The State Of The Economy

Floor Speech

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Mr. SCALISE. I want to thank my friend and colleague from Missouri for leading this hour. And I know we've continued to have this conversation and talked about this months ago, back when the original bill came through to do the stimulus package and, you know, President Obama said that he's got to spend more money to get the economy back on track. And I know you're getting ready to talk about Henry Morgenthau, who was Treasury Secretary under Franklin Roosevelt. And he warned back then that spending and spending money and acquiring more debt doesn't get the economy back on track when you're growing the size of government. And it didn't work then and it's not working now.

But of course now we've got this bailout bill, this permanent bailout bill by Chairman BARNEY FRANK, who, as you pointed out, was defending Fannie and Freddie when they helped create this mess, and Chris Dodd. And they've got this bill that creates a permanent bailout fund.

And then it also taxes a lot of our banks who didn't have anything to do with creating this problem in the first place. And, in fact, this bill not only will create this permanent bailout fund and will enshrine this whole concept of too big to fail, but it's going to hurt our local banks, the folks that actually played by the rules, that didn't do anything wrong. And now they're going to be at a disadvantage. It's going to be harder for them to give loans to our small businesses and middle class families who are trying to get by, because now they're going to actually create a two-tiered system that favors those big Wall Street fat cats that helped create this problem that are now permanently too big to fail and get a permanent bailout fund at the expense of our local banks who didn't do anything wrong and played by the rules. And so it's really frustrating when you see this bill moving through.

And they're trying to call it a reform. Really, all it does is it lets the SEC off the hook for their failures to actually do their jobs as regulators when they let Bernie Madoff off, and they had a Ponzi scheme similarly in south Louisiana by this guy called Stanford. Once again, a report just came out the other day that the SEC knew about this back in the 1990s and did nothing. And the SEC's been derelict in their responsibility so they're going to try to go create some new Federal agency to do the job that the SEC was supposed to do but didn't do. What we ought to do is hold those folks accountable, like the folks at SEC and the folks that propped up Fannie and Freddie that created this mess, instead of trying to blame somebody else and punishing our local banks who didn't do anything wrong, and now making it harder for them to give loans to our small businesses and middle class families.

Mr. AKIN. Congressman, as I hear you speak, I'm just reminded that I probably didn't do you justice to introducing you, because, to some degree, you're an economic wizard because you stood here on the floor a year ago, just before we were going to pass this cap-and-tax bill, and actually, I guess I'm thinking about the--I called it the porkulus bill. Some people called it the stimulus bill. And you told, on this floor, and this is nationally recorded for anybody who wants to look at it, you said that stimulus bill is not going to work.

Now, the Democrats were saying, if you don't pass the stimulus bill, you're going to have more than 8 percent unemployment, so you guys better pass the stimulus bill. And you stood here on this floor, I remember you doing it, saying, it won't work.

Well, now, a year and a couple of months later, you're a regular economic genius because you saw that it wasn't going to work. You understood the principle of why it wouldn't work. They went ahead on a one-party rule, without any Republican support, passed a bill that we knew wouldn't work, and now it hasn't worked. And now we've got over 10 percent unemployment. And they said, if you don't pass a bill, you'll have 8. I wish we had just stuck with 8, I suppose.

But $700 billion of supposed stimulus. Now, we do have the Chief of Staff for the President, a former Member of the House, who said that every time one of these economic crises come along, you've got to milk it for everything you can get. And so they loaded into this $700 billion bill all kinds of expansions of welfare and all kinds of government programs and hiring a bunch of people by the Federal Government. And of course it wasn't going to work.

You didn't have to be really an economic genius, although you are. All you really had to do was to read a little bit of history.

Mr. SCALISE. And if my friend would yield.

Mr. AKIN. I do yield.

Mr. SCALISE. You're too generous in your praise. I don't think it's much of being an economic whiz as it is being a student of history. And as you were saying, we've studied history. And you don't need to figure out and reinvent the wheel here.

