The Congressional Record is a unique source of public documentation. It started in 1873, documenting nearly all the major and minor policies being discussed and debated.
“STUDENT LOANS” mentioning the U.S. Dept of Labor was published in the House of Representatives section on pages H6153-H6159 on July 27, 2010.
The publication is reproduced in full below:
STUDENT LOANS
The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of January 6, 2009, the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Gohmert) is recognized for 60 minutes.
Mr. GOHMERT. Mr. Speaker, it's always an honor to be on this floor. But at times it gets very difficult hearing positions put as being mine which were not mine.
I would like to point out, for example, about student loans. I have student loans. We gave up--well, I won't even get into that. The only asset my wife and I have left is our home so that we could have the honor of being public servants.
We've got a lot of student loans, and I cannot imagine a worse scenario than having to come begging to an administration that we already see punishes Republican States, Republican communities, and beg the administration for a student loan, because there is no one else that makes student loans besides the government.
There were people that fought a revolution to avoid having the government, the King, make all the calls on who got to be educated, well-educated, that is, and who got to be property owners, who got to be well-to-do. They fought a revolution so that we would have the chance, the opportunity to at least succeed ourselves without having a government pick the winners and losers. That was the last thing they wanted.
Patrick Henry talked about that. Is life so dear and peace so sweet that it can be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God.
They did not want the government to tell them what they could have and not have, what they could do and not do, who could have their children educated and who couldn't. And we have grown into a government that tells everybody everything they have to do.
And now, though some of us read those disastrous health care bills, others are just now finding out the things we tried to warn about: that it was not about health care, it was about the GRE, the Government Running Everything.
So now we find out in the news what some of us already knew. Gee, people are surprised to find out the government, under that disastrous health care bill, so-called, will keep everybody's records.
And then people were surprised to find out that the health care czar says we may require everyone to have a body mass index, so we know who all is fat in this country and who isn't, who's more fat than others. That's the government's business? It wasn't after the revolution.
They didn't want the government to say who could eat what and who couldn't eat this and that. My gracious. They got upset over a tea tax. If they could only see what's happened now.
But, my friends are honorable people. So are they all, all honorable people. Come not to praise this country. Apparently, we're coming to bury it and to start with a new country where the government controls everything.
Boy, Shakespeare could have a day with what's going on now.
The government, our friend the government, is going to tell us who gets health care. We tried to warn people that if this health care bill passed, it would mean rationing. It passes, signed into law, all kinds of joyous occasions, and then we find out the President puts in charge the ration king. It shouldn't have surprised anybody. The President himself said to that dear lady at the White House, tea party precedent, whatever they tried to bill it as, when she said, what about my mother? She had a pacemaker put in, and she's had all these additional years of really quality life. And the President ends up, after stammering around for a while saying, maybe we'd been better off to just tell your mom to take a pain pill. Those were his words. Maybe we'd have been better off telling her to take a pain pill.
I don't want the government to have that kind of power. Your mom lives, your mom dies. You live, you die.
Was the revolution for nothing but 200 years?
And now we've left all personal responsibility. We don't want personal responsibility. We're going to let the government tell us who can have a college-educated child and who can't.
We've seen what happened under this majority with the African Americans who had come begging in this city saying, please don't end the voucher program that was started under the Republicans. We weren't sure about it.
One dear lady was talking about her children, how one had been brutalized, but others had been able to go to a good school, a private school because they got a voucher, and it allowed them the freedom to have their child as educated as any rich Democrat in this city.
But apparently, as Clarence Thomas points out, and I can't do his book justice, ``My Grandfather's Son,'' he talked about being raised in a poor, poor African American community by loving grandparents who had very little. And he talked about his grandfather pointing out that some snakes, you don't have to worry so much about because you see them. They make a big deal if they're going to try to bite you from the front. But you have to worry about those that will sneak up on you, act like they're no big deal, just kind of blend in, and all of a sudden they bite you.
And that's what he talks about, as I understood him to talk about this soft form of discrimination. You know, we're going to help you. We're going to provide for you. We're going to take care of you. But don't have a thought of your own because if you dare, as a minority, to have a thought of your own and try to rise above your circumstances on your own, we're going to slap you down. And that, as he talks about in his book, is the kind of discrimination that can hurt worse than any kind.
