[Congressional Record Volume 156, Number 66 (Wednesday, May 5, 2010)]
[House]
[Pages H3184-H3188]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                  WHAT GOT US INTO THIS ECONOMIC MESS?

  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. Mr. Speaker, it's a pleasure to be able to join you and my 
colleagues and others who are gathered here to talk about something 
that has been on our minds for some considerable time now--many months, 
even 1\1/2\ to 2 years--and that is the subject of the economy and jobs 
and what's really going on in America.
  I'm a person who is of that baby boomer-type cycle--I'm 62--and there 
are many other people such as myself in America that have done a lot of 
work and tried to save our money and all of a sudden something seemed 
to go wrong in the economy. We lost a lot of money in 2008, and there 
is a real concern out there about jobs, the economy, and what's going 
on in the policies. And so I thought, in that we have 1 hour--we don't 
have to do everything in 1 minute or 5 minutes, but we have 1 full hour 
today--that I would open the subject. I will invite my other Republican 
colleagues to join me. You may see some coming in before long. And I 
want to talk about this whole situation, and because we have more time, 
I can go back just a little bit.
  I would like to go back to how is it that we were kind of cruising 
along, things seemed to be going pretty well by about 2006 or so with 
the economy, 2007, and then all of a sudden, in 2008, we really seem to 
have come to ``grief on a reef,'' so to speak. So what went on?
  Well, let's go back to an interesting article in the New York Times, 
not exactly a conservative oracle. It was September 11--not in 2001, 
but September 11 in 2003--the New York Times reported this, that there 
is a new agency proposed to oversee Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae. Well, 
why would there be a new agency to oversee Freddie and Fannie? Well, 
Freddie and Fannie were these quasi-governmental agencies, and their 
job was to help provide Americans with affordable loans so Americans 
could buy houses.
  So here we have in this article, it says: The Bush administration 
today recommended the most significant regulatory overhaul in the 
housing finance industry since the savings and loan crisis a decade 
ago.
  Oh, my goodness. So President Bush is saying we need to overhaul 
Freddie and Fannie. They were quasi-private, quasi-public. Why would he 
want to overhaul? Well, they just had misplaced a few hundreds of 
millions of dollars and gave people a lot of concern that maybe Freddie 
and Fannie were not in good shape economically. Well, then the question 
becomes, if they're not in good shape, what would that mean? Well, that 
would mean, guess what? The American taxpayer may be asked to bail out 
Freddie and Fannie. So the President is saying, Hey, I need some more 
authority to make sure that Freddie and Fannie don't do some dumb 
things that cost us a whole lot of money. So that's what the President 
is saying in this article. Again, this is 2003.
  Following that, we read further in the article, and we have another 
interesting situation here where we have the gentleman now who is in 
charge of trying to fix these Wall Street institutions, that is, our 
current Congressman Barney Frank. And this was his statement in the 
same article in 2003: These two entities, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, 
are not facing any kind of financial crisis. The more people exaggerate 
these problems, the more pressure there is on these companies, the less 
we will see in terms of affordable housing.
  So this is something we have a clear party line difference. The 
President is saying Freddie and Fannie are not managing things 
properly, they were a risk to our economy, and you have a Democrat, who 
is now the ranking guy on this committee, that's saying, no, they're 
fine, Freddie and Fannie are just fine.
  Well, of course, hindsight is always 20/20. It was obvious that what 
was said here by Congressman Frank was completely wrong. Freddie and 
Fannie were in trouble. They did mismanage things, and they have now 
been taken over by the Federal Government, more or less. And guess who 
has to pick up the tab? You guessed it. The American taxpayer.
  Now, how did this whole situation develop and what happened? Well, 
part of what happened was people came to the conclusion some number of 
years ago that it would be nice if people could get loans to buy 
houses. And what happens for the people who don't have very good credit 
ratings? How about the people who are a bad security risk? What are we 
going to do with them? Well, we're going to say, You can get a loan, 
too. That's what he's saying in terms of affordable housing.
  So somehow, in the name of compassion, we came up with this idea that 
the government was going to allow people to get loans and not check 
whether the person had a capacity to repay the loans. And at the height 
of the big bubble that was going up on home prices, just about anybody, 
regardless of their credit rating or anything else, what job they had, 
could go in and get a loan to buy a great big house. And it worked 
pretty well for a couple of years. You could go in, buy a house, and 
then wait a couple of years. The price of the house would double, and 
you would sell it and buy some other big house.
  And you could pyramid your money up even though you were borrowing 
money and you didn't have any way to pay it back, because these loans 
were so good you wouldn't have to pay anything for a number of years at 
all. You could get a loan that would say you don't have to pay anything 
for a couple of years at least. So you could buy something. It would 
appreciate. You could sell it, and then move on and do that. And so 
people were starting to do that with houses. The trouble was, of 
course, that the bubble burst, and all of the house of cards came 
tumbling down.
  Now, we understand what caused the problem originally was the concept 
that the government requires the banks to make loans to people who 
can't afford to pay. That's a bad policy, because when people can't 
pay, somebody's going to have to pick up the tab. And guess what 
happened? You guessed it once again. It was Uncle Sam passes it on to 
the taxpayer to pick up the tab for this failed policy.

