[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 155 (2009), Part 11]
[House]
[Pages 14438-14445]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                       NOT LEARNING FROM HISTORY

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of 
January 6, 2009, the gentleman from Missouri (Mr. Akin) is recognized 
for 60 minutes as the designee of the minority leader.
  Mr. AKIN. Madam Speaker, there was a cynical comment that was made by 
people who take a look at history. They say that one of the things we 
learn from history is that we learn nothing from history. I don't know 
that that is universally true, but certainly for our subject for this 
evening, that will certainly be the theme, that we are not learning 
very much from history.
  We are going to be taking a look at the fruit of fiscal 
mismanagement, and particularly what is going on in our country in 
terms of a very, very important number, and that is unemployment. The 
unemployment numbers have continued to rise, in spite all kinds of 
assurances that by spending tons and tons of money, that we can turn 
those numbers around.
  The historic connector here that is I think quite interesting is a 
fellow by the name of Henry Morgenthau. Probably you have not heard of 
Henry Morgenthau, but he was an important figure in his own day. And 
here in this Chamber, in this House, Henry Morgenthau met with the Ways 
and Means Committee in 1939.
  Henry Morgenthau was FDR's Secretary of the Treasury and he had 8 
years working on a theory that is known as Keynesian economics. He was 
one of the main architects of Keynesian economics, whose idea was that 
what the government needs to do is to stimulate the economy. You have 
heard that phrase over and over, stimulate the economy, and the purpose 
of stimulating the economy is, of course, to create more jobs.
  That is a little bit like grabbing the straps on your boots and 
lifting up and trying to fly around the room. It doesn't work. And 
after 8 years of failed experience, these were the words, the very 
quote of Henry Morgenthau here in this building before the Ways and 
Means Committee.
  He said, ``We have tried spending money. We are spending more than we 
have ever spent before, and it does not work.'' His words are echoing 
down through history. ``It does not work, I say. After 8 years of the 
administration, we have just as much unemployment as when we started, 
and an enormous debt to boot.''
  These are the words coming to us, floating down through history by 
Henry Morgenthau, the main architect of Keynesian economics. Franklin 
Delano Roosevelt, the master of the policy of stimulating the economy 
with big spending.
  Maybe we haven't been doing a good enough job on stimulating the 
economy with big spending, so let's just take a look and see what we 
have come up here in just the last year or so.
  I am joined by a number of my good friends and colleagues who are 
going to help us in unpacking some of what is in this spending that we 
have and also going to help talk about this incredible statement that 
was made by the President last week that, somehow or another, that his 
administration had created 100,000 to 150,000 new jobs. It is kind of 
amazing, because all of the actual numbers from the government show 
that that is not true at all.

                              {time}  2100

  So we have quite an interesting evening together. And I'm joined by a 
good friend of mine from Iowa, Congressman King, who is here to join us 
in our conversation tonight. I hope that everybody else will feel 
comfortable to just tune right in and join us. We're going to have a 
little bit of fun and take a look at some of the economics. It's a 
serious picture, but it's an example to us that we must learn from 
history. It's also an example of the fact that America is on the wrong 
track.
  As we take a look at what's going on with job losses, I think many 
Americans, Congressman King, understand the fact that all is not right 
and that unemployment number jumping up as high as 9-something percent 
is not acceptable.
  I would yield time to my good friend from Iowa, Congressman King.
  Mr. KING of Iowa. I thank the gentleman from Missouri (Mr. Akin) for 
pulling this hour together. And I listened to the first flash of 
illumination of common sense here coming from deep within history of 
Franklin Delano Roosevelt's administration, his Treasurer, Henry 
Morgenthau, saying that Keynesian economics does not work.
  And so I wanted to add to this, John Maynard Keynes' philosophy that 
he spoke about during that period of time of the implementation of the 
New Deal that was presented by FDR, and historians have taught for 
years that FDR's New Deal saved us from the Great Depression, although 
there isn't any evidence of that, especially, FDR's Secretary of the 
Treasury making the statement that Keynesian economics does not work.
  Now, Henry Morgenthau was a contemporary of John Maynard Keynes, and 
Keynes became prominent in the twenties and throughout the thirties and 
kind of wrapped up his career in the forties. But Keynes described how 
Keynesian economics worked. He did

[[Page 14439]]

