[Congressional Record Volume 167, Number 132 (Wednesday, July 28, 2021)]
[House]
[Pages H4240-H4245]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




               ECONOMIC POLICIES CRUSHING TO WORKING POOR

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of 
January 4, 2021, the gentleman from Arizona (Mr. Schweikert) is 
recognized for 60 minutes as the designee of the minority leader.
  Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Speaker, yes, it is one of those last names. I 
have family members that have trouble pronouncing it.


                         Parliamentary Inquiry

  Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Speaker, may I make a quick parliamentary 
inquiry?
  The SPEAKER pro tempore. The gentleman will state his parliamentary 
inquiry.

[[Page H4241]]

  

  Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Speaker, my question is, just because the 
Democrat leadership here changed the rules sometime last night, do I 
have to wear this thing while standing here alone during my 1-hour 
Special Order? May I take it off when I am at the mike?
  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy, the 
gentleman may remove his mask while under recognition.
  Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the clarification. I know 
we are all trying to get our heads around it because things keep 
changing around here.
  Mr. Speaker, the gentlewoman from Oklahoma had a couple of things she 
wanted to share tonight. This is the first time she and I have had a 
chance to talk. She is really smart and incredibly charming.
  Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentlewoman from Oklahoma (Mrs. Bice).
  Mrs. BICE of Oklahoma. Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague from 
Arizona.
  Mr. Speaker, I rise today to address the ongoing crisis happening at 
our southern border. Since President Biden took office, he has stopped 
building the wall, brought back catch and release, and ended the remain 
in Mexico policy.
  As a result, this administration has created the worst humanitarian, 
national security, and public health crisis ever seen at our Nation's 
southern border.
  In the past 3 months, each month, we have seen more than 170,000 
border encounters, a new 21-year high, totaling over half a million 
illegal border crossings. These numbers are resulting in overcrowded 
shelters, human trafficking, drug smuggling, and violence.
  In addition, the surge of unaccompanied children coming across the 
border shows no signs of slowing down.
  In June, the number of children arriving daily rose to 530. A journey 
like this is not only unsafe; it could lead to sexual exploitation or 
forced labor.
  Despite the continuing increase of border encounters each month, 
House Democrats want to defund Customs and Border Protection and 
Immigration and Customs Enforcement by nearly $1 billion. Our CBP, ICE, 
and DHS officers have been putting their lives at risk protecting 
Americans. Calling to defund them during the worst immigration crisis 
in U.S. modern history is deeply troubling.
  Mr. Speaker, the open border rhetoric from the Biden administration 
has encouraged hundreds of thousands of people to make the dangerous 
trek to the U.S. We must secure the border. We must protect our border 
cities. We must support the men and women who honorably protect our 
border. We must end this heartbreaking crisis.
  In addition to the immigration crisis that we are seeing on the 
southern border, we are now dealing with a COVID crisis that is not 
being addressed. The number of individuals crossing into this country 
with COVID has increased exponentially.
  These individuals are not being tested. They are not being offered 
vaccinations. They are being put on buses and shipped across this 
country.
  With the number of cases on the increase, it is imperative that this 
administration addresses the border crisis issue immediately.
  Mr. Speaker, I again thank my colleague from Arizona.
  Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Speaker, to the gentlewoman from Oklahoma, I only 
got this in an alert just about 2 hours ago, and I will send her a copy 
of it.
  Apparently, we now have a whistleblower, a formal whistleblower 
complaint. They were there to help take care of these children, and 
they were instructed not to disclose how many of these people in the 
housing unit had COVID.
  If that is true, once again, we are back to the duplicity of what has 
been going on at the border.
  As we talk about just what this is doing, the impact to the country--
and I am going to talk a little bit about what it does to the working 
poor--that might be a really interesting thing, because you touched on 
it, this whistleblower complaint that may expose that they are being 
told not to disclose the level of COVID that is in this population 
