[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 155 (2009), Part 5]
[House]
[Pages 6774-6781]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                        OUT-OF-CONTROL SPENDING

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of 
January 6, 2009, the gentlewoman from Minnesota (Mrs. Bachmann) is 
recognized for 60 minutes as the designee of the minority leader.
  Mrs. BACHMANN. Madam Speaker, I appreciate this opportunity to be 
able to speak this afternoon to the American people about something 
that has been on all of their minds for the last 5 months, and that is 
spending, the out-of-control spending that they see occurring here in 
their Nation's Capital. And they are worried. They are worried, Madam 
Speaker, about what they are seeing.
  And there is an old adage that we have heard as a precursor to a 
joke. Since we have been children, we have heard the adage that asks a 
simple question: What comes first, the chicken or the egg? And we ask 
that question in public policy: What comes first, spending or taxes? 
And clearly, spending is the precursor to taxes. And what we have seen 
the Obama administration and the Democrats who currently control both 
the House and the Senate embrace is a new initiative never seen before 
in the history of our country, a level of spending that is 
unprecedented.
  Joining me now in this hour that we have to speak to the American 
people is one of our new freshmen. His name is Mr. Jason Chaffetz. And 
he hails from Utah's Third Congressional District. We are very excited 
to have him join us and to have him speak now to this body and to the 
American people on spending and what that means for our economy. Mr. 
Chaffetz, I yield.
  Mr. CHAFFETZ. I thank the gentlewoman. It is a pleasure and honor to 
serve in the United States Congress. I'm a freshman here. I didn't 
create this problem, but I am here to help clean it up. I argued for a 
long time that the Republican spending was far too egregious, that we 
were spending far too much money and continued to propel ourselves into 
debt that was unsustainable and unacceptable in my opinion.
  It is funny, though, that as I hear the Democrats argue that while 
there was all this out-of-control spending when the Republicans were in 
charge, that somehow that has changed, that somehow deficit spending 
has changed. It has not. It is partly what got us into this problem.
  We, on an average day, have added $2.8 billion to our national debt 
since January of 2007. That doesn't count the stimulus. That doesn't 
count the bailout. That doesn't count any of these nearly $2 trillion, 
trillion, of additional spending that we have seen this Congress all 
too often just quickly go off and give away.
  We cannot run this government on a credit card. Our families can't do 
that. My family can't do that. The American people can't do that. This 
Federal Government has got to stop doing that. We don't have a revenue 
problem in this country for our Federal Government. We do have a 
spending problem. We have a huge spending problem.
  I remember when I was in college, not too long ago, but it was a 
while ago, and I had my monthly stipend for the month. And at about 
week 3, I ran out of money. And I thought I will just call mom and dad 
and they will just send me the money. So I called up and talked to my 
mom. And she said, no, I'm sorry, you're going to have to figure it 
out. And my dad, whom I really didn't want to call, said, you had your 
allowance, you have got to learn to live within it. It is one of the 
most valuable lessons that I ever learned. I learned more about Top 
Ramen noodles than anyone in this country in that week. And it was a 
good thing. It was a healthy thing. It made me reprioritize what was 
important. And it made me think through what was a priority in my life, 
that I couldn't just go on the credit card and continue to spend more 
money.
  The primary reason I ran for the United States Congress is because I 
care about the future and because we are on a trajectory that is 
unsustainable. Until we return to those core principles of fiscal 
discipline, limited government, accountability and a strong national 
defense, we will continue to suffer as a Nation. And right at the top, 
right at the top of that list is fiscal discipline. Because there are 
things, there are roles and responsibilities that our government has to 
execute on. And we can all point to failures. We can all point to 
successes. But fundamentally, the spending in this Congress, the 
spending that is proposed by the Obama administration, is simply 
unacceptable.

[[Page 6775]]

  We cannot be all things to all people. And my concern is that the 
rhetoric is not matching the reality. I sat right here at in this 
Chamber, row 7, thrilled and honored to watch the President of the 
United States address the joint session of Congress. He asked in that 
session that we present appropriation bills free of earmarks. And yet 
the very next day, it hadn't even been 24 hours, the House of 
Representatives passed a bill with more than 8,500 earmarks. I'm proud 
to say I voted ``no'' on that. There was a presentation that said that 
they wanted more openness, that we wanted more transparency, that we 
were going to get 5 days to review a bill online, that the American 
people would get to see what is in these bills, and that we as a body 
here in the House of Representatives would have 48 hours, 48 hours, to 
be able to see what is in a bill before we voted on it. It unanimously 
passed this body in a resolution. And yet just over 12 hours later, we 
got the single largest spending bill in the history of the United 
States. It was more than 1,000 pages. We had just over 12 hours.
  That is not openness. That is not transparency. And the consequence 
is this out-of-control spending. It was $1 trillion, a number so big it 
is not even fathomable. And now we look and we hear people say, well, 
95 percent of Americans are not going to pay one dime more in taxes. 
That is not true. It is not true. American people, I hope you digest 
this, it is not true.
  The so-called carbon tax, or the cap-and-trade, is a tax that will be 
paid by 100 percent of Americans, 100 percent of Americans. If you 
consume or use any form of energy, you're going to have to pay this 
tax. Now, I want to take care of the environment. I care about the 
environment. But this is simply not the time and the way to do it. And 
if you look at this chart here, what is sickening to me and our future 
is what is going to happen with our debt. Based on the President's 
presentation, based on the spending plan that he has put together, 
based on the President's budget, we are going to double, double, our 
national debt to $20 trillion. Somebody has to pay that. It is the 
American people that are going to pay that, my kids and their 
grandkids. We have got to cut the size and scope of government. We 
cannot be all things to all people.
  Somehow, some way, we have got to find a way to be disciplined enough 
to say, enough is enough. Let's prioritize those things that are most 
important that we have to do to protect and take care of the American 
people. But we cannot continue this out-of-control spending.
  Just over 10 years ago, our Federal budget was $1.5 trillion. Now we 
are over $3 trillion on our way to $4 trillion. And that doesn't count 
the bailouts, the stimulus and the others who are already beating the 
drum saying, we need more. No, you don't. We need to cut spending and 
cut back the size and scope of government, because in my opinion this 
government right now is spending too much, the administration is taxing 
too much, and this administration is absolutely borrowing too much 
money.

