just take a few minutes to talk about what happened yesterday and 
what's happening today.
  The basic premise that we're trying to just remind the public that 
because to address this global warming you have to monetize carbon, 
that is, in essence, adding a dollar amount to carbon, which that 
dollar amount would be passed on. Ratepayers will pay more. President 
Obama admits it. Really, the draft bill admits it because there's 55 
pages of what to do with job losses in the bill.
  Here's a couple of amendments that we debated last week--I mean 
yesterday. An amendment offered by Lee Terry, Republican, of Nebraska, 
would require annual EPA certification of the average retail price of 
gasoline. If the price exceeds $5 per gallon as a result of this act, 
this act would cease to be effective.
  We're admitting that there will be an increase in cost. Voted down on 
a party-line vote.
  Mr. AKIN. Reclaiming, you're just saying that what we said is, hey, 
gas is painful when it gets up there to $3 or $4 a gallon. But you're 
saying if gas gets to $5, we put an amendment saying enough already; 
that's enough tax at $5 a gallon. And that was a party-line vote. The 
Republicans voting, I assume, that they don't want to let it get over 
5. The Democrats saying it's okay to tax more than that; is that 
correct?
  Mr. SHIMKUS. That is correct. Another amendment offered by our 
colleague, Mike Rogers, Republican, from Michigan, that would require 
an annual certification by the administrator in consultation with the 
Department of State and the United States Trade Representative that 
China and India have adopted a mandatory greenhouse gas reduction 
program at least as stringent as that would be imposed under this act. 
And what we're saying is this is all pain and no gain unless we have an 
international agreement that brings in China and India.
  Well, my colleagues on the other side all voted ``no'' against 
requiring China and India to be under the same regime. Republicans all 
voted that we should be in the same regime.
  Another amendment that said if unemployment gets to 15 percent, that 
we ought to change course, that this cap-and-trade scheme is not 
working. Another party-line vote, Republicans saying we ought to get 
out of this agreement if job loss gets to 15 percent. Democrats stayed 
on the party line saying, no, 15 percent job loss is acceptable under 
this bill.
  Mr. AKIN. Just reclaiming my time for a minute. What--how much 
unemployment do we have now? We're not up to 10 percent yet, are we 
gentleman?
  Mr. SHIMKUS. We are right around 10 percent.
  Mr. AKIN. Right near 10. So you're saying if it gets to 15, enough 
already. We've got to ease back on this thing that's hurting us. 
Because the point of the matter is this tax is going to create 
unemployment. Right? And if they say, well, it's not going to create 
unemployment, then they don't have any problem with an amendment saying 
that at 15 percent unemployment we're going to stop it. Right?
  But, no, so they're saying no we don't want that amendment, saying 
they think it will go over 15 percent.
  Mr. SHIMKUS. And I am going to head back to the committee and I 
appreciate the time. Let me just say we also had an amendment: will 
global warming bills' costs be disclosed. We asked for full disclosure 
on electricity bills. Republicans said, yeah, that's a good idea. 
Democrats voted ``no.'' Democrats declined to shield homeowners from 
electricity spike hikes.
  So what we're trying to do is, understanding that this is going to 
cause an increased cost to the ratepayer, no one's speaking for the 
ratepayers. Well, the Republicans are speaking to the ratepayer. The 
Democrats in the committee markup are speaking to those special 
interest groups that cut this deal behind closed doors.

                              {time}  2015

  You've got a lot of my colleagues here who all want to speak with 
you. I appreciate your yielding me some time. Keep up the great fight.
  Mr. AKIN. Congressman Shimkus is just doing the yeoman's job on the 
committee. It's a tough thing. Those amendments seem to me so 
commonsense that I'm kind of amazed that

