[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 155 (2009), Part 6]
[House]
[Page 7620]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




            AMERICA'S ECONOMIC POLICY: SPEND, BORROW AND TAX

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the 
gentleman from Texas (Mr. Poe) is recognized for 5 minutes.
  Mr. POE of Texas. Mr. Speaker, America's new economic policy is real 
simple; spend a lot of money, borrow a lot of money, and tax everybody, 
all in an effort to make the United States a country like socialist 
France. And the method to pay for these high-dollar programs that the 
administration is now funding is to tax everything, especially energy.
  The first part of the ``tax energy plan'' is to tax energy 
consumption. Now we understand that every homeowner in the United 
States will be taxed approximately $3,000 a year every year for the 
consumption of energy in that home. So every time you turn on the 
lights, you turn up the taxes. You use a little bit of heat to keep 
warm in the winter, you're going to pay the heat tax, all in an effort 
to bring revenue in for these high-dollar programs.
  There are more ideas to tax energy. One is to increase the gasoline 
tax--not that we aren't paying enough for gasoline already, now we're 
going to pay 10 cents more a gallon in the gasoline tax. We use 
gasoline, we're going to give the government more money.
  And then, thirdly, there is the mileage tax that is being proposed. 
What that means, Mr. Speaker, is for every mile you drive somewhere in 
the fruited plain, the government is going to track you with GPS, and 
at the end of the day you are going to get taxed on mileage tax. Being 
tracked by GPS by the Federal Government sounds a little bit like Big 
Brother out of ``1984'' to me.
  Contrary to some places in the United States, where I come from we 
don't have mass transit. We don't have choo-choo trains that run and 
take everybody to work. I have an area made up predominantly of rice 
farmers, suburban areas, petrochemical areas, and we don't have high-
dollar trains like the one that is being built from Los Angeles to Las 
Vegas, or from La La Land to Fantasy Land. People have to drive work 
trucks, that's what they drive, but now they are going to be taxed for 
driving. And of course that is taxing the American worker and the 
consumer.
  And now there are going to be new energy taxes on energy companies--
you know, those mean old energy companies that produce energy to keep 
the lights on in this place and other places, and so we can drive our 
vehicles and that sort of thing. But the energy companies are going to 
pass that tax on to the rest of us. And what that means, you cut 
through all the taxes, because of the new energy tax on energy 
companies, every American is going to add 41 cents to their gasoline; 
in other words, that's passed on to us. You add on the mileage tax, you 
add on the 10-cent tax for using gasoline, and now we've got another 41 
cents that will be passed on to the American consumer.
  Now the new cap-and-trade idea--it really should be called cap-and-
tax--is sending energy companies packing their bags. Mr. Speaker, what 
I mean by that is, they're leaving town. The taxes are too high. 
They're not going to stay here any longer. It's been reported by 
different media sources that the new country, the new place for energy 
companies to move is a place called Zug, Switzerland. You've probably 
never heard of it. You have to look it up on a map to find it. But the 
tax rate for corporations in that area of Switzerland is 9 percent. The 
corporate tax in the United States on those energy companies is 35 
percent. No wonder they're leaving town. They can't afford to do 
business in the United States.

                              {time}  1545

  The U.S. energy companies are going someplace else because of the 
overwhelming tax structure here.
  Mr. Speaker, the answer is not to tax more but to allow more energy 
production, novel thought that that is. Rather than run energy 
companies out of town, maybe we ought to let them expand in the Outer 
Continental Shelf. That would actually create thousands of American 
jobs. We wouldn't be sending money overseas to OPEC. We'd keep that 
money in the United States. We'd keep the lease revenue that those oil 
companies have to pay for to get that oil out of the Outer Continental 
Shelf. We'd keep that lease revenue in the United States. And we'd also 
keep the tax revenue in the United States.
  But, Mr. Speaker, the new French economic plan is tax anything that 
produces in this country, and now we're going to tax energy out of the 
energy business, including consumers that use energy. I guess next 
year, Mr. Speaker, we'll all wonder why we're just freezing in the dark 
because we don't have any energy because it all left town.
  And that's just the way it is.

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