this himself, and his description was this. He said, I can solve all 
the unemployment in the United States. All we need to do is go find an 
abandoned coal mine and go out in that abandoned coal mine and drill a 
whole group of holes out there, and then take American cash, tamp it 
down into those holes, and then fill the abandoned coal mine up with 
garbage and turn the entrepreneurs loose to dig up the money. That 
would solve all the unemployment in the United States of America.
  Now, that doesn't sound very rational when I say this on the floor of 
the House of Representatives, but that came out the mouth of John 
Maynard Keynes, who inspired this Keynesian economics and Morgenthau's 
response.
  I yield back.
  Mr. AKIN. I just have to kind of wonder what he was drinking when he 
came up with a theory like that. That's an interesting tidbit of 
history.
  Mr. KING of Iowa. And we didn't have EPA approval either.
  Mr. AKIN. He didn't have EPA to put the garbage in the mine. I'm sure 
he would have gotten in trouble with that.
  It's just a treat to have, also, my good friend Congressman Lamborn 
who's joining us tonight as well. And we're just getting started now, 
talking a little bit about this idea that somehow all of this spending 
that we've been seeing in this last year that we've been here together, 
this incredible level of spending, is supposed to help with this 
unemployment problem. And yet, just as Morgenthau would have predicted, 
we're seeing unemployment going up and the spending just totally out of 
control.
  I yield time to my good friend, Congressman Lamborn.
  Mr. LAMBORN. Well, I thank the gentleman from Missouri for letting me 
have this time. It's good to join you for a few minutes with this time 
that you've put together to speak and present to the American people 
and to have a dialogue between each other what the spending is really 
costing us. And so far it's not producing jobs. I think we hit 9.4 
percent, if I have that correct, of what the latest unemployment 
figures are.
  Mr. AKIN. Just affirming that, reclaiming my time and affirming that 
number, yes, it is now 9.4 percent. You recall that there was a promise 
when we got to this great big--they call it a stimulus bill. We call it 
the porkulus bill. When we got to this porkulus bill, they said, If you 
don't pass this bill, if you don't do that, why we may have 
unemployment at 8 percent. And here we are at 9.7 percent, and we did 
pass the bill. And so the excuse is, well, this thing is really helping 
us a lot. Well, I sure hope it doesn't help us in that direction too 
much longer because that was what was supposed to be. But I think 
you're right. Your number is 9.7.
  I yield.
  Mr. LAMBORN. Thank you. With that amount, 9.4 percent, which I think 
is the high point for 25 years, unfortunately it's the high point in 
unemployment in our country for two and a half decades.
  And I just wanted to mention, it's so inconsistent or even 
hypocritical for the press to say that this is not anything other than 
an unmitigated disaster. They're falling all over themselves trying to 
put a spin on this thing saying, Oh, it's really not as bad as it 
seems. The rate of growth of unemployed people has slowed down, or it's 
less than we thought it was going to be.
  Can you imagine if we were 12 months ago, 24 months ago, when George 
Bush was President, what the press would have said? They would have 
said, It's horrible, and the policies are doing this and driving 
unemployment up.
  Mr. AKIN. Just reclaiming my time a minute. What would the press have 
said if, under the Bush administration, they claimed that they created 
100,000 to 150,000 jobs and they didn't have any documentation for 
that? Say, Where in the world did you get that number, because the 
numbers that have just come out show that we've lost jobs. It's gone 
the other direction.
  If you had a track record like that--this is just the year, this 
year. This is starting in February, March, April, this is another 
March, 14, 28, April, April, May and May, this is just a few months 
here. And this is what's going on with unemployment. And you're out 
here and you claim, Hey, we just created a whole lot of jobs. People 
would kind of wonder, I would think the press corps would say, Wait a 
minute. Where'd you come up with this 100,000 to 150,000 jobs that he 
claimed last week that they created? I supposed he'd say, Well, if we 
hadn't passed this great big porkulus bill, why, by golly, it would be 
worse. Of course he hasn't learned from Henry Morgenthau.
  I yield back.
  Mr. LAMBORN. The gentleman from Missouri is correct. It's so 
inconsistent. If this was the previous President, the press would just 
be laying right into him. Right now they're giving the President a 
pass. And it's inconsistent, and I think the American people can see 
through that.
  And Congressman, you also mentioned, what are these phantom jobs out 
there that were saved? Anyone can claim, well, there's one or two or 
300,000 jobs that were saved. I can't document it, but just take my 
word for it, and the press isn't looking at that either. I just wish 
the press would do their job of being an honest, objective observer and 
reporter of what the facts are. And until the press does that, the 
American people are really not being served well.
  Mr. AKIN. Well, reclaiming my time, I think you're right. And I'd 
like to just take a moment and get into--these numbers are easy for us 
to rattle off, just off the tip of our tongue, but let's take a look.
  First of all, you've got $700 billion in this Wall Street bailout. 
Now, some of this came under President Bush, and I think the people in 
this room voted against this thing because it didn't make a lot of 
sense. Half of it, though, is the beginning of this year, and we keep 
dumping all this money out, and it's not quite clear what we got for 
it. And then we get to this thing here, this economic stimulus which is 
supposed to be fixing this unemployment problem. And what's going on in 
this bill?
  I've got a few, just choice examples I'll share, but I know others of 
you here have some examples. We're joined by a number of fantastic 
Congresspeople, and here's one. This is one here, this is you can't 
afford a bicycle after purchasing a $1 million home. Okay. This is 
money for Washington, D.C., part of the stimulus money that's supposed 
to be helping us with jobs.
  Washington, D.C., Department of Transportation will spend $3 million 
in stimulus money to expand its Smart Bike program. The money will 
increase the program by five times, from 10 bike racks to 50 bike 
racks, and from 100 bikes to 500 bikes. Neighborhoods expected to get 
the new bike racks include Adams Morgan, Columbia Heights, Capitol 
Hill, Anacostia and Georgetown, where the average single-family home 
runs at $1.2 million. Boy, now there is an interesting use of money. 
May be a wonderful thing to do, but I'm not sure what we should be 
taxing everybody to try to create jobs.
  And we've got a lot of other fun examples. I'm joined by my good 
friend Congresswoman Bachmann, and Congresswoman Bachmann is articulate 
and a good friend to people who care about jobs and care about fiscal 
sanity.
  I yield time.
  Mrs. BACHMANN. I thank the gentleman from Missouri for calling this 
together so that we could call attention to the job losses that are 
happening all across the United States. It's in your district. It's in 
my district. It's every one of our districts here that are represented 
this evening.
  And I was absolutely shocked, as I've been watching this play out, of 
the Federal Government jumping in and taking over private businesses, 
beginning with Chrysler and then now with General Motors. We're seeing 
something that we haven't seen. I don't know if we ever have seen 
anything like this in the history of our country, and I am still livid 
over the conversation I had today.
  Mr. AKIN. Reclaiming my time just a minute, what you just said is so 
important for people to understand, and that's because we don't have 
quite the sense of history. We've just heard from