                              {time}  1530

  Mrs. BACHMANN. I thank Representative Chaffetz from Utah's Third 
Congressional District, and what an honor to serve with you. What an 
honor to know that we have freshmen who have learned the true lessons 
of life, that you live on Ramon noodles rather than get money from mom 
and dad. That's where it all comes from. Our country is well served 
from having his representation.
  Spending is the issue that we need to address right now. It comes 
down to a philosophical claim and a philosophical shift. That may not 
seem like much, but we are here debating ideas on the floor of the 
House of Representatives. And there is a big idea that we are grappling 
with right now: where are the answers to the problems that lie before 
our Nation? Where are those answers? Who is the best person to solve 
those problems?
  What we have seen in just the last 50 days is a decided shift, a 
transformational shift, a groundbreaking shift from the way America has 
previously done business, and it says this. It says that there is a 
real belief that the genius of America lies in government, and that it 
lies in Washington, D.C., and that it lies with the Federal Government 
making more and more decisions over the personal areas of our lives. 
And that the Federal Government is far wiser with our money than the 
individual is with their own money, or that a private business is with 
their money, or a local community is with their money.
  These are troubling times to be sure, but is the answer to be found 
in a larger government that comes about through greater levels of 
spending? Well, that is not what a Harvard study found back in about 
2002. Researchers from Harvard made an exhaustive study, one of the 
largest of its kind done over a series of years. This is what they 
studied. They studied over 18 different economies across the world. Of 
course not all of them are free market-based economies like America's 
economy. It was the whole gamut of economies across the world, and they 
asked a very simple question and one that would be prudent for us to 
look at now as we are engaging in this economic debate, and it is this: 
What are the courses of action that causes an economy to climb and to 
grow and to find prosperity? Just exactly what we are trying to find 
now here in the midst as we grapple with these very real problems. What 
is the way out? And conversely, what is not the way out? What causes 
economies to contract, to fail, to have hyperinflation ensue, to see a 
misery index go up? What is that policy? And this is the result. I 
think for the common sense quotient that makes up most Americans today, 
the answer is not real startling.
  This Harvard study from 2002 that looked at 18 different economies 
said this: When nations have contracted their spending, when they have 
brought their spending under control and reduced their spending, when 
they have lowered the amount of spending that they pay for government 
wages so they aren't increasing government public wages, in fact they 
are lowering government wages, and when those same economies cut taxes 
for the people of the government, then you see the economies turnaround 
and you see the economies thrive and you see the economies grow.
  The study also found just the converse. It found that where nations 
decided that the answer to the economic problem would be to grow 
spending, in fact dramatically increase spending, to increase wages for 
public employees in the government sector, where taxes would be 
increased on the people and burdens would be heaped up on both 
businesses and on private individuals, again the common sense quotient 
that makes up the great majority of American people won't be surprised 
by the results from this Harvard study.
  These are the results: the results are when governments decide to 
dramatically increase spending, as the current Obama administration and 
the current Democrat-controlled Congress is about to engage in and in 
fact have engaged in, then government economies at that point fall into 
a spiral. It becomes negative, the revenue that comes in, and there is 
not growth out of the economy.
  That only makes sense because where do governments have to go to 
finance what they have to do. There is one place that they have to go, 
and that is in my pocket and in the pocket of the American consumer and 
that is in the pocket of private industry.
  Now there are some nations that don't allow for private industry. 
They have government-controlled economies. We have seen that in the 
living laboratory of the last 100 years of history across the world. We 
have seen the engine, the greatest engine of prosperity known to man 
through the annals of history which would be the United States free 
market capitalist-based system.
  You look at the dramatic growth and increase of standard of living, 
opportunity and freedom, it has occurred on America's watch from 1900 
to the year 2000. You saw dramatic growth and wealth creation like we 
have never seen before in the history of the world.

[[Page 6776]]

