their remarks and include therein extraneous material. ms. sutton: ms. woolsey of california, mrs. cosmos of florida, ms. kilroy of ohio, ms. kaptur of ohio, mr. johnson of georgia, mr. defazio of oregon, ms. sutton of ohio. the speaker pro tempore: without objection. . the speaker pro tempore: under the speaker's announced policy of january 6 2009. the following members are recognized for five minutes each. for what purpose does the gentlewoman from florida rise? the gentlewoman is recognized for five minutes. ms. ros-lehtinen: mr. speaker, last month, most americans filled out what is probably the most complicated and lengthy federal income tax return in our history. most everyone agrees that our nation's tax system is flawed and in need of considerable

reform. the tax code is so complex that more than 80% of individual taxpayers either use an accountant or a computer-based program. the i.r.s. estimates that americans spend 6.6 billion hours and $194 billion to comply with the tax code that has far too many complicated provisions which require special paperwork and detailed recordkeeping. our tax code has become more and more a complex, burdensome and expensive drag on the economy, which we can ill afford in the middle of a severe economic downturn and harms america's businesses' ability to compete in the global marketplace by discouraging saving, investing and risk taking. american workers are now asked to work for three full months to

pay for their annual federal, state and local taxes. it is totally unacceptable to require already stressed families to give up at least a quarter of their income to prop up an expanding federal bureaucracy while everyone else is making significant sacrifices. instead of providing tax relief to american households, some administration officials have proposed new tax schemes that will further burden small businesses and consumers. one of the worst of these is the european-style value-added tax, which would levy a complicated tax at each stage of manufacturing, thereby adding a hidden cost to the finished product. this is damaging not only to the consumer, but also to many industries involved in

manufacturing, which have been hard hit during this recession. instead of adding new taxes, congress should be focused on reforming the current tax structure. i join many of my colleagues in the house who have asked the chairman of the house ways and means committee, the gentleman from michigan, mr. levin, to schedule hearings on tax code simplification. the last major reform of the tax code took place over a quarter century ago, in 1986, and while far from perfect, helped reduce the harm inflicted on the economy in many ways. the guiding principles of the 1986 reform were that it must not increase the total tax burden while lowering individuals' and corporate tax rates. tax reform must not be used as a subterfuge for increasing taxes

for it complicates a difficult issue with questions about whether the combined tax burden should be higher or lower. mr. speaker, businesses and families need a stable and uncomplicated tax code. businesses need to know how high their taxes will be in future years and make decisions about hiring and expanding. families need to know how high their taxes will be before they make decisions about large expenditures. a constantly changing tax code makes it difficult for businesses and families to make these decisions. the tax code has become sufficiently complex and harmful that a major rewrite is in order. and if congress passes tax reform, it should consider making a commitment to keep the reformed tax code in place for as many years as possible. congress must remember the

sacrifices made by all of america's families. the american people need action that will break the barriers of an unfair and complicated tax system and congress must respond because the future health of the u.s. economy demands it. i thank the speaker for the time. the speaker pro tempore: the gentlelady yields back. ms. woolsey of california. for what purpose does gentlelady from ohio rise. ms. sutton: i ask unanimous consent to claim the time. the speaker pro tempore: without objection. ms. sutton: thank you, mr. speaker. today i rise as a proud co-sponsor in strong support of the america competes reauthorization act. as we recover from this recession, we must remain committed to ensuring that our students are properly educated in math and science to strengthen our nation's economic competitiveness. with the america competes reauthorization act, we will make targeted investments in

technology, science, math education and groundbreaking research. research leads to innovation. innovation leads to manufacturing new products. and manufacturing leads to good paying jobs. according to the alliance for american manufacturing, every manufacturing job in our country directly supports four additional jobs. this bill will support our manufacturers, many of which are small businesses, by improving access to credit with innovative technology federal loan guarantees. this bill improves the manufacturing extension partnership program by reducing the low--- the local cost share allowing manufacturing extension program centers like magnet in ohio, to leverage more funds. magnet, which is based out of cleveland, has leveraged management extension partnership funds to generate $10 million in

new investment and has created or retained over 400 jobs in my congressional district alone between 2005 and 2009. manufacturing extension partnership centers will help rejuvinate our manufacturing base by informing local community colleges of the skill sets local manufacturers seek. our workers must have the necessary job training to secure good paying jobs. we must invest in our students, our workers, our small businesses and our short, mid and long-term economic competitiveness. and that is exactly what our bill does. for these reasons, i am proud to co-sponsor the america competes reauthorization act. and when the bill is called up for a vote tomorrow, i urge a yes vote. and i yield back my time. the speaker pro tempore: the gentlelady yields back the balance of her time. the gentleman from north carolina. for what purpose does the

gentleman rise? mr. johnson: to address this body for five minutes. the speaker pro tempore: without objection. the gentleman is recognized. mr. johnson: thank you, mr. speaker. mr. speaker, i rise today with sadness to recognize fallen rockdale sheriff's deputy brian mahaffey. he was shot and killed in the line of duty while executing a search warrant in conyers, georgia. the deputy was shot, although he was wearing a bullet-proof vevt. this bullet entered at an unusual angle and as a result, he received a fatal gunshot wound. the deputy was only 28 years old. deputy mahaffey served his

community courageously and honorably. brian was not only a sheriff's deputy, but he was a husband. he was a father. he was a brother. and he was a son. he loved to fish. and he loved to work on cars. his friends often described him as a kind-hearted, genuine, sincere, loving person. it is difficult to see a life cut short, mr. speaker, by such a reprehensible act, but the people of the 4th district of georgia are thankful for his love of serving others and protecting the community. i am deeply saddened at the loss of our fallen sheriff's deputy

brian mahaffey and our thoughts and prayers are with him and his family, his wife diana, two-year-old trenton and three month old daughter anniston and his brother and his parents terry and cindy. i hope they find comfort in this difficult time. when a law enforcement officer is killed in the line of duty, it is a loss that is felt by the people of georgia. we are a family and we have just lost a son. brian mahaffey was a here oove -- hero. i'm humbled by his service and his sacrifice. deputy mahaffey's duty was

protect and serve the citizens of rockdale county. thanks to law enforcement officers like brian, our nation is more secure. he routinely put his life on the line to defend those in rockdale county and his bravery resulted in his death. the 4th district has lost a dedicated deputy, a public servant, role model and family man. we must honor his memory with an unwillingness to surrender to crime and to lawlessness. and we must maintain our determination to bring justice to those who make us unsafe. i yield back the balance of my time, mr. speaker. the speaker pro tempore: the gentleman yields back the balance of his time. ms. cost moss from florida.

for what purpose does the gentlelady from ohio rise? >> ask to take the time. the speaker pro tempore: without objection. the lady from ohio is recognized. ms. kilroy: i rise today in strong support of the america competes reauthorization act, legislation that will create jobs, strengthen our commitment to innovative research and invest in education to keep our country competitive in the global economy. over the last century, america has been the leader in technological and scientific innovation. although other nations are making investments in their own research capabilities, we must rise to meet the challenge and ensure we remain the world's leader in innovation and learning and revitalizing our economy. i am part of the task force and i also hold hearings on this issue in my community and recently had the opportunity to

meet with executives from the silicon valley and they tell me that innovation and research and development is necessary to get america moving again in our economy and keep america the leader in technological and scientific innovation. other nations are making investments. america competes act will strengthen our manufacturing sector and guarantees small and medium-sized manufacturers that create products, supports research for advancements in manufacturing and supports the manufacturing extension manufacturing program so it can continue to meet the needs and challenges of manufacturers today. the america competes act makes investments in clean energy technologies that will create jobs and secure our long-term economic growth. as china, brazil and other countries make huge investments in this growing industrywe must ensure that our country

does not lose its competitive edge and fall behind in its technological capabilities. the america's competes act reauthorize eases the projects to support research and establishes energy innovation hubs to support collaboration research and advanced energy technology, building a workforce that will be competitive in the world's global marketplace and it requires advancement in science, technology, engineering and math education at all levels of our education system. the america competes act advances the noyce program to train secondary program to teach in high-needs school and provides grants to major in science, technology, engineering and math fields and establishes fellowships to lead the way in education research in these areas. it will strengthen the diversity

by science, technology, increasing participation of women and minorities in the classroom and workforce and increases funding for reauthorized funding by the department of energy office of science the largest supporter of research science. the natural science foundation and national institutes of technology with the intent of doubling funding they receive over the next 10 years. the research they support will create the innovative technologies of the future and drive students to become the scientists and engineers. invent tore of the year is a china shining example. his work makes a product called brain data possible. a medical device that allows people to control computers by their thoughts. this has incredible implications for par pliegeics confined to

wheelchairs and veterans. this is a research we need that leads to incredible innovation but will inspire students with the possibilities of what they can achieve as scientists and researchers thems. we have the key opportunity as the economic recovery takes hold to make essential investments that will keep our nation competitive and secure its long-term economic growth. the america competes act is supported by the u.s. chamber of commerce, the national association of manufacturers, the ohio business roundtable, the ohio state university and hundreds of businesses, professional societies, institutions of higher learning across the country. i'm proud to co-sponsor this bipartisan legislation and i urge my colleagues tomorrow when it comes for a vote to support the america competes act. thank you, mr. speaker. i yield back. the speaker pro tempore: the gentlelady yields back the

balance of her time. mr. moran of kansas. mr. burton of indiana. ms. kaptur of ohio. mr. paul of texas. mr. defazio of oregon. mr. garrett of new jersey. . under the speaker's announced policy january 6, 2009, the gentleman from missouri, mr. akin, is recognized for 60 minutes of the designee of the minority leader. mr. akin: mr. speaker, thank you very much for recognizing me and allowing us again on a wednesday evening to explore the interesting question that has certainly been much in the minds of americans over the last couple of years. that is the situation of jobs and our economy, particularly what is the connection between jobs and the economy and what's

going on that we have reason for hope, for things turning around, or not? and we continue as americans to ask, where are the jobs? because there are many, many people who are unemployed and many people who are unemployed for more than a year are no longer counted in our statistics which sut that the unemployment rate is -- which suggests that the unemployment rate is somewhere in that area. so the real unemployment rate is probably higher. that that's a reason for people to be concerned. if you have a job. if you don't have a job, it's not a matter of concern, it's a matter of a serious crisis. and there are many people who are struggling with that and we're going to take a look at that this eng and also take a look at -- evening and also take a look at what are the various factors that influence, the fact that we don't have jobs, whether we're doing the right or wrong things and also the curious phenomena that we're seeing now where, from a policy point of view, we're doing many things

that are very destructive to job creation and yet the economy seems to be coming back to some degree. what is that? what drives the economy he and why would wall street -- economy and why would wall street -- things are looking good for wall street when so many people are out of work. we're going to look at some of those questions this evening. starting off i have depicted here the lower part of this graph is the net jobs gained or lost. this centerline here is zero jobs. we haven't created any jobs, we haven't lost any jobs, if you see a bar that is near this centerline, this is going back to 1993, we come here, 2001 was the recession when i was first elected to congress, 2001 we were losing jobs. and you can see those, we inherited them, a recession, from the last days of the previous administration, george

bush came to office here, we were losing jobs and we had to do something to try to turn the economy around. you see, something was done, the economy turn around and now the next and last section of the graph is 2009 and you can see the tremendous number of jobs lost over here. the jobs lost again being the lines under the graph showing that these are thousands and thousands of jobs that are lost. so, this shows you, this graph here, shows the fact that we do have a great deal of job losses, the graph up above is a little bit more complicated. we don't need to get into that for the moment. and so how is it that this whole situation came to be and how did we get into the problems in the first place? well, it started some years ago for this particular recession. it was brought on, as you recall, you probably heard some discussion about the word acorn or about freddie and fannie, the