The liberals who would talk to him, and you could tell they only wanted to talk about sports, or how he had been mistreated as a poor black growing up in America; whereas others, he began to notice, as a radical liberal himself, Clarence Thomas in the early days, bitter about what he had been through, began to notice that conservatives would talk to him and wanted to know his opinion about a lot of different things, including politics.
And he began to see that soft discrimination from liberals. Yeah, we'll help you. We'll provide for you, but you've got to do what we tell you, because if you dare to have a thought of your own, if you dare to think for yourself, if you dare to try to rise above your circumstances, we'll slap you down.
{time} 2200
As he said during those hearings, it was an electronic lynching that he got.
And what's tragic through it all, when you go back and review his incredible school record, growing up with the poverty he did, the man had and has a brilliant intellect, but you wouldn't know it from the liberals. They were out to slap him down.
And here you have African American mothers coming to Congress saying, Please, don't let the voucher program go. Allow us not to have our kids educated where they can be shot and be part of gangs, but where they can go and have a uniform and get a great education and end up being very wealthy or very powerful down the road, much like the President himself did.
Why wouldn't you want that for every child. Regardless of the race, creed, color, nationality, why wouldn't you want that for the child? Give them a voucher. Let them chose what school they can go to so they don't have to worry about their child being shot, killed, brutalized by gangs.
You want to talk about what this majority did? They struck that program down and condemned minorities in this city back to the poor schools from which they came. Don't you dare try to rise above your circumstances. We want you back in the poor schools where you will have to rely totally on us. Why not let them reach their God-given potential? Slapping them down.
And our friends across the aisle want to come in here and trash-mouth Republicans because we had concerns about the government taking over all of the student loan business. Yes, I do, and I always will. The government gets to tell us who's going to get a loan, whose child gets a college education? Yes, I've got a problem with that.
One of our friends across the aisle says it's like a car wobbling down the aisle or the street, he said. And people on our side of the aisle, he says, don't even want to try to fix it. Well, guess who set it to wobbling? Our friends across the aisle. And guess what? I am so sick and tired about hearing all of this trash mouth of the last 2 years of the Bush Presidency and how terrible the last year of the Bush Presidency was and how bad the last 2 years of the Bush Presidency was, because guess who was in charge? It sure wasn't George W. Bush. He was over there in the executive branch. But the Constitution makes clear that the people who run the country will be the Congress. That the President down at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue, right down that way, he can't appropriate one dime for any program. It has to come from the Congress.
So what happened? Our friends across the aisle appropriately complained that during the Bush early years the Republicans got giddy and began spending too much, began to have a $160 billion annual deficit in their budget. And so our friends across the aisle said, Throw them out. Put us in. They're overspending. We'll fix things.
And so the voters appropriately said, Republicans, you have been overspending. We loved you in 1995, 1996, 1997, 1998, 1999, 2000, when you, not President Clinton--he was in the office. He fought the Republican Congress kicking and screaming. But when they would have enough votes over here, he couldn't stop them, vetoed a few things. When he couldn't stop the Congress, they had folks across the aisle that realized they wouldn't get reelected if they didn't vote for balanced budgets, then the Republican Congress brought President Clinton around.
And that's why I love the comment from my colleague across the aisle about the Clinton administration. He said, There were problems except for the blip during the Clinton administration. That's right. There was 4 years of Democrat control in this House as they brought our financial situation closer and closer to the day we are now. And as my Democratic colleague pointed out, there was a blip during the Clinton administration after the Contract with America when Republicans took over, and they balanced the budget. The President can't do that. This Congress has to do that.
And what do we have to show this year? No budget. As one of our Democratic colleagues said back in 2006, If you can't put together a budget, you can't govern. This year, they didn't put together a budget. So according to our Democratic friend, they cannot govern.
I'm proud to be joined by my friend, Congresswoman Virginia Foxx, and I'll be proud to yield to her such time that she needs.
Ms. FOXX. Thank you, Congressman Gohmert. I wasn't subjected to listening to the entire last hour, but I am responding to your email.
