[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 157 (2011), Part 13]
[House]
[Pages 19027-19031]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                        AMERICA AT A CROSSROADS

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of 
January 5, 2011, the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Gohmert) is recognized 
for 60 minutes as the designee of the majority leader.
  Mr. GOHMERT. Madam Speaker, there are an awful lot of people hurting 
across America now.
  We take up a few suspension bills here that only the Congress could 
deal with, so it's something we have to do, we're proud to do, 
important to those organizations in two States. It's important to them; 
it's important to us.
  We have people on the other side of the aisle who come forward and 
try to make it into a jobs debate when it would seem that some of the 
best debate would be if all of us, en masse, walked down to the other 
end of the hall of this building and began to seek to debate the 
Senate--the Senate leadership, that is--and Democratic Party on why 
they are so intent on stopping legislation that could put people back 
to work.
  There are many besides the President, in addition to the President, 
who say this is a do-nothing Congress; and because the Senate does so 
very little, they give credence to that argument. One need only look to 
all the bills we have been passing here in the House that could help 
the economy, would help the economy, would put people back to work, 
would bring down dramatically the cost of energy, which would bring 
down inflation and the stagnation and stagflation that's been put in 
place by this President and, actually, the 2 years prior to this 
President when our Democratic friends across the aisle controlled 
Congress and jumped up spending like we could not have anticipated.
  Our friends across the aisle correctly pointed out that Republicans 
in 2006 were spending too much money. They were right in pointing out 
that we should never be spending $160 billion more than we were taking 
in. They were right.
  As a result of their being right on that and their promises that they 
would rein in that runaway spending, our friends across the aisle were 
given the majority in November of 2006.

                              {time}  1710

  What followed in 2007, 2008, 2009, and 2010 under the Democratic 
majority was runaway spending at a level never even dreamed of, at 
least on our side of the aisle.
  Who would have ever dreamed that the same party that condemned 
Republicans--correctly--for overspending the amount of money coming 
into the Federal Treasury by $160 billion would up that ante and 
overspend by 10 times that much? Over a $1.5 trillion deficit in just 1 
year. It is just unfathomable.
  One of the things that so concerned me about TARP, not only the bill 
when I read it, but the fact that it desensitized Americans to just how 
much $700 billion is and how much it was in late 2008.
  It's my belief that if we had not passed TARP and people being so 
desensitized as to how much $700 billion was, President Obama could 
never have gotten through what was said to be around an $800 billion 
porkulus, stimulus, whatever you want to call it, which turned out, by 
some accounts, to be more like a trillion dollar giveaway program--only 
if you consider giving away amounts like $500 million to $600 million 
to Solyndra, that goes bankrupt, as throwing away money.
  We have set this country on a course toward ruin. And now the 
Secretary of the Treasury, Mr. Geithner, who we recall had time with 
the International Monetary Fund, as came to light during his 
unfortunate confirmation hearings, 4 years in a row he was paid by the 
International Monetary Fund and was said to be an independent 
contractor, although he manifested control and some level of governance 
within the International Monetary Fund. He had a job with the 
International Monetary Fund, but they paid him as an independent 
contractor, and, therefore, when he signed a document swearing that he 
would pay all of the taxes due on those amounts that were listed on 
those four documents, then he was allowed to receive all of the money 
that should have been paid to the Federal Government in taxes in return 
for his sworn agreement to pay that tax independently on his own. As we 
found out during those confirmation hearings, he did not fulfill his 
oath. He broke his oath. He didn't pay those taxes, and now he's in 
charge of the Treasury. How amazing.
  I've privately had Internal Revenue Service employees tell me how 
grieved they were to have had someone who did not pay his taxes when he 
was required to do so by law, went even further and he signed a sworn 
document that he would take care of it, and didn't, because, despite 
all the jokes about the IRS and despite there being some people with 
the IRS who can be a bit brutal at times, there are some wonderful 
people who work for the Internal Revenue Service who are abundantly 
fair, want to do the right thing, and have incredibly clean 
backgrounds.
  In fact, the rule as I was given to understand by IRS employees is, 
if you ever have underpaid your taxes or failed to pay taxes, you're 
out. You cannot work for the IRS. There have been incidents where an 
IRS agent has overpaid taxes and then recalled someone giving them 
cash, and without anyone ever being able to hold them accountable, no 
one would have ever reported it, but to keep a clean conscience because 
an IRS agent was so clean and had a conscience and wanted so to abide 
by honesty and truth and the U.S. law, filed an amended tax return 
which still allowed a refund coming back. And as a result, their 
employment was in jeopardy.
  Imagine the feeling of Internal Revenue Service employees who have 
had to throughout their stellar careers at the Internal Revenue 
Service, had to keep all of their affairs clean and in order, open, 
honest, to find out they are going to be ruled and governed by someone 
who misrepresented on signing a sworn document that they would pay 
taxes that they didn't until someone called it to their attention prior 
to being appointed to that role. It has to be tough for IRS agents who 
have had such stellar, honorable careers to have dealt with that.
  So what's wrong with having somebody who plays so fast and loose with

