[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 147 (2001), Part 12]
[House]
[Pages 16750-16751]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]



                      DEBATE ON THE BUDGET SURPLUS

  The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. Johnson of Illinois). Under the 
Speaker's announced policy of January 3, 2001, the gentleman from North 
Carolina (Mr. Ballenger) is recognized during morning hour debates for 
5 minutes.
  Mr. BALLENGER. Mr. Speaker, I have a strange problem with the way we 
are talking about our present debate on the surplus. For 30 years, 40 
years we never worried about the surplus. We never had a surplus and we 
spent it all. So, here now, we are about to have a nervous breakdown on 
whether we are going to have a $150 billion surplus. Oh, my goodness 
gracious, only $150 billion, my, how can we possibly get along there?
  What we really should be worrying about is, we are having a 
manufacturers' recession right now. Why? Well, as a manufacturer 
myself, and I checked with businesses back home, the main problem we 
have got is our dollar is the most overvalued currency on the planet 
today.
  You should be a tourist traveling anywhere in the world. Everything 
seems cheap. The reason it is cheap is because our dollar is worth so 
much more than the value of currency of the place you are visiting. If 
we could do something to reduce this I think we would accomplish 
something, but we cannot compete with anybody in the world at the 
present time with the dollar as long as it continues to be the most 
expensive currency in the world.
  Let me give some examples. After the earthquake in El Salvador, some 
of my friends there approached me with the idea that they needed to buy 
two by fours. They bought all the two by fours that were available as 
far as they were concerned in Central America, and so I called up some 
friends of mine down in North Carolina and asked them about what kind 
of a deal can you give me on 14 foot and 12 foot two by fours, and they 
said, Cass, well, the lumber market is terrible now but we will see 
what we can do.
  These numbers are not exact, but they will show what I am talking 
about. This gentleman down there offered me something like a container 
load of two by fours, mixed 12 and 14 foots, for, say, $4,000 for a 
container. I checked with a real large timber firm down in Louisiana 
and theirs was $5,000 a container. So I figured I had a pretty good 
price.
  So I called back my friend from El Salvador, and I said I think I 
have got a good deal for you here, let us see if we cannot negotiate. 
He said, well, what is your price. I said the deal we

[[Page 16751]]

have got is $4,000 a container, and he said, well, thanks a lot, Cass, 
but we just bought Canadian and we got it for $3,000 a container.
  I went back to my friend down in North Carolina who had offered me 
this great, wonderful deal, and I said, I am sorry but you got beat. He 
said, Cass, I hate to tell you this, but it is happening everywhere; we 
quote in competition with the Canadians. He said, first of all, you 
have got to realize that our dollar, as compared to their dollar, is 
worth sixty cents of our dollar. In other words, for $60 you can go out 
and buy $100 worth of Canadian dollars. Now, that is a wild and funny 
way to look at it, but in reality that is the way it works.
  So just lately I checked on woodchips. In North Carolina we used to 
clean our forests up and we would chew all the wood up into woodchips, 
carry it down to our coastline and ship it all over the world. I do not 
know whether Mother Nature greatly appreciated what we were doing, but 
we were chewing these chips up and shipping them out. Everybody in the 
world wanted them, and all of the sudden we find out that in Australia 
they have come up with a better way of doing it and their money is 
cheaper than our money, and so our woodchip business is gone.
  I do not know how many people have talked to the steel industry. The 
steel industry in this country is noncompetitive. They are getting 
dumped on, as they say, because of the inability to meet the costs that 
the other countries have for their manufacturing costs, but in reality, 
the whole thing hangs on a more expensive dollar, and let us be honest.
  The more we balance the budget, the more surplus we generate, the 
more popular our currency becomes to the rest of the world. So what do 
they do? They decide to come here and buy our bonds, and they buy more 
bonds and they buy more bonds, and pretty soon, the dollar becomes more 
valued. I do not know how many of you ever watch it in the market and 
so forth, but the dollar goes up, the yen goes down, the pound goes 
down, the mark goes down, and here we are becoming less and less 
competitive and laying more and more people off because of it.
  I would like to give an example. About 2 months ago, a group of us 
traveled from Brazil to Argentina to Chile. In Brazil, business was 
pretty good. We did not know specifically why. We went to Argentina 
after that, and Argentina had dollarized their currency. They tied 
their currency to the value of the dollar, and this was a great and 
wonderful idea to stop inflation, and they did. But the Brazilians 
devalued their currency and killed whatever industry that they had in 
Argentina. This is exactly the way the system works.
  It is great if you are a tourist and can go anywhere in the world and 
buy everything you know cheaper, but in reality, somewhere along the 
line we have got to see what we can do.
  This is kind of a strange request that I am making, but I think 
probably the best thing we can do is spend more of the surplus and then 
people would say, hey, they are not quite as chancy with their money as 
we thought. So maybe we ought to buy some German marks or some British 
pounds and so forth and quit investing in American dollars. This may 
sound weird, but most of the folks in this room do not know any better. 
So I would like to sound weird and hope that we can influence somebody.

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