crossing the border illegally.
  Mrs. BICE of Oklahoma. I had not heard that, so that is incredibly 
interesting information.
  I think that with the mandates that are being put in place by the 
administration, asking for vaccinations of Federal employees, 
vaccinations of our military, how about we test and vaccinate people 
who are illegally coming into this country if we are going to ship them 
all over the U.S.?
  Mr. SCHWEIKERT. It is a great irony, isn't it?
  Mrs. BICE of Oklahoma. It is an incredible irony.
  I will say I appreciate this whistleblower coming forward and 
providing that information to us because you are right, we are not 
being given accurate or timely information about what is happening on 
the border currently.
  Mr. SCHWEIKERT. What do you think the likelihood is that the Democrat 
majority here, in their constitutional oversight responsibility, will 
take that whistleblower complaint seriously and look into the fact 
that, if it is true, we have been lied to?
  Mrs. BICE of Oklahoma. I guess it remains to be seen.
  Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentlewoman and wish her a 
great evening.
  Mr. Speaker, we are going to do a couple of things this evening, and 
I am going to try to tie it together. Hopefully, some of this makes 
sense. I am going to start off with just a one-off.
  Last week, I had a gentleman knock on my front door of my home. For 
all of us who are elected in this sort of time where things are a 
little anxious, you always stand up a bit when someone you don't know 
is at your front door.
  Turns out, it is a really smart gentleman. He has a Ph.D. in 
amphibians and lives down the street from me. He had something he 
wanted to share, and this was something I didn't expect. It was a 
complete one-off.
  He told me the story of what had happened just a couple of weeks 
earlier. He had this beloved dog. I am going to screw up the breed. I 
think it was some type of malamute, just this big, beautiful, fuzzy 
white dog. Apparently, the canine had gotten his wife's purse and 
chewed up some gum.
  I know this seems like a weird thing to do on the floor of the House, 
but it killed the dog. I think the more technical term is a sugar 
alcohol that is used. It is pronounced xylitol, which we see in certain 
gum products and candy products. It is an artificial sweetener. 
Apparently, it kills our canines.
  We have drafted a letter to the FDA and the appropriate agencies, 
asking if there is knowledge of this. If there is also knowledge of 
this, should there at least be some warning put on these packages? 
Because I had never heard of this.
  Then, when I went to the internet and looked, there was story after 
story after story after story of just heartbreak about people with 
their puppies getting some gum, getting one of these artificially 
sweetened candies, and dying. I guess it shuts down the liver 
incredibly aggressively.
  As almost a public service announcement, but also I am hoping that my 
colleagues on the left and right--if the FDA, if the bureaucracy 
doesn't really respond to us--would be willing to do a piece of 
legislation creating a directive that there needs to be some sort of 
warning on these products that if your puppy gets loose with this, it 
may lose its life.
  That is a little different than talking about economics, but the 
gentleman was just heartbroken because this dog was truly one of his 
best friends, a really important family member. To go from being out 
there playing to, several hours later, having him pass away, I think 
all of us would understand the impact of that.
  I had not heard about this. I think if we have gum with that 
sweetener sitting around our house--and I have a puppy coonhound that 
will munch on anything. We quickly got that in the shelves, away from 
the dog.
  For all of us, it is something that we are thinking. Hopefully, the 
FDA and others will do the right thing.
  Mr. Speaker, let's talk about what is going on in our Nation. We are 
going to touch a little bit--and it is going to be a little sarcastic 
and a little cranky. I am sorry about that, but I don't know another 
way to try to tell the story of just the absurdity of what is going on 
in some of our tax policy and economic policy.
  Mr. Speaker, the theme I really want to try to weave through today is 
not

[[Page H4242]]

being understood, I don't think, by either Republicans or Democrats, 
liberals or conservatives.
  So much of the public policy that is being pushed right now is just 
crushing to the working poor. We are going to do some really crappy 
things to the working poor, and it is not necessary.
  There is rational economic policy. You don't cater to certain of your 
activist constituencies as much, but it is much more effective to 
helping those we say we care about here in our society.

