[Congressional Record Volume 157, Number 2 (Thursday, January 6, 2011)]
[House]
[Pages H94-H98]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                    ISSUES FACING THE 112TH CONGRESS

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of 
January 5, 2011, the gentleman from New Mexico (Mr. Pearce) is 
recognized for 30 minutes.
  Mr. PEARCE. Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the opportunity to address the 
House on this historic day, this historic day when we have had the 
entire body read the Constitution of the United States. As that process 
went on, there was some wonderment in the audience about why we were 
doing it and what it would mean. But as I listened to the different 
bipartisan Members reading the Constitution, I felt a gravity come 
through the institution that we began to listen to and hear and read 
the words of our Founding Fathers as they set us on this great 
experiment called the American Republic, the Republic which was turned 
loose for the first time, a government of the people, by the people, 
and for the people.

                              {time}  1730

  And on this historic day, we have to contemplate what our tasks are 
as they lie ahead. For myself, I see the most important thing in front 
of us as being economic growth, jobs; and we have to wonder what we're 
going to do about that.
  As I traveled around the district, after the election, we did--we 
have 18 counties, and we did 18 different town hall meetings, listening 
to the people of the district after the election. And the overriding 
concern is what are we going to do about jobs and what are we going to 
do about the economic future of the country.
  I think people are alarmed at the policies that they have seen come 
out of Washington. They're alarmed at the spending. They're angry that 
Washington has not been listening, and they're just upset with the 
policies in general.
  The last election sent two very clear messages: number one, you, in 
Washington are not listening to us; number two is that we don't like 
what you've been doing.
  So, as we contemplate the future, we have to try to get our hands 
around the

[[Page H95]]

economic growth question, and we have to ask ourselves why do we not 
have job creation at this time in our history.
  As a business owner, I can tell you that the most important thing 
that we face right now is uncertainty. Now, that uncertainty originates 
from inside the government, so our government is doing the things which 
freeze our job creation in its place.
  The uncertainty arises on two basic fronts. First of all, taxation, 
and second, regulation.
  And so our friends across the aisle were just asking, why are we 
talking about the health care bill when that's been debated and 
discussed? If we narrow it down to job creation, if we narrow it down 
to the economic uncertainty or certainty, I hear business owners every 
day saying, we're going to have to lay off one or two people, maybe up 
to 10 percent of our workforce. Maybe we're going to have to lay off 
more to get below that threshold because we cannot afford the mandates 
that are given to us in this health care bill.
  So, number one, that's taxation and uncertainty all in one piece. The 
health care bill hires 16,000 IRS agents, but does not hire one doctor. 
You can always tell by the functionality, not by the name of a bill, 
what it does, but by the functionality. And when it hires 16,000 IRS 
agents and no doctors, you can guess that it's more about taxing the 
American public than it is about providing health care. And we're 
seeing that play out in the job market across the United States.
  People are frozen into place, wondering what it's going to mean in 
additional cost for their companies. So rather than leaving those 
people on the payroll, they're actually shrinking the payroll at a time 
when we need employment; 9\1/2\ to 10 percent unemployment for extended 
periods of time is not what makes people secure about the future. So 
that's one piece of the health care bill.
  The second piece of the health care bill that is freezing job growth 
and job creation in its tracks is the regulatory environment. This is a 
time with baby boomers moving into retirement age, retirement age 
brings more expenses, more health care costs, and we should be seeing a 
growth in jobs in the health care industry nationwide. But instead that 
industry is frozen regulatorily. People don't know what the future is 
going to bring, and so that job growth that should be occurring to take 
care of our seniors is actually frozen in place by the regulations in 
this bill.
  So, again, we began with the idea that we want to create jobs and 
grow the economy. We have to assess those things, those elements which 
are creating the impediments to growth, taxes and regulation. Then we 
can walk through our economy one section at a time to find the same 
thing is occurring, and we would begin to understand more clearly and 
more definitely that our government is the problem in job creation.
  For instance, if we took a look offshore, we all saw the problems 
with BP. That was on the TV every day. And I think BP should be 100 
percent accountable and responsible.
  It was my business--my wife and I had a service company, we fixed and 
repaired down-the-hole problems in oil wells. So we're familiar with 
the things, the decisions that were being made by the company out there 
as that well progressed towards a catastrophic failure.
  Now, I do not believe--even though I think BP should be accountable--
I do not believe that we should have killed one job in relation to 
that. When an airliner crashes, we don't stop all airlines. We bring 
the Nation's best people together, we determine what happened, and we 
determine how to make it not happen again. That's what we should be 
doing offshore. We should be bringing the Nation's best together, 
letting them analyze the problem, and then making sure it does not 
occur again.
  But instead, the Obama administration implemented a moratorium, and 
that moratorium shut down the drilling offshore. We have 33 deepwater 
platforms. Those deepwater platforms cost billions to make, sometimes 
15 years to manufacture them, and we have now shut them down; no 
economic activity at all.
  Now, any business will tell you that they've got to have revenue from 
their investment. And so now then those deepwater rigs are beginning to 
steam away at about two or three knots per hour to foreign countries. 
Some have already gone to Africa, South America; and those jobs will 
never occur offshore in the U.S. again. I think that that's an over-
response from the Obama administration, and I believe that one of the 
things this Congress should do is pull the pendulum back to the middle.
  Yes, we should protect our environment. Yes, we should hold the 
companies accountable; but, no, we should not have killed one job. So I 
think in the early days of this Congress, we should make that a clear 
differentiation between the parties or between philosophical views of 
how to return the country. I think that we should make those clear 
distinctions that this group of people should be back on the payroll; 
and, yes, we should keep our environment clean, and we will hold those 
who make problems accountable.

