[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 156 (2010), Part 11]
[House]
[Pages 15809-15816]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                              {time}  1830
                              THE ECONOMY

  The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. Tonko). 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. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.
  Good evening. It's a pleasure to be able to join you. I had a chance 
to listen in on some of the last hour presented by the Democrats and 
their views on the economy. It seemed like a fair amount of sophistry 
to me and a lot of excuses. It would seem like we're blaming things on 
Bush and the Chinese. So I am going to be presenting and maybe even 
have some guests here presenting a different perspective on the 
economy, and the American people will be the judge of that debate and 
discussion in November.
  Now I would suggest that the Democrats and their policies are 
actually destructive to the economy. I don't think it's a coincidence 
that if you look at the 10 cities in America that have the highest 
percentage of people below the poverty level, that those cities have 
been managed, every one of them, for many years by Democrats. Now you 
can blame the Chinese and you can blame President Bush, but I would 
suggest, and I will show in the next hour in plain, simple terms why 
the Democrat policies are literally destroying the economy.
  Now you could say, well, I don't like that, or maybe you're being 
partisan. I'm not really quite so concerned about being partisan or 
whether we like things politically. I'm concerned with America. I'm 
concerned with the people that don't have jobs. And I'm concerned that 
not only are we creating unemployment but we are systematically 
destroying the businesses that can create employment in the future.
  Let's take a look at these questions. Those are strong charges to say 
that the Democrats are the ones that are actually responsible for 
what's been going on. I think a lot of Americans have some sense that 
that may be true. Sometimes it's fun to take a look at some of these 
political cartoons. We have the President here now talking to the guy 
that owns the china shop: ``Now give me one good reason why you're not 
hiring.'' And you have health care reform storming in and cap-and-tax 
or cap-and-trade and the taxes that are impending and all. The point of 
the cartoon, of course, is the fact that the policies that we have seen 
are creating the unemployment.
  Let's look at that again just a little bit closer. Now when we talk 
about the economy, there are different ways of measuring it, you can 
see. Well, is Wall Street doing well? Am I doing well? Am I happy with 
my job or are things going comfortably for me? Is there a lot of 
employment or unemployment? Those are measures that we use. We take a 
look, also, at the rate of the Federal Government, how much it's 
spending money versus how much it's having to borrow. Those are all 
things when we say the economy, what does that mean? But particularly 
it's very personal when we talk about unemployment and it becomes not a 
political issue but a personal issue when it's your job that was just 
lost.
  We were told that we had to come up with this economic stimulus bill 
last year. We were told that if you don't pass this economic stimulus 
bill, this unemployment could get above where it is now. It's going up, 
could get above, but if you don't pass it, why, we could have 9 percent 
unemployment if you don't pass this stimulus bill. And so the 
Democrats, all by themselves, passed this $800 billion bill to 
supposedly stimulate the economy. After they passed it, what happened? 
Well, now we've got this unemployment here at 9.7 percent. The numbers 
vary, but we're pretty close to 10. But that 10 percent is very 
conservative, because if you've lost your job more than a year ago, you 
don't get to count in the statistics anymore. So, in fact, the 
unemployment rate is well over 10 percent in America.
  Now we were told that if you passed the stimulus bill, that we could 
keep it underneath 8 percent. That's the words that the Democrats 
brought to this floor a year ago. The fact is they were wrong. Anybody 
can see they're wrong. Just take a look at what the unemployment 
numbers are, and they don't

[[Page 15810]]

bear it out. In fact, they spent $800 billion, and where did it all go? 
Did it go for a lot of projects? Or was it just more bailouts? In fact, 
it turned out that it had a lot of bailout money in it that didn't 
really go for even things that FDR would have considered an economic 
stimulus package.
  This is what's going on. We've got a high level of unemployment. The 
stimulus package that was passed here, and the Democrats said the 
Republicans didn't help any. They're right, they didn't, because we 
didn't think that stimulus package would work. We stood here on the 
floor, I stood here on the floor on a time just like this, on a 
Wednesday night, and said, ``It's not going to work.'' But they did it, 
anyway; and now we can see, it didn't work.
  And now what are they going to do? Well, they want to do some more 
stimulus packages. Is it going to work? No. Because it's based on 
faulty economics. It will never work. The interesting thing is they 
should have really listened to the Secretary of the Treasury under FDR, 
Henry Morgenthau. He tried the same thing. This was back in the 1930s. 
He said, we've tried spending money to try and get the economy going. 
We've spent and spent. Now we're in a tremendous amount of debt and 
unemployment hasn't changed a bit. He said, ``It does not work.'' To 
this House Ways and Means Committee, Henry Morgenthau, way before I was 
born, he was saying, ``It doesn't work.'' Yet here we go; we're doing 
it again.
  Now let's take a look more specifically at what the Democrat policies 
are that are in conflict with creating jobs, because I would suggest 
that the Democrats have got this problem. The problem is, is that 
everything they stand for is specifically going to be in conflict with 
creating jobs.
  What are the things they stand for? Well, let's take a look at where 
jobs come from. And this is the linkage that the Democrat Party doesn't 
want you to figure out. It's not a very complicated thing. And, that 
is, if you get a job, you have to get a job from somebody. Who's the 
``from somebody''? Well, it's a business somewhere. You can't separate 
employers and people who run businesses from jobs. Jobs just don't hang 
out out there floating around somewhere. They're created by an employer 
somewhere. And if you create conditions economically that make it 
impossible for the employers, then guess what's going to happen. You're 
not going to have jobs. It's not very complicated. It's about as simple 
as a lemonade stand. I'm going to use the illustration of a lemonade 
stand to try and hammer through this very simple truth; and it's very 
important, because the future, the economic future, the future of 
families in America hang on understanding these simple principles.
  The idea is that jobs come from an employer; and if you harm the 
employer, you're not going to have the jobs. And if you do it bad 
enough as FDR did and you hammer them bad enough, you'll put the 
employers out of business, and then it's going to be a long time before 
the company starts up and new jobs can be created. So let's take a look 
at what happens.
  Let's say that you've got a lemonade stand. You happen to have a very 
fortunate piece of property and a whole lot of people are coming 
through there. They're hot, sweaty and tired. You've got the one piece 
of property where you can put up a whale of a lemonade stand. So you 
start out. You hire your younger brother and sister to work there. You 
squeeze the lemon juice in the morning and get some sugar from the 
store, put it all together, you get some ice, get out there and you 
have a pretty good day. You sell a lot of lemonade, you get going at 
it, and pretty soon, though, you realize there's a whole lot more 
demand for your lemonade than you have capacity to make this stuff.
  So you start thinking, man, I wonder if I should go down and buy some 
sort of a lemon squeezer and a great big shaker machine and ice 
machine. I'll hire five or six more people, not just my younger brother 
and sister but I'm going to bring some other friends from my class and 
they can all work at the lemonade stand and we'll make a whole lot more 
lemonade then, you think to yourself. But for me to buy that ice 
machine and the lemon squeezer and all, I'm going to have to have some 
money and I'm going to have to make sure that there's going to be 
enough money coming in from lemonade to pay off the cost of that 
machinery.
  So if you're an owner of a business, one of the things you have to 
figure out is you have to have enough money to be able to create new 
jobs. Now if you go with your plan and you buy the lemon squeezer and 
the ice machine, you can hire eight more people to make lemonade and 
you can sell it.

