[Congressional Record Volume 157, Number 36 (Thursday, March 10, 2011)]
[House]
[Pages H1706-H1711]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                              {time}  1640
                            THE U.S. ECONOMY

  The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. Hultgren). Under the Speaker's announced 
policy of January 5, 2011, the gentleman from Missouri (Mr. Akin) is 
recognized for 60 minutes as the designee of the majority leader.
  Mr. AKIN. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.
  We are going to talk for a little while here this afternoon about a 
subject that is on, I think, everybody's minds regardless of their 
political affiliations. The more we look at it, the more significant it 
seems to be--in fact, the more frightening it seems to be. It is the 
simple situation with our economy and the level of what the government 
is doing in the ``spending money'' department. This, of course, ties 
into the job situation in America. The many people who are looking for 
work, some of the businesses that are struggling as well as the 
families who are struggling, all of it is tied together in the economy. 
It is also, of course, tied to the Federal Government and its spending.
  What I'm going to try to do is paint a picture in simple terms. 
Sometimes economists make things seem a little bit too complicated. 
This doesn't have to be so complicated. In fact, the less complicated 
it is, the less frightening it becomes. So, first of all, I'd like to 
talk about some words that we use in Washington that we maybe aren't 
familiar with here, particularly our freshman Members. The first word 
is ``entitlements.''
  I'm an engineer by training, so ``entitlements'' you could think of 
as a machine. In fact, it's a little bit like those machines in 
bathrooms, and when you put your hands in front of them, they spit out 
those brown paper towels you see. In fact, the entitlements we're 
talking about here spit out dollar bills. What happened is a legislator 
or a legislature maybe 30 years ago created some bill which 
automatically gives money to certain people who come and put their 
hands in front of the machine. Of these entitlements, the biggest ones 
are Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. These are programs that 
have been around for quite a while, but they're a little bit like that, 
if you think of them as things that spend money automatically. So those 
of us here on the floor of the Congress talk about whether we're going 
to fund this or fund that or how we're going to run the government. 
These things were created a long time ago, and they just keep on 
running and spending money. Those are called ``entitlements.''
  There is another thing that is like the entitlements, and it is the 
interest on our debt. When the U.S. Government issues a Treasury bill, 
the Treasury bill is supposed to pay some interest. It's a little bit 
like that machine in that it spits out some dollar bills. It, like an 
entitlement, is something that's spending money.
  Now, here is the thing that I think is frightening, and I think 
you'll think it's frightening as you give this a little bit of thought, 
and this isn't sometime way out in the future but, rather, just this 
year. If you add up the Social Security, the Medicare, the Medicaid, 
and the other entitlements--there are some other smaller entitlements--
and if you put those together with the interest on our debt, it comes 
to $2.2 trillion. I don't know what $2.2 trillion is in terms of trying 
to visualize the money, but it's very easy to visualize this. $2.2 
trillion is also the total revenue that the Federal Government brings 
in in taxes, so that makes it easier to see. In other words, these 
entitlements and the interest on the debt, $2.2 trillion, is the same 
thing as the revenue that we get in from taxes.
  Now, why is that frightening?
  It's because it doesn't include two other things: the defense budget 
and what's called non-defense discretionary.
  So what are these two things over here?
  The defense budget is pretty obvious. Obviously, it's tanks and 
airplanes and ships. It's men with rifles, and it's our national 
security. That's a piece of that, and you can see that it's almost $700 
billion. Then non-defense would be things like the building that we're 
in. It would be the Capitol building. It would be the Federal parks. It 
would be the Federal prisons. It would be the Department of Energy or 
Commerce or

[[Page H1707]]