  And I think the American people are looking for that balance, that 
pendulum to come back toward the middle to where we say we can protect, 
we can preserve and we can create jobs simultaneously. And that is one 
of my sincere hopes that we begin to do this in these early days.
  There's an economic truism that says when you raise taxes, you kill 
jobs. When you lower taxes, you create jobs. People would say, well, 
how do we create more jobs? The answer is, if you really want to do it, 
you should lower taxes. And that's what this bill was saying right at 
the end in the lame duck session to extend the Bush tax cuts. It was 
saying that we should not raise taxes on any single American.
  Now, you have the partisan debate that says we shouldn't be lowering 
taxes on billionaires. Well, frankly, there are very few of those. Many 
of the people who fall in that $250,000-a-year and above income are 
simply small business people.
  For instance, just last week, we had a dairy owner saying, you know, 
we run $1 million a month through my small dairy. We only have 50 or 60 
employees, but it costs us $1 million a month to milk cows, to pay the 
feed and, hopefully, we get enough revenue. And yet these are people 
that you're going to drive the taxes up on. As you drive taxes up on 
your job creators, what you do is you take away their ability to create 
more jobs.
  Now, if any of you have any cash left in the bank, which is 
questionable at this point, you wouldn't know that cash in the bank has 
almost zero worth. You get 0.0025. You get one-quarter of 1 percent 
interest on your money in the bank. So any company today is looking to 
reinvest its money to create cash flow, rather than holding cash in the 
bank.
  But the uncertainty, the tax uncertainty and the regulatory 
uncertainty causes us to be uncertain about the future, and it causes 
us not to create jobs. And so we, in this body, have a tremendous 
obligation and a tremendous responsibility and even the--we can create 
the right perception, the right certainty if we'll simply take the 
right steps to just cause the mental framework of America to say, yes, 
we now know where we're going in the future; we now can invest with a 
certain amount of predictability.
  And I think that it is our God-given responsibility at this point in 
our history, to do everything we can to start rebuilding our economy. 
So there are those who would say, but we can't do that. We might take 
jobs back from some foreign country.
  The entire world's economy takes its heartbeat from the U.S. economy. 
We're about 25 percent of the world's economy.
  I was in Germany several years ago to visit the soldiers in Landstuhl 
who had been wounded. In the evening time we met with about 100 
different German corporations and they said, please fix your economy. 
When you, the U.S., sneeze economically, we, the world catch flu 
economically.