                              {time}  1840

  But it requires that you've got to have some money to buy the ice 
machine and the lemon squeezer. You've been making good money in the 
lemonade stand, you can see how you could pay it off in a couple of 
months, but you don't have the money right now. And so as a businessman 
you're saying, well, I've somehow got to get this money, and that comes 
into a question about liquidity, if you can borrow some money from 
somebody.
  Now, what happens to this lemonade stand guy if you're running along, 
you're making this lemonade, and all of a sudden you say we're going to 
put a tax on lemonade stands and we're going to charge 50 cents a glass 
of tax on lemonade? Well, if you do that, that means the guy that owns 
the lemonade stand isn't going to have the money to pay off the ice 
machine and the lemon squeezer, so he's going to just hunker down. He 
will pay the tax, he will keep things going the way they are, but he 
says, man, this is a hostile environment out here. They're taxing every 
glass of lemonade I make, and so I'm not going to create as many jobs.
  Now I guess a lemonade stand may be silly, I'm trying to make it 
sound simple. It's not complicated. If you tax the owners of businesses 
heavily they're not going to have the money to make the investments to 
create new jobs, and it's that linkage which the Democrats refuse to 
understand and it is so obvious and so simple. Our policies are going 
after the owners of businesses and we're calling them ``rich guys'' and 
we're saying you've got to punish the rich guys by taking their money 
so everybody else can be okay. This is the bailout mindset. This is the 
bailout fever that has infected this city. It is the bailout concept 
that the government has to redistribute wealth. And when you take it 
away from the guys that own the business, you're not going to be 
creating the jobs.
  That's just the mechanics of how economics works. You don't have to 
like it. I didn't invent it, I'm just explaining what is common sense 
and most Americans can understand: Jobs come from employers; if you 
destroy employers, you're not going to have jobs. And how do you 
destroy employers? The best way to do it? Tax them. There are other 
ways to destroy businesses, but taxing them is a pretty good way to do 
it.
  Let's take a look at other questions. One, like the lemonade stand 
example, if the owner of the business, maybe he's making good profit on 
his lemonade but he doesn't have a huge bank account or money saved up. 
What he will want to do is go to a bank and borrow some money for his 
ice machine and his lemon squeezer. So he goes to the bank and he tries 
to get a loan from the bank, but what we found is going on right now, 
the policies on banks are so tight--even though the Fed has released 
tons of money--that the bankers are afraid to loan money to businesses 
and businesses are afraid to borrow it. That is not a good condition if 
you're trying to create jobs because you have to have a source of money 
for businessmen to borrow in order to get innovation and things going 
to get the marketplace going.
  Another thing that's a huge killer of jobs is if the businessman 
doesn't know what's going to happen. The guy with the lemonade stand is 
doing a land office business because it's 100 degrees every day and 
everybody is coming by his lemonade stand. But the thing is he knows 
the season is changing and fall is coming and he's not so sure that he 
is going to be able to sell that lemonade as the weather gets colder. 
Now