We know for a long time that our colleagues who just preceded us have often been on the floor and made some really outrageous comments where they rewrite history and present things as facts that just can't be backed up with facts. And in response to your plea to come share some of the truth telling with you, I'm glad to join you this evening. I did bring a few facts with me that I want to share.
But I heard the last 5 minutes or so of our colleagues, and I was really astounded at some of the words that they used, like their ``pro-
growth agenda'' and how our tax-cutting policy was not paid for and how they did everything under PAYGO except very, very rare emergencies where they had to go outside of PAYGO and that we were so irresponsible that we would just not vote for the PAYGO bill.
I find it really like the book ``1984.'' I would say to people, if you haven't read the book ``1984'' or if you haven't read it in a long time, take some time to read it, because what you're seeing here from our colleagues on the other side of the aisle is ``1984'' being played out in the year 2010.
I do want to bring some facts to it, and I'm glad, Madam Speaker, that Congressman Gohmert is explaining the fact that under the Clinton years, which we hear so much about and which I, on the Rules Committee, am often having to correct various chairmen, such as the chairman of the Budget Committee when he came to the Rules Committee who bragged about the surplus at the end of the Clinton years. And I asked him, well, who was in charge of the Congress the last 6 years of President Clinton's administration? And he really didn't want to have to say, but he had to finally admit it was Republicans.
And then he talked about the terrible situation under the last 2 years of the Bush administration. I had to again say, Now, remind me again who was in charge of the Congress under the last 2 years of the Bush administration. And of course it was our colleagues across the aisle, the Democrats.
And we have to constantly remind them, as my colleague from Texas has done, that the President is not able to spend money. The President doesn't set up the appropriations bills. It's the House of Representatives that's charged with that in the Constitution. The President can veto a bill, and the Congress can override the veto.
But, you know, our colleagues across the aisle wouldn't even put in an appropriations bill in the last year of President Bush's administration because they were afraid that President Bush would veto those bills, and they wouldn't be able to override them.
{time} 2210
And they wouldn't be able to override them because I agree with Mr. Gohmert that Republicans did lose their way for a short period of time when President Bush was President and the Republicans were in control of Congress. They spent too much money. When I came here and Mr. Gohmert came here in 2005, we brought that message from our districts and our colleagues from all across the country brought that message, and actually what a lot of people don't know is that we actually cut spending in 2005 and 2006, but we get absolutely no credit for it.
Let me say, contrary to what our colleagues were saying, I did hear them talk about what the deficit was when President Bush left office. The little piece of fact that they left out was they were in charge of the Congress the last 2 years of Mr. Bush's administration. When they took over the Congress in January 2007, the deficit happened to be $458 billion and was on a trajectory to go to zero again. That would have been wonderful.
Now, let me say, that's more of a deficit than I wanted to see, but it was not the trillion dollar deficit that they talk about which they created in the last 2 years of President Bush's administration. At the end of 2008, the deficit was $1.4 trillion. In 2 years, the deficit quadrupled. It went from $458 billion to $1.4 trillion, the largest deficit ever. And what is it going to be this year? It's going to be the largest deficit ever again and be even larger than the deficit that they created in 2008.
My colleague was talking about the health care bill that passed with only one Republican voting for it in the House, and we're all very proud of that. Republicans are very proud of the fact that we all voted against the health care bill the first time. The second time, no Republicans voted for it. And what does that health care bill do exactly? It's been extolled as such a virtuous thing but it imposes
$569 billion in new and higher taxes on businesses and individuals, and the cost for this health care overall bill jumps to more than $1.2 trillion.
The American people are very concerned about where these folks who are in control--I will not say anything about leadership on their side--but they're in control, they're in charge, and they are leading us down a path of ruin in this country.
Mr. Gohmert talked about the education situation in Washington. Basically, the trend of these folks, the student loans, what to do about education in Washington, the health care bill, everything that has been done by our colleagues across the aisle, Mr. Speaker, has been to put the government in control of our lives. Republicans don't believe in that. That's not an American ideal. We're the freest country in the world. That's what's made us the greatest country in the world over the years, and we will remain the greatest country in the world as soon as we can replace our colleagues across the aisle and put this government on a sound footing economically.
