[Congressional Record Volume 157, Number 182 (Wednesday, November 30, 2011)]
[House]
[Pages H7993-H7997]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                        AMERICAN EXCEPTIONALISM

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of 
January 5, 2011, the gentleman from Iowa (Mr. King) is recognized for 
30 minutes.
  Mr. KING of Iowa. Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I appreciate that 
recognition, and I appreciate the input that has come from the 
gentlelady from North Carolina. I came down here to change the subject, 
but I wanted to speak about regulation, and I'll just wrap up those 
thoughts that I had before the clock ticked down and take it over to 
this.
  As I emerged into the construction business that I identified, I 
found myself doing seminars with other people of the same profession 
around the five-State area in the upper Midwest with our trade 
association, the Land Improvement Contractors of America. In that five-
State area as I traveled around and held those seminars, I began to ask 
the questions of self-employed people. Most of them had started the 
business themselves, and they were employers doing this in the kind of 
way that we need to encourage more Americans to do rather than 
discourage them with regulation.
  I began to ask them, How many agencies regulate your trade? As I 
asked that question, there might be 60 to 70 contractors in a room, and 
we would begin to write down the names of those agencies. And, yes, 
some of them were divisions within the agencies. You can start with the 
IRS and the EPA and you go on and on and on. OSHA, the mine regulators. 
It continues on. But we came to this number of our little narrow trade 
group, 43 different agencies that regulate us. And we needed to know 
the regulations from 43 different agencies. We needed to be able to 
anticipate how they would interpret those regulations and how they 
would

[[Page H7994]]

enforce them, and then you also had to calculate, when they 
contradicted one another, what the likelihood would be of one entity 
showing up, one agency to regulate you versus another.

                              {time}  1910

  If they had conflicting regulations, then you ran your operation to 
try to comply with the one that's most likely to show up to regulate in 
contradiction with the other. That goes on in America every single day. 
There are floors and floors of lawyers and administrative experts whose 
job it is to try to keep those companies from avoiding the conflict 
that comes from Federal regulations and, of course, our State 
regulations that are part of that as well.
  It is a great frustration to enter into a business wanting just to 
provide that good or that service and do it with in a marketable, 
competitive way; to have a margin of profit and control your destiny 
and raise your family and do those things that are acting out the 
American Dream, and find out that a lot of your life is really just 
tied up in meeting with government regulations and serving this 
Congress and dealing with so many people that can control the destiny 
of some 300 million Americans, who have never signed the front of a 
paycheck, who have no idea what it's like to not maybe have any capital 
and go out and build a little bit with some sweat equity and take that 
little bit of capital and roll it and invest it, and after a while find 
enough margin out there and enough customers that you're compelled to 
hire a person to help you.
  Now there's two people working there instead of one. And then you 
multiply that again and you take some more sweat and your little bit of 
equity and now you get to double up the equity and now you get to have 
another employee and another. While that's going on, you're building a 
capital base that bridges you through the hard times.
  And the attitude, especially over on this side of the aisle, is an 
attitude that employers somehow are victimizers of the proletariats. 
Ladies and gentlemen, Mr. Speaker, I would say to you that those folks 
here in this Congress--and most of them are over on the liberal side of 
this aisle--believe that employers are victimizers and that employees 
have a certain virtue to them. I'll just say that we have good and evil 
in all of us. But the people who risk their capital and many times put 
everything they have on the line and help stand to lose it all if it 
doesn't work, they're not taking advantage of the employees. They're 
giving the employees a job.
  Republicans over on this side, we say: jobs, jobs, jobs. Well, yes, 
we want those jobs. I don't believe that government creates the jobs. I 
think we should stop saying we need to create jobs. We don't. We need 
to get government out of the way so that investors can see an 
opportunity for profit. And if they see that opportunity for profit, 
they won't just invest their capital or their sweat; they will produce 
the kind of jobs out there that will sustain people in a market 
economy.
  That's what needs to happen because, first, there have to come 
profits. You can't pay payroll very long if you don't have profits, 
which means that you're not going to have jobs unless people make 
money. So what do we do in this Congress? You people over here, you 
want to punish those people that are making money. On this side of the 
aisle, we don't want to call those people that are punishing the people 
that are seeking a profit because we're saying we want jobs.
  We should all say we want to see profit in these companies so that 
that profit gets reinvested and more people have an opportunity to go 
to work and receive a paycheck and perhaps a raise and a better 
benefits package. And maybe, if that profit gets so great in those 
companies, they'll spin off of there and the people that learn the 
business going to work for the boss end up in competition against the 
boss. That's another thing that is the American way.
  These kinds of things need to happen organically over and over again 
in America millions of times. And if they don't happen, then this 
country devolves itself down into a European-style social democracy. 
it's hard for me to even say those words and think of America in that 
fashion. We've moved in that fashion dramatically.
  Mr. Speaker, the President of the United States doesn't believe in 
these things that I have described that I think are good. He's 
advocated this Keynesian economy on steroids. He's advocated for 
spending trillions of dollars, borrowing it. About half of that money, 
by the way, is borrowed from the investors in America, who believe that 
U.S. Treasury bills are the safest place to put their money.
  And actually it may be if you're going to talk about global currency, 
the other currency has gotten unstable, too. The euro is in a very 
unstable, unbalanced condition right now. They have spent money in the 
European Union--money that they didn't have. They have built a 
government bureaucracy much heavier than needed to be.
  I've twice been to Greece this year, and they have their head in the 
sand, in my opinion. They believe that they are the first of a multiple 
dominos in the EU and that they're only 2 percent of the GDP of the 
European Union, and if they're not bailed out by the EU--and that 
means, yes, loan guarantees, but it gets down to debt forgiveness at a 
certain point--if they're not bailed out at a certain point, if they 
default, then they will move away from the euro, the currency, and pick 
up the drachma again and print their money back in Greece a second 
time, or again.
  If that happens, they think the euro becomes less stable if the 
Greeks aren't involved in it. They argue that they're a domino. So if 
they're not held up, propped up by the rest of Europe, then they'll 
fall as a domino. And if that happens, the euro will start to tumble. 
By the way, their domino will clip Italy, Portugal, Spain, Ireland, 
Belgium, name your country over there.
  Well, it may or may not be true. It's hard to look at Greece and 
argue that they are a domino, and if they fall, that they'll 
necessarily hit one of those other unstable countries that will also 
fall into one and the other and the other. And it will start this 
cascading effect through the dominos of those unstable countries in 
Europe might not be true. It might be true that Greece could have a 
firewall built around it; and if they default, they default. And they'd 
have to rebuild their country from bottom up, inside out, back to 
production again.