[[Page 15811]]

he's got some unknowns, the weather is in there. Well, we've got a big 
unknown, and that's what the people in Washington, D.C. are going to do 
to businesses next.
  When the businessman doesn't know what's going to happen, guess what? 
In Missouri we have an expression, it's called ``hunkering down,'' or 
sometimes people say ``hunkering down like a toad in a hailstorm.'' 
Well, they hunker down because they're not sure what these guys in 
Washington, D.C. are going to be doing. And if they're going to pass a 
health care bill which is going to crank taxes way up on everybody 
that's working for you, if you're going to pass this great big tax 
increase, there's some uncertainty there. And if you think the economy 
is really bad and everybody is struggling and there is not much demand 
because nobody has jobs and the whole economy is sort of sluggish and 
sitting like a stone, then you're going to be very careful about doing 
anything in terms of increasing your productivity or how fast or how 
efficiently you can make something because you're saying, wait a 
minute, I'm going to have to make a big investment. I don't know if I 
can sell enough product with the taxes and everything to be able to pay 
it off. So uncertainty is a killer in terms of jobs.
  And then of course red tape and government mandates. If you make that 
lemonade stand, test every single glass to make sure it's just crystal 
pure and you have to file a report with the government and with the EPA 
that every single glass of lemonade is certified and has been tested on 
analytical equipment to be sure, what that does is that red tape then 
makes your cost of product go up and it makes it harder for the guy to 
run his business. So when you do that, he's not going to hire as many 
people.
  So all of these things are things that are going to make the 
unemployment rate go up in America. These are the main things. Now, 
this isn't just Todd just invented this, you can see it by common 
sense. But also, I've talked to all kinds of businesses. I have had 
forums of businesses and said, now give us the list of things that make 
it hard to hire people. These are the lists they come up with, it's not 
a big surprise. This isn't any kind of rocket science. So my 
proposition was the Democrat policies are basically in conflict with 
creating jobs. Let's take a look at what some of those policies are 
because we have examples of them.
  We've been told that all of this woe that the economy is in is 
President Bush's fault, China's fault. Is it really? Here's the 
legislation. Democrat tax increases. We just talked about tax 
increases, the number one enemy of creating jobs. ObamaCare, socialized 
medicine, $570 billion, that's what that is supposed to be for a year. 
That's a lot of money. Who's going to pay that money? You guessed it; 
it's supposed to be the guys that owns those businesses. Is that going 
to make for more jobs? No, it's not. SCHIP, $65 billion. The stimulus, 
$7 billion. The benefits and other homebuyer credits, $23 billion. HIRE 
Act, $6 billion. Total package, $671 billion in tax increases. Is that 
the way to create jobs? No.
  Now the Democrats don't have to look at Republicans to get the right 
answer, they could look at history. They could look at JFK. JFK was a 
Democrat. He understood this stuff, he got it right. JFK came into a 
time when there was a recession, and he did the right thing; he knew 
what the right thing to do was, and that was that he cut taxes. And 
when he did, the economy rebounded. The Democrats could learn from JFK, 
but they refuse to. They don't want to hear this because they like 
spending money. Their solution to everything is more money and more 
government--more government spending, more government programs. They're 
not listening to JFK, they should have. They could have listened to 
Ronald Reagan, but they don't like him too well. They don't have to 
listen to him, they could listen to JFK.
  They could also listen to Bush, who inherited a recession in 2000, 
and in 2001, 2002 and 2003 did a bunch of tax cuts. Those tax cuts got 
the economy back going again. They could learn from examples, but 
they're not. Instead, they're following the same path of FDR, who 
turned a recession into a Great Depression. And they're not listening 
to Henry Morganthau, who was the Secretary of Finance under FDR. So 
these are tax increases. Does that help the job situation? No, not at 
all. In fact, they harm it.
  Well, what other tax increases have we got going? Oh, okay. Not only 
are we going to increase taxes for all these programs, what we're going 
to do is we're going to allow all the tax cuts that took place under 
Bush--which were designed specifically to get the economy going--and 
we're going to allow those things all to expire or some portion of them 
to expire, which means that whatever effect they had--because we did 
move from a recession into some good, strong economic activity in 2004 
and 2005 and 2006--whatever effect they had is now going to boomerang, 
and it's going to hurt us in the same amount in the down side as the 
other helped us in the up side. And so the ordinary income, the top 
income rates in 2010, 35 percent, they're going to jump to just under 
40 percent. Capital gains is going to go from 15 to 20 percent. 
Qualified dividends, 15 to almost 40 percent. And the death tax is 
going to go from 0 to 55 percent.
  Let's take an example of what this death tax is going to do. You've 
got a couple of guys running a farm. You've got 1,000 acres, they've 
got some good equipment. It's a dad and his son. Tragically, as time 
goes on, the dad gets old and dies. The farm was owned by the dad. The 
son wants to take it over--take that equipment, take that acreage and 
make it go. They hire 10 people to work their farm for them--I just 
made up the number 10, I don't think they need that many maybe. But 
anyhow, they got some people that are hired to do that. And so the 
death tax comes along and says to the son, hey, you owe the government 
because we're going to tax your dad for dying.

