Republican Conference Bills

Mrs. LUMMIS. Mr. Speaker, tonight's discussion will be about bills that Members of the Republican Conference have sponsored that have not yet gotten a hearing that we still think are very good ideas for our country at this time of high debt, high deficits, and when regulation is being heaped on businesses that actually need the chains to be broken so they can pursue the American Dream of hiring people, creating jobs and fulfilling our role in the country and the world, which is to feed people, clothe people, create jobs, create wealth, create opportunity and so that all Americans have the opportunity to do so without being shackled by the Federal Government.

With me this evening is BOB LATTA, who is from one of the most diverse districts in the entire United States. It has everything from agriculture to manufacturing, and it has experienced every up and down that is possible for one district to experience. During the course of this evening, Mr. Latta and I hope that we will have the opportunity to refer you frequently to www.americanroadmap.org, which is a draft of the Budget Committee on which we both serve, an opportunity that provides Americans the chance to get out of debt and to eliminate the deficit, and to comprehensively do so without raising taxes.

It takes a long time, but it creates a very smooth landing for our country. And we also want to refer you to www.americaspeakingout.com. Americaspeakingout.com is an official function of the Republican Conference here in the U.S. House which allows you to weigh in on ideas that you have for our country that will make it stronger, safer, more efficient, more cost effective and will unshackle this Nation's economy in a way that will allow us to once again pursue our role as a global leader in terms of innovation and jobs.

So at this time I would like to yield to my colleague, the gentleman from Ohio (Mr. Latta).

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Mrs. LUMMIS. That $2 billion a day you just mentioned, that would only take either 3 or 4 days for the entire budget of the State of Wyoming for 2 years. That covers our whole budget. It's a stunning number. That's how much money we're talking about.

And I yield back.

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Mrs. LUMMIS. Are you aware of any circumstance since you have been in Congress where the Members of Congress in the leadership have been called to the White House to sit down and talk about how we are going to cut spending?

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Mrs. LUMMIS. Is there any instance where the Federal Government has done the same thing? Has the Federal Government gone to its employees and said, We need to cut you back to 32-hour weeks so we can keep you employed, keep you on your benefits so you don't lose your health care, but we need to save some money. Are you aware of that?

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Mrs. LUMMIS. What do you hear from your constituents? Do they believe that they are ready for the kind of reforms that you believe are necessary to save our country?

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Mrs. LUMMIS. The chart I have to my left, the viewer's right, is exactly illustrating what the gentleman has just been discussing. If you look at the spread between spending and taxes that occurs on the far side of the dotted line, that shows you what is projected into the future. That spread between spending and taxes going into the future is enormous and consistent. And if you look at what that produces in terms of deficits, look at the bottom line, the red line again on the far side away from me from the dotted line, and you can see that deficits are projected into the future. When we say unsustainable, that's what we mean. The long-term consequences to this country is that our children and grandchildren will inherit the consequences of our reckless behavior. How do we resolve this?

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Mrs. LUMMIS. This chart illustrates exactly what the gentleman is discussing. If you look at the blue line, that is private sector employment. That is employment in the entrepreneurial economy. This is employment that comes from the employer class of Americans. If you look at the red line, the skyrocketing government employment, that is just that. It is the Federal Government attempting to replace the private sector with public sector jobs. The only problem is a public sector employee pays the same taxes that a private sector employee does. However, the public sector employee's salary comes entirely from private sector employment and the taxes generated by it. There is no way that we can sustain an economy of totally government employees when we have lost the private sector jobs, the kinds of jobs that Mr. Latta has been referring to this evening in his district.

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Mrs. LUMMIS. My daughter did a study for an economics professor about externalities, meaning decisions you don't necessarily see in black and white on a business plan, that might affect a Wyoming rancher's decision to stay in agriculture or leave agriculture. Because we know that in Wyoming agriculture, especially beef production agriculture--of course, there are no subsidies in beef production agriculture in Wyoming, and other States as well.