details of this whole situation may seem a little bit hazy to you, that's all right. a lot of things go on and it's hard to keep track of everything. but the recession really got started because of a combination of several things that happened. by and large, if you're looking at somebody to blame you should be looking here. you should be looking at the federal government. it was policies of the federal government that created this problem, the unemployment problem and the turndown in the economy. well, exactly what happened? well, what happened was, gag back many years, people got the idea that it would be a good idea for banks to loan money to people so people could buy houses. but there are some people who economically are not in a very strong position to be able to continue to make your mortgage payment month in and month out. and so congress in its wisdom made the decision that we were

going to force banks to make loans to people who were bad loan prospects. that means, that there was a high chance that they could not repay the loan. i suppose this was done in the name of compassion or whatever, i'm not sure how compassionate it is to put someone into a loan that they can't afford to pay for. but that's what we actually instituted into law. and so we had the situation ticking along like a time bomb. by the time president clinton was in his last year, he increased the percentage of the loans that had to be made to people who couldn't afford to pay them. and so the bankers were going out and making loans to people that couldn't afford to pay, you'd say, why would a banker do that? well part of the reason is because the banker could pass the loan on through to freddie and fannie. freddie and fannie were two quasi-public organizations. they acted like private

companies but there was always this implicit guarantee that if anything happened to freddie and fannie the federal government would come in and bail them out. well, so what happens? you put that in combination with a another thing that was going on and that was this recession here. the federal reserve did, first of all, they created money but they also particularly reduced, they reduced very much the cost of money to banks. so you had almost a zero interest level and you had a lot of liquidity looking for some place to invest money. so what did people invest money in? they invested money in houses. and so everybody started buying houses and housing prices went up and up and one -- up. i came down here by 2004 or 2005, i thought i was the dumbest congressman in the entire house because i hadn't gone out and bought a multimillion dollar house and watched it double in four or five years. but of course when you see something expanding that rapidly it suggests you may be dealing

with a bubble and of course that's what happened, the housing bubble popped. so it was a combination, one, of policies created by congress, requiring loans to be made to people who couldn't afoffered -- afford to pay them. as the housing bubble popped and the housing values came down, all kinds of people, when the music stops, who's left without a chair? and so the economy starts to take a beating and the group that was pushing very hard for these loans to people who couldn't afford to pay them, of course, was acorn, someone certainly that the president was closely associated with. and was this a big surprise to lawmakers? it really wasn't to many. in fact, you to take a look at that great conservative oracle, "the new york times," i say that somewhat sarcastically, you find on september 11, 2003, as early as september, 2003, president bush was saying to congress, give me thority to work with

freddie an fannie because they're spending too much money -- and fannie because they're spending too much money. so the republicans did that, -- the -- so the congress did that. it was killed in the senate because the republicans did not have 60 votes in the senate. and so this ticking time bomb continued to tick. we did not deal with the financial mismanagement of freddie and fannie until the train came off the tracks somewhat down the line. so that maybe a brief version, but it gives -- may be a brief version but it gives you a sense of how things got started and it wasn't problems with free enterprise, it wasn't problems with businesses much, it was made right here in this chamber. i'm joined by a fantastic congressman from illinois, somebody who is highly regarded, a graduate of west point which we won't hold against him even, and it's congressman shimkus. i'd be delighted to hear your perspective on where we're going on these things. mr. shimkus: i thank my colleague from -- for giving me some time. i'm joined with some high school

students from nors i city, illinois, which is a small rural community, a thing that's worried them and their folks is, where's the jobs going to be? and i always come back to, over this last year and a half, what have we done to help create an environment? and as you know, and you've got a great background in this, there's a simple statement, if you want employees you have to have employers. mr. akin: that's a profound statement that you just made. it's so simple and yet we forget it, don't we? mr. shimkus: we forget it and we drive them out. you look at what we've done is, with the bailout of wall street, what we actually did was we established a premise of too big to fail. and then we bailed out these huge powerful big wall street banks and who's paying the fare? our smaller community banks with

new insurance premiums and they're the ones who loaned to small businesses throughout smalltown rural southern illinois. then we bring up a cap and trade regime on a false premise of carbon dioxide as a toxic emit ant, we say we want to intoxicate carbon, even the senate talked about taxing carbon. what does that mean? higher electricity prices, higher gas prices. that's not a good signal for people to invest and take a risk that they're going to get a return vement. then we do the fraud -- investment. then we do the fraud of all frauds and we say we're going to provide health care to all americans and we're going to cut medicare $500 billion, we're going to raise another $500 billion in taxes and we're going to create a system that really is unsustainable. and the business community's saying, time-out, i'm not going to take any risk until this thing all sorts out. so it's unfortunate when we really need jobs in america that our response here in the past 18 months is send every signal

against those. i want to finish with the statement that, if you want to pay for government services, you have to have the private sector that's earning money to pay the taxes to pay for government services. government employment, government jobs is not going to be able to pay for government services. mr. akin: you have just made a whole series of very, very excellent, really commonsense kinds -- kinds of points. and in summarizing what you've said, many people have likened that our policy for the last year and a half is the equivalent, it's tantamount to declaring war on business. you can't declare war on business and then complain that there aren't any jobs around. it just doesn't make sense. now, i had a -- there was a supposedly the president was going to do some meetings on main street about unemployment. so a couple weeks ago we had a meeting across the river from

you gentlemen on main street in st. charles. and we invited about 30 or 40 business people, some bigger companies, smaller companies, and we asked them, what are the most important things to get right, for us to get right down here, in order to create the environment where the private sector can create jobs? we can't make any jobs in the federal government, every time we make a job it takes two jobs out of the private sector, but we can set a proper environment for job creation. and so i asked a little bit from a negative point of view. i said, what are the things that are most destructive to creating jobs? i've got a list of them here but they put them in the order that common sense says. the first thing they said is excessive taxation. now, starting on excessive taxation, everything that came out of your mouth, gentlemen, is another story of excessive taxation, you got the wall street bailout, i think you mentioned that failed stimulus bill, i'd call it a porkulous

bill, $787 billion, it turned out to be $800 billion, then you've got the tax on carbon, the cap and tax, so that's something we didn't pass, we passed in the house but the senate hasn't, fortunately, hasn't confirmed it. the president made a promise, he said, no one making you understand $250,000 is going to need to worry about getting taxed and yet we passed a bill that the poor soul who switches a light switch is going to be taxed. then we socialized medicine. all of those things massive taxes and people were saying, if there's one thing you want to do to create jobs, you do not want to bury the small business guy in taxes. you know that. absolutely, it's common sense, isn't it? . mr. shimkus: the reality is the people who are going to have the

most difficulty are the small businesses in complying and again, when you talk about small town rural america, you look at we want to encourage people to hire folks. we don't want to discourage. and it's a sad state of affairs that the only place in america you can go to find a job is washington, d.c. and the only place that the real estate values are high is washington, d.c. we cannot continue to disincentivize the national capital at the expense of main street u.s.a. mr. akin: why would taxation kill jobs? if you think about it. what about our jobs? 80% of jobs in america are businesses with 500 or fewer employees. you're saying, you have these small business guys out there and all of a sudden the government lets them have it with a whole bunch of taxes.

the small businessman, the small profit he makes -- mr. shimkus: if the gentleman would yield. in small town rural america, a big job, a big company has 25 employees, maybe 40 employees. they are the massive job creators of rural america. and i know the department of commerce has what they define as small. most folks in my congressional district -- i will have someone joining me tonight -- if someone had 500 jobs in any part -- that would be like a massive influx -- and that's what we need to get to. i'm not putting just the national government to blame. the state of illinois is listed as one of the worst states for people to locate and create jobs because of additional things you just highlighted. mr. akin: is it tough on taxes? mr. shimkus: tough on taxes.

mr. akin: that's the worst thing. their point was, you have a little machine shop or business. all your money is taxed away, you can't add a mu machine tool or invest in a new process, new idea or innovation. we have a guy in my district and he has a farm over in illinois and i just love innovation in america and this guy recognized that there is a material that nobody seems to want in our country and comes out of the south end of pigs and kind of smelly stuff and he found a way to put pig m arch nure in big kettles and turn it into a crude tar which he makes asphalt to make roads. and we have a section of road which is pig manure road which our department of transportation says is pretty good quality asphalt. that's the kind of thing, you have to have money to invest in a new idea and if the government

taxes your money away, how do you create those jobs? mr. shimkus: and i'm going to end with this. uncertainty, uncertainty creates a disincentive to assume risk. if you assume risk, that's a failure of the economic policy. if you're successful, we want those folks to be rewarded and be able to keep that money so they can grow their businesses. but if they fail, they fail. grant failed numerous times, lincoln failed numerous times. there are successful individuals that were not successful in many businesses but didn't turn to the government for a handout. i wanted to come down and visit. i appreciate your work on this. and thank you for your work. mr. akin: i know your constituents appreciate you and

you bring that common sense to the heartland and we need more of that. thank you so much, gentleman. i was just running along. we talked about what caused this problem. a lot of it was government policies and the idea of giving people loans they couldn't afford to repay them and you have everybody buying these different kinds of mortgage-backed securities and the major corporations of america, the wall street corporations started to fail and choke on these bad policies, which are based on no common sense at all. now you have what's happened before in america, you have a recession going on. so the question is, what do you do if you've got a recession and different presidents have had different approaches to that. what we have seen as we have been talking about, is we have done about everything on this list, which are things that are going to kill jobs. we have done everything

policy-wise wrong. we could hardly get anything more wrong. according to the small business people in our community, the excessive taxation. let's talk about what the taxation was. you have the wall street bailout, which is basically creating a whole lot of the government debt, which is going to have to turn into taxation. you have the taxation of the cap and tax bill that they're talking about. you are going to expire taxes on capital gains, dividends and death taxes. those taxes are going to go up next year and you have the tremendous taxes inherent in the socialized medicine bill. you have a whole lot of taxes coming down on the owners of businesses. that's the job killer. the incomes thing that my constituents said that was a major part of the problem was the insufficient liquidity. a businessman usually gets a loan for three to five years and

has to pay a decent percentage to the loans. what happens is we have tightened up the securities so tremendously that it's hard for small business people to be able to get loans. they can't borrow money or the money they used to be able to borrow, they are paying twice the interest rate. so the liquidity is a big problem. insufficient liquidity is a big problem. tax problems. the economic uncertainty. all of these massive bills like socialized medicine, those are things that create a lot of uncertainty. if you are uncertain as a small businessman, what you are going go to do is you are going to honker down and avoid making decisions, preserve your capital and try to ride out the storm. so that's the economic

uncertainty that's been created. and then the red tape is another one that they mentioned, excessive government mandates and red tape. that's particularly deadly to small businesses, because the big business could have the red tape department, but a small business can't afford to have that kind of overhead in terms of management staff. and so red tape is also very much of a job killer. now we have employed all of these tools in the last year and a half and essentially declared war on business. so why in the world would we want to do something like that? we shouldn't be doing it. the result, then, is that we have created an environment to make one, a recession that could have been bad, but made it worse. we were told in the recovery plan in the beginning of the year in 2008 and 2009 here, we were told that if we don't pass

-- the recovery plan, i guess they called it the spluss plan, if we don't -- stimulus plan, if we don't pass it, we will have unemployment as high as 8% or 9%. the democrats passed this bill. and our actual unemployment has gone up like a skyrocket. why is that? obviously, the stimulus bill didn't work. should we have known it didn't work? of course. we could have gone back to the days of f.d.r. and he had a recession and turned it into a depression and used the wrong economic theory. what was that theory? if the federal government spends money wildly, it will improve. because as the government buys, the whole economy will take off and do well.

henry morgenthau and with the help of little lord keynes did. at the end of eight years, small businesses were not just honkered down but out of business. then what happens is, this guy, henry morgenthau, secretary of the treasure, talks to the ways and means committee and says we tried spending and doesn't work. it just doesn't work. what's more, we are tremendously in debt as well. that goes back to world war ii days that shows that this idea of the stimulus bill just doesn't work. it's not the right way to do it. now, is there a way to deal with the recession? the answer is yes. it has been tried by a number of different presidents. and the various presidents that have been most successful in stopping these recessions.

