[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 156 (2010), Part 8]
[House]
[Pages 10737-10743]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                      REPUBLICAN CONFERENCE BILLS

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of 
January 6, 2009, the gentlewoman from Wyoming (Mrs. Lummis) is 
recognized for 60 minutes as the designee of the minority leader.
  Mrs. LUMMIS. Mr. Speaker, tonight's discussion will be about bills 
that Members of the Republican Conference have sponsored that have not 
yet gotten a hearing that we still think are very good ideas for our 
country at this time of high debt, high deficits, and when regulation 
is being heaped on businesses that actually need the chains to be 
broken so they can pursue the American Dream of hiring people, creating 
jobs and fulfilling our role in the country and the world, which is to 
feed people, clothe people, create jobs, create wealth, create 
opportunity and so that all Americans have the opportunity to do so 
without being shackled by the Federal Government.
  With me this evening is Bob Latta, who is from one of the most 
diverse districts in the entire United States. It has everything from 
agriculture to manufacturing, and it has experienced every up and down 
that is possible for one district to experience. During the course of 
this evening, Mr. Latta and I hope that we will have the opportunity to 
refer you frequently to www.americanroadmap.org, which is a draft of 
the Budget Committee on which we both serve, an opportunity that 
provides Americans the chance to get out of debt and to eliminate the 
deficit, and to comprehensively do so without raising taxes.
  It takes a long time, but it creates a very smooth landing for our 
country. And we also want to refer you to www.americaspeakingout.com. 
Americaspeakingout.com is an official function of the Republican 
Conference here in the U.S. House which allows you to weigh in on ideas 
that you have for our country that will make it stronger, safer, more 
efficient, more cost effective and will unshackle this Nation's economy 
in a way that will allow us to once again pursue our role as a global 
leader in terms of innovation and jobs.
  So at this time I would like to yield to my colleague, the gentleman 
from Ohio (Mr. Latta).
  Mr. LATTA. Mr. Speaker, I would like to thank the gentlelady for 
yielding. This is a very important issue that we are talking about: 
jobs, small businesses, and how we can get this country moving. I rise 
tonight to discuss a bill that I have sponsored, H.R. 1763, which is 
the Responsible Reinvestment Act of 2009. But before I do, I would just 
like to make a couple of comments, as the gentlelady just said, about 
the uniqueness of my district.
  I have the number one manufacturing district in the State of Ohio. I 
also have the number one agricultural district in the State of Ohio. 
And about 2 years of this time, according to the National Manufacturers 
Association, I had the ninth largest number of manufacturing jobs in 
the United States House of Representatives. But because of the 
recession that we've seen happen across the country, I have dropped to 
about 20th, which is totally unacceptable because last summer we had 
unemployment rates raging across our district and across the State and 
the country. Two of my counties had over 18 percent unemployment. I had 
four others over 16 percent. So we have to do something in this country 
to get this country moving.
  It's kind of interesting. We talk about having a district that's 
number one in manufacturing and also a district that's number one in 
agriculture. So how did that work? Well, I have so many of my farmers 
that work full time off the farm, but they work full time on the farm. 
So like my relatives who also live in my district, you know, they're 
working a lot more than 40-hour weeks, and they are making sure that 
the American economy keeps moving, they are making sure that Americans 
are fed, but they are also making sure that we don't have to rely on 
foreign countries for our food, like we have to do when it comes to 
oil, relying on foreign countries for our needs.
  So we need jobs. We need jobs that are created by the private sector. 
We don't need any government jobs that are really just make-work jobs 
out there. Small businesses continue to bear the burden of this 
economic slowdown, and they need relief to be able to survive and 
continue to remain in business. Currently, small businesses employ over 
half the private sector workers in America. To assist small business 
owners, I introduced the Responsible Reinvestment Act. Specifically, 
this bill focuses on the following areas that I believe will not only 
help small businesses grow throughout the country but also help put our 
neighbors back to work.
  The bill does the following: a 20 percent tax cut for small business 
is equal to 20 percent of the total income of the business. It 
permanently repeals the estate tax, or the death tax. You know, we have 
to do something in this Congress because if we do not act by the end of 
this session, the death tax will revert to where it was 10 years ago 
without any adjustment to inflation, and that will hit small businesses 
and farmers alike. So, again, this bill repeals the death tax; it 
increases the expensing for small businesses to $500,000; a full first-
year expensing for farm and manufacturing equipment; and the full 
deductibility for the self-employment tax in relation to health 
premiums, which is extremely important for small businesses across this 
country.
  The items in this bill will also be very beneficial to small business 
owners by freeing up capital for them to use to reinvest in their 
business. And through doing that, it will bring stability back to the 
communities in which they exist.
  The future of our country depends on a proactive approach to creating 
viable solutions for small business owners to exceed and remain 
profitable. Small businesses are the lifeline and the heartbeat of our 
Nation's economy, as these are the companies that we rely on for 
products and services. As a Congress, we must absolutely stop passing 
legislation that contains massive spending and, instead, pass 
legislation like H.R. 1763 that will help small businesses rather than 
hurt them.
  President Obama submitted his administration's fiscal year 2011 
budget proposal with a record-breaking cost of $3.8 trillion. This 
budget proposal includes a $2 trillion tax increase over the next 10 
years and projected record deficits. This proposal will double our 
Nation's debt in 5 years and triple it in 10 years from fiscal year 
2008 levels.
  The Congressional Budget Office has stated that under current 
spending levels, by 2020 American taxpayers will be paying $2 billion a 
day in interest on the national debt alone. And, again, let me 
reiterate that--$2 billion a day. I think we have to understand what 
this is going to do. It hasn't been all that long ago that we look back 
to the late seventies and early eighties when we had 21.5 percent 
interest rates in this country. And it wasn't very long ago I was 
talking with some small business owners in my district, and they said, 
Well, we even had problems getting a loan at over 26 percent interest.
  Now, if the Federal Government is borrowing over $2 billion a day--
and you know, when you are talking about that, you are looking at the 
Federal deficit or, I should say, the debt going to $20.3 trillion by 
the year 2020, and now the U.S. Treasury is coming out and saying that 
that could be at least $26 trillion, that $2 billion a day is going to 
be much higher, and businesses out there are going to have to do one 
thing--compete against government to borrow. That means the interest 
rates are going to skyrocket again, and how are we going to get small 
businesses moving again in this country?
  Mrs. LUMMIS. Will the gentleman yield briefly?
  Mr. LATTA. Absolutely. I yield to the lady.

