[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 156 (2010), Part 9]
[House]
[Pages 12489-12496]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                          WHERE'S THE BUDGET?

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. 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. Mr. Speaker, we're going to talk about an interesting 
subject here this evening, and one that might seem a little boring to 
start with but actually has tremendous ramifications, and that is the 
question and the subject of budgeting.
  Now, budgets are always kind of an unpleasant thing because there's a 
natural requirement of a budget to balance a couple of things, balance 
spending and how much money you take in. So when a family works on a 
budget, it may be a hard time because you have to make choices between 
what are you going to spend your money on and how much money do you 
have to spend. So budgeting is one of those tough things, but it's 
necessary for organizations in order to be organized enough to try to 
keep some semblance of economic sanity.
  We're going to talk about budgeting some. And the subject is of some 
interest tonight because, if you think about a family, maybe some 
families budget in a much more formal process, others do it a little 
bit informally, but more or less what they try to do is keep how much 
money is coming in pretty close to what's going out. When they don't, 
they start to get some very high credit card bills. Of course, small 
businesses, very important for them to budget.
  So who is it? Which one do you think forgot about budgeting? Fortune 
500 corporations? No. Schools have budgets. But we find tonight this 
curious phenomenon, and this is a little bit like watching an eclipse 
or something. It doesn't happen very often. Since 1974, when the Budget 
Act was passed, it's never happened that Congress did not have a 
budget. And yet, this year, Congress, it's Congress that doesn't have 
the budget. Kind of an amazing thing.
  We've heard our floor leader, Congressman Hoyer, he says it isn't 
possible to debate and pass a realistic long-term budget until we've 
considered the bipartisan commission's deficit reduction plan which is 
expected in December.
  That sounds a little bit like an excuse, doesn't it?
  It's the first time we've done anything bipartisan in the last 18 
months if they did wait for it. And if it were bipartisan, I'm sure 
they wouldn't be interested in passing it.
  Is it true that we have to wait until December to pass a budget? I 
don't think so. There's no excuse. There's a balanced budget resolution 
here. Here it is, actually, a copy of the front of the bill.
  Of course, the trouble with this, this has a big problem. This is a 
Republican budget. This is a budget that's talking about getting the 
budget balanced by 2020. It's an austere budget. It's a tough budget. 
It's a budget that you'd argue about, but it's a responsible budget.
  And I'm joined by some very good friends of mine on the subject of 
budgets. And we're going to move from budgets. We're going to end up 
answering at least one question. That is, well, why are budgets 
important?
  I'm joined by my good friend from Arizona, Congressman Franks, an 
expert on quite a number of different subjects, and we're going to talk 
a little bit later tonight, too, about doing some oil drilling.
  I believe you were, was it 16 or 17 when you had your first oil rig? 
But I yield time to my good friend.

                              {time}  2130

  Mr. FRANKS of Arizona. Well, in talking about the budget tonight, I 
guess I believe, Congressman, that the budget challenges that we have, 
the deficit spending and the debt, has the ability to challenge and 
damage this country perhaps in a way that no military power has ever 
been able to do.
  We are around $13 trillion in debt in this country. And if you try to 
measure that in simple terms, it almost boggles the mind. But if you 
try to put it in terms that we can understand, if we decided to pay 
that off at a million dollars a day. Let's say we just suspended the 
interest on the debt and we didn't go another penny in debt, and we 
said we are going to pay what we owe off before we go deeper in debt. 
Now that I suppose sounds outrageous for a place like this, but that's 
a very commonsense idea. And yet, if we paid our existing debt off at 
$1 million a day, with no interest and no additional spending, it would 
take us around 40,000 years to do that.
  Mr. AKIN. That's really discouraging.
  Mr. FRANKS of Arizona. My grandkids may not be around that long. But 
the real tragedy, of course, is that we're not paying this debt off at 
$1 million a day as a country. That's a very nominal figure. We're 
going into debt thousands of times that much every day. The Obama 
administration is spending us into oblivion. There has never been a 
precedent. Since this Obama administration's taken place in two year 
cycles, they have put us at what looks like will be around $3 trillion 
additional in debt. If we don't change that, I really believe that it 
could be the central figure in America's economic obituary.
  Mr. AKIN. I very much appreciate your starting off on a very sobering 
kind of note because I wanted to get to that question about, well, 
maybe budgets sound boring, but what does it mean? And I think you put 
that in graphic terms. You are saying it's more damaging than some war 
that some foreign conqueror could wreak, more havoc than a war.
  Mr. FRANKS of Arizona. Well, Congressman, if we fail to put our 
economic house in order, we're not going to be able to project any 
military capability at all. You know, a government is what it spends. 
And one of the reasons that America has such a strong military 
capability is because we're so strong economically. We're the most 
powerful Nation economically in the world. We dwarf all other 
economies. But the way we're going, we could be competing with Greece 
for the instability that this administration seems to be heading our 
country toward.
  Mr. AKIN. You know, you have been almost reading my mind, because I 
have some charts that do compare Greece to where we are economically, 
and they are spooky charts.
  I am joined by another one of our good friends, my good friend from 
Georgia, Congressman Broun. And I have to say I have got a couple of my 
favorite people to share an hour with on the floor tonight, both very 
articulate, but both very knowledgeable.
  Congressman Franks, if you start to talk to him about missile defense 
and ballistics and all kinds of technical questions, he is a veritable 
Popular Mechanics walking on two feet.
  And then my good friend Dr. Broun, who spent years as a medical 
doctor, also has a whale of a lot of Georgia common sense. And I would 
like to welcome you, Dr. Broun, or Congressman Broun, or my good friend 
Paul. Thank you.
  Mr. BROUN of Georgia. Thank you, Mr. Akin. I appreciate your 
yielding.
  In fact, the quotes you have up there on the chart I think are very 
telling. Democratic Whip Steny Hoyer, this is when he was the minority 
whip, 2006, as is indicated. He said, ``The most basic responsibility 
of governing.'' And as you also very ably pointed out, John Spratt, who 
is the Democratic chairman of the House Budget Committee, Congressman 
from South Carolina, said also in 2006, ``If you can't budget, you 
can't govern.'' If you can't budget, you can't govern. And it's just 
inane.