one was j.f.k. of course, the democrats won everything down here. republicans in the house are 40 votes short of the majority, so we don't have a lot to say about the different bills that are passed and same thing is going on in the senate and is there a approach they could do? i have been critical of democrats but not because of the democrats that i have anything personal but because the policies have been hurting our country. j.f.k., who is a democrat, did the right thing. and they should have learned from him. and what did he do? he cut taxes. how does that help? cut taxes? the government should be spending money. if you cut taxes, what happens is, it leaves more money for that small businessman to invest. as he invests, it creates jobs. as more people have jobs and make income, they pay more in taxes. it's an ironic effect of

economics that you could reduce taxes and increase government revenue. we saw it happen under the bush administration. j.f.k. was followed by ronald reagan and bush. both of them used the same approach by cutting taxes and turned us out of a recession. you can see that on the first chart that we had. you can see that this recession that president bush inherited here, he had in 2001 -- you have lack delup luster job growth in 2002 and 2003 and then put policies of these tax cuts which he was able to get through the senate despite of the fact that we did not have 60 republican votes. we had tax cuts through the senate, capital gains, dividends and the death tax. when we got that through, you could see that the recovery followed. so that's the effective way. and i think it's not american

even to be critical of a political party or somebody else's solution without proposing a better idea. and so certainly the better idea is cut taxes. that's what always works. it's worked in other economies and and other parts of the world as well. so here we have a little bit of a cartoon of what's going on. sometimes you have to laugh a little bit, even though it doesn't seem very funny when you don't have a job. but you have the president here saying, now give me one good reason why you aren't hiring. there are a whole bunch of reasons, these bulls in the china shop. the health care reform is a huge tax, but a tremendous amount of government red tape and extreme incentive of not to hire workers because you have to pay so much with this new socialized

medicine. the cap and trade or cap and tax is the energy bill. most businesses use energy. so if you have an increase in the cost of energy, which this bill would do, you're taxing small business. and then, of course, you have other different taxes in the background coming in. so we're doing a lot of things that are absolutely the wrong thing to do. and that's basically could be summarized as a war on business. and we have talked about the right thing to do, which is to cut our spending and also to cut taxes. and the point of the matter here is that our economy and these jobs all work according to basic principles of economics. so now we come to, i think, a very interesting question. and this is the question. if we have been doing everything

wrong, which i would suggest from a policy point of view, we have done about everything wrong, we have created red tape, created taxes, not allowing the liquidity that the businessman to make jobs and then on top of that, high level of uncertainty and very excessive government spending. if we're doing all those things wrong, how come it seems that the stock market is bouncing back and seems like we are starting into a recovery in appearances -- there appears to be a recovery going on and that becomes an interesting question. if what i'm saying is true that we have done all of the wrong things for businesses and if you check with any small businessman in america, they would say yeah, you do not want to increase taxes, you do not want uncertainty or government red tape. you want the small businessman to have access to liquidity and capital. and all of those things where we

haven't done a good job in those are problems. a businessman will say that's common sense and that's how business works and if you want jobs you want businesses. how comes it appears we are pulling out of the recession and starting to do better? obviously, the answer to that question is that there are other things that affect our economy. in fact, there is another thing that is even stronger than all of the policies that are so important that we get right down here. . what is the force that's so powerful? in a way could you look at it as the crack cocaine of our economy. think of it for a minute that there's a person standing there, they're in need of a sevenway heart bypass and they have diabetes and they're getting older. and so they're not too healthy. but, with a little crack cocaine

they think they're superman. well, we have the equivalent of crack cocaine in our economic system in america and that's the federal reserve and their crack cocaine is to increase the money supply. it used to be called running the printing presses except today we don't run printing presses, things are just recorded as zeros or ones in computers. but the point of the matter is the federal reserve has created a tremendous spike or increase in liquidity to try to deal with the tough times in the economy. and on top of that increase in liquidity, they have dropped the interest rates down very low toward zero. now what that does is it creates all this easy money that's looking for a home and that has a tremendously stimulating affect on the economy, but a little bit like crack cocaine does to somebody who may be otherwise sick. so when we've done this in the past we've run into these bubble cycles where you have easy money

and at a low interest rate, there's people that have access to that money, they want to go out and buy stocks, they find somebody something they want to buy, they bid it up, it goes up, up, up, there's the bubble and the whole thing collapses. we saw it with high-tech stocks and we have been through it with real estate. people who had had a lot of money, particularly low interest rates, about 2004 or so, 2005, they go out and buy real estate because what is -- what is more solid and american and reliable than mortgages of americans for their own homes. it's been a steady business. you always have to watch out when you see money get too easy to be made. you saw home prices in many areas double and then the whole top blows off of it. that's created by this easy money or what i would call the crack cocaine of our economic system. and that's what's going on right now. that's why you see wall street apparently seeming to do better, the stock market seeming to go

up and yet all of the policies from a logic point of view that are necessary for a healthy business environment and for lots of good paying jobs, those policies are not in place, they're being ignored. in fact, it's almost ironic, the president made a statement, he said, and i had it on a chart, i think it was last week, where he said, you know, the government can't so much make the jobs but we need to set the environment so that there is the proper environment for job creation. he was exactly right on that. and then he turned around and has advocated every single policy that he's been advocating, all of his priorities are going to have the net effect of destroying jobs. and so there's a little bit of a dichotomy here. now, i have been critical of democrat policies. not because i don't like democrats, maybe i ought to make it clear that all of us work in this chamber and everybody that i know of in here, there are a lot of fantastic peep and i don't know anybody who wakes up

in the morning saying, howky mess up our country? no one thinks that way but the point of the matter is, there are policies that work and there's policies that don't work. the policies that work, if you want to create jobs, are that you have to get off of the big spending and you have to back off on taxes and when you do that, you'll actually get more revenue and you can pay for more government services. now let's take a look at what i'm talking about big spending. many people felt that president bush spent too much money and he probably did. in fact, these blue lines are president bush and these show what the deficit is by year. and if you take a look here, the very worst bush deficit was this year. it it's shown in red because this was the pelosi congress with bush as president and he was somewhere, just about $450 billion of deficit. which was president bush's worst

deficit. sow spent more money than we had and that isn't a good thing to do. we did have too wars that were going on and we had come out of a recession. anyway, that was his worst spending year was 2008. now we come to obama's first year as president and what we find is that now the deficit has more than tripled in one year. tripled in one year. so we go from $450 billion some under bush, which was about $3 -- 3.1 of our gross domestic product which is average really for some of the deficits that various presidents have run, that the deficit's about 3% of our gross domestic product, the next year under obama the deficit and pelosi and reid, the deficit triples to $1.4 trillion. now, what is $1.4 trillion mean? well, it's three times bigger than bush's worst deficit.

but as a percent of g.d.p. it's 9.9% of g.d.p. that's the highest since world war ii in terms of government spending. so this is not the thing to be doing when there's not a lot of jobs and when businesses are being hammered. we do not want to be running that kind of spending and that kind of spending tends to lead to all kinds of taxes. what happens is you can take a recession and turn it into a great depression by using the wrong policies. now, there's -- one of the things that i hear sometimes from people and i think the a fair and good question and that is, ok, congressman akin, you're being kind of an alligator mouth and you're criticizing some of these democrats but i think you've got a short memory. don't you remember the republicans used to be in charge in 2001 through 2006, you were in the majority, what kinds of things did do you? well, when we were in majority

we did quite a lot of things that nobody knows anything about. but they were not actually such bad policies. in the case of health care, for instance, did we do anything in health care? yes, we did. we passed numbers of times bills to move forward with associated health plans. that was something where small businesses could pool their employees together and get a better price on health insurance. what happened to the bills that the republicans passed in the house? they went to the senate. what happened in the senate? well, the republicans did not have 60 votes in the senate and so the bill died for associated health plans, it was brought up numerous times. we had bills to change tort reform. they were passed in the house, they went to the senate, guess what happened to them in the senate? you guessed it. we didn't have 60 votes, they were killed in the senate. we had bills to protect against the problems of freddie and fannie. the republicans pad passed a bill to create more government control of freddie and fannie because they were cooking their

books and they were not solvent the way they should have been. guess what happened to those bills over in the senate because we did not have 60 votes? they were killed by democrats in the senate because we didn't have enough to get to 60 votes. we also passed a number of energy bills in the house to protect against spikes in gasoline prices that we've experienced. what happened to our energy bills? a number of them that were sent to the senate, you guessed it, they were killed by democrats in the senate. in fact, people are surprised to note that there is more difference on a party line vote on energy in the u.s. congress than there is on the subject of abortion. most people know congress gets polarized on the abortion issue. they don't realize that we're even more polarized on things like energy. all of these different bills were passed in the house. and of course we did get some strong judges on the supreme court. now, one of the things that has always surprised me from a

policy point of view, aside from the fact that we can't seem to learn from the other countries that have gone bankrupt and states in america that are going bankrupt because they're spending too much money, why is it that we have so much faith in big government? that's something that is a real puzzle to me. and i think of another country that was founded on the idea of a great, great deal of faith in big government. this was a major world power and their whole basic way of thinking about things was that the government is going to provide you with food, the government will provide the citizens with housing for a place to live, the government will provide the citizens with education so they can be well educated, the government will provide them with a job and the government will provide them with health care. and so this was the idea that the big government is going to provide you with food and

clothing and shelter. and a job and education and health care. now, what was the name of this big country? well, it was known as the union of soviet socialist republics, the ussr. it was done by the communists. and they felt like it was the thing that big government could be trusted to provide all those nice things for citizens. it turned out, as we took a look at it, that it wasn't such a nifty theory. it didn't work. and i created a great -- and it created a great deal of poverty. not only that, the people who had adopted that theory had failed to recall that historically, one of the greatest dangers to human life are big governments. big governments have killed far, far more human beings of their own citizens than all the wars of history. if you take the wars of history from the time of christ forward,

you will find that there weren't nearly as many casualties from war as there were just from the casualties of a couple of communist dictators to what they did to their own people. that's not to mention the nazis and other kinds of dictators that have likewise killed many of their own citizens. in the case of stalin, about 40 million people were starved in the ukraine and of course mao is known to have murdered about 60 million chinese. that's more the combination of those people under communism, under the big government theory, killed more people than any wars. so why do we have so much faith in big government when we've seen its tremendous failures? and yet it seems that over the past year and a half, everything, the solution to everything is more taxes and more government. i don't see the logic of why we want to be doing that. and so that's what's driving this tremendous federal spending as this faith that big

government has to do everything for us. and of course economically that's not a good approach. the result is that we've gotten into this particular situation here. this is the actual money that the federal government takes in. there's the blue dot and the red circle here is the money we're spending. obviously if you take a look at this, you can see the blue circle is smaller than the red circle. that says we're spending more money than we're taking in. what's that ratio? well, that ratio today is, when the federal government spends a dollar, 41 cents of it is borrowed. out of a dollar, 41 cents is borrowed. and that is the difference between the blue and the red circle here. now, where is the federal spending going? well, it's going to medicare and medicaid which are now

mathematically broken over time. if you just run what's happening with these programs, you don't change the programs any, you just get more and more people asking for services out of these programs, that and combination with social security, the dark red here is growing at a rate that you could get rid of the defense, nondefense and everything else and you're not going to have enough money to run the government. and so this is really a crisis. and it's a little bit ironic that when the federal government cannot run health care, that is medicare and medicaid, which is currently the federal government's responsibility to be running medicare and medicaid, although medicaid is passed onto the states to a degree, too, that we cannot run that, the government can't run that well, so what do we do? we're taking all that over and having the government run all of health care with this new socialized medicine bill. certainly the solution to that bill is only one thing. it must be repealed, it is the

worst piece of legislation i have ever seen in congress and i believe that there are many, many other people who have the same opinion that the solution for america to move forward with decent health care has to start with the repeal of socialized medicine. but you can see we're not running medicine too well, even before the socialized medicine and that's the problem with this excessive spending and what happens then, too, is that as the government grows and grows, you take money away from small businesses, first of all, they hunker down, they don't make decisions, they don't make jobs, they lay people off, but eventually you could make them sick enough that they close you their doors and guess where the jobs go? there will be jobs, they just won't be in america, they will be overseas and that's the problem with the excessive taxation and the war that's going on in our economy on businesses and jobs. .