  I hope that this doesn't happen in Greece. I hope that there's a 
stable economic environment that grows out of Europe. We're tied to 
them financially with hundreds of billions of dollars invested over 
into the European banks. If they should fail, then it hurts us badly.
  We're also highly leveraged in this country. The comparison of us to 
Greece is one that is considerably disturbing. There is a good side to 
a potential Greek default, and that would be that it would give this 
Congress a lesson for what America needs to do to avoid a similar 
calamity. I would like to see us steer our way out of this, but we're 
here having a debate in this Congress about minutiae in proportion to 
the scope of the problem that we are in.
  We came into this new Congress with a new Speaker, John Boehner. We 
have an opportunity with 87 new freshman Republicans that came here. 
Most of them pledged not to raise the debt ceiling. Most of them 
pledged to bring us back to fiscal responsibility and fiscal 
accountability. They all believe that to this day. I don't think 
they've lost their beliefs. But along the way there were a lot of big 
decisions that needed to be made without time to analyze. And so what 
happened?
  I said the first thing we needed to do was repeal ObamaCare, repeal 
ObamaCare, repeal ObamaCare. I can't say it enough. We need to repeal 
ObamaCare if we're going to have a country that will function and 
operate economically again. It drives us so deeply into debt that just 
removing a couple of those components of ObamaCare, according to Denny 
Rehberg, the chairman of the HHH Appropriations Committee--Health and 
Human Services Appropriations Committee--it would cut our spending over 
the next decade by $1.379 trillion. It would solve the whole problem of 
the supercommittee, that $1.379 trillion cut that comes just from 
ending the expansion into Medicaid. By the way, the CLASS Act was going 
to go anyway. The administration admitted that they couldn't sustain 
that component.

[[Page H7995]]

  One other component in ObamaCare was the individual premium subsidy 
for those who were compelled to buy insurance under ObamaCare. Those 
components totaled $1.379 trillion. So we strike those out, shut off 
any funding to that, and we've saved that $1.379 trillion. That would 
more than handle the $1.2 trillion that we're directed in the debt 
ceiling deal.
  But, Mr. Speaker, this went this way. We had a chance coming into 
this new Congress, this 112th Congress, to draw bright lines and to 
ensure fiscal responsibility and actually fix the real scope of this 
problem. Step number one was repeal ObamaCare.

