[Congressional Record Volume 157, Number 186 (Tuesday, December 6, 2011)]
[House]
[Pages H8174-H8178]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
AMERICA AT A CROSSROADS
The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of
January 5, 2011, the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Gohmert) is recognized
for 60 minutes as the designee of the majority leader.
Mr. GOHMERT. Madam Speaker, there are an awful lot of people hurting
across America now.
We take up a few suspension bills here that only the Congress could
deal with, so it's something we have to do, we're proud to do,
important to those organizations in two States. It's important to them;
it's important to us.
We have people on the other side of the aisle who come forward and
try to make it into a jobs debate when it would seem that some of the
best debate would be if all of us, en masse, walked down to the other
end of the hall of this building and began to seek to debate the
Senate--the Senate leadership, that is--and Democratic Party on why
they are so intent on stopping legislation that could put people back
to work.
There are many besides the President, in addition to the President,
who say this is a do-nothing Congress; and because the Senate does so
very little, they give credence to that argument. One need only look to
all the bills we have been passing here in the House that could help
the economy, would help the economy, would put people back to work,
would bring down dramatically the cost of energy, which would bring
down inflation and the stagnation and stagflation that's been put in
place by this President and, actually, the 2 years prior to this
President when our Democratic friends across the aisle controlled
Congress and jumped up spending like we could not have anticipated.
Our friends across the aisle correctly pointed out that Republicans
in 2006 were spending too much money. They were right in pointing out
that we should never be spending $160 billion more than we were taking
in. They were right.
As a result of their being right on that and their promises that they
would rein in that runaway spending, our friends across the aisle were
given the majority in November of 2006.
{time} 1710
What followed in 2007, 2008, 2009, and 2010 under the Democratic
majority was runaway spending at a level never even dreamed of, at
least on our side of the aisle.
Who would have ever dreamed that the same party that condemned
Republicans--correctly--for overspending the amount of money coming
into the Federal Treasury by $160 billion would up that ante and
overspend by 10 times that much? Over a $1.5 trillion deficit in just 1
year. It is just unfathomable.
[[Page H8175]]
One of the things that so concerned me about TARP, not only the bill
when I read it, but the fact that it desensitized Americans to just how
much $700 billion is and how much it was in late 2008.
It's my belief that if we had not passed TARP and people being so
desensitized as to how much $700 billion was, President Obama could
never have gotten through what was said to be around an $800 billion
porkulus, stimulus, whatever you want to call it, which turned out, by
some accounts, to be more like a trillion dollar giveaway program--only
if you consider giving away amounts like $500 million to $600 million
to Solyndra, that goes bankrupt, as throwing away money.
We have set this country on a course toward ruin. And now the
Secretary of the Treasury, Mr. Geithner, who we recall had time with
the International Monetary Fund, as came to light during his
unfortunate confirmation hearings, 4 years in a row he was paid by the
International Monetary Fund and was said to be an independent
contractor, although he manifested control and some level of governance
within the International Monetary Fund. He had a job with the
International Monetary Fund, but they paid him as an independent
contractor, and, therefore, when he signed a document swearing that he
would pay all of the taxes due on those amounts that were listed on
those four documents, then he was allowed to receive all of the money
that should have been paid to the Federal Government in taxes in return
for his sworn agreement to pay that tax independently on his own. As we
found out during those confirmation hearings, he did not fulfill his
oath. He broke his oath. He didn't pay those taxes, and now he's in
charge of the Treasury. How amazing.
I've privately had Internal Revenue Service employees tell me how
grieved they were to have had someone who did not pay his taxes when he
was required to do so by law, went even further and he signed a sworn
document that he would take care of it, and didn't, because, despite
all the jokes about the IRS and despite there being some people with
the IRS who can be a bit brutal at times, there are some wonderful
people who work for the Internal Revenue Service who are abundantly
fair, want to do the right thing, and have incredibly clean
backgrounds.
