[Congressional Record Volume 156, Number 124 (Wednesday, September 15, 2010)]
[House]
[Pages H6742-H6748]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
{time} 1830
THE ECONOMY
The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. Tonko). 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.
Good evening. It's a pleasure to be able to join you. I had a chance
to listen in on some of the last hour presented by the Democrats and
their views on the economy. It seemed like a fair amount of sophistry
to me and a lot of excuses. It would seem like we're blaming things on
Bush and the Chinese. So I am going to be presenting and maybe even
have some guests here presenting a different perspective on the
economy, and the American people will be the judge of that debate and
discussion in November.
Now I would suggest that the Democrats and their policies are
actually destructive to the economy. I don't think it's a coincidence
that if you look at the 10 cities in America that have the highest
percentage of people below the poverty level, that those cities have
been managed, every one of them, for many years by Democrats. Now you
can blame the Chinese and you can blame President Bush, but I would
suggest, and I will show in the next hour in plain, simple terms why
the Democrat policies are literally destroying the economy.
Now you could say, well, I don't like that, or maybe you're being
partisan. I'm not really quite so concerned about being partisan or
whether we like things politically. I'm concerned with America. I'm
concerned with the people that don't have jobs. And I'm concerned that
not only are we creating unemployment but we are systematically
destroying the businesses that can create employment in the future.
Let's take a look at these questions. Those are strong charges to say
that the Democrats are the ones that are actually responsible for
what's been going on. I think a lot of Americans have some sense that
that may be true. Sometimes it's fun to take a look at some of these
political cartoons. We have the President here now talking to the guy
that owns the china shop: ``Now give me one good reason why you're not
hiring.'' And you have health care reform storming in and cap-and-tax
or cap-and-trade and the taxes that are impending and all. The point of
the cartoon, of course, is the fact that the policies that we have seen
are creating the unemployment.
Let's look at that again just a little bit closer. Now when we talk
about the economy, there are different ways of measuring it, you can
see. Well, is Wall Street doing well? Am I doing well? Am I happy with
my job or are things going comfortably for me? Is there a lot of
employment or unemployment? Those are measures that we use. We take a
look, also, at the rate of the Federal Government, how much it's
spending money versus how much it's having to borrow. Those are all
things when we say the economy, what does that mean? But particularly
it's very personal when we talk about unemployment and it becomes not a
political issue but a personal issue when it's your job that was just
lost.
We were told that we had to come up with this economic stimulus bill
last year. We were told that if you don't pass this economic stimulus
bill, this unemployment could get above where it is now. It's going up,
could get above, but if you don't pass it, why, we could have 9 percent
unemployment if you don't pass this stimulus bill. And so the
Democrats, all by themselves, passed this $800 billion bill to
supposedly stimulate the economy. After they passed it, what happened?
Well, now we've got this unemployment here at 9.7 percent. The numbers
vary, but we're pretty close to 10. But that 10 percent is very
conservative, because if you've lost your job more than a year ago, you
don't get to count in the statistics anymore. So, in fact, the
unemployment rate is well over 10 percent in America.
Now we were told that if you passed the stimulus bill, that we could
keep it underneath 8 percent. That's the words that the Democrats
brought to this floor a year ago. The fact is they were wrong. Anybody
can see they're wrong. Just take a look at what the unemployment
numbers are, and they don't bear it out. In fact, they spent $800
billion, and where did it all go? Did it go
[[Page H6743]]
for a lot of projects? Or was it just more bailouts? In fact, it turned
out that it had a lot of bailout money in it that didn't really go for
even things that FDR would have considered an economic stimulus
package.
This is what's going on. We've got a high level of unemployment. The
stimulus package that was passed here, and the Democrats said the
Republicans didn't help any. They're right, they didn't, because we
didn't think that stimulus package would work. We stood here on the
floor, I stood here on the floor on a time just like this, on a
Wednesday night, and said, ``It's not going to work.'' But they did it,
anyway; and now we can see, it didn't work.
And now what are they going to do? Well, they want to do some more
stimulus packages. Is it going to work? No. Because it's based on
faulty economics. It will never work. The interesting thing is they
should have really listened to the Secretary of the Treasury under FDR,
Henry Morgenthau. He tried the same thing. This was back in the 1930s.
He said, we've tried spending money to try and get the economy going.
We've spent and spent. Now we're in a tremendous amount of debt and
unemployment hasn't changed a bit. He said, ``It does not work.'' To
this House Ways and Means Committee, Henry Morgenthau, way before I was
born, he was saying, ``It doesn't work.'' Yet here we go; we're doing
it again.
Now let's take a look more specifically at what the Democrat policies
are that are in conflict with creating jobs, because I would suggest
that the Democrats have got this problem. The problem is, is that
everything they stand for is specifically going to be in conflict with
creating jobs.
What are the things they stand for? Well, let's take a look at where
jobs come from. And this is the linkage that the Democrat Party doesn't
want you to figure out. It's not a very complicated thing. And, that
is, if you get a job, you have to get a job from somebody. Who's the
``from somebody''? Well, it's a business somewhere. You can't separate
employers and people who run businesses from jobs. Jobs just don't hang
out out there floating around somewhere. They're created by an employer
somewhere. And if you create conditions economically that make it
impossible for the employers, then guess what's going to happen. You're
not going to have jobs. It's not very complicated. It's about as simple
as a lemonade stand. I'm going to use the illustration of a lemonade
stand to try and hammer through this very simple truth; and it's very
important, because the future, the economic future, the future of
families in America hang on understanding these simple principles.
