30-SOMETHING WORKING GROUP -- (House of Representatives - February 15, 2006)
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Mr. INSLEE. Mr. Speaker, I appreciate you mentioning this little small business that has had a little success, it is called Microsoft, in my district that has been one area that has recognized the power of innovation. There are many others in my district.
I will just tell you, I want to mention a couple of my favorite constituents, about why they believe this Democratic Innovation Agenda makes sense, that we should seize the creative powers of Americans and put it in harness.
One of my favorite constituents, my mother, I talked to her today, and she was brimming with laughter. We had a great talk, and it was great to hear her laughing because she went through a tough patch with some health problems about 6 months ago, and it was a tough time for her.
Since then, she has got on a medical technology that was developed in Seattle by some brilliant doctors doing research in basic and applied research; and because of their work now done over a decade ago, my mother was laughing today and probably is alive today. The reason that she was laughing today is that someone had the wherewithal and the foresight to make an investment in basic research medical technology involving the blood system over 10 years ago.
We have rolled out this idea to increase and accelerate research in medical technology because we belief there are a lot of people that can use this; but unfortunately, the budget the President has submitted to Congress today, we had Mr. Leavitt, Secretary of Health and Human Services today, he let us know that they are proposing to cut blood research by $20 million. At this time of the most rapid time of potential scientific growth, when we have mapped the human genome, when we could be looking at the dawn of medical technology, that we could make penicillin look like a small investment, they want to cut medical research.
Mr. HOLT. Mr. Speaker, if the gentleman would yield, just on that subject very quickly, the budget that the administration that President Bush presented to us a week or so ago cuts the funding in 18 out of 19 institutes at the National Institutes of Health, including the National Cancer Institute by $40 million and the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute by $21 million.
Mr. INSLEE. Mr. Speaker, I will just mention my other constituent who is a friend of mine. I will just call him Bill. He is a 55-year-old guy, great guy, plays basketball. He had prostate cancer. He is being treated now with new technology developed, again, in Seattle, bragging about the hometown team a little bit here, about three or 4 years ago. We hope things are going to go well.
We have rolled out saying we should accelerate our budget for research into cancer because we are on the cusp of some major breakthroughs, principally because of our genetic development to map predisposition and risk factors to this regard. But what does the President's budget want to do? They want to cut $40 million out of the cancer budget for research this year, $40 million. They want to cancel 634 grant programs now existing for research in some of these emerging fields.
Mr. RYAN of Ohio. Mr. Speaker, would the gentleman yield for just 10 seconds. This is at the same time that this President and this Republican House and the Republican Senate have the political gumption to give $16 billion in corporate subsidies to the energy companies and billions upon billions of dollars in corporate welfare to the health care industry and the pharmaceutical companies, at the same time they are cutting these programs.
I just want the American people, Mr. Speaker, to be aware of what is happening here. They are not just cutting this stuff because we are in tight fiscal times. They are cutting it, and at the same time giving corporate welfare to the tune of billions upon billions upon billions of dollars to the wealthiest industries in the country, to the most profitable industries in the country.
Mr. MEEK of Florida. Mr. Speaker, I just want 10 seconds, too.
The Republican side says, trust me. I guarantee you that the President cannot do it by himself. He needs this Republican Congress to do it, and they have given him everything that he has asked for. This President, who is so-called conservative, oh, we want to watch spending, has not vetoed one spending bill. This is the biggest borrow-and-spend administration almost in the history of this country. Here is the chart to prove it. It is. The President, not by himself, his picture is here. We should have the Republican Conference here because they helped him make this history. Unfortunately, it is bad for Americans.
There was $1.05 trillion borrowed from foreign countries, $1.05 trillion that he has done and accomplished in 4 years. Forty-two Presidents, including his father, were not able to accomplish that goal.
Mr. DELAHUNT. Combined.
Mr. MEEK of Florida. They borrowed $1.01 trillion, World War I, World War II, Korean War, Great Depression, and every other issue that we had facing the country, economic slowdowns, what have you, gas prices, what have you, were unable to borrow from China, Saudi Arabia and other countries.
So when we talk about the will of this administration and what they are doing and what the President says and they do another thing, he cannot do it by himself. He needs this Republican majority, and that is the reason why the American people, Mr. Speaker, have to make a change in providing the kind of leadership that they need in this Congress to make sure that they are represented.