[[Page 19028]]

signing documents, not paying taxes, playing with other people's money 
in the International Monetary Fund? I would submit to you that we get 
things, as we have here recently, with our Secretary of the Treasury, 
who enjoyed spending hundreds of billions of dollars from TARP, who has 
enjoyed the power of giving away money, paying money. Under TARP, in 
fact, a provision allowed the Secretary of Treasury to pay more than 
fair market value if anything--and this is my interpretation--if 
anything in his opinion, his sole opinion, would somehow, some way, 
some day help our economy somehow, even if it was helping a foreign 
economy. That's the mentality at the IMF and apparently the mentality 
currently at the Treasury Department.
  I did not think we could get a worse Treasury Secretary than Hank 
Paulson until we got our current Treasury Secretary, making the 
mistakes he has and taking the position he has, and now wanting 
Americans to come in and bail out foreign countries who are slightly 
ahead of us on the road to socialism.
  If you go back to the Roman Empire, the Romans found that over time 
when you continue to give people bread and circuses, they come to rely 
on those. They come to believe that they shouldn't have to work, that 
the government will give them entertainment and will give them money to 
use, food that they need, and it materially affects work.
  Socialism of a sort was tried in the New Testament church. And on 
this Earth, on this planet with fallible individuals, it resulted, as 
it always has and always will, in the Apostle Paul ultimately having to 
come to the conclusion and issue the order, okay, new rule: if you 
don't work, you don't eat.
  The Pilgrims had a beautiful compact. They were going to bring 
together all into a common storehouse and share and share alike. That 
brutal first winter caused them to lose so many. Eventually, they got 
to a new thing that we now call private property where people would own 
their own property, produce from it as they wished with full freedom to 
do so. They could eat what they raised. They could trade what they 
raised. They could use it as they saw fit. That kind of mentality and 
that kind of structure that affords private property to people to own 
and use on their own, or rental property that they can use to produce 
income, those kind of freedoms have allowed the entrepreneurship that 
has brought us to the point in history where we are the greatest Nation 
in the history of mankind, with more freedoms than any in the history 
of mankind.