                              {time}  1920

  We passed that out of this House, H.R. 2, sent it over to Harry Reid 
in the Senate, Mr. Speaker, where he set it up for failure and they 
shot it down.
  So every Republican in the House and every Republican in the Senate 
has voted to repeal ObamaCare. Congratulations, thank you all for doing 
that. We didn't get it done, but we got it voted on. And it's on the 
conscience of the people that voted ``no'' that that monstrosity of a 
regulation churns its way through, consuming $105.5 billion in 
automatic appropriations that were written deceptively into ObamaCare 
in an unprecedented fashion. Oh, yes, the tactic had been used before, 
but the scope had never been used like that before.
  And so that $105.5 billion is in there. And it's around $26 billion 
in the first 2 years of ObamaCare, this year, next year, $26 billion 
being churned away. And if we had reached an impasse on our 
negotiations with the continuing resolution, the CR that hit at 
midnight on March 4, if that had resulted in a showdown that would have 
been the President causing a shutdown, that might have seen the lights 
go off in Federal offices all across the land, Mr. Speaker. But you 
could have driven around the Federal buildings here in this city and 
around the Federal buildings across America, and where the lights were 
on in that eventuality, they would be on because the money that funds 
ObamaCare goes on anyway; it's automatic, they call it mandatory 
spending. And we tried to shut that off as well. And we did send the 
amendment language out of this House of Representatives that shut off 
all of the funding to ObamaCare. And it went over to the Senate, but it 
was attached to the bill that went with the CR as an appendage so that 
they could separate it out and vote it down in the Senate--and that's 
what Harry Reid did in the Senate also, Mr. Speaker.
  And so here we are with a Congress that began kind of on the right 
foot with an opportunity to force a showdown with the President of the 
United States and make him defend ObamaCare. We could have legitimately 
funded all of the functions of government--or we could have responsibly 
funded all of the legitimate functions of government would be a better 
way to phrase that, Mr. Speaker--and shut off all funding to ObamaCare. 
The President of the United States then was predicted to veto a bill 
like that. Had he done that, he would have had to explain to the 
American people that his signature piece of legislation, ObamaCare, 
means more to him than all of the legitimate functions of government 
combined. That would have been the showdown. It should have been the 
showdown. I believe that we would have prevailed on that showdown. And 
I think the President would have had to accept the funds that we put on 
his desk in a CR appropriations bill, minus any funding that goes into 
ObamaCare, cutting off all the automatic funding that goes to 
ObamaCare--could have, would have, should have done that, Mr. Speaker.
  We moved past that point. The CR was going to be $100 billion in 
cuts; it didn't become that. That number went down low enough that I'll 
not utter it into this Congressional Record. It's just not something 
that people go back and revisit that even voted for it. And then we 
were going to do yeoman's work and cut trillions of spending with the 
budget bill that came to the floor of the House, known as the 
Republican budget resolution, that was championed by Paul Ryan of 
Wisconsin, who has done great work here on fiscal responsibility. That 
budget didn't balance for 26 years, Mr. Speaker. That was all we could 
get out of this Congress. It's hard to craft a budget that comes that 
close. He did a lot of hard work on it and laid out some good 
parameters that we need to pick up and deal with.
  But the budget resolution here on the floor of the House was a 
promise from ourselves to ourselves that we were going to hold this 
spending down. And this spending allocation was agreed to by this 
Congress--by the majority of the House of Representatives, excuse me. 
The Senate hasn't passed a budget in so long I don't remember when. And 
so Mr. Speaker, that budget was passed, balancing in 26 years, spending 
too much money, leaving us with $23 trillion in national debt 10 years 
down the road. And it was a great step in the right direction--not as 
strong as I wanted it to be, not as strong as the RSC budget, which I 
voted for, but the one that could pass that could constrain our 
spending. I voted for them both. The RSC budget that balanced in about 
9 years and the Ryan budget that balanced in 26 years left us with $23 
trillion in national debt 10 years down the road. That doesn't sound 
very appetizing to the American public, those facts, Mr. Speaker, but 
those facts didn't hold.
  The promise from ourselves to ourselves went kind of out the window 
when the debt ceiling agreement was presented to the floor of this 
Congress and ultimately passed. And in that was a supercommittee, in 
that was a promise to vote on a balanced budget amendment, and in that 
was the threat that if the supercommittee didn't produce a product that 
could pass the Congress and be signed by the President, then there 
would be the sequestration--which I don't know where the language of 
that came from, but the sequestration is the automatic cuts that we're 
looking at now.
  I knew when the debt ceiling deal was finally put on paper that we 
had to go through a number of things. One of them was we had to have a 
debate about how we were going to define a balanced budget amendment. 
Well, we had that debate. And I think I won the debate and lost the 
decision, but nonetheless, the clean version of the balanced budget 
amendment was brought to the floor. I didn't call it a clean version. I 
think we needed to have the balanced budget amendment that passed the 
Judiciary Committee. We should have let the committee work its will. 
The Judiciary Committee marked up a balanced budget amendment that had 
a cap at 18 percent of GDP on spending and it had a supermajority in 
order to raise taxes. It was the right thing to do. It had exemptions 
there for a declared war or a case of a serious national emergency and 
other provisions. It was a good constitutional amendment that we could 
live with that would strengthen this country over the long term. We 
didn't have a vote on that. We had the one that said that thou shall 
have a balanced budget and allows for a tax increase to balance that 
budget. And of course you get to a certain point with tax increases and 
then you see a decline economically. And I think we are past that 
tipping point today, Mr. Speaker. That was another one of our 
struggles.
  So now we're faced with a sequestration. I'm thankful that the 
supercommittee didn't send us a package that couldn't pass the 
Congress, the House and/or the Senate. I never believed that they 
could. They concluded they couldn't reach an agreement. There was 
completely an impasse. Republicans said we're not going to raise taxes 
and Democrats said we aren't going to do it if you don't raise taxes. 
They want to punish the people that are producing. They would increase 
the taxes--you guys over there, you would increase the taxes on the 
people that are paying the most taxes. You would increase the taxes on 
the people that are paying the highest percentage. You would argue that 
it's progressive.
  And, you know, you're never going to be satisfied. I know you won't 
be satisfied. If I can tell you today--and tomorrow is the first day of 
December--that I have a magic wand, and I promise you all that we're 
going to give you what you want, and you've got all of the month of 
December to put your wish list together. And when the ball drops in 
Times Square in New York on New Year's Eve at midnight and the new 
year, 2012, begins, here would be the deal--here's the magic wand: Give 
me a list of all the things that you