[[Page 10738]]


  Mrs. LUMMIS. That $2 billion a day you just mentioned, that would 
only take either 3 or 4 days for the entire budget of the State of 
Wyoming for 2 years. That covers our whole budget. It's a stunning 
number. That's how much money we're talking about.
  And I yield back.
  Mr. LATTA. I thank the lady for yielding back. Because again, you 
know, when you are looking at these staggering numbers--I'm sure 
Wyoming, like the State of Ohio, in our Constitution we have to balance 
our budget. I was a county commissioner for 6 years when I was first 
elected to public service. We went through the '91-'92 downturn at that 
time. And what did we have to do? Well, we had to cut back. We didn't 
just say we have to spend more. We had to cut.
  Mrs. LUMMIS. Will the gentleman yield?
  Mr. LATTA. I yield to the lady.
  Mrs. LUMMIS. How did you cut?

                              {time}  1845

  Mr. LATTA. Well, what we had to do was when we did our budget for the 
year, there are certain things in Ohio that the commissioners are 
responsible for. You looked at things. You thought, we have to budget 
for things like bad weather because you have to have more overtime.
  One of the things that we always hoped we never have happen was a 
capital murder case because we know how much that would cost. We had to 
sit down with all of the other elected officials and say, We have to 
make cuts across the board and scale back. If we didn't, we were going 
to be in trouble. Again, our Constitution says you shall balance your 
budget.
  Mrs. LUMMIS. Are you aware of any circumstance since you have been in 
Congress where the Members of Congress in the leadership have been 
called to the White House to sit down and talk about how we are going 
to cut spending?
  Mr. LATTA. Again, this is a problem we are facing. Instead of saying 
we are going to increase certain budgets by 12 percent over the year 
before, we have to go back maybe a budget before that and say that is 
where we need to start the cuts. One of the things that is happening 
with small businesses across the country, or large businesses, when I 
go across my district and when I have the opportunity, I try to go to 
as many factories and businesses as I can. And when I am talking to 
these individuals, I like to find out what is happening to them.
  But they like to ask this one question: We have cut way back to keep 
our doors open; what have you done in the Federal Government to help 
along these lines?
  I think one of the interesting trips I was in was at a factory in my 
district. I went into the plant and they had to scale back. They had to 
unfortunately cut employees. But at the same time they were in there 
saying we had to reduce the number of hours people were working. So 
maybe it was not 40-plus hours, but it was a 32-hour work week. Then 
they said we have to make sure that management does their share. They 
were cut 10-20 percent in their salary. And management was cleaning the 
restrooms in the factory to try to help do anything to scale back on 
costs that they would pay someone else to do.
  Mrs. LUMMIS. Is there any instance where the Federal Government has 
done the same thing? Has the Federal Government gone to its employees 
and said, We need to cut you back to 32-hour weeks so we can keep you 
employed, keep you on your benefits so you don't lose your health care, 
but we need to save some money. Are you aware of that?
  Mr. LATTA. Again, I think we would have heard it if something like 
that would have happened. But at this stage of the game, the Federal 
Government has a trump card some people think, and that we control the 
printing presses for putting out money. The big problem is we watch 
dollars being put out, but at the same time the United States Treasury 
is out there at an auction, and at that auction you have the Federal 
Reserve buying it, and all of a sudden we are monetizing our debt. We 
are moving one IOU from one pocket to the other. We are not 
accomplishing anything. We are not cutting anything. And we watch 
expenses keep rolling up.
  The American people understand that what we do at home when we sit 
around our kitchen tables and you get out the family budget and say 
these are the things that we are going to have to pay for. It is the 
question of wants and needs. There is a big difference between what I 
want and what I absolutely need. I think the Federal Government has got 
to go to what is needed, and we are going to have to start scaling back 
immediately.
  I am sure you have students and constituents who come here. When I 
had a group of students here today on the Capitol steps, and I look at 
these kids, juniors or seniors in high school, I look at what their 
future is for the next 10 years, and I don't care if it is $20.3 
trillion in debt or $26 trillion in debt, according to the Treasury, we 
are in trouble.
  Mrs. LUMMIS. What do you hear from your constituents? Do they believe 
that they are ready for the kind of reforms that you believe are 
necessary to save our country?
  Mr. LATTA. I thank the gentlelady. I think what you are looking at is 
from the small business owners. They understand right off the bat that 
something has to be done. They understand that they have had to make 
deep, deep cuts.
  Until recently, I served on the Budget Committee, and you are still a 
member. Sitting through those hearings with the Congressional Budget 
Office director or the Office of Management and Budget director or 
Secretary Geithner or when we heard from Mr. Bernanke, we heard the 
same thing: we are on an unsustainable growth of spending in this 
country. It has got to be stopped. They don't offer a solution, but it 
is a very simple solution: you don't spend what you don't have.
  I was one of 19 grandkids on my maternal side. I will never forget my 
grandmother, the good German farm woman she was, she had a simple 
saying, that he who goes a borrowing goes a sorrowing. She pretty much 
made sure that all 19 of us understood that. Again, you don't spend 
what you don't have because we cannot spend our way out of this mess. 
If we are going to be doing that, all we are doing right now, and have 
been doing, is mortgaging the future of the next generation of 
Americans.
  You know, the question when you talk to parents out there and say are 
your kids going to be better off than you are, most parents don't 
believe it. They think that their kids are going to have a harder time 
of it than they have, and that is a bad sign for America's future.
  Mrs. LUMMIS. The chart I have to my left, the viewer's right, is 
exactly illustrating what the gentleman has just been discussing. If 
you look at the spread between spending and taxes that occurs on the 
far side of the dotted line, that shows you what is projected into the 
future. That spread between spending and taxes going into the future is 
enormous and consistent. And if you look at what that produces in terms 
of deficits, look at the bottom line, the red line again on the far 
side away from me from the dotted line, and you can see that deficits 
are projected into the future. When we say unsustainable, that's what 
we mean. The long-term consequences to this country is that our 
children and grandchildren will inherit the consequences of our 
reckless behavior. How do we resolve this?
  Mr. LATTA. Well, when you look at these budget projections, you have 
to have people working. When we are looking at an unemployment rate of 
9.7 percent in this country and a little under 11 percent unemployment 
in the State of Ohio, and we all know what is going to happen later 
this summer when all of those people who were hired to be census 
takers, working for the census are going to be back on unemployment, 
these numbers are going to go right back up because it kind of is a 
false data time that we are in right now when we are looking at these 
numbers.
  Of course we saw what happened when the unemployment numbers came out 
and only 41,000 jobs had been created in the private sector, what Wall