So the largest group in Wyoming are those that make from 0 to 4 percent profit. The second largest group are those that make from 0 to minus 4 percent profit. And after looking at many factors of what would motivate a person to stay in a business where the profit margin is that low, the answer for especially second, third, and fourth generation ranchers was the ability to pass it on to my children, to give my children a better life, to give my kids the ranch.

Now, Mr. Latta has mentioned two things that are of concern if a person's motivation is to give their children a better standard of living, a better life, an opportunity, a shot that maybe they didn't have or that they have enjoyed and they just want their children to have as well. You mentioned that next year the estate tax is going to go back up to a maximum amount of 55 percent of the value of the estate, with only a $1 million exemption; whereas, this year there is no estate tax whatsoever.

Think about that and how that will affect you if you have spent your entire life building something with the one motivation of giving that to your children or your grandchildren. That is going to be devastating. Many people I know would accept a smaller estate tax with a higher exemption, but no one I know is going to be satisfied that a 55 percent tax on your life's work that you wish to pass on to your children is anything but a taking. And takings are unconstitutional under our Fifth Amendment. I mean, that's how people look at it.

And, you know, if you worked your whole life for something 7 days a week, not 5 days a week, not 40-hour weeks, but every minute of every day that you are awake, growing your family, growing your business, growing their opportunities, creating a community, creating the kind of American Dream that so many people came here with nothing and then built over their lifetimes or their parents built over their lifetimes and want to pass on to their children.

The other point you made that I think is going to affect that American Dream is our debt, is these running deficits that are unsustainable over time. Because if we mount our children and our grandchildren with debt, it will crowd out private investment. If we are spending the entire Federal budget, all of our tax dollars on the combination of entitlement programs and interest on the national debt, we have crowded out the opportunity for private investment as well as for discretionary spending within our economy.

I yield back to the gentleman to tell us more about the consequences of these bad policies and the kinds of bills that he has proposed to change all that.

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Mrs. LUMMIS. The gentleman has mentioned a couple of things that are important to recreating a vibrant economy and to taking the shackles off of American business, and tax policy is high on the list. The fact that we could have an estate tax that is much smaller in terms of its impact on a family, and the American people would accept that is in fact the case. I hear it over and over in this country. We have also heard that it would be helpful in terms of American competitiveness for us to reduce our corporate tax so we are more globally competitive.

Among the provisions that anyone can read about is in americanroadmap.org, and that is the proposal to create a flat income tax. That would be a rate, such as 10 or 11 percent, that you would pay on all of your income, regardless of source, regardless of whether it's active or passive, whether it is capital or income from a job, whether it is rental income, royalty income, or, again, active income. All sources of income would be taxed at 10 or 11 percent.

So you take all your income annually times 10 percent or 11 percent. Maybe you have a deduction of

$20,000, so your first $20,000 worth of income isn't taxed. And then whatever that amounts to, you just write a check and send it in to the IRS. You don't need to have CPAs help you fill out your tax returns. And I can tell you, if we did that, it would save the American people a lot of money. We would garner a lot of tax revenue that we aren't collecting now because of the efforts and machinations that people go through to try to protect as much of their income as they can from being taxable because, A, there is no way to avoid it, whether you are rich or poor; and, B, it's predictable. You know that the person across the aisle from you at work or at church is also paying 10 or 11 percent, whatever it is, of their paycheck.

That sounds so fair to me. It sounds so logical. And yet that is something that is so hard to change with all of the interest groups that affect the appearance and shape of our Tax Code.

I do want to encourage, as we go along, everyone to go into AmericaSpeakingOut.com and weigh in on ideas that we have proposed to reduce the Federal debt and deficit and stimulate the economy and take the shackles off the American entrepreneur. And also to just weigh in and give your own thoughts about how we might do it.

I would like to talk about one of the bills that I have sponsored, and it's a way to reduce the number of Federal employees without firing anybody. It is a bill that would provide that if you look at the curve off here to my left, your right, you will see Federal employment in the year 2010, which is the farthest bar away from me, has absolutely skyrocketed. And this is Federal Government employment full-time equivalents excluding the Postal Service. So it has just grown leaps and bounds.