                              {time}  1850

  We want 55 percent of the value of that farm. His son takes a look 
and says, Well, Mr. Government, if I had to sell half the land, I'd be 
from 1,000 to 500 acres, and I'd have to choose which tractors that I 
sell. I couldn't make the farm work. If you take 55 percent out of it, 
I couldn't make the farm work. The government says, I don't care. Just 
give me my 55 percent.
  It may not be a farm. It may be a small business, but that's what 
this death tax does. That's why we got rid of the death tax because we 
want those businesses to keep going. We want that money to be plowed 
in. And we're willing to live with the fact that somebody may be very 
well-to-do and very comfortable and having a very nice life. We don't 
begrudge it to somebody to work hard, save money, and do well. Because 
we realize if you allow that guy to do well, he's going to hire other 
people, and that's what creates jobs, and it increases everybody's 
standard of living.
  This policy to allow this thing to go back to 55 percent is going to 
hurt the job situation. It's going to hurt the economy. It's going to 
hurt Americans.
  Now, the other thing here, the capital gains is the same kind of 
thing. So if you keep taxing businesses a lot--now, there is this other 
thing, child tax credit, the marriage penalty and the average, those 
things are changing back again. And the lowest tax bracket, it goes 
from 10 to 15 percent.
  Now, the Democrats may change this a little bit to make it look 
pretty to people, but if you don't deal with things like the death tax 
and qualified dividends and capital gains, these are the things that 
make the difference in whether or not there are going to be any jobs or 
whether we're going to have companies going bankrupt.
  Well, you got the message. It's really dumb to be raising taxes when 
the economy is having a hard time. Everybody can tell you that. It just 
isn't smart. There aren't many people who have been dumb enough 
economically when the economy is in trouble to want to go ahead and 
push for the largest tax increase in the history of our country.
  Now, I notice my Democrat colleagues were talking about how bad it is 
that things weren't made in America. They said we've got to bring those

[[Page 15812]]

jobs back in the country. How are you going to bring jobs back in the 
country when we create a set of rules that makes it so expensive to 
build something here that you have a huge advantage somewhere else to 
build it in another place?
  What sort of things would that be, Congressman Akin? Are you telling 
me that America's got policies that make it so people don't want to 
produce things in America? Well, yeah.
  Take a look at this. This is the corporate tax rates of a whole bunch 
of countries--you may not be able to read them all down here. But this 
is Ireland down here, has a 13 percent; and as you go down the line, 
let's see, this is Turkey over here. It's gotten to 20 percent. And 
let's see. Where else do we go? Sweden, they're pretty socialistic. 
They're at 20 percent. Then you've got all the way over here to Canada 
and France. And that green line, that's the United States. We're second 
only to Japan in terms of corporate tax rates.
  Now, it's pretty hard for me to see the logic of complaining about 
things being made overseas when what we do with our tax policy is tax 
corporations so heavily that you create an incentive to chase the 
production overseas. If you're a businessman, you're competing. You're 
competing with all of these other countries. And what you're going to 
have to do is be competitive or else people won't buy your product.
  So for us in Congress to complain about foreign imports and things 
when we've got a corporate tax rate that's second highest in the world 
is once again an example of Democrat tax policy being completely at 
odds with a goal of a strong economy and lots of jobs. You can't keep 
taxing the creator of jobs without losing your jobs. I think it's 
straightforward. I'm trying to make it simple. Because there's one 
example after the other that our policies just don't make sense.
  Here's a chart done in a little more colorful way. We compete with 
France and Spain, U.K. and China. We talk about China. They've got 25 
percent. Here we are. We've got a 40 percent corporate tax rate. Why in 
the world would we want to be doing that? It just doesn't make sense, 
and that's why our economy is in trouble. And if we don't fix this, it 
will just get worse. Because what you do is you hammer a business and 
you hammer a business and you hammer a business, sooner or later it's 
going to go out of business. Then it's going to be a whole lot harder 
for somebody to start up a new company and try and put those jobs that 
could have been there otherwise if our policies had been more 
favorable.
  Now, here's what happened when we did the stimulus. The Democrats' 
answer to this is, of course, well, the government can direct things 
and make things work and they'll really make it good. So you've got to 
take a whole lot of money away from all of those taxpayers. Let's grab 
a whole bunch of money from the taxpayer, and we're going to spend it 
in this stimulus bill--which, by the way, went to pay, among other 
things, the teachers' union in California because they had overspent 
their pensions and were getting near bankruptcy; same thing in 
Illinois.
  So we're taking this stimulus bill, taking money away from States 
like mine in Missouri, and giving the money to States that couldn't 
manage their budgets--like California and Illinois--and taxing the 
taxpayers all across America to bail out people who were irresponsible. 
That's where a lot of that stimulus money went. It also went to other 
various miscellaneous projects and all.
  But what was the result of all of the stimulus spending? What you see 
is we've lost 2.6 million jobs since the stimulus started.
  You see, Henry Morgenthau was right. It's not logical that, if 
government spends a whole lot of money, it makes the economy better.
  If you ran your household and you're in trouble economically--you've 
got a whole lot of loan payments that are coming due, you don't have 
enough salary to pay those things, you've got some medical bills, 
everything is not right in your economic little family--and you say to 
your wife, Hey, here's what I'm going to do. I'm going to go out and 
get this credit card and I'm going to spend money like mad and that way 
we can fix our problems here with our little family, your wife would 
think you were nuts. She'd tell you to stay away from the bar or stop 
smoking them funny cigarettes because anybody's got the common sense to 
know that if you're in economic trouble you don't spend money like mad. 
And yet here we are in economic trouble, we spend money like mad, and 
then we're wondering how come we lost all of these jobs. What in the 
world are we thinking?
  The Federal Government cannot create jobs by spending lots of money. 
The Federal Government can spend a lot of money and they can hire 
people. You say, Wait a minute now. The Federal Government takes a 
billion dollars and they hire all of these people. Isn't that going to 
create jobs, because you've got these people working for the 
government.
  Well, here's the trouble with that line of reasoning. It's true; you 
have government employees. But for every government employee, you've 
taken money out of the economy which could have been used in the 
private sector. And when you do that, you lose more than two jobs out 
of the private sector for every government employee you hire. 
Obviously, you can't do that very long. Pretty soon you've got more 
government employees than you do people working in the private sector. 
And when you've got that, you've got a country that doesn't work 
anymore economically. And we are rapidly marching toward that point 
where these economic policies are going to bring a great deal of 
trouble down on our heads if we don't get sober and start taking a look 
at the hard facts about economics.
  Now, there are a whole lot of people now suffering with unemployment, 
but it's important for them to understand the principle that you have 
got to allow businesses to prosper if you want to have employment.
  This is where the Democrats should do some reading. This isn't too 
much reading to do for maybe a week or so. Here it is. Henry 
Morgenthau, Franklin Delano Roosevelt's Treasury Secretary, before the 
House Ways and Means Committee, 1939: We've tried spending money. We're 
spending more than we've ever spent before, and 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.
  How many times do we have to replay the sad lessons of history? Well, 
I can hear all sorts of things. Well, Democrats just saying, Well, the 
Chinese are fiddling with the currency, and President Bush's policies, 
they're the ones that brought us all this trouble. No, it's not. No, 
it's not. It's not President Bush's policies.
  Look. President Bush spent too much money. His worst year was 2008 
when Nancy Pelosi was Speaker of the House here. He had a deficit of 
$450 billion. Too much. He shouldn't have had 450.