  So you want to ask, How did we end up with this 10 percent 
unemployment? How did we end up with a very weak economy? How did we 
get into this trouble? The trouble was caused, about 90 percent, by the 
U.S. Government. It was caused by people who meet in this Chamber and 
various administrations.
  At the end of the Clinton administration, the Clintons decided that 
what they were going to do was to increase the percentage of those bad 
loans that banks had to approve. What did the banks do with them? They 
passed them on to Freddie and Fannie. What happened to Freddie and 
Fannie? Well, Wall Street sliced and diced the loans up and sold them 
all over the world, and Freddie and Fannie then get into a big problem.
  Now, what was the political organization that forced all of these 
loans to be

[[Page H3185]]

made to people who couldn't afford to pay it? You guessed it. It was 
ACORN. ACORN was involved in a lot of voter fraud, but it also was 
involved in forcing banks locally to take loans that they shouldn't 
have taken. So this is a piece of what happened.
  The other piece was the policy of the Federal Reserve. Because of the 
recession that we came into in 2001 when I was first elected, the 
Federal Reserve decided to increase liquidity. But particularly what 
was happening, Greenspan decided to reduce the interest rate. Now, this 
idea of increasing liquidity is the equivalent of the crack cocaine of 
economics. What it is is it's a government--in the old-fashioned world, 
you would say the government is running the printing presses.
  Well, that's what we did. We ran the printing presses, but we also 
reduced the cost of money to very low, to about zero percent, and held 
it there for some period of time. By dumping lots and lots of dollars 
into the economic system, people that had the dollars go, Hey, I'm 
getting these dollars for a very, very low interest rate. What can I 
invest in? Hey, why not invest in the housing business, because housing 
prices are going up like a rocket. I can borrow money at a couple 
percent, or even less, and I can double my money, almost, in the 
housing business in a couple, 3, 4 years. So why not do it?
  Well, everybody did for a while until this very low interest rate, 
the high level of liquidity, and boom, you get another bubble. It's 
like the high-tech bubble, because we're using liquidity to try and 
pull ourselves out of problems. We'll come back to that in a little 
while.
  So what was it that really caused the economic crisis? Well, first of 
all, it was lousy policy set right here in Congress about making loans 
to people who couldn't afford to pay them and then not holding Freddie 
and Fannie accountable for what they're doing. And by doing that, we 
ended up with the beginning of the recession.
  Now, following that, we start to go into recession. The idea then 
was, just in Bush's last year or so and when I was here, we had Paulson 
come to us and say, Hey, look, everything's in trouble. You guys have 
got two choices: Either the entire world economic system is going to 
melt down--I mean, the Earth is going to crack. Hailstones are going to 
come from heaven. I mean, it's going to be terrible, and there's going 
to be riots in the streets because the dollar bill won't work anymore 
and the banking system will collapse--or your other alternative is, 
give me $700 billion in unmarked bills in a brown paper bag. Those are 
your two choices, Congress, and we're going to the public and letting 
everybody know. And if you do the right thing, hopefully there will not 
be this terrible calamity.
  And so Congress was supposed to give $700 billion to Hank Paulson. 
Well, did he really need that? No, he didn't need it. In fact, it was 
part of the same mistake that we make frequently here, and that is that 
every time there's a problem economically, the government has to jump 
in and fix it, bailout fever. And this was, of course, the beginning of 
the big Wall Street bailout.
  Unfortunately, some Republicans supported that idea, along with most 
of the Democrats, and we took $700 billion away from the American 
taxpayer to buy these supposedly troubled assets that had been created 
by Wall Street. Well, it's pretty hard to buy something when there 
isn't a market in it, so we took $700 billion out of the market--about 
$350 supposedly spent during Bush's last year, another $350 in Obama's 
first year--and that was the beginning of our big spending. And again, 
it's based on this concept that the government should jump in and fix 
everything and that the government is going to be able to fix the U.S. 
economy. That turns out to be a troubling assumption, and it continued 
to get us in trouble over the last year or two, which has then made the 
