Issues Largely Untouched By American Media

Floor Speech

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Mr. GROTHMAN. Mr. Speaker, tonight, we are going to address three what I consider key issues that have sadly been left largely untouched by the American media.

The first one is the penalties against married couples in income transfer payments and the degree to which these income transfer payments are going to be affected by the Build Back Better bill, if any of that survives for passage at the end of the year.

We know that Karl Marx wanted to destroy the American family. We know for a while, last year, Black Lives Matter, which was so important in last year's campaign, had on their website that they wanted to destroy the Western-prescribed nuclear family. As a practical matter, this means they wanted to keep the man out of the house.

People might wonder why I keep bringing this up. It seems like old news. I would feel better if some Democrat stepped forward and publicly condemned Marxism and publicly praised the idea that children may benefit from having a father at home. But that is not going on.

In America, before Lyndon Johnson came in with his Great Society, or war on marriage, whatever you want to call it, all but 7 percent of American children started out with both parents.

Now, I know wonderful single parents. I know children who became wonderful adults raised by single parents. But nevertheless, the statistics again and again show, whatever metric you have, you might be better off or it might be easier to raise that child with two parents at home.

After the Gingrich reforms in the 1990s, that number has since stayed at about 40 percent of children born without both parents at home. So it went from 7 percent to 40 percent, a steady increase 35 years after Lyndon Johnson passed his war on marriage bills in the 1960s. Things have been relatively static for the last 25 years.

Now, in my opinion, the reason the number of families with both parents at home dropped is because most government transfer payments are conditioned upon not having a lot of income or not having a major breadwinner in the house.

There are about 90 government transfer payments this is true of. But some of the ones that the average person should be aware of are SNAP, the food stamp program; the low-income housing program; the earned income tax credit program; the Pell grants; and the TANF program. All of these programs are designed to disappear if you have a person who makes an average income in the household.

In Build Back Better, the earned income tax credit goes up. Joe Biden increased the food stamp benefits on his own, and there will be large increases in the amount of low-income housing available.

I want to point out one of the programs, by the way, that we used to build more low-income housing. It is called section 42 housing. It is funded by very generous tax credits, which come from, obviously, very wealthy property developers. As a practical matter, the government winds up paying for over 80 percent of the housing that a private person gets through the tax credits. So one of the primary benefits of this form of low-income housing is we are, quite frankly, making the rich richer. It is one of the big tax benefits that helps the wealthier people.

In section 42, because so much of the housing is paid for by the government, the person who does the building has every incentive to make that property as expensive as it can be. We are glad the Chair is listening here because it is something I didn't know about until about 6 years ago.

It creates a situation in which a developer who is building low- income housing can outbid another developer for prime land, and they can build fancier countertops, that sort of thing, because the government is paying for 80 percent of it. So if you are somebody like me, who sometimes thinks our tax code does benefit the ultrawealthy, section 42 is one of those provisions.

Pell grants are another example of a program that you can benefit from, either you or your children, provided nobody in the household is making too much money. It is another program therefore designed--as one mother told me: Me and my husband work. My poor kids have to take out such big student loans. Is it fair we are penalized for being married and working?

That is the way that program is set up. It is designed to penalize the old-fashioned family, which is what Karl Marx would have wanted.

It is not unusual to have situations in which the penalty for getting married can be as much as $14,000. Like I said, as we have more low- income housing, as we up the earned income tax credit, these programs are pushing, I think, America in the wrong direction.

I will direct people who are listening to recent studies that have been put out by The Heritage Foundation and Robert Rector, who has long been an expert in this field, describing the degree to which the penalty on people who get married goes up.

Now, I would hope, for children in the future, that we don't continue down this path of apparently penalizing both parents for staying in the home. I hope it is something that is looked at by Republicans if we get the majority, and I hope more Democrats look into this before we add too many other benefits conditioned upon a low-income situation if Build Back Better is passed.

Again, I think it would be good if the press, which hasn't so far-- but I would hope the press would pick up on Mr. Rector's paper and comment on how America will change if more and more benefits are targeted at people who are not married with children.

I think this is one of the key stories in America over the last 50 years. I hear a lot of people back home, when they feel that America is not quite as enjoyable to live in as it was 50 years ago, that one of those reasons is what they would refer to as the breakdown of the traditional family. I hope, after hearing my explanation tonight, more people realize that that was not necessarily by accident. There are evil, leftwing people who want to break down the family, and the public policy of the American Government right now is to use their financial incentives to penalize the average family.

Now, the next issue that, if we look 15 years down the road--and I always think when we take up issues or address issues or decide how to vote on issues, we should say: How is this going to affect America not only today but 15 years from now?

I do believe that the screwed-up welfare system continues to chip away at America. But I would say the second-biggest--maybe the biggest--issue is what is going on at our southern border.

Earlier today, I had the chance to talk to a member of the Border Patrol, who appeared here in the Capitol. Having seen the border five times last year, I thought I had my fill of bad things that are going on. But talking to him as far as what is going on right now, it is worse than ever. They are seeing more people and more drug gangs operating near the border.

We are at a point in which we are not only seeing Mexican drug gangs hanging out in California, fighting for the marijuana fields that are apparently popping up in California, but they are now fighting with Chinese gangs. I mean, I have been down there several times. I have yet to see them, but this Border Patrol agent told me what we have going on in California is violent conflict between Mexican gangs and Chinese gangs, and they are becoming more aggressive.

You didn't used to see people coming to the border shooting at Border Patrol agents, but that is what we are getting now. In the past, when I have been down there, they would avoid the Border Patrol agents. Now, you really have to look out.