Our country has cyclically gone through good times and bad. You know, sometimes we're up, sometimes we're down. A typical recession lasts about 18 months, and our country was in a recession, and it was starting to taper off. And we were in the sevens, 7 1/2 percent unemployment, which was too high. But the President was saying, you've got to pass that $787 billion stimulus bill or else unemployment might go over 8 percent. Basically, they said unemployment won't go over 8 percent if you pass the bill. And of course we knew that wouldn't work because, as history shows us, it's never worked before. It's only created even more problems. And sure enough, just like history's always shown, and just as we predicted over a year ago, when they spent all of that money growing the size of the Federal Government, not creating jobs in the private sector, it actually created more problems to the point where unemployment is now hovering over 10 percent.

Mr. AKIN. What amazes me, Congressman, is if you looked out at the average guy in America that runs a family, okay, there's all these families all over the place, all over America. How many of them would be dumb enough to think when they're in hard economic times that what they're going to do is they're going to increase their level of spending. They're going to go out and spend a whole lot of money in order to make the fact they're in hard economic times better. You know, I don't think there are that many dumb people in this country that really believe something like that.

And yet somehow or other a majority of legislators in the Federal Government fell for that scam. I think a lot of times people fall for something because they want to, not because it makes any logical or rational sense.

But these weren't the only legislators that have been sucked in. You know, you go back to the days of FDR. There was a recession going, and he managed to come up with just the right policies to turn it into the Great Depression because he wasn't any genius on economic matters. And so at the end of 8 years of the Federal Government spending money like mad, his Secretary of the Treasury, Morgenthau comes back to the House here, to the Ways and Means Committee, and he makes a statement. We've tried spending money. I guess we've heard this before. We're spending more than we've ever spent. They spent nothing compared to what we're spending 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.

Now, this obviously proves that we learned nothing from history. Certainly the Democrats learned nothing from history because that is exactly what we just did a year ago. We spent $787 billion. It wasn't even good old Keynesian stuff. It wasn't hydroplants. It wasn't building big ships for the Navy, putting people back to work with the government getting manufacturing jobs on the street. No. It's all this more food stamps, welfare checks, bailouts for States that hadn't managed their budgets responsibly. So here we go.

So you said, gentlemen, this isn't going to work. You knew because Morgenthau told us. The Democrat that worked for FDR told us it wouldn't work. And we tried it again, and it still didn't work. That is how we got started.

Then after that, of course, we introduced some other factors in the economy which, just like FDR, we're going to take a bad situation and make it worse. I love these cartoons.

Now give me one good reason why you're not hiring. We see the President here talking to some guy who owns the china shop and he's got a couple bulls coming in the door. Health care reform, cap-and-tax, and then the war tax. So we've got all of these taxes, and these bulls are coming in, and this guy is a little concerned about hiring these bulls to help his china shop.

So, anyway, here we go. We're starting to get into the first part of last year. We're seeing unemployment going up. We're seeing the solution is government spending, and things have not gotten a whole lot better.

I yield to my friend.

Mr. SCALISE. The frustrating thing about all of this, and of course there's a saying that if you don't learn from history, then you're doomed to repeat it. And it seems like we're repeating history now. But what's frustrating is, really, starting back in January of last year, over a year ago, what the American people said, what many of us here in Congress said back then was we need to be focusing on creating jobs and getting the economy back on track. And, in fact, there are tried-and-true ways of doing that that have been proven every time they've been tried. And one sure proven way of getting the economy going again is cutting taxes.

Mr. AKIN. Wait a minute. You just cussed on the floor of the House. I didn't think you were allowed to say that. Horrible world. Cutting taxes. Oh, no. You're going to get accused of a hate crime, gentleman, if you keep that up.

Mr. SCALISE. I know President Obama and Speaker Pelosi and her liberal lieutenants don't like the concept of cutting taxes. And, in fact, they have got a lot myths going around out there that cutting taxes are what created this problem instead of what we know created the problem, and that is like groups like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac giving loans to people who had no ability to pay.

But cutting taxes, if you go back in history, and you can go back to John F. Kennedy. You can go back to Ronald Reagan. When they cut taxes, Federal revenues grew because the economy got going again. People were spending money much wiser than government spends money, but they were spending money to create jobs. And jobs were being created, and the economy got going again because taxes were cut. And those tax cuts yielded in more revenues coming in to the government.

