[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 155 (2009), Part 13]
[House]
[Pages 17317-17318]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                   ARE WE REDISTRIBUTING THE WEALTH?

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the 
gentleman from South Carolina (Mr. Inglis) is recognized for 5 minutes.
  Mr. INGLIS. Today, the Obama administration has floated an idea that 
really is rather shocking and is quite different than what I thought we 
were going to do with the TARP money that's coming back to us. In fact, 
last week I had two town meetings where I talked to folks in South 
Carolina's Fourth District about how it is that the $350 billion of 
TARP I is now coming back to us, the taxpayers of the United States. In 
fact, $70 billion has been repaid.
  We're earning interest ranging from 5 to 9 percent on that. And the 
last reports we had, it's totaling $4.5 billion that's paid back to us 
in interest. So you have the principal return of about $70 billion. We 
have interest coming back to us in the form of the magnitude of 
somewhere around $4.5 billion.
  Today's story indicates that really it's a larger amount of interest; 
it's $6.5 billion.
  Now, what the Obama administration is talking about doing--and this 
truly is shocking, Mr. Speaker--is that that money would not come back 
to pay down the deficit from whence cometh the $350 billion that we 
spent on TARP but, rather, they would divert this money to troubled 
homeowners.
  There are two problems with this, Mr. Speaker. One is a real 
constitutional question, which is: What gives? The administration gets 
to decide, not Congress. The administration gets to decide, the 
Executive gets to decide about how to redistribute this money so that 
they can basically take it and use it for the Treasury purposes to do 
something else besides pay back to the deficit or pay back to the 
Federal Treasury? I don't think so, Mr. Speaker. It's a constitutional 
problem with that. That's the first objection.
  The second is: Is this administration absolutely intent on 
redistributing wealth? Isn't that what they're doing here? This money 
is America's money that we invested in trying to save our banking 
system from collapse, putting $350 million in TARP I into this effort 
to stop the collapse of our banking system.
  When that money is paid back, it should come to all of us, all 
American taxpayers. We invested it; we should get it back. This is what 
I was telling in town meetings last week is that we're going to get 
this money back. And we've got a shot at getting back TARP I, maybe 
even at a profit.
  But now the Obama administration is talking about redistributing that 
money, not giving it back to all the taxpayers; rather, doting on 
constituencies that they find favorable or that they are favorable to. 
So they pick up on a sympathetic case, which is maybe troubled 
homeowners, and they decide that we'll just slough the money to them 
rather than pay it back to the Treasury and have it enjoyed by all the 
taxpayers who invested the $350 billion to the banking system.

[[Page 17318]]

  So I ask you, Mr. Speaker and Members of the House, there's a 
constitutional objection here that we really should be concerned about 
as a Congress, and then there's this real question about how far will 
this administration go in attempting to redistribute wealth.
  This money belongs to all of the American people. This money we 
pledged together to try to rescue the banking system. As it comes back, 
paid back to us, it should be paid back to all of us, not just to 
troubled homeowners, not just to sympathetic cases but, rather, to all 
American taxpayers.
  So I urge my colleagues to join with me in watching the 
constitutional question here and watching the redistribution of wealth, 
which we must object to, Mr. Speaker.

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