In fact, the rule as I was given to understand by IRS employees is,
if you ever have underpaid your taxes or failed to pay taxes, you're
out. You cannot work for the IRS. There have been incidents where an
IRS agent has overpaid taxes and then recalled someone giving them
cash, and without anyone ever being able to hold them accountable, no
one would have ever reported it, but to keep a clean conscience because
an IRS agent was so clean and had a conscience and wanted so to abide
by honesty and truth and the U.S. law, filed an amended tax return
which still allowed a refund coming back. And as a result, their
employment was in jeopardy.
Imagine the feeling of Internal Revenue Service employees who have
had to throughout their stellar careers at the Internal Revenue
Service, had to keep all of their affairs clean and in order, open,
honest, to find out they are going to be ruled and governed by someone
who misrepresented on signing a sworn document that they would pay
taxes that they didn't until someone called it to their attention prior
to being appointed to that role. It has to be tough for IRS agents who
have had such stellar, honorable careers to have dealt with that.
So what's wrong with having somebody who plays so fast and loose with
signing documents, not paying taxes, playing with other people's money
in the International Monetary Fund? I would submit to you that we get
things, as we have here recently, with our Secretary of the Treasury,
who enjoyed spending hundreds of billions of dollars from TARP, who has
enjoyed the power of giving away money, paying money. Under TARP, in
fact, a provision allowed the Secretary of Treasury to pay more than
fair market value if anything--and this is my interpretation--if
anything in his opinion, his sole opinion, would somehow, some way,
some day help our economy somehow, even if it was helping a foreign
economy. That's the mentality at the IMF and apparently the mentality
currently at the Treasury Department.
I did not think we could get a worse Treasury Secretary than Hank
Paulson until we got our current Treasury Secretary, making the
mistakes he has and taking the position he has, and now wanting
Americans to come in and bail out foreign countries who are slightly
ahead of us on the road to socialism.
If you go back to the Roman Empire, the Romans found that over time
when you continue to give people bread and circuses, they come to rely
on those. They come to believe that they shouldn't have to work, that
the government will give them entertainment and will give them money to
use, food that they need, and it materially affects work.
Socialism of a sort was tried in the New Testament church. And on
this Earth, on this planet with fallible individuals, it resulted, as
it always has and always will, in the Apostle Paul ultimately having to
come to the conclusion and issue the order, okay, new rule: if you
don't work, you don't eat.
The Pilgrims had a beautiful compact. They were going to bring
together all into a common storehouse and share and share alike. That
brutal first winter caused them to lose so many. Eventually, they got
to a new thing that we now call private property where people would own
their own property, produce from it as they wished with full freedom to
do so. They could eat what they raised. They could trade what they
raised. They could use it as they saw fit. That kind of mentality and
that kind of structure that affords private property to people to own
and use on their own, or rental property that they can use to produce
income, those kind of freedoms have allowed the entrepreneurship that
has brought us to the point in history where we are the greatest Nation
in the history of mankind, with more freedoms than any in the history
of mankind.
{time} 1720
But over time we've seen those who fled Europe and England to come to
America to start a new life, so many of them fleeing persecution as
Christians, coming to a new land where they would not be persecuted as
Christians. They came to America. And with private property engendering
the kind of thought processes that led our Founders through the
guidance--divinely, I believe--that they got, as pointed to by so many
of the Founders, we got our Constitution. We have a structure of
government from Founders who did not trust government; who wanted to
make it as difficult as possible to pass laws. Even once they were
passed, they could be vetoed. Struck down. They wanted it difficult.
They saw gridlock as being a good thing. The more difficult it was to
pass laws, the less chance the government would interfere in personal
property rights and personal freedoms of the individual.
Europe after World War II seemed to move into this socialist type of
thinking where the government will take care of people. Some in this
country after World War II for 60 years, going on 70 years now, have
been pushing an agenda to get us to a socialist state, where we take on
the attributes of those systems that have repeatedly failed over and
over in time.
I was recently in Israel. I went to a former kibbutz. Those were
truly communes. They had real communism there. Share and share alike.
But socialism, communism, it can sound so nice. Everyone bring in to
the common storehouse. Share and share alike. It sounds nice, but it
never works.