The idea is that jobs come from an employer; and if you harm the
employer, you're not going to have the jobs. And if you do it bad
enough as FDR did and you hammer them bad enough, you'll put the
employers out of business, and then it's going to be a long time before
the company starts up and new jobs can be created. So let's take a look
at what happens.
Let's say that you've got a lemonade stand. You happen to have a very
fortunate piece of property and a whole lot of people are coming
through there. They're hot, sweaty and tired. You've got the one piece
of property where you can put up a whale of a lemonade stand. So you
start out. You hire your younger brother and sister to work there. You
squeeze the lemon juice in the morning and get some sugar from the
store, put it all together, you get some ice, get out there and you
have a pretty good day. You sell a lot of lemonade, you get going at
it, and pretty soon, though, you realize there's a whole lot more
demand for your lemonade than you have capacity to make this stuff.
So you start thinking, man, I wonder if I should go down and buy some
sort of a lemon squeezer and a great big shaker machine and ice
machine. I'll hire five or six more people, not just my younger brother
and sister but I'm going to bring some other friends from my class and
they can all work at the lemonade stand and we'll make a whole lot more
lemonade then, you think to yourself. But for me to buy that ice
machine and the lemon squeezer and all, I'm going to have to have some
money and I'm going to have to make sure that there's going to be
enough money coming in from lemonade to pay off the cost of that
machinery.
So if you're an owner of a business, one of the things you have to
figure out is you have to have enough money to be able to create new
jobs. Now if you go with your plan and you buy the lemon squeezer and
the ice machine, you can hire eight more people to make lemonade and
you can sell it.
{time} 1840
But it requires that you've got to have some money to buy the ice
machine and the lemon squeezer. You've been making good money in the
lemonade stand, you can see how you could pay it off in a couple of
months, but you don't have the money right now. And so as a businessman
you're saying, well, I've somehow got to get this money, and that comes
into a question about liquidity, if you can borrow some money from
somebody.
Now, what happens to this lemonade stand guy if you're running along,
you're making this lemonade, and all of a sudden you say we're going to
put a tax on lemonade stands and we're going to charge 50 cents a glass
of tax on lemonade? Well, if you do that, that means the guy that owns
the lemonade stand isn't going to have the money to pay off the ice
machine and the lemon squeezer, so he's going to just hunker down. He
will pay the tax, he will keep things going the way they are, but he
says, man, this is a hostile environment out here. They're taxing every
glass of lemonade I make, and so I'm not going to create as many jobs.
Now I guess a lemonade stand may be silly, I'm trying to make it
sound simple. It's not complicated. If you tax the owners of businesses
heavily they're not going to have the money to make the investments to
create new jobs, and it's that linkage which the Democrats refuse to
understand and it is so obvious and so simple. Our policies are going
after the owners of businesses and we're calling them ``rich guys'' and
we're saying you've got to punish the rich guys by taking their money
so everybody else can be okay. This is the bailout mindset. This is the
bailout fever that has infected this city. It is the bailout concept
that the government has to redistribute wealth. And when you take it
away from the guys that own the business, you're not going to be
creating the jobs.
That's just the mechanics of how economics works. You don't have to
like it. I didn't invent it, I'm just explaining what is common sense
and most Americans can understand: Jobs come from employers; if you
destroy employers, you're not going to have jobs. And how do you
destroy employers? The best way to do it? Tax them. There are other
ways to destroy businesses, but taxing them is a pretty good way to do
it.
Let's take a look at other questions. One, like the lemonade stand
example, if the owner of the business, maybe he's making good profit on
his lemonade but he doesn't have a huge bank account or money saved up.
What he will want to do is go to a bank and borrow some money for his
ice machine and his lemon squeezer. So he goes to the bank and he tries
to get a loan from the bank, but what we found is going on right now,
the policies on banks are so tight--even though the Fed has released
tons of money--that the bankers are afraid to loan money to businesses
and businesses are afraid to borrow it. That is not a good condition if
you're trying to create jobs because you have to have a source of money
for businessmen to borrow in order to get innovation and things going
to get the marketplace going.
Another thing that's a huge killer of jobs is if the businessman
doesn't know what's going to happen. The guy with the lemonade stand is
doing a land office business because it's 100 degrees every day and
everybody is coming by his lemonade stand. But the thing is he knows
the season is changing and fall is coming and he's not so sure that he
is going to be able to sell that lemonade as the weather gets colder.
Now he's got some unknowns, the weather is in there. Well, we've got a
big unknown, and that's what the people in Washington, D.C. are going
to do to businesses next.
When the businessman doesn't know what's going to happen, guess what?