                              {time}  1900

  In 2009, under Obama's Presidency, $1.4 trillion. That's three times 
Bush's worst year out of Bush's 8 years, Obama's first year. The amount 
of debt incurred in that year was three times in 2009 what Bush's worst 
was. Don't tell me about Bush. Obama makes Bush look like Ebenezer 
Scrooge. He's a mere piker when it comes to spending money you don't 
have. And 2010 you say--was 2010 any better? No, it was worse. It was 
$2.5 trillion in deficit spending. We aren't listening to Henry 
Morgenthau. We should learn from Henry Morgenthau, if he is a Democrat. 
We should learn from JFK. If you want jobs, you can't destroy the 
businesses.
  Take a look at these government deficits. That's the number that I am 
talking about here. This gives you a little bit of a sense. Now, you 
can't run your family that way. And over a period of time what we're 
going to find out is you can't run a country this way either. Because 
when you have deficits like this what's going to happen eventually is 
somewhere along the line you got to pay. And who's going to pay? Well, 
that hasn't totally been determined. But you can bet one thing:

[[Page 15813]]

When the economy goes bad everybody suffers.
  In fact, if I were a happy little Socialist, and I'm not, but if I 
were a happy little Socialist what I would want to do is I would want 
to implement an economic policy that made the economy strong because I 
would get more government revenues to slop around to my friends. If the 
job of the government is to redistribute money, is to be experts at 
bailout, which it should not be, but if that is your goal at least you 
should adopt policies that are going to provide as much revenue to the 
government as possible.
  In 2001 and 2002, if you took a look at the items that the economists 
would say were the big ticket items of George Bush, one was the war on 
terror and the other was the tax cuts. And people said, oh, look at all 
the money the government lost from the tax cuts. So you add the war on 
terror and you add the cost of the tax cuts, and what you find is that 
the money that the government was losing in 2001, 2002, and 2003, in 
terms of the economy being bad, was worse than the tax cut plus the war 
on terror. And so when the economy is bad, not only do people not have 
jobs and poor people suffer, and more well-to-do people suffer, 
governments suffer too. The governments don't have the money.
  And if you happen to be a State governor and you have a balanced 
budget amendment in your Constitution, such as Missouri, you are in big 
trouble if you are the governor because you've got to do some serious 
cutting. And you're not going to be very popular when the economy goes 
bad and you happen to be a governor. On the other hand, if the 
economy's doing well it makes you look like a hero because you have 
plenty of money for everything and you can be benevolent. So when the 
economy goes bad it sinks all boats, everybody, including government's 
as well. So this level of deficit spending is unparalleled in our 
history, and it's going to destroy our country if we continue along the 
lines.
  Here is one way of looking at the destruction right here. See when we 
have the Chinese buying up our debt, the Chinese are buying Treasury 
bills and the Chinese are happy because they're getting paid a certain 
number of percent by the Federal Government for every Treasury bill. 
And so they're willing to sit there quietly buying up America and 
they're getting their percent.
  Well, what happens when we spend so much money that all the money 
that we're taking in with taxes can't afford to pay for what our debt 
service is? This would be the equivalent of you're at home and you've 
got these credit cards, the credit card companies really like you and 
everything, and so your family budget, well, you are spending a little 
more each month, a little more each month, and pretty soon you find out 
when you add everything all up that you take a look at your credit card 
debts and the interest rate that you are paying on all those credit 
cards is more than the amount of money you make. What's that mean? That 
means you are in deep doo-doo. You are paying more in interest than you 
are getting in terms of how much money you make.
  When the Federal Government gets to this point what's going to happen 
is that the amount of tax revenue is going to be less than what we're 
paying on all this debt that we're buying. That's another way of 
picturing the fact that these economic shenanigans that are going on 
cannot continue forever. People understand that. It doesn't make a 
difference if you are a liberal or a conservative. If you have any 
understanding of economics, you are going to say, look, this is not 
sustainable. And that's kind of where we are.
  This is Social Security and Medicare. This is what their entitlements 
are going to cost. This is what the U.S. economy is. You can't sustain 
this with this. It just doesn't work. And so that's where we are. I 
started with the premise that the Democrat policies, the Democrat 
policies are actually destructive to the economy and they're 
destructive to creating jobs. And what are those policies? One after 
the other they are policies of increased taxation, more government 
programs, more government redtape. And the combination of those things, 
along with excessive Federal spending, basically creates a suction 
where there is no money in the economy for small businesses and you 
don't create any jobs. And that's what's going on.
  So as I said as I began, it's not a coincidence that the 10 poorest 
cities in America, the cities that have the highest percent of people 
below the poverty level, have all been run by Democrats, some for over 
100 years. And they keep electing Democrats because we don't understand 
the basic idea that jobs come from businesses. If you want a healthy 
economy and businesses, you're going to have to allow some people to 
prosper and just grit your teeth when you say it, some people are going 
to get filthy rich. But the benefit of allowing a few people to get 
wealthy means you are going to have some healthy companies and 
companies that are growing and hiring people. And when the economy does 
better, everybody prospers.
  You got a guy on the street, just a little kid trying to make some 
money. He goes around mowing lawns. Now that kid, would he rather be 
mowing lawns in a rich neighborhood or a poor neighborhood? I would 
suggest the kid may be dirt poor, but he would do better in a 
neighborhood of millionaires because when he mows the lawn, they are 
going to give him a little bit better price. Another neighborhood full 
of people that can barely afford putting food on the table, they're not 
going to pay him much to mow their yard for them. So when the economy 
gets better, it helps everybody. And when you drive the economy into 
the dirt, then everybody suffers at the same time.
  We may not like it or not, but we're all hooked together in this 
great country called America. Now, I think there are some ways we could 
get a little bit philosophical here. I think there are some places 
where we as Americans have to take a look at our forefathers and maybe 
learn some lessons from them. Our forefathers bled and died and 
sacrificed greatly for freedom. Their understanding of freedom was 
maybe a little different than the way we are today in America.
  Their understanding of freedom was a sturdy independence, a sturdy 
character of hard work and wise decision-making. Honest business 
transactions. Courteousness. A sense of neighborhood and community 
service. It was so many things that I heard in an Eagle Scout ceremony 
on Sunday. All of these virtues about being courteous and cheerful and 
hardworking and diligent and all these kinds of things. And that was 
the freedom of our forefathers.
  It seems to me that to some degree now in America we've started to 
adopt an idea of freedom that it means that anybody can do anything 
they want regardless of whether it's very smart to do or not. And when 
things don't go well, we just want the government to come and bail us 
out. That's what I call bailout fever. I don't think that's the freedom 
of our forefathers. I don't think the idea is instead of saving for 
your retirement that you go out and buy the ski boat or whatever it is 
that you don't really have money to buy, you buy it on credit. And you 
buy a house too big for what you can afford, and then when things don't 
go right we say I'm a victim. Those rich somebody or others did this to 
me. It was George Bush's fault. No, it was the Chinese's fault. No, 
it's not my fault that I spent all that money on the ski boat. That's 
not freedom. That's not being responsible. Freedom doesn't mean do 
whatever you want to do and expect the government or somebody to bail 
you out and blame someone else. It doesn't mean you are dependent on 
the government or other people.
  Freedom means that you have a right to certain basic inalienable 
rights, the inalienable right of life, to be alive so people don't kill 
you, and liberty so you have a right to free speech, to share with your 
neighbor what you think the truth is and to share your opinions. To be 
able to get in a town hall meeting and challenge people and say, where 
did you spend that money and why did we do that? We call it free 
speech. And to pursue happiness.

[[Page 15814]]