[[Page 12490]]

  It's unconscionable that this leadership here in this House isn't 
even going to attempt, not even attempt to bring about a budget for 
this Congress to vote on. And why is that? Why would they not, 
particularly with these very strong statements that the majority whip, 
now Steny Hoyer, made back in 2006 before they became the majority? 
John Spratt, when he was on the Budget Committee, not the chairman, as 
he is now, said if you can't budget, you can't govern. But they can't 
budget, they won't budget, and they are not governing very well either. 
But why? Why is that so?
  Mr. AKIN. I would like to jump in, if I could, because I think that's 
where we got to ask the question. This is, I guess, when the 
Republicans were in the majority, 2006. And they are saying the most 
basic responsibility is governing. This is Congressman Hoyer. And now 
we don't have a budget, and he is one of the leaders.
  Here we have the ranking member on the House Budget Committee, and he 
says, ``If you can't budget, you can't govern.'' Well, that's what they 
are saying in 2006. But it seems like that's not where we are today, is 
it? Here's ``Where Is the Budget?'' This is something that was in The 
Hill newspaper. But it's kind of telling. ``Skipping a budget 
resolution this year would be unprecedented. The House has never failed 
to pass an annual budget resolution since the current budget rules were 
put into place in 1974.''
  That's why I am saying this is a little bit like one of those full 
eclipses of the sun. You have to wait for a certain number of years and 
be just in the right place to see it. This is unusual. We haven't seen 
this before. Unfortunately, it is not a good omen exactly from an 
economic point of view. According to what? The Congressional Research 
Service. They are the ones that keep records of all of this kind of 
stuff. So there isn't any budget, which does beg the question.
  Mr. BROUN of Georgia. Mr. Akin, before you take that chart down, if 
you would yield for half a second, down at the bottom, I want to call 
attention to the viewers, this was an article, this didn't come from 
Glenn Beck or Rush Limbaugh or Sean Hannity, it came from The Hill, one 
of the Hill newspapers up here called The Hill, on April 14, 2010, this 
year, talking about this Congress, talking about this leadership. 
Skipping a budget resolution would be unprecedented.
  Mr. AKIN. Unprecedented.
  Mr. BROUN of Georgia. Unprecedented.
  Mr. AKIN. Unusual. And what are the implications of all of this? You 
know, the Congress didn't pass a budget, but the administration sent us 
a budget. This is kind of a complicated looking chart. But this isn't 
very complicated in a lot of ways, because this thing is receipts. This 
is the money coming in. And this is outlays. Now, this is the sort of 
chart that you need to have some first-graders, because they could give 
us some real wisdom.
  We could say which one of these circles is bigger? Is it the red one 
or the blue one? The red one is bigger. So we're spending more than 
what we're receiving. That says your budget's in trouble. That's not 
very complicated. And it's so much in trouble that the U.S. Congress 
doesn't want to acknowledge that fact. They say, well, if we don't see 
it, maybe--it's like at night, you know, when you have a bad dream. If 
you pull the covers up, maybe it will go away. That seems where we are.
  My good friend from Arizona.
  Mr. FRANKS of Arizona. Well, I think that one of the disappointing 
things for me in this body, and in all due respect to the majority, is 
that they seem to hold themselves unconstrained to the truth and the 
things that you mentioned. It almost seems that they feel like they can 
hold themselves to be able to take a vote here and repeal the laws of 
mathematics. And we're facing a day of reckoning that is coming pretty 
quickly.
  There are a lot of things that are beginning to snowball. Not only is 
this administration spending and deficit spending in an unprecedented 
way, but we're fast approaching where the baby boomer generation, of 
which I am sort of kind of on the tail end, barely old enough to be a 
baby boomer--
  Mr. AKIN. I am on the front end. So let's talk about that.
  Mr. FRANKS of Arizona. But the point is, this has been the most 
productive generation in the history of this country. And the baby 
boomer generation is beginning now to start to retire. And that means 
two things: that productivity is going to be dramatically reduced, and 
of course then they are going to go on Social Security and begin to put 
a drain on the system. And we absolutely are in an unsustainable 
circumstance at this moment. And for all the things that we try to do, 
the Democrat majority simply is ignoring that reality.
  I have two little babies at home, 22-month-old twins, and they are 
the greatest joy of my soul. And I will just say to you that the idea 
that we're robbing them of God knows what, I mean it's almost like they 
could be facing a complete economic meltdown, and it could happen way 
before they get old enough to deal with it. But we actually, in my 
judgment, have generational theft here. And it is something that is a 
disgrace. And I think it's fundamentally immoral. And we don't have to 
do that.
  All we have to do is say that whatever else we're going to do, we're 
going to do like families. We're going to have a budget. We're going to 
say we're not going to spend more than we take in. We may not be able 
to pay this debt off tomorrow. I already said it might be 35,000, 
40,000 years the way we are going just at a million dollars a day 
paying it off. But we're not going to go further in debt. And that's 
something this Congress should have the courage to do.
  Mr. AKIN. I think that Congress has tended--our job is to spend 
money. That's what Congress is designed to do. Of course we do too good 
a job of it. And the question is we have been overspending for a long 
time.

                              {time}  2140

  We overspent when President Bush, we Republicans, when he was in. And 
I know you gentlemen joined me in some very tough votes in saying, no, 
we can't do that. But we have overspent to a degree all the way along. 
But what happened is we've taken this thing to an entirely new level. 
And I have some charts that I think explain that. But I want to hear 
from my good friend from Georgia.
  Mr. BROUN of Georgia. I want to add to what our good friend from 
Arizona was just saying. In Scripture, Proverbs tells us a good man 
leaves an inheritance to his children's children. And the inheritance 
we're leaving to our children's children is a mound of debt that 
they'll know we'll never overcome.
  We've got to stop the spending here in Washington. We have to stop 
this outrageous growth of the Federal Government--outrageous, 
unacceptable to the American people--robbing our children and our 
grandchildren not only of their economic future but also of their 
freedom. And that's exactly what we're doing here in this Congress.
  And it all started with the TARP funds that President Bush and Hank 
Paulsen pushed through. I voted against those TARP funds in 2007. I 
guess it was in 2008 when it was pressed forward by President Bush and 
he was wrong and I voted against him, and many Republicans did at the 
same time, voted against him. But it has been magnified. It has been 
grown at a tremendous exponential rate: the red ink, the debt, the 
spending. And I think the reason we're not going to vote on a budget, 
not even have a proposed budget by the Congress, is because this 
majority does not want any constraints on their spending. They don't 
want any.
  And a budget, if you follow it, constrains spending. That's what it's 
designed to do. And it also puts forth all of the parameters and would 
show the American people the increasing debt that is going to be pushed 
off on future generations.
  So we're going totally against what Scripture teaches us when God 
tells us a good man leaves an inheritance to his children's children.
  Mr. AKIN. The point you bring up, gentlemen, I was not a Boy Scout, 
but we had a bunch of boys that were Boy