                              {time}  2045

  I do this slide as often as I can. What is the greatest threat in 
this country right now to my 5-year-old daughter, to your retirement?
  The fact of the matter is our demographics. This slide is before all 
the crazy spending proposals that have been produced so far this year. 
This is where we are structurally.
  And the fact of the matter is, as a society, we are getting old 
really fast. So think of this in 30 years in today's dollars. So I will 
adjust for inflation. In today's dollars, we will be $101 trillion in 
publicly borrowed money. Only about $3 trillion of that is what you 
would think of as general spending. All the rest of it is purely Social 
Security and Medicare.
  Medicare is about $71 trillion of borrowed money. The spend is much, 
much, much, much larger than that, but that is how much we are going to 
have to borrow to finance the shortfall.
  Because, once again, for those who don't pay attention to this, 
Medicare is a promise. We have made that promise to American workers 
and American retirees. But only part A, which is the hospital portion, 
is actually the trust fund. And the trust fund is gone in 3 to 5 years, 
we wiped out that money.
  The rest of Medicare spending, when you see the doctor, when you get 
a pharmaceutical, those things come right out of the general fund. 
There is no trust fund for that spend.
  If we don't get serious about sort of the holistic theory of how you 
save this country, and it turns out really aggressive economic growth, 
you have got to embrace technologies and new methods to crash the price 
of healthcare, these sorts of things. If we don't have that type of 
vision, these numbers become what drives all policy.
  If you care about the environment, if you care about education, if 
you care about this, there will be no money because we will spend every 
dime we have just financing the retirement promise that we have made as 
a government, as a society to each other. But yet this isn't 
particularly sexy. It is really scary. It is really hard. It requires a 
calculator. And God knows, we all work in a place that doesn't own 
calculators.
  So let's walk through a little bit of the reality that part of the 
solution to what we are doing to the working poor, part of the solution 
to what we are doing to these massive, massive unfunded promises is 
economic growth.
  And one of my intense frustrations is the amount this place is 
willing to, what do you call it, oh, yeah, lie, about basic revenues. 
We call them receipts in Ways and Means, tax revenues, and these 
things. Remember, post tax reform a number of my brothers and sisters 
on the left got up behind these microphones and told stories: We are 
going to go into massive recession, the revenues are going to collapse, 
this is going to happen.
  Well, what ended up happening?
  Remember 2018--because remember we passed tax reform at the end of 
2017--2018 and 2019 were the second and third highest, adjusted for 
inflation, so we are talking real math, receipts, tax collections in 
U.S. history. But what was more phenomenal about it is it created such 
an economic lift. So many of our brothers and sisters were working, 
particularly from the working poor. We saw things--and we are going to 
look at a couple of those boards--where the working poor became 
dramatically less poor. And because they are working, the trust funds 
we were just touching on, what we showed for Social Security and 
Medicare, their longevity revenues, because people were working, their 
lives got longer. This was actually, I thought, the Holy Grail for both 
those on the left and the right, we were going to try to find a way to 
mathematically make the numbers work so we can keep our promises.
  Well, it turns out, post tax reform, the receipts were incredibly 
robust, and they were the second and third highest in U.S. history. And 
the only reason they weren't number one, by a sliver, was in 2015 we 
had some really unusual, what they call, timing effects, when certain 
things happened just before the end of the fiscal year that were posted 
in a certain fiscal year. So I won't geek out too much on that.
  But often you will hear Members of the majority party here get behind 
the microphone, and say, well, the tax scam. It is really actually a 
pretty dark thing to say, because those couple of years before the 
pandemic were some of the most robust--actually, the most robust years 
in modern economic times for the poor in this country. The working poor 
became dramatically less poor.
  But there are those that will stand behind the microphone and call it 
a tax scam. And the willingness to keep lying--and I am sorry, I know 
that is a crappy word to use, but I am so frustrated because they can't 
seem to stop. A couple of Members, just this last week, once again, got 
behind these microphones, and said: Well, 83 percent goes to the top 1 
percent. That is a lie.
  As a matter of fact, even the Washington Post--which is not really 
particularly friendly to those of us on the free market economic side--
has gotten so frustrated with Democrats getting behind microphones and 
lying. They are even now saying, the zombie claim that 2017 tax cuts 
gave 83 percent to the top 1 percent. Even the leftist newspapers are 
just bewildered with the left not telling the truth. I don't mind 
having policy arguments, but don't make crap up, over and over and 
over.
  We see now even the left-wing media is having to correct the 
Democrats, saying, no, it turns out post tax reform that 2018 and 2019 
were sort of miracle years; incredible wage growth, incredible 
productivity growth, savings growth, and particularly for the 
populations that we claim we care about.
  Remember, they were the first 2 years in modern economic history 
where income inequality really shrank, and I thought that was the Holy 
Grail, that the wealthy got wealthier, but the poor got much less poor 
much faster, actually closing the income differential gaps and the 
wealth gaps. I always thought that that was the Holy Grail around here.