                              {time}  1910

  To pursue happiness, that means whatever gifts God gave you, whatever 
desires or interest that you can pursue that career, and you can 
succeed or you can fail based on whether or not you made good 
decisions, based on your being responsible.
  When the Founders a couple of hundred years ago used the word 
``government,'' when they talked about government, they did not think 
about capitol domes. They did not think about Washington, D.C. They 
thought about the government that a man exercises over his own life, 
whether he was honest, hard working, trustworthy, whether he was 
friendly, whether he was a good citizen in the community, that was the 
use of the word ``government.''
  Today, we tend to think of government in terms of capitol domes. We 
need to get back to the traditional view of things in America and not 
look at freedom as license to do things that are irresponsible and then 
ask Big Brother government to come pick up the pieces, because the 
government can't afford to do that anymore.
  Recent statistics have just come out, I think it was the front page 
of the Wall Street Journal saying that in a good number of households 
in America, almost half of them, there is someone in the household 
that's getting government bailout of some kind, some type of government 
subsidy.
  Now, obviously, if you keep doing that more and more, there is going 
to come a point where it doesn't work and that's what all of these 
graphs and charts are showing, that you can't continuously have the 
Federal Government spend more and more money without the wheels falling 
off of everything. We have come to that point, and the point has to be 
turned around not even so much by people in Washington, D.C. It has to 
be turned around by the good citizens of America that look back to the 
strong parts of our past that have made America such a unique Nation, a 
totally unique Nation in the history of the world, and we have to go 
back to those virtues and that self-government that's necessary to 
rebuild this country.
  America was built by these crazy people that came here with all these 
crazy ideas. They didn't know what ``can't'' meant. They didn't know 
what ``I can't do it'' meant. They just tried. Some dream became a 
vague possibility, then possibility, and then eventually that dream 
became reality and America was built one dream at a time.
  It became so common we gave it a name. We called it the American 
Dream. It was a phenomenon of freedom, of citizens being able to be 
free to succeed or fail without all kinds of government red tape, 
without excessive government taxation, without bureaucrats looking over 
your shoulder. They could go out and try. And a lot of them failed.
  There was one guy, his name was Edison. He failed a lot. He was 
trying to make light bulbs. He made a hundred of them. Every one of 
them didn't work. When he got done with a hundred, he said, well, now I 
know a hundred ways not to make a light bulb, and he kept on trying. 
That was that American can-do spirit.
  He doesn't ask the government to subsidize his light bulb company; he 
didn't go to the government for a bailout. He didn't say his mom didn't 
give him enough chocolate chip cookies so he was really a victim. No, 
he just went back to the drawing board and kept on working.
  And that was the American Dream. So America became a more and more 
unique country. We came to be the oldest country with the written 
constitution that we have. We were known for going all over the world 
when there is a hurricane or a tragedy. Where there is a war where 
people are being oppressed, you find the American soldiers there 
helping out. And people around Europe can be cynical; but when there is 
trouble, they sure like it when America is around.
  America was different in other ways too, and in its perhaps most 
important way America was unique because we were built on a religious 
principle. We believe that there is a God and that that God granted to 
all human beings certain basic fundamental rights. We wrote it in a 
thing called the Declaration of Independence.
  We believe that every individual should have the right to be alive. 
You shouldn't just shoot people. People should have a right to be alive 
unless they do something terrible. Second of all, that they should have 
a right to liberty, the liberty to speak their own, to have the right 
to free speech and to own property, not to have their property stolen 
from them by the government and given to someone else.
  We didn't believe it was ever the government's job to take money from 
one person and give it to the other. That was socialism, that was 
theft, that was immoral. You had the right to own what you worked hard 
for and you also had the right to pursue whatever it was that God had 
gifted you to do. If you were to be a singer, God would say go out and 
be strong and do a good job being a singer.
  If you are going to be a businessman, be a good businessman. Treat 