economic situation even worse.
  The next thing that happened was, after we did this Wall Street 
bailout, we decided that what we had to do next was a stimulus package. 
The proposal was that we're going to do this stimulus. Now, the whole 
concept of stimulus is pretty much like the idea of, if you had a pair 
of boots on, what you're going to do is to reach down, grab your 
bootstraps and lift hard, and if you lift hard enough, you can float 
around the room. And this is the concept in economics that was known as 
Keynesianism. It was the idea that if the Federal Government just 
spends a whole lot of money, it will make the economy better when you 
have a tough economy.
  If you think about that from a commonsense point of view, picture 
you're trying to run your family and you realize, hey, there's really 
some economic problems our family is having, so the solution is go out 
and just spend money like mad. Now, would you think that would be a 
very smart idea? Well, most commonsense people--certainly people from 
my State, the State of Missouri, would say that's not very smart just 
to go out and spend a whole lot of money. Has that idea been tried 
before? Well, yes, it has. It was tried by Henry Morgenthau back when 
Little Lord Keynes was first proposing this theory. It's a lovely 
theory if you're in government, because the theory says you can just 
spend lots and lots of money that's not your money.
  People in politics think that's nice because people like it when I 
spend lots of government money. The problem is that Henry Morgenthau, 
who was Secretary of the Treasury under FDR, managed to use this policy 
to take a recession and turn it into the Great Depression. And so he 
came, at the end of 8 years, before the House Ways and Means Committee 
here, and Henry Morgenthau says that we have tried this theory of 
spending money. We've spent and spent and spent, and we have not seen 
any change in unemployment. We have terrible unemployment and a huge 
debt and deficit to boot. So this is the guy right alongside with 
Little Lord Keynes that said this didn't work. We tried it for 8 years, 
and it just created the Great Depression in America.
  We should learn something from history, but, no, we decide what we're 
going to do is we're going to come up with the ``stimulus bill,'' 
another 700-and-something billion dollars, $787 billion. And here we 
have our new President here. He says, like any cash-strapped family, we 
will work within a budget to invest what we need and sacrifice what we 
don't. The things on this side of the chart sound pretty good. If I 
heard somebody say that that was my President, I would say, Hah, this 
is a pretty good idea.
  This is what the President said at the beginning of the year.

                              {time}  1645

  The only trouble is there is this huge gap between what is said and 
what is done. So what we do, we start with: Is it any real serious 
budget reform? No, it is not really budget reform at all.
  In fact, what has happened in terms of the Federal spending? Have we 
learned anything after the stimulus bill? What should we have learned 
from the stimulus bill? Well, we were told that if you do not pass the 
stimulus bill, if you don't pass it, here is what is going to happen, 
so you better look out. If you don't pass the stimulus bill, that is 
what is going to happen to unemployment, this line here. But if you 
pass a stimulus bill, here is what is going to happen, it will keep 
this unemployment down. So we were told that if you don't pass the 
stimulus bill, unemployment could go as high as 8 percent. And if you 
pass it, it will bring it on down.
  Well, that was all based on this silly idea that if you spent lots 
and lots of money, everything would be okay. This really wasn't even a 
good FDR stimulus bill because if he had been doing it, it would have 
had a lot of concrete in it. It would have been hydroelectric plants 
and roads. This had much more food stamps and aid to States that 
overspent their budgets and things like that. So we spent $787 billion 
on the stimulus bill, and here is what happened. This red line. So you 
think a whole lot of government spending is going to fix unemployment? 
Absolutely not. We have already tried it. One more time, if we didn't 
learn our lesson from Henry Morgenthau, we have another chance. Here we 
go. Same dumb idea, still doesn't work. You can try it as many times as 
you want. It is not going to work. So the unemployment now jumps up. In 
many places it is more than 10 percent. These numbers are pretty 
conservative. If you have been looking for a job for more than a year, 
you are not counted anymore in these statistics. So people without a

