Important Issues Facing America
IMPORTANT ISSUES FACING AMERICA
Mr. RYAN of Ohio. Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the opportunity to be here again with the authorization and approval of our leader, Ms. Pelosi; Steny Hoyer, our whip; Mr. Clyburn, our caucus chair; and our vice chair Mr. Larsen from Connecticut. We would like to thank them also for giving the 30-something Working Group an opportunity to come to the floor as often as possible to talk about the issues that are facing this country.
Unfortunately, Mr. Speaker, we once again find ourselves in a scenario where there is a major disconnect between what the feelings are of the average American citizen sitting in Ohio or Florida or in the Midwest or any other State with what their issues are, what their challenges are, the problems they face sitting at the kitchen table, and what is going on here in the United States Congress and around the Potomac River.
Mr. Speaker, we have heard now how we have all these new issues that have been dusted off the shelf, brought back out front, back on the talk shows, back on the media circuits, back on radio talking about priorities that only belong to a small fringe group of people in America when the real problems that American citizens face look a little something like this: College tuition costs, up 40 percent; gas prices, up 47 percent; health care costs up 55 percent; and median household income down 4 percent.
The American people are crying out to State capitals all over the country, to Washington, DC, please, please, somebody listen to what our needs are. Please, somebody help us with an alternative energy plan. Please, someone help us reduce the cost of college tuition. Please, someone help us rein in the cost of health care. Please, someone help us lift our wages up, someone invested in the country. That is what the American people want. Yet time and time and time again we continue to get issues of amending the Constitution for any reason we see fit and divisive debates in the United States of America.
So I have a question, Mr. Speaker, that I would like to propose to the American people. What do we believe in as a country? What do we believe in, Mr. Speaker? What kind of America do we believe in? Do we believe in an America that will give the very, very few a tax break, the people who make more than $1 million a year a tax break, while we are increasing the cost of college tuition, while we have high gas prices? And with the top leadership in the United States of America saying conservation is a good personal virtue, but it has no room in the personal policy debate that this country has. Is that what we believe?
See, I believe that the American people want leadership in this country and they want us to take on these issues. These are difficult issues, and it may be hard to go to a millionaire for some people and ask them to pay a little more in taxes, that may be difficult, but the country demands that kind of leadership because we need to invest it into lowering college tuition costs so we can get more people educated in this country.
Now, I agree it is not just money. We need reform. We need to do things differently. We need to figure out how a 21st century college or university should work or a K through 12 should work. We need to do all those things. Just throwing money is not the solution. But to give millionaires a tax break at the expense of the kinds of reforms that the Democratic Party wants to do in college tuition, in alternative energy sources, I think is very, very important.
We have in the United States a lot of untapped human potential. And a lot of times, Mr. Speaker, we get caught up in policy debates about what our resources are, and conservation, and making sure we tap into all the resources of the country, but one of the great untapped resources that we have in the United States of America are our kids. We cannot continue down the road we are going down now, not investing into the arts, not investing into the team sports, not investing into business incubators at the rate we should be, not making sure that every school has a nurse or a clinic so our kids are healthy, not making sure that we reach out with SCHIPs, so that all our kids are covered and have health care so that they can be productive citizens.
These are investments we make into our kids, into our parents to make sure they are healthy so that they can be productive and learn in school. Because the other option is to say, the heck with the kid, he doesn't have the money. He or she doesn't have the money, they can't afford to go to the doctor, well, lose another one and move on. That is not what America believes in, Mr. Speaker.
So the real issue is this: Here is the world we are competing in: 1.3 billion Chinese citizens, 1 billion Indian citizens, and the European Union. They all want to clean our clock, Mr. Speaker. They want to knock off America. They are not scared. They are coming after us. They are barreling down. You go to Shanghai, you are riding a magnetic levitation train, one of the only ones in the world. They are investing in engineers like crazy, schools and education like crazy, knocking over buildings. They do not have property rights, environmental rights, human rights. They do not respect religion. They are not really playing fair, but they are playing to win.
Now, how do we combat that with only 300 million citizens? We combat that by investing into our people, making surely our people are healthy, educated, and have opportunity. And you know what? Some people may not take advantage of the opportunity. We understand that. But we need to begin to provide opportunity again for Americans.
The article today in USA Today about college debt, how can we expect kids to go out and take risks and take chances and start new businesses when they leave college with, last year, averaging $19,000 in debt? Nineteen thousand dollars. You think these kids are going to want to go to an inner city school and teach kids when you leave them with, if they have a Master's Degree or Ph.D. or something, over $100,000 debt if you're a doctor. We need to invest back into the United States of America. We need to have an infrastructure program.
Back home 2 weeks ago people in Ohio were talking about sewer lines and water lines and septic tanks and fees. Look what is happening to our country. We are letting it rot from within.