  And when it happened--but it didn't happen with social engineering, 
it didn't happen with big spending programs that you get to basically 
extort votes with. It happened by opening up the economy and creating 
investment in productivity that made it so you could pay people more. 
It gets vilified with misinformation. It is just real hard to make 
honest government public policy when one side won't actually own a 
calculator.
  So to beat this a little bit more, you take a look at what happened 
to, particularly, working, unmarried women. The wage growth was 
remarkable. Just remarkable. I think it was in 2019, we had African-
American females, I think, who were having like a 7-8 percent growth in 
wages in a single year in a time with almost no inflation. Some of 
these numbers were remarkable.
  And if the goal here is to make the poor less poor, I actually 
believe those who were on the free market side have demonstrated there 
is a path where it works, and it is sustainable. And we are going to 
come back to that theme, because this year we will probably see income 
and equality shrink, but it is going to shrink in a way--because we 
have pumped so much cash out the door--it is not sustainable. As soon 
as that money goes away, we go back to the bad old days and the really 
crappy policies of the previous decade.
  So let's actually walk through something that we started to touch on 
when we opened this up. The violence--and I am going to use the term, 
economic violence--that we are committing to the working poor in this 
country seems to get no press. I mean, if you read some of the really 
geeky economic journals, they are shaking their heads trying to get 
their heads around why the left is doing what they are doing.
  But if I came to you tomorrow and said, tell me the number one policy 
sin that is going on right now that crushes the working poor. The 
classic definition of the working poor is they may not have finished 
high school. That is

[[Page H4243]]

their labor is their value, it is what they sell.
  It turns out, when you open up the borders--we have some amazingly 
detailed studies, and these are studies from years ago, back when 
Democrats actually believed in locking down the borders to protect 
working men and women. Remember these days, it was only like a decade 
and a half ago, where Republicans were accused of being owned by the 
Chamber of Commerce and wanting cheap labor, and Democrats were going 
to protect working men and women? Until all of a sudden it seems to 
reverse.
  And I just desperately wish this place actually used basic economic 
theory to create policies instead of sort of having a meeting and 
saying, okay, this year you guys take that side, we will take this 
side. It is just absurd what is going on.
  We have a number of studies that talk about when you flood the market 
with folks with similar skill sets. So you basically--if you are part 
of the working poor, what do you sell? You sell your labor. And this is 
the right board, sorry.
  When you open up the border, we are actually looking at a reduction 
in wages by 6.2 percent. But why this is so harsh is some of the papers 
say it is going to last for a decade. What is going on at the U.S. 
border right now is, you are kicking the heads in of the working poor 
in this country for the next decade.
  I know that doesn't fit the talking heads' language that you see on 
cable television or the rhetoric around here, but you can't sort of 
give speeches and say you care and then engage in policies that crush 
the value of their labor because you make them compete against 
potentially millions of those with similar skill sets.
  And you start to take a look at what we did this last year, where 
there was peak unemployment for those skill sets. Now, if you happen to 
be a computer programmer this last crappy year, actually you did just 
fine. If you are someone who your skill set was you could work from 
home, you survived.
  If you happened to be part of the population that you had not 
finished high school, you were in the 21-plus-percent unemployment 
area. It turns out the very populations that were most crushed by the 
pandemic are the very ones we are turning around and kicking their 
heads in again by opening up the border.
  Is it compassionate? Is it truly loving?
  When I hear speeches from my friends on the left saying, well, we are 
opening up the borders to be compassionate. How about the millions and 
millions and millions of our brothers and sisters here who may not have 
had the opportunities that those in this body have had? And we are 
going to make them compete with similar skill sets and millions of new 
arrivals.
  And it turns out, if you actually look at the math, it is African 
Americans, particularly in urban areas, that you have just--that this 
body has just--by this President's policies, have crushed their future 
earning power, have made the value of their labor much less and it is 
not short term.
  If you read the studies, we have a whole decade now of loss from 
where we were in 2018 and 2019, we have just wiped out that progress 
and the previous several years of progress. You would think this place 
would actually care about things like that.
  No. Because what is going to happen is the left's economic policies 
aren't, hey, we need revenues for this spending, and being extra 
creative with where those revenues come from.
  Remember, I have come to this floor multiple times and said, if we 
need a trillion dollars for infrastructure, I can show you where you 
can cut a trillion dollars in spending, stop subsidizing the rich.

