Mr. Speaker, it never ceases to be an honor for me to be able to speak on this floor. The freedoms we have, the blessings, we've received because of those who've gone before us.
The country is in trouble. People around the world cannot believe that the greatest nation in the history of mankind just cannot make itself live within its means. So businesses, manufacturing have flocked away from America.
I know there are some who believe that the greatest thing that can happen for America is for those manufacturing jobs to leave America because they believe, gee, they hurt the environment because they pollute, so just as well they go to some other Third World country or China or other place, when the truth is, apparently, when those same manufacturing companies leave the United States, they go to nations that, on average, pollute, depending on the nations, 4 to 10 times more than we do here in the United States. For those that understand the way the world turns, as pollution goes up in Asia, we usually breathe it here in the United States. So that hasn't worked out so well for the environment of the planet. We're hurting the planet as we drive manufacturing jobs out of America.
This administration has used the EPA as a sword, as a tool to drive more and more manufacturing and production out of the United States, hurting the country more and more, not because, necessarily, they want to intentionally hurt the country. I'm not saying that. They just think we're better off.
If they're not willing to have a draconian EPA being, as the President said in his speech, working side by side with them in private business, good riddance. Go somewhere else. Because, in the President's own words, that's what he said, and it was the scariest thing I heard that the President said last week, standing right here at the second level in this Hall, the line, and I'll read from his speech directly. He said, ``We need to look for ways to work side by side with America's businesses.''
America's businesses do not need a government that wants to be their partner. The government in this country, according to the Constitution, metaphorically speaking, is supposed to be a referee--keep the playing field fair, keep it level, make sure everybody has a chance to compete and compete fairly, and stay out of the way. Do not interfere. Don't try to be a partner with business. Stay out of the way and be a referee.
It's when this United States Government has tried to be a partner that so often it gets in trouble, and it kills businesses and it kills jobs, and people flee and go to some other country where they're allowed to produce things without the government trying to be their partner.
Anybody that wants the government to be their partner should go to Venezuela or Third World nations. They're more than happy to partner with those businesses.
But some years back there was a group of us that went to China, and we met with a number of CEOs of international corporations that have taken their American jobs by the thousands, taken their businesses, their manufacturing production and gone to China. I had the feeling that when we talked to them and asked them the question, ``Why did you move all these jobs to China?'' that they would say, well, they just couldn't work with the labor unions. The price of labor was too high. Regulations were too much. But the number one answer was because of the corporate tax. The corporate tax in America, in the United States, is the highest corporate tax in the world.
Now corporations, those that understand business law, corporations, directors, and officers, have a fiduciary duty to their stockholders to try to make as much money as they can. Unless some, Mr. Speaker, do not know who the stockholders are, more and more they're union workers; they're American workers across their countries; they're small business owners and operators, franchise operators; they're the rank and file across the country--State employees, local employees, Federal employees. But more than that, businesses across America, they have retirement accounts that invest in these companies.
Those companies' officers and directors have a fiduciary duty that they have to--or they could be sued--have the best interests of the company and the stockholders at stake in the decisions they make. If you go to law school--I hopefully have saved somebody a lot of money--that's it in a nutshell.
So, when a group of corporate leaders is trying to decide how can we avoid being sued by the stockholders by doing the best thing to help them create the most revenue for their stock--what can we do? What will enhance their dividends?--they have to look. When they see the United States of America is taxing corporations at 35 percent and they see that China taxes at 17 percent, you would think it was pretty much a no-brainer. That's basically what they said.
I was gratified to hear that, whether it's union labor or nonunion labor, across the board, the experience that the corporate leaders that I talked to in China say really their best workers are right here in the United States--union workers, nonunion workers--and that, generally speaking, they have better quality control over products produced here in the United States of America. So, when they move plants from here in the United States to other places like China, they have wonderful workers, but the quality control is not as good as what they have here.
But if you think about it and you realize, gee, they would pay half the corporate tax in China that they pay here by the billions, then they could afford to build state-of-the-art facilities, where facilities here in the United States, their manufacturing plants, may be falling apart and getting older. Well, you could go build a state-of-the-art facility in a place like China, and because of the tremendously reduced corporate tax, by the time you really get around to paying much tax, you've paid for the plant.