[[Page 12491]]

Scouts. And one of the things that they learned, which we did, because 
my wife and I were outdoors people and did a lot of backpacking and 
canoeing and all, is that when you come to a campsite, you always want 
to leave it better than the way you found it. It was just sort of like 
a tradition among outdoorsmen. And that tradition very much reflected 
the mindset of my parents' generation, the people that fought World War 
II. My father is 89 and was with Patton in the Army.
  But there was a general way of thinking in that generation. And the 
mindset was that they were going to sacrifice a lot of things they 
wished they'd had as kids in order to give their kids something better. 
They're going to leave the campsite better than it was left for them.
  And so my parents' generation, if they made a mistake, it was they 
tended to spoil us. They tended to give us everything we wanted, 
whereas they had had to really--the other generation, they might not 
have had a college education but said, My son is going to be a doctor. 
My son is going to be an engineer. I'm going to make sure they have 
enough money to go to college, which I didn't have a chance to do. And 
that was their mindset. And that's what breaks my heart about such a 
boring subject as budgets is because of the fact that we're not 
following--we're leaving that campsite look like a dump truck full of 
litter just got dumped on it. We're leaving litter that our kids can't 
pick up, our grandchildren won't be able to pick up. And that's just 
wrong. And it is not the American way.
  And yet what's it spring from? Our own selfishness politically that 
we have to appease--which is wrong in the first place. It's theft and 
we're going to steal money from a lot of people that aren't even alive 
yet and we're going to spend it and hand it out to people. And that's a 
sad place to be in.
  So we're doing two things. So we're increasing taxes radically, but 
we're increasing spending even more. The ironic thing is that when you 
increase taxes, you also kill the goose that's laying the golden eggs 
and you start to take in less revenue.
  Here's a list of some of them. This cap-and-tax bill that we passed. 
This thing is supposed to be about global warming. It's supposed to be 
about reducing CO2. The only thing this thing does is create 
more taxes and more government regulation and probably more 
CO2 to boot. If they wanted to stop CO2--if 
people were honest about stopping CO2--let's assume you're a 
greenie and that your CO2 is really bad and we've all got to 
stop breathing. How are you going to do it? You're just going to double 
the number of the nuclear power plants and you wipe out all the 
equivalent of all the CO2 burned by every passenger car in 
America. But that's not what this bill does. It supposedly is about 
global warming, but in fact it's just more taxes.
  And the health care tax thing. This deal here, that bill, they had to 
struggle to keep it under a trillion dollars. The President said, I 
won't do it if it costs a dime. No. He did it because it costs more 
than a trillion. So there's another great big tax. Death tax. Capital 
gains. They're going to expire. So we're going high in taxes. But does 
that mean we're cutting back on spending? No.
  This, my friend, is why if I were a Democrat I wouldn't want to put a 
budget out there. Take a look at that picture. My friend from Arizona.
  Mr. FRANKS of Arizona. I just was responding. I think if we could 
explain why they are not putting a budget out is because they do not 
want the American people to see what they're really doing.
  Mr. AKIN. I don't think they want them to see that graph.
  Mr. FRANKS of Arizona. I don't think they want them to see that. 
Fundamentally, you're correct. I was touched by the gentleman's 
understanding that this is really about--and we always forget that true 
statesmenship is not just about the next election. It's about the next 
generation. And I'm always in memory of how my parents worked so hard. 
My dad worked in the mines and everything else he could think of doing, 
and he is probably listening to us tonight. But I'm just so thankful 
for a father that gave everything of himself to try to make it possible 
for me to have a better life than he did, and I wouldn't be here 
without that. My mother worked in nursing homes. And you know, they 
gave everything they had to us.
  And here we're doing exactly the opposite. Not only are we spending 
our children into an oblivion of debt, not only are we teaching the 
next generation that they don't have to be responsible, not only are we 
seeing government take over most of our major industries now whether 
the auto industry, the health care industry, the insurance industry, 
the banking industry. I don't know what's next. We're teaching our 
young kids something that is very, very frightening.
  And I just think that more than anything, Mr. Akin, that you pointed 
out the real issue here. It is a lack of commitment to the future 
generations. And this Democrat majority has done for spending what 
Stonehenge did for rocks. There is no one that can touch them. They can 
talk about Republican deficits. And from my part and yours and Mr. 
Broun's here, you know we worked here when we were in the majority. Our 
votes reflected a desperate commitment to balance this budget.
  But this Democrat majority has completely left all reason to the 
wind. They've tried to spend and tax and borrow our way into 
prosperity, and I just don't think I've ever seen in my lifetime a more 
dangerous situation for us economically. And in the final analysis 
here, they are also doing everything they can it seems to crush 
business and job growth.
  And so it just seems like all of these things are coming together, 
and I don't know where it ends, and I don't know what to do. It's 
almost you have to be an alarmist to tell the truth here.
  Mr. AKIN. I thought it would be appropriate to talk about what these 
bars mean. It's pretty straightforward.
  These were Republican years under Bush, and this shows the deficit. 
We're not proud of this deficit. Shouldn't be any. The worst year under 
Bush was this one where Speaker Pelosi ran the Congress. So this was 
Bush's worst year for deficit right here.
  So we go from 2009 to 2010 with President Obama, and he's three times 
the Bush level of deficit and this year is even higher.
  Now, one of the ways to measure these things is this deficit is a 
percent of our gross domestic product, all of the stuff that we make in 
America. This is running at about 3.1 percent. This is about 9.9 
percent right here. Now, these numbers have consequences, and the 
consequences are your children and your grandchildren. But it also 
could precipitate a crisis a lot sooner, and we really don't know what 
that crisis looks like.
  What happens when you go to the bank and your ATM doesn't work? You 
worked all of your life and you have savings in the bank and there 
isn't any money in there because you can't get any money out because 
the dollar bill isn't worth anything. Have we ever experienced that 
before? We've seen some high inflation that's not pretty. What happens 
if the banking system just stops working because we pushed this too 
far?