[[Page H3186]]

job for a year--maybe some have given up in despair of ever getting a 
job--they are not even counted in these numbers. So this idea of a 
whole lot of government spending didn't work, and so we have 
unemployment.
  I am joined by a good friend of mine, Dr. Price, who is really on top 
of some of these things. I would ask if he would like to join in the 
conversation a little bit here this afternoon.
  Mr. PRICE of Georgia. I thank the gentleman for his leadership on 
this and all issues, and especially for highlighting the challenges 
Americans face all across this land.
  But pointing out, as this chart so aptly does, that the ``solution'' 
which has been put in place by this administration has, I would argue 
and I know you would, has in fact made things worse. So here we are 
with the Nation being promised a little over a year ago that if we 
spent hundreds of billions of dollars in an effort to try to get the 
Nation back moving from an economic standpoint, that we wouldn't see an 
unemployment rate of 8 percent.
  Mr. AKIN. Right. If we didn't pass it, 8 percent.
  Mr. PRICE of Georgia. That was going to be the high point. And here 
we are at 9.7 percent, and it has been higher than that. And the take-
home message on that is what they are doing doesn't work.
  I told a fellow the other day, I said, They are thinking about doing 
a new stimulus bill, a new jobs bill. You know, they tried millions and 
then they tried billions, and I guess we are going to move to 
gazillions next.
  Mr. AKIN. Don't forget the trillions. We are working on trillions 
right now.
  Mr. PRICE of Georgia. And as you well know, it is money we don't 
have. It is money that we don't have, and that is the troubling thing 
for the American people all across this land because they know the 
policies that have been put in place not only haven't worked, they have 
been destructive to job creation, which is what is frustrating to those 
of us on our side of the aisle who know that fundamental American 
principles, if you follow them, actually can allow you to create jobs.
  So what does that mean? It means spending less. You've got a great 
chart right there, and people rail on the amount of spending that was 
done at the end of the last administration, and we did as well. But if 
you might share with folks the numbers that have happened since Speaker 
Pelosi and her crowd have taken over.
  Mr. AKIN. Right. You know, I appreciate your bringing that up because 
one of the things that Americans intuitively understand, they are not 
really buying this idea that by spending tons of money the Federal 
Government is going to make everything better. Maybe some ivory-tower 
people, but most people on the street know that doesn't make any sense.
  They also know we as Republicans did the wrong thing; we spent too 
much money. And the worst year in terms of spending too much money was 
Bush's last year in office and our deficit was $459 billion. That is 
this box here. The reason it is red is because this is when the Pelosi 
Congress took over, so it was George Bush with the Pelosi Congress. And 
of all of the years that President Bush had spent too much money, this 
was his worst year right here. We follow that up with 2009 and this 
$459 billion jumps to $1.4 trillion. Now when you really think about 
it, that is really a tripling of the amount of deficit.
  Mr. PRICE of Georgia. It really is astounding. And the picture--they 
say a picture is worth a thousand words. That picture is worth over a 
trillion words, and that is because that is money we don't have. It is 
money that puts greater deficits and debt on the backs of our kids and 
our grandkids. It is mortgaging the future.
  Right now we are seeing the consequences of reckless and 
irresponsible spending at a national level in another nation--Greece. 
And if you look at the trajectory, the spending path we are on, and the 
debt and the deficit path we are on, we are not far behind the 
incredible irresponsibility that is now being addressed in the nation 
of Greece.
  Well, the American people know that is wrong. They know they can't go 
to the garage and print money, and that is what the Federal Government 
does. That is what the Obama administration has done. Those red columns 
there, those red lines there, demonstrate clearly that the deficits and 
the debt that are being run up by the Obama administration and Speaker 
Pelosi and the majority party right now are unparalleled in our 
history.
  Mr. AKIN. It seems like people think politics is complicated, and all 
this economic stuff is complicated. It doesn't have to be nearly as 
complicated as people think it is. For instance, take a look between 
the parties. The Democrats, their basic idea of a solution to a problem 
is that the government has to get bigger and spend more money. That's 
the way they always look at it. They think that the solution is the 
government, and we think that the problem is the government. This thing 
here is an indication that with a completely Democrat House and Senate 
and President, this is what happens. We triple this amount of deficit 
to the point now when the Federal Government spends $1 today, 41 cents 
of that $1 is borrowed.
  Aside from this just insane level of spending money that we don't 
have, which is basically taxing our grandchildren--I have some 
grandchildren, I've gotten old enough, and I don't like the idea of 
taxing them any more than paying taxes myself.