In Missouri we have an expression, it's called ``hunkering down,'' or
sometimes people say ``hunkering down like
[[Page H6744]]
a toad in a hailstorm.'' Well, they hunker down because they're not
sure what these guys in Washington, D.C. are going to be doing. And if
they're going to pass a health care bill which is going to crank taxes
way up on everybody that's working for you, if you're going to pass
this great big tax increase, there's some uncertainty there. And if you
think the economy is really bad and everybody is struggling and there
is not much demand because nobody has jobs and the whole economy is
sort of sluggish and sitting like a stone, then you're going to be very
careful about doing anything in terms of increasing your productivity
or how fast or how efficiently you can make something because you're
saying, wait a minute, I'm going to have to make a big investment. I
don't know if I can sell enough product with the taxes and everything
to be able to pay it off. So uncertainty is a killer in terms of jobs.
And then of course red tape and government mandates. If you make that
lemonade stand, test every single glass to make sure it's just crystal
pure and you have to file a report with the government and with the EPA
that every single glass of lemonade is certified and has been tested on
analytical equipment to be sure, what that does is that red tape then
makes your cost of product go up and it makes it harder for the guy to
run his business. So when you do that, he's not going to hire as many
people.
So all of these things are things that are going to make the
unemployment rate go up in America. These are the main things. Now,
this isn't just Todd just invented this, you can see it by common
sense. But also, I've talked to all kinds of businesses. I have had
forums of businesses and said, now give us the list of things that make
it hard to hire people. These are the lists they come up with, it's not
a big surprise. This isn't any kind of rocket science. So my
proposition was the Democrat policies are basically in conflict with
creating jobs. Let's take a look at what some of those policies are
because we have examples of them.
We've been told that all of this woe that the economy is in is
President Bush's fault, China's fault. Is it really? Here's the
legislation. Democrat tax increases. We just talked about tax
increases, the number one enemy of creating jobs. ObamaCare, socialized
medicine, $570 billion, that's what that is supposed to be for a year.
That's a lot of money. Who's going to pay that money? You guessed it;
it's supposed to be the guys that owns those businesses. Is that going
to make for more jobs? No, it's not. SCHIP, $65 billion. The stimulus,
$7 billion. The benefits and other homebuyer credits, $23 billion. HIRE
Act, $6 billion. Total package, $671 billion in tax increases. Is that
the way to create jobs? No.
Now the Democrats don't have to look at Republicans to get the right
answer, they could look at history. They could look at JFK. JFK was a
Democrat. He understood this stuff, he got it right. JFK came into a
time when there was a recession, and he did the right thing; he knew
what the right thing to do was, and that was that he cut taxes. And
when he did, the economy rebounded. The Democrats could learn from JFK,
but they refuse to. They don't want to hear this because they like
spending money. Their solution to everything is more money and more
government--more government spending, more government programs. They're
not listening to JFK, they should have. They could have listened to
Ronald Reagan, but they don't like him too well. They don't have to
listen to him, they could listen to JFK.
They could also listen to Bush, who inherited a recession in 2000,
and in 2001, 2002 and 2003 did a bunch of tax cuts. Those tax cuts got
the economy back going again. They could learn from examples, but
they're not. Instead, they're following the same path of FDR, who
turned a recession into a Great Depression. And they're not listening
to Henry Morganthau, who was the Secretary of Finance under FDR. So
these are tax increases. Does that help the job situation? No, not at
all. In fact, they harm it.
Well, what other tax increases have we got going? Oh, okay. Not only
are we going to increase taxes for all these programs, what we're going
to do is we're going to allow all the tax cuts that took place under
Bush--which were designed specifically to get the economy going--and
we're going to allow those things all to expire or some portion of them
to expire, which means that whatever effect they had--because we did
move from a recession into some good, strong economic activity in 2004
and 2005 and 2006--whatever effect they had is now going to boomerang,
and it's going to hurt us in the same amount in the down side as the
other helped us in the up side. And so the ordinary income, the top
income rates in 2010, 35 percent, they're going to jump to just under
40 percent. Capital gains is going to go from 15 to 20 percent.
Qualified dividends, 15 to almost 40 percent. And the death tax is
going to go from 0 to 55 percent.
Let's take an example of what this death tax is going to do. You've
got a couple of guys running a farm. You've got 1,000 acres, they've
got some good equipment. It's a dad and his son. Tragically, as time
goes on, the dad gets old and dies. The farm was owned by the dad. The
son wants to take it over--take that equipment, take that acreage and
make it go. They hire 10 people to work their farm for them--I just
made up the number 10, I don't think they need that many maybe. But
anyhow, they got some people that are hired to do that. And so the
death tax comes along and says to the son, hey, you owe the government
because we're going to tax your dad for dying.
{time} 1850
We want 55 percent of the value of that farm. His son takes a look
and says, Well, Mr. Government, if I had to sell half the land, I'd be
from 1,000 to 500 acres, and I'd have to choose which tractors that I
sell. I couldn't make the farm work. If you take 55 percent out of it,
I couldn't make the farm work. The government says, I don't care. Just
give me my 55 percent.
It may not be a farm. It may be a small business, but that's what
this death tax does. That's why we got rid of the death tax because we
want those businesses to keep going. We want that money to be plowed
in. And we're willing to live with the fact that somebody may be very
well-to-do and very comfortable and having a very nice life. We don't
begrudge it to somebody to work hard, save money, and do well. Because
we realize if you allow that guy to do well, he's going to hire other
people, and that's what creates jobs, and it increases everybody's
standard of living.