  In fact, up until about 2006, we saw the greatest wealth enhancement 
in recent times. Under six of the eight years of President Bush, we saw 
some of the greatest increases in private wealth enhancement than we 
had ever seen in all of history. How did that happen? How did that 
occur? Well, it didn't occur because of dramatic increases in 
government spending. Where it occurred was the genius of private wealth 
creation. That is what America has given to our people. We have given 
the genius of freedom which in turn has given us the genius of 
prosperity and the genius of private wealth creation. It is what I wish 
for my parents. It is what I wish for my children. It is what I wish 
for my neighbors, that they would have private wealth sufficient to be 
able to satisfy not only themselves, but so that they can give out of 
their bounty to others. And that is what we have seen occur in this 
country, and the genius of wealth creation in private hands that has 
led to some of the greatest levels of compassion and of charitable 
giving that we have ever seen in the history of our country.
  But what has been the response of the Obama administration? President 
Obama in his State of the Union address stood in this Chamber 
addressing this body as well as the United States Senate and the 
American public. And he said very simply and unashamedly, he planned to 
cut the deduction that Americans can take for charitable giving.
  Now I don't know about you, but I think it is very good, Madam 
Speaker, to encourage Americans to give more money to the charity of 
their choice. Whether it is their local church, and local churches and 
religious groups were the groups which began America's hospital system. 
In every community across the United States, we boast wonderful 
hospitals--Presbyterian hospitals, Lutheran hospitals, Catholic 
hospitals, Baptist hospitals. Denominations saw to it that in their 
local communities, they weren't just meeting the needs of their 
parishioners only--only of Catholics, only of Presbyterians, only of 
Lutherans--they saw as Christ reached out to the infirm with his own 
hand, that they wanted to reach out in a charitable context and reach 
the needs of people beyond their own denominational doors, reach out to 
literally give a glass of cold water to those who were infirm, and meet 
the health care needs of those in their community.
  I worry, Madam Speaker, I fear, Madam Speaker, that as President 
Obama is seeking to cap the gift giving that Americans will now be able 
to do to their local churches, to their local hospitals, to their local 
charitable institutions, that we will see these great givers of gifts, 
local charities, dry up. Why, because the Federal Government, the 
philosophical direction that President Obama has taken is that he 
believes the Federal Government can do a far better job spending your 
money than the American people can spending their own money. Madam 
Speaker, I beg to differ. No one spends their money better than the 
individual, and no one needs their money more right now than the 
individual. No single mother needs their money more right now than that 
single mother who may have three kids, who may have four kids.
  I know personally in my own life when my mother found herself a 
single mother after a divorce that left her with four children, she had 
to take a low-paying job because she was determined that her children 
would be fed, sheltered and clothed. There wasn't much money available. 
We went immediately overnight from being middle class to being below 
poverty. But I had a mother who was determined that her children would 
have shelter. We didn't have a home any longer in the suburbs. That had 
to be sold. But we had an apartment, we had somewhere to live, and my 
mother made sure that she worked. And I began at about age 12 getting 
baby-sitting jobs. My brothers got newspaper routes. We did what 
families are doing today. They are doing whatever it takes so they can 
survive so their children can have a meal tonight when they come home 
from school. They are doing whatever they can.
  So, Madam Speaker, it strikes me as cruel that a philosophical 
decision has been made by the Obama administration and by the Democrat 
leadership that runs both the House and the Senate now in Washington, 
D.C., every lever of power today is controlled by the Democrat 
majority, and that decision has been made. Clearly it has been made 
affirmatively, and it has been made time and time again in the last 50 
days of this administration. And it has been that we need to spend more 
money which in turn will mean the poor American people will have to be 
taxed almost into poverty to pay for this profligate spending.
  Madam Speaker, I would ask: what is this emergency spending that the 
President believes must be done to save the economy? And I think, Madam 
Speaker, that it would sicken the American people if they knew what 
some of these spending projects are. Here are some among them. My 
colleague, Representative Jason Chaffetz of the Third Congressional 
District of Utah talked a little bit about the stimulus bill that is 
costing the American taxpayers well over a trillion dollars with debt 
service.
  We received that bill and had only limited hours to be able to debate 
and vote on that bill. But the nasty little secret, Madam Speaker, that 
the American people are sadly learning is that not one Member of 
Congress was given an opportunity to read this bill before we were 
asked to vote on the highest spending bill that has ever come before 
this body. Ever in the history of man, no one has ever spent in one 
fell swoop a trillion dollars before in a spending measure. And the 
Members of this body, the people's representatives, weren't even given 
the courtesy of reading this bill which broke every promise that was 
made to the American people during the course of the last election.
  On the campaign trail, we heard over and over again from then-Senator 
Obama that he wished to give the American people 5 days to read these 
bills online so the people's representatives would have time to read 
these bills before we vote on them. He wanted to ensure complete 
transparency, complete openness. We cheered President Obama when we 
heard that, and we are sadly disappointed that President Obama has 
chosen, together with the Democrat leadership that runs Congress, that 
they did not want, that they were so ashamed, could it be, of the 
stimulus bill, we don't know what their motives were, we don't know. 
But what would lead them to keep this bill in hiding?
  As a matter of fact, there isn't one Republican word in the trillion-
dollar spending bill, not one word of bipartisan support. There were 
some offers of bipartisanship that we heard in the press, but no real 
extending of the hand to the American people to have true bipartisan 
intervention in this bill.
  As a matter of fact, President Obama came over to meet with the 
Republicans, and we were so delighted. When President Obama came over 
to the Capitol, the Republicans in the House came together. We welcomed 
President Obama. When he came in our closed-door meeting, we prayed for 
our President and we promised him that we will pray for him at every 
meeting and that we will also have an open door to him. We have an 
eternal olive branch held out to President Obama because we want to be 
able to work with him. However, what we saw was that olive branch was 
not extended to the House Republicans.

                              {time}  1545

  We were not invited to those negotiations. As a matter of fact, the 
ranking member, the House Republican, lead member on the House Ways and 
Means Committee--and that would be Ranking Member U.S. Representative 
Dave Camp from the great State of Michigan--he said he was walking to 
the rotunda, and never in his career here in Congress has this ever 
happened to him. He walked past Senator Harry Reid, who was at a 
microphone announcing that a deal had already been struck in 
negotiations on the stimulus bill. Where was Representative Camp going? 
He was going to attend the conference committee that was supposed