                              {time}  2150

  What is the civil unrest? What happens with our just-in-time food 
inventories when there is no more food on the shelves and when there is 
no more gasoline at the gas pumps because we have pushed this too far? 
How far is too far? I don't know, but I know this: This isn't the right 
direction that we are going.
  I yield to my friend from Georgia.
  Mr. BROUN of Georgia. Mr. Akin, you are exactly right. We have seen 
historically what happens when this sort of thing occurs. All we have 
to do is look off our own Florida shores, at Cuba, under the Communist 
dictatorship of Fidel Castro. I'm old enough to remember when Mr. 
Batista was overthrown by Castro. I'm old enough to remember that Cuba, 
prior to the Communist takeover of their country, was a very vibrant 
community and very

[[Page 12492]]

economically sound. There were some inequities and problems there. I'm 
not trying to promote Mr. Batista's governance down there by any means, 
but on the other hand, where are the Cubans today?
  The debt created by Fidel Castro and by the socialistic mentality, 
which is the same mentality that Fidel Castro had, is very pervasive 
here. It is the same mentality we have here with our leadership, both 
in the White House as well as here in Congress, today, under Democratic 
leadership. It leads to economic ruin. It leads to abject poverty for 
everyone.
  Former Prime Minister of England Margaret Thatcher at one time said 
the problem with socialism is, eventually, you run out of other 
people's money. That's exactly what happened. You had a chart up there 
about the taxes. You had it up there as ``cap-and-tax.'' I just want to 
quote President Obama about a couple of things about that so-called 
``cap-and-trade'' bill that we passed here in the House. The Senate has 
been dealing with that.
  As you said, Mr. Akin, it is not about the environment. In fact, the 
President, himself, said that he needed that for revenue, revenue to 
pay for ObamaCare. Now, that's not a direct quote of the President's, 
but that's what he said. He said he needed the revenue from the 
environmental tax, which was really an energy tax, a tax on all 
energy--gasoline, electricity and everything. He needed the revenue so 
that he could pay for his medical program, for his socialized medicine 
that we forced through here in Congress. That's why I call it ``tax-
and-trade,'' not ``cap-and-tax,'' but you can call it ``tax-and-tax,'' 
I guess, or any of those. Also, the President said very clearly--and I 
can quote him on this. He said that this energy tax would necessarily 
skyrocket the cost of gasoline. It would necessarily skyrocket the cost 
of gasoline.
  Mr. AKIN. I think he also promised that nobody making less than 
$250,000 would be taxed, right? Yet, if you flip on a light switch, you 
are going to get taxed.
  How do you square those?
  Mr. BROUN of Georgia. Everybody is going to get taxed. So that was a 
falsehood. In Georgia, we call that a bald-faced lie. The promise that 
we had that people who made under $250,000 would not be taxed is 
totally wrong, and he knew it. In Georgia, the people just say it's a 
bald-faced lie, meaning that he knew very well that he was not telling 
the truth when he said that.
  Mr. AKIN. You know, the funny thing is that we need to learn 
something from history, and the Democrats have got something they could 
learn from. It's Henry Morgenthau. He was the Secretary of the Treasury 
under FDR. They had a recession, and by his policies, they managed to 
turn it into the Great Depression. After 8 years of government 
spending, which is what we have seen--just incredible levels of 
government spending--he makes FDR look like a piker. He makes George 
Bush look like Ebenezer Scrooge.
  So here is Henry Morgenthau before the House Committee of Ways and 
Means. He says this:
  We have tried spending money. We are spending more than we have ever 
spent before, and it doesn't work. I say, after 8 years of the 
administration, we have just as much unemployment as when we started 
and an enormous debt to boot.
  That is Henry Morgenthau. He is a contemporary of little Lord Keynes, 
that not so bright British economist.
  Here is a Democrat who just says, Hey, we tried it for 8 years, and 
it doesn't work. So what are we doing now? We are going right back 
around, and we are overspending. We haven't learned our lessons.
  Mr. BROUN of Georgia. Mr. Akin, if I might, if you would yield a 
minute.
  Mr. AKIN. I do.
  Mr. BROUN of Georgia. Just recently, just last week, our President 
went before the G-20, I guess is what it's called now, and he was 
encouraging them to spend, spend, spend. As you brought up Lord Keynes' 
name, there is something called Keynesian economics, which basically 
says that you get out of recessions and depressions by the government's 
spending money, but it never has worked, and it never will work. It's 
just like socialism never has worked and never will work.
  It seems as if the arrogance of this administration and of this 
leadership and as if the ignorance of both are leading us down the same 
path that FDR and Henry Morgenthau went down in the Great Depression. 
World War II didn't get us out of the Depression. It wasn't World War 
II that got us out of the Depression. It was cranking up the 
manufacturing sector and the private sector's actually starting to 
create new jobs because of the need for increased manufacturing that 
got us out of the Depression. Actually, the Depression didn't end until 
after World War II. It was private enterprise and free enterprise and 
what's called supply side economics, which most people don't understand 
and which, I think, a lot of economists don't understand.
  Yet we certainly know that this administration and the leadership of 
this House and the Senate have absolutely no clue about what creates 
jobs or about what creates a strong economy. It is less government, 
less spending, more manufacturing, more free enterprise. Having the 
small business sector expand and having consumers with money in their 
pockets to be able to go buy goods and services, that is what is going 
to create jobs. That is what is going to get us out of this recession 
that we are in today.
  In fact, some economists now are saying that we are beginning to go 
into a depression. The policies of this administration and the policies 
of the leadership of the House and the Senate, of the Democratic Party, 
are going to do the same thing that they did under FDR and Henry 
Morgenthau. They are going to create greater debt, and they are already 
doing it. They are going to create greater spending. They are going to 
create greater problems for the future of this Nation. The question is: 
How are we going to ever recover? I'm not sure.
  Mr. AKIN. I'm not sure about the intent.
  Yes, your whole idea about little Lord Keynes and his idea about 
spending one's way into prosperity strikes me about like grabbing your 
boot loops and trying to fly around the room, you know? I don't know if 
he was a boot loop kind of guy, but anyway, he was certainly different 
in his view of economics.
  My good friend from Arizona.
  Mr. FRANKS of Arizona. Well, I just want to agree with Congressman 
Broun, you know, when he talked about what brought us out of the 
Depression. The postwar industrial machine in this country was 
astounding.
  One of the things, it seems, that this Democrat majority simply does 
not understand--and it's probably because most of them haven't been in 
small business or in the real world many times; they don't sign the 
front of a check, you know, but usually sign the back of it. The 
reality is that they forget that the monetary system is a reflection of 
the method of the productivity mechanism that we have in this country.
  All economy, ultimately, and in the most fundamental, substantive 
analysis is about productivity. You know, that means that people have 
to work and create goods and services. When we don't have people 
working, when we don't have jobs, then it doesn't happen. When you take 
government money and when you say, well, we're going to spend our way 
into recovery, it does two things.
  First of all, it either takes the money directly out of taxpayers' 
pockets--it has to come from somewhere, right?--or they have to borrow 
it. If they borrow it, then it makes less capital available for 
business and for those groups that actually create jobs. They don't 
seem to understand that, unless the 300-plus million people of the 
country are working and creating jobs and creating goods and services, 
no matter what our monetary policies are, nothing will work, and the 
economy will fail.
  I guess I just want to add, Congressman, that the highway of history 
is littered with the wreckage of governments that thought that they 
could create and maintain productivity in

