Liberal in the Land of Conservative

But let me give you a couple statistics.

Since President Bush has come to office, guess what has happened. We have lost 1.4 million jobs. We need to be creating jobs. We need to be creating about 180,000 jobs a month to keep pace with population growth. Manufacturing jobs have increased by 3.4 million.

Income is down on an average, so the person going to work 40 hours a week, the person making the right decisions, the person trying to fulfill the American dream is getting further behind no matter how hard they are working.

The number without health care insurance has increased 8.6 percent. We now have 50 million American people without health care insurance.

And I guess the debate can be supply and demand: There is a big supply, there is big demand for it, not quite enough to pay for it, so your child doesn't get to go to the doctor.

If that is the type of country we are choosing to live in, then go ahead and follow the policies that have been put in place the last 8 years. If we think there is a better way to do this, perhaps we can start having a vision that extends to the next generation, not the next election.

Of course, we hear about gas prices doubling. College costs have gone up 36 percent. Foreclosure rates have hit an all-time high.

This President created an economy totally predicated on consumer spending. He drove that spending by the only way people could do it under the economy that was dropping their wages, by borrowing on their homes. And then they were given risky loans, and those risky loans--here is the thing in my district. I trust the bankers in my district; I trust those people to make loans. And do you know what? There used to be a contract in this country. As a borrower, you were expected to repay. I still believe that is true. But there is another part of that equation: As a lender, you actually used to want to get repaid. We have people now who are speculating, who are giving loans with no intention of ever caring what happened to the loan, selling it off into speculation, put in some exotic investment vehicle outside of any regulation, because we can have no regulation.

This economy predicated itself on consumer spending, on consumer borrowing. And the driver here was, if we regulate companies, how could they make money? If we ask them to take lead out of toys for children, that would cut into profit. And how dare we think we would do that. If we actually asked that our food be safe before we fed it to our children, we were overregulating and messing with that invisible hand.

Well, that is not the way the world works. It is not the way the people of America want things to work. What they want is a sense of fairness. They want that chance to be able to work hard, save a little money, get a house, take care of their family, and let their children have an attempt at living a life equal to or better than their own.

There are statistics out there now, for the first time in American history after 7 1/2 years of this Presidency, that the majority of Americans do not believe their children will live the type of life that they had, that they themselves had a chance to live. That is absolutely criminal. It is absolutely immoral. It is absolutely not the principles this country was founded on. And those that would say by us asking for alternative energy sources, by us asking to try and improve the ability of efficiencies in our automobiles and our building designs, that those of us who are asking oil companies to not be able to take $18 billion, and to think that you are going to drill your way out of this--they just tell us world demand is up. How in the world is drilling going to be a long-term solution? It is beyond me. With those things happening, though, the American people can be glad to know that is the minority opinion.

The majority in this House of Representatives is representative of the majority of the American people. Fully 72 percent disagree with the past policies we are on. Only 28 percent of the American people would espouse to believe that the policies you heard from the previous speakers are the direction that we should go in.

We should have a civil debate on this House Floor, we should talk about the implications of our policies, but we should also realize what we are talking about is the livelihood and the quality of life of the American public, and we have got work to do in that regard.