[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 155 (2009), Part 14]
[House]
[Pages 18531-18532]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                         THE PRESIDENT PROMISED

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the 
gentleman from Indiana (Mr. Burton) is recognized for 5 minutes.
  Mr. BURTON of Indiana. Mr. Speaker, the President over the past few 
days has been telling the American people, Trust me. This health care 
plan we're talking about is going to be a great thing for America. It's 
not going to cost Americans a lot of money. It's going to provide 
better quality of care, and nobody will be left out.
  So I decided to go through what the President has promised on other 
occasions just to see if he deviates from his plans when it's more 
convenient for him. For instance, let's just go through some of the 
things he has promised.
  He said Americans and the Members of Congress would get 5 days to 
read bills that were going to affect the American people. We've had 
bills that we didn't get until 3 a.m. in the morning that were 1,100-
pages long, and we had to vote on them that very same day. There's no 
way to read 1,100 pages of legalese and have them understood in just a 
few hours.
  He said no lobbyists would be in his administration. There are 
lobbyists, a number of them, in his administration. He said no taxes on 
those making under $250,000. That's not true. We've already levied 
taxes on people making under $250,000.
  He said no earmarks and no pork-barrel projects. In the omnibus 
spending bill which he signed recently, there were 8,000 pork-barrel 
projects in that bill. He said there was going to be openness in the 
health care debate. There has been not a great deal of openness, and a 
lot of it has been conducted behind closed doors. He said the people 
were going to see almost every aspect of it because he was going to 
have roundtable discussions throughout the entire debate.

                              {time}  2000

  He said he was going to cull spending and there would be no new taxes 
on people under $250,000. This is the highest amount of spending since 
World War II. There's been $1.4 trillion in new taxes. He said he was 
going to cut each budget of each cabinet by a hundred million dollars. 
That has not yet been accomplished. He said he was going to try to 
block and oversee the problems with the TARP plan, that $700 billion. 
He said there would be no Big Government, but there's been a takeover 
of the auto industry, the financial industry, the energy industry, the 
health care industry, and it's the largest budget in history that he 
proposes.
  He said that he would allow people to withdraw from their 401(k) 
accounts without any penalty if they were unemployed and having a 
difficult time. That was not in the stimulus bill. He said there would 
be a $3,000 tax credit for every person hired by business. That was not 
in the stimulus bill.
  And then, of course, we come to the health care plan. He said this 
plan is going to be very good for America, and

[[Page 18532]]

I want all of my colleagues to take a good look at this plan of the 
Democrats' health care proposal which the President supports. All of 
the white spots are new agencies that are going to be making 
determinations about people's health care. It looks more like a roadmap 
that's been messed up. You can't figure it out. You have to go from 
here over to there to get health care, and it's going to cost a great 
deal of money.
  In fact, the plan is supposed to cost, we believe, between 1 and 3 
trillion dollars, that's 1 and 3 trillion dollars that we don't have 
that's going to have to be raised through tax increases and fees, and 
this is going to be part of it. They're going to end up taxing 
everybody for this health care plan.
  And finally, this is going to result in about 4.7 million jobs lost, 
because when small business in America has to pay for this 
conglomeration of health care, they're going to have to cut back on 
employment of their employees, and a lot of those jobs will probably go 
overseas.
  This is a terrible thing for America right now. And the reason I 
bring all of the things up that the President has promised, he's 
promising the American people a very good health plan. Trust him, 
everything is going to be fine. There is nothing to worry about. And 
yet it's going to cost so much money, it's going to cost rationing of 
health care, and it's going to cost everybody in this country and the 
future generations a great deal of money that we don't have. And I 
think that is a heck of a legacy to leave to our young children and our 
posterity.
  I want to end by reading what was in the Wall Street Journal on the 
front page: Congress' chief budget scorekeeper casts a new cloud over 
Democrats' efforts to overhaul the Nation's health care system, telling 
lawmakers Thursday that the main proposals being considered would fail 
to contain costs.
  They say it will, but this article and this man says it will not. It 
will not contain costs, one of the primary goals, and could actually 
worsen the problem of radically escalating medical spending.
  I hope everybody in the House is paying attention to this.

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