[[Page 12493]]

markets better than free enterprise could. It has just been an element 
of history, and I don't want to see this country join that litany. This 
administration is driving us head on in that direction.
  You know, you talked about, historically, our total GDP in this 
country--and one of you can correct me if I'm wrong--is somewhere in 
the neighborhood of $15 to $17 trillion a year.

                              {time}  2200

  Whenever our debt approaches 100 percent of the GDP per year of a 
country, historically and empirically that has almost always 
precipitated a major meltdown. I'm not talking about just a recession 
or even a depression, I'm talking about a cataclysmic meltdown that 
leaves a country having to start over from the beginning. And I don't 
want to see us go in that direction.
  Mr. AKIN. Gentleman, you expressed that in good scholarly terms about 
your debt being as high as your GDP. But just trying to put that as a 
family--if you're a family and you make $100 a week and your credit 
card bill is $100 a week, you're in trouble. That's what you're saying. 
In fact, you're more than in trouble. And I think that's what you're 
talking about
  Mr. FRANKS of Arizona. Well, in this case, the Democrats are way past 
that because that would mean you're spending as much as you're making. 
They're spending more than the government is taking in. That's deficit. 
I'm talking about something a little different. I'm talking about the 
debt--the total debt to GDP ratio. And in this case we're not there 
yet. I think that we're somewhere at about $1.4 trillion, $1.3 trillion 
deficit and about at $13 trillion debt. And $13 trillion debt would be 
up somewhere against around a $15 trillion to $17 trillion GDP annual 
economy. What's 13 into 17? We're not at 100 percent yet but we're 
starting to get there. Whenever it goes to 100 percent or 105 percent, 
historically there's usually some type of major meltdown. I think 
that's a reflection not so much of arbitrary numbers but of sort of 
human nature. We begin to think, Oh, we'll never be able to pay this 
off. Let's just quit. The capital begins to run away from the markets. 
People begin to horde what they have. Just like in the Great 
Depression. It wasn't that all the money disappeared. It wasn't that 
all of a sudden capital vaporized. People put it in their pockets 
because they no longer trusted their government. They no longer trusted 
that they could put their capital at risk and have any real assurance 
that they had even a possibility of getting it back. And that's where 
this government is failing the people. They are destabilizing this 
economy so badly that capital is afraid to even get in the game.
  Mr. AKIN. Yes. And that's one of the factors that totally destroys 
jobs--and that is the uncertainty factor. So if you want to ruin jobs, 
raise taxes a whole lot, create a lot of uncertainty, and then spend 
way beyond your means. That's what we're doing. It's a war on business.
  There are a couple of different things. We talked about these tax 
increases that the Democrats did. Here's something they didn't do at 
all. They haven't fixed the problem with Freddie and Fannie. These are 
two timebombs ready to go off again. They started the big crisis before 
when we mismanaged Freddie and Fannie. As much as people go ``boo'' and 
``hiss'' at George Bush, in September 11, 2003, he was asking for 
authority to regulate Freddie and Fannie because they were out of 
control. And the Democrats blocked that legislation in the Senate, and 
now we have a meltdown on our hands. So there's some things that are 
taxes, some things that are spending, and some things that are no 
action at all that all feed into this problem. So this sounds kind of 
boring.
  Mr. BROUN of Georgia. Let me ask you something. I want you to make 
this clear, if you don't mind, Mr. Akin. We hear from our Democratic 
colleagues over and over again that all this is Bush's fault. We're 
still hearing that on this floor. It's Bush's fault. President Bush in 
2003 was trying to rein in Freddie and Fannie. The Bush administration 
said that there was a problem. And I think you're fixing to show us an 
article.
  Mr. AKIN. This doesn't say Rush Limbaugh here. This says: The New 
York Times. This is the New York Times. Not exactly a conservative 
newspaper. September 11, 2003, the headline is: The Bush administration 
today recommended the most significant regulatory overhaul in the 
housing finance industry since the savings and loan crisis a decade 
ago. Under the plan disclosed at a congressional hearing today, a new 
agency would be created within the Treasury Department to assume 
supervision of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.
  So this is 2003. They saw it coming.
  Mr. BROUN of Georgia. And who blocked that?
  Mr. AKIN. This then resulted in Republicans in the House passing a 
bill. Where's it go then? We sent it to the Senate. What happened in 
the Senate? You needed 60 votes to pass it. And so what happened? The 
Democrats killed this in the Senate, just like they killed the energy 
bill in the Senate that was designed to help us with gas prices; just 
like they killed, as you know, gentlemen, the tort reforms in the 
Senate to reduce health care costs; just like, as you know, my friend 
from Arizona, they killed the associated health plans that we passed 
time after time here on the floor to try to allow small businesses to 
pool their employees to get a better price on health insurance.
  Now we were accused of doing nothing. We didn't do nothing. We sent a 
lot of legislation to the Senate where they didn't have 60 Republican 
votes, and it was killed by Democrats. Here's what happens here. But 
have we done anything about Freddie and Fannie? No. It's still hugely 
in debt, and we're just basically bailing it out all the time. What's 
the result of that going to be? It's going to be a lot of trouble.
  Here's one of the pains. This is what hurts, one, is unemployment. 
Look at the private-sector employment numbers here. Look at the red 
line. That's the public-sector employment. Have we created jobs? Sure 
have. We hired a whole lot of census workers. But the jobs that pay for 
the government are going down because these policies make a difference 
in peoples' lives.
  Whenever I think of unemployment--you gentlemen are both gentlemen. 
Both of you have wives and kids. And I suppose that somehow wired back 
in the back of our minds, certainly in the back of mine, when I have a 
wife and kids, I need to take care of them. That's the fundamental 
thing that I'm supposed to do as a dad. If I fail at that, then I'm a 
miserable failure in my own mind.
  And I'm picturing a set of policies that the Democrats proposed to 
put people into houses they couldn't afford to pay for, so they're 
going to default on their mortgage, and they and their kids are going 
to be sitting on a sofa out on the street as they have been thrown out 
of a house. That, to me, is kind of a nightmarish thing. And that's 
that unemployment. It looks like a boring number on a chart, but it's 
people who are hurting. It's people who are living back with their 
parents. It's parents who are digging into their savings to take care 
of their kids because there are no jobs. So these things may be boring, 
but they sure have a lot of pain associated with them and a lot of 
consequences associated with them.
  This was a promise that if we gave lots of money to different States 
that had been mismanaging their budget with this supposed stimulus 
bill, I think it was supposedly $787 billion, but turned out to be $800 
billion. And we spent all this money. And this is what's supposed to 
happen. It's supposed to reduce unemployment. Here's what the 
unemployment really is. Because we didn't learn from Henry Morgenthau. 
You have can't spend your way into prosperity by spending Federal 
money. These things have consequences. They hurt people. This isn't 
just boring numbers on a graph. That's actually what the actual 
unemployment is. So there's a consequence to these policies.
  The tragedy is there are solutions to this stuff. It isn't that hard 
to do. What we ought to do is just learn from JFK. We can learn from 
Ronald Reagan, but try to be a little charitable. JFK got it