[[Page 6777]]

to come up with the agreement on the stimulus bill. Representative 
Camp, the Republican, hadn't even yet made it into the conference 
committee meeting and Senator Harry Reid was already at the microphone 
announcing that an agreement had been made.
  The Republicans had been had. But what was worse, Madam Speaker, the 
American people had been had because there was no bipartisan agreement. 
We questioned President Obama. One of our Members, Representative 
Roscoe Bartlett from the State of Maryland, said, Mr. President, I have 
lived through the Great Depression, I have seen it. What evidence do 
you have that this radical spending and radical government intervention 
into a troubled economy will be able to pull our economy out of these 
current doldrums? Because it's never occurred before in the history of 
America where radical spending has literally brought us back to 
American prosperity. Prosperity does not follow spending. Prosperity 
follows the belt tightening that government has to do so the American 
people have more of their own money to spend.
  When our Member, Representative Bartlett, asked this question of the 
President, here was the President's response; he said, I disagree with 
your premise. He said, I believe that the problem with President 
Roosevelt is that he failed to spend too much in the 1930s. I, for one, 
was incredulous, Madam Speaker, when I heard President Obama say that 
he believed that President Roosevelt failed to spend too much to bring 
the economy out of the doldrums. That was amazing. No President has 
ever intervened more, has ever spent more. In fact, many historians 
agree that what was a recession that President Roosevelt inherited 
turned into a Great Depression. And we don't want to see that happen 
again for the sake of our children, for the sake of the United States 
economy.
  And then the question was asked about taxes to our President. He was 
asked about the massive tax increases that will surely result as night 
follows day from all these dramatic spending increases. And President 
Obama said simply this--he was attempting to be humorous, and he said, 
Well, I live down the street in a very nice house, Pennsylvania Avenue, 
1600. I really like it there. And he said, I don't have a lot of 
expenses and I don't pay property taxes; I can afford to pay a little 
more. And again, I was incredulous by that statement. It almost 
reminded me of Marie Antoinette when she said, ``Let them eat cake,'' 
meaning that the rest of us aren't living in public housing, the rest 
of us are struggling with the day-to-day expenses that we deal with. We 
are all in need of as much money as we can keep in our own hands, not 
sending it on to the Federal Government.
  We have joining us in the Chamber right now another representative 
from the great State of Missouri. His name is Todd Akin. And Todd Akin 
has long been a champion against dramatic increases in government 
spending. He has long called on this body to get its house in order. 
And I will now yield to the gentleman from Missouri.
  Mr. AKIN. Well, thank you, gentlelady. It's a treat to be able to 
join you this afternoon on the topic that I think arrests the attention 
of Americans everywhere, the state of our economy, and what should and 
could the government be doing about it?
  If we just back up a small amount and try to frame the question, we 
go back to a time, a number of years ago, when there were created these 
Freddie and Fannie quasi corporate entities. And what happened was, 
under President Clinton what happened was that they decided they were 
going to increase the number of loans that were going to be made to 
people who couldn't afford to pay their loans--which is a little bit of 
a risky thing. And so we created these entities and we issued a whole 
bunch of loans to people.
  And while the real estate market was doing well, it looked okay on 
the surface. And then, as everybody knows, what happened was the real 
estate bubble popped, and now all of a sudden you have this socialistic 
kind of policy that was implemented by the Democrats that was 
supposedly to help people with loans, and now the whole thing is 
collapsing and people say, well, this is a failure of free enterprise. 
It's not. It's a failure of another one of these government programs 
that's trying to take two plus two and get eight out of it. So that's 
essentially what happened.
  If you want to take a look at the New York Times, you can look at 
September 11, 2003. And you can see what happened in 2003, and that was 
the President, President Bush at that time, was saying, hey, we've got 
problems with Freddie and Fannie, you've got to give me authority to 
regulate these guys. And a Member of the House here, Congressman Frank, 
said there's no trouble with Freddie and Fannie. A couple of years 
later it turned out he was radically wrong, and now the whole world is 
in an economic tailspin because we had these loan programs. Well, 
that's where we are.
  So the question then becomes, what should we do? Well, obviously we 
shouldn't keep making loans to people who can't afford to pay them. But 
the other thing that you know in a recession is this; you don't want 
the government spending too much money. Well, why would that be? Well, 
because there is an effect that goes on. When the government spends too 
much money, it's like a big vacuum, it sucks that liquidity out of the 
regular private sector. And the private sector are the very ones that 
have to fix the problem.
  To get the economy going, you've got to get the private sector going. 
The government can do anything it wants, it can do handsprings and all 
this sort of stuff, but the government makes no wealth whatsoever, all 
it does is spend wealth. It can print money, it can tax people, it can 
spend money, but it doesn't create prosperity, it doesn't create 
efficiencies. It simply can hamper the process.
  So what's going on here? You've got two basic theories about what you 
do in a recession. One of them was started by FDR. And he had a guy, 
this fellow here that I have a quote, his name was Morgenthau. 
Morgenthau was Secretary of Treasury under FDR--and this is the first 
theory of what to do. And Morgenthau's idea was, we're going to spend a 
whole lot of money to stimulate the economy, and that will make 
everything better--because we're starting to enter into a recession 
back in the 1930s. And so Morgenthau, along with this Little Lord 
Keynes--who was a little weird--came up with this idea that they were 
going to spend a whole lot of money. And so they did it. And here at 
1939, after he's done this for 8 years, Morgenthau meets with the Ways 
and Means Committee, and he takes a look and says, we've tried spending 
money. We've spent more than we've ever spent before, and it doesn't 
work. I say after 8 years of the administration, we have just as much 
unemployment as when we started, and enormous debt to boot. So that's 
one theory. The theory is--and this is one that the liberals have 
always liked because they love to spend money--is if you spend enough 
money, you can get out of trouble.
  It's a little bit like if I were to tell those of you here today, 
reach down, grab your shoe laces and lift hard and fly around the House 
Chamber. That's what this is like doing. And, you know, there isn't 
hardly an American family I can think of that's dumb enough to support 
this idea, and Morgenthau finally figured it out in 1939. There's not 
an American family that would say, when you're in economic trouble, go 
buy a brand new car, spend money like mad because maybe things will be 
better the next day. We just know intuitively, when you get in trouble, 
you've got to hunker down a little bit. That's what you do in Missouri, 
you've got to hunker down and use a little common sense. So this theory 
doesn't work.
  Now, what's the other approach? What do you do when you have a 
recession? Can the government do anything? Well, it can. What it should 
be doing is not spending so much money, which is the topic of the 
congresswoman's discussion this afternoon. We're doing the wrong thing, 
we're spending too much money. The reason that that doesn't work is it 
pulls money out of the basic, particularly out of the places in the 
economy that need to have money in order to create jobs and 
productivity.