  My background is engineering and the manufacturing business. You 
know, this idea about unemployment is not that complicated. It is 
really very basic. Anybody who has tried to run a little lemonade stand 
knows more or less how businesses work. What I have done, I have 
created a list that if you want to kill jobs, if you want to declare 
war on business in America, these are the things that you want to do to 
create unemployment. And the tragedy is we are doing all of the things 
that are well calculated to create unemployment.
  Now, I guess the good news is that the jobs that would have been 
created here by American businesses and American ingenuity are simply 
going to be done in plants that are overseas, and so those jobs go to 
other countries. We will still use our intelligence. In my own city of 
St. Louis, we have a guy who is the president of Emerson Electric, it 
is a big company, and it has all kinds of divisions and it has all 
kinds of technology. They create tons of jobs. The president of Emerson 
says, Look, when you do all of these things to us, you are forcing us. 
We will still grow. Our stock will do well. We will create jobs, it 
just won't be jobs in the U.S., they will be somewhere else. So what do 
you do? If you think about this, it is not very complicated.
  The first thing is, if you have a tremendous amount of uncertainty, 
you don't know what nutty thing the government is going to do next; if 
you're a businessman, you're going to say, I think I'm going to hunker 
down. I'm not going to make any big decisions because I'm not sure 
whether the last couple of dollars I have in reserve I am going to need 
for some other harebrained idea that these guys in Washington come up 
with.
  So if there is economic uncertainty of any kind, that is going to 
tend to undermine job creation. And then if there is a slowdown, that 
is what we have been seeing, that doesn't help because you don't have 
the orders coming in. And here is the big one, excessive taxation, 
because what President Obama has promised is that he is going to tax 
those people in the $250,000 bracket. Well, I'm glad he is going to do 
that because I don't make that much money, so I don't need to worry, 
right. Oh, no, I do need to worry. I need to worry because the people 
who are making $250,000, a lot of those are the guys owning these small 
businesses that make all of the jobs. And the guy who is making 
$250,000, you say, I don't feel sorry for him. But you better, and here 
is why: because that guy is going to put that money back into his 
business to put a new wing on a building, put a new machine tool there, 
or develop a new process. Which is going to hire more people. So if you 
kill him, if you take all of his money away through excessive taxation, 
he won't invest in his business.
  Mr. PRICE of Georgia. You mentioned how our good friends on the other 
side of the aisle look to government as the solution to everything, and 
they do. They believe that Washington and government has a better 
answer. We sometimes get criticized for

[[Page H3187]]

