30-Something Working Group
30-SOMETHING WORKING GROUP -- (House of Representatives - June 19, 2006)
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Ms. WASSERMAN SCHULTZ. We have begun a proud tradition in south Florida, and we are looking forward to equaling over time the amazing success of the Boston Celtics. Having already experienced the joy of a national championship by the University of Florida Fighting Gators basketball team, basketball is alive and well in Florida. As you can see, we have some pretty good players down our way.
But I want to jump off because Mr. Ryan did refer to the billions in debt, and you went through very eloquently, and I don't think people in America have a real idea, that is why I love that chart of the percentage of debt that each of those countries has of the United States.
And when you graphically depict it across the entire country, it really, really drives the point home. But what I found, and I have a shorter tenure in Congress than you and Mr. Meek and Mr. Delahunt do, going from the State legislature where we were dealing with millions more often than billions with a ``b,'' people would tell me it is hard to get their mind around what a billion is. It is such a big number; it is hard to grasp.
So I came up, along with my staff's help, with this chart to graphically illustrate what a billion is. When we are talking about billions in debt and the interest payments are in the billions and they dwarf other priorities like homeland security and funding for our veterans and education, how much is a billion?
A billion hours ago, for example, humans were making their first tools in the Stone Age. A billion seconds ago it was 1975, and the last American troops had pulled out of Vietnam.
A billion minutes ago, it was 104 A.D. and the Chinese had first invented paper.
If you take the definitions that the Republicans use when it comes to a billion, a billion dollars ago under the Republican leadership was only 3 hours and 32 minutes ago at the rate our government is currently spending money.
So a billion used to be a really significant number that if you translate it into time was a very long time ago. But translated into time under Republican leadership, it was just a few hours ago.
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Ms. WASSERMAN SCHULTZ. You are absolutely right, and a little more reality to translate what we are talking about here into everyday economics, if you look at the 2006 tax reconciliation bill and compare it to benefit by income for the benefit that was given or the equivalent of the benefit to the amount of income that an American taxpayer brings in, for example under the 2006 tax cut legislation that passed out of this House overwhelmingly with Republican votes, an average American taxpayer that makes between $10,000 and $20,000 a year would get back enough to buy a Slurpee. But if you make between $40,000 and $50,000, you will get from the 2006 Republican tax cut bill about as much money to buy a gallon of gas.
Now, if we are talking real benefits here, the real benefits and who got the most out of the Republican tax cut bill this year, the reality is if you made more than $1 million, you get the equivalent of a Hummer.
I don't know, if I am talking to the folks in my district, and I know the folks in Youngstown, Ohio, and the people on the Cape and in the Boston area, they probably are not that interested in getting enough money back to buy a Slurpee. Something tells me, and at least when I go home, and I have a district that includes a lot of areas that have people of means, and I can tell you when I go to community events and bring my kids to the soccer game and drive my kids around in our minivan, the people in the wealthiest parts of my district are coming up and saying keep the money because the needs we have in America are overwhelming. They are saying, you know what, I don't need the Slurpee, I can buy my own Hummer. If you are making more than a million dollars, you can buy your own Hummer.
Mr. RYAN of Ohio. And it is not like we have the money to give the person making a million dollars.
Ms. WASSERMAN SCHULTZ. We don't. We have an $8 trillion deficit.
Mr. RYAN of Ohio. And where do we get the money to give the money to the millionaire to go buy a Hummer? We have to go borrow it. That makes no sense.
Ms. WASSERMAN SCHULTZ. Yet the rank and file Republicans and the Republican leadership continue to try to profess that they are the party of fiscal responsibility. It is hilarious. It really is.
In the legislature in Florida, we used to talk about statements like that not being able to pass the straight-face test. It doesn't pass the straight-face test. How do they say it without smirking? How do they say it without crossing their fingers and putting their fingers behind their back? We should check behind the backs of all of the Members when they are speaking on the floor here about how fiscally responsible they are because I am sure they are all like this. They can't cross themselves enough. It is really over the top.
I was taught to tell the truth by my parents. I'm incredulous how some of these Members get away with claiming fiscal responsibility.