[[Page H5881]]

anybody in the political business would dare to vote against something 
that's saying, hey, it's $5 a gallon for gasoline or unemployment is at 
15 percent. Actually, that's not such an odd idea because Spain has put 
in this same thing that is being proposed here. Their unemployment now 
is 17.5 percent, and they're suffering. They're calling all the green 
jobs ``subprime jobs.''
  Thank you very much, Congressman Shimkus.
  We're joined by a very sober judge from the State of Texas, my good 
friend, Judge Carter. Welcome to our discussion this evening. Let's 
talk a little bit about these taxes.
  Mr. CARTER. Well, some of the things that our friend Congressman 
Shimkus said are pretty sobering.
  Mr. AKIN. Yes, they're sobering. They even make a judge sober. I 
yield.
  Mr. CARTER. We're saying $5 a gallon for gasoline with that increase 
being caused by this tax-and-trade scheme that's being sold to the 
Congress as some kind of clean-up-the-world project. We think that at 
least ought to raise the issue and should slow down the process. Yet 
they say, No. Let's see what's going to happen when it gets to be $5 a 
gallon.
  Let's think in our recent past as to what happens when gasoline gets 
to $5 a gallon. Well, of course it's going to be the evil oil 
companies' fault that secretly have made deals with each other to fix 
prices and to make them go up. That's why, when they said the 
electricity bills are going to go up, we just said that we wanted them 
to say on the electricity bill what caused this to go up. Well, it 
happens to be our cap-and-tax program that caused it to go up. That's 
fair. The American people ought to know what caused the doubling of 
their electricity bills. Guess what they're going to say? Oh, the evil 
power companies have jacked the prices up to bilk the poor consumers. 
Truth and sunshine is what this government needs. Put the truth in the 
bill.
  Mr. AKIN. That's absolutely right. I appreciate the gentleman's 
perspective, and that's coming from a judge.
  You want to know what has happened and exactly what's going on. Don't 
put this behind smoke and mirrors. We're talking here about comparing 
the cost of these taxes being proposed. This is the cost of World War 
II right here, this big blue circle. This cap-and-trade here at $1.9 
trillion is a tremendous, tremendous tax. The other wars--this thing 
here--would be the war in Afghanistan and the terrorist wars and all. 
All of these are small by comparison to what's being proposed.
  So what does that mean for the average family? What are their costs 
going to be?
  Well, you can see the energy here. The blue here is gasoline, and the 
gasoline is going to jump 16 percent. This is just by 2012. You're 
going to see a 16 percent increase in the cost of gasoline. The green 
is electricity. That's going to jump 9 percent, and that's just the 
beginning. That's only by 2012. Then you've got natural gas, which is 
going to jump 14 percent. Now, when the economy is rough and people are 
having trouble with unemployment, this somehow or other seems like a 
pretty strange thing to be talking about, a massive tax increase like 
this.
  We're joined by my good friend from Georgia, and I would yield time 
to the doctor.
  Mr. BROUN of Georgia. I thank the gentleman for yielding.
  I think the American people need to understand what this is going to 
mean to them directly. I think these charts are great. As Judge Carter 
said, I think the facts that Mr. Shimkus gave us were absolutely 
sobering, but there are a number of people in this House of 
Representatives who have openly said that they would like to see gas go 
up to $10 a gallon. They think that that will start people conserving 
gas in America. Well, most folks can't afford $10 a gallon gas. There 
are people in this House who want to federalize--nationalize--the whole 
of the energy system, and there are many Members of the Democrat 
majority who are promoting that. I think this may very well be the 
opening for them to try to nationalize it, just like Hugo Chavez has 
done in Venezuela, and that's exactly the picture that we see here in 
America.
  What Nancy Pelosi and company are doing here in this Congress is 
they're going down the same road, and they're trying to force America 
into the same policies and down the same road that Hugo Chavez in 
Venezuela has taken that country down. Yet what is it going to cost 
each individual family?
  It is estimated that every family is going to pay over $1,000 in 
increased electricity costs. It's estimated that the tax, itself--I've 
seen various estimates--will be anywhere from over $3,000 per family in 
America to over $4,000 per family in America per year in increased 
taxes. It's going to increase the cost of food and of medicines. Every 
single good and service in this country is going to go up because every 
bit of food and every medicine--every good and service in America--is 
dependent upon energy. If you flip on the light switch, your bill is 
going up. If you go to the gas pump, your bill is going up. If you ride 
public transportation, the bill is going up. The bill is going up. The 
bill is going up for everything in this country. The American people 
need to say ``no'' to this idiotic, what I call, ``tax-and-cap.'' The 
reason I call it ``tax-and-cap'' is because it is a huge tax. It's not 
about the environment.
  The President, himself, said that this needs to pass so that he can 
fund his socialistic agenda. He didn't call it a ``socialistic 
agenda,'' but that's exactly what it is. It's a big government agenda 
for health care. For every single thing that this country does, they 
want to do that.
  Mr. AKIN. Dr. Broun, I appreciate your firmness and your just 
basically calling this what it is.
  An hour ago, we heard the Democrats talking about the fact that, oh, 
they're really into technology and innovation and all of this kind of 
stuff. This thing has nothing to do with technology or innovation. This 
is just a plain, old tax increase. It's a plain, old tax increase, but 
it's a big, whopping tax increase, is what we're dealing with here, and 
the justification is kind of amusing.
  I'd like to take just a minute, and then I'm going to recognize my 
good friend, Congresswoman Lummis from Wyoming.
  Having an engineering background, I kind of get interest out of it. 
How much human activity does it take to affect greenhouse gases? This 
block here of all of these boxes represents all of the greenhouse gases 
which comprise only 2 percent of the atmosphere. So these are all of 
the things that cause global warming. Most of this is water vapor. By 
the way, it's not CO2, okay? Now then, this yellow stuff 
over here is the part of the greenhouse gases that is CO2. 
Those are the yellow boxes. The little red box there is the 
CO2 that is caused by human activity, and that little red 
box right there is the excuse for this whopping, big tax. Now, somehow 
or other, the logic of this just seems like a very, very thinly veiled 
excuse for a great big tax.