Now, how do we soften the landing for those people that were hired in a way that will allow our economy to return to normal so we can begin to reduce all this deficit spending? And the answer is for every person who retires or voluntarily vacates a position, that vacated position, that vacant position would be moved into a position pool, and only half of the positions would be moved in the position pool. Then the executive branch of government, run out of the President's office, would have to determine whether that position was essential to that agency and needed to be placed back in that agency and then filled with an employee, or whether that position should be moved to another agency that had a more impactful mission on our American economy and on our government regulatory needs.

So it's a way over a 10-year period to reduce the number of Federal employees through attrition. They leave. Their position becomes vacant. Half of those positions go away. That saves about $70 billion. Not a small amount of money.

Some of the other ideas that Republicans have filed go way back to the stimulus package. We sponsored a bill that would have stimulated economic growth; in fact, it would have created twice as many jobs at half the cost of the majority party's $787 billion stimulus package. How did we do it? We did it by investing in infrastructure instead of earmarks and by cutting taxes. This is something I believe, Mr. Latta, that you and I both supported.

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Mrs. LUMMIS. You know, among the other pieces of legislation that Republicans have sponsored includes reducing our salaries or freezing our salaries, freezing government salaries, reducing spending across the board. There have been Republican proposals, anything from 1 percent to 5 percent to 10 percent. There have been Republican proposals that would take spending, as Mr. Latta referred to earlier, back to 2008 levels or even 2006 levels. You know, we had enough government then. There were not a lot of complaints that, my gosh, we don't have enough government; we need to spend more on government.

So we could take spending back to 2006 or 2008 levels, and I don't believe the American people, other than those who have benefited specifically by being employed by those Federal agencies and Federal programs, would notice the absence of that money, and in fact, they'd probably benefit mightily because it would save so much money that interest payments on the debt and the deficit would be reduced, and we would not have to borrow so much money.

A couple weeks ago here in Washington, some U.S. Treasuries were issued. They are issued every day that we are working, Monday through Friday. There's a sale of U.S. Treasury bonds because we are going into debt so much we have to sell Treasuries every day. This particular issue was undersubscribed. That means there were not enough buyers for the money that we attempted to sell, and the reason is that for the risk that the buyers were taking, they wanted a higher rate of interest. They wanted a better return. When you take more risk on an investment you're purchasing, you want a higher rate of return.

As soon as we have to start paying higher interest in order to attract buyers to our debt, we are ensuring that our children and grandchildren are going to be saddled with higher interest payments once again, crowding out other investments in our economy. These are the kinds of things that absolutely stifle economic growth in our country and encourage some businesspeople, as was mentioned by Mr. Latta, to move their businesses elsewhere.

We do know that, for example, in the Gulf of Mexico right now, with the moratorium on drilling and no end in sight to when it might be lifted, that there are drill rigs that are considering moving to that tremendous oil and gas find off the coast of Brazil. If one of those enormous rigs is moved off to the coast of Brazil, it will be 5 years before it comes back. It's not going to move back at a moment's notice. That takes so many thousands of jobs away from workers in Louisiana. So they're doubly punished. They're punished because their shores are polluted by oil from the Deepwater Horizon rig which exploded, destroying the fishing industry and retarding the tourism industry. And then they're adding insult to injury; the oil and gas employees lose their jobs in areas where you could drill at a shallower depth or a medium depth in a much more safe and well-understood manner. This is the wrong reaction.

You know, the President is speaking later this evening about the situation in the Gulf, and what I would note about that is, we can't legislate our way out of the damage and the devastation to the Gulf. We have to clean it up, and we have to make BP pay for it. Those are our alternatives: Clean it up; make BP pay for it.