What's threatening our freedom is the control and the bills that have been passed that say government knows best. The government bureaucracy is what they believe in. We believe in the American people. We believe in government of, by, and for the American people, not government to control the American people.
So we have to do something to stop this slide that is occurring, and I want to give just one little example, if my colleague from Texas would let me. There is a Web site called republicanwhip.house.gov which has many of these items on it, and I would invite people watching to go to this Web site. I'm just going to share with you something that our Republican whip has put out called Weekly Waste Watch; Week 52 is this one:
``$2 Million to Hire Goats (not people) and Fight Weeds.
``Benewah County, Idaho, recently received a $2 million Stimulus grant for weed control. Heyburn State Park, located within the county, will use a portion of the $2 million to fight weeds across Plummer Creek. Their solution? Renting 540 goats to graze on the weeds.
``The South African Boer goat is the `latest weapon' in Benewah County's fight against invasive weeds. The goats have already been put to work munching on weeds like knapweed, tansy, and St. John's wort. Each goat eats about 3\1/2\ pounds of weeds per day and should be finished pruning the creek shoreline within the next 2 weeks.''
Now, this is the cost of the dollar per goat per day, and with 2 weeks and the taxpayer expenditure on goat employment, it should come to roughly $7,560.
``Idaho's unemployment rate is currently at 8.8 percent. While invasive weeds on State park land may be a problem, it is unclear how fighting their growth by employing 540 goats and two foreign herders''--by the way, the herders are not Americans--``will get Americans back to work.''
This is the way they think you should spend money. They're out of touch with reality. Most of them have never worked a job in their lives. Many of them have been in Washington 40-plus years. They have no idea what the average American is doing out there. They don't go home. They won't hold town hall meetings. They're out of touch. And to provide this kind of money to take goats to eat weeds, when we have a 9.5 percent unemployment rate--it is probably closer to 16 percent--is really a shame.
I'd be embarrassed. I would be embarrassed if I had voted for that stimulus package. I'd be embarrassed if I'd voted for the health care bill. I'd be embarrassed if I'd voted for the bailouts of the automobile companies. I'd be embarrassed if I'd done any of the things that our colleagues across the aisle have done in the last 3\1/2\ years, almost 4 years that they've been in control while our economy has been going in the ditch. Talk about things going in the ditch. They've taken the economy in the ditch, and they're totally out of touch with the American people.
Mr. GOHMERT. If I could reclaim my time, going to the June employment numbers, I have an article here. I call him a friend. I hope he would. Mallory Factor had written an article entitled, ``The Truth About June Employment Numbers,'' and Mallory talks about the spin that our friends across the aisle are creating, trying to make it sound great about the unemployment numbers.
And as he says, ``All this spin is supposed to make us respond positively: `Wow! Happy days are here again. The recovery must be really gaining steam.' And we are supposed to conclude that maybe we don't need to throw out the Democrats in the midterm elections after all.''
Mallory goes on and says, ``The June jobs numbers show unemployment falling .2 percent to 9.5 percent.
{time} 2220
This may sound, or this may seem, like an improvement until you realize that this decrease is almost all caused by an additional 611,000 Americans giving up on finding jobs last month. When people stop looking for work, unemployment percentages go down even though the economy has not improved and may have even gotten worse.''
He goes on and says, ``Not only is unemployment the lowest in the government sector of all industry sectors in America, Federal civilian employees make a stunning 30 to 40 percent more in total compensation than similarly skilled private workers, according to the Heritage Foundation.''
Now, further, he says, basically, at the end of 2007, ``The Federal Government's civilian payroll has actually increased by 240,000 to 2.2 million workers, excluding Census and postal workers.''
We know last month, in June, there was all this hoop-de-do about 431,000 new jobs; and that would ordinarily be fantastic, except that 411,000 of them were temporary Census workers. Anyway, Mallory goes on and says, ``This leaves a smaller private sector supporting an ever larger public sector. And that can't be good for the recovery.''
I yield to the gentlewoman.