And I saw that so clearly in an exchange program to the Soviet Union
back in 1973, when it really was the Soviet Union. And on visiting a
collective farm, a socialist farm, you look out, the fields did not
look very good. I have worked on farms and ranches, and those did not
look productive. But I was surprised to see in the middle of the
morning the farmers were sitting in the shade in the center of the
village. I spoke some Russian back then and asked as nicely as I could
without meaning to insult because I really was curious, When do you
work out in the fields? And they laughed. And one of them that seemed
to be the most boisterous of the group said, I make the same number of
rubles if I'm out there or I'm here in the shade. So I'm here in the
shade.
[[Page H8176]]
That's socialism. That's why it fails.
And we've seen the riots in Greece as the government tried to be
responsible and say, Look, we're going broke. We're out of business. We
have got to stop spending money we don't have. We've got to rein it in.
And people have rioted and say, No, no, no, don't cut back what I'm
getting from the government, not understanding if it's not there, your
government will eventually be taken over by some type of radical form--
at least historically that's what often happens--and some dictator,
which they would hope would be a benevolent dictator, would take over,
get the rioting under control, and set the government on a course.
We saw a government after World War I in Germany trying to work
toward a process. Economic times were tough. So a little guy with a
mustache ends up actually getting elected to office and then eventually
taking over the country. We know the results of that--at least most of
us do. There are some, like Ahmadinejad, that thought the Holocaust
never happened. But it did.
So why in the world, when we see how that works out and we see that a
country will not accept its own responsibility, as incredible as the
people can be of a country like Greece--you meet people from Greece,
you love them. They're just great folks. As beautiful as a country can
be, as rich a history as a country can have like Greece, you want to
embrace them. Understandable.
But when a people such as those in Greece want to continue down a
bankrupt course and you see them heading for the edge of a cliff and
they say, Come join hands with us, it doesn't make me feel any better
to hear people like Secretary Geithner say, figuratively speaking,
Let's join hands as they jump off the cliff and take us with them. But
we're told, Well, gee, some of the European countries, they'll feel
better about trying to bail out Greece if they know that the United
States will come in if things don't work out and bail them out.
We have had such radicalized spending that's been out of control. And
until we get that under control, we're of very little use to most of
the world economically. The best thing we could do for Greece, for all
of Europe, is get our spending under control, come back from a point of
strength financially, show them by example how you get out of your
problems, and then the world will be better off financially because you
see repeatedly in history when a country gets in trouble financially,
it opens the door to dictators or a radical form of a government such
as we see in Iran today. That wasn't entirely economic.
We do recall--I was in the Army at the time--when President Carter
failed to support our ally, the Shah. I never met the man, but
apparently historically not a warm fuzzy fellow. Was not fine with the
folks in Iran. But using very poor judgment, President Carter hailed
the Ayatollah Khomeini in his return to Iran as a man of peace; and as
a result that man of peace, as President Carter hailed him, thousands
and thousands and thousands of Americans have given their lives or had
their lives taken from them.
There are prices that are paid by bad judgment; and this country has
paid a price for bad judgment, and now we have more efforts at bad
judgment. That would include telling the world that as we've overspent
more than a trillion dollars more than what we have coming in, Don't
worry, we'll come bail you out. I was surprised to find out this summer
that we're not printing money to get us out of our problem. No, we're
not printing money. I was surprised to find out--because I've said that
before. I think we're just printing money to try to pay off our debt.
That causes runaway inflation. I was corrected. And I stand corrected.
We're not printing money to get out of our financial dilemma. No, I
was told we're not printing this money. We're just adding ones and
zeroes in a computer to say that we've got more money. We're not even
printing it anymore. How irresponsible is that? There is a price that
will be paid for that kind of irresponsibility, and it is very tragic
that it may well be paid by our children and grandchildren. It is the
height of irresponsibility to leave that to future generations.
And then to have our Treasury Secretary say, Let's go bail these
folks out. Well, it's not really us. It's the International Monetary
Fund.