[[Page 14440]]

one of our other guests just a minute ago that this is a 25-year high 
in unemployment.
  But what you've just talked about is, when the President goes in and 
fires the president of General Motors and appoints the people a board 
and decides to rewrite the bankruptcy laws, this is unprecedented. And 
I think, my good friend, you have a specific example from your district 
about what this could mean to Main Street America. I wish you'd saw 
share that with us tonight.
  Mrs. BACHMANN. I do. I had met with dealers in my district before 
from Chrysler, and they looked me in the eye and they said they were 
just flabbergasted. They couldn't believe that they got a pink slip 
that they were going to be out of business by the end of the month. All 
the cars that they had on their lot they'd have to sell. They were 
going have to wrap up and go out of business by the end of the month. 
And they told me that they were one of the most successful Chrysler 
dealerships, not just in Minnesota, but in the Nation. They performed 
160 percent better than the top performers in the country. They met all 
the criteria for staying open for Chrysler, and still they were pink-
slipped. No one could understand.
  Mr. AKIN. Reclaiming my time, I'm just trying put myself in the shoes 
of the family who owned that dealership that you're talking about.
  Mrs. BACHMANN. This particular family, Congressman, had put $5 
million into this dealership just prior to receiving this notice. They 
were slated to adding another Jeep dealership to the Chrysler business 
that they already had. Significant amount of money, and they produced 
tax revenue to the amount of $3 million every year on that 5-acre 
parcel that they utilized.
  Mr. AKIN. Just reclaiming my time, so you have a dealer who's been in 
business in your town for what, 90 years or something I think you were 
saying?
  Mrs. BACHMANN. This particular dealer had been in the business since 
the early 1920s. The one that I spoke with today had been in business 
for 90 years. They were a General Motors dealership.
  Mr. AKIN. Ninety years, and their dealership was assessed at, what 
was the value of it?
  Mrs. BACHMANN. There's a recent appraisal done on this dealership, 
very successful dealership. They have all the debts paid. They own 
everything outright and clear, and the appraiser said this dealership 
is worth $15 million.
  Mr. AKIN. Reclaiming my time, so $15 million, and then you wake up 
one morning and you get this thing in the mail and it says your $15 
million just basically vaporized, didn't it?
  Mrs. BACHMANN. Was worthless. Now the only thing that their 
dealership is worth today is the underlying property that the building 
sits on. They put all sorts of money into building their building, 
which is now free and clear. They worked hard to make sure they could 
pay for it, and now it's a dealership building. And as most Americans 
know who are listening to us speak this evening, if you have a 
dealership building, you can't use it for much else other than a 
dealership. And trust me, there's no one out there right now who's too 
interested in buying an old used dealership building because there's 
not new car dealers going up out there.
  Mr. AKIN. So once again we have another projection of this example of 
Washington thinking they know how to do everything, deciding who's 
going to be the president of General Motors. All of this money that 
belongs to our constituents, we're going to dump this money into 
various companies, and then we're going to try and manage. We can't 
manage D.C. What makes us think we can manage car companies?
  What an example of--and I think there are some other examples of 
what's going on with some of this spending.
  And I see that we're also joined by Congresswoman Lummis from 
Wyoming, I believe. So we've got the West pretty much covered. We've 
got Iowa covered. We're going to have Georgia in just a minute.
  Please join us.
  Mrs. LUMMIS. I thank the gentleman from Missouri for pulling us 
together this evening for this discussion.
  In Wyoming, our economy is very much based in the energy industry 
because we have coal, oil, gas, uranium, wind, solar, biomass, and that 
is the mainstay of our economy by far.

                              {time}  2115

  So as we watch the 350 to 375 very small businesses that are drilling 
for oil and gas and see the legislation that is coming before this 
Congress at the behest of the Democratic Party, it will devastate our 
businesses.
  Mr. AKIN. Reclaiming my time, so you're talking about the tax that 
they're proposing to pay for some of the spending that is that cap-and-
tax situation which is going to devastate small business, and small 
business, of course, is where these jobs are created; is that correct?
  Mrs. LUMMIS. Absolutely. I think the Americans have the perception 
that Big Oil is who is recovering these natural resources; but even 
those firms hire very small, literally mom-and-pop operations, five and 
six employees to go out and drill the drilling, to do some 
environmental compliance, to do the surveying, and to complete those 
wells, and do the fracturing of the deep seams that are required to 
cause the gas to flow into a natural gas well. These are very small 
operators. As I said, in Wyoming alone, over 350 businesses.
  Yet what we see on the horizon taxwise through the national energy 
tax that's being called cap-and-trade would be utterly devastating to 
those businesses.
  Mr. AKIN. Reclaiming my time, what you're doing is making a 
tremendously important connection. And I think a lot of people do get 
that impression that all of the jobs in America are General Motors or 
General Electric or Mobile Oil or whatever it happens to be. But in 
reality, as one of the most ranking members in small business, what you 
find is you define small business as about 500 employees or less. Small 
businesses create almost 80 percent of the new jobs in America.
  So what you're saying is exactly spot on to what all of our data 
shows, and if you're looking at 80 percent of the new jobs and you're 
looking here at an increasing level of unemployment, what you should be 
paying attention to is what are you doing for small business. And what 
you're talking about is we're doing something that we haven't learned 
from history. You're going to slap a great big tax on them to cover up 
all of this spending. And what's going to happen is you're going to dry 
up the potential of those new jobs that could come from small business.
  I appreciate you making that connection.
  And I'm going to just jump over to my good friend from Georgia, a 
medical doctor, but also somebody who has quite a fair amount of 
passion about freedom and about some of these economic issues as well, 
my good friend Dr. Broun from--is it the Atlanta area?
  Mr. BROUN of Georgia. No, sir. I live near Watkinsville, Georgia, 
south of Athens, and I represent northeast Georgia. And I thank the 
gentleman for yielding.
  The chart that you have down there on the floor. If you put the date 
of this week on the next bar, going back to what Mrs. Bachmann was just 
talking about, these dealerships are shutting the doors. Dealerships 
may have 20 employees, they may have 30 or 40 employees. I've met with 
a number of them. There is a dealer in my district in Clayton, Georgia, 
in Rabun County, right up on the North Carolina line, called me this 
week and he got one of those pink slips. He is a customer of the 
automaker, and that's what all of these dealers are, they're actually 
customers. And what is happening is this administration is forcing the 
Big Three automakers to fire their customers, and that makes absolutely 
no economic sense.
  But this dealer doesn't do any floor planning. In other words, he 
doesn't have to borrow money from the automaker to put the cars on his 
lot. He owns them all. He's paid for them all. He owns his dealership. 
He doesn't owe anything to the carmaker. But they