I was advised privately that it was possible the Chinese Government would make deals with some companies if they were big enough, and it might be, for example, they would say, Look, you move your manufacturing plant, hire these thousands of employees here in China instead of in the United States, and we'll make a deal with you. No corporate tax for 5 years.
Then, depending on the company and the negotiations, they might say, And then for the next 5 years, maybe 5, 7 percent, maybe 10 percent. Maybe then it goes to 17, or maybe by 15 years you get to the 17 percent rate.
But in those kind of scenarios, they say, We paid for a state-of-the-art facility by the time we ever get around to paying corporate tax. Whereas, if we kept those jobs in America, facilities getting older, we just can't produce dividends and returns on money for stockholders. We're just treading water. Here, because the corporate rates are half as expensive, then we can produce, we can compete anywhere in the world. Our goods are that much cheaper.
Now, it is true our labor is more expensive, but, in general, we have good laborers in this country, and there are Americans that are willing to work, willing to do the jobs. From talking to employers, though, we could use a lot more people willing to be employees who can pass a drug test. That's kind of important.
Now, I have had so many constituents say, Look, you have to pass a drug test in order to get employment for most important jobs nowadays, whether it's with a grocery company back home or a small operator. I was talking to an independent oilman this afternoon that drills wells from Longview, Texas, and he was saying, We have to give people drug tests.
He was telling me, because of the drilling that's currently going on in east Texas, he's having trouble finding enough workers right now, today. While people are unemployed around the country, he's having trouble right now, today, finding enough people who can pass a drug test and are willing to work hard on an oil well, and he would put them to work.
In fact, he was telling me this afternoon, they'd start out at $50,000 a year. They'd have health care. It's hard, dirty, long hours, tough work, but it's a good living. But so many of the people that apply can't pass a drug test. And because it's such difficult work physically and it requires that you be alert because all of the other people on the rig have to count on each other, kind of like in a military operation, the equipment is so dangerous, if somebody has taken drugs and is not at peak performance, they can get somebody killed. It's happened far too many times. They have to have people pass a drug test.
That's just this afternoon. Well, think about it. If we had manufacturers coming back into America because the corporate tax rate was less than 17 percent, then the manufacturing jobs show up like crazy.
Now, I realize from hearing all of the news, apparently the big emphasis of the national union leaders, who sure don't seem to be speaking to all of the union folks I know, but their emphasis seems to be basically we're not doing very well getting union members from private corporations. So they've gone all after government employees: Let's try to unionize government employees because maybe we can pick them up.
And what I think eventually rank-and-file union workers for private companies will begin to understand is it seems that they're being thrown under the bus. The concentration seems to be for more government workers, less private workers, which means they're driving for more jobs in the government sector, which kills off the private sector, which will kill off those jobs for the union members who have jobs in the private sector.
So, as I sat back here listening to the President's speech last Thursday night and as I struggled with what the President was saying--because some of it didn't seem to me that it was going to create the jobs he was promising, but I was willing to wait for the bill and not judge from a speech, because it's been said around here before that CBO cannot score a speech. Well, that was before, a couple years ago, when the administration got on to them, and basically they did score a speech, but that's because the White House is able to exert pressure on CBO that the Republicans have not been able to see fit to do.
I know Mr. Elmendorf was not happy with my reference, but the fact is, after Mr. Elmendorf met with the President in the woodshed, or the Oval Office, he came back and was able to bring down the scoring of ObamaCare by about a quarter of a trillion dollars or so. Then after ObamaCare passed, they said, Whoops, looks like maybe we underestimated by about a quarter of a trillion dollars.
That makes for a pretty big plus-or-minus margin of error when CBO can't do better than that, but CBO and the rules were created by the most liberal Congress in history until about 5 years ago. They created CBO. They created the rules for scoring. They yanked us out of Vietnam without a chance to make sure our allies there would not be killed, so most of them were. They also created an automatic baseline for government budgets that increases every year. They created a formula. It increases every year.
Now, I was here in '05 and '06, and I am embarrassed that, as Republicans, our party did not have the nerve to eliminate the CBO, to eliminate the ridiculous rules by which bills are scored. The actual reality and history and recurrent numbers of what happens--when you do this, you get this effect--you can't consider that. They have to use rules that don't apply in the real world and without taking into consideration the effects that have been had when an action is taken every time.