people have taken a look at various countries and looked at this problem with excessive government and the regulations and the increases and we can see in 2001 that united states was sixth in terms of an economic freedom index. i think this is calculated by the heritage foundation. and they took a look at all kinds of things like taxes, red tape and a whole series of other factors. and the united states is sixth in the particular list. they calculated we have dropped just in 10 years, eight behind several other countries. and one of the things that a lot of the european countries have discovered and it is ironic because we thought of them as being social is particular and big government, they are finding they are in a race to cut back on taxes because they realize business is the keys to prosperity both in terms of jobs

and in terms of government revenues. you have to remember when the economy is sick, the state governments really take a beating and so does the federal government. in fact, if you look at the early bush years, 2001, 2002, what you found was the cost of the tax cuts that the bush administration put together, including the cost of the two wars in iraq and afghanistan, that the total of that amount of money was less than the drop in revenue because of the recession. so when you have a recession, it's not just small businesses, it's not just citizens that take a beating, it's also governments don't have revenue. by cutting taxes, what happens? what you find is the government revenue starts to go up. and you say that's like what water is running up hill. congressman akin, you are an grer. how is it that the government

could cut taxes and increase the amount of revenue they take in through taxes? the answer is pretty straightforward. if you think about it, pretend you are king for a day and your job is to tax a love of bread. -- loaf of bread. am i go go to charge a penny per loa fmp or $5? you start thinking if i do $5, that's too much. people may not buy bread. if i do a penny, i'm not getting all the taxes i could get. common sense is that somewhere there is an amount that the government could tax something that is optimum in terms of how much revenue. the government has increased taxes so heavilyly that we are way beyond the optimum. by reducing taxes, you could increase the revenue because as

the economy gets going, it generates more jobs, more prosperity and as you take a percentage in taxes, even though it is a smaller percent, you end up with more revenue, which is what happened in 2004, 2005 and 2006. some of these different governments, foreign governments are starting to realize, the americans were right all the time. j.f.k. was right. ronald reagan was right. bush was right. when you get in trouble, cut taxes and government spending and don't want to get into this highly inexcessive government spending here. so that's what they did. that's what many foreign countries figured out. here we go along, the u.s.a. and our tax on corporations is the second highest in the world. it's like we haven't learned at all from the lessons that europe has been learning. and so that is something we need

to be paying particular attention to. now to add insult to injury, we not are only overspending, we're not only hammering businesses with all kinds of regulations, red tape, with the lack of liquidity, huge and high taxes, but now we have gotten to the point that we are that cynical here in congress that we aren't going to create a budget. i think it's the first time this has happened in a very long time that the u.s. congress is not going to have a budget for the year and maybe you could say, well, you haven't stayed in your budget, so what's the point? you have to have some guidelines or rules that we're going to go by. and apparently, that's not in the cards that we're going to create a budget this year. all of these things are

concerning. all of these things affect americans everywhere. and there are things that it's right that the american public should be concerned about these things. and there is a level of fear and anger in the general public because of the fact that we're not really paying attention to our business. we aren't really being responsible economically with our constituents. now, all of this stuff about the economy, jobs, the federal reserve, creating liquidity and low interest rates, i guess it could seem kind of boring if it didn't have a tremendous impact on the every day lives of american citizens. it's helpful to put a picture on what we're talking about. and in my own mind, as a guy who's responsible for earning income for my family, the

picture that i guess i live in fear of is the picture of a house with a sidewalk out in front and the family furniture, like a sofa and easy chair and ironing board sitting out on that sidewalk because they couldn't afford to pay the mortgage payment on the house. and so the house has been taken away from me and the family. and i'm picturing a wife and some kids looking at dad saying, now what are we going to do? you haven't had a job in a long time, dad. and that's being created by the wrong policies right here in government. and it's that reason that there needs to be a change and there needs to be a whole new look at what we're demanding that the federal government does. what's happened is we have

drifted from the idea of limited government, of the federal government being donl only the things that states cannot do for themselves. originally, a couple of hundred years ago, the federal government was boring, we had four laws on the books. we had laws against piracy and counterfeiting and we had a law against treason because when somebody is a spy on america, they are a spy on the whole country. there were limited laws at the federal level and all of the other things like murder and stealing were all state laws. now, we look at the federal government and what do we want them to do? we want the federal government to do food. and we want the federal government to do housing. and we want the federal government to do education. we have just taken over almost all the student loans.

now the federal government is in the student loan business and the car making and insurance business and flood insurance business and we have got the federal government in the food business and in the housing business. and all of these different things which never, never were dreamed of by the founders that the federal government would get into the health care business and all of these different things. so what has been the result? the result you can see is excessive spending. but it has been that chairs and furniture sitting out on the sidewalk and the father trying to figure out, i have been looking for a job over a year now and i still don't have a job and asking himself what went wrong. well, an awful lot went wrong. started right down here when we started imitating the big

government idea that government is going to do everything for everybody. the government shouldn't and can't and we are getting a real lesson in that in these very days. and so it is that we have come taking a good look at where the problem started, the fact that we have done the wrong solutions, the solutions of excessive government spending, excessive taxation, taking away liquidity from small business people and then last of all, using the crack cocaine of the federal reserve to create tons of money and low interest rates. that will boomer rang just as crack cocaine does to a sick person and will continue to make our country sick until we can start to direct the federal reserve to control and regulate the supply of money in such a way that we don't create tremendous amounts of liquidity and i'm joined on the floor this evening, congressman from the iowa, a man of considerable

amount of common sense, a man who is not shy about expressing his opinions. so it's a treat to welcome congressman steve king. we are about to close up. mr. king: i thank the gentleman from missouri for heading up this special order hour. as we watch this, two different paths one can follow, the road that is being traveled by the obama administration, pelosi house and reed senate it is keynesian economics on steroids. we need to get to the adam smith market economic components. and if we look at this, we can add up as i said, the banks, insurance companies, freddie mac

and fannie mae, student loan program completely, the nationalization of our bodies under obamacare. now we have the financial services sitting over there in the senate about ready to get shoved out of there and back here for a conference report and could end up on the president's desk and add that cap and tax, another huge endeavor on the part of the president -- mr. akin: controlling health care, controlling every financial transaction, three nets of oppression. mr. king: when we add up the percentages of the private sector from a year 1/2 ago and comes to 74% that would be nationalized today with the two acts that they are trying to bring at us, cap and trade and financial services. mr. akin: wow. that's 74% of what used to be private a couple of years ago

was nationalized or under national heavy regulation. mr. king: 51% that had been nationalized, the banks, insurance, freddie mac and fannie mae and car companies and obamacare. that's 51%. mr. akin: based on the amount of revenue, the size of the business? mr. king: based upon the private sector activity as annual idsed by dr. boyle from arizona state university. mr. akin: wow. that is absolutely incredible. in the last year or two we have seen history being made. mr. king: one would consider it to be a done deal. and then we are on the cusp of the financial regulations which is 15% of the economy and add another 8%, which is a low estimate of what cap and trade would actually do to us. i don't know what's left. whatever part of the economy they would like to take over, but from my standpoint, every

bit of free enterprise that is out there, increases vitality of americans. they get a reward. not enough to work hard but work smart. everything the government takes over lowers the american productivity and reduces our gross domestic product and takes our standard of living down. mr. akin: it makes sense economically. and i heard people talk about this. you can see we aren't learning from history. you can see that socialized medicine didn't work well in england because you look at the cancer rates there, canada, their socialized medicine costs them a fortune. when you get sick in canada, you come down to the united states. you can see examples of it not working in massachusetts and tennessee and we refuse to learn

from that. we refuse to learn. so to some degree, you could say logically, we could be smarter than do all this stuff. but there is another argument why it's not a good idea which i have not heard as often. maybe it is more an emotional argument, but it is true nonetheless, it's stealing. when the government takes money that it's not authorized constitutionally to take, that it has no moral logical reason why the government should take money and redistribute money, it goes back to the argument between the president and joe the plum are -- plumber and the president make it clear we didn't make government to make money and give toit someone else. where does the government have the authority to make money and give it to someone else. we call that stealing.

if the government takes your money out of your pocket and gives it to me, is it morally any different? it's still institutionized theft and our founders understood. governor bradford in the 16 20's when it was impossibled on the pilgrims by the loan sharks from england. not only did socialism not work, they almost starved and they knew it was morally wrong and institutionalized theft. . mr. king: is that when it first came down, no work, no eat? mr. akin: i think that was long before the pilgrims. mr. king: but in the united states? mr. akin: it may have been a quote from the bible.

we're about out of time. the solution is straightforward, cut taxes, cut government spending and repeal the socialized medicine bill and get back to some sense of fiscal sanity and reduce the number of functions the federal government is trying to do. this isn't that complicated. it's been done before. there's precedent that shows if we do this, it will work. we're on the wrong track now. i thank my good friend from iowa, congressman king a stalwart of freedom and liberty. god bless you and god bless the u.s.a. the speaker pro tempore: the gentleman yields back the balance of his time. under the speaker's announced policy of january 6, 2009, the chair recognizes the gentleman from iowa, mr. king, for 60 minutes.

mr. king: thank you, mr. speaker. i appreciate the privilege to be recognized to address you here on the floor of the house of representatives. the privilege to also have the gentleman from missouri, mr. akin, yield to me as he delivers the leadership hour presentation on the economic situation here in the united states and the opportunity to say a few words on that particular subject. i may revert back to that subject, mr. speaker. however, i want to shift the subject a little bit over onto subject matter that seems to be on the minds and lips of americans across this country. i have had the privethroge travel to some of the corners of america in the last few weeks and had my conversations in -- oh in the coffee shops and restaurants and city halls and in meeting places and i was a little bit surprised that -- i had had the perception that in my district, immigration

become an issue that is very much front and center, but i -- i expect that's going to be the case in states like arizona, california, texas, these states that are our border states, new mexico, where you have a large number of illegal border crossings. but i didn't expect it would be the case in the northeast, for example, and other places across the country, to the intensity it was. i have found that at every stop, someone would gring up -- bring up immigration and it reminded me of the times in 2006 and in 2007 when this nation debated immigration intensively and constantly at every stop, even to the point where as much as i like to talk about it, as interested as i am in the subject and since i'm also the ranking member of the immigration subcommittee, it's my job, mr. speaker, but in my town hall meetings in 2006 and 2007, in many of them, i set the rule that we were going to talk about everything except immigration until we had dealt

with everybody's concerns and issues, then we would go to immigration to finish the time we had left. invariably we'd get to immigration and it would burn all the time we had left. because the american people are very intense on the immigration issue. and we watched as frank luntz did a focus group in arizona, just came back from there recently, watched how that group itself was divided between themselves with very intense emotions, most of them full of frustration and anger about the immigration issue, not in complete agreement on what to do. it seems as though the hispanics in america are where you find the objections to the enforcement of immigration law the most vocal ones, yet we know there are a large number of hispanics, many of them have been here hundreds of year, their families have been, but i'll submit that that doesn't get anybody anything. i just shook the hand of an

individual down at the turkish reception tonight who is a naturalized american citizen as of about less than three weeks ago and i would express this, that for any of us to argue that our ancestors have been here since the beginning of the republic, the daughters -- the american revolution, for example, and i'm glad they maintain those traditions and it means a great deal throughout the families and we understand that we have obligations that are generational that pass along because of the culture and heritage and family and the duty to our country, but i recall standing in the indian room in the old executive office building as emilio gonzalez, the director of the department of citizenship and immigration services, gave a speech at a natural sigs ceremony there, which i attended for that purpose. what he said to those gathered that were about to take the oath to become naturalized

american citizen he said, look out that window. look out that window. when you look out the window, you look at the white house itself and you see the vast south lawn and south side and the west side of the white house. he said, i want you to know two things. one of them is, from this day forward, you are as much an american as the person that lives next door, and he pointed to the white house where president bush lived at the time. and when he said, when people ask you, where are you from, don't tell them that you are from turkey or france or mexico or canada or wherever it may be. tell them you are the first american, that you're an american, you are the first american and you are as much american as the man that occupies the white house today. that's the right sentiment for this country for legal immigration.