Justice or Education. All those different government things that we 
spend money on are in this non-defense.
  In other words, if you want to balance the budget today, what do you 
have to do?
  What you'd have to do would be to cut defense to zero: not one 
soldier, not one rifle left, not one uniform. You cut that to zero, but 
that's not enough. Then you'd cut the rest of the stuff the government 
is spending money on. You'd close this building down, the Capitol. 
You'd close the Senate and the House down. You'd close down the Federal 
parks. You'd close down all of those different departments, those of 
Commerce, Justice, Education, Energy, and all those things. You'd close 
them all down. When those are all zero, you will have a balanced 
budget.
  How is that going to work? Not very well.
  That's why I say what we're dealing with is a far bigger problem 
than, I believe, most Americans are aware of. If you think about that, 
you ask: How in the world can our government and how can America 
continue when we're doing this?
  As I've said, I'm a conservative Republican. These aren't Republican 
or Democrat numbers. These are just the numbers. This is just our 
country. This is a country that we inherited. This is really our 
country, and these are what the numbers look like. So this is pretty 
frightening. What that means is we're going into debt, deeper and 
deeper into debt at an incredible rate right now, trying to do 
something that mechanically, economically, mathematically just will not 
work. That's the nature of the problem.
  So, if anybody has a little bit of sense of intuition, if anybody has 
a good American spirit, one of the first things you ask when you see a 
good problem is: Oh, how can we fix the problem? Because this is 
something all of us have to deal with. Let's take a look at what the 
possibilities are.
  The real possibilities remind me a little bit of all of these kinds 
of funny weight-watching programs that are out there. I always think 
it's sort of interesting when people say they're going to go on a low-
carb diet or this diet or that diet or something. When you come to be a 
little bit older, such as I am, you're really faced with two realities. 
You either get more exercise or you don't eat so much. It's about that 
simple. You don't have to have a lot of fancy dietary programs.
  This situation suggests that it's kind of simple. It's either don't 
spend as much money or tax everybody a whole lot more. The trouble is, 
in this situation, the ``tax everybody a whole lot more'' doesn't 
really work. Let me explain why it doesn't. We'll take a look at 
another chart.
  What happens to our economy is that we have these different taxes 
that we run. In spite of all the different taxes--sometimes we raise 
them and sometimes we lower them--what the experience of the Federal 
Government has been is that our revenue kind of comes in at this 18 
percent average. So you say, Well, look. We've got way too much 
spending and not enough revenue coming in, and we need an extra $1.5 
trillion in revenue, so we're going to just raise taxes about 30 
percent. The trouble is, if you do raise the taxes, you don't get more 
revenue coming in. That's sort of a weird thing, isn't it? Let's talk 
about that for just a minute.
  Why would it be that if you raise taxes the government wouldn't get 
more revenue?
  The reason is, if you tax the economy to a certain degree, then you 
start to collapse the jobs and the economy. The economy goes south. 
When it does, it stalls, and you don't get as much tax revenue. Think 
about it this way. I'd like to explain it by just having you picture 
yourself, if you will, as being king for a year and that your job is to 
try to raise some tax revenue for your kingdom.

                              {time}  1650

  And the only thing you can do is to tax a loaf of bread. And so you 
start thinking in your mind about this. You say, well let's see, in my 
kingdom they eat a lot of bread. So I could just tax a loaf of bread 
for just 1 penny a loaf.
  Or you could say to yourself, ha, I know how to get a lot of taxes. I 
am going to put a $10 tax on every loaf of bread. But you think, yeah, 
but I bet nobody would buy any bread if we did that.
  So your common sense would say somewhere between a penny and $10 for 
that loaf of bread, there is going to be an optimum tax. If you raise 
it or lower it either way, you won't get as much money raised in taxes, 
and that's what's going on here.
  You can raise the tax rate, but what happens is people find out ways 
to avoid it. The economy stalls and so, in fact, your revenue starts to 
fall off, and you don't get any more money in. Of course, the problem 
is your spending is still going like mad.
  So the solution to this problem isn't even as easy as trying to lose 
weight. You really don't have two alternatives. What you have is really 
one alternative, and that alternative is you have got to get these 
entitlements under control.
  Now, the fact of the matter is that even if you look at a snapshot of 
this year, you have to get the entitlements under control, but 
particularly this graph shows that the entitlements here, these are 
just three of them, the big ones, Medicaid, Medicare, Social Security, 
that these entitlements are growing rapidly over time.
  So even if we went to the scenario up here, and we got rid of defense 
and nondefense spending, and we balance the budget with the government 
spending nothing, except just entitlements, even if we did that, in a 
couple of years these entitlements are going to eat our lunch.
  The problem is you can't fix it by getting more revenue in. And so 
what's your alternative?
  The alternative is the uncomfortable fact that America cannot 
continue to afford these entitlements.
  Now, of course, that's radioactive to say that politically. I am 
surprised I haven't been hit by lightning yet. But that is, 
unfortunately, the pure mathematics of it. Now, there are some people 
in politics, they like to sugarcoat things and may not tell you 
absolutely all the truth, but those are the facts. That's where we are.
  Now, how are you going to deal with these things? None of us really 
know. We have a bunch of ideas. We are struggling with how you are 
going to do it, but there are a lot of people that are dependent on 
these entitlements. Yet, the money is not going to be there.
  We can't keep borrowing money from the Chinese to pay for these 
things because sooner or later what's going to happen, the interest 
rates will go up on that money, and the whole Nation will be bankrupt.
  And I don't quite know what that would look like. What does it look 
like if you picture, you get up one morning and you find out that the 
dollar bill doesn't work any more? You go to your grocery store and it 
seems like everything stopped moving. The trucks aren't moving and you 
can't get food for the shelves because the trucks don't have gas. The 
whole thing just kind of comes to a stop because the dollar bill, the 
whole country has gone bankrupt.
  I don't know what that looks like. I don't think it's particularly 
pretty, but that's going to be the picture if we don't deal with this 
problem.
  What I am suggesting is that, first off, what we have to do, every 
one of us as Americans, we have to educate ourselves on the simple 
facts. You don't have to be a wizard on the budget or economics; all 
you have to realize is that the entitlements are using up all of the 
tax revenues. That's a problem. Plus the entitlements are also growing, 
and you don't really have flexibility to raise the taxes too much more.
  Let's take a look at the problem a little bit more closely. This is a 
picture of what's going on relative to the national defense. I am on 
the Armed Services Committee. We have spent 10 years, all kinds of 
hearings, listening to what the Russians do, what the Chinese are 
doing, what the different threats are, and also understanding the logic 
of why America has a strong national defense, why that buys us a great 
deal.
  You might ask yourself why in the world do we have nuclear aircraft 
carriers. What exactly do they do, because other countries that are 
allies of ours, they don't have ships like that. Why would we? Well, 
the reason is because if you think about America and the globe you find 
that America is sitting there a little bit to a degree by itself, a 
little bit of an island. And our two main