[[Page 14441]]

have fired him. And in doing so, this administration has fired all 
their employees.
  So the next bar for all of these dealerships I think is 780-some-odd 
just this week that are going to be fired--the dealership's going to be 
fired, thus all of their employees are going to be fired. And that's 
going to put that bar even higher. And it's just not right.
  This is an unprecedented takeover from the private sector by this 
administration--by the car czar that has been set up by this 
President--and it is totally unconstitutional, it's totally against 
freedom, it's totally unprecedented. And it's exactly the same thing 
that Hugo Chavez is doing down in Venezuela.
  So if we could imagine that next bar on that graph, it's going to be 
even higher than it is.
  Mr. AKIN. Reclaiming my time, what I'm hearing you say is--you're a 
medical doctor. You're not claiming to be some economic expert. You're 
saying common sense says that this 9.7 percent unemployment that we got 
right now is not the end of this problem and that the idea of the 
tremendous level of spending that we're seeing is not going to help. 
You're agreeing with Henry Morgenthau from 1939 that all of this 
spending is not going to make this any better. And what's more, a lot 
of that spending is going to result in more unemployment rather than 
less.
  Is that the bottom line of what you're getting at?
  Mr. BROUN of Georgia. If the gentleman will yield, absolutely. That's 
what's going to happen. You cannot borrow and spend yourself to 
economic prosperity. And that's what's going on here. We're borrowing 
too much, we're spending too much, taxing too much, and it's going to 
cost jobs.
  I'm sure we'll come back to discussing what the gentlelady from 
Wyoming was talking about because there is somebody else that's going 
to talk a lot of jobs across this country. But we're going down a road 
that is going to hurt our economy. It's going to cost jobs, as we see 
an increasing number of jobs on your chart there that are being lost. 
And unemployment claims, we're going to have more and more of those. 
And it's really taking away from the future of our children and your 
grandchildren.
  Mr. AKIN. That's the bottom line. I think that's what's gotten us 
staying here this evening talking about this subject. This is critical. 
This is a very significant problem.
  I would like to jump back to my friend from Iowa, Congressman King, a 
gentleman who has run his own private business for many years before he 
came to Congress, knows a little bit about small business, knows a 
little bit about taxation and red tape. And he also understands what 
some of these massive government spending programs in the last year, 
what these are liable to do in terms of effects on our economy.
  Mr. KING of Iowa. I thank the gentleman from Missouri. I started 
business in 1975, a capital-intensive business with a negative net 
worth so I had to actually make everything work or it would have 
collapsed around myself. And I remember prior to that looking for a 
job. I applied for a good number of jobs. Worked for other people. They 
worked for me. I had to build a business up a piece at a time, a 
component at a time.
  One of the points that I think would illuminate this when I look at 
the numbers that are there on the chart: $700 billion on the Wall 
Street bailout, $787 billion in the stimulus plan. That was going to--
and I remind everybody here and including Madam Speaker--if she were 
paying attention--I would be reminding her that President Obama said 
that his stimulus plan was going to save or create 3.5 million jobs--
and that was just back a couple of months ago right there on the time 
line where a $787 billion. 3.5 million jobs saved or created. And I 
thought at the time, How do you measure a saved job? It was there when 
you started, it was there when you're done the. It's one that your 
economic plan didn't destroy, but it isn't necessarily one your 
economic plan saved.
  So now we have the White House saying they've saved or created a 
dinky little 100,000-150,000 little jobs when their endeavor is 3.5 
million jobs. And by the way, that number is not out of thin air. That 
is off of the White House's Web site, WhiteHouse.gov/economy. So those 
numbers are real.
  Another image that flashes to my mind when I hear the gentleman from 
Georgia talk about Hugo Chavez, I had a flashback about the visitation 
that took place between our Commander in Chief, leader of the free 
world, President Obama and Hugo Chavez down in Central America. And I 
recall that we needed to have a strong message from the President of 
the United States that would embrace Colombia and ask for a vote on the 
floor of this House as was agreed to under those terms. We didn't get 
that meeting, but we got a glad-handed, big smiley happy face meeting 
between Hugo Chavez and President Obama.
  And I remember the image that flashed in my mind. One of them is Hugo 
Chavez could declare our President to be El Diablo at the podium of the 
United Nations and say, The smell of sulfur still lingers from 
yesterday. And those anti-American people laughed and cashed our 
checks. And just a few months later we have President Obama glad-
handing with Hugo Chavez. And when I saw that image, I realized that 
the great nationalizer of the industries in Venezuela who had just 
nationalized a rice plant that belongs to a good Minnesota company 
named Cargill was standing there smiling next to President Obama who 
was the greatest nationalizer of all, who has since nationalized two of 
the three largest carmakers in the world--General Motors and Chrysler--
and we've watched the nationalization of our financial institutions, 
our insurance industry. The list goes on and on.
  The free market system from top-down is being swallowed up and 
nationalized instead of privatized.
  And I would also make this point that our President today was elected 
at least in part because he challenged President Bush and criticized 
President Bush for going into Iraq without an exit strategy. This 
President has declared that he doesn't want to own or manage Fannie 
Mae, Freddie Mac, the financial institutions, the insurance agencies, 
or the automakers of America. But he has engaged in all of that without 
an exit strategy.
  I call upon President Obama to come up with an exit strategy to 
divest the Federal government and the taxpayers from this private 
sector industry that have been so nationalized that he makes Chavez 
look like a piker.
  And I yield back.
  Mr. AKIN. That's really quite a summary of where we are. What we're 
getting at is this disease that struck the Washington area just one 
year or two ago. It's bailout fever, you know. And we got into this 
idea that we're going to bail everybody out--at least if you're big and 
important. If you're a small business, you're going to go bankrupt. If 
you're a car dealership, you go bankrupt and you lose $15 million in 
one day. But we're going to bail out all of these, and in the process, 
what's going on in unemployment? Is this nationalizing of businesses 
such a good idea? I think there are a lot of people having some very 
extreme second thoughts.
  This was not going to happen if we voted for that great big porkulus 
bill. I'm on the Armed Service Committee. When you say $787 billion, 
that's more than my paycheck. I tried to figure out how much money is 
that. And the biggest thing we deal with in any committee is aircraft 
carriers. These are big things. If you ever get on an aircraft carrier, 
you could play a game of football on the deck of one. They're really 
big, and they cost a ton of money. We have 11 in our total fleet. They 
cost about $3 billion a piece.
  So if you take a look at what happened to us in the first 5 weeks 
after we've been told that President Bush is spending way too much 
money, we put this bill in place--this was the trimmed-down version--on 
this floor we voted for $870-something billion. That would be over 250 
aircraft carriers anchored end-to-end. I couldn't even imagine. You 
could make a highway across them. That's how much money that's in this 
package alone.

