By Tom McClintock

Remarks delivered in the House Chamber, Washington, D.C. January 6, 2011. M. Speaker:

I rise to express the hope that historians will look back on the 112th Congress as the session that restored American prosperity – and to express my strong agreement with the new leaders of this House who have declared that every action of this body must be measured against this goal.

We speak of “jobs, jobs, jobs,” but jobs are a product of prosperity. And prosperity is the product of freedom.

Government does not create jobs or wealth – it merely redistributes them. Jobs and wealth can only be created through the free exchange of goods and services in a free market. Government’s role is to create and protect the conditions which promote prosperity.

If I give you a dollar for a cup of coffee, what’s going on in that transaction? I’m telling you that your cup of coffee is worth more to me than my dollar. And at the same time, you’re telling me that my dollar is worth more to you than your cup of coffee. We make that exchange and both of us go away with something of greater value than we took in – each of us goes away richer.

That is the freedom that creates prosperity. That simple exchange – whether for a cup of coffee or for a multi-billion dollar acquisition – is what creates wealth.

But now suppose some third party butts its nose into this transaction. “The coffee must be between 110 and 130 degrees; it has to include a swizzle stick; it must be covered if it is to be consumed more than 25 feet from the point of sale” – and on and on. Every one of these restrictions reduces the value of that exchange for one or both of us.

That’s the fundamental problem that we face today. Our government has not only failed to protect the freedom that creates prosperity, but it has become destructive of that freedom.

To create jobs we must restore prosperity and to restore prosperity we must restore freedom.

We must restore the freedom of choice that gives consumers the ultimate say over the output of our economy. In a free and prosperous society, consumers vote every day with their own dollars on what kind of light-bulbs they prefer, on how they wish to get to work, on what foods they like, on how much water they want in their toilets, on what kind of cars they want or on what kind of housing they desire. These consumer choices signal – every day – what things are actually worth and what our economy will actually produce. Government is destroying the elegant simplicity of this process, and this Congress must reverse that destruction.

We must restore the freedom of individuals to enjoy the fruit of their own labor so that they can make these decisions for themselves once again.

That’s why excessive government spending is so destructive to prosperity – it destroys the freedom of individuals to make their own decisions over what to spend and where to invest their own money. It robs them of both the ability and incentive to create prosperity.

Presidents like Coolidge, Truman, Reagan and Clinton who have reduced government spending relative to GDP all produced dramatic increases in productivity, prosperity and the general welfare of our nation.

And Presidents like Hoover, Roosevelt, Bush and Obama who have increased government spending relative to GDP all produced or prolonged or deepened periods of economic recession, hardship and malaise.

Our government is embarked on the latter course, and this Congress must reverse that direction.

Government has an important role to play in the marketplace. It is there to assure that representations are accurate and that contracts are enforced – in other words, you have to tell the truth and you have to keep your promises. Government exists to assure that the currency is stable and reliable and that property rights are secure.

When it fulfills this fundamental role, it maximizes the freedom that a buyer and a seller have to assess their own needs and resources and to make those exchanges that allow both to go away better off than they were. When it steps beyond this role, it destroys the conditions that maximize prosperity.

M. Speaker, let us together revive and restore the freedom and prosperity of this nation and fulfill that sacred command inscribed on our Liberty Bell: “To proclaim liberty throughout ALL the land, and unto ALL the inhabitants there of.”

http://mcclintock.house.gov/

I commend the Senate for passing the tax relief measure yesterday (HR 4853 – Tax Relief Compromise), and I hope that the House passes it today.

According to the CBO, this bill comprises $136 billion in additional spending and $721 billion in tax relief. That means fifteen percent of this bill is spending – the other 85 percent is tax relief:

• No across the board increase in income tax rates next year.
• No AMT biting deeper into middle class families.
• A Death Tax that’s a third less of what it would otherwise have been — threatening far fewer family farms and family businesses with extinction.

If this relief fails, when the ball drops at Time Square on New Year’s Eve, Americans will have just been walloped by a tax tsunami the likes of which we haven’t seen since Smoot-Hawley.

Families and small businesses will be spending the New Year struggling to pay thousands of dollars of new taxes. A family making $50,000 will see at least $3,000 more taken from its paychecks. A small businessperson whose shop makes $300,000 will have to cut another $8,400 – perhaps the difference between a part time and a full time job for an employee.