saying government can't do anything. There are some things that 
government ought to be doing, but they ought not be owning banks, they 
ought not be owning automobile companies, they ought not be running our 
health care system, they ought not be deciding whether or not there is 
any risk at all in the market.
  Our friends on the other side of the aisle believe that the 
government ought to control all of those things. And when they control 
all of those things, what happens is that you decrease all of the 
ingenuity and entrepreneurship and genius of the American people.
  So what I like to say is, when you have big government, you have 
small citizens. When you have small government, you have big citizens. 
And we believe in big citizens as opposed to big government.
  Checks and balances are what is necessary. You wouldn't have these 
kinds of crazy things going on up here in Washington if there were 
checks and balances here in the Federal Government. And the people 
across this land know that. They know that runaway government on either 
side, frankly, is not what they desire. So they look to Washington and 
say, My goodness, what the heck are they doing? We have to put some 
checks and balances in place.
  Mr. AKIN. The President says here that families across the country 
are tightening their belts and making tough decisions, the Federal 
Government should do the same. Yes, we should do the same, but what are 
we doing? Let's take a look at the policies: Wall Street bailout, $700 
billion; stimulus package, another $700 billion; then in this House we 
passed that goofy cap-and-tax bill which is going to put the government 
in charge of trying to reduce CO2 in the country by making 
the Federal Government in charge of all of the building codes for 
houses. You can't even add an addition to your house without making 
sure that it is safe from a global warming point of view. And there 
goes another number of billions of dollars in taxes. And then, of 
course, socialized medicine that we just got done with, which is 
absolutely the biggest government takeover. It is one-sixth of the U.S. 
economy. The government can't run Medicare and Medicaid and keep them 
in the black, so what are we going to do, take over all of health care?
  The families are tightening their belts, so what is the Federal 
Government going to do? They are just absolutely going to go on another 
spending spree. So what does that do? Excessive taxation. What's that 
do? It kills jobs. What does that do? It takes away freedom because it 
makes you little and Big Government big.
  Here is a question for you. Thinking back about what phenomenon in 
all of human history should human beings be most concerned about, 
should it be the problem of war or should it be the problem of Big 
Government? It is an interesting question. Why do we have this faith, 
why do the Democrats have this faith in Big Government? Is there 
anything historical to suggest that they are a solution or is it more 
to suggest that they are a problem.
  Mr. PRICE of Georgia. In the area of health care, which I know a 
little about, having practiced medicine for over 20 years, what we have 
seen is the intrusion of the Federal Government into the practice of 
medicine, into health care, is only destructive to all of the 
principles that we hold dear for health care.
  So whether it is affordability, or accessibility, or quality, or the 
responsiveness of a system, or innovation, or choices, all of those 
kinds of things that we as Americans hold dear in health care, they all 
get destroyed with the Federal Government. You know that. That is what 
results in that kind of economic uncertainty for the businesses of 
health care.
  I can't tell you how many letters I have received that have told me, 
from my colleagues, my former medical colleagues who, since the bill 
has been passed and signed into law--these are people in the prime of 
their career, those who are taking care of literally thousands of 
patients across this land--who have said, Look, with the oppression of 
the Federal Government at this point, I'm going to do one of three 
things. Either I am going to close my practice, I'm leaving, and that 
challenges the accessibility problem. Or I am going to limit the number 
of patients I see that have some type of government health care because 
of the intrusion. In fact, virtually all of us will have government 
health care when this crowd gets done with their plan. Or third, and 
something that you've touched on, which is the alternative for 
business-minded individuals in an economy like this where the 
politicians are picking the winners and losers: They are heading 
elsewhere. They are going offshore.
  Mr. AKIN. A little island in the Caribbean, come on down. A big 
hospital and a landing strip.

                              {time}  1700

  Mr. PRICE of Georgia. There are actually hospitals being built in the 
Caribbean right now.
  Mr. AKIN. In expectation of this thing. So what you are saying is 
really not very outlandish, from a commonsense point of view. It is not 
like you are speculating and saying this thing is not going to work.
  We have seen European socialized medicine. We have next door the 
Canadian socialized medicine model. And I think it was about 10 years 
ago the head of Canada, their prime minister said, We have got the best 
health care system in the world, as long as you are healthy. It was 
that little ``as long as you are healthy'' piece that is the problem. 
If you are not healthy, you go down to America to get it taken care of. 
So we have seen it not work in Europe.
  I am a cancer survivor. I see what the cancer rate statistics are in 
England. I don't want to be a cancer guy in England. I wouldn't want to 
be a cancer guy here. So you see it hasn't worked in England, it hasn't 
worked in Canada, as well as our system currently works.
  Then, of course, we saw Massachusetts and Tennessee take bold forays 
into this socialized medicine field, and they got hammered by it. So 
what do we do? We do the same dumb thing.
  I was going to jump to something even more basic, though, if you 
think about it, and this was a statistic that kind of surprised me--
some of them are in the Congressional Record--and that was the number 
of people that were killed by their own governments.
  If you take a look, you know, at the good old communists. You look at 
Stalin, he basically had murdered about 40 million people. Now, he was 
pretty good at murdering people, but not nearly as good as Chairman Mao 
in China, who has credit for killing about 60 million Chinese.
  Now, this is government-on-citizen crime. This was not a war. In 
fact, if you add just the people killed in various communist countries 
that killed their own population, the governments killing their own 
population, you have more people killed by just communism alone than 
all the wars in history since the time of Christ.
  So the question is, is it really rational for human beings to put so 
much trust in government? That is not talking about Nazis or the other 
types of dictators that killed lots of their own citizens.
  So why do we have this great faith in government, when we see it 
doesn't work for health care, yet we have the government in charge of 
that? We are putting government in charge of student loans and in 
charge of insurance for flooding, and we have got the Federal 
Government in charge of housing and in charge of education. We have got 
the Federal Government in charge of car companies, insurance companies 
and all.
  Let's see, the Soviet Union, what was their model? The government was 
in charge of, well, let's see, education, health care, your house, your 
food and your job. It didn't work for them. Why do we want to do the 
same thing here?
  Mr. PRICE of Georgia. It is very concerning. And I think that is 
exactly the picture that is being painted for folks all across this 
land and why they have the kind of frustration and anger and angst and 
anxiety about the future of their country. It is why they are saying, 
look, to Washington, are you not listening to us? Can you not hear us?
  They know. They know that the government ought not to be owning 
banks. They know that the government ought not to be owning automobile 
companies. They know that the government ought not to be running health 
care.