{time} 1730
It is kind of reminiscent of President Obama saying, We're going to
go get Qadhafi, we're going to help these so-called ``rebels,'' but
we're not actually going to do it. No, we're not going to do it; NATO
will do it. We started a little bit out there, but now it's not the
United States at all; it's NATO.
So we checked, and we find out 65 percent of NATO's military is
United States Armed Services. Oh, no, it wasn't NATO--much. Sixty-five
percent was the United States. It was the United States. And now the
Secretary of the Treasury wants us to do this with countries that are
failing and yet still unwilling to embrace the problem they've created.
And then we're told there's such great news, that unemployment has
now dropped from 9.1 percent to 8.6 percent, or 9.0 to 8.6 percent, and
we're supposed to feel like that is such a wonderful thing. I'm not a
huge fan of The New York Times, but there was an article in December
2's New York Times, an editorial entitled, ``Been Down So Long.'' I
think it's worth entering into the Congressional Record by its reading.
The unemployment rate dropped to 8.6 percent in November
from 9 percent in October in the jobs report released Friday.
The economy added 120,000 jobs and job growth was revised
upward in September and October.
That's better than rising unemployment and falling
payrolls. Yet, properly understood, the new figures reveal
more about the depth of distress in the job market than about
real improvement in job prospects.
Most of the decline in November's unemployment rate was not
because jobless people found new work. Rather, it is because
315,000 people dropped out of the work force, a reflection of
extraordinarily weak demand by employers for new workers. It
is also a sign of socioeconomic decline, of wasted resources
and untapped potential, the human equivalent of boarded-up
Main Streets and shuttered factories.
The job growth numbers also come with caveats. More jobs
were created than economists expected, but with the job
market so weak for so long, that is a low bar. It would take
nearly 11 million new jobs to replace the ones that were lost
during the recession and to keep up with the growth in the
working-age population in the last four years. To fill that
gap would require 275,000 new jobs a month for the next five
years. That's not in the cards. Even with the better-than-
expected job growth in the past three months, the economy
added only 143,000 jobs on average.
And most of those new jobs are low-end ones. In November,
for example, big job-growth areas included retail sales,
bartending and temporary services. Teachers and other public
employees continued to lose jobs, and job growth in
construction and manufacturing were basically flat. Indeed,
work--once the pathway to a rising standard of living--has
become for many a route to downward mobility. Motoko Rich
reported in The Times recently on new research showing that
most people who lost their jobs in recent years now make less
and have not maintained their lifestyles, with many
experiencing what they describe as drastic--and probably
irreversible--declines in income.
Against that backdrop, the modest improvement in the jobs
report, even if sustained in the months to come, would not be
enough to repair the damage from the recession and its slow-
growth aftermath. Help is needed, yet Congress is tied in
knots over even basic recovery measures, like extending
federal unemployment benefits and the temporary payroll tax
cut.
Meanwhile, the increasing likelihood of a recession in
Europe, or any other setback, could easily derail the weak
American economy, sending unemployment back up to double-
digit recession levels.
Now, we've been hearing a great deal lately from the President and
from Members of Congress on the Democratic side about how we just
needed to extend this wonderful payroll tax holiday. Well, as the
person who came up with the idea of a payroll tax holiday 3 years ago,
I'm offended at the use of the term ``payroll tax holiday'' to cut 6.2
percent Social Security tax down to 4.2 Social Security tax when it has
not increased jobs, it has not helped jobs.
We're talking $30, $40, $50, $60, when the payroll tax holiday I was
proposing was a true holiday. It would have allowed every worker in
America not to pay any Social Security tax, any Medicare tax, any
income tax for at least 2 months. It would not have hurt Social
Security, the trust fund, and it would not have hurt the Medicare
system because it was totally paid for.
My bill said that money that was leftover--which was available at the
time before our Secretary of the Treasury just started giving it away--
that
[[Page H8177]]
money would be moved over and would cover the Social Security trust
fund monies that were necessary so the tax would not be missed. It
would cover the monies that were supposed to go in to cover Medicare.
And so the only way that money would be missed is that Secretary
Geithner would not have been able to give it away and support those
four-to-one Democrats or Republicans that are executives on Wall Street
and who reside in controlling our investment banks.