Ms. FOXX. Well, I happen to have here a piece put out by the Joint Economic Committee. This is a committee made up of Democrats and Republicans, and I am sorry I don't have a chart to show it. I know there is one somewhere around here, but there is a figure here that Federal Government jobs from February 2009, when President Obama became President, to June 2010, the number of jobs in the Federal Government increased by 405,000. The number of private sector jobs decreased by 3,261.
When the stimulus package was passed, Dr. Christina Romer, who is his economic adviser, chief economic adviser, promised that the unemployment rate would not go above 8 percent and that a tremendous number of private sector jobs would be created.
I do have this, and I want to try to show it if I can here, it shows that under a fully controlled Republican government, Federal Government, that is with Republicans in charge of Congress and a Republican President, 6,690,000 million jobs were created. Under a fully Democrat-controlled Congress, we have lost 6,403,000 jobs.
You know, again, facts are stubborn things. These are coming from the Obama administration's own Labor Department. And what caused this to happen? It's cutting taxes and letting the American people keep more of the money they have earned.
Our colleagues across the aisle believe that the money, all the money in the economy belongs to the government; and that if you have a tax cut, it is the government giving something to the citizens. The government does create money in the sense it prints money. However, the government doesn't create wealth. The government destroys wealth.
Regulations and government spending destroy wealth. It's only when you allow the American people to keep their money do you see job growth, and we are talking about the lapsing of tax cuts that were passed in 2001, 2003, occurring January 1; and those tax increases are going to hit every American. They keep saying, oh, it's only going to hit the wealthiest; they are going to hit every American. It's going to destroy even more jobs.
And as you have pointed out, and our friend Tom McClintock from California does so eloquently, he points out the similarities between what's happening now with this Democratic administration and what happened under Franklin Roosevelt in the Depression, how these policies made the Depression worse. What they are doing at every stage is making things worse.
Mr. GOHMERT. I appreciate the point of the gentlewoman.
I would submit that it appeared that after the Republicans not only had Congress, as they took over in January of 2005, but then also had the White House beginning January of 2001, that there apparently is a giddiness from controlling both Houses of Congress and the White House. Because when there was a Democratic President, Bill Clinton, the economy was going to Hades in a hand basket, and that's when the Republicans took the majority, November in 1994.
So Republicans took over, and they fought tooth and nail against the Clinton administration. They succeeded, despite the best efforts of the Clinton administration, in balancing the budget and bringing us to the point where things were balanced despite the President's desire to spend out of control.
But then once the White House was obtained, January 2001, the Republican Congress quit being as diligent. It was as if the Republicans did not want to tell the President ``no.'' From the other standpoint, the Bush administration didn't want to say ``no'' to Democrats or Republicans so there were no vetoes for, I think, at least 6 years or more of President Bush's two terms.
But what we have seen since our friends across the aisle had the House, the Senate and the White House, is giddiness, dizziness beyond anything anybody could have ever have imagined. Where we got beat up where it was $160 billion deficit in a year, our friends think nothing of having 10 times that deficit in a year.
I am just shocked because I remember so vividly people on the other side of the aisle complaining, appropriately, about not having a balanced budget, that I am shocked that they could stand up and act like they haven't created the biggest deficits in American history in a year and a half, and going back the 2 years before that. It shocked me that once our friends across the aisle took the majority November of 2006, that their runaway budgets and deficits were far more than anything we had done in our first 2 years here in 2005 and 2006, and I am talking about my friend, Ms. Foxx, having both been elected in 2004.
So I don't want to return to the same overspending from 2001 through 2006, but I absolutely know we have got to stop the craziness from the last 3\1/2\ years of spending with our Democrat friends in charge. I would just have to submit, with the runaway spending, and the damage that was done to our energy programs, beginning in 2007 and 2008, as the Democrats took control, to our economy, to our private sector, the additional requirements that were rammed down from this Congress down the private sector's throat, when they took over in January of 2007 and, again, in 2008, that I would submit to you that either our Democratic friends who took the majority in January of 2007 need to stand up and take credit for what they did in 2007 and 2008, or they need to admit that they were the most incompetent Congress in the history of the country.