From the Left we’re told that we should raise taxes on the very rich who make over $200,000 because they don’t pay their fair share.

According to the IRS, those folks earn 36 percent of all income; they pay 49 percent of all income taxes.

A lot of them aren’t people at all — half of the income earned by small businesses will be hit by these tax increases. These are the job generators that we’re depending upon to end the nightmare of unemployment for millions of American families. To confiscate billions of dollars more from them and expect more jobs to come of it is simply insane.

Some of my fellow Conservatives object to the 15 percent of this bill that spends money we don’t have. I agree.

But that damage can be corrected through offsetting spending reductions next year. The new Republican House majority can do so without the Senate or the President – simply by refusing to appropriate funds – and it’s committed to doing so.

But it cannot rescind the taxes next year without the Senate and the President, who have made their opposition to just such a clean bill abundantly clear.

And even if such a retro-active bill could be passed by Spring, these families and businesses won’t get their tax overpayments refunded to them until they file their returns a year later.

Massive tax increases under Hoover turned the recession of 1929 into the depression of the 1930’s. Let that not be the epitaph of this Congress.

WASHINGTON D.C. – House Water and Power Subcommittee Ranking Member Congressman Tom McClintock (CA-04) today delivered the attached remarks on the House floor during a debate on HR 4753 – Claims Resolution Act of 2010.

HR 4753 – Claims Resolution Act of 2010
Congressman Tom McClintock
November 30, 2010

Mr. Speaker:

Titles 3 through 6 of the bill purport to settle four water rights claims against the United States by signing away the public’s right to nearly 300 BILLION gallons of water annually AND in perpetuity — in addition to spending more than $1.2 billion.

The proponents of the bill are correct that if taxpayers will end up paying more if the claims go to trial, then we should settle out of court. But I sincerely doubt this is the case.

For the better part of a year, I asked for a legal opinion from the Attorney General on this question — to no avail — until a day before the issue was first brought to the House floor. What we received was not a legal opinion assessing the validity of the claims or the extent of the taxpayers’ liability. It was a general statement of their preference for settling claims rather than litigating them.

And it is undermined by many specific objections raised by the Administration. For example, with respect to the White Mountain Apache settlement, the Department of Interior wrote on November 15: “This authorizes federal appropriations for numerous tribal projects that are extraneous to settlement,” and urged “these projects should be considered on their own merits in separate authorizing legislation.” Last year, it warned that funding would “be excessive if it were viewed as settlement consideration.”

They also warned of language – still in the bill – which waives the sovereign immunity of the United States for future litigation. They warned, “this provision will engender additional litigation – and likely in competing state and federal forums – rather than resolving the water rights disputes…”

“Extraneous to the settlement.” “Engender additional litigation.” “Excessive if … viewed as settlement consideration.”

Those aren’t my words – they’re this administration’s words. In fact, the administration expressed so many reservations about aspects of these settlements that we can only conclude that these are not settlements negotiated by the Attorney General and presented to Congress, but rather a grab-bag written by Congress itself and now rubber-stamped by the Administration on political and not legal grounds.

We were initially told that the Attorney General never comments on the validity of claims, but we found this to be false. For example, in the Colville case in 1994 involving a similar water rights settlement, when the Attorney General’s office believed we had a weak case and should settle, they warned us that we are “not that well postured for a victory on this claim” and that “the outcome could easily be a significant cost to the taxpayers and the public.”

That’s not what they’re saying in this case.

Mr. Speaker, we have many more Indian Water settlements pending for vast quantities of water and substantial sums of money. We need to get our act together on this.

I believe Congress needs to demand that the administration be candid and forthcoming in all claims for settlement, and that Congress insist that before it begins deliberating on a settlement, that the Attorney General has conducted and completed the negotiations, determined all the details, certified that the settlement is within the legal liability of the government and only then submits that settlement for consideration by Congress.

Anything less is breaching the fiduciary responsibility that we hold to the people of the United States.

In a moment of breathtaking condescension during the debate over ObamaCare, Nancy Pelosi said, “We have to pass the bill so you can find out what is in it…”

Well, they passed it.  And ever since, the American people have been finding out what’s in it.  There’s a reason that not a single Democrat in a competitive race is touting his or her support for ObamaCare.