[[Page H1708]]

trading partners, which is Europe and all the way around to China and 
Japan and India, those trading partners are a considerable distance 
around the world.
  And it is in our interest because of all of the things that we buy 
that are traded that we protect those trade routes from some hegemon 
that might want to cause trouble. So we have things like our Navy and 
our nuclear-powered aircraft carriers so that we can go to the other 
side of the world and conduct operations and not to worry about fueling 
these things up. That's the reason why we have a lot of national 
defense. This started a long time ago, and you can see this blue line 
here talks about our defense and what's going on with defense spending, 
and then what's going on with entitlements.
  You see entitlements back here in 1965, this is just Medicare, 
Medicaid, and Social Security. This chart says it's 2.5 percent of GDP. 
You see defense is much, much higher, it's jumped up to above 9 here.
  But then over time these entitlements are going up. That 9.9 percent 
is low because it doesn't add all of the entitlements. That's just 
three of the big entitlements, and defense spending is going down. So 
people that say, well, aren't you open-minded, shouldn't we be cutting 
defense and cutting other things as well?
  The answer is no, not really. Because you see any freedom that you 
enjoy in this country isn't worth anything if we are being attacked by 
an enemy and there are bombs falling and there is chaos all around us. 
Our national defense provides us with what we enjoy in a peaceful and 
decent world to live in.
  As you see, the defense budget is going down and yet the entitlements 
are going up. So this gives you a sense, again, that you can't fix this 
by cutting defense. You could cut defense to zero and you still are not 
going to deal with the problem here.
  Here is another way of saying that you can't really fix the problem 
by raising taxes. This is a curve of the very highest marginal income 
rate, back here in 1960. If you were very well-to-do, your tax rate is 
90 percent. So if you earn $1, you give 90 cents to the government.
  Well, you can imagine the people that are making a whole, whole lot 
of money aren't dumb enough to give 90 cents out of a dollar away. So 
what they find a way to do is move to another country, or they find 
different tax shelters and things to avoid paying this. But, anyway, 
you have this very high tax rate here on the people that are very well-
to-do.
  These lines show how much revenue comes into the Federal Government. 
You see, as this highest tax rate is decreased, that's the red line, 
what you see is that actually the revenue that the government is 
collecting goes up. This is reflecting that same idea that we talked 
about, the loaf of bread.
  If the loaf of bread is overtaxed, people won't buy much of it, and 
you won't get that much tax. If you put a thousand-dollar tax on a loaf 
of bread, nobody would buy any. Golly, you have got nice, high taxes. 
Should you have a lot of money coming in? No, because it doesn't make 
sense. That's what this chart is showing: That as the taxes actually 
come down, you actually get more revenue with the government.
  Has this actually been proven to happen? Yes, historically it has. 
There are several times when it did.
  And those times were, first of all, when JFK inherited not a very 
good economy, I mention this because JFK was obviously a Democrat, a 
Democrat President. He understood these principles, and when the 
economy was bad, what JFK did was he decided to cut taxes.
  Now, doesn't that seem like an odd thing? The economy is bad. The 
government needs more money, and yet he cuts taxes. What an odd thing 
to do. Yet it certainly worked. It worked beautifully.
  So how did it work?
  Well, over a period of time by putting more money back in the 
economy, the people that were small business owners took the money, 
invested in their businesses, and they built warehouses, new machines, 
new technology, new research to develop better products.
  As their businesses grew, they hired more people. And as they hired 
more people the government got more tax revenue. The economy got better 
and better, and as the economy got better they made more money. So the 
result was, by actually cutting taxes, particularly cutting taxes in 
certain ways, that is you cut taxes on the people that own the 
businesses, when you do that, you can actually pick an economy up and 
get it going so you get more revenue coming in.