Mr. AKIN. I would like to slow you down just a minute because you are smart in this stuff, and what you're saying is historically accurate. But I would like to take that apart, slow it down just a little bit so people can see the logic of why this works the way it does. Because what we know from Henry Morgenthau--if nothing else, the Democrats should be able to learn from Democrats, but they're not. They refuse to, and the reason they refuse to is because they don't like the answer that Morgenthau said, which is they can spend money like it's going out of style.

Now, what Democrat could you learn from? You just mentioned his name. It was JFK. He understood enough about economics to know that if you back off the taxes, you can actually get the economy going. Well, how does that work? Well, when you back off the taxes, it leaves more money out there for small businesses to hire people. And if small businesses have more money to invest, they invest in a new wing on a building and a new machine tool and they invest in their own business, and those people then, as they invest, create jobs.

So what you've said is this isn't rocket science. This is something that JFK understood. Ronald Reagan did the same thing. He cut taxes, and the economy grew. And Bush did the same thing. But here's sort of a weird thing. They call that supply-side economy. Democrats call it trickle-down economics. Whatever you want to call it, it works.

But the thing that strikes me is that logically, how is it, because it seems like you're making water run uphill. What you're saying is that the Federal Government is going to lower their tax rate, and yet they're going to get more money back. That seems counterintuitive. So I'm thinking about it like Congressman Scalise.

Let's say you're king for the day and the only thing you can tax is a loaf of bread. So you're thinking in your mind, How much tax am I going to put on one loaf of bread? You're thinking, If I put a penny on it, nobody's going to notice, and I can collect a penny on all of these loaves of bread. Then you think, Hey, how about if I put 5 bucks tax on the loaf of bread? Then I'd really get a lot of money every time somebody buys a loaf of bread. But then you'd think, But maybe people wouldn't buy as much bread if you've got to pay 5 bucks just to try to get the bread.

And so you're going back and forth in your mind, and pretty soon you say, commonsense says there is some optimum tax on that loaf of bread where you can get the most possible money. If you go too high, you get less revenue for the government. If you go too low, you left money on the table. So there's some sort of an optimum point.

And I think that's what Ronald Reagan and the other Presidents understood, that when you tax the economy too much, it basically drives it into the ground, which is exactly what's going on here. And so what you're saying about the fact that we drop taxes and that helps get the economy going, that's the logic of it. You actually drop the taxes and you get more money into the government. So the result was we dropped taxes, and what we saw was the government got a whole lot more money, and we started to pay off the debt.

And so I thought it would be good to take that apart and explain the logic of it, because what you're saying historically is right, but it seems odd that the government drops taxes and they get more money back.

Mr. SCALISE. If the gentleman would yield?

Mr. AKIN. I do yield.

Mr. SCALISE. History can teach us good lessons and bad lessons. There have been good things that have happened through our history and bad things. And clearly during the depression, that was a bad time in our Nation, but there were telltale signs and things that government did that made things worse that we should be learning from and, unfortunately, the folks running Congress right now haven't learned from.

But there's also good things that have happened over the years, just as when President Reagan cut taxes and you just saw this robust economy take off for over 20 years and job creation that no one's ever seen in the world. And yet that is another part of history that's not being followed that we ought to follow. And Congress, over its time, has spent more money than it's taken in, too, and that's another lessen to learn.

But I think what's so frustrating to people across the country, they want us to be focusing on creating jobs and getting the economy back on track, and that's something that I want us to focus on, too, but what they've seen is just the opposite--policies like this health care bill that's going to run jobs out and these other policies that you talked about.

And now this permanent bank bailout fund that's moving through Congress, it's a top priority of the President, and the American people are saying, once again, Enough already. We don't want any more bailouts. We didn't want the first one. We voted against that first bailout because we knew it would fail, and it failed. And so here the President is again not learning from history but repeating the mistakes of history by trying to create this permanent bailout fund establishing more of this concept of ``too big to fail.''

Mr. AKIN. That permanent bailout concept, isn't that a dangerous kind of thing? Because what we've seen is more and more of the government wanting to get into all of these different businesses, and that certainly is a scary kind of thing. And the other thing we're seeing a whole lot of, which is making people tremendously frustrated and angry, is seeing one thing being said and opposite things being done.

