American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009

Floor Speech

AMERICAN RECOVERY AND REINVESTMENT ACT OF 2009 -- (House of Representatives - January 28, 2009)

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Mr. KINGSTON. I thank the chairman, and I wanted to respond to some of the comments that my Democrat friends have been making. Number one, we do want to work with them on this package. We met with President Obama yesterday to pledge our support of turning this economy around. We have offered a lot of good ideas, ideas that the House Democrats have not embraced as of yet, but we hope that they will, because we think President Obama and we made some progress yesterday.

One of the things we talked about is extending tax breaks for small businesses so that they can create more jobs. We think that is very important.

We talked about easing the credit crisis so people can go out and borrow money and make investments in new jobs. We also talked about housing, stabilizing the housing market so that people can become homeowners.

One of the things that's not in this package is also tax credits for small businesses to purchase health care for their employees. We think that would be very, very helpful. And also ending some of the unfunded mandates that are strapping our cities and local governments.

We believe we have a lot of good ideas. We are very disappointed that this committee, Appropriations, only had one hearing and we were shut out of some of the subsequent negotiation and crafting of this bill that we think could have been helpful to do on a bipartisan basis.

Now Mr. Hoyer had talked about history and how stimulus bills work. Let's talk about the stimulus bills and let's talk about recent history. I don't need to go back to Ronald Reagan.

Last year, 2008, $29 billion for Bear Stearns, $168 billion for the other stimulus package we just passed in May, $200 billion for Fannie Mae bailout, $85 billion for AIG bailout, $700 billion for the TARP, the Wall Street bailout. If this kind of spending worked, we would be in great shape in our economy right now. But we keep throwing more and more money on the problem to the extent that this country now has a $10.6 trillion national debt.

In fact, the interest on this package alone, Mr. Chairman, will be $347 billion a year. And so this really isn't just an $825 billion package, this is a $1.1 trillion expenditure. Who is going to pay for it? Not people here today but our children and our children's children. We are digging a hole.

And where does this money come from? Three sources. You can tax people, and I can tell you the working man is taxed to death right now. And I am glad there is some tax relief in here for some people, but not tax relief for everybody in the middle-income bracket, which is what we desperately need. The second way we can do that is to print the money. We print money, and it just leads to inflation. Or we can borrow the money. Right now we owe foreign governments $3 trillion, China being the number one lender to us at 22 percent, followed by Japan and followed by Great Britain. We are digging a huge hole.

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