that's the way we should think about new americans, in every bit as good a standing once they take the oath of citizenship and go through the naturalization process, in every bit as good a standing as someone born to the 10th generation that might be here. each of us have a different set of history a different set of family histories, but we need to be tied together you should in banner. so the idea that we'll see students sent home from school because they're wearing red, whilet, and blue on a day that's a mexican nationalist day, a day that's not celebrated to any significant extent even down to a city in mexico where the mexicans won a victory over the french, but celebrated here in the united

states. i think it was a beer distributor that began the celebration of cinco demayo here in the united states. whatever that is, mr. speaker, i don't take issue with the celebration of a holiday that makes people proud of their culture and heritage. if that were the case, i couldn't celebrate st. patrick's day, which i also recognize isn't celebrated so intensively in ireland itself, but here it is. there are some parallels there. the people who reject the american flag and the american culture that i take issue with, not the people who are new americans who are proud to be here. but we have a big decision to make in this country. this immigration debate has gone on for a long time. it centers on this it centers on the idea that the people who came across the border illegally should somehow be granted citizenship or a path to citizenship if that's their goal, and somehow it turns into a reward for breaking the law.

we need to recognize, mr. speaker, that there are hundreds of millions of people across this globe and perhaps billions that would love to come to the united states and become americans. and they're waiting in line in the right way, respecting our laws. i will submit that the people who respect our laws will make better citizens than those who have broken our laws. and our argument here in this country comes down to this -- grant amnesty to people who broke our laws, reward them for breaking our laws, because there's an argument that we must capitulate because we can't enforce the laws that we have. mr. speaker, it is not the case that we can't enforce the laws that we have. and it is not the case that enforcing those laws would be ineffective in resolving this immigration problem we have in this country. the problem we have is, our administration lacks the will to enforce the law. it isn't just the obama administration.

it isn't just secretary napolitano who has demonstrated a lack of will in enforcing immigration law. this goes back through several presidents and i would take us back to 1986, when president reagan signed the amnesty act of 1986, and it was to provide amnesty for a million people in the united states illegally, but the standards -- and by the way, president reagan was honest enough to call it the amnesty bill when he signed it. it was one of the few times president reagan, i'll say, let me down on something i thought was philosophically wrong. i remember disagreing with president reagan in 1986 when he signed the amnesty bill and i didn't consider that i would end up in the united states congress some -- less than 20 years later, and there would be an argument about what was amnesty. wasn't any question about what amnesty was in 1986.

ronald reagan admitted it was amnesty he said he had to sign the bill in order to get control -- in order to control the borders, in order to enforce the law he had to sign the amnesty bill. that was his calculation. i don't think he liked it, philosophically. he probably came to a conclusion he didn't have a choice. whatever the rationale was he signed the bill and called it amnesty. no one argued, it was amnesty, it was to be a million people but the fraud and corruption and the people who gamed the system tripled the number and those who received amnesty in 1986 were closer to three million than the one million that was supposed to be the amnesty to end all amnesties that was going to put this away and the only way to get control of the borders in 1986 was to give amnesty to the people who were here and enforce the law against the employers and tighten the border and make sure that there wouldn't be a magnet for people to come into the united states system of, mr. speaker, what happened was, the enforcement that was

stronger, far stronger under dwight eisenhower, that diminished from dwight eisenhower's time on, was stronger under ronald reagan than it was under the first bush administration, and it was stronger under the first bush administration than it was under president clinton. and i recall my frustration with each of those presidents and their lack of will to enforce immigration law. under bill clinton, there was an accelerated effort to naturalize a million people into the united states and i'll say legal ly or iliely as the anecdotes came to me. they told me they understood they would be frast tracked to citizenship but they were to vote for bill clinton for president. that's what i heard from some in my district. i don't know the specific data on that, i only know the anecdotal data. if one shows up and tells me that it's a sure bet there are others that had the same idea.

so a million were accelerate bud naturalization in 1996 and a lot of them voted for bill cloin clinton and a lot of frustration was built among those who respect our borders, the sovereignty of the united states, the need and the obligation to defend the borders and who respect the rule of law and do not want to see it subverted or eroded, especially intentionally by an administration seeking to produce a political gain. then, mr. speaker, from the clinton administration, we transitioned into the bush administration, george w. bush, a man who i personally like and respect and admire, and found a couple of things to disagree with along the way. this was one of them. it's hard for me, mr. speaker to stand here on the floor and speak to the issues that i disagreed with on with ronald reagan, the issues i disagreed

with george bush, george w. bush. but i saw a lack of enforcement of our immigration laws in that period of time under the george w. bush administration as well. and there was, in the second term of the bush administration, there was a concerted effort to try to bring our -- to try to bring comprehensive immigration reform to bear. comprehensive immigration reform was the fancy term for amnesty. . and rather amnesty which is comprehensive immigration reform. so the american people had to submit to different definitions of amnesty and continually the argument was made that well, whatever it was they wanted to do to provide amnesty wasn't

amnesty. recall the discussion well, if they pay a fine of $500 and promise to learn english and promise to pay back taxes, couldn't we give them a path to citizenship? that's not amnesty. you going to sell a path to citizenship for $500, i have to call that amnesty. and if someone promises to learn english, that's an obligation of the naturalization process. you have to prove efficiency in the spoken and written word to be nationalalized. i know they get sloppy with that and some of the people that are national tralized aren't so very good and you will notice that at a naturalization ceremony, they may not recognize what that means to stand and i have heard different directions that have

gone out to the crowd and some have not responded even though it is the most significant moment in their lives. those who step up and want to become an american and who are determined to assimilate themselves in the broader american culture, which has a lot of subcultures in it admittedly, mr. speaker. we have seen it diminish from dwight eisenhower all the way to barack obama. barack obama, it's different than it was under the bush administration. the bush administration accelerated it and began to enforce the law more aggressively than they were in the last couple of years. it was, i believe, an effort to convince the american people that they were committed to enforcing immigration law. and i don't know if their heart was ever in it, but i believe it was at least a minimum to establish a record and a standard that they would use enforcement so the rule of law

could be re-established and then upon the establishment of the re-establishment of the rule of law, might possibly be able to pass an amnesty bill that the american people would accept. i think it was a political miscalculation. i think it was a mistake for george w. bush to give his amnesty speech that he gave on that january 5 or 6 of that year sometime about january 5 or 6 of 2005 i believe it was. i think it was a mistake for the president to do that. i think that he should have first come out with the standard of, we're not going to ask the american people to establish a new policy and grant a path to anything, to guest workeror path to citizenship or more of a permanent green card status unless and until we can establish as a federal government that the rule of law and the law enforcement personnel whose job it is to enforce immigration law will be

enforced and that those who break the law would do so with the expectation that they would be con fronted by the law and pun -- confronted by the law and punished in proportion to their crime. and i also submit, mr. speaker, that a nation that doesn't have a border, can't declare itself a nation, we must have a border, define the border and can't call it a border unless we defend the border. and on our side, the law must prevail and justice must be blind and has got to be enforced by the people who are paid to enforce the law. if they decide not to do that, they are subverting our civilization. many of the people who come here come into the united states because they live in a country that doesn't have the rule of law, a country that has corruption, a country that has spiraled downward into third worldism, a country that can't be brought up into a modern,

civilized civilization within this generation of man. many times it's hopeless to think of it with the level of corruption and lack of rule of law. can't let that happen in united states of america. justice has been blind and the rule of law has been firm and evenhanded and rigid throughout centuries. and so arizona recognized that there were federal immigration laws that weren't being enforced despite all the federal officers that work the border in arizona, the lack of will, the lack of will that comes from the top, from the president of the united states to the secretary of the department of homeland security, right on down the line through the border patrol and u.s. customs and border protection personnel. you can go into the station at the border patrol and you can read the mission. we're going to get operational control of the border. the mission sounds good. but the mission has got to be in

the heads and hearts of the people who are carrying out. and that's got to come from the top. i listened last week to a speech that was delivered here at the american enterprise institute by general petraeus, who received the irving crystal award that evening and it is a respectable honor that recognizes the contributions of a respectable man, irving crystal and general petraeus is a fitting recipient for that award. he made three points as he left iraq and where i first met him in 2003 where he commanded the 101st airborne in mosul. general petraeus, even then, they swept in and liberated the northwest quadrant of iraq and a couple of other provinces there. that was around march 22, in

that period of time. by mid-to late may, general petraeus had held an election in mosul. that is 2003. he elected a governor and vice governor and i met them. and he promoted very effectively liberty and freedom and our version of democracy there that could be carried out in that country and i asked him how did you know how to do it? he said we didn't know how to do it but we needed local representatives. it's interesting that general petraeus said the governor and vice governor and he sat on the side of the table to send the signal that the iraqis were running the show. even then months of the time of being liberated, general petraeus' speech last week laid out in three steps along the way of success. there were points as he held up in fort levenworth, not that far

from me, and he and others that he gave significant credit to wrote the language, the counterinsurgency booklet that was so well published and distributed across the country over one million copies have been distributed and i read fair parts of it. but he laid out this point that first you got to get the big things right. you got to articulate the mission. you've got to plan the mission. the mission has got to be right, get the big things right. then you've got to market it and sell it to the people who have to carry it out. that's step number two. step number three is, see to it that the mission is carried out, right down to the details. but first you've got to define the mission and then you've got to market the mission to the people that are going to carry it out and then you have to follow up to make sure that the mission is carried out down to the details. well, the mission that we have

in border security, immigration enforcement in america is not clearly articulated. congress can pass legislation, which we did in the secure fence act that establishes that we're going to build 854 miles of double fencing, in some cases triple fencing and that the secretary of homeland security had to certify when they had operational control of the border, operational control of the border. and there's a good definition in the secure fence act that defines that. but it suffered an amendment to it over in the senate that weakened the secure fence act that was duncan hunter's major effort here in the house of representatives. the definition of operational control of the border was reduced and subverted. and the result was that the mission that congress laid out

for the border protection personnel all together was ill defined because of the southern californiaors from within. we weren't able as a congress to define the mission. we tried and voted on it here in the house and passed a very clear mission, but it was subverted in the senate and has been undermined by some of the people on the border and the effort to require that before you could build a fence, you have to negotiate with the local people and that local includes people on the south side of the border, i don't think we should go to mexico asking them to protect our border. that is an added mission that undermines the mission. so we have custom border patrol, i.c.e. agents including our

border personnel swimming upstream against high tide of people and drugs pulling through there, maybe they understand the mission, but they do not believe nor do they have the confidence that the higher-ups will support them. they're out there, punch the clock, do what they do, plug the hole here and there, but isn't anyone in this administration from the white house on down that has defined how we actually accomplish this mission of controlling our borders and shutting off illegal immigration in america. now, i don't think it happens to be all that complicated, mr. speaker. i think you have to have the will. and so the first thing to do is shut off the bleeding at the border. and as congressman phil gingrey

so articulately said, and he's a doctor and confident he worked in the emergency room, he said when somebody comes in, the victim of an accident and bleeding all over the place and bleeding all over the floor and bleeding from several places in their body, the first thing that you don't do is grab the mop and the bucket and start to clean up the mess. the first thing you do is stop the bleeding. get the patient stabilized. and once you get it stabilized, then you can worry about cleaning up the mess. well, we have a lot of discussion about cleaning up the mess and we don't have a lot of discussion about how to stop the bleeding. this is where the bleeding exists and do something to stop it. first on the border, we have had and i don't know that i have confidence in the numbers during this administration. they're telling me that they

have fewer interdictions, therefore there are fewer border crossings. i suspect if you stopped enforcing the law you would have fewer interdictions. they have never given a real number how many across the border and how many are stopped, but i do a lot of asking. and we do have testimony before the immigration subcommittee, numbers such as this that we have as many as four million illegal border crossing attempts a year. now, some of those could be trying more than once. in fact, i know it is. when i asked the border patrol what percentage of those attempts are you able to stop? on the record, they'll say i think about 25%. when i go down to the border and i ask those who are engaged in this on a daily basis, they will look at me and i say 25% and they'll laugh and snicker and

they will say, the moss common number is -- it's more like 10% that we stopped. and some will tell me, 3% to 4% but i never had anyone tell me they stopped 25%, 20% or 15%. i can't think of a number above 10%. the number i often hear is 10%. four million illegal border crossings a year and stop 10% of that, that's not a very big number, mr. speaker and it's not good efficiency on what we need to be doing down there on the border. we need to look at this. what would you do to stop the bleeding? number one thing, shut the border off. not that hard to figure out. why can't we do that? it's only 2,000 miles, as if that's a vast, undefendable territory, and it's not.