[[Page 10739]]

Street thought of that. They are looking at things are not going well 
for this economy.
  I know you heard these same statements that were projections from the 
Congressional Budget Office director when he was before the Budget 
Committee. We are looking at probably 2014 or 2015 before we get back 
to, and I don't care if you want to say normal employment or normal 
unemployment in this country. The question is for areas that are hard 
hit like a lot of parts of Ohio and a lot of parts of the Midwest where 
manufacturing takes place, what are we going to do in our areas for the 
next 4 or 5 years with these high unemployment rates? Where are people 
going to go?
  Mrs. LUMMIS. This chart illustrates exactly what the gentleman is 
discussing. If you look at the blue line, that is private sector 
employment. That is employment in the entrepreneurial economy. This is 
employment that comes from the employer class of Americans. If you look 
at the red line, the skyrocketing government employment, that is just 
that. It is the Federal Government attempting to replace the private 
sector with public sector jobs. The only problem is a public sector 
employee pays the same taxes that a private sector employee does. 
However, the public sector employee's salary comes entirely from 
private sector employment and the taxes generated by it. There is no 
way that we can sustain an economy of totally government employees when 
we have lost the private sector jobs, the kinds of jobs that Mr. Latta 
has been referring to this evening in his district.
  Mr. LATTA. One of the things that we are talking about, those jobs, 
and it goes back years ago when I was a county commissioner. You wanted 
to make sure you had as broad a tax base as possible in your county or 
State or country. It is like a pyramid. You want as big a base on that 
as possible. But the thing we were worried about, what happens if? We 
were losing jobs and we had fewer and fewer people. All of a sudden 
that starts shifting that base, and pretty soon you have a very small 
tax base out there of individuals, and you have a lot of other people 
up on top. It doesn't work.
  What we can't have in this country is killing the entrepreneurs. When 
you look at all of these different scenarios out there, the bills that 
have come before this Congress, and these are the same people that I 
talk to in my district. And again, when you are dealing with the 
largest manufacturing district in the State, 20th largest in the 
Nation, they are concerned. I hear all the time about the issues out 
there that will help bring them down, is about the best way to say it.
  You know, we have the second highest corporate tax rate in the world. 
What are we doing about that here? When we talk about the health care 
costs, a lot of them are saying when they hit that certain magical 
number, when they get above it, they are asking why do I want to expand 
if I will be paying more. It won't work. Folks in business understand 
it. It gets to the point of economics 101 from your first year of 
college which is the law of diminishing returns. It is the more I work, 
the more I get taxed, and the less I have; why do it? People aren't 
going to do that. It is against human nature to do something like that.
  Mrs. LUMMIS. Would you recommend reducing the corporate tax rate?
  Mr. LATTA. We have to go across the board. If we are going to compete 
against our foreign competitors, and that is who is out there today. 
Because when we look at a lot of these regulations that are coming down 
on businesses, you look at the corporate tax rate and you look at what 
has happened here with health care, we have seen these numbers coming 
out today of what is going to happen on the health care side. They are 
saying you get to keep what you want; well, that is not going to happen 
for a lot of individuals.
  When you look at the regulations, companies are saying we don't have 
to worry about that if we are someplace else. I have had companies that 
are located in a village or city, and when the EPA puts a mandate in 
for water or sewer, but the parent company is some place outside the 
State, and they are told if their rates go up to a certain amount and 
they are no longer profitable in their area, well that company is going 
to be moved. When you are looking at losing 300 jobs or 400 jobs or 600 
jobs, that is totally unacceptable.
  Mrs. LUMMIS. Are you aware of any employers in your manufacturing 
district that have pulled up stakes and moved their businesses 
elsewhere?
  Mr. LATTA. That happens all of the time, unfortunately. We have 
situations where we are competing. I know years ago when I was a county 
commissioner, we were competing against many other parts of the State 
of Ohio or maybe someplace in southern Michigan or eastern Indiana. In 
a short 20-year period, now we are competing with somebody 8,000, 
12,000 miles away. If they are in a situation where they have lower 
labor cost, and if they have lower cost for their electricity or other 
fuel costs, and we are all for clean air and clean water, but if they 
are in certain areas where there is no concern for that, and we have 
heard under the cap-and-trade legislation, if we did everything that 
was asked for under this piece of legislation that passed out of the 
House, in 8 years there would be absolutely no difference in 
CO2 emissions. Why, because China and India would be making 
that amount up. But at the same time, we would have lost all of those 
jobs in this country. Those jobs would have moved someplace else.