                              {time}  1700

  What we're getting at is the part of the solution to the problem that 
we talked about in the very beginning. And the solution is two-fold. 
The first is fairly obvious: We have to cut spending. And particularly 
we must cut these entitlements in some way. The second thing, though, 
is that you don't have to cut them entirely. What you can do probably 
is also to some degree grow your way out of the problem.
  In May of 2003--George Bush had been elected in 2001, the same time I 
was elected--and when we came in, there was a recession going on. You 
can see that reflected in some of these graphs. This is the time period 
of 2001 on up to about 2006. This chart is a little bit old, but it 
makes an interesting point. And so this is the gross domestic product 
before and after tax relief. The tax relief is this vertical line right 
here. This was not a particularly popular tax. It was a tax relief to 
get rid of capital gains, dividends and get rid of the death tax.
  People say, well, those are taxes that favor the rich. Well, the 
problem is, if you want jobs, you've got to have employers. If you tax 
small business into the dirt, you won't have as many jobs. And so you 
can't have it both ways. If you want to allow small business owners to 
keep enough money that they can invest in their business, you can't tax 
them very, very heavily.
  And so the deal was here, you change capital gains, dividends and 
death taxes. That freed money up for small businesses to invest. Now 
look what happened. This is the GDP, or the growth of our economy. 
Here's the tax cut. These average about 1.1 percent of GDP. And then 
here after that tax cut, this thing averages 3.5 percent. This, then, 
is the result of generating a lot more money for the Federal 
Government.
  So when business is doing well and when people are being employed, 
when people have good job markets and the economy is strong, not only 
do individual citizens prosper, the Federal Government prospers. It 
gets more money. So let's take a look at this question. And we're going 
to look at this exact same graph. This is May of 2003 when those tax 
cuts went into place; they were called the Bush tax cuts, as you 
recall.
  Here's the chart on employment, job creation, before and after tax 
relief. You see here, these lines, anything going down means we lost 
jobs, and so you're seeing we're losing a lot of jobs in the front end 
when we were in the recession. Then as we did some tax cuts in here, it 
helped a little bit. But still when we do this tax cut, take a look at 
how things turn around; and this is the average loss of 100,000 jobs 
per month, this is a gain of 168,000 jobs a month after this tax cut 
goes into place.
  So, you can see where I'm going. I'm starting to get to a solution to 
this problem, and there are really two pieces of solution. And so let's 
take a look at the final chart here. This is government revenues. 
Again, May of 2003: Capital gains, dividends and death tax. So this tax 
goes into place.
  This is the Federal revenues coming down here from 2 trillion down to 
1.9 down to 1.8. Revenues are going down. The country is in a 
recession. We do the tax cuts. And take a look at government revenue. 
Government revenue takes off. Because the economy is starting to 
strengthen now, so are the revenues for the Federal Government, 4 
straight years of increases right after the tax cut. What an odd thing. 
You might not have expected that.
  What does that say then about our problem overall? Coming back to our 
first chart here then, the problem is that the entitlements are eating 
our lunch. Entitlements are taking everything that the Federal 
Government has.
  And so the solution is what? Well, it's two-fold. First of all, we're 
going to have to reduce the amount of spending here, reduce spending 
anywhere we can, for that matter, particularly in this sector, because 
a lot of the spending over here creates a tremendous

[[Page H1709]]