Two of the central promises made by the President and his supporters were that ObamaCare would keep health costs down and that if you liked your plan you could keep it.  He told a joint session of Congress that people who say otherwise are “lying.”

That’s when Joe Wilson made his famous outburst.  Although I deplore the breach of decorum, I did have the satisfaction of informing Joe recently that I had sighted a bumper sticker in my district that read, “Joe Wilson was right.”

For my part, I warned that the same government that paid $400 for a hammer and $600 for a toilet seat wasn’t likely to keep our health care costs under control.

Since then, the President’s own actuary has admitted that ObamaCare will inflate the cost of healthcare in America by at least $311 billion beyond what it would otherwise have been over the next ten years, boosting those costs to a staggering 21 percent of GDP by 2019.

Caterpillar tractor estimates that the cost to that single company will exceed $100 million; John Deere made a similar estimate of a $150 million hit to its bottom line; AT&T estimates its added costs at $1 billion.  Those costs will ultimately come out of employees’ paychecks.

In fact, when House Democratic leaders accused the companies of lying and threatened them with subpoenas, the CEO’s explained that the Securities and Exchange Commission requires them to make truthful and accurate financial estimates under severe legal penalties – unlike Congress – and that they welcomed the opportunity to discuss their actuarial analyses in a national forum.  The Congressional leaders quickly and quietly dropped their plans for a public hearing on the matter.

The second promise the President made that day was that if you like your health plan, you could keep it.  Many of us warned at the time this was patently untrue – that under the bill, any change in the terms of a plan would trigger the full mandates in the law, effectively cancelling the health plan.

Companies that had been offering coverage for the children of employees have been quietly withdrawing from the market in advance of provisions taking effect that require them to maintain children through age 26 on their policies.

Now we’re learning that many MediCare Advantage plans are folding because of the new law, and companies like McDonald’s are announcing that they will discontinue their existing health plans because they cannot affordably provide them and meet the mandates of the new law.

The Administration’s response in advance of the election has been to grant waivers to politically well-connected companies – literally placing the government in the position of picking winners and losers.  This should disturb anyone who values a nation that once could claim to be a government of laws and not of men.

 At the time, many of us warned that socialized healthcare systems produce exactingly consistent results: massive cost overruns followed by a brutal rationing of care.  Within months, the President appointed Donald Berwick as the new head of the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services, by virtue of a recess appointment that bypasses Senate confirmation.  Berwick is one of the world’s outspoken advocates of the government rationing of health care.

 None of these developments should surprise any us.  They were all clearly and loudly forewarned by the opponents of ObamaCare at the time – and utterly ignored by the majority of Congress and the Administration.  House Democratic leaders like Barney Frank candidly admitted that Obamacare was “the best way to reach single-payer,” that is, a full government monopoly on healthcare.  In other words, the willful purpose of this act is ultimately to destroy the private health insurance market.

Perhaps the most dangerous provision of this bill is the assertion by the federal government that it now has the power to force every American to purchase products that the government believes they should purchase, whether or not they need them, want them, or can afford them.

If this precedent prevails, the federal government will have assumed authority over every aspect of individual choice in the care of our families and ourselves and can logically be extended to what foods we eat or to what physical activities we engage in.

Nor is this brave new doctrine limited to health care.  Once the precedent is firmly established that government may order individuals to make purchases in the marketplace, what limitation remains on its power to order any other of our decisions as consumers?  As Congressman Scott Garrett pointed out, what is to stop the government in the next recession from ordering every American to buy a car from “Government Motors” because “that would be good for the economy.”

Twenty state attorneys general are now challenging this act and their suit will decide whether our Constitution still protects our individual freedom to live our own lives and make our own decisions.

Eight days from today, the American people will render their judgment on the direction that this Administration and Congress have taken us over the past two years.  A large part of that verdict will be due to ObamaCare.

I believe that in the opening days of the 112th Congress, a Republican House will pass a repeal of ObamaCare.  If that repeal fails to pass the Senate, or if the President vetoes it, I believe the House will refuse to fund those provisions of ObamaCare that violate the Constitution or that increase the costs and reduce the availability of health insurance to the American people.

But it shouldn’t stop there.  Fundamental changes need to be made in our health care system to bring costs under control and to restore to individuals the power that comes with being a consumer in a free market.

We need to address the cost drivers that are pricing health care out of the reach of most Americans.