So I am so glad that the gentleman from Washington (Mr. Inslee) is here because you represent the very people, they are in your district, that are talking about innovation. Mr. Ryan read it off. These are statements that these CEOs have made. They are literally begging. They are saying we hope y'all work together. We had the creator of ``Star Wars'' here the other day. He said I hope y'all get together; you are talking about the same thing.
The difference between what the Republicans are saying and what we are saying, we actually mean it. We will do it if given the opportunity. They are in control. They have the majority. They agenda the bills before committee.
I am sorry, but we both asked for 10 seconds and we took 20.
Mr. RYAN of Ohio. I only took 15 or 20 seconds. You took a minute and a half.
Mr. MEEK of Florida. I will admit to that.
Mr. RYAN of Ohio. For the record.
Mr. INSLEE. Mr. Speaker, just on that note about the difference between rhetoric and reality, it can be pretty stunning here in Washington, D.C.
The President said something that was a profound shift from his policies of the last 5 years when he said that the Nation had to break our addiction to oil during his State of the Union speech, which was amazing for him to say because every policy that he has championed up to now has continued that addiction to oil. Nonetheless, we welcomed it. We always welcome him to take lines from our speeches, and we hope that it could be mean a real shift in policy.
Unfortunately, the very week that the President said we needed to break our addiction to oil and said we needed to do more research into new energy technology, the same week he said that, his administration gave the pink slip to 100 researchers at the Renewable Energy Lab in Colorado, the very sort of warriors that we expect to help us develop these new clean energy sources. In his budget, he laid off I think it is something like 20 percent of the researchers at the very lab that we want, as Democrats, in our proposal to beef up. The reason we want to beef it up is we have seen the incredible productivity gains that have been obtained already.
Eighty percent decreases in the cost of solar cell technology in the last 12 years, 80 percent. While gas and oil have gone through the roof, solar cell technology has gone down 80 percent.
Mr. HOLT. Mr. Speaker, would the gentleman care to answer a question for me: How does the President propose to broke our, as he calls it, addiction to oil, and indeed, we do need to be weaned from our dependence on oil, if his budget, presented a few days after the State of the Union here in the House, provides funding for renewable energy and energy efficiency below the level at which it existed when he took office 6 years ago?
Mr. INSLEE. Well, that is what we call in the business a rhetorical question, and we were just optimistic. We all walked down the steps 6 inches in the air when the President said this the other day; but the next morning reading the budget, it was just a slap in the face. It was a slap in the face to anyone in America who believes that we truly do need to have new technological advances.
What we are proposing is that we should grab a hold, as we did in the new Apollo energy project or the original Apollo energy project, we need a new Apollo energy project that will have the same type of creativity and challenge to the American people that Kennedy had in his State of the Union speech on May 9, 1961. He said we are going to the Moon in 10 years. We did it. We now need a budget that will say we have the same degree of aggression and optimism that we had in that to wean ourselves off of foreign oil. Nothing else will do.
We Democrats are proposing to take a major step forward in that regard with flex fuel vehicles, which are on the street today. We just need to get more of them by using cellulosic ethanol which increases the return per acre of biofuels by a factor of three to four above existing ethanol levels. That is what we need to do.
Mr. DELAHUNT. If I may, you sum it up so well and yet you have to make an investment; and the reality, as we have discussed, is that investment is not forthcoming. It just is not because, as Mr. Ryan indicated, it is going elsewhere, and it is going to feed that corporate welfare that is eating the budget, along with tax cuts for the most affluent of America.
Mr. MEEK of Florida. Mr. Speaker, could you say that again just in case a Member might have walked into his office and walked away?
Mr. DELAHUNT. Well, there is only so much money. The pie is not infinite, and the pie gets bigger around here because this administration and this Congress authorize the borrowing of money that we will have to pay back in the future with interest to China, to India, to the OPEC nations, and to other investors.
So there is nothing left, other than the rhetoric that we hear, to invest in the priorities that we believe the American people would embrace such as innovation. Let me just cite one example, if I can.
This is a report by The Washington Post less than a month ago, and remember, Democrats have had nothing to do with this because we are barred by Republicans from participating in the behind-closed-door negotiations to establish those priorities. Think of what a democratic process that is. Let me read to you:
``House and Senate GOP negotiators, meeting behind closed doors last month to complete a major budget-cutting bill,'' this was their effort to save money, ``agreed on a change ..... that would save the health insurance industry $22 billion over the next decade, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office.''