The President, if he had had executive experience, would likely have called the head of BP within 48 or 72 hours of that oil spill and said, I want you on a conversation with me every single day at a specific time. I want you and me and the Coast Guard and the Governors of the affected States and anyone else who is able to help us clean up this mess, and they could get on the call every day at the same time. The President could have opened a call, and he could have said, I'm not going to stay on this call for more than a minute, but I'm going to tell you that the people on this call are responsible to the people of this Nation to make sure that that oil does not get to our shores, and I want you to do everything possible. BP has said they will pay for it. BP is on this call, and are you assuring us you will pay for it? I mean, under which circumstances, they would have said, yes. And it could have proceeded that way every day with the President's full support for the Governors' requests, for the Coast Guard's requests, for repealing the effects of the Jones Law, which inhibited our ability of getting other countries to help us in the response. All of that could have been handled if it would have begun earlier enough.

But the fact that there was an effort to run away and avoid the problem and deal with it not until it was just completely out of control is, I believe, an indication of someone who had legislative skills and not executive skills. There is such a difference. We cannot legislate our way out of the situation, and we should not have a cap-and-tax bill as a response to a devastating accident that may be the worst ecological disaster we've ever had, because taxes are not going to change it.

BP has said they're going to pay the bill. To do otherwise would be to impose taxation on the people in this country who can least afford it, those of low and moderate income who are trying to make ends meet at a time when unemployment is still 9.7 percent, at a time when we should be helping them find jobs, not imposing a moratorium on safe drilling, that takes jobs away from them. The Gulf is just one example of where that's true.

And I yield back.

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Mrs. LUMMIS. Mr. Latta has announced a call to action for all Americans, and we are attempting as a Republican Conference to solicit ideas and priorities from all Americans, regardless of party affiliation.

Please visit americaspeakingÐout.com.

This will provide an innovative online forum for policy debate and idea generation. It gets us outside of Washington to talk about policy solutions at town hall meetings across the Nation. It allows us to discuss how

our principles of freedom and smaller government could be applied to the priorities of the American people.

In time, we will produce a new governing agenda for America guided by this open process and built on our conservative principles, and we want to demonstrate that Congress should pursue different policies and operate this House more responsibly than both Democrats and previous Republican majorities. And if I hear something all the time on the Republican side of this room, it is that we don't want to treat the Democrats the way we used to treat them, and we don't want to be treated the way the Democrats have treated us.

I really believe that the 112th Congress that begins in January could be a new beginning for our country. It will only be so if the American people say it will be so because the American people are the ultimate governors of this country, and they govern with their vote, and they will have an opportunity in November to vote.

So please visit americaspeakingout.com. Give us your ideas. We want to know. We want to build a working, bipartisan majority with the American people so we are legislating what the American people want, not what liberals want, not what conservatives want, what the American people want.

So americaspeakingout.com is a state-of-the-art Web site that allows individuals to suggest ideas of their own or weigh in on ideas offered by others. Everyone can see the ideas that are on the table, make comments on them, and register their approval or disapproval.

This Web site brings the Halls of Congress into American homes and uses the best of social media to allow America's many voices to be heard.

And we would conclude by saying, to change the way Washington works and the policies it pursues, it will require Washington to listen when America speaks out, and we hope all Americans will join us in this unprecedented process of engagement.

For concluding remarks, I yield back to the gentleman from Ohio.

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Mrs. LUMMIS. I thank the gentleman from Ohio for joining me this evening.

I look forward to hearing the remarks of the next group. They are our Democratic colleagues from across the aisle. This group will be led by Representative Wasserman Schultz, who I had the privilege of visiting Israel with earlier this year. She led a congressional delegation to Israel. And for this neophyte in international policy, it was a fabulous experience. We had the opportunity to meet Israeli President Shimon Peres. We visited with Benjamin Netanyahu, with the minority leader, Tzipi Livni, and also with Palestinian Authority leaders. We visited Jerusalem, the Golan Heights, and some of the fabulous farming communities near the Sea of Galilee.

For someone who had never visited Israel--in fact, I had never seen the Mediterranean Sea in my entire life, and to get to visit it with people who are steeped in the history, the politics, and the worldwide consequences of our relationship with Israel, it was a tremendous experience. So I want to thank the gentlewoman from Florida, Representative Wasserman Schultz, for including me on the congressional delegation that she led to Israel.

Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

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