United Nations Tax Equalization Reund Act of 2011
Floor Speech
BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT
I thank the gentlelady for yielding, and I want to congratulate her on being the new chair of the Foreign Affairs Committee. I know she is going to do an outstanding job.
Madam Speaker, let me just start off by saying the U.N. has been a scandal-ridden mess for as far back as I can remember. I've been in Congress 28 years, and we've had scandal after scandal after scandal. The people over there that have been overpaid, comparing it to the private sector for accountants, for business, for all kinds of things, and we raise Cain about it on this floor, but nothing ever changes.
Remember the oil scandal involving Iraq? Remember Saddam Hussein and the deals that were cut and how the U.N. was involved in that?
Nothing ever changed. We keep throwing the money in the same direction and the same amounts, year after year after year. We give them 22 percent of their budget. Now, if you take all the countries in the world that are involved in the U.N., you'll find that we're sending a real disproportionate amount of money to them. Our share should not be 22 percent. Nevertheless, we do it year after year after year.
And now we find out that the U.N. Tax Equalization Fund, the TEF, was overpaid $179 million. Why in the world should we allow them to keep our money? We're already paying them more than we should, in my opinion.
I heard what my colleague said about the security of the place and all that. We give them more than enough money to take care of the place and to pay the salaries and to do what needs to be done over there. That is, if you support everything the U.N. does.
But to allow them to keep almost $180 million of our money when it's an overpayment makes no sense whatsoever. So what we're saying here today is, you know, we're just going to hold this money back if they don't return what they already owe us.
Now, if we had any other creditor that owes us money, or if you had a creditor in your hometown, you would expect that creditor to pay you back. You'd expect them to pay what they owe.
But the U.N. is a different thing. Why? It makes no sense to me whatsoever.
I've been here long enough to know that there has been problem after problem after problem with the U.N., and we've complained about it. We have done very little to correct that, but we've complained about it time and again.
But at the very, very least, at the very least we should expect them to pay us back the money that they owe us. So I wish my colleagues would think about this from a logical point of view. Why should we let them keep money that they owe the United States, especially at a time when we have a $14 trillion, get that, $14 trillion national debt? We're going to be $1.5 trillion short this year, and the legacy we're going to leave to our kids and grandkids is unbelievably bad. And so this is a drop in the bucket, no question about it. But I think we should get our $170 million back, and I hope my colleagues on the other side of the aisle will concur.
BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT
Source