amount of red tape and regulations for businesses. If we can reduce the 
red tape and regulations on businesses, if we can also cut taxes on 
businesses in certain specific ways, you can start to get this economy 
growing again.
  And if you do that, then what starts to happen is instead of having 
2.2 trillion in terms of receipts from the Federal Government, they 
will start to go up. We will get more tax revenues so we have less 
debt, and so we both reduce here, but we also grow our way out of the 
problem.
  And so that's the general strategy that I think most any economist 
would say that you're going to have to do faced with the problems. Now, 
of course, there's a whole lot of politics, as you can imagine, that's 
involved in these questions and these issues.
  The politics are, the main political questions would be, first of 
all, what should the Federal Government do? Is it really the job of the 
Federal Government to get involved in education per se? Or is that 
something that should be done at the local level? Is it really the 
Federal Government's job to get involved in flood insurance? Is the 
Federal Government to be involved in providing loans to people? Is that 
really the job of the Federal Government? What really is the job of the 
Federal Government? That is the biggest political question here and 
what we argue about quite a lot, and with good reason, because that is 
the big question.
  As you recall, there was a nation that believed that the job of their 
federal government was to provide you with a good education, to provide 
you with health care, to provide you with a home and some food, provide 
you with a job and a future. It was the federal government's job to do 
those things. And that particular nation went into the dustbin of 
history.
  And we thought, as the Soviet Union collapsed, oh, that will never 
work. That's communism. Communism doesn't work very well. Socialism 
doesn't work very well. And yet, here, years later, in America, we're 
thinking the Federal Government should be providing health care, the 
Federal Government should be providing housing, the Federal Government 
should be providing food, the Federal Government should make sure that 
you have a job, the Federal Government should be doing this and that 
and the other thing. And so we're wondering why we're starting to get 
in trouble.
  Now that's a debate. What should the Federal Government be doing? 
Should it be doing all these entitlements? Well, if you go to the U.S. 
Constitution, you would find out, well, no, in fact, a lot of these 
things are unconstitutional. The Constitution says that the only things 
the Federal Government can do are the things which are specifically 
enumerated. Well, what's one of the main ones enumerated? Well, you 
don't have to read past the, not only the first page, it's in the first 
paragraph, it's in the Preamble. As a Federal Government, we're 
supposed to provide for the common defense. First of all, the job of 
the Federal Government is to protect our country. Any other rights you 
have mean nothing if you're being bombed and people are attacking your 
shorelines.
  The main job of the Federal Government is to provide for the national 
defense. A lot of these other things, they might be nice. They're 
probably, even though they've been around for generations, not 
constitutional because they're not specifically enumerated powers of 
the Federal Government. And what we're seeing happening, what was a 
safety net has become a way of life for huge blocks of our citizens.
  And we're getting to the point where, in fact, we are and have 
arrived at the point where the numbers don't work. America's solvency, 
everything you and I think of as America, is up for grabs. This is a 
very, very sober moment for our country.
  I would ask you to, if you will, just pretend in your mind, pretend 
that you were a Congressman or a Senator in the year 1850. In the year 
1850, you might recall, there was this 10,000-pound gorilla in the 
tent. People politically didn't quite know what to do with it. It was 
called the issue of slavery. And the way politics was working, you had 
the Southern guys and the Northern guys, and so the power was somewhat 
divided, and the people that were Congressmen and Senators didn't know 
what to do with this huge gorilla which we call slavery. They didn't 
know what to do with the issue, so they sort of tried to step around it 
the best they could politically. And they said, well, we'll let one 
State come into the Union, and it will be a free State, and then we'll 
let another one come in, and it will be a slave State. They tried to 
make a compromise instead of dealing head-on with a massive problem 
that they had.

                              {time}  1710

  In 1852, there was a book, ``Uncle Tom's Cabin,'' and it increased 
the rhetoric and the tension of the slavery issue. So the issue of the 
gorilla was now glowing, and he is there and he is threatening. By 
1857, the terrible decision from the Supreme Court, the Supreme Court 
again decided to act like legislators. Instead of just interpreting the 
law, they decided to create law. They decided in Dred Scott that Dred 
Scott was not really a person, he had to go back to slavery, et cetera, 
he was property. They made other decisions that the Congress couldn't 
decide whether new States coming in were slave or free. So now this 
whole great big slavery gorilla was really ready to storm out and cause 
trouble.
  President Lincoln, the first Republican President, is elected. The 
South knows he is against slavery. He gets on the train, and he hasn't 
even gotten here to Washington, D.C., and the Southern States start to 
secede. America, like a train going off a cliff, starts in the Civil 
War. After 4 years, Abraham Lincoln writes his second inaugural 
address, and he references the fact this war is more miserable, there 
has been more suffering, and it has been much, much worse than anybody 
imagined it would be.
  So what's the point? The point was that there is this gorilla in the 
room that the leadership failed to deal with, and the results were 
absolutely horrible. Statistics don't touch your heart, but statistics 
also are helpful to know. Six hundred thousand Americans died in the 
battles of the Civil War. That is more than all of the Americans killed 
in all the wars of our past other than the Civil War.
  But the stories that come from that war are even more compelling. I 
recall one that every time I think of it, it puts a face on the Civil 
War. There was a Northern unit that was trying to take a position 
occupied on some higher ground by a Southern unit. The Northern unit 
seemed like they had the South just wavering. They were about to be 
able to take the hill, and there was a young officer at the top of the 
hill who would reappear, almost not worried about his own safety. He 
would reposition his Southern troops, and they would settle down and 
fight the North back. They fought back and forth a number of times 
until the officer of the Northern unit remembered he had an older man 
who was an excellent shot with a rifle. He said: There is a young 
officer up there that is really the one who is holding this hill, and I 
want you to use your great marksmanship ability, and I want you to take 
that officer out.
  So the next time that young officer showed himself, this crack 
marksman shot him. And the young officer, the Southern officer, dropped 
dead on the spot. The Northern troops moved up and by the time they 
took the position, the marksman went over to see who he shot. He 
realized he had shot his own son. He was so distraught that he just 
stood up and ran across the field where the Southern army was shooting, 
and he was killed by rifle fire.
  That is a little personal tragedy. The Civil War was full of those. 
But they are full of them because there was a leadership failure to 
deal with the crisis that America had to deal with, and they didn't do 
it, for whatever reason.
  Today, we also have a crisis that is right here in front of us. And 
as Americans start to understand where we are with the budget, we also 
have to deal with this thing. The face on our entire economic system 
collapsing could be very ugly indeed.
  And so my point of being here on the floor today is not to be 
particularly partisan, but simply to acknowledge that the numbers don't 
work. Now I have to be somewhat partisan because our President 
submitted the 2012 budget. The 2012 budget is irresponsible because it 
refuses to deal with these mathematics. It pretends that it is a budget 
but it never deals with entitlements, for whatever particular reason,