                              {time}  2100

  Stop subsidizing the very top 1 percent. Stop subsidizing their flood 
insurance on their third home on the beach. Stop buying them subsidies 
for their Teslas, for their electric car, and for their solar panels.
  If you take a look, Mr. Speaker, this is one of the great 
perversities we have here in policy, is the left wants to raise taxes 
on the rich and then on the other hand, hand it back to them in 
subsidies for other things they buy. I assume this is purely political.
  This is, hey, I am giving you something, vote for me. Then you are 
able to tell your base, hey, look here, I went out and taxed the rich.
  But from an economic standpoint, this is an absurd thing to do. This 
is economically distorting, and this is almost a type of political 
exploitation.
  Why don't you just go straight, Mr. Speaker?
  Don't do the economic extortions. Stop subsidizing, and stop sending 
the money out the door.
  What is fascinating is I have done that speech now three times on the 
floor. I have sat down with a couple of my Ways and Means Democrat 
friends, walked them through the binder on all the things we do to 
subsidize the wealthy, and they just look at me, shrug, and say, Well, 
I don't know how we would sell that.
  It is crazy. But it shows you, Mr. Speaker, the perversity of policy 
here.
  So this becomes the policy being offered by the left: Let's raise 
corporate taxes.
  Okay. Well, besides the international tax that we seem to be signing 
onto that is going to make the United States one of the most 
uncompetitive nations in the world, we are also about to do something 
where raising the corporate tax in the first 24 months we lose 1 
million jobs.
  So, Mr. Speaker, do you remember how we were talking about we need 
that robust economy and we need the robust labor market, but Democrats 
get their tax policies, just the corporate tax will unemploy in the 
first 24 months 1 million Americans.
  So we start to take a look at--and this is a little complex to try to 
show on a board, we are going to have to spend more time on it to try 
to explain. But this is a whole bunch of the revenue side that the 
Democrats are proposing, and this is the spending.
  The problem is much of the revenue here is a fraud. It is not real. 
So, Mr. Speaker, you start looking at the tax compliance. We can give 
you some proposals, and we have been trying for years, saying use data. 
You can cover much that of that tax gap by using data, not hiring 
80,000--think of that, 80,000, that is twice as many as the entire 
Coast Guard--80,000 new unionized IRS employees to go out and chase 
people for the taxes when it turns out we have these supercomputers in 
your pocket, and there is data out there that would let you match 
instantly saying: Is this person telling us the truth?
  It would be dramatically less intrusive, because for this to work, 
the Democrats actually have a proposal where you are going to turn 
every bank account into an IRS employee. Mr. Speaker, you do 
understand, if you look at the Democrats' revenue proposal, my 
transactions, my bank balances, my ins and outs, go to the IRS.
  This march towards totalitarianism is on every one of these aspects. 
So it is not enough to just make up fake numbers of what the revenues 
are going to be. It is inherently intrusive, and it won't work. You 
will get lots of data, Mr. Speaker, that you can functionally use 
against the American people, but it is not the data that is actually 
going to get you the revenues, because for these who are really rich, 
tomorrow they will just move their money or their currency, they will 
do a crypto, they will do that type of token type of transaction, and 
it will be the rest of the American public that just gets crushed by 
this intrusion.
  So let's actually sort of dig a little bit more into this so it is 
understood. Lots and lots of the experts out there, many are just the 
columnists. If you take a look, Mr. Speaker, some of them who are 
actually on the left are making it very clear that the Democrats' 
revenue proposals are a fraud. They are making things up.
  These are just some snippets of many of the articles that are out 
there, and they are calling it bipartisan. But there was a promise.
  Do you remember? The big promise from the President and Speaker 
Pelosi is: We are going to pay for these things.
  No, they are not. Let me show you, Mr. Speaker, how devious this 
stuff is. So President Trump a couple years ago--and many of us weren't 
thrilled with the model--proposed a rebate back to the consumers.