                              {time}  1740

  So that gives you some understanding of our responsibility to fix our 
economy. So, systemically, I think that we should walk through each 
industry one at a time to see what this government has been doing to 
kill or freeze jobs. I think that once we look offshore and realize 
that we are killing those jobs, we are sending those jobs

[[Page H96]]

to, say, Venezuela--I'm not sure who among us would want to do that, 
but that's, in effect, what is happening--I think that we should do 
what it takes to bring those jobs back.
  I think then, systemically, as we work our way through the country, 
we should ask ourselves about the 27,000 farmers in the San Joaquin 
Valley, 27,000 farmers that used to make their way, make their payments 
to the bank, make payroll, buy fertilizer, buy seeds, buy new tractors, 
invest in diesel, invest in repairs of the tractors. That's the whole 
growing economy. But a couple of years ago, because of the 2-inch 
silvery minnow, that entire economic region was simply shut down; that 
is, we are choosing all on behalf of a species preservation and none on 
behalf of the human species' job creation.
  I think that the American people are expecting us to find the 
balance. I think they are expecting us to keep the species alive, maybe 
in holding ponds and release them by the millions into the rivers, but 
I think they are expecting us to find a solution to the job creation in 
the country. And I think that we can do it better than by simply 
saying, by some judge's order, that an entire economic subculture is 
simply going to disappear.
  Now, the farmers haven't been working in a couple of years. Many are 
on assistance. They are not making their payments for the land. The 
banking system is less stable in the region. And, in the process, we 
are importing food which is far less safe to consume. We are importing 
from Central America, South America, maybe Mexico, and we have no 
control over what pesticides they use. So we have been seeing 
increasing inputs of food into our economic system here in the U.S. 
which are less safe. We saw the lead poisoning from China. We see these 
things every day. Why we would do that on behalf of some rigid 
philosophical viewpoint is simply exasperating Americans at this point.
  Another issue in which we should look, if we are systemically looking 
at the way our economy is being frozen in its tracks, is our entire 
timber industry. We used to have a thriving timber industry here in 
this country. In New Mexico, we had a thriving timber industry that was 
almost as big as the oil and gas industry. We employed 20,000 people in 
the timber industry at one point. Today, New Mexico, like many of the 
other States, employs zero. We have nobody working in the timber 
industry.
  Now, in full disclosure, during the last campaign I did have a guy 
come up and say, ``That's incorrect. We have eight.'' He said, ``I 
started a small lumber mill, and we are processing small diameter trees 
and we hired eight people.''
  But imagine what would be going on in New Mexico if we had our 
communities with those timber jobs that used to be there. Our tax base 
would increase, the number of jobs would increase. We would have people 
paying Federal income tax, State income tax. But instead, those 
economic potentials have been shifted away to another country.
  Now, I love the Canadians, but I think that we should have the jobs 
in New Mexico that we shipped to Canada. The idea, when we put the 
spotted owl regulations into effect, was that we were going to send 
these jobs to third-world countries. That's not what happened. They 
went to the economically closest neighbor, the one with the least 
transportation costs, and we gave the jobs to them.
  I think that in this country people are tired of our government 
choking down the job base, the economic base for different regions, and 
we can work our way across the country and assess these.
  I think the American people are expecting us in this new Congress, as 
we go through the Constitution as we read it on the floor, I think they 
are expecting us to redesign and reinvent government. I think they are 
expecting us to take a fresh look, do a forensic audit of the entire 
government to see what is working properly and what is working 
improperly. And when we do that, I think they expect us to cause 
efficiencies to occur in the government and cause efficiencies in the 
regulatory framework to where we can protect the species, protect the 
environment, protect the worker, and have the job creation on the other 
side of the pendulum, find that spot in the middle where we can do 
both.
  I think Americans are alarmed, I think that they are afraid, and I 
think that they are angry over the way that Washington has been 
functioning. The last election said so. I do not think the last 
election was about Republican politics. I think it was a message that 
we want things to straighten up in America.