                              {time}  1900

  Mrs. LUMMIS. Are you aware of any manufacturer that has moved into 
your district from a foreign country, saying this is a better place to 
do business? It's more economical here? I can make a better profit 
here?
  Mr. LATTA. I thank the lady for yielding.
  This is the problem you run into. In my opinion, I truly believe that 
the United States has the greatest workforce in the world. We have the 
best trained workforce. We have the best educated workforce, but we 
just need to be put on an equal footing. And when companies understand 
that--you know, it's just like with that small entrepreneur.
  If they toil day after day--I knew somebody that, to get their 
company started, they had a small bed that could roll up in their 
office. And his wife would come in and help work, and she slept on the 
couch. But, you know, they put hours and hours and hours into that 
business, first of all, to get it off the ground, to grow it, and then 
to make it successful.
  But if you put the roadblocks in front of these people, you know, 
some folks aren't going to be as steadfast as they were, and they are 
going to say, You know what? It's just not worth it. Why kill myself? 
And I think that, again, it's the spirit of entrepreneurism in this 
country that makes this country work.
  It's like when I talk to these kids on the Capitol steps. You know, 
why did a lot of our relatives ever get on--some people's relatives 
came on the Mayflower. Most of ours came on the Poorflower. And when 
people got off that boat, and my relatives came down by barge on the 
Ohio River, and they came up the canal system, and they cleared the 
land, and they started farming in Putnam County in Ohio. They had a 
desire. They wanted land. They wanted to grow that land. They wanted to 
make sure that they had something not only for themselves but for their 
kids. They wanted a future. And I think that's what we are losing track 
of in this body and in this Congress, that what's happened is that it's 
no longer about the future, but too many are thinking, ``It's about 
me.'' And the problem with ``me'' is we are not growing it. And we have 
to grow the ``we'' and the ``us'' to make this country successful.
  Mrs. LUMMIS. My daughter did a study for an economics professor about 
externalities, meaning decisions you don't necessarily see in black and 
white on a business plan, that might affect a Wyoming rancher's 
decision to stay in agriculture or leave agriculture. Because we know 
that in Wyoming agriculture, especially beef production agriculture--of 
course, there

[[Page 10740]]