The true engine of job creation in this country will always be America's businesses, but government can create the conditions necessary for businesses to expand and hire new workers. This statement is completely true. Unlike a lot of statements that are made, this statement is completely true. The true engine for job creation in this country will always be America's businesses.

Let's put a little bit sharper point on it. What businesses? Well, 80 percent of the jobs in America come from what are small businesses or businesses with 500 or fewer employees. So the businesses with 500 or fewer employees in America hire 80 percent of the employees in America.

Now, the true engine of job creation in this country will always be, in America, as we say, smaller businesses, but government can create the conditions necessary for business to expand and hire new workers. That's absolutely true. The government cannot create a job no matter what it does, but it can create conditions which allow the small businesses to prosper and hire a lot of people. So this statement is entirely true. The President is right in this. The conditions can be created.

Well, what are those conditions? Well, let's take a look at it. Does it mean $2 trillion in tax increases over 10 years? No, it sure doesn't. What happens when the government takes a whole lot of tax money out of the economy? It's taking it out of the pockets of the people who own the small businesses. Guess what tax category the people who are running those small businesses, guess what tax category they're in? They're in the exact bracket that President Obama said he wants to take tax from, people making over $250,000.

People say, My goodness. If somebody's making $250,000, they ought to pay a little more taxes. Fine. Keep taxing them. What happens? If you keep taxing these guys, they won't invest in their businesses. If they don't invest in their businesses, where are the jobs going to come from? You can't have it both ways.

And yet it seems that the administration wants to talk, saying that we've got to create the right conditions, and they're doing precisely the things that destroy jobs in America, worst of which is excessive taxation on the people that own the small businesses. So that's certainly the wrong thing to do. It's creating the exact wrong conditions. It is driving unemployment, making it even worse, which is what FDR did to take a recession and magically turn it into the Great Depression.

One of the pieces of legislation that the President in his last State of the Union urged Members of Congress to support, the job-killing cap-and-tax legislation. What's this? Well, this is a tax on energy. Well, wasn't there a promise that said, unless you make $250,000, we're not going to raise taxes? Yeah, unless you flip a light switch, and then you're going to get taxed because he is pushing a tax on energy. Everything uses energy, particularly small businesses.

So if you put this cap-and-tax bill into place, you're doing another thing that makes it harder for creating jobs. That's why this cartoon has got a lot of truth when it says that you've got this health care and the cap-and-tax. These are things that are destructive to jobs.

New taxes on employers who don't offer a government health insurance plan. Of course, the new socialized medicine bill is going to be brutal in terms of creating unemployment, because what are you doing? You're, first of all, trying to balance the cost of giving everybody Cadillac health care, and you're going to try to balance that on the back of small business owners. What are they going to do? They're going to say, Hey, I don't want any more employees than I could possibly have because I've got to buy health insurance for all of them, and it's terribly expensive. So I'm going to work my employees as many hours as I can just to make sure I don't have a single employee more than I need. So you're creating a tremendous economic pressure to get rid of jobs by passing this socialized medicine bill.

So let's take a look standing back a little further.

What is it, what are the things that are killing jobs? Because obviously something is killing jobs in America. What are the different factors that are killing jobs?

Well, here is a whole list of them. If you want to kill jobs, this is the thing to do, and this is just what the administration has been doing for a year and a half. This isn't rocket science. This is very common sense. It's about as common sense as a lemonade stand.

The first thing is economic uncertainty. If you're a small business man and you don't have a clue what the government is going to do to you next, what do you do? In Missouri, we call it hunkering down. You don't make decisions. You don't hire people. You don't buy expensive new machine tools. You hunker down when there is economic uncertainty.

So that's first of all when you have things out there such as cap-and-tax, which is going to tax energy.

You've got a new socialized medicine bill that nobody understands how it's going to be implemented. But we know it has been loaded with taxes. They have even got wheelchair taxes. I don't know what poor mind thought of the idea of taxing wheelchairs, but it seems kind of perverse to me. Maybe that should be a hate crime, too. I don't know.

Economic uncertainty. This is a job killer. You want a steady economic climate if you want to keep jobs running forward.