This policy to allow this thing to go back to 55 percent is going to
hurt the job situation. It's going to hurt the economy. It's going to
hurt Americans.
Now, the other thing here, the capital gains is the same kind of
thing. So if you keep taxing businesses a lot--now, there is this other
thing, child tax credit, the marriage penalty and the average, those
things are changing back again. And the lowest tax bracket, it goes
from 10 to 15 percent.
Now, the Democrats may change this a little bit to make it look
pretty to people, but if you don't deal with things like the death tax
and qualified dividends and capital gains, these are the things that
make the difference in whether or not there are going to be any jobs or
whether we're going to have companies going bankrupt.
Well, you got the message. It's really dumb to be raising taxes when
the economy is having a hard time. Everybody can tell you that. It just
isn't smart. There aren't many people who have been dumb enough
economically when the economy is in trouble to want to go ahead and
push for the largest tax increase in the history of our country.
Now, I notice my Democrat colleagues were talking about how bad it is
that things weren't made in America. They said we've got to bring those
jobs back in the country. How are you going to bring jobs back in the
country when we create a set of rules that makes it so expensive to
build something here that you have a huge advantage somewhere else to
build it in another place?
What sort of things would that be, Congressman Akin? Are you telling
me that America's got policies that make it so people don't want to
produce things in America? Well, yeah.
Take a look at this. This is the corporate tax rates of a whole bunch
of countries--you may not be able to read them all down here. But this
is Ireland down here, has a 13 percent; and as you go down the line,
let's see, this is Turkey over here. It's gotten to 20 percent. And
let's see. Where else do we go?
[[Page H6745]]
Sweden, they're pretty socialistic. They're at 20 percent. Then you've
got all the way over here to Canada and France. And that green line,
that's the United States. We're second only to Japan in terms of
corporate tax rates.
Now, it's pretty hard for me to see the logic of complaining about
things being made overseas when what we do with our tax policy is tax
corporations so heavily that you create an incentive to chase the
production overseas. If you're a businessman, you're competing. You're
competing with all of these other countries. And what you're going to
have to do is be competitive or else people won't buy your product.
So for us in Congress to complain about foreign imports and things
when we've got a corporate tax rate that's second highest in the world
is once again an example of Democrat tax policy being completely at
odds with a goal of a strong economy and lots of jobs. You can't keep
taxing the creator of jobs without losing your jobs. I think it's
straightforward. I'm trying to make it simple. Because there's one
example after the other that our policies just don't make sense.
Here's a chart done in a little more colorful way. We compete with
France and Spain, U.K. and China. We talk about China. They've got 25
percent. Here we are. We've got a 40 percent corporate tax rate. Why in
the world would we want to be doing that? It just doesn't make sense,
and that's why our economy is in trouble. And if we don't fix this, it
will just get worse. Because what you do is you hammer a business and
you hammer a business and you hammer a business, sooner or later it's
going to go out of business. Then it's going to be a whole lot harder
for somebody to start up a new company and try and put those jobs that
could have been there otherwise if our policies had been more
favorable.
Now, here's what happened when we did the stimulus. The Democrats'
answer to this is, of course, well, the government can direct things
and make things work and they'll really make it good. So you've got to
take a whole lot of money away from all of those taxpayers. Let's grab
a whole bunch of money from the taxpayer, and we're going to spend it
in this stimulus bill--which, by the way, went to pay, among other
things, the teachers' union in California because they had overspent
their pensions and were getting near bankruptcy; same thing in
Illinois.
So we're taking this stimulus bill, taking money away from States
like mine in Missouri, and giving the money to States that couldn't
manage their budgets--like California and Illinois--and taxing the
taxpayers all across America to bail out people who were irresponsible.
That's where a lot of that stimulus money went. It also went to other
various miscellaneous projects and all.
But what was the result of all of the stimulus spending? What you see
is we've lost 2.6 million jobs since the stimulus started.
You see, Henry Morgenthau was right. It's not logical that, if
government spends a whole lot of money, it makes the economy better.
If you ran your household and you're in trouble economically--you've
got a whole lot of loan payments that are coming due, you don't have
enough salary to pay those things, you've got some medical bills,
everything is not right in your economic little family--and you say to
your wife, Hey, here's what I'm going to do. I'm going to go out and
get this credit card and I'm going to spend money like mad and that way
we can fix our problems here with our little family, your wife would
think you were nuts. She'd tell you to stay away from the bar or stop
smoking them funny cigarettes because anybody's got the common sense to
know that if you're in economic trouble you don't spend money like mad.
And yet here we are in economic trouble, we spend money like mad, and
then we're wondering how come we lost all of these jobs. What in the
world are we thinking?
The Federal Government cannot create jobs by spending lots of money.
The Federal Government can spend a lot of money and they can hire
people. You say, Wait a minute now. The Federal Government takes a
billion dollars and they hire all of these people. Isn't that going to
create jobs, because you've got these people working for the
government.
Well, here's the trouble with that line of reasoning. It's true; you
have government employees. But for every government employee, you've
taken money out of the economy which could have been used in the
private sector. And when you do that, you lose more than two jobs out
of the private sector for every government employee you hire.