One version would have targeted private HMOs participating in Medicare by changing the formula that governs reimbursement, lowering the payments to those insurance companies by $26 billion over the next decade. But after lobbying by the health insurance industry, the final version made a critical change that had the effect of eliminating all but $4 billion, according to CBO.
In other words, they turned around and said we apologize to those HMOs, those insurance companies, and we will give you back $22 billion of the $26 billion, and we will not let it happen again. Think of what we could do with that $26 billion in terms of innovation.
Mr. HOLT. My colleague from Florida mentioned George Lucas, the writer, director, producer of Star Wars, who was here yesterday to talk about this Democratic innovation agenda. The point I wanted to emphasize is we are not just talking about government spending, we are talking about investing so that innovators like George Lucas, and you might say that is just entertainment. Well, that is innovation. It makes money for the United States. In fact, he probably has done more for our balance of trade than any other single individual you can name.
But he was asking us to train the bright kids, the scientists and engineers that he needs. He was asking us, as we lay out in our innovation proposal, to reward risk takers and entrepreneurs, to protect intellectual property, to do those things that make it possible for innovators to succeed in the United States.
So it is not just about spending. The innovation creates the agenda, it creates the atmosphere as well as the pipeline for that innovative economy that we are talking about. That is what George Lucas was saying when he was here yesterday.
Mr. MEEK of Florida. He was not asking, he was literally begging for the Congress to work together in a bipartisan way to make it happen. Just the day before he was with us, the President gave him the National Technology Award. We are talking about walking the walk, not just talking. The bottom line is he came and he understood. We were committed prior to the technology award being awarded.
We have a chart before Mr. Delahunt, and it is one thing for us to let the Republican majority know what they can do if they really want to do it. It is another thing for us to break it down. I want to make sure that the American people understand that we are about making something happen. Regardless of who gets the credit, we are working on behalf of the American people and the American spirit, taking from Mr. Holt and what he says all the time. That is what took us to the moon. That is what brought us up front as it relates to innovation and inventions, being the first.
Mr. Speaker, I yield to Mr. Delahunt.
Mr. DELAHUNT. Let me refer to this chart. I think it is very telling. How can we afford those tax cuts that are trillions of dollars at this point in time, particularly if they ever became permanent.
Mr. RYAN of Ohio. Tax cuts for the wealthiest 1 percent of the people in the whole, entire country.
Mr. MEEK of Florida. Do not leave out the oil industry.
Mr. DELAHUNT. I will not leave out the oil industry or the pharmaceutical industry. We just heard what happened behind closed doors. But how are we affording to do that and at the same time ignoring the kind of initiatives that are embraced in this project for innovation that we have been discussing and that the President speaks about but does not fund.
Let me tell you how we take care of the corporate welfare program and how we take care of those tax cuts. We borrow or they borrow. The Republican majority borrows the money. I think it is particularly dangerous to do that not just because it will create deficits that could very well implode our economy and reduce the United States in terms of its economic capacity and future, but in addition it is dangerous because from whom do we borrow this money?
As of November, 2005, this is what the chart reveals: $682 billion from Japan; $249.8 billion from China; and yesterday we had a hearing in the International Relations Committee that discussed, and the Republican chairman and others that were clearly from the right of the political spectrum were describing China as a potential enemy and adversary, and yet we are borrowing money from the Chinese to support tax cuts for wealthy Americans.
Mr. HOLT. Could the gentleman tell us, if the Republican budget is carried out this year, how much more we will have to borrow in the next year? I can tell you it is going to be about $400 billion, added to various columns on your chart there. Some of it will be borrowed here in the United States, but a large number of dollars will be borrowed from Japan, China, U.K., Caribbean countries, Taiwan, OPEC, and Korea, as you show here.
Mr. DELAHUNT. I find it particularly interesting that we are borrowing money from OPEC. Not only are we purchasing oil from OPEC, but we are borrowing money from OPEC. And yet to hear the rhetoric in this Chamber and our committee rooms about OPEC, one would consider them, well, to use George Lucas, the Darth Vader of the international order in terms of its impact on America. Mr. Speaker, we have borrowed, we owe them almost $70 billion. What are we doing?
Mr. RYAN of Ohio. If the gentleman would yield, I want to make a point that we have kind of left out when talking about technology. We talk about the $682 billion from Japan and the $249 billion from China that we are borrowing.
