[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 157 (2011), Part 8]
[House]
[Page 10872]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                              {time}  1110
                               DEBT LIMIT

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. The Chair recognizes the gentleman from 
Illinois (Mr. Schilling) for 5 minutes.
  Mr. SCHILLING. Madam Speaker, I come before the floor of the House 
this morning to talk about the top issue of the Illinois 17th 
Congressional District, and that is the debt limit. The debt limit has 
been raised 51 times since 1978. Mr. Geithner has indicated that doing 
the same thing over and over again is insanity, and I tend to agree 
with him.
  Where are we at today? $14.2 trillion in debt. We reached the debt 
limit on May 16, 2011. Business owners such as myself share a message 
with people: it is time that we did the responsible thing and come up 
with some solutions so we stop the continuance of leaving this debt to 
our kids and our grandkids.
  As a small business owner, I'm asking President Obama not to balance 
the budget on the backs of the small businesses across the United 
States of America. The thing that I understand as a small business 
owner is that in a downturn economy, the worst thing we can do here 
from Washington, DC, is raise taxes on small businesses. The reason 
why, and I use my business as an example is, in a downturn economy, I 
understand that raising prices on my product when people are already 
struggling to purchase a product is not the best thing to do. When my 
taxes go up, I can raise the price or I can let someone go. And, you 
know, as hard as it is to let someone go, that's what businesses will 
have to do because people won't be able to afford their product.
  We need to try a different way, and that's why we are promoting a new 
train of thought here in Washington, DC. These 87 Members of Congress 
have changed the thought process of Washington, DC. We've changed the 
thought process from how much can we spend to how much can we cut. What 
we have also done is, we are trying to get Washington, DC, to focus in 
on wants versus needs and then prioritizing those out.
  The President has even admitted that the overregulation needs to be 
addressed. Whether it is the EPA, OSHA, the overtaxing, the 1099 tax 
form that we just got repealed, the Small Business Administration says 
that businesses like my little pizzeria in Moline spend four-and-a-half 
times as much per employee to comply with environmental regulations 
than bigger companies. We spend three times more per employee on tax 
compliance than large businesses.
  Congress needs to provide an environment with some economic 
certainties. We can do this by stopping tax increases on our job 
creators. My home State of Illinois, and quite frankly President 
Obama's State of Illinois, recently had the largest tax increase in the 
history of the State. It seems like every morning you open up the paper 
in Illinois and another business is threatening to leave. We can do 
something about this. We can provide our job creators with a certainty 
that with the unemployment rate at 9.2 percent, we don't need to add 
any more tax burden or further any more overregulation.

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