[[Page 12494]]

right. There's a solution to this. We don't have to do this. All we've 
got to do is simply cut spending and cut taxes. Everybody knows that.
  I've used the analogy--were you a pilot, Congressman Franks?
  Mr. FRANKS of Arizona. I never was.
  Mr. AKIN. Was it you?
  Mr. BROUN of Georgia. I'm a pilot, yes.
  Mr. AKIN. You're a pilot. I think we used this analogy the other day 
on the floor, because I remember as a kid the biplanes and the early 
days of flight. My science teacher flew glider planes and designed some 
of the glider planes that were used in the D-day invasion. He was a guy 
that hated what he called ``fizzle ed'' because he wasn't in great 
shape and he didn't like the football jocks. But the ironic thing was 
he got an award to the National Hall of Fame of Glider Pilots, which is 
an athletic type of thing because he could do all kinds of aerobatic 
loops with his glider planes. And he taught me some basics about 
flying. And what caught my attention was, in the early days of flight 
you get in an airplane and you do one of these deals where you don't 
have enough power and you pull the airplane into a stall and the 
airplane falls over backwards and it'll start to spin. And it was 
called a graveyard spin, I guess. When pilots got into those things, 
they kept flying the airplanes into the ground, which ruined their 
whole afternoon.
  Finally, somebody realized--I guess a smart pilot decided to gamble 
his life. He said, I think there's a way out of this problem. And it's 
counterintuitive. And that is, when you're in that spin, the temptation 
I guess of pilots is to pull the stick back and try to get the nose of 
the plane up so you don't fly into the ground. And that just makes it 
worse.