And that's a shock to some people when they actually do their
research and find out Wall Street is four-to-one Democrat over
Republican because they've been listening to Democratic leaders for
years talk about those sorry fat-cat Republicans on Wall Street. Well,
they hadn't done their research either; or if they had, they would have
been very disingenuous in so saying.
That money--as I and many others contended--that was in TARP and was
in the slush fund of the Secretary of the Treasury would have been far
better used by those people who earned it, by just saying you get every
dime back that you were paying in this month and next month. And I also
knew privately in my heart that if we could have that payroll tax
holiday, a true payroll tax holiday for 2 months--and initially I said
a year.
But if we could have had that for even 2 months, then I knew
taxpayers across the country would see--many, most for the first time--
just how much money they were sending for the Federal Government to
use, and they would demand better from their Congress, from their
President. They would demand better from the bureaucrats in Washington
that get to the end of the year and see they've got money left and rush
out and throw it away, spend it on whatever they can. They would have
demanded better government, and they would have gotten it or they would
have fired everybody at the next election and gotten better. But we
didn't get a true payroll tax holiday.
I was very honored to have a chance to explain the concept of a
payroll tax holiday when President Obama came to our Republican
Conference back the first of the year in 2009. As I explained to him,
this is immediate; it immediately helps the economy. Moody's said the
tax holiday idea--a true tax holiday, not this bastardization of one--
the true tax holiday would have increased the 1-year GDP more than any
other proposal, more than any other Democratic proposal or any other
Republican proposal. And as I explained to the President, we pass this
and you sign it--and if you just say you are willing to sign it, we
would get it passed. If you sign it on a Thursday, then on Friday all
of that money, all of the income tax, Social Security, Medicare tax,
all of that will be in the check of the person that owned it.
{time} 1740
It doesn't have to go through Washington, and Washington take its cut
out and dribbles out $30, $40, $50, $60 to the worker. They got it all.
And then, to know that was going to be paid for by stopping the
giveaways to the auto companies, to the investment banks, to the fat
cats, as the President calls them, that was what I wanted to see. And
that money would go into the hands of the people that earned it, and
then they would have decided.
We did a survey in our district about what people would use their
money for. Look at your check. Think about it for 2 months. What would
you use it for? And we weren't talking about $20, $30, $40, $50, $60
like this President has. We were talking about, $2,000 $3,000 $5,000
$6,000. And when people did that, they told us, for example, we've got
a gas guzzler, and gas is so high now we can barely pay our gasoline
bill, but we're underwater on our car. We owe more than the car is
worth so we can't afford to trade it in. So we're stuck.
You let us have our money for 2 months, we'll buy a new car. And the
people in America would have decided which car companies deserved to be
bailed out, and they would do that by deciding which car they would
buy. And you wouldn't have had to have an auto task force secretively
meeting in the White House and an auto czar and all those folks
breaching the Constitution, breaching bankruptcy law, and deciding
which dealers got to keep their dealership and which would have had
them arbitrarily yanked away, only years down the road to find out,
oops, we made a mistake on that. Oh, well, they're gone. Too bad. We
could have avoided all that.
And with all the effort that was undertaken to try to shore up the
real estate market, we had people telling us, look, we got behind on
our mortgage payments when gas hit $4 a gallon. You let us have the
$6,000 we'd get to keep over 2 months, we'll catch up on our mortgage.
We'll catch up on the other things. You don't need to have some big
financial bailout situation because we'll take care of it ourselves if
we have our own money.
Then again, to know that that would have been paid for by the TARP
money, and Social Security would not have been hurt. They would have
gotten all the tax money that would have come in. It would have just
come from TARP, instead of the individual taxpayers. And to know that
Medicare would not have been hurt, because that money would have gone
directly into Medicare, not from the taxpayer for 2 months, but from
TARP. That would have been the right thing to do.
If you really want a stimulus, let the people that earned it spend
it. They'll know better than the people here in Washington did.
And it didn't pass. And President Obama has chosen to take the name
``payroll tax holiday'' that I was using 3 years ago and use it for a 2
percent tax. Why? Because it will look good for the election. Why?