Consumption reduction. That's just talking about the economy slowing down. When you have the economy slowing down, it hurts everybody. Just as a rising tide floats boats, a tide that's going down, you end up sitting on the rocks. So the poor economy also is a job killer.

Excessive taxation is probably, probably the biggest factor which is going to kill jobs, and that's why it is that the Democrats should have learned from JFK. I don't expect them to learn anything from Ronald Reagan, but they could learn from JFK. They did the same thing Reagan did, and that is cut taxes so that the businessman has money to invest and create jobs. But instead what we have been doing is tax after tax after tax, all these new taxes. What's that do to the guy that owns the business?

Well, to start with, he doesn't hire anybody. To start with, he reduces any kind of expansion to his business. But after a while, just like your body, if you keep cutting off your food pretty soon you start to get skinnier and skinnier and eventually guess what happens to that little business, it goes out of business and now there is no longer a little engine there to create jobs because that business is gone.

And that's what FDR did, he drove the taxes so hard that the businesses started to shut down from excessive taxation. In a temporary sense, the business just doesn't hire. In a longer-term siege, what happens is the business goes bankrupt, and now there is no one there to start to create the jobs in the first place. Excessive taxation is deadly as a job killer.

Insufficient liquidity is another problem that seems a little complicated but it makes a lot of sense. If you own a small business, one of the things that you have to have is liquidity. That is you have to have some money to be able to borrow to get going on different projects.

There is a company in my district out in the St. Louis area called Innoventer. Innoventer is obviously an idea coming from inventions. They are inventive sorts of people, and one of their latest inventions is something that people that live in the Midwest would be tickled to know there is a use for, and that is pig manure. When you get out in the country, and you smell something that smells a little funny, you know you are near a hog farm.

And pig manure is not one of those things that people will go out of their way to try to obtain, it's considered something of very low value and something you would just as soon not smell. Well, Innoventer has come up with a way of taking pig manure and putting it into essentially what is a glorified pressure cooker, they put it at pressure and under a certain temperature. And they break that pig manure into sort of like the oil that is pumped out of the ground, sort of a primordial kind of goo which they have found they can then use to make asphalt with.

So what do you need in order to make this little business go? This is not as pretty as making lemonade, but you are going to create these furnaces, electric furnaces with pressure and these containers and eventually it makes this stuff which you then can turn into asphalt. And we have a section of road in the St. Louis area paved with this asphalt made from, you got it, pig manure.

But you have got to have some money to build the equipment to do this. Well, where do you get the money from? Well, you get loans from banks, okay. So a lot of small businessmen, they will take a 3- or a 6-year loan, and they have to pay a pretty good interest rate for it because small businesses can make a mistake and go bankrupt.

And so they get a loan from the banks, and the local banks underwrite the small businesses and, as they convert pig manure to asphalt, you will see people getting hired.

The trouble, though, is this: You have got to have liquidity. And so what has the administration done in order to make it so banks have liquidity? Well, they started one way with the crack cocaine in the Federal system, that is they released tons of money into this, they used to call it printing money. So at the high level in the big banks there is lots and lots of easy money that's created by the Federal Government.

Usually that creates bubbles and then they blow up, but now what's happened is that easy money is not coming down through the arteries to the small businesses because the banking regulators are so tough with small business, the small banks are afraid to loan any money. And so now you have got guys that have imagination that would be creating jobs because there is insufficient liquidity. Now they are being choked out.

Now this particular innovator has found maybe a way around it to get some money, but a lot of problems are in this liquidity are. What's the biggest culprit? Probably excessive taxation. Second biggest may be this liquidity, certainly the economic uncertainty. All of these things are factoring into that 10 percent unemployment.

Excessive government spending is a job killer, but it does it sort of slowly and it does it on a rebound. It's not a direct effect.

What happens is when the government spends too much money, then the problem is there isn't the liquidity in the economy and so the money is not invested in the businesses, therefore they don't create jobs. So that's how that works.