[[Page H7996]]

want to do to take away the liberty and freedom of the American people, 
take away the wealth and the capital that has been so justly earned by 
people in this country and redistribute the wealth in the ideal of Karl 
Marx or any of the other leftists that you worship, grant all of the 
wishes that you have, reorder society according to all your dreams, and 
let you have 30 days to put the list together. And at midnight, when 
the ball drops at Times Square, stroke the magic wand, give you all 
your entire wish list.
  If I had that power and if this happened in this fashion, I will tell 
you, you guys would work hard. Your lights are on at night; you're well 
funded and you're smart people--you're wrong on your philosophy, but 
you would put together a list, and it would be a long list. And it 
wouldn't be without some internal fights--and Barney Frank will still 
be there after all, so there would still be some of those internal 
fights going on. And in the end, if I granted you your wish at midnight 
at the new year, but the deal would be that you had to then stop 
complaining the rest of your life, you would have to live under the 
rules that you had written that you spent 30 days--all your career 
wishing and dreaming and working and leveraging for in this Congress, 
we'd give you everything you asked for on the new year, but you'd have 
to be quiet then and live under those rules. And I can tell you what 
would happen. You would stay up all night long on New Year's night 
thinking, what did we forget? How did he cheat us? We really forgot to 
leave this in, we need to change the rules. And we're going to want 
more and more and more. Because, first of all, you don't want to admit 
to the American people what you really want to do. You're anti-
capitalists, you're anti-American liberty, you're anti-free enterprise. 
There are a number of the pillars of American exceptionalism that you 
just plain oppose. And here we are, hardworking American people, why do 
we have all this capital? It never was a zero sum game. It never was. 
If you look back, where was it when the, let's say the caveman first 
went out there and brought a pelt back and turned it into a blanket.