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Ms. WASSERMAN SCHULTZ. Look at this. To illustrate what you are talking about here, you have got interest rates that are bad enough in terms of interest people have to pay in order to get on top of their college loans.
But college tuition itself has gone up. This is under the President, since President Bush has taken office. College tuition itself has gone up 40 percent.
Then you take a look at gas prices which have gone up 47 percent. You take a look at health care costs, gone up 55 percent. This is the reality for Americans today. But median household income has dropped by 4 percent. I mean, dropped. So how are Americans supposed to make up this difference? What are they supposed to do when it comes to the income that they are bringing in and the everyday costs that are a part of their life? This is, like, for a mom who has got a bunch of kids, and she is trying to figure out how many of them she is going to be able to actually feed, which one do you let go? Which one is not important? Higher education? Putting gas in your car? How are you going to get to work? How are you going to get to the grocery store? How are you going to help your family day to day?
How about health care? What happens, we all know, because everyone's heard the story. I have constituents who don't even think about this stuff every day who can tell me, you know, most of the people that they know who don't have health insurance have to wait `til they are so sick that they have to take their family member or themselves to the emergency room so that they can get primary health care. I mean, which one do you eliminate? Which one is not important if your income is plummeting?
Now, let's take a couple of other things that have happened under the Bush administration. You have got the typical family paying $1,200 more a year for health insurance. You have housing that is the least affordable that it has been in 14 years. I mean, just to give you an example, in the community that I live in, I represent south Florida, the average price of a house in the two counties that I represent is over $300,000. That is not affordable. I mean, that just puts home ownership completely out of bounds for, never mind the average person, even somebody making a decent living.
Mr. DELAHUNT. One can only imagine that young person graduating from college with this debt.
Ms. WASSERMAN SCHULTZ. But this is the 30-something Working Group, Mr. Delahunt. We identify, we are not, well, some of us are not, that far from having been through exactly the situation.
Mr. DELAHUNT. But being 30-something, things were better.
Ms. WASSERMAN SCHULTZ. Of course.
Mr. DELAHUNT. For you when you were 20-something than your 30-something.
Ms. WASSERMAN SCHULTZ. Mr. Delahunt, let me just tell you. When my husband and I got married, we got married in 1991. And I was 24 and my husband was 26. Within several months of getting married, we were able to buy our first home. We both had health insurance. We were not worried about how to put gas in our car, and neither one of us had college tuition debt.
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Ms. WASSERMAN SCHULTZ. What plan have you heard of from the other side of the aisle, from our good friends on the other side? Where is their economic plan? Where is their plan to fix it? What bills have they passed that reduce the deficit, that help Americans struggling to pay for gas, that help them pay for higher education? I mean, is it all you are on your own? It is all about you, and we are from the Government, and we are not here to help.
We have a plan. We have a new direction for America which is laid out right there. I hear a lot of the Republicans on the other side of the aisle accusing us of not having a plan. We have got one. Where is theirs? Because if we keep going in this direction, we are headed for more deficit and more of our citizens twisting in the wind.
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Ms. WASSERMAN SCHULTZ. Mr. Delahunt, you are absolutely right. The contrast here is that when it comes to actually improving the economy and beginning to go in a new direction, the Republicans have no plan at all. More of the same. More deficits, more tax cuts for the wealthiest among us, more people who are going to go uninsured, more of the same; as opposed to the Democrats' new direction for America, Mr. Ryan, that you have on the easel next to you.
And I think it would be useful to take, Mr. Speaker, the Members through what the Democrats' plan is if we take the majority back of this institution and the things that we would implement if we were able to actually implement an agenda.
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Ms. WASSERMAN SCHULTZ. And, Mr. Ryan, don't forget. We have a plan that would allow small businesses to pool their resources and pool their risk that, if we were allowed to implement it, and if we were in the majority in this institution, we would pass legislation that would do that without totally eliminating the benefits that are part of these health insurance packages.