                              {time}  2210

  So this guy, when he's in this graveyard spin, he says, I'm going to 
do it. And everybody is watching him, Here goes another guy who is 
going to fly his airplane into the ground. And instead, he kicked the 
rudder to stop the spin, pushed the stick forward until the airplane 
stabilized. And then he pulled the stick back and pulled it right out 
and made it look easy.
  You know, the solution is JFK, Ronald Reagan, and George Bush all 
understood the solution to this problem. It doesn't have to be doom and 
gloom. The solution is, stop Federal spending, stop the high tax rate; 
and pretty soon we'll come out of the graveyard spiral. And we don't 
have to do another Great Depression. We've done that before. I don't 
want to be too doom and gloom about this, but the fact is these numbers 
are hurting people.
  This is the President. He says, Now give me one more good reason why 
you're not hiring, and you've got this great big socialized medicine 
bill, which is well calculated to destroy the economy, and then this 
goofy cap-and-tax excuse for global warming. I asked my constituents, 
Which is more important to you, our dependence on foreign oil or global 
warming? And it was an 80/20 type thing. Let's get practical. We need 
to be doing something about our energy business in this country is what 
they're telling us. But it isn't all doom and gloom. There are 
solutions to these things. My good friend from Arizona.
  Mr. FRANKS of Arizona. Well, I will just say, and it just seems 
obvious to me--and I will probably take a little chapter out of your 
cartoon there--this President has been very confident in a lot of his 
prognostications. There's a hubris and an arrogance there that is just 
overwhelming. But when you look at the facts, whether it's in our 
military challenges, our national security challenges, whether it's 
dealing with the challenges in the gulf, or whether it's dealing with 
the economy, it seems that his arrogance-to-competency ratios are 
catastrophically out of balance.
  If you really want to know where the deficit is in this country, it's 
between the arrogance of this administration and the competence of this 
administration; and I think therein really lies the big challenge that 
we face. I don't know what's going to cure that if voters don't wake 
up.
  Mr. AKIN. You know, the thing that strikes me is most people that I 
know--I am an engineer. Engineers are kind of geeks anyway, but we have 
such a predictable sort of thought pattern, and that is, now we've got 
this great big hole that we've just drilled in the bottom of the ocean. 
Now, you can talk about that it's a mile deep and there's tremendous 
pressure. We are going to talk about this because you used to have an 
oil rig, and we need to talk about oil.
  But in it's simplest form, there's this ocean, and there's a hole in 
the bottom, and it's leaking oil. And my impression is that most 
Americans I know, when you have all this sloppy, yucky, sticky oil 
pouring out of a hole in the ocean floor, your first reaction is to try 
to figure out, how do you fix it. You know, you want to try to say, 
Okay, let's get some people together that know about this stuff, and 
let's stop the problem, and let's try to mitigate the damage that's 
done, clean it up; but let's stop it from spilling oil. I mean, that's 
such a fundamental thing. Engineers have this big weakness. They're 
always ready to fix something when they haven't even defined what the 
problem is, but that's such a knee-jerk reaction.
  And yet what we've got here is somebody who is more ready to try to 
figure out who to blame than to fix the problem. We've seen it before 
in the economy on the other things, but there's nothing quite as vivid 
as just a plain old hole in the ocean that's spewing out oil. And you'd 
say, Well, first let's put a team together to fix it. Instead, we're 
going to say, Oh, let's see how much we can excoriate BP. Well, I don't 
feel sorry for them. They're the ones that had--as far as I know, the 
personnel on the oil rig were either incompetent or made some very bad 
decisions. They deserve to lose a lot of money. They did things wrong.
  The only thing is, it seems to me that the Federal Government has 
been even worse. And the thing that's so amazing is, why don't we put 
the team together to fix the problem instead of just standing around 
and looking to assign blame on the whole thing? That's what concerns me 
a lot. What happens if this economy turns into another big hole in the 
ocean that really starts to go downhill? What are we going to have for 
leadership to fix that problem? I recognize my good friend from 
Georgia.
  Mr. BROUN of Georgia. Thank you, Mr. Akin. Just today, we had 
Secretary Salazar come to the Natural Resources Committee to talk about 
the BP oil spill and about what is being done. And during my time of 
questioning the Secretary, I brought up to him a quote from Bill 
Clinton, Democratic President. I don't very often quote Bill Clinton or 
Democratic Presidents, but Bill Clinton urged this administration, 
first, to stop the leak; second, to clean up the oil; and, third, to 
protect the environment and those who are being damaged by this.
  Mr. AKIN. That doesn't sound too complicated.
  Mr. BROUN of Georgia. Then to try to find out what caused the problem 
and then fix it. But that's not what we're doing. Just today we had a 
hearing on the chairman of the Natural Resources Committee's bill, the 
CLEAR Act, to regulate offshore drilling, onshore drilling, all 
drilling, all energy production here in this country. And Secretary 
Salazar defended his moratorium that's going to kill over 100,000 jobs 
in this country.
  Mr. AKIN. I think it was 140,000 direct jobs. These are not the 
barbers and the restaurateurs and stuff. This is just the hard jobs 
that it's going to kill.
  Mr. BROUN of Georgia. It's going to kill those jobs. And Secretary 
Salazar defended his decision. The interesting thing--Mr. Akin, you're 
an engineer--Secretary Salazar pulled together a panel of experts to 
look at this problem and to make recommendations. And in the report 
that came out, the Secretary used this report to promote a 6-month 
moratorium to stop drilling--for all drilling, onshore, offshore, 
shallow water, deepwater, all drilling.
  Mr. AKIN. So did this plan, first of all, stop the oil that's coming 
out of the floor of the ocean?
  Mr. BROUN of Georgia. Well, no. They're just stopping the drilling 
that's going on.

[[Page 12495]]


  Mr. AKIN. So they didn't fix the problem?
  Mr. BROUN of Georgia. They didn't fix the problem at all.
  Mr. AKIN. Did they deal with cleaning up the mess?
  Mr. BROUN of Georgia. They didn't deal with anything. They didn't 
deal with any of the things that Bill Clinton suggested that they do. 
And the interesting thing is that the Secretary said that this panel 
was suggesting that we have this moratorium. The panel came back and 
said, No, no, no, no, no, we didn't say that. In fact, we don't want 
you to stop the drilling. We think you ought to continue it.
  Mr. AKIN. Now wait a minute. Let's get this straight. This is a 
little confusing. A panel of, more or less, experts is put together. 
They're asked to come up with a recommendation. They come up with a 
recommendation, and the administration says, Well, we're going to put a 
moratorium on drilling because that's what was recommended. And the 
panel says----
  Mr. BROUN of Georgia. No, we didn't.
  Mr. AKIN. No, we didn't. We didn't recommend that. I guess the panel 
came up with the wrong answer.
  Mr. BROUN of Georgia. Well, I think it goes back to something that 
the President's chief of staff said when he said that a crisis is too 
good to waste. I suggested to the Secretary today that this is a crisis 
that they shouldn't ignore because it appears to me--and how it appears 
to a lot of American people--that this administration is trying to push 
through its tax-and-trade policy.
  Mr. AKIN. I call it cap-and-tax, tax-and-trade.
  Mr. BROUN of Georgia. Yes. Well, it's an energy tax that's going to 
tax everybody in all sectors of the society. It's going to hurt poor 
people, people on limited income because more of their money is 
expended on things that are critical for life.
  Mr. AKIN. Let's get this straight. So what we're going to do is, 
we've got a hole in the ocean that's pouring out this really sticky, 
yucky oil. I mean, we're counting on BP to clog that up. We don't 
really have that good of a solution on the cleanup thing because the 
Governor is saying, we want to build some sand berms to stop the oil 
from washing into our wetlands. And the government says you can't do 
it, and then they say you can. And when they start to do it, they say 
you can't. So we're not really taking care of the mitigation piece of 
it.
  Instead, our solution is, Hey, let's tax everybody. That seems a 
little counterintuitive. So we're going to tax them twice. One, we're 
going to tax them when the government taxes them on energy; and, two, 
they are going to get hammered because the cost of energy is going to 
go up because we don't have the whole oil basin of the gulf, which is a 
pretty good source of oil, to give us lower-priced fuel. That just 
seems a little bit counterintuitive, doesn't it? It's a little bit like 
that graveyard spiral. We keep twisting downward. We need somebody to 
firewall a stick, kick the rudders right, and then pull us out.
  My good friend, Congressman Franks from Arizona, was it 15 or 16 or 
17 you owned your first oil rig? We need a little bit of help on this.
  Mr. FRANKS of Arizona. Actually, my younger brother and I started out 
with a little, small drilling rig when I was 17 and he was 15. It was a 
great experience, and I will never forget it. But the offshore 
situation, of course, is a much bigger challenge.