[[Page 14442]]

  That's not the Wall Street bailout, and that's not this 
appropriations bill that's full of goods. That's not this international 
monetary bailout that they're talking about doing where we're going to 
take defense money and give it to foreign countries, put it in a fund 
so that Chavez and the Iranians and other people can take defense money 
out of the United States away from our taxpayers so that they can fund 
their governments, and we're talking about doing that. We're wondering 
why in the world do we have this unemployment. I think we're making 
some big mistakes economically.
  I would like to jump back over to my very good friend Congresswoman 
Bachmann who, by the way, is a great articulator of free enterprise 
principles and does a wonderful credit to Minnesota.
  We're delighted that you're here, and please chip in and join in.
  Mrs. BACHMANN. I thank the gentleman from Missouri.
  And I'm very concerned again about these motor takeovers from the 
Federal Government. One thing that I am very concerned about, a story 
came out today where there's been approximately 1,500 letters that have 
gone out to GM dealerships.
  One story that came out today, there is a dealership that I know of 
that applied to their Democrat Senator to appeal for help so that they 
could stay open. That Senator was able to arrange a meeting between the 
dealer and the officials at GM. We all know GM is now Government Motors 
because it's owned by the American people. It's been nationalized. 
There is no private corporations the way we used to think of GM. Now, 
the main stockholder is the American Government. So this Democrat 
Senator who was applied to for help was able to secure a meeting with 
General Motors and a car dealership, and they were able to get their 
dealership back.

                              {time}  2130

  Well, that's great, that's wonderful.
  There is also another article I saw today where a constituent had 
contacted one of the representatives, a Democrat representative here in 
this Chamber, Representative Barney Frank. Barney Frank was able to go 
and talk to the right people and get this dealership back open. Is that 
what we have come to in this country, that rather than a private 
business with a private contract with another private corporation, 
they're no longer able to work out their agreements because, as 
columnist Michael Barone has called, he said, Now we've moved into the 
realm of gangster government. We have gangster government when the 
Federal Government has set up a new cartel and private businesses now 
have to go begging with their hand out to their local--hopefully well 
politically connected--Congressman or their Senator so they can buy a 
peace offering for that local business. Is that the kind of country we 
are going to have in the future?
  When I was on the phone today for over an hour with one of my local 
dealers, the very first thing out of her mouth was this, she said, This 
is the most un-American thing I have ever seen in my life. I can't 
believe that I lived to see the day that my country would come to this 
point where, having my dealership for 90 years, I get a letter FedExed 
to me that tells me I have until Friday to sign this document to not 
only give up my company that was made worthless--worth $15 million, 
made worthless overnight--now GM is demanding that she hand over her 
customer list, her service customer list to GM. Why? GM most likely 
will use those customer lists, they will give it to her former 
competitors. What is she getting for this? What is her remuneration? 
She had the rug pulled out from her and from her husband. They 
virtually lost everything overnight to what? To what Michael Barone 
calls a gangster government.
  We need to call this for what this is, my colleagues. We need to call 
this for what this is. Call it out. The American people need to get 
outraged and figure out that it could be them next. No business is safe 
when you see the administration appoint czars--car czars, wage czars--
there's over 20 czars that have been appointed. And what do those czars 
do? They bypass the Congress. We are the people's elected 
representatives; we have been bypassed.
  We now have an imperial presidency where the President has appointed 
various czars reporting directly to him. And now he is reaching into 
the confines of private businesses and overnight rendering them 
virtually worthless--unless, unless they have a special tug, a 
political tie to a local Democrat Congressman. Is that what we've come 
to? And I yield back.
  Mr. AKIN. Well, I just appreciate the lady's passion and strong 
support for the concept of freedom.
  You know, what we're really talking about here is, what is the job of 
the government? And we have come to a point where we have actually 
elected people who have forgotten this basic concept, and that is, the 
government that can give you anything you want can also take away 
everything from you, including your freedom.
  And that is the great danger of this insidious creeping bureaucracy 
where the Government inserts itself into all kinds of different 
businesses. The Founders would have been outraged at what you've just 
described. And even people from not so many generations before us would 
say, that is impossible, that could never happen in America.
  Mrs. BACHMANN. If the gentleman would yield, the Founders went so far 
as they began a revolution over a stamp tax, over a stamp tax. This is 
the actual outright taking of someone's personal property. And the 
Founders were unwilling to pass the Constitution without the Bill of 
Rights. And as the gentleman knows, the Bill of Rights was to protect 
individuals, people, not to protect government, but to protect people 
from the encroachment of big government upon their leaders. And the 
Fifth Amendment guarantees the right of your personal property. Big 
government cannot come in, they are prohibited from coming in and 
taking your personal property without just compensation. Here is a 
perfect example of violation of these citizens' Fifth Amendment rights.
  Mr. AKIN. You are absolutely right. And we have seen other examples 
of it; the decision in Connecticut where some local municipality 
decided to trample the Fifth Amendment, just walk right in and take 
somebody's private home in order to make a strip mall so they could tax 
the strip mall. And the Supreme Court jumped to the defense of the 
local government saying, that's just fine. And they just ignored the 
Fifth Amendment.
  And so we see this continuously growing government. And if you take a 
look at where we are spending money, it is just absolutely amazing. And 
here is an example. This is a town that is supposedly almost bankrupt--
I think it's Pawtucket, Rhode Island, if I remember right. The city on 
the verge of bankruptcy spends $550,000 in stimulus money for a 
skateboard park. Now, what in the world is the Federal Government doing 
with bicycle racks in D.C. in million-dollar neighborhoods, skateboard 
parks somewhere else. We're putting it all in here and claiming somehow 
it's going to make unemployment better, and yet the numbers are going 
nuts. The President, it seems--what's going on with the White House 
Press Corps? He claims they've just created 150,000 jobs, and yet you 
see the data going, we're already at 9.7 percent.
  And it's my understanding, when you jump to the next big tax we're 
talking about, they want to be like Spain. And Spain has the enviable 
17.5 percent unemployment. Is that where we're going? How long is this 
going to go before the American public says enough already; it's time 
to change this big spending?
  If you want to see this thing graphically, this is a little bit 
chilling. This is historic budget imbalance. These are the different 
years of the Presidents. These years over here are President Bush. And 
those of us here that are Republicans, we didn't like the fact that 
President Bush was spending too much money. This is deficit spending. 
This is a budget imbalance. But take a look. When we were kids, didn't 
you have to go--what was it, first grade, what thing