  If we are going to straighten things up in America, the most 
important thing to do is set about job creation and economic growth. If 
we will grow the economy about 3 percent to 3.5 percent--and that's 
what we have averaged for the last 70 years, so understand that that's 
not an unachievable goal. But if we will grow our economy in that 
range, then all the problems begin to dissipate. The shortages and 
budgets in the Federal Government begin to dissipate. The shortages in 
our State budgets begin to dissipate. That is the only answer. I have 
never seen a company save its way to prosperity.
  So I agree with our leaders and I agree with the Republican Party 
that we should be looking at spending cuts throughout our government. 
We should be finding more efficient, more effective ways to find 
governance. But I do not think we can find our way to prosperity in 
simply the budget cuts, but instead we have to look at tax certainty 
and regulatory certainty to create the economic growth that is there.
  Now, I said earlier that tax cuts create jobs, and you might want to 
know how that actually plays out. One guy in Artesia, in New Mexico, 
Mr. Swift, said it most clearly. He said: ``I drive bulldozers. For me 
to create one job takes $340,000. Now,'' he said, ``if the government 
is taxing away my profits, then it takes longer to accumulate the 
$340,000.'' He said, as I mentioned earlier, ``That money in the bank 
is absolutely no use right now. I would rather have it in the 
bulldozers. But the government takes it and taxes it away, and then it 
takes me longer to create a job.''
  So you see this stagnant economy one job at a time because we are 
taxing too high, we are spending too frivolously as a government. And 
the American people are looking for solutions, and I think that we, as 
Republicans, have the right idea in tax certainty, regulatory 
certainty. And the job creation will begin then from the private 
companies.
  Now, people have asked: What about the stimulus bill? Well, the 
stimulus bill was never going to create jobs, because what it does is 
it taxes away from that bulldozer operator who was going to create the 
job with his $340,000, and then it gives that tax money over here to 
someone else. And they create jobs, but just for a short time, because 
if they only created jobs with that input of stimulus money, then 
that's not a legitimate long-term job in the first place.
  What we are looking for is sustained economic growth from jobs that 
come by private companies investing private capital. This is a 
capitalist society. Capital is the building block, and capital is 
generated by profits. As we tax away the capital, then we convert 
ourselves into a stagnant, nongrowing economy.
  It's all fairly basic, but it just gets confusing when we here in 
Washington want to take the money from our job creators and spend it 
ourselves. There is something in politicians that seems to thrive on 
taking your money and putting it here to create our idea of right and 
wrong. Let the American people free. Let the American people have their 
tax money back and they will begin to invest it in growth 
opportunities.
  How many of us are involved in the stock market? We do not want to 
invest our money in uncertain stocks or uncertain bonds. So the idea of 
certainty plays out all the way through the investment spectrum, from 
just your basic small guy buying into the stock market to your small 
business person who wants to invest in a piece of equipment, a pickup 
truck, a new room in his office, a new office for someone to provide 
some service at, a new computer so he can bring on a new IT person. 
Those are all examples of private investment, private capital creating 
jobs in the private market.

                              {time}  1750

  Now people always say, Well, what about those jobs? If we raise 
taxes, we

[[Page H97]]

can create more jobs over here in, say, teaching in our schools. Or 
maybe hire more government agents over here in the Department of 
Transportation or wherever.
  Again the basis of any economy cannot begin at government spending. 
It has to begin in the private market. When we in the public sector, 
when we in government take more than generally somewhere in the range 
of 20 to 22 or 23 percent, what we do is we stifle growth of the 
economy.
  You can look at the full state-run economies. The USSR was a good 
example. They were above 50, 60 percent. Their government took in that 
much of the gross domestic product. They eventually collapsed because 
there was no growth in jobs, no growth in revenue, and then we had a 
simple failure of the economic system.
  Now as we convert from more a private market into a government 
market, we're going to see the increased pressures of stagnant 
economies because, again, we're taxing away that ability for private 
firms to invest private capital. We can never take money from private 
companies, put it into the government and have the government to run 
companies.
  I give an example that if the government thinks it can run a company, 
let's let it fix the post office first. That's a business operation 
that it's in. Maybe you think the post office is running well, but many 
would disagree that it does.
  Another example of why government shouldn't be in business is 
Medicare, Medicaid. We have been told here in this body that Medicare 
loses about 20 percent to fraud every year. That's about $90 billion. 
Another $60 billion a year on Medicaid fraud. That's just fraud. That's 
not waste. That's people cheating the system.
  The example was given by 60 Minutes a couple of years ago by a guy in 
Florida who was making $400,000 a month selling things he didn't really 
own to clients of the Medicare system. Now they did exist and they had 
numbers. And so he had a store front because he said the government 
inspectors would drive by and they would drive by to see that I 
actually was there and had a store front but he said I never owned any 
inventory. So he never had any inventory, selling fictitious things to 
real Medicare patients, he makes $400,000 a month. He said on this TV 
interview, yeah, you caught me and I'm going to jail for 12 years. But 
there are 2,000 people just like me here in Miami. While I'm in jail, 
I'm going to lease my list, my mailing list of Medicare patients, to 
someone else who's going to do the same thing.
  If a business were to do that, they would be out of business within 
the month. But government doesn't ever go out of business. All they do 
is increase your taxes and you as a private citizen are sitting there 
trying to figure out around the dining room table how are we going to 
make ends meet and the government is simply pouring more money into a 
system that is leaking it so badly through the fraud and through the 
abuses that we're never able to have the program function correctly.
  The government at this point needs overhaul in a serious way. I 
think, then, in addition to growing the economy, in addition to 
creating certainty in regulations and in taxation, one of the great 
responsibilities this Congress has is in oversight. In that oversight 
capacity, I suspect that we need to deal with these leakages out of the 
system that are being taxed away from hardworking families struggling 
to make ends meet and maybe, maybe just going down a bit on their taxes 
where they're not trying to sink underwater themselves.
  One of the regulatory things that we should do is take a look at the 
way our banking regulators are operating. What our local banks are 
being told by the regulators that come from here in Washington, D.C., 
is that if you make one bad loan, we're going to come take your bank 
away from you. What that has done is frozen our banks completely in 
their tracks. They're afraid to lend because that might just be the 
loan that goes bad on them and then they lose their entire bank. We've 
seen examples like that across the country. And so our regulators right 
now again are creating great uncertainty among banks who would be 
giving the loans that would keep small businesses going; but instead 
they're afraid, they're uncertain, they don't make loans, and small 
businesses have the capital that they need to keep operating choked off 
by a regulatory framework that is wrong.
  These are the things that I think compel us in this Congress to do 
the right thing. Americans are not expecting magic. They're not 
expecting for us to do the unimaginable. Just start choking off the 
abuses, choke off the fraud, create a little certainty in the economy 
so that people can begin to hire, so that our economy will begin to 
grow, and as it grows, Medicare begins to work better again, Social 
Security begins to work better if we grow the economy, local and State 
budgets begin to work better if we grow the economy, and our national 
budget begins to work better if we choose as a Congress, and there will 
be many choosing here to obstruct that because they feel that it is 
somehow wrong to give tax cuts. If they choose to obstruct it, I think 
we have deep economic troubles lying ahead.