[[Page H3188]]

And they know that not because it is just not right; they know it 
because it doesn't result in the highest quality of opportunities and 
choices and dreams realized for individuals.
  Remember, big government, small citizen. Big government, small 
patient. Big government, small consumer. You've got small government, 
you've got big patients, you've got big citizens, you've got big 
consumers, and more dreams realized.
  Mr. AKIN. And that is really what you are saying, is basically you 
are losing your freedom; a little bit here, a little bit here. You are 
losing your freedom, and pretty soon you feel frustrated, you feel 
angry, because you have some common sense, and you know what it takes 
to make jobs, and we are doing all the wrong things.
  But there are so many people on the street, and they are looking to 
you, they are looking to me, to try to help turn this thing around and 
get jobs going. And, of course, we don't have enough votes to turn 
these policies around.
  Another one of these things that is really tough on jobs is 
insufficient liquidity. What that means is that a business needs to be 
able to borrow money. But the banking regulators are so tight now that 
a lot of businessmen can't get the loans they need to make their 
business go.
  Of course, excessive government spending, we have been talking about 
that, and excessive government mandates and red tapes. Boy, talk about 
that. And this health care bill, of course, is leading the charge and 
damaged all these areas. And the end result is what? Well, 
unemployment. Not a big surprise, particularly, because we are doing 
everything wrong.
  And yet here is an interesting question. Apparently what is happening 
is Wall Street seems to be doing a lot better. Is it because we have 
turned these bad policies around and are doing the right thing in D.C.? 
No. We are still doing everything wrong, and yet Wall Street seems to 
be doing better. Well, what is the logic of that?
  Well, you know, to some degree it goes back to that same problem that 
got us into this housing bubble, and that is the crack cocaine of the 
government Federal system. That is, they can create unlimited 
liquidity.
  Mr. PRICE of Georgia. And unlimited amounts of money is what that 
means.
  Mr. AKIN. Unlimited amounts of money and very low interest rates. So 
you have got lots of money with very low interest rates, and it comes 
down and starts to create these bubbles. So we really haven't fixed the 
job problem.
  Mr. PRICE of Georgia. You are absolutely right. I think that is so 
important because when people look to the items that need to be fixed 
from a financial standpoint, they look and they see that Washington has 
had its hand in some things that have been very destructive.
  Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, for example, are really at the epicenter 
of the challenges that we have had in the economy. And the bill that is 
being proposed and the bill that came through the House earlier to 
assist in ``fixing'' things, their solution doesn't address Fannie and 
Freddie at all, which is so frustrating because the American people 
know that there are positive solutions. And you with the Republican 
Study Committee, we have been working diligently on putting forward 
those positive solutions to all of the challenges that we face that 
embrace those fundamental American principles.
  So whether it is health care, whether it is energy, whether it is the 
economy, whether it is jobs, all of those things have fundamental 
principal solutions that don't require putting the government in 
charge.
  Mr. AKIN. You are absolutely right, and it doesn't involve the 
government taking everything over.
  We're going to take a break and yield because I believe there is some 
business that needs to be taken care of.

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