So we get terribly inaccurate scoring from a government entity, and we also have this automatic baseline that increases every year. There is not a business or home in America that can plan a budget by saying, We're automatically going to increase our budget every year from now on. No matter how much income or revenue we have each year, we're going to keep increasing our budget. That is what has been happening for 37 years, since 1974.
The Budget chairman back in '05 and '06 was not willing to do it, but I am extremely gratified that our bright chairman of the Budget, this Budget chairman, is going to do it, in that this year he's going to take up a zero baseline budget. I filed one in my first Congress back in '05 and '06, in my second Congress in '07 and '08, in my third Congress in '09 and 2010, and in this Congress. I am delighted. I don't care whose name is on the bill; but when we finally eliminate the automatic increases in the Federal budgets every year, that's going to be huge, and it's going to be better than anything that the President has proposed by way of producing revenue and balancing the budget.
I do appreciate the White House emailing their version of the American Jobs Act.
BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT
PARLIAMENTARY INQUIRY
Mr. GOHMERT. If I might inquire of the Speaker, a parliamentary inquiry: If there are charts around on the floor, can anybody use those?
The SPEAKER pro tempore. The gentleman is free to use charts in debate.
BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT
Mr. GOHMERT. Thank you, Mr. Speaker, because I saw my friends across the aisle using a chart that said the ``American Jobs Act.'' It makes a wonderful chart if it's still on the floor, because that's what we're talking about, an American Jobs Act.
The President kept saying, Pass it right away. Act now. Pass this jobs bill. Pass it right away. Pass it again right away. Pass the bill right away. They'll get back on their feet right away if we pass the bill. Anyway, just on and on--pass the bill, pass the bill, pass the bill. So I heard the speech. I got a copy of the speech, and I like to highlight stuff where I can find it easier. So we've got all this ``pass it now,'' ``pass it right away'' stuff highlighted.
Where is it? We were told to pass it now, to pass it right away. We heard the speech Thursday night. We didn't get a bill Friday. We didn't get a bill Saturday. Obviously, it can't be filed Saturday or Sunday if we're not in session. We didn't get it, though, through email. They send the stuff when it's needed, but nothing Saturday, nothing Sunday.
On Monday, we were inquiring of the White House by email, by phone, Look, when are you going to let us see what this bill we've got to pass last week is?
We finally got a copy, and I was up until 5 a.m. on Tuesday morning going through it--tagging it, highlighting it, being staggered by the stuff in here that will kill jobs instead of create them--oh, other than the jobs that are created for the government that will help kill the economy. I couldn't believe this was being called an American Jobs Act, but it was not a surprise to me even at noon today when we inquired and found that no one had been willing to file an American Jobs Act in the House of Representatives. It had been available. The President had been talking about it since last Thursday, but nobody had been willing to actually file that bill in the House.
I have been through the President's American Jobs bill, and I am absolutely convinced--absolutely no question--that this will hurt our economy. It creates massive, bigger government intrusion. If you like Freddie and Fannie Mae, you will love the new American Infrastructure Financing Authority. What a wonderful government creation that is. We're going to provide billions and billions of dollars to create this new government entity. But not to worry--these are people who will be running it who really know what they're doing--right?--because the Secretary of Transportation is going to be in charge. I do know the Secretary of Transportation right now, and I like him very much. He's a good guy. Nonetheless, we're creating another government nightmare called the American Infrastructure Financing Authority.
Unbelievable.
You would have thought we would have learned a lesson--but not to worry. These are people who will be appointed by the President. Some other people here in Congress can throw in some recommendations, but they're appointed. The seven voting members are appointed by the President. So that will be wonderful. They'll run all our infrastructure requirements for us, and of course the President will appoint the chief executive officer.
Having been a history major in college, I do believe that the best indication of future performance is past history, past performance. With the auto czars and the private committee composed of a bunch of auto czars, I read somewhere that not any of them had ever worked in the auto industry at all, and most of them didn't even own a car. Nonetheless, they had put them in charge of our auto industry.
That kind of scares you when you think about it and when you think this is the same guy who's going to appoint all these people to run the brand-new American Infrastructure Financing Authority. That's AIFA, and it is just another nightmare. It's going to help bankrupt America quicker than this administration has already been doing.