are no subsidies in beef production agriculture in Wyoming, and other 
States as well.
  So the largest group in Wyoming are those that make from 0 to 4 
percent profit. The second largest group are those that make from 0 to 
minus 4 percent profit. And after looking at many factors of what would 
motivate a person to stay in a business where the profit margin is that 
low, the answer for especially second, third, and fourth generation 
ranchers was the ability to pass it on to my children, to give my 
children a better life, to give my kids the ranch.
  Now, Mr. Latta has mentioned two things that are of concern if a 
person's motivation is to give their children a better standard of 
living, a better life, an opportunity, a shot that maybe they didn't 
have or that they have enjoyed and they just want their children to 
have as well. You mentioned that next year the estate tax is going to 
go back up to a maximum amount of 55 percent of the value of the 
estate, with only a $1 million exemption; whereas, this year there is 
no estate tax whatsoever.
  Think about that and how that will affect you if you have spent your 
entire life building something with the one motivation of giving that 
to your children or your grandchildren. That is going to be 
devastating. Many people I know would accept a smaller estate tax with 
a higher exemption, but no one I know is going to be satisfied that a 
55 percent tax on your life's work that you wish to pass on to your 
children is anything but a taking. And takings are unconstitutional 
under our Fifth Amendment. I mean, that's how people look at it.
  And, you know, if you worked your whole life for something 7 days a 
week, not 5 days a week, not 40-hour weeks, but every minute of every 
day that you are awake, growing your family, growing your business, 
growing their opportunities, creating a community, creating the kind of 
American Dream that so many people came here with nothing and then 
built over their lifetimes or their parents built over their lifetimes 
and want to pass on to their children.
  The other point you made that I think is going to affect that 
American Dream is our debt, is these running deficits that are 
unsustainable over time. Because if we mount our children and our 
grandchildren with debt, it will crowd out private investment. If we 
are spending the entire Federal budget, all of our tax dollars on the 
combination of entitlement programs and interest on the national debt, 
we have crowded out the opportunity for private investment as well as 
for discretionary spending within our economy.
  I yield back to the gentleman to tell us more about the consequences 
of these bad policies and the kinds of bills that he has proposed to 
change all that.
  Mr. LATTA. Well, you have touched on something when you are talking 
about the death tax, the estate tax. And, you know, when you are 
talking about something going from having zero death tax this year, 
which won't ever happen because, you know, there will be a retroactive 
clause put in somewhere saying that they are never going to let people 
off the hook, and they are going to say anybody that passed away this 
year, somehow they will try to bring them back up, and I am sure the 
lawsuits will begin.
  But you are right about a couple things right off the bat. You know, 
family businesses, family farms, I know it's difficult for some folks 
when you are only looking at a very small percentage of about less than 
2 percent of Americans now that make their livelihoods from the farm. 
And when you go to your local county fairs and you go to look at these 
implements and the costs, and when you are talking about a $425,000 
combine with one head, or you are looking at a couple hundred thousand 
dollars for a tractor, and you start adding all these pieces of 
machinery up. People say, well, if you have got a couple million 
dollars you are rich. Well, most farmers that I know are land rich and 
cash poor.
  And what happens in a lot of cases or a small business, what do they 
have to do? Well, number one, okay, they have to start doing estate 
planning early on. And I am an attorney by trade. But when you start 
talking about that we have to tell the American people they have to 
expend millions and billions of dollars when it comes to estate 
planning or doing the taxes every year, we should simplify this. But, 
also, we shouldn't be taking what they have worked hard for. And when 
people are out there thinking, Is it going to be worth it in the end?
  Because this will be--you know, if we get to a point in this country, 
people are going to say, You know what? If the government's going to 
take it in the end and I can't pass it on, what are they going to do? 
Either, A, I am not going to work that hard, or, B, I am just going to 
spend it. And if they spend it, what's going to be the result of that? 
They are going to say, Government, you take care of me now. I am not 
going to worry about my livelihood or I am not going to worry about 
down the road when it's time for me to retire. Just have the government 
take care of me. And that's not going to work.
  So, you know, we have got to keep this entrepreneurship. We have got 
to make sure that people in this country have the ability and the 
thought that they can succeed. You know, a lot of people sometimes are 
jealous of people that come here as new immigrants to this country, but 
the thing that they know is they come to this country like a lot of our 
ancestors did. They want to make something of themselves. They want to 
make something of their future. They want to have something for their 
kids. But when you kill that entrepreneurial spirit, that's when the 
beginning of the end becomes.
  And you know, it's kind of interesting. There used to be a saying 
years ago before the fall of the Soviet Union that the people pretended 
to work and the government pretended to pay them. And we never want to 
have that happen in this country, where people get to the thought that 
there is this hopelessness, that there is no reason to do it. We want 
to make sure that the people have the ability in this country to get 
ahead.
  And I yield to the lady.
  Mrs. LUMMIS. The gentleman has mentioned a couple of things that are 
important to recreating a vibrant economy and to taking the shackles 
off of American business, and tax policy is high on the list. The fact 
that we could have an estate tax that is much smaller in terms of its 
impact on a family, and the American people would accept that is in 
fact the case. I hear it over and over in this country. We have also 
heard that it would be helpful in terms of American competitiveness for 
us to reduce our corporate tax so we are more globally competitive.
  Among the provisions that anyone can read about is in 
americanroadmap.org, and that is the proposal to create a flat income 
tax. That would be a rate, such as 10 or 11 percent, that you would pay 
on all of your income, regardless of source, regardless of whether it's 
active or passive, whether it is capital or income from a job, whether 
it is rental income, royalty income, or, again, active income. All 
sources of income would be taxed at 10 or 11 percent.
  So you take all your income annually times 10 percent or 11 percent. 
Maybe you have a deduction of $20,000, so your first $20,000 worth of 
income isn't taxed. And then whatever that amounts to, you just write a 
check and send it in to the IRS. You don't need to have CPAs help you 
fill out your tax returns. And I can tell you, if we did that, it would 
save the American people a lot of money. We would garner a lot of tax 
revenue that we aren't collecting now because of the efforts and 
machinations that people go through to try to protect as much of their 
income as they can from being taxable because, A, there is no way to 
avoid it, whether you are rich or poor; and, B, it's predictable. You 
know that the person across the aisle from you at work or at church is 
also paying 10 or 11 percent, whatever it is, of their paycheck.
  That sounds so fair to me. It sounds so logical. And yet that is 
something that is so hard to change with all of the interest groups 
that affect the appearance and shape of our Tax Code.