[[Page H4244]]

  So you buy a pharmaceutical, the purchasing managers in the 
background who buy it from the manufacturer and get it to your pharmacy 
get a rebate. They take that rebate and use part of it to buy down the 
price of the drug. Then it is sold at the retail counter, and you get a 
lower price.
  President Trump's proposal was to take that and not buy down the 
price of the drug; therefore, it would actually raise the drug cost a 
little bit to Government, but the consumer would get that rebate at the 
retail counter. This is the simplest way to describe it. It is a little 
complex.
  This is the way it works over here. The Democrats said: Oh, no. We 
hate this.
  I have a whole list of quotes from Speaker Pelosi and the Biden team 
saying that this will never become policy and this will never become 
law.
  Well, if it was never going to become law, how can the Democrats turn 
around and tell us that they are going to use the money from that 
program as one of their pay-fors?
  It was like $180 billion. This is not law, and it is not policy. It 
was a proposal. But somehow if you look at the list of the pay-fors 
from the left, Mr. Speaker, they put $180 billion and say: Hey, we will 
just take this fake, magical money and use that to buy our friends.
  Is this the new and improved way?
  Mr. Speaker, you wonder why the American people when they start to 
understand the scam that are so many of these spending tax proposals 
why they are becoming so cynical.

  I put up this board, because I want to call it the cliff that it is. 
Here is one of the other great scams that is in the Democrats spending 
proposals, how they get the scores to work.
  Mr. Speaker, may I ask for my time.
  The SPEAKER pro tempore. The gentleman from Arizona has 29 minutes 
remaining.
  Mr. SCHWEIKERT. I am sorry if I sound a little cranky, but I have had 
a lot of coffee. As you know, Mr. Speaker, at a certain point when you 
start to stack this stuff up it just breaks your heart, because we are 
better than the games we are playing right now. Please trust me, if 
Republicans were doing this, I would be, and I have been, when we have 
tried doing these sorts of things I have been every bit as aggressive.
  So here is the scam so the public understands this: There are things 
like PAYGO where, hey, if a program goes more than 5 years, it has to 
be paid for.
  So, Mr. Speaker, what if you create a multi-multi-multibillion dollar 
program, and then on the fifth year you just pretend it comes to an 
end?
  Hey, we are just going to drop it. It doesn't really exist. Wink, 
wink, nod, nod.
  We know a future Congress will have to extend it, because it have 
will have a constituency, but that way when it is scored, it scores 
within--and we don't have to pretend that we just created another 
program that has no funding and, therefore, continues to explode that 
debt.
  This is actually what the Democrats are doing, and much of the 
spending is the creating games.
  So earlier this year we created things like the childcare tax credit 
extension. Republicans really want to work on this, because 
particularly if we can target it to help the working poor there is a 
much more uncomfortable conversation, but we need to have it because, 
as you know, Mr. Speaker, the United States has a collapsing fertility 
rate. We actually now functionally don't have enough children to cover 
our debts. Oddly enough, that has a huge impact on future economic 
robustness.
  How do we make it so you can afford to have a family?
  So the left has actually created a thing here where it costs 
functionally $100 billion this year. In the proposal, it would cost 
$1.3 trillion to do this the way the Democrats are spending money over 
the 10 years.
  So how do they make that score work?
  How do they not have to say: Well, just the childcare credit is $1.3 
trillion of spending over 10 years. They just pretend it stops. They 
get a few years out, and then they just drop it.
  You are really going to take the populace of the United States, start 
sending them a check every month, and then pretend it is going to stop?
  That is the example. There are bunches of these examples. As a matter 
of fact, they did it with SCHIP years ago where on the sixth year the 
program was just supposed to disappear, and that is how they were so 
giddy they could get it to work with PAYGO.