Earlier in the evening, we talked about the 600,000 engineers that are going to graduate in China. They are taking, they are basically lending us money, we are paying them back with interest, and they are investing that money right here to train engineers to the tune of 600,000 a year.
Do you think these engineers are working just in private industry in a communist country? No, they are working for the Chinese military. They are working on the next-best technology that the Chinese military, their communist government, could maybe put up possibly in the international community. We are funding our own enemy's military because we are fiscally reckless here at home.
Mr. MEEK of Florida. Mr. Speaker, I want to thank the gentleman for pointing that out.
I have a picture here of Secretary Snow, appointed by the President and confirmed by the Republican Senate. I think it is important to understand, when you start talking about what is going on, how we are borrowing and how they are out of control on the Republican side. Here is a blown-up letter dated December 29, 2005, literally the Secretary of the Treasury begging that we need to raise the debt limit because we will be able to continue to finance government operations. This is not government operations of Iraq or Afghanistan. This is government operations of these United States.
Secretary Snow, I go back, and repetition is good because I want to make sure that folks understand. Gentlemen, I want to say this, and you cannot say this enough. They have broken records, borrowing $1.057 trillion from foreign nations. Like I said before, the President cannot just do this by himself, so I am going to put a picture of the Republican leadership there to say they are a part of this incompetence as it relates to borrowing from foreign nations that we have concern about like China.
So, Mr. Delahunt, you have hit the nail right on the head. Mr. Holt, you are 210 percent right. We cannot talk about innovation, but in the meantime we have other priorities with the special interest. I think it is important. I want to make sure that staff gets a picture of the Republican conference because I think it is important. I think we need to put the pressure on not only on individual decisions but on decisions that the majority has made that has put this country in the back seat as it relates to innovation and as it relates to many other areas that we should be leading in.
Mr. HOLT. A little earlier this evening folks on the other side were saying that revenues have continued to grow because of the tax cuts. No, what has grown because of the tax cuts is this deficit, this borrowing. So much of it from China, Japan, even OPEC, as my friend from Massachusetts has pointed out.
Mr. DELAHUNT. I think it was interesting to hear our friends and colleagues on the other side say we have to hold them accountable in Washington. We have to hold those bureaucrats, we have to hold them accountable. Let us get on with the job. I find that confusing.
I thought, now maybe you can give me some guidance here. I thought the Republicans were the majority party in this House and in the Senate for a substantial period of time, and I am confident that President Bush was elected in 2000 and it is 2006 and it has been 6 years. Who is in charge? Who is in charge, Mr. Speaker?
They are the ones that should be held accountable. This is not about bureaucrats. I understand it is an election year and all of a sudden they are going to position and posture themselves as outsiders. Outsiders, that is a bad joke. They run this place. They run this town. They know how to exercise power.
Mr. RYAN of Ohio. In fact, I thought that was a joke. In fact, I wrote it down in a journal, and I laughed about it later in the day because I thought it was a joke. Then I find out that they are serious.
Mr. Speaker, I yield to Mr. Inslee.
Mr. INSLEE. Under the current control of the Federal Government, if China invades Taiwan, we will have to borrow money from China to fight the war. That is a very sad irony, if not a joke.
I wanted to point out one thing before we finish, an aspect of the Democratic Innovation Agenda that we have not talked about, and that is our efforts to help small businesses innovate because Democrats recognize that small businesses are tremendous engines of innovation. That is where a lot of our creative genius comes out. I want to point out a few things that we have proposed to make sure that small businesses are successful in innovating, and one is we have a constellation of proposals that will help small businesses across what is called the valley of death which is where they cannot get financing when they have a good idea but cannot quite get to commercialization. We would make sure that the Small Business Innovation Research Program is held up and supported. This administration is actually cutting the availability of small businesses to use the innovation grant program to get their innovations to market. They purport to believe in the power of business but will not help them with that.
Second, we propose that we will help reward risk taking and entrepreneurship by promoting broad-based stock options, and not just for top dogs in corporations but for the rank and file.
Third, we want to protect intellectual property by making sure that patent fees go to help the patent process so these businesses can get their patents.
Fourth, we want to help specially tailored guidelines for small businesses to help with the Sarbanes-Oxley requirement in accounting.
I point these out because I think it is fair to say that the Democrats have put forth four very concrete proposals to make sure small businesses can thrive in a challenging environment. That is important because we know that government is not the source of all great ideas in our society. We want small businesses to achieve, and we have good proposals for that to happen.
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