Obviously, you can't do that very long. Pretty soon you've got more
government employees than you do people working in the private sector.
And when you've got that, you've got a country that doesn't work
anymore economically. And we are rapidly marching toward that point
where these economic policies are going to bring a great deal of
trouble down on our heads if we don't get sober and start taking a look
at the hard facts about economics.
Now, there are a whole lot of people now suffering with unemployment,
but it's important for them to understand the principle that you have
got to allow businesses to prosper if you want to have employment.
This is where the Democrats should do some reading. This isn't too
much reading to do for maybe a week or so. Here it is. Henry
Morgenthau, Franklin Delano Roosevelt's Treasury Secretary, before the
House Ways and Means Committee, 1939: We've tried spending money. We're
spending more than we've ever spent before, and it does not work. I
say, after 8 years of the administration, we have just as much
unemployment as when we started and an enormous debt to boot.
How many times do we have to replay the sad lessons of history? Well,
I can hear all sorts of things. Well, Democrats just saying, Well, the
Chinese are fiddling with the currency, and President Bush's policies,
they're the ones that brought us all this trouble. No, it's not. No,
it's not. It's not President Bush's policies.
Look. President Bush spent too much money. His worst year was 2008
when Nancy Pelosi was Speaker of the House here. He had a deficit of
$450 billion. Too much. He shouldn't have had 450.
{time} 1900
In 2009, under Obama's Presidency, $1.4 trillion. That's three times
Bush's worst year out of Bush's 8 years, Obama's first year. The amount
of debt incurred in that year was three times in 2009 what Bush's worst
was. Don't tell me about Bush. Obama makes Bush look like Ebenezer
Scrooge. He's a mere piker when it comes to spending money you don't
have. And 2010 you say--was 2010 any better? No, it was worse. It was
$2.5 trillion in deficit spending. We aren't listening to Henry
Morgenthau. We should learn from Henry Morgenthau, if he is a Democrat.
We should learn from JFK. If you want jobs, you can't destroy the
businesses.
Take a look at these government deficits. That's the number that I am
talking about here. This gives you a little bit of a sense. Now, you
can't run your family that way. And over a period of time what we're
going to find out is you can't run a country this way either. Because
when you have deficits like this what's going to happen eventually is
somewhere along the line you got to pay. And who's going to pay? Well,
that hasn't totally been determined. But you can bet one thing: When
the economy goes bad everybody suffers.
In fact, if I were a happy little Socialist, and I'm not, but if I
were a happy little Socialist what I would want to do is I would want
to implement an economic policy that made the economy strong because I
would get more government revenues to slop around to my friends. If the
job of the government is to redistribute money, is to be experts at
bailout, which it should not be, but if that is your goal at least you
should adopt policies that are going to provide as much revenue to the
government as possible.
In 2001 and 2002, if you took a look at the items that the economists
would say were the big ticket items of George Bush, one was the war on
terror and the other was the tax cuts. And people said, oh, look at all
the money the government lost from the tax cuts. So you add the war on
terror and you add the cost of the tax cuts, and what you find is that
the money that the government was losing in 2001, 2002, and 2003, in
terms of the economy being bad, was worse than the tax cut plus the war
on terror. And so when the economy is
[[Page H6746]]
bad, not only do people not have jobs and poor people suffer, and more
well-to-do people suffer, governments suffer too. The governments don't
have the money.
And if you happen to be a State governor and you have a balanced
budget amendment in your Constitution, such as Missouri, you are in big
trouble if you are the governor because you've got to do some serious
cutting. And you're not going to be very popular when the economy goes
bad and you happen to be a governor. On the other hand, if the
economy's doing well it makes you look like a hero because you have
plenty of money for everything and you can be benevolent. So when the
economy goes bad it sinks all boats, everybody, including government's
as well. So this level of deficit spending is unparalleled in our
history, and it's going to destroy our country if we continue along the
lines.
Here is one way of looking at the destruction right here. See when we
have the Chinese buying up our debt, the Chinese are buying Treasury
bills and the Chinese are happy because they're getting paid a certain
number of percent by the Federal Government for every Treasury bill.
And so they're willing to sit there quietly buying up America and
they're getting their percent.
Well, what happens when we spend so much money that all the money
that we're taking in with taxes can't afford to pay for what our debt
service is? This would be the equivalent of you're at home and you've
got these credit cards, the credit card companies really like you and
everything, and so your family budget, well, you are spending a little
more each month, a little more each month, and pretty soon you find out
when you add everything all up that you take a look at your credit card
debts and the interest rate that you are paying on all those credit
cards is more than the amount of money you make. What's that mean? That
means you are in deep doo-doo. You are paying more in interest than you
are getting in terms of how much money you make.
When the Federal Government gets to this point what's going to happen
is that the amount of tax revenue is going to be less than what we're
paying on all this debt that we're buying. That's another way of
picturing the fact that these economic shenanigans that are going on
cannot continue forever. People understand that. It doesn't make a
difference if you are a liberal or a conservative. If you have any
understanding of economics, you are going to say, look, this is not
sustainable. And that's kind of where we are.