                              {time}  2110

  You wonder why the public realizes this place is almost operating 
like scam artists. If we allowed someone outside this building to do 
things like that, we would put them in jail.
  Mr. Speaker, there are a couple of other things here. There are ways 
to find revenues to cover the infrastructure spending. I believe those 
of us on the more conservative side, we can show you places to cut 
spending and, therefore, not create the distortions.
  You all saw the report, though I am sure my brothers and sisters on 
the left will avoid ever saying it out loud, that the actual capital 
gains tax hike on its own loses $33 billion in the 10 years, that it is 
not until you start to play games with something called bases.
  Well, Mr. Speaker, have you ever thought about what a capital gains 
tax actually is? Okay. We are going to tax you for the gain you have in 
your value, the profit you made. What happens when the house you have, 
the piece of real estate, the other things you own--it is not 
appreciation. It is called inflation.
  You do realize that is one of the great scams going on at this 
moment. As your house goes up in value, as other things go up in value, 
and we are going to get this much larger capital gains tax, then we are 
going to remove a bunch of what they call the bases. We are going to 
cap what you can subject to the lower tax rate.
  You do realize that we are going to tax Americans on the higher price 
from inflation, not the actual purchasing power of it getting more 
valuable.
  Let's do an example of your home. Now, you are a single person. You 
own a home, and it goes up by half a million dollars. You have just 
done incredibly well. That first $250,000 of gain--it is called once in 
a lifetime though you get to use it, I think, every 5 years--is exempt. 
But that other $250,000, you will have to pay capital gains tax on.
  How much of that gain is appreciation? You bought a house in the 
right neighborhood. You exploded in value. But the next house you are 
going to buy, didn't it also go up similar in value, similar in cost? 
Was it inflation?
  You will pay tax and now extraordinarily high tax rates, if the 
Democrats get their proposal, on that gain. It is a certain level of 
cruelty.
  The last thing I want to touch on is, if our body here really wants 
to have an honest discussion about infrastructure and its true needs in 
our society--I have not seen the details of the so-called bipartisan 
agreement in the Senate, but the devil is always in the details.
  I have a couple of examples here. If we are really going to do this, 
we need to sort of figure out if the Democrats really want 
infrastructure, particularly even green infrastructure. Do we really 
want it, or do we just want to put up a whole lot of cash that, 
ultimately, basically goes to environmental groups and that, 
ultimately, just goes to lawyers?
  Let me give you an example. For us out in the Southwest, there is 
this area of New Mexico--I guess the way it is phrased is that they 
have this tremendous wind asset. It is one of the greatest wind 
production areas in all of North America.
  Fifteen years ago, California said, hey, we really want some of that 
clean energy from that wind area in New Mexico. We will help invest in 
it. We will buy a forward on it. We will contract to buy this. We are 
at 15 years now, and the power line still isn't permitted because of 
all the environmental reviews, all the different jurisdictions.
  If you are really trying to decarbonize the power grid, are the 
Democrats willing to stop funding the lawyers and the environmental 
groups that make their living off the litigation and NEPA study after 
NEPA study? Those are environmental studies.
  We have a case here. It is referred to as SunZia power line. You can 
go online and look it up. It started in 2006, and some of the documents 
out there say they will finally get their permits in 2023 or 2025.