look at the territory that we are defending in places like iraq and in afghanistan, for example. a lot of that border is really easy to defend. it's not very difficult terrain. it's wide open desert on both sides where you can see a long ways. and we are spending, we are spending $12 billion on the southern border every year. $12 billion. $12 billion that works out to be a 2,000-mile border, $6 million a mile. you add up customs and border protection, the humvees and the pensions and the payroll and all the fuel and the gas and everything that goes into this and the support network and helicopters, et cetera, it adds up to around $12 billion and $6 million a mile. i don't know the most current numbers we have on what it takes to build a four-lane highway, but not $6 million a mile.

the cost to defend the southern border and i think it's probably less than half of that price, mr. speaker, at least some of those older numbers i have looked at, but for the cost of what we're spending to defend the southern border, we could pave a four-lane highway 2,000 miles a year every year. this is every year. $6 million a mile. now, i ask myself, if janet napolitano came to me and said, congressman king, i want to contract this border control with you and i would like to give you a mile to start out with and it's just a mile that looks like the graph ell road from my house west or a mile of open desert and i'm going to give you $6 million to see to it nobody crosses that mile for a year -- on second thought, since

the government does these budgets over a 10-year period of time, give me a 10-year contract to guard a mile of border and give me $60 million to watch that border for 10 years, a mile of it. . i'll submit that $60 million would be adquout so that nobody would get across my mile. i'd be willing to watch you dock my pay if anybody got across it and walk aid way. if i'm in the private sector business industry, i'm not going to create this huge enterprise of hiring people and putting humvees underneath them and all the trappings that go along with that. you need some. we need boots on the ground. we need to protect and defend them and give them good equipment. we know their lives are on the line every day and we've got to respect and appreciate them and pay for them. but mr. speaker, building empire with boots on the ground isn't the only way to solve this problem.

in fact, i will submit it's not the most cost effective way. the most cost effective way would be to do what a businessman would do. if janet napolitano handed me $60 million and said, guard that mile for 10 years, you can bet i'd put up not just a fence, i'd build a concrete wall. i'd put wire on top of that wall and i would have a road and i'd have a wire fence behind that road and i would have cameras and monitors and vibration sensing devices, i would have all of the electronics necessary to send me signals if anybody came and tried to get over, under, around, or through that wall. so would anybody theals would do a calculation on how best to defend the border. anybody except boeing, for example, who spent a lot of money down there a lot of money convincing this congress they should accept a virtual fence and that virtual fence so far has been a bust.

as much as i appreciate and respect boeing when it comes to airplanes and tankers, the job down there on the border, they've got some making up to do. and we would have been better off if we had spent a couple million a mile to build a concrete wall i designed and put the wire on top of there and build the sensory devices and build a road behind that and then put a fence in there, there would be a zone that if you got over the concrete wall you took some other equipment to get over the fence that's there, and we could defend it. we could patrol it. that's what we needed to do. for a couple million dollars a mile, we could set that system up and then have $4 million a year left over. doesn't mean i'll be able to do all that without paying people and hiring people to guard that mile.

we spent $2 million a mile, to put in a wall and a fence and a road and some sensory devices. that's that still leaves $4 million left over for that year. to hire some help, buy a few humvee, get some radios, some uniform, pension plan, all these things that go into it. so i will submit that cash flows, mr. speaker, to build a wall, build a fence, because it reduces the number of personnel necessary and it's far more effective, excuse me. excuse me. it's far more effective from a cash flow standpoint from an american taxpayer dollar invested standpoint to put the infrastructure in place to maintain the infrastructure. if we had the corps of

engineers to come out with a wild number that it would cost $50 billion to maintain the fencing on the southern border. there were no numbers to back that up or numbers to support it. the wild number that they pulled out of the sky. i build things. we do corps of engineers work, have in the past. i am now out of that construction business. but i designed a concrete wall that one could put the footing in with a slip form and drop in precast panels and put the wire on top, lay the sensors in there, build that thing, wouldn't take us much to put together a crew that could build a mile of that a day. that would be not the kind of all hands on deck effort you see in manhattan project or a nasa project or the kind of effort they're using to put out the leak in the gulf right now. this is just a little old construction company that would set the system up, toss those panel in set them in with a

crane, one after another, right on down the border. it's not that hard. and it's not that expensive. and it is very effective. unless the border patrol concentrate on the areas where they'd be going through, going under and going around. it would reduce the traffic dramatically. especially concrete. you can't cut through it with a torch or hacksaw. you have to have a concrete saw, and i don't know one that doesn't make noise or vibrations. to people who argue me, you show me a 20-foot wall, i'll show you a 21-foot ladder, i think it was perhaps janet napolitano, if you show me a 12-foot wall, i'll show you a 13-foot ladder. i've heard people on both sides of the aisle make that argument. so i ask the question of the chief of the border patrol at a hearing at ellis island some years ago a few years ago, i said, if we can build an

impermeable bare yore from even hell, no one could go under, no one could get over, no one could get through it, how many border patrol does it take to man that? the answer i got back was, it still takes boots on the ground. it still takes more boots on the ground. i want enough boots on the ground, i want enough border patrol, i'm ready to put the national guard down there and forward that border. i'm ready to turn that into a training ground for afghanistan and iraq. should have done that a long time ago. that all makes sense to me but if you follow what i said, an impermeable barrier from even hell tharbling you couldn't dig under, couldn't go over the top, the full length of the 2,000 miles on our southern border, how many people does it take to watch that? i know it's hypothetical and

theoretical but the answer in those parameters is zero. it takes nobody to watch that impermeable barrier that can't go under and can't go over the impermeable barrier. that means it takes zero personnel to watch that that's hypohypothetical answer that needs to come. we know we don't have that kind of barrier. we know we can't build that kind of barrier. but my point i'm making, for those who would willfully deny the logic of this is, the better the barrier, the few they are personnel. i don't argue we have to build 2,000 miles of border fence and control. we just build it where they are crossing the most and we keep building it, building the length of it until they stop going around the end. if that's 2,000 miles, then it's 2,000 miles. if it's 854 miles, as described by the secure fence act, then it's 854.

but that kind of barrier makes the personnel we have more effective and allows us to get control of our border. it can force all traffic through our ports of entry and that's what we've got to do. we've got to beef up our ports of entry, beef up surveillance and our technology at our ports of entry, so we can catch those drugs and the illegal people and contraband going through those ports of entry. that's part of our job. we can do that. now, under this plan that i laid out, with the money we have, we can easily build all of the barriers on the border we deem are appropriate and effective and useful and we should and must do that. and we still have money left over for the personnel that we have and we'll be more effective in what we do. we can shut off the bleeding at the border. next thing that needs too happen, mr. speaker, we've got to shut off the jobs magnet. some of that can be done at the same time. there's no reason we can't do

it simultaneously. this effort on the part of the obama administration to steer away from enforcing against illegal workers and use -- but go against the actual employers without bringing illegal workers into this, when they say the raids were inappropriate, unjust, they argue it's racially motivated, i'm out of patience with people who play the race card the first time. they'll lead with the race card every time as if the race card is trump. the rule of law has to be trumped and the rule of law is justice is blind. justice is blind and does not regard race as a factor. the arizona law prohibits the utilization of race as a sole factor when it comes to evaluating reasonable suspicion. these officers know what reasonable suspicion is. i happen to have written a

reasonable suspicion law in iowa with regard to workplace drug test, similar to the arizona statute and the definition that they are utilizing which is federal case law on reasonable suspicion. and in 12 years in iowa, even though we're not using law enforcement officers to define a reasonable suspicion, what we're doing is asking the employer to designate an employee, the employer himself or herself, or an employee as their specialist in drug abuse in the workplace and if they see behaviors that are erratic, that are indicators of drug abuse, maybe the look of their eyes or pupils, dilation of the pupe pugh pills, showing up late, production going down, things of that nature, let alone accidents where people can get hurt or killed, they say to that employee, i have a reasonable suspicion you're using drugs and you need to go to the nurse's office or

downtown to the clinic right now and provide a urinalysis and we will test it and find out if you are abusing drugs. in 12 years, we haven't had a constitutional issue, we haven't had any litigation, i haven't heard any complaints about one person being unjustly targeted under reasonable suspicion for race or any other cause. or even because of personalities. and you have to know, mr. speaker that even in iowa, there are companies where that personnel who manages the reasonable suspicion definition, whose job it is under human resources to do that evaluation and make the call, that individual, yes they're trained. but surely we would have one that would be a racist like all these cops in arizona have been described to be by the people who oppose this arizona immigration law. surely there would be one that would have a personality disagreement with an employee and like to get even with them by making them take a drug test, at will.

but none of those objections have been raised. so it's hard for me to accept the idea that trained law enforcement officers, not -- it might be the janitor or the nurse or the truck driver that's pointing his finger at an employee and say, you go take a drug test. that's what's going on in iowa. without complaints or objections. in arizona, these are trained law enforcement officers whorks training is being focused because of an executive order of the governor, and they are sensitive to these issues. they understand this law and will understand it even more before it goes into effect in august. a lot of them are hispanics themselves and to presume that law enforcement officers are racist and racially motivated is a division among the american people caused and perpetrated by people who would so see -- who would tsao seeds of discontent and untruth and dishonesty for political gain. that, mr. speaker, is what's

going on in arizona. the law they passed in arizona is a law that mirrors federal immigration law, it directs local law enforcement to enforce immigration lou and it also allows citizens of arizona, gives them standing to sue if local -- if the local government is not enforcing immigration law to the standards defined. i understand that law enforcement thinks they're in a squeeze, may be sued because they're accused of discriminating and on the other hand they may be sued because they weren't discriminating, that may be what we've already heard down there but it's my experience when you bring a law like this, and i've had that experience happen to me at least two times in other circumstances, one is a drug testing law, that brought out people that were aggressively opposed to it, accused it would be setting things up for discrimination based on personalities, race, or any other region, and then when we pissed -- passed the official

english law in iowa, took six years to get there, finally it became law, there were a lot of objections from some of the more liberal members of the latino communityism sat with them and listened to their voices over and over again. but all the fears they voiced over all those months and years, there hasn't been a single report that's come back since then that anybody was disparaged or discriminated against because someone said to them, well, english is the official sate of the state of iowa. and so these fears didn't come to fruition there, the same arguments being made in iowa are being made today in arizona on the immigration law, the same arguments about official english, the same arguments being made in iowa over the reasonable suspicion language on iowa's drug testing law, none of those fears came to fruition under official english or under the drug testing reasonable suspicion in iowa. .