                              {time}  1930

  There was a little bit of wealth that was created out of the labor 
that's there. When they were scavengers and foragers, they still made 
tools. And along the way, somebody else could make a tool a little 
better, a little more efficient, and someone else could raise a little 
garden and trade some vegetables for some arrowheads, whatever it might 
be. Someone else could tan a hide better than the person that hunted 
for the pelt, and so they traded labor.
  And in the middle of all of that, they acquired things. They said, 
I'll tell you what. Let's do two pelts. You keep one, I'll keep the 
other. Fine. Now there's two blankets where there had only been one 
before. And on and on they went, building and building and building 
capital because we had free enterprise capitalism. We let people invest 
their sweat, and they turned it into equity.
  And eventually they invented the wheel, and along came the industrial 
revolution, where we built things and we put them on ships, and we 
traded around the world. And we found that there were resources that 
were developed in other countries more efficiently than we could here.
  Adam Smith wrote in ``Wealth of Nations'' about how they had the wool 
industry going on up in England and Scotland and in Ireland, and so 
they should be the ones there that were shearing sheep and turning that 
into clothing, and put the wool products that they did so well on ships 
and sail them down to Portugal, where they were a lot better at raising 
grapes and turning that into wine. And bring back a load of wine and a 
ship full of wool, and that was the division of labor that he 
described. And both countries were better off.
  Mr. Speaker, whenever there are two people that trade a dollar, and 
it's a business transaction, or it's two or more, maybe it's three, 
four, five or six people in this exchange, these business deals are set 
up because each party benefits. There doesn't need to be a loser in an 
economic transaction.
  And when I hire somebody to go to work for me and I pay them a wage, 
they get something in return. They want the money; they want the 
benefits. They might want the challenge. I hope they do. And they want 
to contribute, and we reach this agreement. It is a contractual 
agreement between two consenting adults. And so capital is built; 
wealth is built. It's not a zero sum game.
  Gold got mined out by the Incas and the Aztecs, and Adam Smith wrote 
about that. And he said the Spanish galleons went back across the ocean 
with having cut out the cost of labor--he didn't say by stealing the 
gold from the Incas and the Aztecs. He said they cut out the cost of 
labor. And once they removed a significant cost of the labor of 
producing the gold from them, they dumped it into the markets in 
Europe, and the price of gold went down.
  Well, supply and demand, the cost of the capital and cost of the 
labor goes together to produce any product that we have there. And over 
the centuries we built ships and we built buildings and we built 
highways, we built bridges, and we created cash and currency to trade 
our labor back and forth with a commodity that would be willing to 
exchange. That's money.
  And then the capital that's built in this world now is trillions and 
trillions. And, yes, class envy sets in and people think they get a 
case of the ``poor me's'' if government doesn't go hand them a job.
  And I hear some of you that say, well, the people that want to work 
should work. People who want to work should have a job. I would argue 
that the people that are able to, that the people that are able to work 
need to sustain themselves, and they need to contribute to the gross 
domestic product in this country. It is the patriotic thing to do.
  America has created now this culture within us that somehow the 
Federal Government is going to guarantee a middle class standard of 
living to everybody that lives in this country, legal and illegal.
  Mr. Speaker, I know you're going to be astonished at this, but there 
are 72 different means-tested Federal welfare programs functioning in 
the United States today; 72 of them. There isn't a single American that 
can name them from memory. If they can't name them from memory, neither 
can they describe them.
  And if they can't describe them, neither can they understand how they 
function individually, let alone understand how 72 different welfare 
programs can interact with each other and function to provide an 
incentive for people to do the right thing, which is produce for 
themselves, maybe get an education, develop some job skills, go get a 
job.
  William Bennett told us, when I came to this Congress, that he said 
he could solve 75 percent of the Nation's pathologies. Get married, 
stay married, get a job, keep a job. That's 75 percent. You know, if 
he's right on that, I'd say the other percent is substance abuse.
  I'll bet we could get to about 99 percent if people would get 
married, stay married, get a job, keep a job and not abuse alcohol and 
reject illegal drugs. You'd solve a lot of the domestic squabbles that 
go on and this society would go on. We need to be a moral society.
  But we are a Nation of doers and achievers, and our culture is being 
eroded by those who want to expand the dependency class in America.
  And that's you folks over on that side of the aisle. You're in the 
business of expanding the dependency class in America. It goes on over 
and over and over again. And you do that because some of you believe, 
maybe even all of you believe, that it is somehow a humane thing to do 
to take from the sweat of one person's brow and hand it over to someone 
who won't sweat for their own. But you do it because it expands your 
political base, and then you pander to and cater to the people that 
you're promising somebody else's labor to.
  And you think that America's going to be stronger? No, we're getting 
weaker. We've reached the point now where these 300 million Americans 
that we have, when you add up--we talk about how many on unemployment 
do we have. Oh, it was 15 million; now it's 14 million.
  You look at the weekly numbers of the new sign-ups and that number 
ranges down there under 400,000 or so.