I know people like to throw blame around. There is plenty of blame to go around because I know, in 2006, I was on this side of the aisle, hearing people stand up at the Democratic microphones, saying what I knew to be true. They were right. We had no business spending $160 billion more than we took in. That was un-American. It was outrageous. This body had no business authorizing expenditures of $160 billion more than we took in. They were right. The Democrats were right when they said we should not spend in a year $160 billion more than we took in.
Nowadays, people like to say, Well, it's Afghanistan and Iraq that have broken this country and have made us bankrupt. That's not the case. We were in Afghanistan; we were in the worst part of the expenditures in Iraq during those days, and we overspent what we had coming in by about $160 billion. If anybody back then had told me that within 4 years those same people who condemned this side of the aisle for overspending by $160 billion would be just fine with overspending by $1.6 trillion, I would never have believed it.
There is no way, with the speeches that were given here in '05, '06, '07 about the Republicans' irresponsibility in '05 and '06, my freshman year, over $160 billion more being spent than we brought in, that they would have any nerve or ability to stand up and say I'm voting to spend $1.6 trillion more than we're going to take in. I just didn't think, I wouldn't have believed that anybody would be willing to do that. Well, they have, and we as a country have.
But I went through the President's bill. Yesterday I went through much of it, but there is a little more that needs to be said, for example, to illuminate the President's comments about he wants to go after the profits of Big Oil; and he does that in his bill, we were told. He was going to fix it for Big Oil.
Well, I was a little cynical, I was a little leery, because I have heard the President call the Wall Street executives fat cats. He has called them names, said we wouldn't be letting them do that, that we ought to go after them, that kind of stuff.
Yet I knew that, while he was calling them names, at the same time his governing made sure that an entity like Goldman Sachs made more money than they've ever made in their history. They should have had to file for bankruptcy. Instead, now they're making more money than they've ever made in history, and this President is presiding in such a way it's bad for America, but Wall Street is doing great, and some would say that doesn't make sense because we know that Wall Street is mainly Republicans.
But if you look into it, as the Heritage Foundation has--my friend Mike Franc there has done the research--you found out that, in essence, corporate executives on Wall Street, when you include their immediate family that donates with them, donate about 4-1 or donate about 4-1 for Obama over McCain. And Mike had said, when he first saw that, he thought, wow, that's intriguing. That may be different from prior years, But as he checked on it, it wasn't that different from prior years, donations from Wall Street.
Then you get to realizing, wait a minute, Democratic Presidents, Members here in this body are constantly deriding these greedy, evil people on Wall Street; and yet they're generally giving 4-1 to Democrats over Republicans. There are 4-1 Democrats on Wall Street in executive positions than there are Republicans. Well, no wonder. It starts making more sense that they would do much better under Democratic administrations since it helps to know people in those kinds of positions.
But we were told by the President he's going after Big Oil. The provisions in this President's bill--it's at page 151--repeal the deduction for intangible drilling and development costs in the case of oil and gas wells. Now, the bill has a dishonest word here. It says repealing oil ``subsidies.''
A subsidy, you can look it up, Webster, wherever you want to, but the definition will basically be the same wherever you look it up. A ``subsidy'' is a grant or a gift of money. There are no grants or gifts of money, and there wasn't anybody that wanted to go after British Petroleum more than I did around here when we found out 800 violations or so and when all the other majors were having maybe one or two in the gulf.
Yet they were involved in crony capitalism. So the administration looked the other way over and over and over again until the Deepwater Horizon blew out. People were killed, you know, not only lives lost but fortunes lost. The Gulf of Mexico was devastated all because this administration and those inspectors that were sent looked the other way to all of this pitiful way that drilling was done because they were buddies, crony capitalism.
So when you look here at what the President actually has in his bill, who it's going to help and who it's going to hurt, what you see are these deductions here that he's repealing--the repeal of deduction for tertiary injectants, the repeal of the percentage depletion allowance for oil and gas wells. Section 199, the deduction attributable to oil, natural gas or primary products thereof, the repeal of oil and gas working interest exception to passive activity rules.
I read through these, checked with experts and find out, CPAs, people that do the tax returns for independent oil companies, and I was reminded, this stuff basically applies only as a deduction for an oil company that produces less than a thousand barrels of oil. All of the majors that this President says he wants to go after and go after their profits, they're majors.
All of the deductions that he is trying to repeal, they're not going to affect, they're not really going to hurt the major oil companies. They're going to devastate the independent oil companies. That will be the result here.