[[Page 6778]]

  So, you see, jobs here, they had a big problem with unemployment. 
Eight years of government spending, they still had a big problem with 
unemployment. Now, what we've done is spent money like mad in the last 
couple of months, and people say, I'm not sure it's going to work. The 
stock market is saying, I don't think that's going to work. And history 
says, I don't think that's going to work. And the Japanese tried it and 
they say, that didn't work for us. You don't want to go spending a 
whole lot of money when you're in trouble.
  What do you want to do? Well, here's what you want to do. You want to 
make sure particularly that the small business people have enough 
liquidity to get their companies going. And so what you want is 
policies that are going to keep money in small businesses so they will 
invest because 80 percent of the jobs are in small business. You've got 
unemployment? You want small businesses going like mad to create more 
jobs.
  And so how do you do that? You let the small businessman keep money 
so that he can plow it back into the business, create the jobs that 
create the productivity. You need people who are entrepreneurs and who 
are inventors and investors. You want those people with the liquidity 
to be able to get the economy jump-started. And that means the 
government has got to stop spending money.
  Well, what way are we spending money? Wow, we're really spending 
money. This last thing that they called the stimulus package--I call it 
the porkulous package--I'm on Armed Services, we deal with things like 
military things. And one of the biggest, most expensive things in our 
budget is called an aircraft carrier. We have ships surround them to 
protect them. We've got 11 of them. They're really expensive and 
they're really big, and we protect them because 11 of them are very 
valuable. And they cost about $3 billion apiece.
  So what we passed in the House, do you know how many aircraft 
carriers you could buy for the money we borrowed that our kids and 
grandchildren have to pay back? You could make 250 aircraft carriers. 
Can you picture 250 aircraft carriers in a row? That's an incredible 
number. Or if you want to look at it a different way, you've heard us 
complain, you've heard the media complain about how big the spending 
was in the war in Iraq and Afghanistan. Add the spending in Iraq and 
Afghanistan together totally for both wars, add it up. Well, we spent 
more than that in the first 5 weeks we were here in Congress this year. 
That's a lot of spending.
  And now here we've got, on top of that, here's the President's tax 
increases for 2010. And what exactly does this big tax policy do? One, 
this is cap and trade. What this is is global warming, which means your 
electricity and your power is going to be more expensive. Guess who 
uses that? Small businesses. This is going to be hammering not only to 
small people, not people making a lot of money, the little guys. You 
have to pay an electric bill? You're going to get hit with this tax. 
This bit about this is just for rich people is baloney. If you have an 
electric bill, you're going to pay this tax.
  And this one over here is on small business. Both of these things 
affect small business. This is exactly the wrong thing to be doing. Tax 
increases is not what we should be doing. We should be going in the 
opposite; we should leave the money in the small businessman's pocket 
to create the jobs.
  And the gentlelady, Congresswoman Bachmann, I really appreciate you 
taking some time to talk about the economics because this is on the 
minds and hearts of Americans. I appreciate your sharing a little bit 
of your time on the floor with me.
  I see you have some other distinguished colleagues here that are very 
qualified to talk on this subject, so I don't want to rattle on too 
long. But I thank you very much for giving me a few minutes.
  Mrs. BACHMANN. Thank you for yielding back.
  The gentleman from Missouri, Todd Akin, is so well respected in 
Missouri for a reason; he's a great historian and a lover of history. 
And I had done some reading myself on depression-era economics because 
that's really, I think, a very important area for us to look at right 
now when you look at the parallel and compare and contrast between the 
policies that are being implemented today and the parallel nature that 
they have with the 1930s. Eleanor Roosevelt said that there were only 
two people who could say anything to her husband and cross him; one of 
them was Henry Morgenthau. And Henry Morgenthau, the United States 
Treasurer, as Mr. Akin had stated, was one of the people who came to 
the very clear conclusion that overspending had been a huge mistake. 
And that is the focus of this Special Order hour this evening is on 
spending. And we saw that, throughout the 1930s, a misery index unlike 
any other had been created because of rampant out-of-control spending. 
And Henry Morgenthau said--probably the person who could testify the 
best to that level of government intervention--it was wrong, it was a 
mistake, it didn't work. And the one thing we know about history is if 
we don't learn from it, we will live to repeat it.
  And I believe, Representative Akin, you can correct me, that it seems 
that you are saying clearly to the American people, let's not, 
President Obama and the Democrats who run the House and Senate here in 
Washington, repeat that same mistake.
  I will yield to the gentleman.
  Mr. AKIN. I think you're absolutely right. And that is definitely my 
point. The point is is it was tried under FDR. You can at least say 
they were trying a new theory of how to get the economy going. And they 
tried it and it didn't work and he made it clear it didn't work. And 
now, apparently the Japanese didn't learn too much from our history, so 
they tried it for 10 years, did all kinds of government spending like 
mad, and they basically wasted 10 years of the productive use of their 
own economy because the Japanese knew it didn't work.
  And the thing that's ironic is, not only do we know what doesn't 
work, we know what does work. JFK and Ronald Reagan, both of them did 
the right kind of tax cuts. The economy turned around. We had long 
periods of very productive, good economic times in America because they 
did the right thing. Why don't we use the good example? Well, I think 
part of the reason is is because we have a mindset now in Washington, 
DC. that big government is God and it knows better how to spend our 
money. And we just like spending a whole lot of money, but it's not 
what's going to make the economy better. And there are going to be more 
and more of your and my constituents who are going to be suffering 
because they don't have jobs, they've got mortgages that are too big, 
and they're really feeling the squeeze.
  And it's a shame when you can't learn when history is staring you 
right in the face. But I really appreciate your putting the focus where 
it belongs in this excessive government spending. And you can take a 
look at billions and billions of dollars--and the numbers just seem so 
big, but when you put it in perspective, the whole war in Iraq, the 
whole war in Afghanistan, added together, spent by this House in the 
first 5 weeks of this year, that's a lot of money, that's an awful lot 
of money. But I do see we have some experts on the floor, and I thank 
the gentlelady for yielding me time.
  Mrs. BACHMANN. I thank the gentleman from Missouri again, Mr. Akin.
  And this is a tremendous historic shift in philosophy that has 
occurred in the last 50 days. Again, the Obama administration, what's 
occurring--and this just came out in the Washington Times, ``The world 
loses over $50 trillion.'' The markets are responding, the markets 
aren't happy.