Because you can't have it any way but one of those two ways. Either you intentionally cause what you did in 2007 and 2008, or you were just so incompetent you need to be put out of your misery, let out of the majority, so that we can go on and try to straighten things up.
{time} 2230
But to sit here, and having heard friends across the aisle say, gee--
and I believe this is the quote--Republicans don't want to reduce dependency on foreign oil, it just flies all over me. How could anybody have ears and think that. All the people I know on this side of the aisle want to end dependency on foreign oil. We want to end dependency on our enemies.
And let me just add, I'm tired of paying our enemies, not only through oil purchases--heck, the New England area just made a 20-year contract this year with Yemen to provide liquefied natural gas that will come rolling up in Boston Harbor. And they're hoping--and I imagine there are a few people praying--that there will not be a stowaway from Yemen, one of those terrorists that they were able to get released from Guantanamo that went back to terrorism in Yemen. They're hoping they won't be onboard that ship to blow it up and take half the city with it.
Now, that does not make sense. I want to end any dependency on foreign oil because I know, having been a member of the military, having had years of military history, having been in the military 4 years, I know if you cannot produce, as a country, everything you need in war, and especially energy, you can't win a serious war, you can't.
Some people are not aware of how dangerous the Battle of the Bulge was at the end of World War II. Some think it was all over. That was not true. Many historians believe, and there is evidence to support it, that if the Germans had had enough gasoline, the Battle of the Bulge, the bulge that was being pushed to the west through the American front--good old Montgomery said, I've got the back back here. I'll stay in the rear in case they break through. It would have been too late if they had gotten Montgomery, but they ran out of gas.
My personal belief, those incidences when the German Army got so close to American supplies of gasoline and through different flukes did not go ahead and take the supply depots I think were acts of God. As a result, they didn't have the gasoline they needed. Patton was able to move in, others were able to move in, and they stopped the bulge. But the intent was working to drive Americans back to the Atlantic Ocean, and they ran out of gasoline.
Now we're to the point where we are so dependent on foreign oil, if we had a major war we had to win, we would need steel. We would need energy, gasoline, things to power our jets, the ability to make jets like we used to. You would need wood products. You would be amazed at how much the military requires in the way of wood product. But all of those things you need to produce yourself--the plastics, all those things--in order to sustain an attack against your own soil, and we're not in a very good position right now.
It also was so infuriating to hear a colleague across the aisle say Republicans are constantly voting against efforts to build back manufacturing jobs in this country. I know that so many of my friends across the aisle never met a tax they didn't like, but some of us, in a bipartisan group, went across to China some years back, and one of the purposes was to talk to manufacturers about, Why did you pick up your industry and move it to China? I figured, in advance, the number one answer we would probably get was the labor was so much cheaper, you don't have to deal with labor unions, that kind of thing. That was an attraction, as was fewer regulations, but the number one reason we heard why whole industries left, took manufacturing jobs from the United States and went to China, was how much cheaper the corporate tax was, less than half of what we have here.
I talked to major injuries--industries--they have been injured--about what would happen if we cut our corporate tax down to 17 percent like China. I've heard repeatedly, We would be back in America in no time. And yet, what do our friends across the aisle talk about? Let's heap more and more and more tax on these mean, nasty corporations. There are corporations like BP who have done wrong and deserve to suffer the consequences, but corporations provide jobs, small businesses provide jobs.
Small businesses, so many of them are subchapter S corporations, and yet we hear from both the majority and from the President that they want to hammer those people with higher taxes. Those are the people that create the jobs. And the insidious thing about corporate tax--
apparently it's a secret that the other side does not want people to know--is no corporation stays in business if they cannot pass that corporate tax onto their customers or clients, no corporation. So it's an insidious tax because it's paid by the folks we're trying to help, who are the working folks, the working poor in America who are getting those prices heaped higher and higher on them. And they're told, Oh, don't worry, we'll make the corporations pay. And the corporations, to stay in business, have to keep passing it down to those poor folks that can't pay anymore.