                              {time}  2220

  But I guess my conviction is that this administration, when this 
tragedy took place, they were so busy trying to fix blame rather than 
fixing the problem.
  Now, the ironic part about it is they'd like to try to pretend that 
there's some debate on who's to blame, and there isn't. All of us in 
this Chamber, all of us in this Congress recognize that BP is to blame 
for this tragedy. BP has said they are to blame for this tragedy.
  And what President Obama should have done when this occurred, he 
should have immediately met with the only industry in the world that 
could deal with the problem of this nature. You can't call in the Air 
Force to lob heavy bombs at it. You've got to go to the industry that 
knows how to deal with these things. He should have called all the 
experts to say: Here's the deal. First of all, we're going to hold you 
accountable. It's going to happen. We know you're at fault. You're 
going to be accountable. But right now, our job is to plug this 
blowout, and we're going to do whatever it takes to do that. We're 
going to work with everyone. We're going to work together, and we're 
going to make it happen, and we're going to make sure that you're doing 
the best you can. We're going to allow help from all over the world to 
help us. We're going to try to make sure that we protect our shoreline. 
In the meantime, we're going to draw off as much oil as we can.
  But instead, instead, this President is out looking over the horizon 
to and fro to find somebody's rear end to kick. That is his answer to 
the problem.
  And I just find it amazing, because the moratorium that they talk 
about, not only does that not plug the hole. You know, it's kind of 
like bringing a person into the emergency room and he's bleeding to 
death, and he again is out trying to find somebody's rear to kick 
instead of trying to fix the patient.
  And this moratorium, not only does it not fix the leak, not only is 
it something that will destroy jobs and hurt the economy, but if all 
you cared about was the pollution that was the problem here, this 
moratorium is going to mean that about a third of the oil that we 
produce out of the gulf--that's about how much--we produce about 42 
percent or somewhere in that neighborhood of our own oil in this 
country, maybe around 40 percent, and about a third of that comes from 
the gulf. And if we don't produce that, that means we've got to bring 
in more tankers. We've got to buy more oil from overseas.
  And what this administration overlooks, very characteristically, is 
that they forgot that 7 of 10 of the last major spills in this country, 
7 out of 10, were from tankers. And so what we're going to do is bring 
more tankers over and increase the empirical chances of us having 
greater spills. And, ultimately, the money that we pay for that, a lot 
of it comes from Middle Eastern oil. A lot of that money finds its way 
into terrorist coffers, and they may bring something over to this 
country that will really be a cataclysm. And this administration seems 
blind to all of that, and I just find it astonishing the lack of 
priority.
  Mr. AKIN. Gentleman, you have illustrated the very point that I was 
trying to make. You instinctively think in terms of fixing the problem, 
not fixing blame.
  And you're a member of the Armed Services Committee, along with 
myself, and I don't know if you were aware of it, but the military has 
basically a whole plan of what they call a fusion unit, and it's a 
management structure where, when you get into something like this, the 
President has complete authority to do this. He could pull on every 
resource of the United States. He puts together the smart people, puts 
somebody in charge of it, and they take a look and say, Here's how 
we're going to solve the problem. One, we're going to try this. If this 
doesn't work, here's plan two and here's plan three. We need these 
resources.
  Foreign countries offered to help us. You put this thing together. 
You have somebody else that's taking care of State laws, environmental 
laws, making decisions.
  When Governor Jindal says, Hey, we want to put a sandbar in front of 
our wetlands to stop the oil before it gets in, you take a look at that 
and you get back to him within 24 hours or 12 hours and decide whether 
it's a good plan or not, and you have the right people, the best people 
available in place to analyze that, make a decision and move forward.
  And instead, he waits a month to get a response from the Federal 
Government, builds the sand dam, and then they tell him to tear it 
down.
  Mr. FRANKS of Arizona. Congressman, he waited 2 months before he met 
with BP. Two months.

[[Page 12496]]


  Mr. AKIN. You're saying the President waited two months before he 
goes to meet with BP.
  Mr. FRANKS of Arizona. And he should have been there at least within 
two days.
  Mr. AKIN. Well, that's convenient, because then anything that doesn't 
work you can continue to blame BP. The problem is, there's all this oil 
all over the place, that little detail.
  You know, I agree with you entirely. BP was wrong. What I'm not clear 
on, was it more of equipment or was it more human. I suspect from what 
I've heard, it seemed like it was more operator error than it was 
technology.
  But, be that as it may, it seems to me that the only thing that 
eclipsed the foolishness and the incompetence of BP is the Federal 
Government response that's even worse.
  Mr. FRANKS of Arizona. Well, it really is. And regardless of whose 
fault it was on the ground, regardless of whether it was a mistake made 
by the operator or by the driller or by one of those contractors there, 
the bottom line is that BP's the operator, so they're ultimately 
responsible. Again, everybody knows that. But this administration was 
focused on blame and political expediency rather than fixing the 
problem.
  Mr. AKIN. Well, thank you gentlemen. I appreciate your joining me. 
Thank you, Mr. Speaker, for allowing us to talk about budgets, but also 
about the situation in the gulf.
  God bless you. Thank you. Good night.

                          ____________________