  Mr. BROUN of Georgia. Will the gentleman yield?
  Mr. AKIN. The thing that is the most amusing on this is that the one 
major source of energy that we have that makes no CO2 is not 
being given any credit or is being pushed forward at all, which is 
nuclear power. We'll talk about that, but I want to yield to the 
gentlewoman from Wyoming, Congresswoman Lummis.
  Thank you for joining us tonight. It's just a treat to have you here.
  Mrs. LUMMIS. Thank you, Congressman Akin. I appreciate being involved 
in this discussion.
  This is a national energy tax. This will not solve our problems with 
pollution, but what will? Sometimes we Republicans are called the 
``party of no,'' and it's because we need opportunities to express our 
better ideas. Indeed, I believe we do have better ideas, and some of 
them are being illustrated by the chart that Mr. Akin has on the board 
right now.
  We have opportunities to clean up the technologies and sources of 
energy that we have right now. We have the opportunity to increase the 
number of hybrid and zero-emission vehicles on the road. We have the 
opportunity to increase wind and solar and biofuels. We have the 
opportunity to add to the amount of natural gas that we use because it 
is, by far, the cleanest burning hydrocarbon. We have opportunities to 
sequester the CO2 that comes from coal, and as we know, coal 
is more than half of the electricity that is produced in this country. 
So, to abandon coal

[[Page H5882]]