[[Page H7997]]

And we think, oh, it was a good week. We had less than 400,000 new 
sign-ups to unemployment. And people run off the other end and they 
expire and they're no longer eligible, and so that number went from 
around 15 million unemployed down to around 14 million unemployed or a 
little more.
  That's not the number that we should be most concerned about. It is a 
number. We should add the 14 million that meet the definition for 
unemployment to the number of Americans that are of working age that 
are simply not in the work force, Mr. Speaker.
  The Department of Labor has that on their Web site. Anyone can go 
there. I think it's dol.gov, something like that. And on that Web site 
you'll see different age groups of those working age. It starts at age 
16, 16 to 19. There are around 9 million Americans of that working age 
that are simply not in the workforce. Yes, they may be in school. A lot 
of us worked our way through school. And I started before that age of 
16.
  And then you go from 20 on up to 25 or so, there's another chunk. 
Work your way on up.
  Americans of working age not in the workforce, when I came to this 
Congress not that long ago were 69 million. Then it became 80 million. 
And about 2\1/2\ months ago the number, for the first time in the 
history of this country, the number of Americans of working age not in 
the workforce now has exceeded 100 million Americans--100 million. 
Think what you could do with the labor of 100 million Americans.
  And while that's going on, now we have, what is our number, 11, 12 or 
more million illegals in America? I actually think it's 20 million or 
more, but they keep tamping that number down. They keep coming across 
the border, and the number got lower instead of greater by some 
analysis.
  But in any case, we know this: about seven out of every 12 illegals 
here in this country work. That's marginally a little greater than the 
number of Americans that are working. And that seven out of 12 that are 
there are part of around 8 million, 7 million to 8 million documented, 
I'll say study-analyzed consensus numbers, 7 to 8 million illegals in 
America that were working. Now, if they all woke up tomorrow in their 
home country, that conceivably creates 8 million new jobs.
  Well, you know, if they weren't coming into this country illegally, 
you wouldn't need so many people to go guard the border either, and 
they could do something productive rather than something that's not 
contributing economically to this country in the fashion that produces 
goods and services.
  So there's 8 million jobs there. But there are many other jobs out 
there for the people that will go out there and start a business, go 
ask for a job, compete in this marketplace. And every one of the 100 
million Americans who are not working that puts in 1 hour's work even a 
week contributes to the gross domestic product of the United States of 
America.
  People who are not working, not producing, are not contributing, 
unless of course they've got investments that are returning, and then 
I'll give them some credit for that.
  But 100 million. Think if you were on a boat or a ship, and let's say 
you had 300 people on that boat or ship, and you had to have some 
trimming the sails, some pulling the oars, some swabbing the decks, 
some down in the galley, some cooking, cleaning, housekeeping and 
somebody up there taking care of the captain.
  And what if you had 100 out of those 300 people that said, I'm going 
to sit here in steerage. Bring me my food, clean up my mess. That's the 
scope of what America is faced with today.
  I'd put the people on the oars. I'd put them up there trimming the 
sails and swabbing the decks, and we will sail a lot smoother, we'll be 
a lot stronger country, and we'll feel better about ourselves. This 
dignity of work is there for every man and woman that takes that job 
on.
  And I challenge us all: let's step up, take the freedom we have left. 
Let's grasp for more of that liberty. Let's grasp more of that freedom, 
and let's put some of these 100 million people to work so they can 
contribute to their gross domestic product.
  The rest of the world will respect us more. We'll be stronger 
economically. We'll have more prudent people that are contributing to 
the ideas in this Congress, and we will get to a balanced budget, and 
we will start to pay down this national debt, and we will enforce and 
respect the rule of law.
  Mr. Speaker, I would go on for another half hour articulating some of 
the other pillars of American exceptionalism, but I recognize there is 
a limit to not your patience, but my time.
  I appreciate your attention, and I would yield back the balance of my 
time.

                          ____________________