Iraq and the Economy

IRAQ AND THE ECONOMY -- (House of Representatives - April 16, 2008)

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Mr. HALL of New York. Madam Speaker, it is good to be here with Mr. Klein and Congressman Braley.

Before I talk about Iraq, I have to respond to a couple of things that were said a few minutes ago by our friends from the other side of the aisle who used the word ``truth'' frequently and talked about their children and grandchildren. And I am sure they are sincere, but to those of you Americans out there listening, I am sure you can remember that when President Bush took over with Republicans controlling both Houses of Congress in the year 2001, he had a surplus delivered to him by the Clinton administration.

In the years since then, these folks you just heard talking, who profess to know what is best for our economy, have delivered to the United States, from a surplus when we were paying down the national debt, now the biggest deficit in the history of our country, the biggest balance of trade deficit, the biggest individual debt by Americans that is held, whether it is credit card debt or home second mortgage debt, and now we have the housing crisis, the subprime crisis, and various big box stores I was reading today are getting ready to file for or have already filed for bankruptcy, including some that we have seen proliferating around the country and have assumed that they were on solid ground.

So I would take all the proclamations you just heard and the fancy charts that you just saw from the Republican hour before us with a grain of salt.

The tax increase that they claim we are voting for is actually something that they, when they installed their tax cuts early in the Bush years, they installed it by putting in a sunset provision that is their creation, not ours. So I stand here and say that we have not in fact voted for anything like this biggest tax increase in history. It is a theatrical and dramatic presentation, well acted, and possibly even believed by them, but it is not the truth.

As far as Iraq goes, we are spending $12 billion a week in Iraq, and I have started to look at the needs of our country and my district in particular in terms of how that money could be used here because we are basically running on fumes financially. I just visited 13 bridges that are on the dangerous faulty bridge list that came out after the I-35 bridge collapse in Minnesota, and the estimate of the New York State Department of Transportation is that it will cost about $60 billion to fix all of the deficient bridges in the State of New York. That is 5 months in Iraq.

I just came back 2 weeks ago from visiting a Nogales, Arizona, checkpoint on the Mexican border. Congressman Braley was on that trip, along with Congressman Arcuri. And we asked at every step of the way the Customs and Border protection officials what they need from Congress and what would their wish list be.

They said basically if it was Christmas and they could have everything that they wanted in terms of infrastructure, primarily what they need is more loading docks to unload the bales of marijuana that are stacked in front of an 18-wheeler behind a load of watermelons, or more bandwidth for more computers so they can get 10 fingerprints processed faster to establish somebody's identity. All of it, northern border, southern border, all ports on both coasts, $500 million a year for 10 years. That is $5 billion.

That's a little bit less than 2 weeks in Iraq to secure both of our borders and all of our ports. That sounds to me like it would actually make our country more secure; not that we want to shut the borders down, but we'd like to know who's coming and who's going, what's coming in and what's going out in terms of drugs, in terms of agricultural products that might be infested, in terms of currency smuggling. So anyway, there's a real cost to all these things.

And I would just say, after hearing General Petraeus and Ambassador Crocker for the second time, it's clear that the goals in Iraq that we're spending this $12 billion a month on have been changing, that the goal posts have been moving, that 5 years after the initiation of this war and the death of 4,017 of our mothers, fathers, sons and daughters, brothers and sisters, I have a figure of 29,676 wounded, the estimate before the VA, Veterans Affairs Committee, last summer was that if the war stopped at that point we'd be looking at $1 trillion for the lifetime care of grievously wounded soldiers returning from Iraq. That's four injuries primarily, traumatic brain injury, PTSD, spinal cord injuries that cause paralysis, and amputations.

And these are, fortunately, men and women who we're able to save today in the battlefield because our battlefield medicine is so much better than it was in Vietnam, for instance. The ratio is about 16:1 wounded to killed where in Vietnam it was about 2 1/2 :1. That's the good news is that we're saving more of these mostly young lives of brave Americans who've gone over there and fought and carried out their mission.

But the bad news is that the American public has not been told yet that, on top of the figures you mentioned, there's at least $1 trillion lifetime care for the wounded from this war that we're already looking at being responsible for. And we have to take care of these wounded warriors. You can't pay for the war and forget about the warriors.

So I would just say that we need to look at this in terms of a broad view of national security and a realistic, clear-eyed view of where we are financially and whether we can afford it.

And with that, I yield back to Mr. Klein.

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