[[Page 10741]]

  I do want to encourage, as we go along, everyone to go into 
AmericaSpeakingOut.com and weigh in on ideas that we have proposed to 
reduce the Federal debt and deficit and stimulate the economy and take 
the shackles off the American entrepreneur. And also to just weigh in 
and give your own thoughts about how we might do it.
  I would like to talk about one of the bills that I have sponsored, 
and it's a way to reduce the number of Federal employees without firing 
anybody. It is a bill that would provide that if you look at the curve 
off here to my left, your right, you will see Federal employment in the 
year 2010, which is the farthest bar away from me, has absolutely 
skyrocketed. And this is Federal Government employment full-time 
equivalents excluding the Postal Service. So it has just grown leaps 
and bounds.
  Now, how do we soften the landing for those people that were hired in 
a way that will allow our economy to return to normal so we can begin 
to reduce all this deficit spending? And the answer is for every person 
who retires or voluntarily vacates a position, that vacated position, 
that vacant position would be moved into a position pool, and only half 
of the positions would be moved in the position pool. Then the 
executive branch of government, run out of the President's office, 
would have to determine whether that position was essential to that 
agency and needed to be placed back in that agency and then filled with 
an employee, or whether that position should be moved to another agency 
that had a more impactful mission on our American economy and on our 
government regulatory needs.
  So it's a way over a 10-year period to reduce the number of Federal 
employees through attrition. They leave. Their position becomes vacant. 
Half of those positions go away. That saves about $70 billion. Not a 
small amount of money.
  Some of the other ideas that Republicans have filed go way back to 
the stimulus package. We sponsored a bill that would have stimulated 
economic growth; in fact, it would have created twice as many jobs at 
half the cost of the majority party's $787 billion stimulus package. 
How did we do it? We did it by investing in infrastructure instead of 
earmarks and by cutting taxes. This is something I believe, Mr. Latta, 
that you and I both supported.

                              {time}  1915

  Mr. LATTA. Thank you very much for yielding, and again, you go back 
to the Responsibility Investment Act again, you were talking about 
cutting taxes here and what we can do to really get things moving. 
Again, if you get rid of and make permanent the repeal of the death 
tax, well, what happens? People are going to say, now I can invest that 
money back into the business instead of going out saying, how am I 
going to try to soften the blow when the taxes finally come, you know, 
through buying insurance or, you know, going to multiple years of tax 
planning on how you're going to get this thing done?
  And I'm sure everybody this year is going crazy with the thought that 
the death tax comes screaming back at the $1 million level at the end 
of this year, and you have a lot of folks with their A and their B 
trusts already funded where they're supposed to be, and they're going 
to say, now what am I supposed to do? So it's right back doing what? 
You know, it's not just the money that people invest, it is also the 
time. If you think how much time is invested by businesses to try to 
figure out how they have to cope with all these taxes and regulations 
out there, I think that that's one of the important things out there.
  Again, in a piece of legislation that I have on the Responsibility 
Investment Act, again, repealing that death tax, we're talking about 
what we can do on the small business side. You know, if we're doing a 
20 percent cut for small businesses and 20 percent tax cut for 
businesses, that's going to allow those businesses to take up to a 20 
percent deduction equal to their income. And it's regardless of whether 
they're paying corporate or personal income tax.
  So those are things we have to do to try to make sure that we get 
businesses back moving in this country again, and again, we just can't 
expect folks out there to say, you know what, I'm going to work like a 
dog 24 hours a day, 7 days a week for X number of years to try to get 
this off the ground and then have to watch it all be taken away from 
me.
  Mrs. LUMMIS. You know, among the other pieces of legislation that 
Republicans have sponsored includes reducing our salaries or freezing 
our salaries, freezing government salaries, reducing spending across 
the board. There have been Republican proposals, anything from 1 
percent to 5 percent to 10 percent. There have been Republican 
proposals that would take spending, as Mr. Latta referred to earlier, 
back to 2008 levels or even 2006 levels. You know, we had enough 
government then. There were not a lot of complaints that, my gosh, we 
don't have enough government; we need to spend more on government.
  So we could take spending back to 2006 or 2008 levels, and I don't 
believe the American people, other than those who have benefited 
specifically by being employed by those Federal agencies and Federal 
programs, would notice the absence of that money, and in fact, they'd 
probably benefit mightily because it would save so much money that 
interest payments on the debt and the deficit would be reduced, and we 
would not have to borrow so much money.
  A couple weeks ago here in Washington, some U.S. Treasuries were 
issued. They are issued every day that we are working, Monday through 
Friday. There's a sale of U.S. Treasury bonds because we are going into 
debt so much we have to sell Treasuries every day. This particular 
issue was undersubscribed. That means there were not enough buyers for 
the money that we attempted to sell, and the reason is that for the 
risk that the buyers were taking, they wanted a higher rate of 
interest. They wanted a better return. When you take more risk on an 
investment you're purchasing, you want a higher rate of return.
  As soon as we have to start paying higher interest in order to 
attract buyers to our debt, we are ensuring that our children and 
grandchildren are going to be saddled with higher interest payments 
once again, crowding out other investments in our economy. These are 
the kinds of things that absolutely stifle economic growth in our 
country and encourage some businesspeople, as was mentioned by Mr. 
Latta, to move their businesses elsewhere.
  We do know that, for example, in the Gulf of Mexico right now, with 
the moratorium on drilling and no end in sight to when it might be 
lifted, that there are drill rigs that are considering moving to that 
tremendous oil and gas find off the coast of Brazil. If one of those 
enormous rigs is moved off to the coast of Brazil, it will be 5 years 
before it comes back. It's not going to move back at a moment's notice. 
That takes so many thousands of jobs away from workers in Louisiana. So 
they're doubly punished. They're punished because their shores are 
polluted by oil from the Deepwater Horizon rig which exploded, 
destroying the fishing industry and retarding the tourism industry. And 
then they're adding insult to injury; the oil and gas employees lose 
their jobs in areas where you could drill at a shallower depth or a 
medium depth in a much more safe and well-understood manner. This is 
the wrong reaction.
  You know, the President is speaking later this evening about the 
situation in the Gulf, and what I would note about that is, we can't 
legislate our way out of the damage and the devastation to the Gulf. We 
have to clean it up, and we have to make BP pay for it. Those are our 
alternatives: Clean it up; make BP pay for it.
  The President, if he had had executive experience, would likely have 
called the head of BP within 48 or 72 hours of that oil spill and said, 
I want you on a conversation with me every single day at a specific 
time. I want you and me and the Coast Guard and the Governors of the 
affected States