So he says he wants to go after the majors, but that's just not what he is doing in his bill, and I know that, being a community organizer, he's not that well up on what he's going to hurt and what he's going to help. But the fact is there are figures that indicate American production activities are dominated by independent producers, who drill 95 percent of the Nation's natural gas and oil wells, accounting for 67 percent of total U.S. natural gas and oil production. That's the independent oil companies of America. Ninety-five percent of the drilling, 67 percent of the production is not ExxonMobil. It's not Shell. It's not British Petroleum. It's the independent oil companies in America.
And who are they? They're people that cannot go to the banks, for the most part, to get a loan. Any bank that would loan an oil company money to drill a particular well is probably going to get shut down because the chances are, in most cases--certainly in the investments I have had--you are more likely to have a dry hole than you are to hit anything that's really going to be of a sufficient, productive nature.
So, of course, once you have established a field, the odds go up dramatically, but most of these wells, when it's not an established field and it's just helping produce more from a known field, you can't get loans. The only way independent oil companies have to be assured of being able to drill oil wells is not to go get a loan, and they also know that if they invest and pay all of the 100 percent of their own drilling and they hit a few dry holes in a row, they're going to be bankrupt, if there were so many of them.
What most independent oil companies do, they do studies geologically. They have to hire geologists most of the time. I am told they were independent geologists. I know a great number of those. They do great work. They will study an area, and they will hire a landman to come in and study who owns what interests in the minerals, who owns what rights that they're going to have to acquire in order to do drilling, and then they hire people that are involved in drilling.
They're not like the majors where they've got all they need to go do all the drilling. They hire independent mud companies, independent wire line companies. They will often have to have people come out and feed them, and if they don't, they're going to have people who need to go eat somewhere.
It is hard, nasty, 24-hour-a-day work. You don't stop 8-5. You have to do shifts because you can't afford to get somebody too tired for staying on a rig too long. But they employ millions of people. They cause the employment of millions around America even though there aren't that many that actually work on the wells, themselves.
They create jobs. They don't just save them like this President says he's been doing. And so what's the President doing? He, in his bill, is not touching, he's not going to hurt the Big Oil companies. They're going to apparently do as well as his good friends at General Electric.
So what we have seen is, if you're really friends with this administration, or to be fair, the parties in power, then odds are you're going to get your tax bills through and you are going to be like General Electric, you're going to be like Warren Buffett, and you're going to be able to skate through without paying virtually any tax.
I loved the way Art Laffer explained to it me in his living room after a Sunday lunch one day last year. We talked about these taxing concepts. I just love the guy. He is so brilliant. He's charming and funny. He sure got us out of a mess back in 1980-1981 because he was the adviser to Ronald Reagan. Art Laffer was his economic adviser.
Many people have heard about the Laffer curve because for people in government who want to maximize the amount of revenue to the Federal Government so they can spend more, how do you do it? Well, if you don't have any kind of tax at all, the government has no tax at all, then the revenue of the Federal Government would be zero on this end. If the government taxed a 100 percent tax, very, very quickly nobody would work. Nobody's going to work to produce 100 percent revenue for the Federal Government unless the whole Nation is enslaved, and God forbid that that will happen.
So on the two ends of the graph, you have zero revenue to the Federal Government, if it is zero percent tax altogether, and on the other end you have zero revenue to the Federal Government if there's 100 percent tax. So somewhere in between, you reach the maximum efficiency for bringing in revenue to the Federal Government. If you tax too high, then you start hurting the amount of revenue percentage-wise coming in, and so you actually get less revenue when you pass that maximum point. Before that point, you can continue to raise taxes and actually increase revenue. Beyond that, the revenue starts coming down. So as Art has described it, you need to cut taxes 30 percent, and you will get us out of this horrific doldrums of an economy.
I was back at Fort Benning, Georgia, at the time, and things were not good. The military was not respected at all. I liked Ronald Reagan a lot. Of course, when you're in the military, you can't say anything negative about the Commander in Chief or you've committed an offense under the UCMJ. You can't criticize someone in your chain of command, including the Commander in Chief. So we just had to bite our tongues, but we could see Jimmy Carter was doing such damage to this country economically and in the foreign arena. It was just tragic.