Because it looks to be so grand because, see, you can tell people that
are working that, gee, the President's got you a petty $30 extra in
your check, and these Republicans don't want you to keep that.
That's not true. We do. But we also, at the same time, don't want
Social Security not to have the money that it needs. What the President
is not telling people, as he has pitted those who are working now
against our seniors, and to the one group saying, hey, workers, I want
you to have that little extra 30 bucks in your pay check, and
Republicans don't want you to have it. And then going to seniors and
saying, you've got to worry about those Republicans because they're not
going to take care of Social Security, never bothering to mention that
when he says we're allowing you to keep this money in your check now,
it means that money will not be in the Social Security Trust Fund, not
even the IOU will be in the Social Security Trust Fund to take care of
our seniors.
We were told when this President was running that he was a uniter,
not a divider. And yet we see in this campaign ploy that working people
are being pitted against our seniors. We've seen class warfare. In
essence, if you see somebody has more than you do, you need to want it
and go after it. After all, that basically seems to be the one common
thread running through all the Occupy Wall Street, Washington, all the
Occupy groups.
We had them come through Washington screaming in the hallways today.
It wasn't enough that they're trying to disrupt a beautiful park people
used to enjoy. Why? Because they have no regard for private property.
Why? Because they've become envious and jealous.
I can say that because I'm repeatedly told in the analyses that I
have less assets than most people. One time I had the least assets of
anybody from Texas in Congress.
My wife and I cashed out all our assets, except our house, so I could
run for Congress, so I could try to make a difference. And I am not
jealous of anyone who has more than me. I thank God we have a country
where people can be entrepreneurs. And I've accepted that as a role I
can play in helping try to do that.
So it breaks my heart when I see a President dividing America with
class warfare, encouraging envy and jealousy. You ought to want what
they have and demand that you get theirs. Leaders coming out and saying
they fully embrace the Occupy movement, it's a great thing, when even
the Occupy folks can't explain anything other than they hate the people
that got more than they do.
Then there's a report--I don't often cite CNBC, but cnbc.com, more
Americans are going abroad for economic opportunities. It says that the
State Department now estimates that 6.3 million Americans are studying
or working abroad, the highest number on record.
[[Page H8178]]
We're told that 70 percent of Americans, adults, believe that their
children will not have as much opportunity and freedom as they've had.
That's why I ran for Congress. That should not happen. We can change
that.
But I'm mystified when I think about the record spending in 2007 that
was followed by additional record spending in 2008, under the guidance
of Speaker Pelosi and Leader Reid, because we know all spending
originates in Congress. This is where budgets are passed. It's where
appropriations are passed. If money is appropriated, it has to be
appropriated from here.
In 2007, 2008, I never heard anybody, Democrat or Republican,
complain that those budgets didn't spend enough money, each year going
beyond what we had spent the year before. And so, then to have a new
President come in in 2009, and with Speaker Pelosi and Leader Reid
still at the reins, jump up spending an extra trillion dollars, and
then come before Congress and the country and say, look, you're just
going to have to raise taxes to get up to where this extra trillion
dollars is that I've already spent.
Why couldn't we just say, Nobody complained in 2007 or 2008 about too
little money being spent. Let's go back to the Pelosi-Reid budget that
was so much more than the Republican budgets of 2005 and 2006. We'll go
back to those. It means we drop $1 trillion in spending. Boom, there
you go. We didn't a need a supercommittee. There you are.
Another easy solution that isn't talked about enough, but this House
voted to cut our own legislative budget 5 percent last year and 6.4
percent the year we're in. That amount of money, though significant to
most of us, is a drop in the bucket when you look at the overall
Federal budget. And the way that that should be used to make a
difference is for this House, since we've done it to ourselves, now
having the moral authority to say to every Federal department, every
agency, we cut ourselves 5 percent last year, you're cutting yourself 5
percent next year.
{time} 1750
And the year after that, since we've already done it, you're cutting
yourself another 6.4 percent; an 11 percent cut. And there you are. We
didn't need a supercommittee. You've got your cuts.