[[Page H1710]]

and tries to kick the can down the road, pretending that the gorilla is 
not there. That we cannot do.
  The fact is that we are overspending. We are overspending at a 
horrendous rate, and something has to be done. So America now faces a 
great challenge in the next couple of years as to how are we going to 
deal with this problem.
  As I said before, the solutions are not simple. In fact, the 
solutions are simple, they are just not easy. I think Ronald Reagan 
said that. The solution is simple, but it is not easy. The simple part 
is we have to cut the spending. The simple part is we need to grow the 
revenues of the government by getting the economy and the jobs going. 
We know how to do that. We have to cut the redtape. We have to cut 
taxes on small business owners, and we have to try to make sure that 
the liquidity is available to small business owners through the banks. 
And then we have to stop the era of uncertainty so the businessman 
feels like the economy has settled down and they can actually make some 
investments. Those are the things you do to get jobs going. We know it 
is fairly simple what it takes to get jobs because we know employers 
make jobs, and that means businesses have to be healthy and we have to 
do the things so they are not red-taped out of existence. We have to 
allow them to be competitive with businesses overseas. I would stack up 
Americans competition-wise with any foreign country as long as we don't 
burden them down with too many taxes and redtape and uncertainties and 
things, and scare all the jobs overseas. So it is simple, but it is not 
easy.
  Also, cutting the tremendous level of entitlement spending. You can 
see you have to do it. You just can't not do it. But how do you do it? 
That is not easy. That is where we are. But we cannot continue to 
ignore the gorilla that is in the tent. If we do that, we threaten all 
kinds of very serious problems in our economy.
  The other different pieces that have to go into place--we have to 
stop all of the regulations that make it so we can't drill for oil. We 
have a Federal Government now that ever since the oil spill has shut 
down drilling for oil. I guess they have got one well working. You have 
chaos in the Middle East, and we are dependent on foreign oil, which we 
shouldn't be because we have a lot of oil in America. We have great 
natural gas resources that we just discovered, all kinds of coal to 
last us for hundreds of years. We have the resources in America, but we 
are not developing them. We don't have drilling rigs going out and 
drilling where we know there is oil. Those drilling rigs are silent. 
Why? Well, because there is an environmental lawsuit on almost every 
promising well--the big, heavy wells that could really bring in oil. 
Or, if it's not that, there are regulations that say you can't drill. 
There is an area in Alaska called ANWR. It is basically like Oklahoma 
only frozen. It is very flat and cold. The idea would be you could 
bring drilling rigs when it is frozen solid, drill down there and pull 
them out before it is thawed. You have a pipe, and you would pump the 
oil out of that area. And you could pull the pipes out later after the 
oil is tapped out. Why are we not drilling?
  Why is it, on our Continental Shelf, foreign nations are coming onto 
our Continental Shelf and drilling for oil and we are not? That just 
doesn't make sense.
  So there are some policies that kind of come over in this area where 
America can do some things to get our economy back in shape. We can cut 
a lot of the ridiculous regulations that come from places like the EPA.
  There was an award that we presented last week here on the floor. I 
think was called the Golden Turkey Award for the fact that the EPA 
decided that milk, because it contained oil or fat or whatever it was, 
had to be treated like an oil spill. And so farmers had to put 
containment around their dairy barns instead of having a few cats to 
lick up the milk that was spilt. I guess it is a sort of cry over spilt 
milk type situation. But talk about overregulation, my goodness.
  Another part of EPA was a decision now that we cannot, if you are a 
farmer, have any rogue dust. Well, what would rogue dust be? That would 
be if you are plowing a field, if any dust comes off your field, that 
would be terrible. So the EPA is very concerned about rogue dust. They 
haven't been to my good State of Missouri and seen, when you are 
harvesting corn in the fall and that stuff has got all kinds of dust 
that the rain has deposited on it. And, boy, when that machine goes by, 
it is a cloud of dust. Still the corn is good, and it feeds a lot of 
cattle. What would you do with all of that rogue dust? Somehow that 
just seems a little absurd to me. So we have to get rid of all this 
redtape and ridiculous kinds of things and let good old American 
innovation go.
  On the subject of innovation, that is what free enterprise is all 
about. That is what we are pretty good at. There is guy in my district 
that I am just so proud of. His name is Kent Schien. He has a company 
called Innoventor. One of the things that he started playing with is 
something that some of us who grew up a little closer to town try to 
avoid at all cost. We try to avoid it at a distance. It is called pig 
manure.

