Liberal in the Land of Conservative

I represent the southern Minnesota district that includes the Mayo Clinic. I also represent a district that is a leader in wind production and biofuels, not just nationwide but internationally.

I also had a guest last night, Chuck Ehler, the superintendent of a small school, Rushford-Peterson, in my district. That community was devastated by flooding that had a Federal disaster in 2007. It's a 103-year-old building.

The people and the citizens who will fuel our economic recovery are those citizens trying to learn in a building that will not work. We must invest in the future. That's how we repair our economy.

As a member of the House Veterans' Affairs Committee, I look to the American Legion for guidance on the priorities of our Nation's veterans. It is because, every day, the Legion is out there, working with our veterans. They understand what is needed.

Our committee's portion, the infrastructure recovery program is targeted. It will be transparent and recipients will be held accountable, and the investments are desperately needed. The construction sector is suffering the highest unemployment rate of any industrial sector, 15.3 percent, 1.4 million construction workers out of a job.

Fully implemented, as our committee proposes, we can have a million workers on a construction site in June of this year and generate $325 billion in total economic activity when fully implemented, jobs that cannot be outsourced to other countries, using materials that are made in America, not outsourced beyond our shores.

Transparency, we require reporting by every State DOT, every transit agency, every airport authority, every 30 days on the contract awarded, by contract, on the specific jobs, job description and payroll, which we will receive and make public through hearings that we will conduct 30 days after the funding is allocated to the States and every 60 days thereafter.

Accountability, an amendment which I expect or hope to offer tomorrow made in order by the Rules Committee, will have a requirement that funds be committed in 90 days, use it or lose it.

I rise today in support of Eric Holder to be the next Attorney General of the United States.

The next Attorney General will need to hit the ground running, from beefing up civil rights and antitrust enforcement to addressing white-collar crime and drug-related violence, to helping keep our country safe from terrorist attacks. As I told the Judiciary Committee last week when I voted in favor of his nomination, Eric Holder is the right man to do the job. He is the right man to lead the Department of Justice at this critical time. And most importantly, coming from a State that had our own share of problems with a political appointee put in place as U.S. Attorney, he is the right man to get the Department back on course, to put the law first, when it comes to the Department of Justice.

The President called on us to take immediate action. That is what this economic recovery plan is about--a bipartisan group of Senators--and, Mr. President, you and I were involved--who got together and said we need to get this done. I thank Senators Nelson and Collins for their hard work. It is not a perfect bill, and I don't agree with everything in it and with everything that came out, but literally we cannot afford to wait any longer to get something passed.

At the core of this bill is jobs. This bill is about jobs, jobs, jobs. It will put Americans to work by rebuilding our roads, highways, and bridges, which have been neglected far too long. The U.S. Department of Transportation estimates that for every $1 billion of highway spending, it creates nearly 48,000 new jobs and generates more than $2 billion in economic activity.

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Another piece of the plan I want to highlight is the emphasis on energy jobs. I spent the last few months traveling around my State. I can tell you what I have seen. I have seen the little telephone company in Sebeca, MN, that needed a backup power structure because power was going out for their customers. They put together a packet with small wind and solar, and they sold it to the people in their area. They have been selling like hotcakes. The windmills in Pipestone, MN, became so popular that they opened up a bed and breakfast. You can go and stay overnight with your wife and wake up in the morning and look at the wind turbine. That is the package.

The point of this is that the people in our State see the value of these new energy jobs, whether it is a little solar panel factory in Starbuck, MN, or a big wind turbine manufacturing factory up in the Moorhead area. They see the value of new energy jobs. This energy technology revolution--or ET--is different than the information technology resolution--IT. When I saw the IT revolution, as big as it was, jobs tended to be segmented in certain areas such as the Silicon Valley, and they tended
to be for people with graduate degrees and PhDs. This energy technology revolution will spread jobs across the country, in manufacturing jobs, green helmet jobs, and many other jobs for the people of this country.

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Finally, this plan contains money, significant money for broadband and telecommunications infrastructure--$7 billion. When President Roosevelt said he was going to put rural electrification in place in 1935, we only had 12 percent of American farms with electricity. About 15 years later, 75 percent of the farms had electricity. That is what Government action can do.

Look at broadband. We have gone from fourth in the world to 15th. This is not the kind of progress that will keep our country moving and get us back on track. For broadband, there is $7 billion in this bill.

The amendment is very simple, and it simply states online publication of periodic reports. The Secretary shall make publicly available on the Internet each report made in accordance with paragraph one. That simply says, at least quarterly, they will put out how they are spending our money.

Mr. President, I come to the floor today with much dismay over the fact that we were not able to pass the energy extenders, the tax extenders, the package of important provisions for our country's economy because of this obstructionism on the other side.

Let me tell my colleagues why this was so important to me. We only got four Republican votes for this package. I think it is outrageous when you look at what we are dealing with.

Today, I am introducing legislation that will restore balance to our tax code and do something unusual: help reduce the national debt. My bill will be a jump-start to this slumping economy. It will double the standard deduction for the next 2 years, providing an annual savings of $750 to 61 million Americans. It will expand access to the child tax credit and provide relief on property tax.