This is Social Security and Medicare. This is what their entitlements
are going to cost. This is what the U.S. economy is. You can't sustain
this with this. It just doesn't work. And so that's where we are. I
started with the premise that the Democrat policies, the Democrat
policies are actually destructive to the economy and they're
destructive to creating jobs. And what are those policies? One after
the other they are policies of increased taxation, more government
programs, more government redtape. And the combination of those things,
along with excessive Federal spending, basically creates a suction
where there is no money in the economy for small businesses and you
don't create any jobs. And that's what's going on.
So as I said as I began, it's not a coincidence that the 10 poorest
cities in America, the cities that have the highest percent of people
below the poverty level, have all been run by Democrats, some for over
100 years. And they keep electing Democrats because we don't understand
the basic idea that jobs come from businesses. If you want a healthy
economy and businesses, you're going to have to allow some people to
prosper and just grit your teeth when you say it, some people are going
to get filthy rich. But the benefit of allowing a few people to get
wealthy means you are going to have some healthy companies and
companies that are growing and hiring people. And when the economy does
better, everybody prospers.
You got a guy on the street, just a little kid trying to make some
money. He goes around mowing lawns. Now that kid, would he rather be
mowing lawns in a rich neighborhood or a poor neighborhood? I would
suggest the kid may be dirt poor, but he would do better in a
neighborhood of millionaires because when he mows the lawn, they are
going to give him a little bit better price. Another neighborhood full
of people that can barely afford putting food on the table, they're not
going to pay him much to mow their yard for them. So when the economy
gets better, it helps everybody. And when you drive the economy into
the dirt, then everybody suffers at the same time.
We may not like it or not, but we're all hooked together in this
great country called America. Now, I think there are some ways we could
get a little bit philosophical here. I think there are some places
where we as Americans have to take a look at our forefathers and maybe
learn some lessons from them. Our forefathers bled and died and
sacrificed greatly for freedom. Their understanding of freedom was
maybe a little different than the way we are today in America.
Their understanding of freedom was a sturdy independence, a sturdy
character of hard work and wise decision-making. Honest business
transactions. Courteousness. A sense of neighborhood and community
service. It was so many things that I heard in an Eagle Scout ceremony
on Sunday. All of these virtues about being courteous and cheerful and
hardworking and diligent and all these kinds of things. And that was
the freedom of our forefathers.
It seems to me that to some degree now in America we've started to
adopt an idea of freedom that it means that anybody can do anything
they want regardless of whether it's very smart to do or not. And when
things don't go well, we just want the government to come and bail us
out. That's what I call bailout fever. I don't think that's the freedom
of our forefathers. I don't think the idea is instead of saving for
your retirement that you go out and buy the ski boat or whatever it is
that you don't really have money to buy, you buy it on credit. And you
buy a house too big for what you can afford, and then when things don't
go right we say I'm a victim. Those rich somebody or others did this to
me. It was George Bush's fault. No, it was the Chinese's fault. No,
it's not my fault that I spent all that money on the ski boat. That's
not freedom. That's not being responsible. Freedom doesn't mean do
whatever you want to do and expect the government or somebody to bail
you out and blame someone else. It doesn't mean you are dependent on
the government or other people.
Freedom means that you have a right to certain basic inalienable
rights, the inalienable right of life, to be alive so people don't kill
you, and liberty so you have a right to free speech, to share with your
neighbor what you think the truth is and to share your opinions. To be
able to get in a town hall meeting and challenge people and say, where
did you spend that money and why did we do that? We call it free
speech. And to pursue happiness.
{time} 1910
To pursue happiness, that means whatever gifts God gave you, whatever
desires or interest that you can pursue that career, and you can
succeed or you can fail based on whether or not you made good
decisions, based on your being responsible.
When the Founders a couple of hundred years ago used the word
``government,'' when they talked about government, they did not think
about capitol domes. They did not think about Washington, D.C. They
thought about the government that a man exercises over his own life,
whether he was honest, hard working, trustworthy, whether he was
friendly, whether he was a good citizen in the community, that was the
use of the word ``government.''
Today, we tend to think of government in terms of capitol domes. We
need to get back to the traditional view of things in America and not
look at freedom as license to do things that are irresponsible and then
ask Big Brother government to come pick up the pieces, because the
government can't afford to do that anymore.
Recent statistics have just come out, I think it was the front page
of the Wall Street Journal saying that in a good number of households
in America, almost half of them, there is someone in the household
that's getting government bailout of some kind, some type of government
subsidy.
Now, obviously, if you keep doing that more and more, there is going
to
[[Page H6747]]
come a point where it doesn't work and that's what all of these graphs
and charts are showing, that you can't continuously have the Federal
Government spend more and more money without the wheels falling off of
everything. We have come to that point, and the point has to be turned
around not even so much by people in Washington, D.C. It has to be
turned around by the good citizens of America that look back to the
strong parts of our past that have made America such a unique Nation, a
totally unique Nation in the history of the world, and we have to go
back to those virtues and that self-government that's necessary to
rebuild this country.
America was built by these crazy people that came here with all these
crazy ideas. They didn't know what ``can't'' meant. They didn't know
what ``I can't do it'' meant. They just tried. Some dream became a
vague possibility, then possibility, and then eventually that dream
became reality and America was built one dream at a time.