We’ve got to stop ignoring the 800-lb gorilla in the room: the trial lawyers lobby and the role of predatory litigation on the healthcare system.  It’s not just the unpredictable jury awards.  The main problem is the cost of defensive medicine – the ten tests that a doctor must now order even though he’s certain only one is really necessary – for fear that if sued, he has to be able to say, “we did absolutely everything we could – including batteries of unnecessary tests.”

We need to remove punitive damages from the Civil Courts that they were never designed to handle.  We need to adopt the English rule that the loser pays all court costs in civil trials.  This by itself would discourage the practice of filing frivolous lawsuits knowing that for an innocent defendant, the cost of settling an unjust complaint is less than the cost of prevailing at trial.

We’ve got to restore competition to the market by restoring to consumers the freedom to shop across state lines for the product that best meets their own needs.  We don’t require Californians only to shop at California retailers or only to bank at California banks – why in the world do we force them only to purchase California insurance?

We’ve got to restore freedom of choice to individuals.  Most people don’t own their own policies – their employer does because we give the employer enormous tax breaks and incentives to purchase plans for their employees.  Yet, we don’t extend those same advantages to the employees themselves so that they can purchase a plan that they can choose according to their own needs – a plan they can keep regardless of who is their employer and a plan that they can fire if it no longer adequately serves their needs.

We’ve got to address the pre-existing conditions issue realistically, and this is where we desperately need a grown-up discussion.  How is it that an insurance plan can afford to charge you just one percent of the cost of a catastrophic illness?  It’s because you only have a one percent chance of contracting that illness.  Insurance covers risk – not certainty.  If you already have that catastrophic illness, the cost of covering that risk is not one percent – but 100 percent.  Insurance is only affordable when it is insuring risk – not certainty.

This process also incentivizes healthy behavior if we allow it to work.  If you’re obese and you smoke, your health risk is higher and your insurance costs more.  Your choice is to pay a higher premium and continue to overeat and smoke, or to go on a diet, quit smoking and pay a lower premium.  But that should be your choice – not the government’s.

Can you imagine the cost of auto insurance if, after an accident, you had a legal right to walk into any auto insurer and say, “I just totaled my car; now write a policy to cover that accident.”

We need to allow policies to be written around pre-existing conditions.  A few years ago, a fellow came to me who had started his own business.  Because his employer owned his policy, he had to go into the individual market.  No one would write him a policy because he had a pre-existing condition – bursitis.  He said, I don’t care about the bursitis – that’s a nuisance I can take care of myself.   I’m worried about a catastrophic illness or injury – just write me a policy for that.  And he was told, “We’d love to write you such a policy, but we can’t.  It’s against the law.”

If we could allow such policies to be written again, we would dramatically reduce the number of people being denied insurance for pre-existing conditions, leaving only a much, much smaller remainder whose pre-existing condition is genuinely life threatening.  Those few cases could then be dealt with through an assigned-risk pool in the same way we provide car insurance to uninsurable drivers.

But most of all, we’ve got to be honest in this discussion.

John Stossel once pointed out that in no other field do we purchase insurance for everyday expenses.  We purchase insurance only for those things that could bankrupt us.

We don’t buy car insurance to cover all of our routine maintenance, fill-ups, oil changes, scratches and tire rotations.  The reason is that these are costs that we incur anyway – why would we want to pay a middleman for those services? Indeed, if our employer guaranteed all the oil changes and fill-ups we could possibly want, we’d probably want a lot more.

At the root of the debate over ObamaCare is the Marxist notion that all profit is waste, and if we can just take profit out of health care, we can reduce costs and improve services.

This is nonsense.  Profit is NOT waste – profit is the essential element that holds costs down, that spurs and pays for research and development, that drives innovation and efficiency and even courtesy to customers.  Take profit out of health care and you will have just learned the difference between FED-EX and the Post Office.

We hear that health care is just too important to leave to the private sector – that health care is essential and must be provided by government.  Well, I can think of something that’s much more essential than healthcare – FOOD.  What a nightmare our world would be if the government ran our grocery stores!  Or, if our employer chose our grocery store for us!

Almost every day I get a letter from somebody saying, “My health plan stopped carrying this or that service,” or, “My health plan just increased premiums again” and “you’ve got to get a gun and force them to do this or that.”  Yet I have never gotten a letter from anyone that says, “My grocery store stopped carrying Wheaties and you’ve got to force them to put it on their shelves.”