                              {time}  1720

  It has its own special smell. Some people can take it and some people 
have trouble with it. He thought, well, maybe if we could find 
something good to do with this pig manure, we'd really have something. 
As you can tell, he's a guy with a lot of imagination.
  So what did he do? Well, he gets this pig manure. He puts it in a big 
kettle. He puts it under pressure and temperature and works something 
like a petroleum cracking process until he breaks the stuff down into 
sort of a primitive asphalt. They've then taken the asphalt, mixed it 
with gravel and used it to asphalt some roads. You may think, that must 
be a smelly road, but it's not. It doesn't have the smell anymore 
because of the temperature and the changes chemically. So now they're 
testing out a section of highway that's been made with pig manure. He 
has this thing designed so that it's not that big a unit so you could 
put different ones of these units in areas where there are pig farms 
and they could bring over their pig manure and get paid for it and 
still make a profit on selling the asphalt.
  That's the kind of thing that makes America. That's the kind of thing 
that has made America such a special place. It's called freedom. It's 
called free enterprise. It's called innovation. It's talking about 
somebody that has a dream in their heart, and they're willing to take a 
risk and to try to do something that no one's ever done before. They 
hear people say, you can't do that and you can't do that, and the 
American in them comes out and the American says, ``Ain't no such word 
as `I can't.' '' And so they go forward.
  America has been built that way. This great nation was built that 
way, by all these people that had some crazy dream that became a vague 
possibility, and then a possibility, and then it actually happened. 
America was built one dream at a time. A beautiful country. But a 
country now that because of government irresponsibility is in a crisis 
state and something that we all have to deal with.
  Some of us that hold elective office, we travel around. We talk to 
our constituents. We talk to people in different States, but our own 
particularly, and there's a perception out there that we can solve this 
problem by taking out a line in the budget that's called waste, fraud 
and abuse. Now, we've never found that line. It's like a fat marbleized 
in meat. It's all over the place. We try to get at that and get rid of 
waste, fraud and abuse. But you're not going to fix this problem by 
fixing waste, fraud and abuse. You're not going to fix this problem by 
more efficiency. You're not going to fix this problem by saying we're 
not going to send any more money to foreign countries. You're not going 
to fix this problem by trimming a little bit here and there. This is a 
massive problem, and it's going to require a rework of the entire way 
that we're spending money in the Federal Government. That doesn't mean 
that it can't be fixed.
  I recall Ronald Reagan. It seemed like things were kind of in rough 
shape when he took over as President. But he had that can-do attitude, 
his little twinkling sets of wit. He would kind of cheer America along 
and he put us on the right path, got the economy going and basically 
won the Cold War. He was a great man, a great leader, that God brought 
to our Nation at a critical time.

[[Page H1711]]

  I think we need to be praying now for great leaders in America, 
people who understand the problem, are not going to turn their tail and 
run away from it; they're not going to pretend it doesn't exist but 
take it straight on, because I believe the American public, when they 
understand the nature of what we're dealing with here, I think they're 
willing to roll their sleeves up and say, Let's do what Americans have 
always done so well. Let's just move forward and solve this problem. 
Let's figure out what each of us has to do, what's reasonable, and 
let's move forward and get this thing done.
  It was my father's generation. My father served with General Patton, 
and there was that phrase, everybody did their bit. That was kind of 
the speak of the day. We, likewise, are challenged now that we have to 
do our bit. We have to be making the wise decisions to put our business 
and industry back in place.
  Now, that's very controversial. You might be surprised here on the 
floor of the U.S. Congress--you wouldn't be surprised if I said 
Republicans and Democrats are pretty polarized on the abortion issue, 
and they are. But you might be surprised to know that in terms of 
voting, Republicans and Democrats are more polarized on the energy 
issue than they are on the abortion issue. But I believe that the fact 
that the foreign oil is starting to become very expensive and more 
scarce is going to tip the balance of that argument. And I believe that 
America is going to start developing our own supplies of energy, and I 
think that's the way we have to go. I think we have to get rid of the 
redtape and the ridiculous regulations like rogue dust and spilled milk 
in the dairy barn and things like that that just don't make any sense. 
There's a Clean Water Act, also, that has incredible kinds of 
regulations and things that don't make any sense at all from an 
engineering point of view.
  We have to look at those things. We're going to have to trim out some 
of those things in this budget in order to create that environment, a 
good, strong environment for business. But we're going to also have to 
look at this spending. We're going to have to figure out ways to reduce 
that spending.
  As a member of the Armed Services Committee, and actually I'm a 
chairman of the subcommittee that deals with the Navy, the Marine Corps 
and projection forces--that would be things like bombers and long 
range--we realize that there is not a whole lot we dare to cut here 
because of the various other nations and the rate that they're spending 
on defense and the threat they could be to our country. This money is 
not always spent as wisely as it should be, but, again, the Navy right 
now, the American Navy, has the same number of ships as we had in the 
year 1916. That's not enough ships to do what we need to do in order to 
try to create a peaceful and free trade area where we can trade back 
and forth across the oceans of the world.