your employees well. Work hard, be diligent. Don't waste; don't 
pollute.
  If you are going to be someone who is a doctor, go to the top of your 
profession. Do a good job. Take care of people well. Come up with new 
procedures and new drugs so that people can be healthy.
  And over a period of time the standard of living increased in America 
because we believed in these basic ideas, these traditions of America. 
But freedom never was a license to take from other people. It was never 
a license to make the government the big bailout expert.
  That's not what our country was built on. And if we go back to this 
other approach, it doesn't work economically.
  So Americans, again in November, they have a choice. You can believe 
all of the sophistry and the blame of George Bush and this and that, 
but we have seen the stimulus bill and it flat didn't work. We have 
seen the taxation of small businesses. We have seen unemployment go up 
and up and up, and people have a sense that all is not right 
economically at the tremendous rate we are spending money. They know 
that we can't keep on this path. And so the choice is to be made 
November.
  Which approach are we going to take? I think the approach of our 
forefathers to have a sturdy, hard-work ethic, integrity and each 
person being responsible and accountable for their own decisions, and 
scaling back that Federal Government, I think a lot of Americans today 
believe that in an effort to maybe in a good intended effort to do 
right things.
  We have made the government no longer a servant but a master. I think 
a majority of Americans now are threatened by the government. I think a 
lot of Americans realize the government is the problem, not the answer.
  I believe those people are going to be rendering a verdict on that 
regard, into that regard. There is a point when the government becomes 
the master and not the servant. How close are we to that point? How 
much control do we really have to the machine that is promising so much 
more than anybody has any reasonable expectation that there is revenue 
to pay for?
  How much control do you have when the government agent talks to you 
about runoff of water? How much control do you have when you want to 
look for a loan for your kid to go to college and the government is the 
only one doing it. The government is in the flood business; they are 
into the automotive businesses. We have got Government Motors now, not 
General Motors.
  They are in the insurance business. The government is going to take 
over all of health care. How much do you want the government to run and 
how good a job have they done with the Post Office?
  We have a Department of Energy, that's an interesting Department, 
isn't it, created to make sure that we are not dependent on foreign 
oil. Boy, I am sure glad we have got that Department working hard.
  We have got a Department of Education. That's a wonder too. The 
government runs that Department of Education. I think the Wall Street 
Journal about 3 weeks ago said the ACT test

[[Page 15815]]

scores of kids that are being tested that want to go to college, 24 
percent of them, are ready for college. That's amazing, isn't it? You 
have got a government product, State government and Federal Government 
product where 24 percent of them are acceptable.
  If you bought gasoline and every tank of gas out of 100 tanks, 24 of 
them worked and the other 76 of them didn't work, you wouldn't buy gas 
there very much.
  So we can let that government agency then run our health care? Is 
this what we really want in America? I don't think so. People in 
Missouri had a referendum on that socialized medicine bill, and they 
passed by 80 percent a measure to challenge that in court. It is 
unconstitutional to require people to buy health insurance, they be 
part of this big government bailout, socialized medicine boondoggle. 
They didn't want it.
  And I have a feeling there is a whole lot of other States full of 
people who are tired of the government being the master and of the 
attitude that freedom means you can do whatever you want and if things 
go wrong you are going to live with the bailout.
  We cannot continue the level of taxation that we have done. We have 
to start rethinking, and it doesn't start in Washington, D.C.
  I think there are a lot of people that think if we got things right 
in Washington, D.C., everything would take care of itself. No, that's 
not right.
  Freedom starts in the hearts of individuals that believe that God 
gives them basic rights. And when the Federal Government starts to take 
away the basic rights that God gives you, that's when there is really 
big trouble. That's where there is a clash; that's where true patriots 
stand up and say, enough already.
  That's what happened in the War of Independence. That's what happened 
in the other wars of America's past. When people threatened our premise 
that God gives you certain basic rights, and they got in the way of 
that, that's when Americans stood up and they acted.