                              {time}  1600

  When they take a look at this massive government spending and, as Mr. 
Akin had said, the new shift that says that government is God, what we 
are doing now is we are embarking on a new level of tyranny never seen 
before in the history of this country. And

[[Page 6779]]

that's really the divide: liberty/tyranny. There is a constitutional 
scholar, Dr. Mark Levin, who's writing a book that's about to come out 
that talks about that chasm between liberty and tyranny. America was 
birthed out of liberty. We want to make sure that that continues.
  And a cradle of liberty was the great State of Tennessee, and hailing 
from the Second Congressional District of Tennessee is Mr. Jimmy 
Duncan, one of the great gentlemen of this body, Mr. Duncan, with his 
words of wisdom on spending.
  Mr. DUNCAN. I certainly want to first commend the gentlewoman from 
Minnesota. She has been a real leader in the Congress here in 
attempting to call attention to the great problems that we're going to 
face if we don't get our fiscal house in order.
  And she just showed an article from the Washington Times. Just 
yesterday there was another article in the Washington Times that said 
the Polish currency had dropped 60 percent in value since last August 
and the Ukrainian currency had dropped in value 43 percent just since 
last September. And those are the kinds of things that we're going to 
face.
  A few years ago, I was told that in Argentina, they got into such bad 
fiscal or financial shape that suddenly they had to start raising the 
prices in the grocery store every 4 hours. And the American people, I 
don't think, realize how tough and how difficult and how extreme our 
problems are going to become if we don't get our fiscal house in order.
  It's mind-boggling, in fact, it's incomprehensible, that Congress 
voted a few months ago, and we voted against it, but they voted to 
raise our national debt to $11.315 trillion. And nobody can really 
comprehend a figure like that, but what it really means is that it's 
not going to be long at all before we're not going to be able to pay 
all of our Social Security and veterans' pensions and all of the things 
we've promised our own people with money that will buy anything, and 
people are going to face some really tough times if we're not careful.
  Some of our leaders are looking dreamily back at the New Deal, and 
our colleague from Missouri just gave a quotation from one of President 
Franklin Roosevelt's Cabinet members. What we are doing now is, 
unbelievably to me, astoundingly to me, we're almost making Franklin 
Roosevelt look conservative by what we're doing. And I have talked 
about debt that we have. Under the administration's most optimistic 
predictions, we are going to add $4 trillion more to our debt over the 
next 3 years. I'm in my 21st year in the Congress. I never believed 
that we would be facing the kinds of deficits and debt that we're 
taking on and facing over these next 3 years. So I want to commend our 
colleague from Missouri, Congressman Akin, for his remarks. I heard a 
lot of the things he had to say, and I know that Judge Carter, our 
colleague from Texas, is going to speak shortly, and I'm going to just 
take just another minute or two. But I think this problem that's being 
discussed here is so very important, we can't emphasize it enough 
because it overrides and affects everything else that we are talking 
about here in the Congress.
  David Walker, who's the former head of the GAO, has been going all 
over this country over the last few months trying to be a Paul Revere 
and sound the warning about what we're facing and what we're getting 
into, and he talks about the $11 trillion debt that we have, as mind-
boggling as that is.
  But what is even worse, in one of the Capitol Hill newspapers today, 
he has a column and he mentions, as he has mentioned before, that we 
have over $56 trillion of unfunded future pension liabilities. Under 
our law if a private company sets up a pension plan for its employees, 
it has to fund it, and its leaders can be put in jail if they don't 
fund those private pension plans. But our leaders, we've done this very 
thing over these last few years. It started with the Great Society 
because President Lyndon Johnson didn't think people would stand in the 
late 1960s for huge deficits at that time, but what we did back then 
was just nothing, was minuscule, compared to what we're doing today.
  We talked about the New Deal. A few days ago in the Washington Times, 
203 leading university economists signed a full-page ad, and they said 
this:
  ``We, the undersigned, do not believe that more government spending 
is a way to improve economic performance. More government spending by 
Hoover and Roosevelt did not pull the United States economy out of the 
Great Depression in the 1930s. More government spending did not solve 
Japan's `lost decade' in the 1990s. As such, it is a triumph of hope 
over experience to believe that more government spending will help the 
U.S. today.''
  These economists, as I said, 203 leading university economists, 
continued and said this: ``To improve the economy, policymakers should 
focus on reforms that remove impediments to work, saving, investment, 
and production. Lower tax rates and a reduction in the burden of 
government are the best ways of using fiscal policy to boost growth.''
  Unfortunately, we're going in the opposite direction now, and it is a 
very dangerous road. We're going down a socialist path, and socialism, 
my colleagues, has never worked anyplace in this world. If it had, the 
Soviet Union and Cuba would have been heavens on Earth. Instead, every 
place where we have let the government get too big and get out of 
control from a financial standpoint, we have ended up with a few 
elitists at the top, almost no middle class, and a huge starvation or 
underclass. That's the only thing government is good at is wiping out 
the middle class.
  And what we have got to make more people realize is this: There's 
waste in the private sector, I recognize, just like there's waste in 
government. But the waste in the private sector pales in comparison to 
the waste that is in government. So every dollar that we can keep in 
the private sector does more to hold down prices and create jobs than 
does any money that's turned over to government, and that's been proven 
all over the country. And the best way we can help the poor and the 
lower income and the working people of this country is by keeping more 
of our money in the private sector where it will be spent much more 
economically and efficiently than it will be if we turn it over to the 
government.
  I know there are others that want to speak, and I have taken up more 
time than I should have, but I once again want to thank the gentlewoman 
from Minnesota for taking out this Special Order and for all the good 
work that she does in this Congress.
  Mrs. BACHMANN. I appreciate the gentleman from Tennessee's Second 
Congressional District, Mr. Jimmy Duncan. He's a tremendous gentleman 
of the South but also a tremendous fighter for the people, the common 
man, who understand how they have to run their own family budget. And 
they look at this Congress and they look at this current Obama 
administration, and they are shaking their heads. In coffee shops and 
barber shops and beauty parlors all across the United States, Americans 
are disgusted because they know in their own life, they can't begin to 
spend that kind of money and think that their family can possibly 
remain afloat. And they know that they are going to suffer, that their 
local neighbor is going to suffer, that small businessmen are going to 
suffer, and suffer they will.
  But that does not have to be our story in the United States. It can 
be completely different. The House Republicans have a very positive 
solution to all of this, and we can come out of these economic doldrums 
very quickly, and the solution is this: If we would zero out capital 
gains, the taxes that you have to pay when you invest your money, if we 
would zero that out for 4 years, people would invest in this economy. 
And if we would take the business tax, it's the small businesses, after 
all, that create 70 percent of all jobs in the United States. If we 
would take away their crushing burden and, instead of the second 
highest tax rate in the world, give them about one of the lowest rates 
in the world, 9 percent, make that a permanent tax.