And so in talking to folks, some people across the aisle say let's erect trade barriers, and yet that would trigger so many problems internationally in trade, so many punitive measures against the United States, when what we could do is eliminate corporate taxes, and nobody in the world could compete with how cheap our prices would be produced. That would explode the economy upward. And as Art Laffer, Ronald Reagan's economic advisor--boy, I sure wish he were advising this President. As he pointed out, you can only increase the percentage of taxes so far, and each increase, to a certain extent, will increase the revenues in the Federal Treasury. But if you increase it too far, then you start hurting the economy, which then, in turn, starts decreasing the revenues into the Federal Treasury.
So if you want to maximize the tax dollars coming into the government so our friends across the aisle can continue to buy safe havens in China for rare dogs and cats, continue to buy safe havens for cranes in foreign countries, continue to pay billions to Pakistan so they can turn around and reward the Taliban that we had pretty much defeated but they're on the rise again, if we want to keep paying enemies of our friends, like the enemies of Israel, all this money, then we need to have higher revenues by the Federal Treasury. And that's going to require not raising taxes--we're too high already--but lowering.
And I know this is going to offend some of my friends across the aisle, but you're going to have to lower taxes on the people that are actually paying them. I know that's an affront to some people. They think, well, the people that are paying taxes must be wealthy or they wouldn't be paying taxes, so they should not be entitled to tax cuts. We should give the tax cuts to people that aren't paying them. So I know it's serious. I know it's an affront to some of my friends, but you have to lower taxes on the people paying the taxes or the tax cuts don't explode the economy and create new jobs.
I yield to my friend, Ms. Foxx.
Ms. FOXX. Well, I want to give a little statistic from the Small Business Committee, which has put out a packet of material that I think is very useful.
Since January of 2009, President Obama and Congressional Democrats have enacted into law gross tax increases totaling more than $670 billion, or more than $2,100 for every man, woman and child in the United States. The list of tax increases includes at least 14 violations of the President's pledge not to raise taxes on Americans earning less than $200,000 for singles and $250,000 for married couples.
{time} 2240
To back up what you were saying, according to the Congressional Budget Office, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, if we could have a full repeal of the death tax, we could create 1.5 million jobs and increase small business investment capital by more than $1.6 trillion each year.
Now, you're talking about the fact that, again, our colleagues across the aisle don't really understand that people don't have to be wealthy to be paying these high taxes, and we know that, if they allow the tax cuts from 2001, 2003 to expire, it is going to be the largest tax increase in the history of this country, and that is where we are going to hurt the economy tremendously because of that, and these are the people actually paying taxes, as you said.
The President wants to say he gave a tax cut to 95 percent of the American people. Well, it wasn't a cut. It was a little rebate, as I recall, and the tax rates were not cut at all. But people can be persuaded to think that they were given a tax cut when it was only a rebate, and it is their money to begin with. It also went to people who paid no taxes, as you said, and had no tax liability, and we have things that actually give people more money back than they have actually paid in taxes.
Where is that coming from? From the people who pay the taxes.
Mr. GOHMERT. If I could reclaim my time on that point, apparently, my friends across the aisle do not want to recall, but the truth is that the rebate that was $40 billion of the stimulus package, of the Democratic Congress stimulus package of January 2008, which I did not support and was totally against. It was $40 billion out of $160 billion, and it was going as so-called ``rebates'' to people who didn't pay any taxes.
Yes, President Bush was in office, but the Democratic majority in the House and Senate passed that stimulus bill with my fussing about it and complaining about it. In fact, after President Bush's State of the Union Address, he was coming up the aisle over here, and I asked him a question. I didn't realize the microphone was picking my question up, but I asked:
By the way, Mr. President, how do you give a rebate to people who didn't put any ``bate'' in?
The question still stands. How do you give a rebate to somebody who didn't put something in to begin with? It's not a rebate. It's a giveaway. You are redistributing wealth from people who have worked hard, who have earned it and who have paid taxes on it so that people here in our majority party could give it away to others who they wanted to give it to.
That does not encourage job growth. It does something that encouraged me to leave the bench and run for Congress, and that is because this Congress was incentivizing people to never achieve their God-given potential, and Congress should never be in that business. We should incentivize people to do their best and to become all they can be.