                              {time}  1720

  But over time we've seen those who fled Europe and England to come to 
America to start a new life, so many of them fleeing persecution as 
Christians, coming to a new land where they would not be persecuted as 
Christians. They came to America. And with private property engendering 
the kind of thought processes that led our Founders through the 
guidance--divinely, I believe--that they got, as pointed to by so many 
of the Founders, we got our Constitution. We have a structure of 
government from Founders who did not trust government; who wanted to 
make it as difficult as possible to pass laws. Even once they were 
passed, they could be vetoed. Struck down. They wanted it difficult. 
They saw gridlock as being a good thing. The more difficult it was to 
pass laws, the less chance the government would interfere in personal 
property rights and personal freedoms of the individual.
  Europe after World War II seemed to move into this socialist type of 
thinking where the government will take care of people. Some in this 
country after World War II for 60 years, going on 70 years now, have 
been pushing an agenda to get us to a socialist state, where we take on 
the attributes of those systems that have repeatedly failed over and 
over in time.
  I was recently in Israel. I went to a former kibbutz. Those were 
truly communes. They had real communism there. Share and share alike. 
But socialism, communism, it can sound so nice. Everyone bring in to 
the common storehouse. Share and share alike. It sounds nice, but it 
never works.
  And I saw that so clearly in an exchange program to the Soviet Union 
back in 1973, when it really was the Soviet Union. And on visiting a 
collective farm, a socialist farm, you look out, the fields did not 
look very good. I have worked on farms and ranches, and those did not 
look productive. But I was surprised to see in the middle of the 
morning the farmers were sitting in the shade in the center of the 
village. I spoke some Russian back then and asked as nicely as I could 
without meaning to insult because I really was curious, When do you 
work out in the fields? And they laughed. And one of them that seemed 
to be the most boisterous of the group said, I make the same number of 
rubles if I'm out there or I'm here in the shade. So I'm here in the 
shade.
  That's socialism. That's why it fails.
  And we've seen the riots in Greece as the government tried to be 
responsible and say, Look, we're going broke. We're out of business. We 
have got to stop spending money we don't have. We've got to rein it in. 
And people have rioted and say, No, no, no, don't cut back what I'm 
getting from the government, not understanding if it's not there, your 
government will eventually be taken over by some type of radical form--
at least historically that's what often happens--and some dictator, 
which they would hope would be a benevolent dictator, would take over, 
get the rioting under control, and set the government on a course.
  We saw a government after World War I in Germany trying to work 
toward a process. Economic times were tough. So a little guy with a 
mustache ends up actually getting elected to office and then eventually 
taking over the country. We know the results of that--at least most of 
us do. There are some, like Ahmadinejad, that thought the Holocaust 
never happened. But it did.
  So why in the world, when we see how that works out and we see that a 
country will not accept its own responsibility, as incredible as the 
people can be of a country like Greece--you meet people from Greece, 
you love them. They're just great folks. As beautiful as a country can 
be, as rich a history as a country can have like Greece, you want to 
embrace them. Understandable.
  But when a people such as those in Greece want to continue down a 
bankrupt course and you see them heading for the edge of a cliff and 
they say, Come join hands with us, it doesn't make me feel any better 
to hear people like Secretary Geithner say, figuratively speaking, 
Let's join hands as they jump off the cliff and take us with them. But 
we're told, Well, gee, some of the European countries, they'll feel 
better about trying to bail out Greece if they know that the United 
States will come in if things don't work out and bail them out.
  We have had such radicalized spending that's been out of control. And 
until we get that under control, we're of very little use to most of 
the world economically. The best thing we could do for Greece, for all 
of Europe, is get our spending under control, come back from a point of 
strength financially, show them by example how you get out of your 
problems, and then the world will be better off financially because you 
see repeatedly in history when a country gets in trouble financially, 
it opens the door to dictators or a radical form of a government such 
as we see in Iran today. That wasn't entirely economic.
  We do recall--I was in the Army at the time--when President Carter 
failed to support our ally, the Shah. I never met the man, but 
apparently historically not a warm fuzzy fellow. Was not fine with the 
folks in Iran. But using very poor judgment, President Carter hailed 
the Ayatollah Khomeini in his return to Iran as a man of peace; and as 
a result that man of peace, as President Carter hailed him, thousands 
and thousands and thousands of Americans have given their lives or had 
their lives taken from them.
  There are prices that are paid by bad judgment; and this country has 
paid a price for bad judgment, and now we

[[Page 19029]]

have more efforts at bad judgment. That would include telling the world 
that as we've overspent more than a trillion dollars more than what we 
have coming in, Don't worry, we'll come bail you out. I was surprised 
to find out this summer that we're not printing money to get us out of 
our problem. No, we're not printing money. I was surprised to find 
out--because I've said that before. I think we're just printing money 
to try to pay off our debt. That causes runaway inflation. I was 
corrected. And I stand corrected.
  We're not printing money to get out of our financial dilemma. No, I 
was told we're not printing this money. We're just adding ones and 
zeroes in a computer to say that we've got more money. We're not even 
printing it anymore. How irresponsible is that? There is a price that 
will be paid for that kind of irresponsibility, and it is very tragic 
that it may well be paid by our children and grandchildren. It is the 
height of irresponsibility to leave that to future generations.
  And then to have our Treasury Secretary say, Let's go bail these 
folks out. Well, it's not really us. It's the International Monetary 
Fund.

