Several Topics That Have Not Been Addressed

Floor Speech

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Mr. GROTHMAN. Mr. Speaker, I have several topics that I don't think have been addressed enough recently, and I would like to talk about them at this time.

I was not going to talk about DEI, but given the past speech, I think I ought to say something. Required reading for all Americans ought to be a book entitled: ``America's Cultural Revolution'' by a guy by the name of Christopher Rufo.

In the book he cites a guy by the name of Herbert Marcuse, who is a genuine communist who wanted to destroy America. He became politically active in the 1960s. Of course, in the 1960s there were a lot of people who were hoping to take down America, and there were a lot of protests and a lot of bombings. His analysis, though he was more of an academic, was that in the 1960s they tried to destroy America by setting America against the rich and creating a war or such a disagreement between the wealthy and the rest of the country that America would fail.

The hardcore left failed in their goal. They failed, in part, because I don't think Americans are naturally that covetous to be jealous over the wealthy people. And secondly, they failed because the American middle class was so well off that they didn't feel anything approaching a revolution was necessary.

So Herbert Marcuse came back with a second plan. His second plan was to try to divide America by race. It was the beginning of what they called the DEI movement. Today--prior to President Trump trying to dismantle it, but it is still out there in a lot of its forms--these people want Americans to not view themselves as primarily Americans but as a subgroup. So we would have African Americans. We would have Hispanic Americans. We would have Pacific Islander Americans. We would have Native Americans. We would have Americans from every different background. We would have Asian Americans. And they would all be told that America was a horrible, racist country, and they would need the government to help them out.

Today, we live in a country--it is hard to believe that anybody would think this is necessary. We live in a country in which most ethnic groups are from places other than Europe, and they are actually doing quite well. Indian Americans may well be the wealthiest subgroup out there right now. Chinese Americans, Filipino Americans, Japanese Americans, Persian Americans are all doing wildly better than the native born. I don't think it is a matter of color. Cuban Americans have long done better than the average American does. People coming here--African Americans coming here from Nigeria do very well. And the fact they all come here shows that either prejudice has entirely disappeared or that it is truly a minor thing. But it doesn't prevent a DEI bureaucracy from trudging ahead and trying to educate people how racist America is and trying to educate people that they ought to walk around with a chip on their shoulder.

This is a very dangerous movement. President Trump has slowed it down for now, but I think Republicans and freedom-loving people have to be a little bit more aggressive in pointing out the absurdity that you cannot succeed in this country unless you are of European descent because so many people are succeeding. They also should point out the motive of the founder of DEI, Herbert Marcuse, wanted to destroy America.

I hope when President Trump leaves the scene that his successor Presidents do what I think is the only constitutional thing to do, and that is to continue to dismantle the DEI bureaucracy, the goal of which is to make Americans bitter and angry.

In the past week, we talked about socialism. This is another topic that I think we have not done a good job of explaining how bad it is and even what socialism is.

Socialism can be used to describe a great deal of governments, but in its purest form, under socialism the government runs everything. Every store is owned by the government and every employer is the government. The idea behind socialism is if all the decisions that are currently made by the millions of businesses in America are made by government, that somehow more people will become wealthier, and there will be no income gap.

I want people to stop and think why socialism fails and how miserable life would be under a pure socialist state. Even Europe is not purely socialist, though they are much more socialist than America. I recently ran into some Pakistani immigrants who were happy to be in America, and above all they were happy to be in America as opposed to Europe because they felt Europe was a socialist state.

In any event, in a socialist state, because the government runs everything, again and again you have to bow before the government to get anything done. My office is in a city called Fond du Lac, Wisconsin. I don't know how many landlords there are, but I would say 250 landlords.

In a socialist state, you have one landlord. If the government doesn't like you or has something against you, you may not be the favored one to get an apartment or you may find you have to be on a waiting list. Since the government runs the grocery stores, some government bureaucrat determines how many grocery stores are in your town and what they are going to sell at the grocery stores. I want you to think, would things get better or worse if you had the government decide what we are going to put on the shelves of the grocery store?

Since all the businesses are owned by the government, they would determine whether you get a job, what sort of raise you are going to get, what your career path is. Obviously, because the government is in control of everything, they will penalize you or may penalize you for what you say or what your thoughts are.

You will begin to get promoted. As happens in socialist nations, you will get promoted based on how the government feels about you because the goal of socialism, the stated goal, which is never achieved, is that we want everybody making the same amount of money or in the same place materially.

You create a situation which is a problem for them if, say, one Uber driver worked 60 hours a week and the other Uber driver works 40 hours a week. Pretty soon, the Uber driver who works 60 hours a week will have money for things that the guy who drives 40 hours a week will not have. This presents a problem for socialism, but as is apparent from the dislike of people who are working harder from people on the other side of the aisle, what will happen is that they will necessarily feel they have to do something to penalize the person who works 60 hours a week rather than 40 hours a week.

Another situation is if two different people work 40 hours a week and one is more frugal than the other person and saves more money, that is also considered a problem in socialism because all of a sudden we have a wealth gap, and the government has to step in and make sure that the person who was more frugal does not have more assets than the person who spends a lot of money.