I know my friend Ms. Foxx, having been president of a university, has spent a lifetime working to try to help people reach their potential. That's what we all ought to be doing. You know, when you have 30, 40 percent of high school students dropping out and never finishing high school, those kids are going to be condemned to never reaching the potential that they have.
Why wouldn't you want to give vouchers to kids and say, ``Go get the very best education you can possibly get''?
``We don't care how poor the neighborhood is that you're growing up in. If you want to go where the rich Democrats' children go to school, here is a voucher. Go there. Get as good an education as they have. Don't let people try to push you down as they did Clarence Thomas when he was growing up. Let's help you reach your God-given potential. Go where you can get the best education.''
What happens when you do that?
Schools know they've got to get better because, if they don't get better, no one is going to choose to go to their schools. So they have to be more picky about the teachers they hire. They have to be really good teachers or nobody is going to want to have those teachers. That's kind of the American way, and that is kind of the way America became the greatest nation in the history of the world. We are in danger of losing that. It is a dangerous time.
My friends across the aisle have continued to say that Republicans hope President Obama fails. I hope President Obama succeeds. I would love it if he became the most successful President in helping people reach the great American dream of any President in our history, but if he continues to try to have the government take over all of the private sector, if he continues to take over health care so that his czar, who is unaccountable to the Congress, can tell people which person lives and which person dies, I sure don't want that to succeed. I want him to succeed as a great President.
There are the words of George Washington when he resigned his commission. It was the only time in history anybody has ever led a revolution as the head of the military, has ever won the revolution as the head of the military, and has resigned and gone home. He sent this beautiful resignation letter.
In it, at the end, he says, ``I now make it my earnest prayer that God would have you and the state over which you preside in his holy protection.''
He goes down toward the end and says, in talking about God, ``And finally, that He would most graciously be pleased to dispose us all to do justice, to love mercy and to demean ourselves with that charity, humility, and specific temper of mind which were the characteristics of the Divine Author of our blessed religion, and without a humble imitation of whose example in these things we can never hope to be a happy nation.''
George Washington says, if President Obama wants to have a happy nation, he needs to inspire this nation to have the characteristics of the ``Divine Author'' of our blessed religion and without a humble imitation of whose example in these things we can never hope to be a happy nation.
We are in trouble. We are in big trouble in this country, and it does not help when the government takes over health care.
There is an article here, dated July 24, in the New York Times:
``Britain Plans to Decentralize Health Care.'' It talks about the aim now is clear ``to shift control of England's $160 billion annual health budget from a centralized bureaucracy to doctors at the local level.''
Do you want to talk about Republicans not being in support of education? I am not in support of this educational bureaucracy. Think about what individual school districts in America could do if you took the billions of dollars that this Education Department has lavished on itself over the years and if you put that money to work hiring good teachers, not administrators who are simply going to have to respond to all of the bureaucratic redtape put out by the Federal Government, which requires bureaucratic redtape and bureaucratic jobs in each State capital, which require bureaucratic redtape and new administrators in every school district.
It is time for the madness to stop. It is time to put the money where it will do the most good and to quit spending the rest of it.
I have a bill, the U.N. Voting Accountability bill, that I will bring to the floor with a discharge petition in September, when we come back. I am hoping my friends on the other side of the aisle, as well as friends on this side of the aisle, will sign on. It is very simple. It will end what has happened as to our apparently having given, according to the recent reports, billions of dollars to Pakistan, billions of dollars which have found their way into helping the people who are killing American soldiers.
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We're paying people indirectly to kill American soldiers. As I've said repeatedly, you don't have to pay people to hate you. They'll do it for free.
My U.N. Voting Accountability Act says any nation that votes against the U.S. position on a contested vote more than half the time will receive no financial assistance from the United States the following year. Very simple. It eliminates those problems, because Pakistan's made very clear in the U.N. they're going to fight us and oppose everything we believe and hold dear.
I don't hope President Obama fails. I hope he will reach the stage of enlightenment that will allow him to see that every government that's tried these socialized efforts to take over car industries, manufacturing, banking, health care, always results in failure.
And it's time to get back to what George Washington described as the characteristic of the divine author of our blessed religion, without a humble imitation of whose example in these things we can never hope to be a happy nation.
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