Why is that?  What keeps your grocery store from raising its prices 29 percent today?   The next grocery store down the street.  It’s because you have the freedom to choose.  Yet because of perverse tax incentives and ruinous regulation, we’ve taken that freedom away from the vast majority of American healthcare consumers, and we’ve got to restore it.

That doesn’t mean we abandon those who can’t afford health care just as we don’t abandon those who can’t afford food.  But we should provide for health care needs of the truly needy the same way as other basic necessities – through vouchers or tax credits that retain their freedom as consumers.

Freedom works, and it is time we put it back to work.  And that includes for our healthcare.

Congressman McClintock represents the California Fourth District. For more information, visit http://mcclintock.house.gov/

H.R. 1586: Defying the Law of Holes
August 10, 2010
Mr. Speaker:

Many people are asking why Congress is here today. I think the answer’s pretty simple: we’re not bankrupting the country fast enough and so we need to come back and spend more.

In the merciful week that Congress was not in session, my constituents had one message: STOP THE SPENDING. Obviously, Congress isn’t listening.

Over the past two years, this administration and this Congress have increased spending by nearly 18 percent and run up more debt in two years than the irresponsible Bush administration did in all of its eight years combined. Meanwhile, unemployment has increased from 7.6 to 9.5 percent. Yet the problem in the view of House Democrats is that we just haven’t spent enough. So we gather here today to shovel another $26 billion at the problem

That comes to about $330 for an average family – taken directly out of the nation’s struggling economy. We’re told, don’t worry, it’s paid for.

How’s that? $10 billion is from increasing taxes on businesses with foreign subsidiaries. But remember this: BUSINESSES DON’T PAY BUSINESS TAXES. Business taxes can only be paid in one of three ways – by us as consumers through higher prices, by us as employees through lower wages, and by us as investors through lower earnings on our 401(k) plans.

Another $12 billion comes from cuts to Food Stamps starting in 2014, but we’re going to use the savings starting now. I tried that one out with my wife at home. “Honey, sure we can afford that new Jet Ski this year – I’m planning on cutting our grocery budget by $10,000 in 2014.” I’m sad to report that she didn’t buy that.

We’re told this is part of the plan to “save or create” jobs. M. Speaker, this isn’t saving jobs – it is destroying them. Government cannot inject a single dollar into the economy until it has first taken that dollar out of the very same economy.

We see the job “saved or created” when the government puts the money back into the economy. What we don’t see as clearly are the jobs lost or prevented when the government first has to take that money out of the economy. We see the lost or prevented jobs through chronic unemployment rates and a stagnant jobs market at a time when we should long ago have moved into a normal “V” shaped economic recovery.

Nor does this even guarantee saving teaching jobs. Good school boards, faced with the choice between a couple of good teachers or a pointless and over-paid bureaucrat are probably going to keep the teachers and fire the bureaucrat. But this bill says they don’t have to make that choice. Indeed, this bill says they’re actually prohibited from doing anything that would reduce their spending below last year’s level.

What about Medicaid? A bi-partisan group of legislators in my state of California tells us they need this bailout money to save the state’s Medicaid program. But bailing out bad management doesn’t improve it. At the peak of the good times, when California was taking in more money than ever before, it was already running a deficit of over $9 billion – almost ten percent of its budget.

Just four years ago, those same legislators voted Medicaid expansions that have increased its share of general fund spending from 14 to 19 percent. California offers such Medicaid options as acupuncture, chiropractic services and psychological counseling.

And now they’re shocked-just-shocked that they keep running out of money.

I love my state, but deficits that are made in California should stay in California.

M. Speaker, with the nation now some 13.2 trillion in debt – 93 percent of the entire economy – it is time to invoke the first law of holes: when you’re in one – stop digging. And if Congress doesn’t invoke that law now, I can all but guarantee you the American people will invoke it in November.

California’s Proposition 8: Judge Walker’s opinion that traditional marriage is an affront to the Bill of Rights would no doubt have come as a surprise to the American Founders – and to more than two centuries of American jurisprudence affirming that institution. Fortunately, the architects of our Constitution recognized the damage that feeble reasoning can do from the bench and provided a multitude of checks and balances – starting with the appellate process – which I am confident will now be brought into play.