abruptly is just not possible. We should pursue ways to clean it up. 
That includes sequestering carbon.
  My State of Wyoming has the most advanced carbon sequestration laws 
in the country, which say that the pores under the surface where carbon 
can be sequestered--or captured and secured--belong to the surface 
owner, and that liability for the escape of hydrocarbons that are 
introduced into those pores are on the companies that put that carbon 
in the ground. So that creates a mechanism that other States are 
looking at right now, including Montana and others that are following 
Wyoming's lead.
  In addition, we need to produce from coal liquid products that burn 
less. In addition, we need more nuclear energy. As we know, nuclear 
energy is not a carbon emitter, and it is producing 20 percent of our 
electricity now. So we absolutely cannot take nuclear energy off the 
table. It's very important that we add more nuclear.
  Mr. AKIN. Reclaiming my time, Congresswoman Lummis, what you're 
saying is really exciting. You're talking about what the Republicans 
have been pushing for now and since I've been here, which has been 
since 2001. It's an all-of-the-above strategy. It's saying let's let 
freedom work. Just get out of the way, and let's start developing 
hydrogen. If we've got places we ought to drill for oil, then do that. 
Fine. If we've got to do coal, let's figure out if you're going to 
sequester it or not. If we need nuclear and if you're really worried 
about that percentage of CO2--I mean if you're really 
serious about that, then why not embrace the number 1 technology that 
doesn't make any CO2, which is nuclear? We're saying do all 
of these things. Let the free marketplace work and let freedom 
basically run. Let American innovation--and let the resources that God 
gave us on this land--work, and we will have energy.
  You know, there's an ironic thing that is just absolutely crazy about 
government. Do you know why the Department of Energy was created years 
and years ago? This is kind of a quiz question if any of my colleagues 
happen to know the answer. Why did we create the Department of Energy?
  Dr. Broun from Georgia, do you know why we created the Department of 
Energy?
  Mr. BROUN of Georgia. Absolutely. It was created to make America 
energy independent.
  Mr. AKIN. What has happened since we've created it, Congressman?
  Mr. BROUN of Georgia. Well, it has not made America energy 
independent whatsoever.
  Mr. AKIN. We are less that way.
  Mr. BROUN of Georgia. We are less.
  Mr. AKIN. What has happened to the number of employees in the 
Department of Energy?
  Mr. BROUN of Georgia. It has skyrocketed. They're really not 
fulfilling the obligation that they have under the charter of 
developing the Department of Energy, so they've been an abject failure 
at what they were charged to do.
  Mr. AKIN. In fact, you could almost say it's of inverse proportion. 
The more people they've hired and the bigger it has gotten, the more 
dependent we have become on foreign energy. That doesn't make a whole 
lot of sense.
  I want to thank Congresswoman Lummis, and I also want to get back to 
Judge Carter here.
  I want to give you a chance to take a look at some of these things. 
We've got, I think, only just about another 5 minutes or so.
  Mr. CARTER. First, if they're not doing their job, we ought to fire 
them. That's just really easy, okay?
  Mr. AKIN. I think that was pretty straightforward. If they don't do 
the job, fire them.
  Mr. CARTER. That's simple stuff. If they're not doing what we hired 
them to do, we've got to fire them.
  Mr. AKIN. Now, Ronald Reagan wanted to close the department down.
  Mr. CARTER. Yes.
  Mr. AKIN. Is that what you're advocating?
  Mr. CARTER. That's fine. I don't have a problem with that at all, but 
let's get back to what we're doing.
  You know, there's an old saying: ``I won't tax you and I won't tax 
me. I'll tax that fellow behind the tree,'' okay? That's kind of what 
we heard from the Obama administration when we started off: Don't 
worry. Ninety-five percent of the people in America are not going to be 
taxed by this administration. Yet, as my colleague from Georgia said, 
there's not anything you can think of that doesn't have an energy cost 
in it. Nothing. I mean it's in everything. So I don't care how rich you 
are or how poor you are. You're going to be taxed by this.
  Now, don't give me the excuse of, well, we're just taxing the 
company, and they're taxing you. That doesn't work. Everybody knows 
where this tax is going. They know it in the administration, and we 
know it in Congress. It's going to us, to the individual Americans, and 
we're going to pay this tax. Look at that. Shoes. Plastic. Food. 
Electricity. Housing. All that.
  Mr. AKIN. Reclaiming my time, these are all different places. If 
you're going to have to use it up, it's going to cost you $1,900 per 
household just for the first year of this tax. This just tells you what 
you'd have to give up to save that money to pay that tax. This one here 
is all of the meat, poultry, fish, eggs, dairy products, fruits and 
vegetables that a family eats in 1 year.

                              {time}  2030

  That's what you've got to give up to compensate for this tax that's 
being proposed. Or, maybe you don't want to do that. You want to give 
up this--all furniture, appliances, carpet, and other furnishings. You 
can give that up for 1 year.
  Mr. CARTER. If the gentleman would yield for just a minute. On that 
food thing, you have forgotten the next tax they're coming up with is 
the flatulence tax on cows.
  Mr. AKIN. Are you going to collect that in bags, gentlemen?
  Mr. CARTER. Ask our farmers if they like that idea.
  Mr. AKIN. I think we're getting close on time, but the good news is 
my good friend, Congressman King from Iowa, is here. I think he is 
going to continue talking on the same subject. I think he might be 
willing to recognize some of the other Congressmen that want to weigh 
in on this absolutely crazy sort of tax system that's being proposed.
  The funny thing is that, just to conclude, this chart right here, 
this is something the Democrats have been unwilling to deal with or 
talk about. But, see this little card? There's a little plastic thing 
here and there's a thing inside there that's the size of two mechanical 
pencil erasers. There's enough nuclear energy in that little pill right 
there to equal 149 gallons of oil, 1 ton of coal, or 17,000 cubic feet 
of natural gas. That's how much energy is in that one little tablet. 
Maybe we ought to be thinking about real technology.
  Thank you all for joining me this evening.

                          ____________________