In the Republicans' legislation that they crammed through the Congress with a rubber-stamp vote that they typically do, their solution was to pass bare-bones insurance legislation that basically provides coverage for almost nothing. And you would basically dumb down any insurance policy. Some people might say, well, some insurance is better than none. But when you have the second leading cause of death for women in this country, being breast cancer, and in most States mammograms are a mandated insurance benefit, their plan would allow the elimination of that required coverage. If you implement it and their plan became law, we would ensure that fewer women would be able to get mammograms, and the incidences of breast cancer would go up.
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Ms. WASSERMAN SCHULTZ. Sure. What former House Speaker, leader of the Republican revolution on this Republican Congress said, he cited a series of blunders. You referred to our Republican colleagues' incompetence a minute ago, Mr. Delahunt. Well, former Speaker Gingrich ``cited a series of blunders under Republican rule from failures in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina,'' which we have been talking about this evening, ``to mismanagement of the war in Iraq. He ..... said the government has squandered billions of dollars in Iraq.''
And our good friend Mr. Tanner, whom you just talked about, and the audit he wants to accomplish once we are in the majority, he analogized that legislation to a mechanic looking under the hood because that is really what is necessary here. I think I would want to make sure I had some Purell with me after we looked under the hood when the Republicans are put aside and maybe have a mask just so that I wouldn't become infected by some of the mismanagement and gross incompetence that has clearly occurred here under Republican rule.
I mean, a deficit of more than $8 trillion, a debt that is more in the time that President Bush has been in office than all previous 42 Presidents combined, a war in Iraq that has created a cesspool in a country that was in bad shape to start with, but that literally the situation that they are in now in Iraq with the terrorism on the rise that exists there was created by this President and the Republicans' war.
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Ms. WASSERMAN SCHULTZ. If the gentleman from Ohio would yield, because the contrast to what is going on in the cesspool that has been created by the Republican leadership in Iraq is that if we were in the majority in this Congress, we would implement the real security agenda. We would focus on making sure that there was a plan in Iraq so that we can train the Iraqi troops to take care of the business at hand in Iraq on their own and begin to phase out our involvement there.
Yet there is no plan to do that. There is no timetable. There isn't anything coming from this President that would say when a percentage of Iraqi troops are prepared, that we are going to pull out X percentage of Americans troops. We have to make sure we start focusing on the terrorism here at home.
What happens instead, in the debate we had the other day, where it should have been a debate, like you said, it was not a debate, but in the basic filibuster, single-subject filibuster in which we were afforded no opportunity to present or talk about our alternative, instead you had bobblehead after bobblehead on the other side of the aisle just come up to the podium and shake their head up and down and say exactly what the administration wanted them to say. Then they put their votes up on the board and did exactly what was expected of them, vote to rubber-stamp the exact same stay-the-course policy that Americans clearly have indicated they do not want to continue. I don't know what hometown these people are going home to.
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Ms. WASSERMAN SCHULTZ. So that way we can get back to talking about what Americans' priorities are here; making sure their kids can afford college, making sure when they are sick they can go to the doctor, but right now they can't because 46 million Americans don't have health insurance; making sure that gas prices aren't over $3 a gallon, with record profits going to the oil industry, and this Congress, led by the Republicans, passing legislation twice last summer with every single Republican voting yes and them holding the vote open at least 40 minutes to make sure that they could twist enough arms to give away subsidies to an oil industry that is already making more money than they know what to do with.
I mean, if you were watching Meet the Press on Sunday and you saw the three CEOs of the oil industry just completely not getting that they need to be part of this solution, and no one in this Congress, that is leading this Congress, except for us, who are making every attempt, no one asking the oil industry to step up and invest their revenue from their profits into alternative energy resources. It is just absolutely unbelievable.
Mr. RYAN of Ohio. We don't mind you making a profit. Profit is not a dirty word. Go out and make money, hire Americans, this is good news. But do it in the national interest.
Ms. WASSERMAN SCHULTZ. Exxon-Mobil invested $10 million, and made $30 billion; $10 million in alternative energy last year. That is what they talked about on Meet the Press on Sunday.
I mean, give me a break. Where is the commitment? Where are the priorities?
Mr. RYAN of Ohio. Who was the one gentleman, Lee Raymond, that got big time money. I don't know how many millions he made last year. I know he got a $2 million tax break.
Ms. WASSERMAN SCHULTZ. $400 million.
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