My legislation allows the middle class to keep their income and does so in a fiscally responsible manner, by fully being paid for.

Unlike most members of Congress, Tim Walz of Minnesota knows his way around a classroom. He taught for 17 years until 2006, when he took a leave of absence from his teaching job and head coaching responsibilities at Mankato West High School in Mankato, MN, to run for Congress. Both Walz and his wife, Gwen, are NEA members. Congressman Walz, who represents the first congressional district in southern Minnesota, decided to run for office after he and his class were turned away from a presidential campaign rally. His campaign, his first ever, was fueled by a small army of current and former students who knocked on doors, made calls, raised and contributed money, and volunteered long hours. The result was one of the biggest upsets in the history of Minnesota politics.

Q. Many people have turned away from politics recently because of its negative reputation of "business as usual." Did you encounter that with other educators?

A. I hate to say it, but I think there has been a concerted effort by some people to try to make politics not seem like a noble profession. I think it's a public service much like teaching. We're here to try and make a difference and represent people and work as hard as we can. And I think a lot of people are just so sick of the partisanship, and that's why we are working very hard to open the process up to people, make it transparent, be as open as we can. We want to convince people that when they are talking about government and when they were talking about Washington, it's their neighbor; it's the guy teaching high school, it's the doctors, it's whoever. And we really want to reinstate that this does matter and that politics isn't a dirty thing; it's how we make our society function.

A. Yes, there are some that did. I come from a long tradition of people back in my district and the state legislature who are educators either at the high school or college level. And so whenever I talk to groups of high school teachers, I do talk about the importance. Because teaching is a humble profession, many of us sell ourselves short on what we can do, and I don't think we should. I find we are well versed, as I said, on the issues and I think we have a strong work ethic, we can articulate, we HAVE to build coalitions, and as I said, we are the thriftiest people on the planet. So, yeah, I think some are getting more excited and saying, "Yeah, I think I can do this." The bottom line is after years of people pounding on public educators, of trying to undermine people's faith in us, the public still trusts us, and they trust us almost above all professions because they know that we care. And I think that is something that can be brought back into politics.

A. Demand that people like me come out in front of them and hear the stories that are happening in the classroom. They need to demand open forums, they need to demand that as they are writing letters and calling, they are getting the attention that it needs. This is a critically important piece of legislation and I still feel like, for the most part, unfortunately, that it's being written without necessarily as much input from teachers as there should be. Educators are the first people that want to improve student achievement, but some of the things being proposed, for example, that you're going to be able to keep better teachers through performance pay, there's several things wrong with that. We didn't take an oath of poverty but we also have issues about the increased amount of paperwork, the increased testing that's distracting us, the narrowing of the curriculum where I find myself fighting to make geography relevant, all of those things. And I think other teachers need to realize it matters when they speak to their members [of Congress]. Call them to speak and have a frank discussion, and expect them to know your issues, to understand when you are talking about multiple measures what that means or we hold up a calendar of what it looks like in Mankato or somewhere else and see that every month is filled with testing. They need to get involved; they need to do it now. This is a critical time.

Mr. WALZ of Minnesota. Thank you for this opportunity to speak on the floor and to give this Chamber a demonstration of what is so great about this country. The previous gentleman's district actually borders mine, but you may not find a more diametrically opposed view of what is happening in this country than you may get in the next 28 minutes.

You hear a lot of statistics and you hear a lot things thrown out. You hear a lot of economists talking about different things. The one thing I have found, and I think maybe it comes from being new to this business of politics, coming from a high school classroom, coming out of what most middle class Americans are experiencing is, is that many of those things do not matter to people.

What matters to them is the reality in their everyday lives. And that reality doesn't take a whole lot of background from them. It doesn't take a whole lot of statistics. It doesn't take a whole lot of anything, other than for them to make some simple judgments.

One of those judgments that the American public is going to ask themselves, and they are going to get to ask themselves in November, after 12 straight years of Republican control of the House of Representatives, after 6 years of total control of both branches of the legislative procession, the American people got a chance to see by the fall of 2006 the direction that those policies had taken us in.

In watching that, they made a decision come November. They chose about 45 new Members of this body, many of them without elected office experience, but many of them who came from the ranks of middle class working people, many of them like myself that never had a salary over $50,000. Teaching for 18 years, my salary when I left my teaching position was $48,000 a year. My insurance costs coming off the top of that were $7,200 a year, and then the taxes that came after that.

One of the things the American public will ask is, were they better off before that time when President Bush and the Republican-controlled Congress took over, or were things going in the wrong direction? Were decisions made that were affecting their lives negatively, and what were those decisions doing to them?

What was happening, as you saw the previous speaker talk about, what was happening to the price of fuel? Why was gas going up and who was benefiting from it? Why was the cost of their produce, why was the cost of groceries going up, and who was benefiting from that? What was happening to the cost of tuition? What was happening to their paycheck? What was happening to insurance costs?

Those were questions that they don't get to stand here and theoretically talk about and come up with some cute alliteration that I always hear. My colleagues are wonderful at the alliteration, and somewhat weak on the policy that impacts people's lives.