It became so common we gave it a name. We called it the American
Dream. It was a phenomenon of freedom, of citizens being able to be
free to succeed or fail without all kinds of government red tape,
without excessive government taxation, without bureaucrats looking over
your shoulder. They could go out and try. And a lot of them failed.
There was one guy, his name was Edison. He failed a lot. He was
trying to make light bulbs. He made a hundred of them. Every one of
them didn't work. When he got done with a hundred, he said, well, now I
know a hundred ways not to make a light bulb, and he kept on trying.
That was that American can-do spirit.
He doesn't ask the government to subsidize his light bulb company; he
didn't go to the government for a bailout. He didn't say his mom didn't
give him enough chocolate chip cookies so he was really a victim. No,
he just went back to the drawing board and kept on working.
And that was the American Dream. So America became a more and more
unique country. We came to be the oldest country with the written
constitution that we have. We were known for going all over the world
when there is a hurricane or a tragedy. Where there is a war where
people are being oppressed, you find the American soldiers there
helping out. And people around Europe can be cynical; but when there is
trouble, they sure like it when America is around.
America was different in other ways too, and in its perhaps most
important way America was unique because we were built on a religious
principle. We believe that there is a God and that that God granted to
all human beings certain basic fundamental rights. We wrote it in a
thing called the Declaration of Independence.
We believe that every individual should have the right to be alive.
You shouldn't just shoot people. People should have a right to be alive
unless they do something terrible. Second of all, that they should have
a right to liberty, the liberty to speak their own, to have the right
to free speech and to own property, not to have their property stolen
from them by the government and given to someone else.
We didn't believe it was ever the government's job to take money from
one person and give it to the other. That was socialism, that was
theft, that was immoral. You had the right to own what you worked hard
for and you also had the right to pursue whatever it was that God had
gifted you to do. If you were to be a singer, God would say go out and
be strong and do a good job being a singer.
If you are going to be a businessman, be a good businessman. Treat
your employees well. Work hard, be diligent. Don't waste; don't
pollute.
If you are going to be someone who is a doctor, go to the top of your
profession. Do a good job. Take care of people well. Come up with new
procedures and new drugs so that people can be healthy.
And over a period of time the standard of living increased in America
because we believed in these basic ideas, these traditions of America.
But freedom never was a license to take from other people. It was never
a license to make the government the big bailout expert.
That's not what our country was built on. And if we go back to this
other approach, it doesn't work economically.
So Americans, again in November, they have a choice. You can believe
all of the sophistry and the blame of George Bush and this and that,
but we have seen the stimulus bill and it flat didn't work. We have
seen the taxation of small businesses. We have seen unemployment go up
and up and up, and people have a sense that all is not right
economically at the tremendous rate we are spending money. They know
that we can't keep on this path. And so the choice is to be made
November.
Which approach are we going to take? I think the approach of our
forefathers to have a sturdy, hard-work ethic, integrity and each
person being responsible and accountable for their own decisions, and
scaling back that Federal Government, I think a lot of Americans today
believe that in an effort to maybe in a good intended effort to do
right things.
We have made the government no longer a servant but a master. I think
a majority of Americans now are threatened by the government. I think a
lot of Americans realize the government is the problem, not the answer.
I believe those people are going to be rendering a verdict on that
regard, into that regard. There is a point when the government becomes
the master and not the servant. How close are we to that point? How
much control do we really have to the machine that is promising so much
more than anybody has any reasonable expectation that there is revenue
to pay for?
How much control do you have when the government agent talks to you
about runoff of water? How much control do you have when you want to
look for a loan for your kid to go to college and the government is the
only one doing it. The government is in the flood business; they are
into the automotive businesses. We have got Government Motors now, not
General Motors.
They are in the insurance business. The government is going to take
over all of health care. How much do you want the government to run and
how good a job have they done with the Post Office?
We have a Department of Energy, that's an interesting Department,
isn't it, created to make sure that we are not dependent on foreign
oil. Boy, I am sure glad we have got that Department working hard.
We have got a Department of Education. That's a wonder too. The
government runs that Department of Education. I think the Wall Street
Journal about 3 weeks ago said the ACT test scores of kids that are
being tested that want to go to college, 24 percent of them, are ready
for college. That's amazing, isn't it? You have got a government
product, State government and Federal Government product where 24
percent of them are acceptable.
If you bought gasoline and every tank of gas out of 100 tanks, 24 of
them worked and the other 76 of them didn't work, you wouldn't buy gas
there very much.
So we can let that government agency then run our health care? Is
this what we really want in America? I don't think so. People in
Missouri had a referendum on that socialized medicine bill, and they
passed by 80 percent a measure to challenge that in court. It is
unconstitutional to require people to buy health insurance, they be
part of this big government bailout, socialized medicine boondoggle.
They didn't want it.
And I have a feeling there is a whole lot of other States full of
people who are tired of the government being the master and of the
attitude that freedom means you can do whatever you want and if things
go wrong you are going to live with the bailout.
We cannot continue the level of taxation that we have done. We have
to start rethinking, and it doesn't start in Washington, D.C.
I think there are a lot of people that think if we got things right
in Washington, D.C., everything would take care of itself. No, that's
not right.