I just want to tell one story, Mr. Speaker. I went to China last summer for about 2 weeks, and as we toured the country and we went to different high-tech shops and chip manufacturers and Intel and all the fancy new high-tech companies that were there, we had a conversation, a kind of an ongoing conversation about their engineers in China versus the American engineers. And after hearing how many engineers they had and how well they were doing and how cheap they were, but yet very educated and very motivated and knew that they wanted to provide a lot of headaches for the United States, I started asking, well, what are the advantages of the U.S. engineers? And time and time again you would hear that the U.S. engineers are more creative, and they work in teams better than any other engineers in the entire world, all over the planet.
So the question is: Why is that? Partly it is because we promote and had promoted and have promoted in the United States athletics and sports and speech and debate. Team concepts. Teamwork. And we also, for some years, promoted the arts and taught these kids at a young age how to be creative and how to learn how to draw and paint and dance and sing and just to be creative and think outside the box. Those are the two advantages we have.
So I came back to the United States after 2 weeks and all you hear is pay to play. If you want to play sports in high school in Ohio: Pay to play. Some kids it may cost $500. Two kids, maybe we will give you a break, $750. Average families don't have that. But these kids are not going to develop the kinds of skills they need to be competitive in a world economy. Period, dot.
Are we okay with that? Is that something we believe in? Do we believe it is okay if kids have to pay an extra $500 or $1,000 to play sports when we know it gives us a competitive advantage in the marketplace? Are we okay with that, America? I am not okay with that. I think it stinks. And then you come back and what is the first thing that gets cuts in the school districts? The art programs. First to go.
I had a woman last night from Liberty High School talk to me about how they had cut art programs for their kids in the grade schools because of budget constraints. We are cutting off our noses to spite our faces. We have to make these investments.
And then I come to Washington, DC, and we have a lot of tourists here, now is the tourist season in June and July, we get a lot of students down here, and what are we talking about? We are talking about gay marriage. Wait a minute, Mr. Speaker. We have got college tuition up 40 percent, gas prices up 40 percent, health care costs up 55 percent, and we are talking about gay marriage? Give me a break. Who are they bothering?
People don't come up to me at the Giant Eagle in Niles when I go down to get a pound of coffee and some honey, Mr. Delahunt, because I like to put honey in my coffee to sweeten it, because my Aunt Rosie taught me to put the honey in. It is good. It prevents colds. Nobody grabs me and says, can you please stop the gay people from getting married up in Massachusetts? They are killing me. No one has ever said that to me, and I am from a conservative district in Ohio.
People want to know what you're going to do about gas prices. What are you going to do about college tuition costs? What are you going to do about health care costs, Mr. Delahunt? These are the real issues in our country.
I yield to my friend.
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Mr. RYAN of Ohio. I appreciate that. We know the economy sometimes weeds out industries and new ones pop up. That happens. That is capitalism. We understand.
But where is the plan? Where is the plan to figure out what are we going to do next? What is the next best thing? What are these Maytag workers going to do? They cannot all work at Wal-Mart or Sam's Club or Super K or Lowe's or Best Buy, or all of the different white elephants that line the suburbs of America.
Are we going to invest in research and development? Are we going to invest in the business incubators? Are we going to lower the cost of college tuition? Are we going to make sure that we invest in the health care industries with nurses and health care workers? What are we going to do? There is no plan for the country.
I believe we need a plan. I just think the values that are here that we are hearing here in the United States Congress certainly do not reflect the average values. I think the Democrats' priorities are America's priorities.
And that is the key here. When you look at this, briefly, as we are talking about Maytag, this is where the United States is borrowing its money. $682 billion from Japan. China, $249 billion, U.K., Caribbean, Taiwan, OPEC, Korea, Germany, Canada. We are borrowing all this money and giving it to the wealthiest 1 percent, 1.9. Let's see here, $1.9 trillion over 10 years of tax cuts that we are borrowing. So we borrow from them and we give it the wealthiest in our country. And education costs go up, health care costs go up, energy costs go up. I yield to my friend.
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Mr. RYAN of Ohio. We owe, every year, in interest, this is the 2007 budget authorization, billions of dollars. The big red thing, what are we spending all our money on, $230 billion is interest on the debt. All this money we are borrowing, it is like your house or your car. You buy a $20,000 car. Over time you pay $25,000 for it because you have got to pay the interest. It is sucking money from education, homeland security, veterans benefits, research and development, business incubators, community development block grants, all the things that we put in the communities to help communities make local decisions so that they can grow their local economy. We are sucking it out and we are giving it to China. China is taking the interest that we give them, and they are investing it back into their state-owned manufacturing companies that are stealing the manufacturing jobs. That is the cycle of the money over and over and over and again.