[[Page 10742]]

and anyone else who is able to help us clean up this mess, and they 
could get on the call every day at the same time. The President could 
have opened a call, and he could have said, I'm not going to stay on 
this call for more than a minute, but I'm going to tell you that the 
people on this call are responsible to the people of this Nation to 
make sure that that oil does not get to our shores, and I want you to 
do everything possible. BP has said they will pay for it. BP is on this 
call, and are you assuring us you will pay for it? I mean, under which 
circumstances, they would have said, yes. And it could have proceeded 
that way every day with the President's full support for the Governors' 
requests, for the Coast Guard's requests, for repealing the effects of 
the Jones Law, which inhibited our ability of getting other countries 
to help us in the response. All of that could have been handled if it 
would have begun earlier enough.
  But the fact that there was an effort to run away and avoid the 
problem and deal with it not until it was just completely out of 
control is, I believe, an indication of someone who had legislative 
skills and not executive skills. There is such a difference. We cannot 
legislate our way out of the situation, and we should not have a cap-
and-tax bill as a response to a devastating accident that may be the 
worst ecological disaster we've ever had, because taxes are not going 
to change it.
  BP has said they're going to pay the bill. To do otherwise would be 
to impose taxation on the people in this country who can least afford 
it, those of low and moderate income who are trying to make ends meet 
at a time when unemployment is still 9.7 percent, at a time when we 
should be helping them find jobs, not imposing a moratorium on safe 
drilling, that takes jobs away from them. The Gulf is just one example 
of where that's true.
  And I yield back.
  Mr. LATTA. I thank the gentlelady for yielding and a couple of your 
earlier points, you know, you were talking about pay here in 
Washington. I've got a bill that hasn't had any hearings, and what that 
bill says is that there are no COLAs anymore for Congress. If you think 
you deserve a pay raise, then you should introduce a piece of 
legislation saying that, and what this bill would do is say no more 
COLAs, period. We wouldn't have a 1-year freeze or a 2-year freeze; 
this bill would say no more COLAs.
  Again, going back to what you said on that interest on that debt, and 
I mentioned a little bit earlier about going back to the early 1980s, 
with that 21.5 percent interest rate that people experienced. I was 
first starting to practice law that year, and I'll never forget, we had 
to do land contracts. And what a land contract, of course, is, say you 
want to buy my house, well, you couldn't go to the bank and get a loan 
because you couldn't borrow any money. So I would have to, as the owner 
of the home, would sell you the house. We would have a contract that 
you pay me the principal and interest over about a 3-year period of 
time, and hopefully, at the end of that 3 years, then you would find a 
bank that you could go out to and get a loan from.
  We don't want to see this go back, like I said, to where we had 21.5 
percent interest. We don't want to go back to have some businesses out 
there at over 26 percent. When the Federal Government is out there, as 
you said, you know, if they have to start raising the interest rates to 
make it more profitable or for either the country--of course, right 
now, we know $3.7 trillion of our debt is owned by foreign countries, 
and you know, we're only seeing that only grow, where they will control 
more of our public debt than anybody else.
  So it's important that we get this under control because we cannot 
have interest rates that high into future. Businesses will stagnate. 
Businesses will not have the ability to go out and borrow money. And 
that's what we're going to be looking at. We'll be staring that in the 
face in a very short period of time, and what we need to make sure is 
that businesses can go down to that local bank on the corner, that 
people can go down to that bank on the corner and draw money and also 
loan money from that bank because, again, if we're in a situation that 
we were, you know, having learned that a lifetime ago already, not too 
many years, but back in a situation that we would be in where we were 
before, we can't compete.
  And something else I guess we're kind of forgetting, when you look 
back on some of these statistics, maybe 10, 20, or 30 years ago, the 
United States was pretty much at the top of the heap. We could make 
some odd, dumb mistakes along the line, but we could correct them 
pretty quick because we controlled about everything. Not anymore. When 
you're looking where the Chinese want to be in the next 10 to 15 years 
and where other global competitors are, we're not going to be there. So 
that's why the United States and this Congress cannot misstep at any 
time, from now or into the future, because our future, not only for 
this generation but the generations to follow, are at stake.
  Mrs. LUMMIS. Mr. Latta has announced a call to action for all 
Americans, and we are attempting as a Republican Conference to solicit 
ideas and priorities from all Americans, regardless of party 
affiliation.
  Please visit americaspeaking
out.com.
  This will provide an innovative online forum for policy debate and 
idea generation. It gets us outside of Washington to talk about policy 
solutions at town hall meetings across the Nation. It allows us to 
discuss how our principles of freedom and smaller government could be 
applied to the priorities of the American people.
  In time, we will produce a new governing agenda for America guided by 
this open process and built on our conservative principles, and we want 
to demonstrate that Congress should pursue different policies and 
operate this House more responsibly than both Democrats and previous 
Republican majorities. And if I hear something all the time on the 
Republican side of this room, it is that we don't want to treat the 
Democrats the way we used to treat them, and we don't want to be 
treated the way the Democrats have treated us.
  I really believe that the 112th Congress that begins in January could 
be a new beginning for our country. It will only be so if the American 
people say it will be so because the American people are the ultimate 
governors of this country, and they govern with their vote, and they 
will have an opportunity in November to vote.
  So please visit americaspeakingout.com. Give us your ideas. We want 
to know. We want to build a working, bipartisan majority with the 
American people so we are legislating what the American people want, 
not what liberals want, not what conservatives want, what the American 
people want.
  So americaspeakingout.com is a state-of-the-art Web site that allows 
individuals to suggest ideas of their own or weigh in on ideas offered 
by others. Everyone can see the ideas that are on the table, make 
comments on them, and register their approval or disapproval.