And then, of course, excessive government mandates and red tape. Obviously if you are a small business person, and you have got to fill out pages and pages and reams of red tape, which small businessmen have to do in America, that takes away from your efficiency. If you are a great big company, you have got a couple of bureaucrats and, boy, they are experts at every red tape that comes along. You can get some efficiency in a big company dealing with red tape. But for small businesses, red tape is a real, real job killer. And so that's who the thing that we don't want.

So, now, if you take a look at the logic of where jobs come from and what you don't want to be doing, and you take a look at what we are doing, you are saying hey, Congressman Akin, you are creating a perfect storm. About everything that creates unemployment, you are doing it all. And we have a statement from the President saying, hey, I understand. He says, I understand that the government, the government can create the conditions necessary for business to expand and hire new workers.

He understands that principle, and yet we are doing everything wrong. Everything he has told us to do is going to affect the jobs.

And so what are some of these little treasures? Well, first of all, this health care reform that we just passed, boy, is this a humdinger. I have been here 10 years--I hate to admit how old I am--I have been here 10 years, and I have seen some lousy bills in my day. But this health care, this socialized medicine that we just passed is two or three times worse than any other bill I have ever seen.

This is going to have terrible consequences for unemployment and for just hammering small businesses, and it's going to create not only that, of course, it will create lousy health care, it will probably bust the Federal budget. But I am mostly on the subject of what are we doing about jobs?

And this thing here is a job killer. This is a real job killer. You have got basically, just like we are talking about with Congressman Scalise, what we are doing is the Federal Government wants to take everything over. This is taking over a sixth of the economy. The government just going to take over health care. It's not a matter of fixing something broken in health care, it's a matter of scrapping it and having the government take it over, not instantly, but over time.

The cap-and-trade, they call it cap-and-trade, it's really cap-and-tax. This is that energy tax that the House passed, people were so mad about it. That was the one where they had 300 pages of amendments passed at 3 o'clock in the morning, and the bill was here from the floor and there wasn't even a copy of the bill when they passed the thing, the House passed it. And people got so mad that the Senate refused to take it up.

But this is a big tax, of course, and, of course, that's not a good thing for small businesses. You have got other miscellaneous taxes coming, many of them associated with this health care reform. That's where some of those taxes are coming from.

So we are doing, we are really doing all the wrong things, and it shouldn't surprise us that we are getting problems with unemployment. Obviously, there are other problems that are going on, too, pretty serious ones, and I would just like to talk a little bit about some of these other taxes.

These are tax increases, tax increases. This is really fine print, isn't it? Look, there are 16 of them on this sheet. If Congress takes no action, these are the tax increases we are taking a look at in 2010. And so what happens when you increase taxes? Businessmen don't have the money to invest in companies, and you pull the economy down. Is that all we have got?

Oh, no, you have got to remember we have got 2011 coming. These are tax increases, if Congress takes no action in 2011.

Look at that, we have got another bunch of these. The marginal income tax rates will increase as follows. These are not small things, these are big deals. The 35 percent bracket will increase to 39.6. The 33 percent bracket will increase to 36 percent. The 10 percent bracket will increase to 15, and the 25 is going to go to 28. So, first of all, all the marginal tax increases on everybody's income taxes are going to go up if the Congress doesn't take any action. This is 2011. This is 2010 down here. Look at all these taxes.

Now, we are having a tax party, aren't we, and it's going to give a tax to our economy. Dividends will no longer be taxed at the capital gains rate for individuals, thereby increasing the double taxation and dividends as much as 164 percent.

Guess what kind of people have these dividends and have money invested in these things? People who own small businesses, of course.

So you are going to tax those people. Guess what's going to happen? They are not going to expand the business, you got it.

The personal capital gains tax will increase to 20 percent and 10 percent from 15 and 5, and the child tax will decrease, so the standard deduction for couples, all of these things, there will be more and more tax increases. Is that it? Oh, no. No, there are more tax increases too. In 2012, the adoption of a tax credit will decrease from 13 to 5,000. The credit for electric drive motorcycles, plug-in electric vehicles will expire, all these things, tax increases.

And so is this the right direction? No, of course it's not the right direction. What we are doing is we are doing precisely what you would do if you are trying to crash the economy.

Now, let's talk a little bit, I don't have charts on this, I want to talk a little bit about what's happening on the spending side. Is it because there are just so many demands on the Federal Government that we just have to keep spending money on all these things? Is it the Federal Government is just getting so expensive?