I am so grateful to Chairman Paul Ryan. We had a good discussion back
in July. Since he's been in Congress like I have, the four terms I have
been in Congress, each time I filed a zero-baseline budget bill that
says no more automatic increases for every Department. No automatic
increases. It ought to be an easy concept.
But we're living under the rules that were established for CBO back
in 1974, a very, very liberal Congress that ended our participation in
Southeast Asia. We should have ended it because we had not given our
soldiers, sailors, airmen--we had not given them the go-ahead to win
that war. We had tied their hands.
When I hear some people say we ought to remember the lessons from
Vietnam--and then it turns out they didn't get the lesson. The lesson
is that unless you are willing to commit 100 percent of the resources
and give the rules of engagement that allow our military to win, they
should never be sent. It is outrageous to have our military in foreign
countries with rules of engagement that don't allow them to adequately
protect themselves. That's the lesson that should have been learned
from Vietnam. We could have won the war.
Sam Johnson can tell you, the leaders in Hanoi, as the POWs were
taken out, one was laughing: You stupid Americans. If you had just
bombed us one more week--like the 2 weeks they had before--we would
have had to surrender unconditionally. They could have done that years
before, saved thousands and thousands of American lives in Vietnam, but
we didn't commit to win it.
We shouldn't send anybody anywhere unless we're committed to win. It
costs too much money. But even more than that, it costs the greatest
American treasure, and that's American lives.
We are in an economic crisis; and as Peter Marshall as chaplain of
the U.S. Senate prayed in the 1940s: What we call crises, God sees as
opportunities.
It turns out, those of us in the House, those of us in the Senate,
even the President, have an incredible opportunity. We'll never be
called the greatest generation; but 100 years from now, if we bring
spending down under control, people can look back and say: Wow, they
had about 60 years, 65 years of uncontrolled spending. It grew and grew
and grew. And the people that were in government then did something
that most have never been able to do when they get to that point, when
nearly 50 percent are getting more back than they are paying in. They
were able to restrain their spending, get control of their financial
destiny, and we got another 200 years of the greatest Nation in
history.
The other is possible. They could look back and say: Wow, the United
States followed the tried-and-true path to the dustbin of history. They
spent more than they had. People found that they could get Congress to
vote them money out of the Treasury. And once again, that socialist
concept failed, and the Nation failed. The Nation that provided for
that brief time of Camelot, a time of hope, relative peace, evolving
toward more perfect freedom, was lost because of financial
irresponsibility.
People have heard me so many times quote Ben Franklin. But it's easy
to see from Proverbs, it's easy to see from speeches of people like Ben
Franklin, our problem is a selfish problem--anytime we spend more money
than we have with complete and utter disregard, gross negligent
disregard, even intentional disregard for the future of our children
and one day their children and one day their children, complete
disregard, we want to spend it on ourselves now.
It's time to tell Greece, to tell everyone, let's hold hands and do
this together, not jump over the cliff by spending good money after
bad. Let's do it by not spending money we don't have. And there's no
way a country would not be upgraded when S&P and the world see, these
people are really serious about not spending more than they have coming
in.
This is a brave country. They know how to make commitments. And that
would get us back to having true freedom and not having the American
citizens have to come begging to Congress, Please, please, throw us
more morsels. Instead, Congress would be a body that inspired greatness
and inspired potential again and wouldn't lure young women into the rut
of having children out of wedlock because they're bored with high
school. It would, instead, give them incentives and encouragement:
Reach your potential; finish high school; go to college.
Let's have incentives not to stay out of work. Let's have incentives
to get back to work. Let's have incentives to sell our products around
the world. You do that by decreasing the tariff that we put on
American-made goods by every American company. That would help get us
on the road back to financial independence.
One other thing: When you have been blessed as the greatest country
in the world when it comes to having your own energy, we ought to use
it. We have it. We've been blessed with it. It's time to use it. And I
would humbly suggest that this President get out of the way, stop
preventing us from using our own energy, and allow us to become an
independent and great Nation again.
With that, Madam Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.
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