Freedom starts in the hearts of individuals that believe that God
gives them basic rights. And when the Federal Government starts to take
away the basic rights that God gives you, that's when there is really
big trouble. That's where there is a clash; that's where true patriots
stand up and say, enough already.
[[Page H6748]]
That's what happened in the War of Independence. That's what happened
in the other wars of America's past. When people threatened our premise
that God gives you certain basic rights, and they got in the way of
that, that's when Americans stood up and they acted.
{time} 1920
Today, there are a lot of Americans that are saying to our Federal
Government, No, this is not what America is built on. Our government
was built on justice. It was built on the concept that people are equal
before the law. If you are a rich man or a poor man, it makes no
difference. Everybody is equal before the law. That's not bailout
fever.
We have given up justice and gone to socialism. It hasn't worked in
Europe. It didn't work for the USSR, and it won't work for us. We need
to go back to what works, and that is people are equal before the law
and people are free to take a gamble and try to run their business, and
if it doesn't work, then they've got to pick themselves up and try
again and not complain that they need more bailouts.
In short, there is a reason why there is unemployment today. There is
unemployment today because it was created by government policies. And
those government policies have to change. We have to take the chains
off of American business, and we have to go back to the principles that
work.
Well, we've talked about a couple of very philosophical kinds of
things: Justice, which is a very important word. Justice does not mean
that Lady Justice who has the blindfold over her eyes is peeking. It
does not mean that she peeks and gives a special deal to one person or
another person. We have created now, with the law, a special bill to
create a whole bailout section of the Federal Government so Lady
Justice can peek and give money to one person and maybe not to another.
What confidence does the individual American have that the government
is going to come and bail them out when they need it? Is the government
going to be there? Do you want to be servant to Big Government or do
you want to be a free person? Do you want to breathe the fresh air,
live in the fresh air and the sunshine of being free, knowing that you
also have to be responsible? Or do you, instead, choose the gloomy path
of the promise that the government will take care of you even though
you know that it can't economically, or it will not take care of you
well and allow you to live in some sort of pseudofreedom where you
don't make responsible choices and you hope the government will take
care of you when it doesn't work?
That's where we are as Americans. It has to start in our hearts.
Freedom starts in the hearts of self-governing people who love God.
They love their family and they love their country. And America is full
of those people. And I have confidence, I have confidence that the
American public still has a passion for freedom, still has a love for
this country, still cares about the American Dream and wants to live in
an environment where they can be free to exercise their God-given gifts
and abilities. They want their children to grow up in a better
condition than they are. They want to see civilization building and
suffering going down. But the only way you can do that is you have to
allow some people to prosper. You can't knock down all the businesses
and anybody who makes money and expect to have jobs. You just can't do
that. It doesn't work.
And so we come back as we started. Do you want jobs? Let's get rid of
all this excessive taxation. Let's do what every President in the past
has done when there is a recession--JFK, Ronald Reagan, Bush. Let's cut
the taxes. That is what we've got to do. We've got to change the
regulations in the banking system so there's liquidity for businessmen
to raise money. We have to create an environment where people aren't
afraid of some new whacky idea coming down the pike and totally
changing the business climate. We have to create a condition where
people have confidence that there will be a stable government in this
country which is not hostile to business, and we've got to cut the red
tape and the government mandates.
What that means is we basically need to take a look at the Federal
Government, and we need to say anything that the Federal Government
does not have to do, it has to be just gotten rid of. We need to
delegate it back to the States or the local governments. We've got to
get the Federal Government out of all kinds of businesses they have no
constitutional reason to be in, and we have to focus on the basic
things, which are justice. We need to make sure there is a level
playing field at home for people to do their work, and there has to be
a secure environment internationally, which means we have to have
national defense. Those are the basic functions of justice. Those
should be the functions of limited government.
When the government gets too expensive, you have to go back and say,
Wait a minute. Let's do the basics. Let's do the basics well, and
everything else the Federal Government does not have to do, then let's
get rid of it. That's where we have to be going. That's a clear path.
It's something that's not going to happen overnight because it has to
change in the hearts of Americans, in the families of America. In the
churches and places of worship, there has to be an understanding that
it's not the job of the government to take care of everything that goes
wrong in everybody's life, because it won't work.
And then Washington, D.C., will change, reluctantly, but Washington,
D.C., will change, and we will see a new America and a brighter day and
a better day for Americans. We will see a place where people are
employed and excited about their work and where there's a
responsibility and a vigor and a vibrancy that was so common of the old
Yankee that the Europeans used to make fun of. And once again, that
Yankee will be back again, Yankee Doodle. They used to sing about it to
make fun of us, but as we have seen tsunamis and hurricanes and all
kinds of crises around the world, they like old Yankee Doodle to come
to help them.
And so I'm proud to be an American. I know that you're proud to be
Americans. We have to move back to the policies that made this country
great.
And I see that a very good friend of mine, a former judge, a
Congressman from the great State of Texas is here to join us before
long, and perhaps he will carry on along these lines. I know he is a
man who loves God. He fears God. He loves his country, and he loves his
family, and that's why I love him. And so I think the next hour will be
exciting, and I urge you to stick with us here.
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