                              {time}  1730

  It is kind of reminiscent of President Obama saying, We're going to 
go get Qadhafi, we're going to help these so-called ``rebels,'' but 
we're not actually going to do it. No, we're not going to do it; NATO 
will do it. We started a little bit out there, but now it's not the 
United States at all; it's NATO.
  So we checked, and we find out 65 percent of NATO's military is 
United States Armed Services. Oh, no, it wasn't NATO--much. Sixty-five 
percent was the United States. It was the United States. And now the 
Secretary of the Treasury wants us to do this with countries that are 
failing and yet still unwilling to embrace the problem they've created.
  And then we're told there's such great news, that unemployment has 
now dropped from 9.1 percent to 8.6 percent, or 9.0 to 8.6 percent, and 
we're supposed to feel like that is such a wonderful thing. I'm not a 
huge fan of The New York Times, but there was an article in December 
2's New York Times, an editorial entitled, ``Been Down So Long.'' I 
think it's worth entering into the Congressional Record by its reading.

       The unemployment rate dropped to 8.6 percent in November 
     from 9 percent in October in the jobs report released Friday. 
     The economy added 120,000 jobs and job growth was revised 
     upward in September and October.
       That's better than rising unemployment and falling 
     payrolls. Yet, properly understood, the new figures reveal 
     more about the depth of distress in the job market than about 
     real improvement in job prospects.
       Most of the decline in November's unemployment rate was not 
     because jobless people found new work. Rather, it is because 
     315,000 people dropped out of the work force, a reflection of 
     extraordinarily weak demand by employers for new workers. It 
     is also a sign of socioeconomic decline, of wasted resources 
     and untapped potential, the human equivalent of boarded-up 
     Main Streets and shuttered factories.
       The job growth numbers also come with caveats. More jobs 
     were created than economists expected, but with the job 
     market so weak for so long, that is a low bar. It would take 
     nearly 11 million new jobs to replace the ones that were lost 
     during the recession and to keep up with the growth in the 
     working-age population in the last four years. To fill that 
     gap would require 275,000 new jobs a month for the next five 
     years. That's not in the cards. Even with the better-than-
     expected job growth in the past three months, the economy 
     added only 143,000 jobs on average.
       And most of those new jobs are low-end ones. In November, 
     for example, big job-growth areas included retail sales, 
     bartending and temporary services. Teachers and other public 
     employees continued to lose jobs, and job growth in 
     construction and manufacturing were basically flat. Indeed, 
     work--once the pathway to a rising standard of living--has 
     become for many a route to downward mobility. Motoko Rich 
     reported in The Times recently on new research showing that 
     most people who lost their jobs in recent years now make less 
     and have not maintained their lifestyles, with many 
     experiencing what they describe as drastic--and probably 
     irreversible--declines in income.
       Against that backdrop, the modest improvement in the jobs 
     report, even if sustained in the months to come, would not be 
     enough to repair the damage from the recession and its slow-
     growth aftermath. Help is needed, yet Congress is tied in 
     knots over even basic recovery measures, like extending 
     federal unemployment benefits and the temporary payroll tax 
     cut.
       Meanwhile, the increasing likelihood of a recession in 
     Europe, or any other setback, could easily derail the weak 
     American economy, sending unemployment back up to double-
     digit recession levels.