[[Page 14443]]

doesn't fit the pattern? Take a look at this year. Take a look at this 
budget imbalance that we're talking about. You think that's not going 
to affect jobs? You don't think that means the government is going to 
get its nose into all kinds of people's business? That's what we're 
concerned about.
  I would like to go to my good friend, Congresswoman Lummis from 
Wyoming. You know, the thing I like about Wyoming and the Western 
States? You have a sense of freedom and a little bit of a sense of 
property ownership and you have a sense of small business. And I 
appreciate that perspective. Please join our conversation.
  Mrs. LUMMIS. I thank the gentleman.
  In Wyoming, we have had surpluses in our budget for the last 7 years, 
and it is because of the explosive growth in the production of energy. 
It has made our unemployment among the lowest in the Nation. In fact, 
there were times during the last 7 years that we have had, 
statistically, zero unemployment. Incredible. While I was running for 
this position, I stopped at a fast-food place to get an iced tea late 
at night, and they offered me a job and my daughter a job at this fast-
food place because they are so much in need of employees.
  Wyoming is unique in that regard, and it is because we are producing 
domestic energy. And there are new discoveries of domestic natural gas 
all over the United States. The Balkan in North Dakota is fantastic. It 
is producing wealth for people who have been farming at that very 
narrow margin of profitability, 0 to 4 percent, for years.
  Mr. AKIN. Well, wait just a minute. You're talking about we're 
creating jobs and wealth and all this, and the government is not doing 
it? Oh, my goodness. That's a novel idea; the government is not coming 
in and telling you how to run everything.
  Mrs. LUMMIS. Not only are we producing the cleanest burning 
hydrocarbon that there is, natural gas, but we are doing it in a way 
that makes us less dependent on foreign energy. And what we are seeing 
in this Congress are policies that will actually make us more dependent 
on foreign energy at a time----
  Mr. AKIN. Let me just stop you there because what you said is very, 
very important. You are finding sources of natural gas--one of the 
cleanest burning fuels that we know, in terms of hydrocarbon-type fuels 
anyway--and you are finding that, which is making it so that you have 
plenty of jobs in Wyoming, you are not doing it with a lot of 
government help, and yet the government is going to try to create 
policies to make us more dependent on foreign energy. What would that 
be? I would suppose that one way to do that would be to tax your 
natural gas, because if that's taxed, then the foreigners have a better 
chance of getting business here. Is that where you're going?
  Mrs. LUMMIS. And to the gentleman from Missouri, we are also 
proposing in this Congress to tax drilling costs, to raise the taxes on 
the brackets, to do away with the death tax, to put the recovery of 
natural gas under the Safe Drinking Water Act. Virtually every time I 
turn around, almost every day here, we are doing something that will 
impair our ability to produce our own natural resources.
  And it's not just in Wyoming, there have been these fabulous new 
finds of natural gas that run up both sides of the Appalachian 
Mountains all the way from Pennsylvania clear to the Southern States. 
All of those States could have new natural gas production, the cleanest 
burning hydrocarbon, that reduces our need for foreign energy, that 
reduces the out-migration of jobs, it keeps them here, it grows them 
here. It grows revenue for those States.
  I can tell you, as our State treasurer in Wyoming for 8 years, we 
had, just off interest income off State investments, the largest source 
of income for our State's general fund from one source, interest income 
off State investments. And all of those State investments, every one of 
them, came from severance taxes on oil, gas, coal, uranium.
  Mr. AKIN. Isn't that something? Well, you are an energetic 
Congresswoman from an energetic State. And it's encouraging to hear 
that we do have those supplies of energy here.
  It is ironic, I think, that when you take a look back at the history 
of the Department of Energy, it was created so that America could be 
energy independent. And they have added many, many jobs to the 
Department of Energy, and yet we have become more and more dependent on 
foreign energy. And if we had more people like you in this Congress, I 
think that would change, and we would see that we would be getting back 
to good old American energy of a lot of different types. And we would 
let the marketplace, and not the government, make the choices as to 
which type you are going to use in each State.
  My good friend from Georgia, Congressman Broun.
  Mr. BROUN of Georgia. Congressman Akin, I appreciate you yielding.
  I wanted to come back to something that you said that I think the 
American people need to understand very clearly. The President has 
talked about looking to Spain as being the model of this energy tax--I 
call it tax-and-cap because it's about taxes, it's about revenue for 
the Federal Government, it's about getting more revenue to socialize 
medicine and other things to nationalize, all of the business and 
industry that is already being nationalized, and even more. But in 
Spain, I would like to confirm something. It is my understanding, if 
you would, please, sir, it's my understanding in Spain, when they put 
on their tax-and-cap or cap-and-trade policy a number of years ago, 
they touted it as creating green jobs.
  Mr. AKIN. I think they call them subprime jobs now, but go ahead, 
Congressman.
  Mr. BROUN of Georgia. Well, the point is, they talked about creating 
green jobs. Just recently, one of their--I think it's members of 
Parliament--was over here talking to the Conservative Opportunity 
Society. And he told us--I don't recall if you were there, Mr. Akin, or 
not--but he said for every single green job that was produced in Spain 
they lost 2.2 jobs. The green jobs that were created were temporary 
jobs; the jobs that were lost were permanent jobs, industrial jobs. And 
that's what I kind of recall. Is that correct?
  Mr. AKIN. Reclaiming my time, that was exactly what he said. And 
actually, that made common sense to me because when you go back to this 
Keynesian economic scheme, what they would argue would be, Hey, we just 
took all this tax money and we hired these people; so when we hired 
somebody, we created a job; so, therefore, we had a net. We just hired 
someone to increase the job by one.
  And what the economist found was, when you take that tax money out of 
things, what happens is, when you took the tax money away to hire the 
one person, you lost 2.2 jobs over in the private side. So that ratio 
seems to kind of follow the economic principle that when the Federal 
Government--yes, you can have the Federal Government take a whole lot 
of money and hire a lot of people to dig holes in the ground, or 
whatever, but when you do it by taking that money away from the private 
sector, you are killing those small businesses, which is a source of 
where you're generating a lot of these jobs. So I think that is where 
he was going.
  Mr. BROUN of Georgia. If the gentleman would yield back just a half 
second. I want to go back to the outrage that my dear friend, Michele 
Bachmann from Minnesota, was showing us. The American people should be 
outraged. And the American people can call a stop to this. We can't. 
We, as Republicans, have offered alternative after alternative. Wall 
Street bailout; we offered an alternative, and President Bush, Henry 
Paulson, the leadership in the House and Senate wouldn't accept it. The 
nonstimulus--as you call it porkulus bill; I call it the nonstimulus 
stimulus bill--we offered alternatives. The leadership in this House 
were obstructionists and wouldn't allow us to have an open hearing and 
discuss it.