  So for me, it's an easy question. If we don't grow, you have great 
troubles lying ahead, then let's grow. Let's pull out the stops, let's 
find those balance points in regulation, let's find the taxes where we 
can lower them to create more certainty and more job growth, let's 
begin to pull those manufacturing jobs back from around the world that 
have disappeared. We've driven them out through our overregulation and 
overtaxation. And I think when we do that, we will begin to see that 
this economy will grow and the world economy will grow along with us. 
If we choose not to do it, I think that we have those troubled waters 
ahead with higher unemployment, higher taxes, greater dislocation in 
our budgets nationally. I think then that we're going to see more 
printing of money. As they print money, then we find that the money in 
your savings accounts begins to dissipate. We've seen almost $2.6 
trillion printed in the last year and a half or two by Mr. Bernanke. I 
think that Americans are alarmed at the prospect of hyperinflation.
  So, Mr. Speaker, as I conclude tonight, I would just like for this 
body to really contemplate the risks on the one side that we face but 
the potential for optimism on the others. I believe that prosperity is 
possible, but I believe prosperity is a choice. It's going to be a 
choice on the part of this body as we move forward through the next 
months.
  So our friends on the other side of the aisle will complain about our 
consideration of health care, and yet all we are trying to do is create 
tax certainty and regulatory certainty. All we're trying to do is 
reverse a government takeover of part of the economy in order to create 
jobs. To me it makes sense. And I understand the arguments from the 
other side and appreciate that they come with a different point of 
view.
  But I think Americans are looking for us to set aside the partisan 
differences that we have and to work as Americans. We run as 
Republican, Independent or Democrat. That's accepted in the American 
political spectrum. But what's not expected is that we come here and 
operate with those same partisan viewpoints.
  So let's set aside the partisanship now at this point, let's begin to 
work as Americans to do the right thing, grow the economy, create jobs, 
give the younger generations a sense that they have a place in the 
future, that the things they are working for will actually materialize, 
that there is a ray of hope.
  For myself, I have an absolute belief that our economy in the future 
is going to be better and that there are great days ahead. Winston 
Churchill's quote gave me that belief. He says, ``You Americans always 
do the right thing.''
  ``After you've tried everything else,'' he says. We've been in the 
process over the last 50 years of trying everything else. Now it's time 
for us to get serious and do the hard work of getting the government in 
control, shrinking the spending, lowering taxes, creating regulatory 
certainty, so that this free market can continue to grow and expand 
through the next generations.

[[Page H98]]



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