                              {time}  1920

  Today, there are a lot of Americans that are saying to our Federal 
Government, No, this is not what America is built on. Our government 
was built on justice. It was built on the concept that people are equal 
before the law. If you are a rich man or a poor man, it makes no 
difference. Everybody is equal before the law. That's not bailout 
fever.
  We have given up justice and gone to socialism. It hasn't worked in 
Europe. It didn't work for the USSR, and it won't work for us. We need 
to go back to what works, and that is people are equal before the law 
and people are free to take a gamble and try to run their business, and 
if it doesn't work, then they've got to pick themselves up and try 
again and not complain that they need more bailouts.
  In short, there is a reason why there is unemployment today. There is 
unemployment today because it was created by government policies. And 
those government policies have to change. We have to take the chains 
off of American business, and we have to go back to the principles that 
work.
  Well, we've talked about a couple of very philosophical kinds of 
things: Justice, which is a very important word. Justice does not mean 
that Lady Justice who has the blindfold over her eyes is peeking. It 
does not mean that she peeks and gives a special deal to one person or 
another person. We have created now, with the law, a special bill to 
create a whole bailout section of the Federal Government so Lady 
Justice can peek and give money to one person and maybe not to another.
  What confidence does the individual American have that the government 
is going to come and bail them out when they need it? Is the government 
going to be there? Do you want to be servant to Big Government or do 
you want to be a free person? Do you want to breathe the fresh air, 
live in the fresh air and the sunshine of being free, knowing that you 
also have to be responsible? Or do you, instead, choose the gloomy path 
of the promise that the government will take care of you even though 
you know that it can't economically, or it will not take care of you 
well and allow you to live in some sort of pseudofreedom where you 
don't make responsible choices and you hope the government will take 
care of you when it doesn't work?
  That's where we are as Americans. It has to start in our hearts. 
Freedom starts in the hearts of self-governing people who love God. 
They love their family and they love their country. And America is full 
of those people. And I have confidence, I have confidence that the 
American public still has a passion for freedom, still has a love for 
this country, still cares about the American Dream and wants to live in 
an environment where they can be free to exercise their God-given gifts 
and abilities. They want their children to grow up in a better 
condition than they are. They want to see civilization building and 
suffering going down. But the only way you can do that is you have to 
allow some people to prosper. You can't knock down all the businesses 
and anybody who makes money and expect to have jobs. You just can't do 
that. It doesn't work.
  And so we come back as we started. Do you want jobs? Let's get rid of 
all this excessive taxation. Let's do what every President in the past 
has done when there is a recession--JFK, Ronald Reagan, Bush. Let's cut 
the taxes. That is what we've got to do. We've got to change the 
regulations in the banking system so there's liquidity for businessmen 
to raise money. We have to create an environment where people aren't 
afraid of some new whacky idea coming down the pike and totally 
changing the business climate. We have to create a condition where 
people have confidence that there will be a stable government in this 
country which is not hostile to business, and we've got to cut the red 
tape and the government mandates.
  What that means is we basically need to take a look at the Federal 
Government, and we need to say anything that the Federal Government 
does not have to do, it has to be just gotten rid of. We need to 
delegate it back to the States or the local governments. We've got to 
get the Federal Government out of all kinds of businesses they have no 
constitutional reason to be in, and we have to focus on the basic 
things, which are justice. We need to make sure there is a level 
playing field at home for people to do their work, and there has to be 
a secure environment internationally, which means we have to have 
national defense. Those are the basic functions of justice. Those 
should be the functions of limited government.
  When the government gets too expensive, you have to go back and say, 
Wait a minute. Let's do the basics. Let's do the basics well, and 
everything else the Federal Government does not have to do, then let's 
get rid of it. That's where we have to be going. That's a clear path. 
It's something that's not going to happen overnight because it has to 
change in the hearts of Americans, in the families of America. In the 
churches and places of worship, there has to be an understanding that 
it's not the job of the government to take care of everything that goes 
wrong in everybody's life, because it won't work.
  And then Washington, D.C., will change, reluctantly, but Washington, 
D.C., will change, and we will see a new America and a brighter day and 
a better day for Americans. We will see a place where people are 
employed and excited about their work and where there's a 
responsibility and a vigor and a vibrancy that was so common of the old 
Yankee that the Europeans used to make fun of. And once again, that 
Yankee will be back again, Yankee Doodle. They used to sing about it to 
make fun of us, but as we have seen tsunamis and hurricanes and all 
kinds of crises around the world, they like old Yankee Doodle to come 
to help them.
  And so I'm proud to be an American. I know that you're proud to be 
Americans. We have to move back to the policies that made this country 
great.
  And I see that a very good friend of mine, a former judge, a 
Congressman from the great State of Texas is here to join us before 
long, and perhaps he will carry on along these lines. I know he is

[[Page 15816]]

a man who loves God. He fears God. He loves his country, and he loves 
his family, and that's why I love him. And so I think the next hour 
will be exciting, and I urge you to stick with us here.

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