  And so there's not going to be a lot here to be able to solve this 
problem. We can spend this money more efficiently probably, but we're 
not going to be able to cut a whole lot there. The solution to this is, 
once again, pretty straightforward: We have to cut particularly the 
amount of spending we're doing on entitlements, and particularly we 
have to reduce the growth where the entitlements, as the years go out, 
are going to become more difficult. This growth is induced because of 
the fact that the population is getting older and the older people are 
taking up more of these entitlement programs, so it becomes more 
expensive.
  So people like me, I'm a baby boomer, as the baby boomers get older, 
then they're going to get onto these programs. It's going to cost a lot 
more, and there's not as many younger workers to be able to pay. That's 
part of why this gets high. We have to be able to bring that curve 
down, and we have to cut the level of spending in that area.
  So we have to do the cutting on the one hand, and the other thing is 
we have to grow the economy. We know how to do it. It's been done by 
other Presidents. We understand the economics of it. But it's just a 
big challenge. The sooner that Americans across the board understand 
what we're dealing with, say, ``Okay, let's roll up our sleeves. Let's 
get to work on this thing,'' I have tremendous confidence. Americans in 
the past have always rolled up into challenges. They've done well, and 
we've gotten through many things.
  I think the way we'll get through them, also, is something we can 
learn from the past. That was what the Pilgrims did when the Pilgrims 
first landed. They had a dream of creating a nation that was designed 
in an entirely different way than the European countries. They arrived 
here, and in the first couple of months half of them died. The 
Mayflower, in the time spring came around, up anchor, was headed back 
to England. The captain said, Come back to England with me, but 50 
Pilgrims said--52 or 53--said, No, we felt like God called us to this 
country to do something new and different and unique, and they stayed, 
and that dream started the great American Dream.
  Later on, 160-some years later, there was a general by the name of 
General Washington at Valley Forge. He also was forced to his knees 
looking to God for help in America's time of crisis. He saw the answer 
to his prayers. In fact, there was this old guy with bifocal spectacles 
when the first Constitution was going to be ratified that talked about 
those days when George Washington ran the army. He rose to speak 
because the politicians were disagreeing with each other at the 
Constitutional Convention, and old Ben Franklin with his glasses down 
on his nose, 80-something years old, which of course was very old in 
those days, stood to address George Washington.
  He said: I have lived through a long time, and the longer I have 
lived, the more convincing proofs I see of this truth, that God governs 
in the affairs of men. And if it's possible that a sparrow cannot fall 
to the ground without His notice, is it probable that a nation can rise 
without His aid?
  Then he goes on to say that in the recent war we saw frequent 
instances of God's superintending Providence. And he closed by saying: 
We need to be in prayer as a Constitutional Congress here as we look at 
adopting the new U.S. Constitution.
  Well, Washington called the first day of Thanksgiving as America 
adopted the U.S. Constitution, but that tradition that when we got in a 
jam that we looked to God continued. General Eisenhower, recognizing 
that trend, decided to add it to our Pledge of Allegiance. And so it 
was that he added words that came from Lincoln, from his Gettysburg 
address, the words ``one nation under God.''

                              {time}  1730

  And so Eisenhower, on just the front steps behind me of this Capitol, 
recited for the first time the new pledge, which included ``one nation 
under God, indivisible.''
  And so as we approach this crisis in our history, I have faith, faith 
in the American people that we will take a look at the problem, that we 
will solve it, we will do the right thing, and that we will recognize 
that the problem is bigger than we are, and that we will have the 
wisdom to also ask God's blessing on our efforts, and that by His help 
we will be able to overcome and put America back on a more solid fiscal 
footing.
  I thank you for allowing me to do, I suppose you'd call it, a 30,000-
foot view of the budget, not a lot of details, but the big picture, a 
very sober, a very serious big picture, one that we all have to think 
about, we all have to become engaged in and take part in.
  Mr. Speaker, I thank you for your indulgence. I thank you for your 
attention and the attention of my colleagues and friends. God bless you 
all and God bless America.

                          ____________________