[[Page 6780]]

  Right now all across the world, nations are scared to death 
financially. They want to go somewhere where they can invest their 
money. Imagine if we would make the United States the premier place in 
the world to invest for business creation and advancement. We would 
bring jobs into the United States, high-paying jobs. Zero out the 
capital gains tax, 9 percent corporate tax, and then lower everyone's 
income tax by 5 percent. And the death tax, the most immoral tax there 
ever could possibly be, that Uncle Sam would reach into your coffin at 
the time of your death and say now you pay taxes once again. Get rid of 
that tax. Get rid of the alternative minimum tax. Our problem would 
then be finding enough workers to fill all the jobs.
  Someone who understands this very well is a southerner named Judge 
John Carter from middle central Texas, representing Texas's 31st 
Congressional District. He has been a champion. He understands the 
devastation of overspending, and he's here to bring that, Mr. Speaker, 
to our body.
  Mr. CARTER. I thank the gentlewoman for yielding. She has done a 
wonderful job in expressing, I think, the mood of the country and the 
mood of the people in the country.
  This weekend I had a great weekend. I opened up a park in one part of 
my district, then moved to another part of my district and opened 
another park. And then I went to something called a Daffodil Festival, 
which is put on by the elderly in our area to raise funds for their 
center. And there was a huge crowd there, and I just wandered around 
talking to people. I wasn't there to make a speech or do anything like 
that, just to talk. And it was amazing how much people wanted to talk 
about what's going on in Washington.
  Maybe my part of the world is different from everybody's part of the 
world, but everybody that I talked to said we are scared to death about 
what we're spending our money on and how much of our money we're 
spending.
  When you start tossing around trillions of dollars, those are numbers 
that the American people, it's so big, they don't conceive what it 
means. But when somebody gives them an example like it's a stack of 
$1,000 bills 63 miles high or if you started giving $1 million away on 
the day Jesus was born, you still wouldn't have given away $1 trillion 
today. Those kinds of numbers make people say, wow, that's a lot of 
money.
  The average person, they know what they've got in their pocket. They 
know what the government takes out of their check every month. At least 
most of them do. And they know what they care about. They want to live 
a life where they can live the comfortable life of being a free 
American, the life of liberty that we created when we founded this 
country. And they see this spending to be enslaving not only this 
generation but generations and generations to come. And especially, 
especially, this is such a risk because we have the experience of the 
New Deal, which, according to the Secretary of Treasury Morgenthau, 
after 10 years, 9 years of trying, didn't work. He was the guy in 
charge of the program, and he said the spending didn't work.
  Now, today there was a fact that came out and it was given to me as 
the truth. I don't know what the source was, but I think it is the 
truth, that we have now seen the most rapid fall in the stock market in 
American modern history, that history going back to 1900. Now, that 
means during the Great Depression the stock market didn't fall at the 
rate it has fallen now.
  Now, I'm not telling people that to scare everybody because everybody 
is already scared. The truth is it's time for us to step up and say 
what would you do in your house if the ski was falling, as it seems to 
be falling in Washington, D.C. today? Most everybody would say, man, 
you know what we're doing? I'll tell you what we're doing. We're making 
sure we hold on to our jobs. We're making sure that we are going to 
have the resources to feed, clothe, and shelter our family first and 
foremost. We're going to take care of the basics, and we are not going 
to waste a dime in our budget.
  I know waste is in the eye of the beholder, and, of course, I 
probably don't agree with many of the programs that the President has 
put into the budget and the stimulus package because we have a 
different view of government and of society. But I can tell you that 
there was so much put into the package that didn't even have a target 
to stimulate but rather was to promote an agenda which was a part of 
political promises that were made on the campaign trail. And when 
you're talking about three-quarters of $1 trillion, almost, then you're 
talking about an awful lot of money being spent on promise and not on 
production.