Debate on HR 4213

Remarks by Representative Tom McClintock

House Chamber, Washington, D.C.

July 22, 2010

M. Speaker:

Anyone who has experienced firsthand the quiet panic that stalks every waking hour of an unemployed family knows how frightening and debilitating is chronic unemployment.  You watch your savings evaporate, you see your children going without the material things their friends enjoy, and you count down the months or even weeks until you won’t be able to make that crucial rent or house payment.

That unemployment check is a lifeline in such times, and I fully appreciate and understand how desperately an unemployed family is looking to the security of getting 99 weeks of such checks.

But I can’t go along with this for a simple reason: The only way out of this nightmare of unemployment for these families is a job. 

Speaker Pelosi has said that the most important thing we could do to create jobs is to extend unemployment benefits to 99 weeks, because the unemployed would spend this money and stimulate the economy.

This analysis completely ignores the harsh and glaring fact that before this money can be put back into the economy, it must first be taken out of that same economy.  We will have to take $34 billion more out of the economy in order to finance these extra benefits through November.  In fact, this is the eighth such extension, totalling $120 billion – meaning over $1,600 from the pocket of an average family of four.

And since we don’t have that money, we’ll have to borrow it from exactly the same capital pool that would otherwise have been loaned to businesses seeking to expand jobs or to homebuyers seeking to re-enter the housing market or to consumers seeking to make consumer purchases – and remember that 2/3 of economic growth depends upon consumer spending. 

But that money now won’t be there to loan for jobs and homes and economic growth. 

This is $34 billion of relief to the unemployed that they desperately need and that I desperately wish we could responsibly extend.  But to do so would also mean $34 billion of fewer jobs.  It means perpetuating this never-ending nightmare of unemployment for these families and, indeed, throwing more families into that nightmare.

We’ve been told for several years now – by both Presidents Bush and Obama – that stimulus spending would help the economy.  But it hasn’t.  And there’s a reason it hasn’t: Government cannot inject a single dollar into the economy that it first hasn’t taken out of that same economy.  Government cannot provide a dollar of temporary relief to the unemployed without first removing a dollar of permanent relief for the unemployed – a job.

The talking point du jour from the other side is, “Republicans have no problems giving tax breaks to the wealthy but won’t extend a lifeline to the unemployed.”  Once again, they just don’t get it.  Milton Friedman once observed that spending IS the effective level of taxation.  Spending can only be paid for in two ways – current taxes or future taxes.  High taxes and deficits are just the symptoms.  The problem is the spending – and this is a spending bill.

On May 9, 1939 – after nearly a decade of unemployment checks and stimulus spending – and with unemployment at 17.2 percent – Franklin Roosevelt’s Secretary of the Treasury, Henry Morgenthau, made this stunning admission during a meeting with Democratic Members of the House Ways and Means Committee.   He said: “No gentlemen, we have tried spending money. We are spending more than we have ever spent before and it does not work. And I have just one interest, and if I am wrong as far as I am concerned, somebody else can have my job. I want to see this country prosperous. I want to see people get a job. I want to see people get enough to eat. We have never made good on our promises … I say after eight years of this Administration we have just as much unemployment as when we started … And an enormous debt to boot!”

M. Speaker, let us heed the lessons of history before we totally destroy our economy.  Perpetual unemployment checks put these desperate families farther and farther away from the only thing that can truly end their suffering – a real job.  That’s a fact nobody wants to face around here – but until we do, chronic unemployment will continue to stalk the land, and God forbid that a few years from now another Democratic Secretary of Treasury will have to make the same admission as Henry Morgenthau did 71 years ago.

WASHINGTON, D.C. – Representative Tom McClintock (R – CA) delivered the following remarks today on the House floor about stimulus spending and unemployment:

Repeating the Lesson
House Chamber, Washington, D.C.
July 20, 2010

Mr. Speaker:

When the stimulus bill became law, unemployment stood at 8.2 percent. Today, eighteen months and hundreds of billions of dollars later, unemployment is 9.5 percent.

This spending binge hasn’t made things better – it has made things demonstrably worse – because before government can put money into the economy, it first takes that money out of the economy. We see the job created when government puts the money back, but we don’t see the jobs that are lost because government first took that money out of the economy.

When we borrow trillions of dollars, we crowd out the same capital pool that would otherwise have been available for businesses to create jobs. And so those jobs don’t get created and the ranks of the unemployed grow.