I liked Ronald Reagan. He said he was going to be able to help bring down double-digit inflation, double-digit unemployment and double-digit interest rates. As much as I liked him, I recall telling my wife, Kathy, back at Fort Benning, I like him, but I don't care who the President is, there's no way a President can actually help do all that, really have that kind of effect.
He proved me wrong. With Laffer's guidance, taxes were cut 30 percent, and the economy took off. Because the economy took off and there were more jobs, unemployment dropped dramatically. Interest rates were able to come down dramatically. We had a 12 1/4 percent or something loan on our first home in Georgia just off post in Fort Benning. It may have been 12 3/4 percent. Some folks told me that was crazy--it was too high--but it wasn't long before interest rates some places were 18 percent, so 12 wasn't so bad. Now, interest rates came down under Reagan, but it was Laffer who said bring down the taxes by 30 percent, and you'll do dramatic work on creating a better economy.
I love the story Art Laffer tells about getting a call from President Reagan. He said, Art, great news. We got your tax cut.
Art said, in essence, this is my paraphrase: That's great, Mr. President. Congratulations.
Art, you don't seem excited. Why aren't you excited? This is great news. We got the tax cut with the Democratic House and Senate. They're going to cut it 30 percent.
He said, Congratulations, Mr. President. That's great.
President Reagan said, Why aren't you more excited?
He said, Mr. President, I understand you're going to cut it like half a percent the first year, 10 percent the next year, and another 20 percent the third year.
He said, Well, that's the deal we had to cut with Congress. We couldn't get all 30 percent at once.
As I recall, he said something like, Mr. President, if you were going shopping and the place you were going to go shopping had a half of one percent sale this month and then 10 percent sale next month and then 20 percent sale the next one after that, when are you going to go shopping?
He said Reagan was quiet for awhile and then finally said, Are we going to have a couple of bad years?
He said, Yes. Now it's going to be 3 years before the economy heals. We could have had it this year.
President Reagan got the best he could in 1981 and 1982, and those were not good years. In 1983, the economy surged, and more money was brought into the coffers.
The problem, though, is that the Democratic Party got so excited controlling the House and Senate--Reagan and Laffer had set up such a situation here, and there was so much more money coming into the coffers, the Federal revenues--that they started spending like never before. They can blame Reagan, but the Constitution makes very clear, Congress spends the money.
So really, this year, we are still working off of what Congress did or didn't do last year under Speaker Pelosi. Next year, beginning October 1, will be the first full year we are back at least as Republicans being in control of one House. So I think it is very, very important what we try to do to generate jobs and when you know that these provisions are going to devastate independent oil companies that do 95 percent of the drilling in continental America and won't hurt Exxon, British Petroleum, and, in fact, because 95 percent of the drilling will not get done in the continental United States.
I guess that's why the President was trying to do this. They apparently don't like drilling. They don't like mining. They don't like any of this stuff occurring on our soil. They would rather it go somewhere else where they pollute a lot more. But we are talking about millions of jobs that will be lost because of the devastating effect of destroying independent oil and gas businesses--and all of that when we've gotten such great news over the last few years. We went from having basically no natural gas reserves to having 100--some say 200, some say 300--years of natural gas reserves.
Some fleets of trucks are starting to convert to natural gas. If we converted cars and trucks--you can't order them from Detroit yet that come equipped with natural gas. You can get them done after they leave the factory. But if we started getting natural gas vehicles like some fleets have done, travel is a lot cheaper. You don't have the pollution you have with gasoline. It burns clean. You do have CO
2.
So look out. We're going to grow more plants, because plants have to have CO
2 in order to have photosynthesis, in order to produce O
2 as a byproduct from growing as a plant. So, gee, if we use more natural gas, we may end up with more healthy plants. So that may be a difficult thing if people don't like green plants.
I couldn't help but notice on page 155--and I have read through here--the President has things like eliminating deductions. He says this bill is paid for. In his speech he says--and I want to read it correctly. He told us back 2 years ago during his health care speech, if you misrepresent my bill, I'm going to call you out. So let me read what he says.
He says, ``And here is the other thing I want the American people to know. The American Jobs Act will not add to the deficit. It will be paid for.''
That's what he said.
What he's counting on, what he references on page 4 of his speech--and it's on page 155--yes, there is elimination of deductions. In reality, it's going to cost this government revenue. It's not going to create more Federal revenue.