I mention that because I think as we work our way through a continuing resolution today and work toward the budget, we had better do something to help out the Border Patrol.

The Border Patrol right now has to deal with a lot more people than they did a year ago. When President Biden took office, there were about 20,000 people coming across here every month. We are now at about 90,000 every month, including a lot more unaccompanied children.

Obviously, when people turn themselves in at the southern border, which they do under our asylum policy, the Border Patrol agents have to drop what they are doing, ignore the border, and do the paperwork. There is even more paperwork when we have unaccompanied minors coming to the southern border because then we have to check out the young children, and we ship them around the country, wherever they have to go.

Now, this drives the Border Patrol up the wall--right?--because if somebody in this room took their children and dropped them off at the Washington, D.C., airport and just told the Southwest ticket agent, ``Oh, here is Johnny. Send him to somebody in Portland, Oregon,'' social services would be after those people. Why are you letting those people go?

But at the southern border, it doesn't work that way. If Johnny shows up at the southern border and has on his T-shirt, ``I want to go to 14 East Elm Street, Portland, Oregon,'' we deliver him to 14 East Elm Street, Portland, Oregon, no questions asked. I mean, presumably, Johnny knows those people. Hopefully, it is an aunt and uncle or grandparents. Hopefully, it is somebody, but we don't know for sure.

That is the reason there is a report that the U.S. Government will lose track of one in three unaccompanied alien children it releases to sponsors into the country. We don't even know where these kids are.

I don't know, for whatever reason--maybe it is that they like the current administration--there are not banner headlines about this, but there should be banner headlines about it. Like I said, if it were our own children just released to the airlines to go around the country, we would be concerned.

I have been at the southern border. I have watched as I flew out of McAllen, Texas, and watched all the people getting on the airplanes, children getting on the airplane, and people getting on the plane without identification. Again, you and I, we have to turn in our driver's license. ``Here I am. Can you let me get back to Milwaukee?'' That is not the way it works with the illegal immigrants. They are let in, and it is a recipe for trouble.

But the one primary thing I took out today was, again, the large number of people coming into the country.

I should point out, too--and this says something about the administration's motivation. In the first 6 months of last year, about 85 percent less people were deported than 3 years ago. Some of that can be attributed to COVID, but we largely know how to deal with COVID today.

So, you begin to get even more suspicious of the administration, that not only are they greatly increasing the number of people who come into the country, but they are dramatically decreasing the number of people with criminal records who are being deported from the country. How can America survive?

Again, when I look at Congress, when I look at what we should do, I say: What effect is this going to have over the next 15 years?

We are right now accepting people who we know very little about. I mentioned they don't need IDs. The last time I was down at the southern border, you looked at a path, which was maybe as wide as this table, and it was littered with ID's as people from wherever--Venezuela, Colombia, Chili, wherever--throw their ID's out, I guess because they want to start a new life and don't want the American government to know who they are, I guess.

That is how we are changing America. That is how we are determining who the new people coming into America are, rather than, if we really want to, doing something under the current system where people have to check in, where people are monitored, where there is some vetting process.

Why you would do it this way if you cared about the future of America, I don't know. And I felt more sorry than ever for some of the people in California who are having these drug gangs buy up houses, sometimes at heightened rates, but are also buying up houses that they are using for their operations. Of course, very quickly, those neighborhoods change if you have drug cartels owning houses in a given area.

Now, I am going to address one final issue tonight, and I am a little frustrated at the media not bringing it up. As I have said before, I am not the most hawkish person on the Ukraine-Russian situation, but since Russia and Ukraine are in the news, you would figure the media, including the conservative media, which hasn't been that loud about it, but any impartial media person would take it upon themselves to talk about the Ukrainian famine.

In the early 1930s, Joseph Stalin and the Soviet Union controlled what happened in Ukraine, and they were mad at Ukraine because some people in Ukraine wanted to be independent and hadn't been under the Communist heel enough.

Ukraine was a very wealthy region as far as agriculture was concerned, so in order to punish the Ukrainians or make sure the Soviet Union took over Ukraine, they instituted a famine. They wouldn't let Ukrainians leave the country. They took over the crops in Ukraine. It dramatically differs if you look up the numbers, but somewhere between, say, 4 and 15 million people starved to death in Ukraine in the early 1930s.

Now, isn't that news? If you were a well-informed, well-read American who went to middle school, went to high school, maybe did some college, shouldn't you know that 4 to 14 million Ukrainians were starved to death by the Soviet Union in the early 1930s?

But I talk to people. I talk to people in this building. I talk to people back home. Somehow, nobody knows it. Well, maybe that has something to do with some of the animosity between Ukrainians and the Russians. Regardless, it is something every American should know so they know why people like me are a little bit concerned when we are nice to groups founded by Marxists or when a U.S. Senator from Connecticut shows up at an anniversary for the Communist Party of America and thinks it is no big deal and we can just laugh it off.

There are many, many things wrong with communism. Suppression of free speech and the free flow of ideas is one of the things that is scary. It was not uncommon in places like Red China or the Soviet Union early on to wipe out all houses of worship. That is something that we find scary, as well as complete government control of the economy and a situation in which they determine that your success economically will, to a certain extent, be dependent upon following the line and bowing to the government.

I cannot imagine a worse form of government than that of communism. It is horrible, even without the mass murders. But every American child should know about the great Ukrainian famine of 1931 and 1932 and the millions of people who died, both so they are knowledgeable on Marxism or communism and to know a little bit about historic Ukrainian-Russian relations.

So, I beg our media to recount what happened. It would be a good time to recount what happened for the American public, and I hope in the future members of the American education system do a little bit better job of explaining some of the horrific things that happened in history.

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