These are the same policies that turned the recession of 1929 into the depression of the 1930’s. Do we really want to repeat this lesson?

House Chamber, Washington, D.C. M. Speaker:

The proponents tell us that this bill will increase lending to small businesses. To do so they are creating a $30 billion slush fund to make loans to smaller banks, therefore encouraging smaller banks to make loans to small businesses. Or so they say.

It is a splendid example of what I like to call McClintock’s Second Law of Political Physics: the more we invest in our mistakes, the less willing we are to correct them.

It’s apparently escaped the proponents’ attention that we are already doing precisely what the proposed new small business lending fund would do through the TARP’s existing Capital Purchase Program.

That’s the conclusion of the Special Inspector General of TARP, Neil Barofsky. He wrote to the Financial Services Committee on May 17th and said: “in terms of its basic design, its participants, its application process, and perhaps, its funding source from an oversight perspective, the (Small Business Lending Fund) would essentially be an extension of TARP’s (Capital Purchase Program).”

So if this scheme actually worked, we wouldn’t need this bill – banks would already be lending like crazy. The problem is, it doesn’t work. But some members can’t bear to face the American people and admit that they’ve squandered billions of dollars of working families’ hard-earned money. So instead they bring us more of the same.

This places an additional $30 billion of taxpayer money at risk. We’re told, don’t worry, we’ll get the money back.

When have we heard this song before? Oh yes, when they bailed out Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. According to the Congressional Budget Office, taxpayers have now lost $145 billion heading to $400 billion.

What’s likely to happen to the $30 billion put at risk in this bill? Those banks with sound finances won’t touch this money – they don’t need it and they don’t need the federal entanglements that come with it.

Only those banks with unsound finances will accept these funds, with little chance they will ever be repaid. In fact, by removing the Special Inspector General from oversight of these funds, that risk is further aggravated.

And just to be clear, there is no guarantee that a dime of this money will actually be lent to small businesses in the first place – in fact, ANY commercial or industrial loan will count towards the requirements of this bill.

After a failed $700 billion TARP, $30 billion might not sound like much. But let’s put it in perspective – the combined cleanup and economic costs of the Gulf Oil Spill are currently estimated around $17 billion. So in terms of economic damage, this bill could actually cost more than cleaning up the entire mess in the Gulf.

It’s true that small businesses are having great difficulty getting loans. So are homebuyers. Why is that?

I suspect one of the principal reasons is that unprecedented public-sector borrowing has crowded out the capital pool that would otherwise have been available to make these private-sector loans.

Under this administration and this Congress, the government is running a 1 ½ TRILLION dollar annual deficit. That’s roughly $20,000 for every family of four in America.

Where does that money come from? We borrow it. From whom do we borrow it? We borrow it from the same capital pool that would otherwise have been available to loan to small businesses and other employers seeking to add jobs, or loan to homebuyers seeking to re-enter the housing market, or to loan to consumers seeking to afford consumer purchases – and remember that two thirds of economic growth depends upon consumer spending.

But that money now isn’t available to loan to employers and homebuyers and consumers to expand the economy – because government has borrowed it in order to expand government.

That is the core of the problem. I had offered an amendment to forbid the use of this TARP III money in the presence of a deficit – for a very simple reason. If the government borrows that money to loan to one small business, that same money won’t be there to loan to another one.

Government cannot inject a single dollar into the economy that it has not first taken out of the very same economy.

But of course, this amendment was forbidden under the rule we are now considering.

Therefore, I oppose the rule and I oppose the underlying bill.

House Chamber, Washington, D.C. May 20, 2010. M. Speaker:

I rise to take strong exception to the speech of the President of Mexico while in this chamber today.

The Mexican government has made it very clear for many years that it holds American sovereignty in contempt and President Calderon’s behavior as a guest of the Congress confirms and underscores this attitude.

It is highly inappropriate for the President of Mexico to lecture Americans on American immigration policy, just as it would be for Americans to lecture Mexico on its laws.

It is obvious that President Calderon does not understand the nature of America or the purpose of our immigration law.

Unlike Mexico’s immigration law — which is brutally exclusionary — the purpose of America’s law is not to keep people out. It is to assure that as people come to the United States, they do so with the intention of becoming Americans and of raising their children as Americans.

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