Well, let's take a look. If you go back to President Bush, he was criticized for spending and the Republicans that were with him, myself included, were criticized for spending too much money. And you know what, that criticism was just. We spent too much money. And 2008 was the worst year in terms of Bush spending too much money; he had a deficit that year of about $450 billion. That's too much deficit.

As you take a look at that, you say, by golly, I don't know how much $450 billion is, that's a little bit outside of my normal family budget.

Well, one way to look at it is as a percent of our overall gross domestic product, the GDP. That's 3.1 percent, which is about common for a lot of Presidents in various years to have a deficit at about 3 percent or so, that's not uncommon. And that was his worst year in 2008 under a Pelosi Congress. So the Democrats were running this institution, you had President Bush in the White House, worst deficit, $350 billion.

Well, what happened in 2009? That deficit, under President Obama, went from 450, went up to 1.4 trillion, that is more than three times Bush's worst deficit spending in 2009.

So how does that relate to gross domestic product? Well, instead of 3.1 percent, it jumps all the way to 99.9 percent of gross domestic product. That's the highest level of deficit since World War II, and that was 2010.

What do you think 2011 is going to be like? Well, you have got it right, 2011 is worse. It takes it over 10 percent of GDP and so we are spending tons of money, that's part of the reason for these tax increases, but the tax increases aren't beginning to be able to keep up with our high level of Federal spending.

And so what you got to the point now is when the Federal Government spends a dollar, 41 cents of that dollar that they are spending is borrowed money, it's not the Federal dollar. So they spend a dollar, but 41 percent of it is borrowed. What would happen, what would happen if the American family ran its budget that way, that you could go out and spend $1.40 but you didn't really have a dollar, you really only had, you know, 59 cents.

I mean, I just can't imagine us putting ourselves into that kind of a situation. So a whole lot of Americans, not necessarily just Republicans, there's a whole lot of Americans saying this has got to stop, this is not the way to run a company.

Yes, the President said something truthful here. He said something truthful. He said the true engine of job creation in this country will be Americans' businesses, but government can create the conditions necessary for business to expand and hire workers.

What he forgot to add was governments can also create the conditions to put people in the poorhouse, drive every job out of this country, and put America's finances in a horrible mess.

We can also do that. That's what we are doing, and it's time for people to start pulling the alarm button and saying enough of this stuff.

I am joined by my good friend from Texas, Congressman Gohmert, and I hope you will rescue me because I'm starting to get a little hot under the collar.

Mr. GOHMERT. I appreciate my friend yielding.

The other alternative to getting hot under the collar is just to have your heart broken. Part of it is anger. When you go through and read these provisions like I'm afraid so many people did not do, you know the impact it is going to have. And yet, you know, AARP got their deal negotiated, you find that in different places, the big pharmaceuticals got their deal negotiated, the insurance companies got something in there in a number of places. You got Plaintiffs Bar got some things negotiated. And you think, who in the world was negotiating for the people of America? Everybody else was getting their deals, unions got their deals, but when you read through this, you knew who it was going to hurt. On the one hand, we had people across the aisle saying they're going to help the working poor. If you read the bill, you knew what it was going to do. You can't increase that amount of taxes, just as my friend from Missouri was talking about, you can't increase taxes like that and not cause some people to lose jobs or have their income cut or have their salaries cut, which means cut income.

I've talked to other people who say that because that passed they are winding down their business and people will be out of work at the end. It will take probably 1 1/2 years, one fellow was telling me last weekend. So you know people are losing their jobs and how devastating that is to lose your job. A career is gone because somebody got overzealous here and passed bills with increased taxes.

The working poor didn't get the help they were looking for. If you make 133 percent or less of the poverty level, oh, yeah, those were the people they were going to really help with this. They're going to get ultimately shoved into Medicaid that so many doctors aren't going to take anymore. Walgreen's, I read they weren't going to take any more prescriptions. That's not helping people in America. It doesn't help them to lose their jobs. It just is heartbreaking to see what is happening to people now because of this poorly conceived health care bill.

I yield back to my friend.

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