  Now, we've been hearing a great deal lately from the President and 
from Members of Congress on the Democratic side about how we just 
needed to extend this wonderful payroll tax holiday. Well, as the 
person who came up with the idea of a payroll tax holiday 3 years ago, 
I'm offended at the use of the term ``payroll tax holiday'' to cut 6.2 
percent Social Security tax down to 4.2 Social Security tax when it has 
not increased jobs, it has not helped jobs.
  We're talking $30, $40, $50, $60, when the payroll tax holiday I was 
proposing was a true holiday. It would have allowed every worker in 
America not to pay any Social Security tax, any Medicare tax, any 
income tax for at least 2 months. It would not have hurt Social 
Security, the trust fund, and it would not have hurt the Medicare 
system because it was totally paid for.
  My bill said that money that was leftover--which was available at the 
time before our Secretary of the Treasury just started giving it away--
that money would be moved over and would cover the Social Security 
trust fund monies that were necessary so the tax would not be missed. 
It would cover the monies that were supposed to go in to cover 
Medicare. And so the only way that money would be missed is that 
Secretary Geithner would not have been able to give it away and support 
those four-to-one Democrats or Republicans that are executives on Wall 
Street and who reside in controlling our investment banks.
  And that's a shock to some people when they actually do their 
research and find out Wall Street is four-to-one Democrat over 
Republican because they've been listening to Democratic leaders for 
years talk about those sorry fat-cat Republicans on Wall Street. Well, 
they hadn't done their research either; or if they had, they would have 
been very disingenuous in so saying.
  That money--as I and many others contended--that was in TARP and was 
in the slush fund of the Secretary of the Treasury would have been far 
better used by those people who earned it, by just saying you get every 
dime back that you were paying in this month and next month. And I also 
knew privately in my heart that if we could have that payroll tax 
holiday, a true payroll tax holiday for 2 months--and initially I said 
a year.
  But if we could have had that for even 2 months, then I knew 
taxpayers across the country would see--many, most for the first time--
just how much money they were sending for the Federal Government to 
use, and they would demand better from their Congress, from their 
President. They would demand better from the bureaucrats in Washington 
that get to the end of the year and see they've got money left and rush 
out and throw it away, spend it on whatever they can. They would have 
demanded better government, and they would have gotten it or they would 
have fired everybody at the next election and gotten better. But we 
didn't get a true payroll tax holiday.
  I was very honored to have a chance to explain the concept of a 
payroll tax holiday when President Obama came to our Republican 
Conference back in the first of the year in 2009. As I explained to 
him, this is immediate; it immediately helps the economy. Moody's said 
the tax holiday idea--a true tax holiday, not this bastardization of 
one--the true tax holiday would have increased the 1-year GDP more than 
any other proposal, more than any other Democratic proposal or any 
other Republican proposal. And as I explained to the President, we pass 
this and you sign it--and if you just say you are willing to sign it, 
we would get it passed. If you sign it on a Thursday, then on Friday 
all of that money, all of the income tax, Social Security, Medicare 
tax, all of that will be in the check of the person that owned it.

                              {time}  1740

  It doesn't have to go through Washington, and Washington take its cut

[[Page 19030]]