Since the government runs everything in socialism--I have to point this out again--the government determines whether you get a job, whether you are promoted in your job, whether you get to work in a favorable location or not a favorable location.

Even today, in a government that is much more limited than under a socialist paradise, I can think of examples in which people were afraid to speak honestly because they worked for the government, and that is something that we should all be considering, do we want to work in a world in which if you are critical of--well, for example, there is a woman I know who wanted to be a substitute teacher, but she was afraid to put a yard sign out for me for fear that since the local school district had a leftward tilt, she was afraid to say she supported me or would give me any money for fear that she wouldn't be called to be a substitute teacher. That is what happens in a socialist state, where the government runs everything.

When we dealt with what was referred to as Act 10 when I was a State legislator in Wisconsin, there were people who were supportive of Governor Walker but afraid to say it because they worked for the government, and there was a government bias against him. Therefore, people had to pay a price if they took a different tack than the majority of people in the government wanted to.

You can see this is, in a way, the ending of freedom if you have a genuine socialism. To my shock, way, way, way too many of my wonderful colleagues on the other side of the aisle voted yesterday for a resolution that could only be taken--or voted against a resolution that was contrary to socialism.

Socialism is the end of freedom. Our whole Constitution is built on the idea of limited government, and of course socialism is all built on the idea of more government.

We recently had a bill coming out of the Budget Committee. There were, I think, 16 or 17 amendments. Every one of the amendments was a Democratic amendment to add more money to some area of the government. In other words, to strengthen the role government has in life and to decrease the free-market segment of the society in which people are free to form their own business or work for whomever they want.

It is, quite frankly, a scary thing that any young people are enthralled with socialism in any sense. I don't think they should even call it socialism. I think they should call it a government economy where the government runs everything and makes all the economic decisions or if not the government economy, they should call it a free economy, in which I am free to work for whomever I want, I am free to open up my own business, I am free to work 50 hours a week if I want and make more money, I am free to take a chance on a different type of product, manufacture a different sort of product, and if it does well, it does well, and if it doesn't, it doesn't.

Another problem with government, of course, is the government decides when any business or any store closes. We all know in our hometowns businesses that close, stores close, but do you know what never closes? A government program.

That is another problem with socialism. If there is something inefficient, if there is something that is producing something most people don't want, because it is owned by the government, it continues to sit there. People who are for socialism, if they are nailed down on it, probably would never let any business fail.

In any event, I do think young people ought to be educated that socialism means a government-controlled economy and a free--I don't like the word capitalism. We will say a free market economy means you are able to work wherever you want, you are able to open up your own business, you are able to invest in apartments if you want, and in general you have a free life when it comes to economic decisions.

That is why America is great. We have to hope that we never fall victim to the idea that socialism is a good thing, and we don't elect people who think having the government own more of the means of production is in any way going to make us more materially better off-- which it won't--but even more, we always have to realize that the larger the government gets, the less freedom you have.

The final thing I am going to deal with tonight is the topic I have dealt with before, and that is the huge marriage penalty associated with our welfare programs.

Almost all the income transfer programs, be it food share, be it low- income housing, be it Pell grants, be it Medicaid, or be it earned income tax credit, they all, in order to get them, rely on somebody being below some poverty line.

That is because with a married couple you have both a man and a woman who may be working. It is rare that a married couple is eligible for these programs. Very quickly, young people in this country figure out that if they want to have children, then they might be materially better off by not being married. We wind up changing the culture. Ever since the horrible LBJ was President, we wind up changing the culture from one in which a very high percentage of people are getting married before they have children.

The number of children born out of wedlock used to be under 5 percent. We have shifted families, because of our overwhelming bias, to a situation in which about 45 percent of the babies born in this country wind up being born out of wedlock. This is unfortunate for the babies. It is also unfortunate for the men.

Usually, Mr. Speaker, when you have beneficiaries in these programs, it is the single woman who is the beneficiary, and therefore the men have a much less productive life because they are not connected with a married family. They are not connected with raising children, and it results in them adopting antisocial behavior. We see this in particular parts of America in which the nuclear family has almost entirely disappeared. There is more crime and more drug abuse, and I attribute that all to the massive expansion of the welfare state beginning in the 1960s.

In any event, I know President Trump's goal is to make America as great as it was at its peak. I would encourage President Trump to put together a committee, or a commission, to see what we can do to get rid of these programs that can penalize people $30,000 to $35,000 a year for getting married.

In America, we should treat everybody equally, and right now we are not doing that. Like I said, I think the result is a more difficult background for young children, a more difficult background for the women, and particularly a more difficult background for the men who cannot assume their role as provider in the family.

I encourage President Trump, as he prepares for the seventh and eighth years of his Presidency, to put forth an agenda in which we stop penalizing people who decide to get married before they have children.

In any event, those are some of the issues that I think are important for the press to pay attention to.

I look at my wonderful Democratic colleagues over there. I remember there was once a Congresswoman, I can't remember her first name, but her last name was Tsongas. You should look her up. She was from Massachusetts. She did understand that this huge marriage penalty we had was a harm to significant segments of the American population. Hopefully, some Democrats can follow Congresswoman Tsongas on board and try to help us do something about this.

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