It's going to cost jobs. There will be fewer people paying as much income tax. That will hurt the Federal coffers more. We'll have more deficit spending. We can't get that under control. But we just passed a deficit bill I didn't support because it didn't have adequate cuts in there. There was no restraint on spending that was really adequate. If you only cut $1 trillion over a 10-year period, and we all know--everybody in here knows--you can't bind future Congresses. So all the cuts that do not occur within the next year or year and a half, there's no reason to think that they will happen. You can't bind future Congresses.
Anyway, even if we did cut $1 trillion--not much the next year, but it gets heavier toward the end of the 10 years. If we were to cut $1 trillion over 10 years and we were to do that every 10 years, within exactly 150 years we will finally balance the budget, and we will have only added $120 trillion to the $14.3 trillion or $14.6 trillion that we've run up in deficit spending now. If we were able to reach this wonderful goal of $2 trillion in cuts in the next 10 years and do that ever 10 years, then we can balance the budget in only 80 years. We'll only add around $72 trillion in additional deficit spending to our deficit.
So the joint committee was charged: Find $1.5 trillion somewhere between now and basically Christmas, the end of the year. Actually, we found out today they're really going to need to find it by the 1st of November. This is how the President pays for his $450 billion spending spree, where we create the American Infrastructure Financing Authority--a new Fannie and Freddie on steroids. We create a new massive government bureaucracy.
The FCC wanted to have a fairness doctrine and control what people said on the airwaves. They want to dictate everything that gets done in the media on the airwaves, but they were realizing more and more people are going to broadband and less and less to the airways. They're losing control of things. So the President addresses that. It's not a jobs bill in the private sector, but it creates a brand-new authority, government entity. Well, actually, he describes it in his bill as a private nonprofit group. He appoints the directors, of course, and it's called the Public Safety Broadband Corporation. Wow, it's going to kill the private sector. But more government jobs. Good news there.
And here's the pay-for. If we had a drum roll, Mr. Speaker, we could ask for it. The Budget Control Act of 2011 is amended by striking $1.5 trillion that they have to find in cuts in the next month or so and inserting $1.95 trillion in cuts. That's it. Magically, he just found $450 billion in cuts, but it's because he told the supersubcommittee: Go find this extra money. What a great revenue-enhancing deficit spending cut that is.
This bill is a disaster. It sets up a program that will allow people who have their hours reduced by 10 percent to start collecting unemployment compensation. It requires State agencies to start mandating that those employers involved certify that even if they cut an employee's hours, they're going to still have the same health care benefits, retirement benefits. I talked to some employers today about it. They said, We'll have to give up providing health care and retirement benefits because we need the flexibility. If we're all taking a cut, then let's take a cut.
I want to challenge my own Republican leadership, Mr. Speaker. Most of America is not even aware that this year we put our mouth where our money is, and we actually voted to cut our own budgets by 5 percent. And next year we're cutting our own budget by 6 percent. Well, we haven't done enough with that. I would challenge our own leadership, and I hope that we'll seize the day--seize the moment--and be able, because we would have the right to do this since we're cutting our own budgets. America doesn't know that, but we are.
Okay. All Federal Government, here's the deal. We're cutting our own budget in Congress by 5 percent this year, 6 percent next year, and we're doing it to every department In the country. We have the moral authority to do that since we're cutting our own. We should do that. Let's get spending under control. But the President uses, apparently, Rahm Emanuel's own philosophy about: Don't let a good crisis go to waste. So he's got this 155-page bill that he finally made available Monday night but that nobody has filed here in the House.
We need American jobs. We need American jobs now. I am convinced that if we eliminated the corporate tax altogether, you would hear a gigantic sucking sound, I believe Mr. Perot used to say, of manufacturers leaving other countries and flocking back to America, making more income than they had in the past, because for the first time--Donald Trump is a sharp man. He has made a lot of money. He has advocated that we put a 25 percent tariff on everything we buy from China.
If you studied the situation and understand the treaties--I don't like most of them, but if you look at what we've done, if we set a 25 percent tariff on everything America buys from China, we have violated a number of contracts and agreements. There's penalty phases to that. We start a trade war. I don't think China wins, but I know we don't either. I don't think anybody wins a trade war that that would start.