but i can with great confidence predict that there will be far, far less going on that reflects the fears of the objectors of the arizona immigration law than are predicted by the people demonstrating in the streets. i think my friend and former colleague, tom tancredo, got it right when he said you can judge their fear of the effectiveness of the law by the level of hysteria that they demonstrate. they aren't demonstrating against an injustice or something that is really unconstitutional. they are demonstrating that it will be enforced and actually be effective and will clean up a lot of the illegal immigration

in arizona, the 460,000 that they say is there and i suspect there are more than that. and when you have across this country, some of the cities who decide to boycott arizona, boycott arizona because arizona said we want to help the federal government enforce immigration law. that's a reason not to buy something from arizona? that's the reason not to go down there for a convention? i think that's the reason to go. i think we ought to get together and take a bus and go to arizona and spend some money. don't have a boycott. have a buycott. pick up some items from arizona and express to them my appreciation to them for stepping up to enforce the law that the american people that is on the books that president obama promise todd uphold and still willfully refuses to do so

through his suborder nates such as janet napolitano. and i might point out, tomorrow, the attorney general, eric holder, comes before the house judiciary committee. there will be a whole series of discussions and questions that will be brought out, i'm confident. eric holder took a look at the arizona law and i think was responding to a direction from the president of the united states to see if he could find anything unconstitutional about the arizona immigration law or something that was unlawful about the arizona immigration law. so that tells me they didn't know the constitution very well and probably thought there was something in there that made all immigration law the exclusive jurisdiction of the federal government. well, that's not true. it does say in the constitution that the federal government shall protect us from invasion.

and it also says in the constitution it's the federal government's job to set and and uniform practice of naturalization. you can tell that i drew a bit of a hesitant blank there, but let me see, article one, section eight, that's what it says in the constitution. those are the two references that we have to immigration in the constitution, but it doesn't make immigration law exclusive to the united states constitution and the federal government. there's nothing in the constitution that excludes the states from enforcing federal immigration law or writing their own. they just can't supersede federal law. and there is a case, u.s. versus santana garcia that establishes a precedent that is implicit

that local government, law enforcement has the authority to enforce local immigration law in the united states. it's implicit in that decision in u.s. government v. san tan/garcia. so anybody that that puts on ar gun and a badge and a uniform and provides for the safety and security of the american people and has pledged to preserve and protect the constitution of the united states ought to know that when you take an oath to uphold the constitution of the united states, that means also the laws that are written within the parameters of that constitution. it's implicit. when we take an oath here to this job as a member of the united states congress, preserve, protect and defend the constitution of the united states as does the president, so

help him god, doesn't mean that the interpretation of the constitution as he sees it, it's not a growing changing government as elena kagan believes, it is a document that is firm, fixed and rigid and it's the text of what it says and wait was understood to mean at the time of ratification of either the broader document, base document of the constitution and also the amendments as they were ratified. the local law enforcement still has the responsibility to step up and help enforce immigration law. it isn't a hands-off thing. they don't look around and think, state bank of tucson was robbed and i'm a state highway patrol officer, so i will chase down the robbers who robbed the state bank of tucson because that's my job. oh, i pulled them over and i was wrong.

i didn't have reasonable suspicion. they robbed the national bank of tucson. i have to let them go. let the federal officers collect them. but the state bank might be their jurisdiction. and then the city police officers, what do they do? do they refuse to enforce speeding laws that perhaps are not in the city ordinance. does the county sheriff only serve papers and refuse to enforce the ordinances of the city? no and no. our law enforcement officers in this country have always cooperated with each other throughout the levels of law enforcement to the extent that they can do that in order to produce an effective enforcement of the law. that is how it has been. that is how it shall be. that's how it shall be in arizona. and sheriff joe arpaio of

maricopa county has been enforcing those laws for a long time now and is facing the heat from eric holder and implicitly from president obama and as janet napolitano who knows him well, made remarks that would imply that she has come to a conclusion that there were biased violations of people's civil rights under the enforcement of sheriff joe arpaio. no basis for it but they stirred up that the american people believed there was a basis for it. i looked at tencht city down in phoenix. -- tent city down in phoenix and if i remember my numbers, but 1/3 of the inmates are there for being illegal and 2/3 being there for other reasons. they are there in striped

uniforms and get pink underwear and it's not the nicest place. we don't want it to be advertised as a nice place to come back to. that's why we have jails. but this situation in arizona, we got to stand with them. i stand with governor brewer. i stand also with representative pearce in arizona for the work he has done and he is very articulate in stepping up to defend immigration law. i encourage and look forward to making a new effort to establish a new fence and barrier on the border, one that works out to be a cash flow. and i also look forward to moving legislation in the aftermath of this november election that adopts the new idea act. the new idea act is the legislation that i have introduced in the last couple of cycles and there aren't many new ideas under the sun. it takes audacity to declare a

bill a new idea. well, i think it is a new idea and new idea stands for the new illegal deduction elimination act. new idea. and what it does is, it recognizes there are agencies out there that are pretty aggressive in defending their turf. the i.r.s. is pretty aggressive. so i asked myself, of all of these agencies, which ones would be the most aggressive and it comes back to me that the i.r.s. would be aggressive. when you go to a pick-up game and you look up here and start choosing sides and i wonder who do i want on my team if i want something done. if i'm going to ask to defend the border, give me the military first. they'll get the job done. and i don't want to get into the argument of army, navy, air

force coast guard. i would say give me the military and seal the border with the military. they will get the job done and who else would like to pick of my team. of all the government agencies if i want someone to help me, would i pick somebody from the e.p.a.? no, they would stand in the way. would i pick someone from the u.s.d.a., not likely? maybe someone from the department of homeland security, yeah, but at the top, they aren't given a defined mission and looks as though their mission is being subverted by the secretary, janet napolitano, so i would pick the i.r.s. on my team and bring them in because they're effective and here's how i would bring the internal revenue service into this effort to help control immigration law. this legislation, the new idea act, the new illegal deduction

elimination act clarifies that wages paid to illegals are not tax deductible for income tax purposes. and so let's say you have an employer that has been paying $1 million a year out to a good number of employees at a rate of $10 an hour. that $1 million a year is tax deductible because it's a business expense like electricity, heat, fuel or merchandise that's purchased for resale. all those things are business expenses. new idea clarifies that the wages and benefits paid are not tax deductible, so the i.r.s. would come in and during the course of their normal audit, they would take the list of employees, punch the social security numbers of those employees into the e-verify data base and if it comes back that they are not lawful to work in the united states, the i.r.s.

would take those wages and say, sorry, employer, this $1 million is not tax deductible for you. so it goes from the expense side pushed over here into the column that makes a profit. now, if you calculate their profit at the time i did this was 34% corporate income tax rate and add the interest and penalty, the effect on that $9 million denied as a tax deduction becomes an addition of $6 an hour. your $10 an hour illegal becomes $16 an hour because of the audit of the i.r.s. who was required to grant safe harbor to an employer who uses e-verify in a reliable way. you give the safe harbor and the i.r.s. to deny that deductibility if they aren't lawfully able to work in the united states and to put

interest and penalty on that as well as the tax liability. your $10 illegal becomes a $16 an hour illegal and what will happen is eight million illegals will be looking for work and eight million jobs that will open up for american workers, people that can work in america with a green card or american workers. that solves about half of our unemployment problem right there and it lightizes the employers. gives them something they can count on. there are some things that need to be cleaned up with that, in addition, mr. speaker. the other one is e-verify must be changed so employers can use it on current employees and use e-verify with a job offer, rather than the law right now requires the employer to hire the worker and then find out if they're legal or not. by that time rkts they have

invested in training and passed up a chance to hire someone else to fill that job, they will hire someone for a week and have to pay them so the employer has to break the law to find out if they're breaking the law. they need to be able to use e-verify with a job offer and verify those legacy employees that work for them, now their current employees. we do a -- we can do this. we can seal the board we are a concrete wall, we can put in sensory device we can put cameras up and monitor it. we can in effect -- we can man it more effectively with fewer personnel than we have if we build the barrier on the border. shut off the jobs magnet in the interior, we can do that by enforcing current law and passing e-verify to establish that i.r.s. is part of a team

member that would be required to cooperate with the social security administration and with the department of homeland security. a right hand, left hand and middle hand all know what the other are doing. it's simple to solve this problem. it's been solved in 60 minutes, mr. speaker. if anyone has any questions they can seizely -- easily visit my website, steveking.com, where i'll be happy to answer any questions that might come up. i appreciate your attention on this subject matter and i yield back the balance of my time. the speaker pro tempore: the chair recognizes the gentleman from iowa for a motion. mr. king: i move that the house do now adjourn. the speaker pro tempore: the question is on the motion to adjourn. those in favor say aye. those opposed, no.

in the relentless revolution, ucla professor at describes why capitalism is a cultural system and not an economic one. >> during the last year as i have served as solicitor general, my long standing appreciation for the supreme court role in our country -- constitutional democracy has become ever deeper and richer. >> the next step for the elena kagan is her appearance before

the senate judiciary committee. by now more about her online at the c-span video library. every program since 1987. watch what you want, when you what. >> supreme court nominee an elena kagan was on capitol hill today for her first round was centers. among the senators she met with, patrick leahy, debt sessions, and former chairman orrin hatch. she and harry reid spoke to reporters shortly after their meeting. >> it seems as the most my life in a courtroom. you are moving to this position across the street is so meaningful to everybody but the everybody, no matter where they are in america, whether it is a

democrat or republican or independent -- the great country we are in is ruled by law. that is what you are going to make sure continues. we are grateful that you have agreed to accept this assignment from the president. i did forward to working to make this transition from your present job to the next job estimate as possible. >> thank you, everybody. >> thank you. >> wire some liberal so skeptical?

>> i want to welcome elena kagan to the capital. i know this will be a challenging process to go

through. it always is for the lifetime appointment of this consequence. i want to assure her and the public that we intend to go through a thorough process. it is not a rush to judgment. we will have an opportunity to examine the credentials and evaluate that. welcome to my office. i look forward to talking to you. >> thank you. >> thank you, everybody. >> thank you, everybody. >> thank you. thank you. thank you. thank you, everybody. >> thank you. thanks, folks.

>> someone will ask a wild question. that is what they do. >> it just ignore it. >> yes. if they can get all the shot they want. we all have hideaway offices. mine has a balcony overlooking a

pretty spot. does everyone have everything they need? >> to me ask a question about being on the other side of the fence? >> elena kagan and die are going to be -- and i -- thank you. i will talk about that after. thank you all. [unintelligible] you know we are going to have a hearing. thank you, everybody.

.hank you per th >> we are glad you are here.

thank you for coming by. thank you, general kagan for being with us to do this is a valuable part of the process. i would like a talk with the nominee just one on ways to the to of us can chat about personal things and some legal things. it is a hell me get her bill -- it will help me get her feel on the approach to life. it will be handled as they fill a long. -- as we go along. it will be a fair process. we will do our best to complete it. i think that is possible. i am glad to have heeded in the office building. >> so much, senator.

>> i think they are important. a gives an opportunity to see the human being behind the prince and media hype that is out there. i look forward to it. .hank you very much for th we had a delightful conversation with elena kagan burda she is a pleasure to talk with, a good conversationalist. she responded appropriately to questions. i enjoyed my time with their. i have not gotten to know her before this. we would give a fair and

rigorous hearing that the american people expect. in the end, we can make a good decision about whether or not they should be confirmed. i have committed to president obama that we will do our best to complete this by august. i think that is possible. it is not as long as a lot of people think. there could be disruptions or unexpected developments. we will do our best to complete the process by them. i do think it is important that i share it with her that a dead understand the magnificent character of this nation has. judges serve under the

constitution. they are not above it. when judges go above that, they feel they have the power based on their changing circumstances in the world redefines the meaning of the competition. -- constitution. people every day except decisions of courts that they do not like if they had the view that the courts are not faithful to the law, that the courts are somehow impose a their political point of view on the people, then the whole system is in jeopardy. she indicated she understood that. she does come out of a tradition of activist judges.

we talked about those things a little bit. >> when you are talking about the role of the court, if she is confirmed there will be no [inaudible] rick >> if she is confirmed. i think it is more important how they role and how they can be effective. [inaudible]

>> we talked about, i shared with their some of my concerns about that. >> did she allay your concerns? not really. i think it is unfair at this point. [inaudible]

>> it sounds like you still have concerns about her views toward the military. think the military issue was a big mistake. i said that before. i have some history of that. [inaudible] >> you said you are concerned because she is coming from the obama administration that she could potentially be a rubber stamp for his policies. did you talk to her about that? >> yes, i did.

a nominate that comes from any background, she has been politically active throughout her life. she has identified with the american liberal position. she clerked for activist judges. i asked her if she understood that as a judge, [inaudible] she indicated she did. she said she would be faithful to the law. ever nominate says that. -- every nominee says that.