                              {time}  1615

  What our job is here in Washington is to produce jobs for the 
American people.
  Mrs. BACHMANN. I just wanted to give one illustration of this, and it 
caused me to think of this when you were speaking, if you take a look 
at just the money that's been spent in the last 50 days, just in the 
past 50 days, let alone the debt that the Comptroller General David 
Walker said the American people owe, which is $53 trillion in unfunded 
Federal debt liabilities, just in the last 50 days, the Obama 
administration and the Democrats that control the House and the Senate 
have spent and committed and put a burden on the back of every American 
household, $18,500, $18,500.
  So not only do the American people have to figure out how to pay 
their water bill and their electric bill, they have got to figure out 
how to come up with $18,500 just to come up with the spending of the 
last 50 days.
  Mr. CARTER. And that spending was new spending.
  Mrs. BACHMANN. That's correct.
  Mr. CARTER. That was new spending. You see, we are creating new 
spending. Well, just for example, we are expanding welfare spending by 
$2.9 billion.
  We were proud, and the Democrats and the Republican puffed our chests 
out when we said we fixed welfare in the 1990s. We did, but we turned 
it right back around in 2009 and put it right back where it was when we 
fixed it.
  Mrs. BACHMANN. I think the American people would be shocked to learn, 
because the welfare reform that passed in the 1990s was with a 
Republican House and a Democrat President, President Clinton, has been 
dramatically effective to reduce even illegitimate rates and reduce 
welfare rolls and reduce costs to taxpayers all across the country.
  I think the American people would be shocked to learn that all of 
those positive reforms have been repealed in one fell swoop. In the 
stimulus package the Obama administration rolled back the positive 
reforms that Republicans, working hand-in-hand in a bipartisan way, 
were able to bring about for the American people.
  Mr. CARTER. Here we have got some other things that are curious, 
Barney Frank's Affordable Housing Trust Fund of $1 billion. Here is 
one, this is something that concerns me.
  And I am going to state this on the record so it's very, very clear, 
that I did not vote for the stimulus bill, and I will tell you why I 
didn't vote for the stimulus bill. I spent almost the whole night 
before that vote talking with the former chairman of the FDIC, and the 
question that he couldn't answer, the question I couldn't get anybody 
in this House to answer, including my President, the President from my 
party and the Treasury Secretary from my party, the answers I wanted 
were what exactly are you going to do with this money?
  And they said buy bad assets and other things. It was the ``and other 
things'' that I didn't like. It was the ``and other things'' that said 
who in their right mind gives a blank check to anybody? I don't care 
who they are.
  Mrs. BACHMANN. That's a tremendously powerful point that you are 
making, tremendously powerful. You cannot spend trillions of dollars 
and not see massive waste, fraud and abuse. In fact, it's so bad that a 
lawsuit was filed by Bloomberg Media to the Federal Reserve saying we 
would like the American people to see the data.
  Who is getting these loans out of this $350 billion, now $700 
billion, that have

[[Page 6781]]

been spent on these bailouts? Every day the Federal Reserve is spending 
money in bailouts, but no one knows. No one knows, no one knows who is 
getting these loans, what is it for?
  The American people deserve answers. The American people aren't 
getting them, and that's the kind of immorality that occurs when we 
have dramatic spending like we have never heard before. This is real 
people, real people are paying out this money. This is no joke. These 
are people that literally will become slaves to the government in order 
to pay their taxes in future years, and this is a crime for the next 
generation.
  Mr. CARTER. I bring this up because I want to point out that one of 
the things we are about to do in the omnibus is health care reform 
fund, $634 billion. Now, what does that mean, health care reform fund?
  Well, we don't know what it means. Just yesterday the President was 
asked, are you a socialist, and he said, in several different answers, 
no, he was not. And yet you hear people say it's for some form of 
single-pay socialized medicine, but you don't get any commitment that's 
what it for. In fact, it just says ``fund.''
  Mrs. BACHMANN. I wonder if this bill will come to us the same way 
that stimulus bill came after midnight, and then we are expected to 
take up the debate at 9:00 in the morning. In fact, experts said we had 
23 seconds per page to read that bill.
  It was a slap in the face to the American people to spend that kind 
of money in stimulus, and now you are talking socialized medicine. This 
is nationalizing. This administration loves to nationalize every aspect 
of every American industry that there is. The health care industry, 
which could be 18 percent of our economy, in one fell swoop, could be 
nationalized.
  Mr. CARTER. Even more important, the Constitution of the United 
States says the Congress initiates spending, not the executive, the 
Congress.
  I have absolutely nothing against the President, this is not any 
criticism, any man sitting in that office, not just Barack Obama, but 
any person, male or female, and if you give them a blank check and they 
don't tell you what they are going to use it for--$634 billion, then 
Congress is not doing its duty.
  Mrs. BACHMANN. It doesn't matter which person is in that office, 
which party.

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