                              {time}  2145

  The omnibus appropriations, we had alternatives. We have had 
alternatives for all this. They call us the Party of No, n-o, but 
really we are the Party of Know, k-n-o-w, because we know how to help 
stimulate the economy. We

[[Page 14444]]

know how to create jobs, and you do that through small business and 
give the money back in ways to create an environment where small 
business can create jobs. As the gentleman from Missouri so aptly told 
us just a few minutes ago, small businesses is where those jobs are 
created. It's about 85 percent of them. But we have offered alternative 
after alternative. And this what I call ``tax-and-cap'' legislation has 
been estimated it's going to cost America, that somewhere between 1.7 
to 8 million jobs are going to be lost. In my district in northeast 
Georgia, we have got in multiple counties right at 14 percent 
unemployment.
  Mr. AKIN. You're talking about millions of job loss as a result of 
this new tax that's being concocted here.
  I would like to recognize another doctor who has joined us. We have 
got some doctors out tonight, and my good friend Dr. Burgess, I want to 
recognize him. What we have been talking about is this incredible trend 
in unemployment and also the trend of excessive spending.
  I would be happy to have your perspective, Doctor.
  Mr. BURGESS. I thank the gentleman for yielding. I was watching in my 
office and heard this discussion, and I did want to come over and say 
just a few words.
  Of course, you're correct. We had a report in our Joint Economic 
Committee last Friday about the current unemployment rate in excess of 
9 percent. Of course, we spent $878 billion in February of this year. 
The President told us that was what we had to spend in order to prevent 
the unemployment rate from going in excess of 8 percent. Clearly we 
have seen that number already exceeded. And then we heard at the 
beginning of this week that because of those numbers, the President was 
going to accelerate the pace of spending, accelerate the pace of 
distributing the stimulus money. We weren't spending fast enough was 
our problem.
  Now, of course, Mr. Speaker, I know the comments need to be directed 
to the Speaker's chair, but I would remind the Speaker that none of us 
in this room, in fact, no Republican, voted for in favor of that 
stimulus bill last February.
  Mr. AKIN. Reclaiming my time for a moment, in a way that's a little 
bit unusual, isn't it? There are usually a few Democrats who will vote 
differently than their party or a few Republicans who will vote 
differently. In this case, though, on this great big porkulus bill, 
every single Republican voted ``no.''
  Mr. BURGESS. You're absolutely right. Every single one of us did a 
gut check and said this is not what I came to Washington, DC, to do. 
It's not what I came to accomplish.
  One of the things I wanted to share with the gentleman and share with 
the House tonight, my hometown newspaper, the Dallas Morning News, runs 
a column every Sunday by a columnist named Scott Burns, a respected 
economist. Scott Burns this Sunday was quoting an economist in Austin, 
Texas, Lacy Hunt. Lacy Hunt, going back to the Great Depression, said, 
and I am quoting here: ``Irving Fisher saw it first. The man who may 
have been the greatest American economist wrote about the debt-
deflation theory of the Great Depression in 1933. He saw that excess 
debt controls nearly all the economic variables.'' He went on to say: 
``Think about it for a minute. It's a very powerful statement. Excess 
debt controls nearly all of the economic variables.''
  What does that mean? That means we cannot control the unemployment 
rate. That means almost everything is out of our grasp because of the 
massive amount of debt that we have accumulated. And on Monday of this 
week, the President said he wanted to accelerate the pace of spending 
because we weren't getting that money out the door fast enough. Again 
let me reiterate, excess debt controls every other economic variable. 
It was true in 1933. I suspect the same is true today.
  He goes on to say, Scott Burns, ``It means that the government 
stimulus won't do much. Basically you can't borrow your way out of 
excess debt.'' I think every Member on the floor here tonight has 
recognized that at one time or another.
  And then the final point that he made: ``The only thing that will 
allow recovery is the passage of time.''
  Fortunately, Congress is not in control of that, and time will pass 
at a set rate regardless of what we think that it will or won't do.
  Mr. AKIN. Reclaiming my time, I want to get what you're saying 
because I think this is important. You're saying there is a 
relationship between this tremendous level of debt that we are building 
and the unemployment numbers. In other words, when you have a whole lot 
more debt, particularly debt with spending, and, of course, spending is 
causing the debt, you're going to have bad trouble with unemployment. 
Is that what this economist is saying, gentleman?
  Mr. BURGESS. Precisely correct. And I thank the gentleman for 
yielding back.
  We are in a period of prolonged economic underperformance is the 
other statement they go on to make. It will essentially be a lost 
decade. We will recover, but the operative factor will be time and not 
actions. That is something that most people do not want to hear.
  Again, excess debt controls almost every other economic facet. You 
cannot spend your way out of this problem. The unemployment rate went 
up. The correct response is to not shove more money out the door. The 
correct response is do what you can to get control of that spending and 
begin to erode the debt, begin to put the debt on a glide path to 
reduction. That's where the recovery will come, and that will take 
time. There is no other way around that.
  But, again, I thank the gentleman for yielding. I think this is a 
wonderful discussion that you've had tonight. I thank you for bringing 
this to the attention of the American people.
  Mr. AKIN. I appreciate the doctor from Texas bringing some wisdom 
here and some economic common sense. And certainly I think most people 
know intuitively these things are connected. If you spend a whole lot, 
eventually you're going to go into debt and then the debt is going to 
influence things. And in this case, I am an engineer by training, not a 
medical doctor, but it's almost like drawing a vacuum economically in 
the economy. So those small businesses that we are just hearing about 
like out in Wyoming, those small businesses don't have the money they 
need to invest to drill a well or whatever it is; so the main engine of 
job creation just dries up. So what you are doing is almost like either 
starving or dehydrating your economy because the government is just 
becoming so oppressive and expansive in everything that it is trying to 
do. And as we heard eloquently expressed from the gentlewoman from 
Minnesota, the story about what happens when the Federal Government 
starts to get into the business of running car things. I am picturing 
there is going to be somebody possibly listening into our discussion 
that's going to be a cartoonist, and they are going to think about the 
automobile that is going to be designed by the U.S. Congress, and they 
are going to have an interesting caricature of what the engine and the 
wheels look like and how big it is and all kinds of things. There is 
probably already a YouTube being created or something along those 
lines. But it's not a pretty picture of having the Federal Government 
running our business in our private sector. And the genius of our 
country is to make that distinction, and we are blurring it badly and 
it's going to cause a lot of trouble.
  I am going to yield to my good friend Congressman King from Iowa. 
Please join us.
  Mr. KING of Iowa. I thank the gentleman from Missouri for yielding.
  There are a couple of points that linger in my mind. One of them is 
to add to the points that the gentlemen from Georgia and Missouri were 
making about Spain, and I concur. For every green job created, it cost 
2.2 jobs in the private sector because it starved capital, but also 
each of those green jobs created cost $770,000 to generate that job. So 
it was a massive cost in capital.
  I want to throw another point into this in a brief way, a teaser in a 
way.