>> do you think that you and other republicans will want to request documents from her time as a clinton aide? >> i think all the documents that are reproducible should be produced. she has no judicial record and only a small factual record as a lawyer. i think the american people are entitled to know what kind of position she took and what kind of issues she was involved with during her time of public service. experience? my view is you do not have to be a judge to go on to the supreme court. i acknowledge that. but i think if you are not a judge, i would like to have seen

somebody practicing law for a number of years. we kind of bounced around a little bit. she indicated she felt she had the experience to do the job. she did not hesitate and that answer. [inaudible] >> i did not say that. new york is a great place. there are other places in the nation, too. was there are other universities than harvard. great universities. it is pretty unusual. i had never thought about the until today. [inaudible]

>> we talked about a lot of things. it was a nice conversation. it was an attempt to allow me to have a better perspective on how she saw her role. [inaudible] >> it proven legal record, good judgment. some demonstration that the nominee understands the need to

show fidelity to the law as written, integrity, discipline. that is really important. a lot of people are good people but they did not have the intellectual consistency. those are the type of things i will be looking at. i cannot say what areas at this point i would be concerned with. i would like to know more about her judgments if not in the legal context but maybe another context. [inaudible]

>> i hope we do not do the hearings to soon. cider leahy and i will be meeting soon -- senator leahy and i will be meeting soon. i need to -- i see no need to rush. people should have their records fairly reviewed. i would like somebody to make a charge and then there is a response.

[inaudible] >> she grasped what i was saying to her. >> were there any areas of disagreement and your conversation? >> we talked about a number of things. the military on campus and some other issues she explained that i might not have fully agreed with and the end. fundamentally, we need a judge who will be faithful to the constitution. i do not want a judge that will promote my agenda on the supreme court.

nor do i want one that will support the political agenda of the president or anybody else. we need to know the judges are independent. and if they understand the difference but from politics and law. mr. gibbs recently said that the president was not so much concerned about content but results. he is result oriented. this is not law. i do not know what this is. it was not the president who said that. i did not think he is a lawyer. they must be faithful to thel law.

when it is not, a vizards the power of law. -- it in eviscerates -- 8 eviscerates the power of law. >> good to have you in my office. >> good to be here.

there is a plaque here from the national rifle association. >> it is beautiful. >> it is a handmade flintlock. >> gorgeous. >> did you get enough? [inaudible] >> elena kagan was on capitol hill making the rounds and a series of meetings with key lawmakers. who did she meet with and what did they talk about? >> she met with senator harry reid, mitch mcconnell, the

leaders of the judiciary committee, senator sessions and senator leahy. these were mostly easygoing discussions about basic issues. they all met with her before. >> how did the meetings go, particularly with republicans? >> as is normally the case, people are guarded about what they talked about. senator hatch and senator sessions did not explain what they talked about. they seem to have gone fairly well. most of the members came away with a positive feeling so it looks like they are going well at this point. >> what is the purpose of the meetings? are they substantial or are they meet and greet? >> for some of the members, they are meet and greet. for some people who may have questions or have not met her,

lawmakers and tell us that it provides a way for them to get some insight into who the nominee is, how they will act as a judge and whether or not they will be a good fit for the court. >> when will the confirmation hearings begin? >> that is still up in the air. senator sessions and senator leahy are putting together the question that they will send to her. once they get that back, they will begin. senator leahy says he would like to have it done before the august recess. republicans seem to be ok with that for now. >> will it go smoothly? will there be opposition? >> there will definitely be some point they will be a bit tougher on her than they were with sonia sotomayor. it looks like it should be fairly okay. it does not sound like there is major opposition. >> thank you for joining us. >> coming up, president obama

meets with afghan president hamid karzai. newleaders of britain's coalition government hold a meeting. eric holder visits to capitol hill tomorrow to testify at a hearing of the house judiciary committee. it is it 10:00 on c-span3 and on c-span.org. >> during the last year, as i have served as solicitor general, my long standing appreciation for the supreme court's role in our constitutional democracy has become deeper and richer. >> the next step for nominee in late not taken as her appearance before the senate judiciary committee. find out more about her from past speeches and appearances on the c-span library.

every program since 1987. >> afghanistan's president hamid karzai it is on it for day visit to the u.s.. he met with president obama. following the meeting, they held this news briefing. >> ladies and gentlemen, the president of the united states accompanied by the president of the republic of afghanistan. >> i am very pleased to welcome president karzai back to the white house. i also want to welcome the president's delegation including ministers from across his government. we talked -- this speaks to the

brought in deepening strategic partnerships between the u.s. and afghanistan. this is the chance to return the hospitality that the president showed me during my recent visit to afghanistan. that included a wonderful afghan dinner at the president shared with us where we were joined by members of the delegation. mr. president, thank you and welcome to the united states. more importantly, this visit is an opportunity to assess the progress of our shared strategy in afghanistan and to advance the strong partnership between our two nations, one that is based on mutual interests and mutual respect. i have reaffirmed the commitment of the u.s. to and afghanistan that the stable, strong, and prosperous. afghans are a proud people who have suffered and sacrificed greatly because of their termination to shape their own destiny. there is no denying the progress the afghan people have made in the recent years. education, health care, economic

development. as i sought in the lights across kabul when i landed which would not have been visible a few years earlier. nor can we deny the very serious challenges still facing afghanistan. after 30 years of war, afghanistan still faces daily challenges in delivering basic services, security to its people well confronting a brutal insurgency. whether afghanistan succeeds in this effort will have consequences for the u.s. and consequences for the entire world. as we have seen in recent plots, al qaeda and extremist allies continue to plot and the border regions between afghanistan and pakistan and a growing insurgency could lead to a greater safe haven for al qaeda and its partners. we are striving to disrupt,

dismantle and defeat al qaeda and their allies in afghanistan and pakistan and prevent their capacity to threaten america and our allies in the future. we are reviewing the progress of our reviewed -- of our shared strategy. the military effort to reverse the taliban's momentum and their capacity to provide for their own security and a civilian effort to promote good governance and development and regional cooperation, including with pakistan, because the strategy has to succeed on both sides of the border. just over half of the additional military forces that i ordered to afghanistan have now arrived. the remainder are due by this summer. as part of our 46 nation coalition, allies and partners have increased their commitment, as well. we are partnering with afghan and coalition forces and have begun to reverse the momentum of the insurgency. we have taken the fight to the

taliban, pushed them out of their strongholds and are working to get afghans the opportunity to claim -- to reclaim their crudities. we have taken measures to avoid civilian casualties. i reiterated that the u.s. will continue to work with our afghan and international partners to do everything in our power to avoid actions that harm the afghan people. the afghan people. it is the afghan people we are working to protect from the taliban which is responsible for the vast majority of innocent civilian deaths. meanwhile, the training and development of afghan security development of afghan security forces and continues so they can begin to take the lead in securities next year. towards this end, we are working with the afghan government and our allies on a broad framework to guide the transition of development, and governance and afghan provinces. i have also reaffirmed that the

u.s. is committed to transferring responsibility for detention facilities to the afghan government. the second part of our strategy, the civilian effort, more american diplomats and experts are now on the ground and are partnering with afghan counterparts. counterparts. in his inaugural address, president karzai committed to making good governance a top priority. i want to it knowledge the progress that has been made, including strengthening anti- corruption efforts, and proving governance and progress toward credible parliamentary elections later this year. president karzai and i both a knowledge that much more work needs to be done. by also welcome his commitment to take additional steps to improve the lives of the afghan people and concrete ways, especially with regard to the rule of law, economic growth, and the delivery of basic

services. i pledged america's continued support for these efforts and i have asked secretary clinton to lead an american delegation to the kabul conference with the afghan government will present concrete plans to implement the commitments. on the related subject of peace and reconciliation efforts, i appreciated the president sharing his plans for the upcoming couple tippees conference. -- upcoming peace conference. i look forward to a continued dialogue with our afghan partners on this effort. we discussed the importance of afghanistan's neighbors supporting afghan's sovereignty

and security. i was pleased to host neighboring president's a year ago and our trilateral cooperation will continue. pakistan's major offensive against extremist sanctions advanced the security of pakistan is, americans and afghans. as we pursue our shared strategy, i am pleased that our countries are working to broaden our strategic partnership over the long term. even as we begin to transition security responsibility to afghan over the next year, we will sustain a robust commitment to afghanistan going forward. this underscores how we can partner across a full range of barriers including the agriculture, rule of law, and women's rights.

we can on leash afghanistan vast potential. -- unleash afghanistan's vast potential. i look forward to formalizing a new strategic partnership between our countries later this year. and to deepening the lasting friendship between our people. with that said -- as i have said on numerous occasions, there are difficult days ahead in afghanistan. we face a determined and ruthless enemy but we go forward with confidence because we have something our adversaries do not. we have a commitment to seek a feature of justice and peace and opportunity for the afghan people. we have the courage and resolve of men and women from afghanistan and our international coalition who are determined to help afghans realize that future. as i said during my visit, i especially want to acknowledge the extraordinary sacrifices

being made by american troops and civilians in afghanistan after different our solidarity to send an unmistakable message to those who stand in the way of afghanistan's progress. they may threaten and murdered innocent people off but we will work to protect the afghan people. they will try to destroy it but we will continue to help build afghan capacity. and allow afghans take responsibility for their country. they will try to drive us apart the we will partner with the afghan people for the future of greater security, prosperity, just as, and progress i am convinced that we will succeed. that is the work that we have advanced today and i want to thank our partners, president karzai and his delegation for the progress we have made and continue to make in the months and years ahead. president karzai. >> thank you, mr. president.

i and very grateful for the kind hospitality that you and your team offered during this visit to the u.s. as always, you have been gracious and kind and very hospitable. we began our visit the day before yesterday with an informal dinner with secretary clinton and secretary gates and yesterday at the state department, we had an extremely fruitful meeting of the groups of afghan ministries and their counterparts outlining the progress we have made the past several years and our aspirations for the future and our objectives toward the future as we travel along. mr. president, i yesterday had

the honor of visiting walter reed hospital where i visited with the wounded from afghanistan and from iraq. it was a very difficult moment for me, mr. president, to meet with a young man, very young man, who had lost to arms and legs. it was heart rendering and there were other wounded just like i had seen in afghanistan. this shows the commitment that the u.s. has to bring security to afghanistan and the difficult task that we have ahead of us in securing our future generations are better and more secure lives. i t y again for the excellent meeting this morning.

president obama and i discussed president obama and i discussed the entire factor of the progress we have main together and the campaign that is going on against terrorism, the successes of the past years, which are numerous and great, for which i again expressed gratitude on behalf of the afghan people to the american people and to you, mr. president. i also thank president obama for adding considerable resources to the success in afghanistan on becoming the president of the united states for which i can take the gratitude of the afghan people and i can reassure you that we will work with dedication and extreme care to have those resources spent well

and in place for a better future for the afghan people. we also discussed this morning the afghan-american strategic partnership and the relationship toward the future beyond the success that we will certainly game against terrorism, the issues related to the region and afghanistan's difficulties for institution building, the buildup of security forces, the afghan economy, issues of energy and issues of developmental and boards to afghanistan for which the u.s. is putting in considerable resources. we also discussed the peace we also discussed the peace process and the upcoming peace upcoming peace meeting in