So inspired by Donald Trump saying, Why don't we put a 25 percent tariff on everything we buy from China--and I've talked to Art Laffer. He likes the idea. He's got some other alternatives as well, but one of them is you eliminate the corporate tax altogether. I really think it's one of the most insidious taxes in America because people have had to be sold a bill of goods to believe that you won't have to pay it. We're going to make these evil, greedy corporations do it.
And I will admit to you, sometimes unions are very helpful because greed does take over. But the thing is, if you eliminate the corporate tax, who's been paying that? The consumers and lower wage earners in those corporations. In some cases, there are studies that have indicated that. But it's the consumers that have to pay the corporate tax. If a corporation doesn't pass that tax on, they can't stay in business.
If you eliminate the corporate tax, you'll have jobs flooding back into America, and you'll have more people paying income tax. The Laffer curve won't be zero taxes on this side with zero revenue. It will be zero corporate tax. But even at the same tax levels, you will have dramatic increases in the Federal revenue because so many more people will be employed, things will be going well, and the economy will have a jump-start like we've never seen before.
So after nobody else would file an American Jobs Act, as the President proposed, and having examined it over and over in the last couple of days, having checked today at noon to see if anybody had the nerve to file this disastrous bill that will kill jobs, run up the price of gasoline and oil and make everybody's life more miserable, more government intrusion into broadcast, more government intrusion into financing things--not Fannie or Freddie because we've still got them around, but a new infrastructure financing authority--I realize this is a disaster for America.
So I filed not a 115-page bill but actually a 2-page bill today at about 1:20, and it says: To amend the Internal Revenue Code of 1986 to repeal the corporate income tax. Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America and Congress assembled. This Act may be cited as the ``American Jobs Act of 2011.'' It repeals the corporate income tax, repeals the alternative minimum tax, and there will be so many more people paying income tax, people will not believe the kind of money that will flow into the Federal Government, not that that's a good thing, but we can at least pay down our debt if we're responsible.
I'm so excited that the Tea Party is getting fired up. I see people from all races, all walks of life in the Tea Party. The one thing they seem to have in common is they're paying income tax, and they're tired of carrying half of the country on their backs. So this is a start, I believe--it is a jobs bill--and you will see jobs flood this country, and we'll get on track.
In the few minutes I have left, let me just tell you about a man that probably had the most influence on my life behind my father. His name was Sam Parker. There have been wonderful men in my life, women in my life, teachers in my life that affected me.
Sam Parker was hired by the Mount Pleasant School Board in 1952 to be a coach and to teach history. He was the head coach of the Mount Pleasant Tigers football team. In 2 years' time, in 1953, he had led them to being undefeated after the first nine games. He turned the program around. He was a devoted Christian, belonged to the Methodist church there, started teaching Sunday school. His wife, Norween, was the librarian at the junior high.
After nine games, we went to play Sulphur Springs, and people were saying, This looks like the best team in 3A, in Texas; they very well could win the State. They went to Sulphur Springs. Some team members told me it was their fault; they didn't take it serious enough, and they lost by one touchdown. That was Friday night. Monday morning, the school board fired Sam Parker.
Then he and his wife had a tough decision. They believed that God had called them to Mount Pleasant to plant their roots, invest their lives, and change America from that small place. Well, he did the unthinkable. He stayed and taught American history after being fired as head football coach.
And 7 years later, I met him in a park recreation program he put on for young kids in the public park down there each summer. I worked with him one summer as a teenager with the kids. He taught more kids how to play baseball in Mount Pleasant during those years than anybody else in town. He was my scoutmaster. He had a troop there. He was my scoutmaster through my becoming an Eagle Scout there at Mount Pleasant, and he taught me American history. He continued to teach Sunday school.
The man that coached 2 years at Mount Pleasant High School changed Mount Pleasant in an incredible way. He was still alive in 1991. Before he died, they renamed the football field Sam Parker Field. He taught me American history. He served in World War II. He loved this country. His son was my best friend--is still a dear friend.
Those are the kinds of people that have changed America. Those are the kinds of people who are the reason we have been blessed like we've been blessed, And if we don't have more people willing to put pettiness aside, goofy ideas that enrich their cronies, goofy ideas that increase power for some people and get back to what made America great, we're going to lose this country. As Ben Franklin said in 1787, we will become a byword down through future generations because we had the greatest country ever given to mankind, and we became irresponsible and lost it.
It's time for major changes.
With that, I yield back the balance of my time.