[[Page H4245]]

  This isn't unique. There are lots of occasions like this where an 
area where you want to build wind, solar, even some geothermal, you 
can't get it permitted.
  Don't you see the absurdity? We are going to put up all this money 
for infrastructure, particularly even from the Democrats, the green 
infrastructure, but we are not going to change the laws because the 
left is the beneficiaries of so much money from the environmental left 
and the trial lawyers and the lawyers that sue on this stuff.
  We need to put a clock on this. Look, I know this hits a little close 
to home for some of our East Coast folks. But when it becomes an 
upheaval over doing ocean-based windmills off part of the East Coast 
here--and a lot of the very, very wealthy leftists are the very ones 
who cry and complain, saying you can't put this in part of our view, 
which really isn't part the view if you actually looked at the data.
  We have to decide. Things like this Vineyard Wind project, which, I 
guess, is--actually, I am embarrassed to say that I have the map on my 
wall. I guess it is off the coast of Rhode Island. They have been 
fussing over that for a decade now.
  Do the Democrats truly want this clean energy? For us in the desert 
Southwest, in the afternoons, because of our photovoltaic inventory, we 
produce too much power. We are now having to have really creative 
discussions of, in the afternoon, when power rates crash to almost 
nothing, should we convert it into hydrogen and make that storage?
  You all saw the incredible article last week in The Wall Street 
Journal about the new iron to rust batteries. They are very, very 
heavy, so they don't work in vehicles but could be incredibly 
inexpensive, efficient storage. This is wonderful. But that is for 
those of us who live in the desert, where we have lots of sunshine and 
photovoltaic is pretty efficient.
  But if you want to transmit that power someplace, are the Democrats 
going to step up and help someone like myself, who is just trying to do 
a piece of legislation that would put this permitting on a clock for it 
to get capital, for you to raise money, for investors to participate, 
for you to plan the power grid?

  You can't have it where the power line for that wind farm you wanted 
takes 15 to 20 years to get the power.
  I guess my little passion here is I am incredibly skeptical on the 
pay-fors. Even if it passes, unless we are willing to change the 
bureaucratic bottlenecks that have been created, you are not seeing 
much of this change in the power grid for a couple of decades.
  Do we continue to tell the public the fantasy? Or do you step up and 
say: Hey, I am going to do the hard things. I am going to change these 
timelines. I am going to have to say no to some of my trial lawyer 
contributors. I am going to have to put this on a clock so everyone 
gets a chance to share their concerns for it to be properly 
environmentally reviewed.
  It doesn't take 20 years to do a line siting. If the left is willing 
to do that, then they will get some credibility that they really are 
serious. If they are not willing to do that, then you understand much 
of the talk about the green revolution and the energy base is a fraud. 
It is theater. It is pandering because we will say: Hey, look at all 
this money, but you can't move the generation.
  It is real, and we have example after example after example.
  Mr. Speaker, I appreciate you tolerating a bit of my tirade tonight. 
As we often joke to whoever is in the chair, I used to get put in that 
chair when I made John Boehner mad, so I got to be in the chair a lot 
at night.
  But the things I shared tonight, they don't need to necessarily be 
partisan. They are math. They are process. They are the bottlenecks 
that keep many of the things we actually can agree upon from happening.
  But this place is so weaponized right now that if I say it is black, 
the other side has to say it is white. It has just become a 
dysfunctional body.
  If our goal is to make the working poor less poor, if it is to make 
our society much more prosperous, if it is to provide optionality in 
our energy, we know it has to be done, but we have to be willing, not 
to necessarily engage in the theater side but maybe actually engage in 
the proof we have of what has worked and what hasn't.
  Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

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