out and dribbles out $30, $40, $50, $60 to the worker. They got it all. 
And then, to know that was going to be paid for by stopping the 
giveaways to the auto companies, to the investment banks, to the fat 
cats, as the President calls them, that was what I wanted to see. And 
that money would go into the hands of the people that earned it, and 
then they would have decided.
  We did a survey in our district about what people would use their 
money for. Look at your check. Think about it for 2 months. What would 
you use it for? And we weren't talking about $20, $30, $40, $50, $60 
like this President has. We were talking about, $2,000 $3,000 $5,000 
$6,000. And when people did that, they told us, for example, we've got 
a gas guzzler, and gas is so high now we can barely pay our gasoline 
bill, but we're underwater on our car. We owe more than the car is 
worth so we can't afford to trade it in. So we're stuck.
  You let us have our money for 2 months, we'll buy a new car. And the 
people in America would have decided which car companies deserved to be 
bailed out, and they would do that by deciding which car they would 
buy. And you wouldn't have had to have an auto task force secretively 
meeting in the White House and an auto czar and all those folks 
breaching the Constitution, breaching bankruptcy law, and deciding 
which dealers got to keep their dealership and which would have had 
them arbitrarily yanked away, only years down the road to find out, 
oops, we made a mistake on that. Oh, well, they're gone. Too bad. We 
could have avoided all that.
  And with all the effort that was undertaken to try to shore up the 
real estate market, we had people telling us, look, we got behind on 
our mortgage payments when gas hit $4 a gallon. You let us have the 
$6,000 we'd get to keep over 2 months, we'll catch up on our mortgage. 
We'll catch up on the other things. You don't need to have some big 
financial bailout situation because we'll take care of it ourselves if 
we have our own money.
  Then again, to know that that would have been paid for by the TARP 
money, and Social Security would not have been hurt. They would have 
gotten all the tax money that would have come in. It would have just 
come from TARP, instead of the individual taxpayers. And to know that 
Medicare would not have been hurt, because that money would have gone 
directly into Medicare, not from the taxpayer for 2 months, but from 
TARP. That would have been the right thing to do.
  If you really want a stimulus, let the people that earned it spend 
it. They'll know better than the people here in Washington did.
  And it didn't pass. And President Obama has chosen to take the name 
``payroll tax holiday'' that I was using 3 years ago and use it for a 2 
percent tax. Why? Because it will look good for the election. Why? 
Because it looks to be so grand because, see, you can tell people that 
are working that, gee, the President's got you a petty $30 extra in 
your check, and these Republicans don't want you to keep that.
  That's not true. We do. But we also, at the same time, don't want 
Social Security not to have the money that it needs. What the President 
is not telling people, as he has pitted those who are working now 
against our seniors, and to the one group saying, hey, workers, I want 
you to have that little extra 30 bucks in your pay check, and 
Republicans don't want you to have it. And then going to seniors and 
saying, you've got to worry about those Republicans because they're not 
going to take care of Social Security, never bothering to mention that 
when he says we're allowing you to keep this money in your check now, 
it means that money will not be in the Social Security Trust Fund, not 
even the IOU will be in the Social Security Trust Fund to take care of 
our seniors.
  We were told when this President was running that he was a uniter, 
not a divider. And yet we see in this campaign ploy that working people 
are being pitted against our seniors. We've seen class warfare. In 
essence, if you see somebody has more than you do, you need to want it 
and go after it. After all, that basically seems to be the one common 
thread running through all the Occupy Wall Street, Washington, all the 
Occupy groups.
  We had them come through Washington screaming in the hallways today. 
It wasn't enough that they're trying to disrupt a beautiful park people 
used to enjoy. Why? Because they have no regard for private property. 
Why? Because they've become envious and jealous.
  I can say that because I'm repeatedly told in the analyses that I 
have less assets than most people. One time I had the least assets of 
anybody from Texas in Congress.
  My wife and I cashed out all our assets, except our house, so I could 
run for Congress, so I could try to make a difference. And I am not 
jealous of anyone who has more than me. I thank God we have a country 
where people can be entrepreneurs. And I've accepted that as a role I 
can play in helping try to do that.
  So it breaks my heart when I see a President dividing America with 
class warfare, encouraging envy and jealousy. You ought to want what 
they have and demand that you get theirs. Leaders coming out and saying 
they fully embrace the Occupy movement, it's a great thing, when even 
the Occupy folks can't explain anything other than they hate the people 
that got more than they do.
  Then there's a report--I don't often cite CNBC, but cnbc.com, more 
Americans are going abroad for economic opportunities. It says that the 
State Department now estimates that 6.3 million Americans are studying 
or working abroad, the highest number on record.
  We're told that 70 percent of Americans, adults, believe that their 
children will not have as much opportunity and freedom as they've had. 
That's why I ran for Congress. That should not happen. We can change 
that.
  But I'm mystified when I think about the record spending in 2007 that 
was followed by additional record spending in 2008, under the guidance 
of Speaker Pelosi and Leader Reid, because we know all spending 
originates in Congress. This is where budgets are passed. It's where 
appropriations are passed. If money is appropriated, it has to be 
appropriated from here.
  In 2007, 2008, I never heard anybody, Democrat or Republican, 
complain that those budgets didn't spend enough money, each year going 
beyond what we had spent the year before. And so, then to have a new 
President come in in 2009, and with Speaker Pelosi and Leader Reid 
still at the reins, jump up spending an extra trillion dollars, and 
then come before Congress and the country and say, look, you're just 
going to have to raise taxes to get up to where this extra trillion 
dollars is that I've already spent.
  Why couldn't we just say, Nobody complained in 2007 or 2008 about too 
little money being spent. Let's go back to the Pelosi-Reid budget that 
was so much more than the Republican budgets of 2005 and 2006. We'll go 
back to those. It means we drop $1 trillion in spending. Boom, there 
you go. We didn't a need a supercommittee. There you are.
  Another easy solution that isn't talked about enough, but this House 
voted to cut our own legislative budget 5 percent last year and 6.4 
percent the year we're in. That amount of money, though significant to 
most of us, is a drop in the bucket when you look at the overall 
Federal budget. And the way that that should be used to make a 
difference is for this House, since we've done it to ourselves, now 
having the moral authority to say to every Federal department, every 
agency, we cut ourselves 5 percent last year, you're cutting yourself 5 
percent next year.