[[Page 14445]]

The cap-and-trade component of this legislation that's impending to be 
driven through this House floor yet this month of June, we have 
experience with that here in the House of Representatives. When Speaker 
Pelosi was elected and received the gavel, she declared that this 
Capitol complex would be carbon neutral. So she ordered that the 
generating plant that provides the electricity that illuminates this 
room when she allows the lights to be on would be changed from coal 
generation over to natural gas under the auspices of this idea that 
natural gas isn't a hydrocarbon, which we know can't be upheld by an 
engineer or a doctor or a layperson. But in any case, she ordered the 
switch over to natural gas, doubled the cost of the electricity, and 
still found out we were not carbon neutral but we're still emitting a 
surplus of CO2 into the atmosphere, so went on the Board of 
Trade and purchased $89,000 worth of carbon credits, the very central 
commodity that is at the middle of the cap-and-trade discussion that's 
going to be presented on the floor of this House, $89,000 for carbon 
credits to offset the CO2 emissions that are going off into 
the atmosphere so we can light this Capitol complex. And I chased that 
back down and found out that some of that money went to no-till farmers 
in South Dakota. Presumably they had still been farming in South 
Dakota. It didn't change their behavior. And some of that money also 
went to a coal-fired generating plant at Chillicothe, Iowa, that had 
received a government grant to burn switchgrass. I went there and 
looked at that. They hadn't burned any switchgrass in 2 years and got a 
check anyway. That's how cap-and-trade will work in the United States 
of America. If we can't get it right in Congress, we are not going to 
get it right in America.
  Mr. AKIN. I appreciate that vivid example of more wasted time. I am 
going to yield again to my good friend Congresswoman Bachmann from 
Minnesota.
  Mrs. BACHMANN. Last weekend my family sat down and we were watching 
the commercial movie ``Titanic.'' And as I was listening to Dr. Burgess 
from Texas talk about the debt and the burgeoning debt load that the 
United States takes, once the ice gash came in the side of the Titanic, 
which we all remember was called the ``unsinkable Titanic,'' we think 
of the United States. Nothing can possibly sink the United States. We 
will always be a superpower. But one thing that has kept us a 
superpower has been freedom, free market economists. We are in the 
process of watching the deconstruction of free market economists before 
our very eyes, something we have never seen. But as the ice ripped that 
hole in the Titanic, water started being taken on, and the engineer 
came out and brought the blueprint of the Titanic. Water came into the 
first chamber, spilled over to the second, spilled over to the third, 
and by the time it filled up so many chambers, it was over. It was 
impossible to resurrect that ship.
  That's, I think, Mr. Akin, what you have been bringing before this 
body this evening. You've been showing to the American people that at a 
certain point when we have such excessive levels of spending that in 
turn leads to such excessive level of taxation that in turn leads us to 
excessive levels of borrowing that at a certain point we wonder what 
that tipping point will be if the United States will not be able to 
recover.
  We do have an alternative, as Dr. Broun said. We have a positive 
alternative that next quarter we could already see growth in our 
economy. But this plan that President Obama has put forward is the kind 
of plan that we could watch last night, or last weekend on TNT in the 
movie ``Titanic.'' If we follow that plan that President Obama has put 
before us, we know what that outcome will be and a lot of very innocent 
people may go down with that ship.
  Mr. AKIN. I very much thank Congresswoman Bachmann and the other 
great guests that we have had tonight. I thank you for this little 
symposium on freedom and the need to have the Federal Government 
restrained to its proper limits.

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