                              {time}  1930

  This Web site brings the Halls of Congress into American homes and 
uses the best of social media to allow America's many voices to be 
heard.
  And we would conclude by saying, to change the way Washington works 
and the policies it pursues, it will require Washington to listen when 
America speaks out, and we hope all Americans will join us in this 
unprecedented process of engagement.
  For concluding remarks, I yield back to the gentleman from Ohio.
  Mr. LATTA. I would just like to conclude on a statement that was made 
as you talk about Americans getting re-involved.
  Again, when I speak to the students on our steps here at the United 
States Capitol, I can't think of a better place to tell kids what they 
have to do. But one of the interesting things, especially when I have 
seniors in high school and I say, how many of you are registered to 
vote, I remember one day we had about 100 students out there,

[[Page 10743]]

and I probably had maybe 20 percent of the kids sheepishly start trying 
to raise their hands. They were going to put them down and I said, wait 
a minute, leave your hands up. I said, I want everyone to look at who 
has their hands up because they're going to be making the decisions for 
you. I said, if you want to participate in this great experiment, you 
have got to be registered, you have got to be involved.
  It kind of goes back to what Benjamin Franklin said. It was reported 
when he left the Constitutional Convention--it was very contentious--a 
lot of people think it was just fine and dandy. They showed up in 
Philadelphia starting in May of 1787 and they wrote this great 
document. But it was hard-pressed, hard work, and they got it done. And 
when Franklin left, a woman asked him as he left, she said, Mr. 
Franklin, what have you given us? And he said, ``A republic if you can 
keep it.''
  I yield back.
  Mrs. LUMMIS. I thank the gentleman from Ohio for joining me this 
evening.
  I look forward to hearing the remarks of the next group. They are our 
Democratic colleagues from across the aisle. This group will be led by 
Representative Wasserman Schultz, who I had the privilege of visiting 
Israel with earlier this year. She led a congressional delegation to 
Israel. And for this neophyte in international policy, it was a 
fabulous experience. We had the opportunity to meet Israeli President 
Shimon Peres. We visited with Benjamin Netanyahu, with the minority 
leader, Tzipi Livni, and also with Palestinian Authority leaders. We 
visited Jerusalem, the Golan Heights, and some of the fabulous farming 
communities near the Sea of Galilee.
  For someone who had never visited Israel--in fact, I had never seen 
the Mediterranean Sea in my entire life, and to get to visit it with 
people who are steeped in the history, the politics, and the worldwide 
consequences of our relationship with Israel, it was a tremendous 
experience. So I want to thank the gentlewoman from Florida, 
Representative Wasserman Schultz, for including me on the congressional 
delegation that she led to Israel.
  Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

                          ____________________