                              {time}  1750

  And the year after that, since we've already done it, you're cutting 
yourself another 6.4 percent; an 11 percent cut. And there you are. We 
didn't need a supercommittee. You've got your cuts.
  I am so grateful to Chairman Paul Ryan. We had a good discussion back 
in July. Since he's been in Congress like I have, the four terms I have 
been in Congress, each time I filed a zero-baseline budget bill that 
says no more

[[Page 19031]]

automatic increases for every Department. No automatic increases. It 
ought to be an easy concept.
  But we're living under the rules that were established for CBO back 
in 1974, a very, very liberal Congress that ended our participation in 
Southeast Asia. We should have ended it because we had not given our 
soldiers, sailors, airmen--we had not given them the go-ahead to win 
that war. We had tied their hands.
  When I hear some people say we ought to remember the lessons from 
Vietnam--and then it turns out they didn't get the lesson. The lesson 
is that unless you are willing to commit 100 percent of the resources 
and give the rules of engagement that allow our military to win, they 
should never be sent. It is outrageous to have our military in foreign 
countries with rules of engagement that don't allow them to adequately 
protect themselves. That's the lesson that should have been learned 
from Vietnam. We could have won the war.
  Sam Johnson can tell you, the leaders in Hanoi, as the POWs were 
taken out, one was laughing: You stupid Americans. If you had just 
bombed us one more week--like the 2 weeks they had before--we would 
have had to surrender unconditionally. They could have done that years 
before, saved thousands and thousands of American lives in Vietnam, but 
we didn't commit to win it.
  We shouldn't send anybody anywhere unless we're committed to win. It 
costs too much money. But even more than that, it costs the greatest 
American treasure, and that's American lives.
  We are in an economic crisis; and as Peter Marshall as chaplain of 
the U.S. Senate prayed in the 1940s: What we call crises, God sees as 
opportunities.
  It turns out, those of us in the House, those of us in the Senate, 
even the President, have an incredible opportunity. We'll never be 
called the greatest generation; but 100 years from now, if we bring 
spending down under control, people can look back and say: Wow, they 
had about 60 years, 65 years of uncontrolled spending. It grew and grew 
and grew. And the people that were in government then did something 
that most have never been able to do when they get to that point, when 
nearly 50 percent are getting more back than they are paying in. They 
were able to restrain their spending, get control of their financial 
destiny, and we got another 200 years of the greatest Nation in 
history.
  The other is possible. They could look back and say: Wow, the United 
States followed the tried-and-true path to the dustbin of history. They 
spent more than they had. People found that they could get Congress to 
vote them money out of the Treasury. And once again, that socialist 
concept failed, and the Nation failed. The Nation that provided for 
that brief time of Camelot, a time of hope, relative peace, evolving 
toward more perfect freedom, was lost because of financial 
irresponsibility.
  People have heard me so many times quote Ben Franklin. But it's easy 
to see from Proverbs, it's easy to see from speeches of people like Ben 
Franklin, our problem is a selfish problem--anytime we spend more money 
than we have with complete and utter disregard, gross negligent 
disregard, even intentional disregard for the future of our children 
and one day their children and one day their children, complete 
disregard, we want to spend it on ourselves now.
  It's time to tell Greece, to tell everyone, let's hold hands and do 
this together, not jump over the cliff by spending good money after 
bad. Let's do it by not spending money we don't have. And there's no 
way a country would not be upgraded when S&P and the world see, these 
people are really serious about not spending more than they have coming 
in.
  This is a brave country. They know how to make commitments. And that 
would get us back to having true freedom and not having the American 
citizens have to come begging to Congress, Please, please, throw us 
more morsels. Instead, Congress would be a body that inspired greatness 
and inspired potential again and wouldn't lure young women into the rut 
of having children out of wedlock because they're bored with high 
school. It would, instead, give them incentives and encouragement: 
Reach your potential; finish high school; go to college.
  Let's have incentives not to stay out of work. Let's have incentives 
to get back to work. Let's have incentives to sell our products around 
the world. You do that by decreasing the tariff that we put on 
American-made goods by every American company. That would help get us 
on the road back to financial independence.
  One other thing: When you have been blessed as the greatest country 
in the world when it comes to having your own energy, we ought to use 
it. We have it. We've been blessed with it. It's time to use it. And I 
would humbly suggest that this President get out of the way, stop 
preventing us from using our own energy, and allow us to become an 
independent and great Nation again.
  With that, Madam Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

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