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Mr. RYAN of Ohio. And it is a total lack of leadership. If you look, this is quite significant. In the first 224 years of the country, we borrowed $1.101 trillion from foreign interests. In the last 4 or 5 years, we have borrowed more than that. $1.05 trillion under President Bush and the Republican Congress. Look at this. They have managed to accomplish more in the last 4 or 5 years than all previous Presidents combined. And at the same time, as we are borrowing this money and we are paying it back in interest to China, taking more of our money from our budget here to pay the interest, I find it peculiar that in 2004, 8 percent of graduating seniors carried student loans of more than $40,000. That is up from 1.3 percent 10 years prior to. More kids are incurring more debt to go to college at a time when the economy has totally shifted from industry to knowledge based capitalism, knowledge based economy.
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Mr. RYAN of Ohio. All the more reason, there are not many options here. The Democrats want to take this country in a new direction. We want to stop all the borrowing, we want to stop all the tax cuts for people who make $300 million a year, 200 million, 1 million, 2 million, 5 million, 10, stop. Balance our budgets. Implement the PAYGO rules so that we could make sure we are not spending any money that we don't have. And we don't have to borrow it from China and take the country in a new direction. Invest in education, invest into the dams here in the United States. Find the $9 billion that got lost somewhere in Iraq and nobody seems to know where it is.
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Mr. RYAN of Ohio. I do not exactly know what specific issues he is talking about, but I am sure he is talking about the $9 billion lost in Iraq. I am sure he is talking about the foreign borrowing, I hope, and find a way to fix it.
This is Pat Toomey. I am sure both of you served a lot longer with him than I did. He is now President of the Club for Growth. ``There's a very high level of frustration,'' says Mr. Toomey, ``and disappointment among rank and file Republicans when they see a government-controlled Congress engaging in an obscene level of wasteful spending.''
``Obscene level of wasteful spending.'' Here is a man who recognizes the fact that paying $230 billion a year in interest payments to foreign countries primarily is not a good investment for the United States of America. And these are the kinds of things that need to change. And these are conservative Republicans.
And all we are saying as Democrats is let us take the country in a new direction because I think our values as Democrats better reflect what the priorities are in America.
And it hit me a couple of weeks ago when we were home for a week and got to spend a long week with our constituents that there is a real disconnect between what the American people want and what is happening down here and the misplaced priorities that I think we see every day here in the United States Congress. And I know my friend from Massachusetts would like to interject here, but just finally to say that it is those investments that we want to make in college education and some of the others that I feel we need to do and do rather immediately.
I yield to my friend.
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Mr. RYAN of Ohio. I agree with the gentleman.
There is nowhere to run, nowhere to hide. And when you have Speaker Gingrich saying the same thing that BILL DELAHUNT from Massachusetts is saying or those of us from Ohio are saying, it must be a consistent theme. And I do not think Republicans are bad people. I just think their priorities are misplaced when you look at what is happening time and time and time again, and it is the same in Ohio. A Republican general assembly, every statewide holder is a Republican, and these kinds of problems have been exacerbated by the local policies at the State level.
And the real issue here is in cities like Toledo, Ohio; or Youngstown, Ohio; or Warren, Ohio; or Niles, Ohio; or Boston, Massachusetts is that there is, as Mr. Delahunt said, an underclass forming. And 70 to 80 percent of the kids who go to Youngstown city schools in in my district live in poverty. Cleveland is now the poorest city in the country.
There is something wrong with the system when we allow that to happen. I do not believe that we cannot figure out how to do something about this. And when you cut community development block grants and you cut Head Start and you make college more expensive, those are not the priorities of the country. And here is why. I just want to make one point. This is not a moral argument. It can be and it is. But I want to make an economic argument to this. How are we going to compete with 1.3 billion Chinese citizens when we only have 300 million and we have a good number of our people living in poverty? They are not even on the field playing for us. We need them on the field. We need engineers, we need scientists, we need teachers, and nurses and doctors in our inner city schools, in our rural communities to help move the country forward and make those investments like the Tennessee Valley Authority, like the G.I. bill. Let us make those investments again, and we will see what will happen to the country.
I yield to my friend.
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Mr. RYAN of Ohio. As we wrap up, there is a lot of rhetoric, but you have just got to look at the facts. President Bush says America's economy is strong and benefiting all Americans. Ask yourself, regardless of the rhetoric, what the reality is. College tuition, up 40 percent. Gas prices, up 47 percent. Health care costs, up 55 percent. Median household incomes, down 4 percent. Don't listen to us. Don't listen to Newt Gingrich. Don't listen to the other side. Judge for yourself. Is this the kind of America you believe in? If so, continue to put the Republicans in charge of the government. Quite frankly, I believe as much as we like them, they are unable to govern. Katrina, the war, all of these statistics, unable to govern.
Let's take the country in another direction and really embody the freedom that this country is supposed to have. Www.housedemocrats.gov/30something, if any of you would like to email later.
Www.housedemocrats.gov/30something. Dana from Pittsburgh and Amanda from Connecticut emailed us last time. Both emailed saying, Congress needs to talk about the priorities of college costs and gas prices and get on the stick.
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http://thomas.loc.gov