So as I listened this week and I watched a concerted effort, and one of the magazines on Capitol Hill wrote about that our friends in the minority have decided they are going to try and pin the energy policies on the new majority, understanding that President Bush will veto any attempt we make to change policy.

The policies that we are operating under in this economy are the ones that were put into place by the minority and put into law by the President. The changes that have been attempted and those that have been made, such as CAFE standards, the fuel efficiency standards and improving them for the first time in 35 years, are so overwhelmingly accepted by the American public, those could not be ignored.

The ideology being expressed by the previous speaker I think is reflected in some. You don't need the polls when you go out and talk to people, but if you want to get to the data you are hearing them talking about, 72 percent of the American people disagree. Twenty-eight percent of the American people agree that President Bush's economic policies are the right direction for this country.

So when I hear talk about supply and demand, as if it is gravity, as if there have not been decisions made to influence either the supply chain or the demand by interests, by the growth, the astronomical growth of lobbyists, especially energy lobbyists at this place, it is bordering on the ridiculous. And when I hear about Adam Smith being talked about, the only "invisible hand'' that is operating in our energy markets is that invisible handshake that happened in the White House between the oil company executives when they created this current energy policy.

I would like to take a chance here to illustrate what has happened on energy as it impacts the economy.

Now, again, speaking to the American people, when they are going and filling up, they are rightfully disturbed. They are rightfully concerned, and many of those people are understanding a larger portion of their disposable income is being eaten up in fuel costs, transportation costs.

The policy that was put into place that has driven this upward climb and that was so conveniently taken out here, about right in here and shown, has been a steady upward trajectory. And they are right. Several things are happening here.

There is no doubt that supply, world supply for fuels, especially with the rise of China and India, is having an impact in this. The only question I would ask on that is, who didn't know that back here? Who couldn't anticipate those changes and start planning ahead, instead of being reactive to everything that has happened?

This administration has been wrong on almost every single indicator economically around the world, socially, and they have not gotten any of it correct since they have come to office. So the trajectory is pretty steady, almost exactly what could have been expected on that.

But there are several other things at work here. One of the things is about this energy policy. I would love to show you and read from that energy policy to tell the Speaker, my colleagues and anyone in America that would like to know what that energy policy is. But the problem is, the White House claimed executive privilege, and in 2004 the Supreme Court upheld that executive privilege.

So that meeting that took place, we do have some reports on who was there, by the way. One of the first visitors on February 14, 2001, just 2 weeks after the inauguration and the President took office, was James Rouse, the vice president of ExxonMobil. He was also the major donor to all of the festivities that happened here with the inauguration of President Bush.

A week later was a long-time friend of President Bush and a supporter, Kenneth Lay, then, of course, head of Enron. They had two meetings. By March 5, the country's biggest utilities, Duke Energy and Constellation Energy, were in the White House. Then British Petroleum came on March 22. And that was followed by 20 oil and drilling companies to get meetings. At this point, to this day, none of that documentation is public. None of it has been out there. None of it has shown what happened. And what we saw was a steady increase and a policy that put this entire Nation's energy needs in the hands of oil company executives.

Now, I could almost get lucky in my district out in southern Minnesota. There is somebody who was in the room, somebody who knows. That somebody now lives in my district--well, temporarily. That someone is the vice president of Enron, Jeff Skilling. He is in the Federal Penitentiary in Waseca, Minnesota, in my district. He was with Enron. He understood what happened here, and he ended up, after going to court, in Federal prison for 24 years.

The policies here have nothing to do with supply and demand. They have everything to do with special interests and corporate interests over the national interests of this country.

So as you hear the previous speakers speak, and they talk about us trying to take energy off the market, the fact of the matter is, as I said, the previous speaker's district borders mine, I am very proud that in southern Minnesota my district is one of the Nation's top four producers of wind energy. We have beautiful wind generators going up and down the district. We have small towns, like Minnesota Lake, that are taking their town's energy and deriving over 75 percent of the energy for the town through the use of clean, renewable wind generation.

We are also one of the leading producers of alternative fuels and biofuels. And let me be very clear about this. As people talk about, well, biofuels are driving up the cost of food products, of commodities, there is a definite moral argument to be made of the idea of taking food, such as corn or soybeans, and turning it into fuel. The fact of the matter is, most economists agree that the impact on that is negligible, compared to the impact of the price of oil.

There is something I would like to quote here, and I would like you to see a couple of things here. When President Bush was asked prior to the election during the campaign back in 2000, he was asked what he would do to help control energy costs, he said, ``What I think the President ought to do when gas prices spike is he ought to get on the phone with the OPEC cartel and say I expect you to open your spigots, and the President of the United States starts jawboning with OPEC members to lower the price.''

Well, in April 2005 there is a pretty famous picture here of the President holding hands with that. That is about the point where oil went up. This is from an ally who has promised to help us pay for the war in Iraq and has yet to pay 7 percent of their total cost.

Now, if they can't make it on $118 a barrel, it makes it pretty difficult for me to understand when they are ever going to get jawboned into doing something about this.

The next thing that I think is a bit of a fallacy here in this whole free market thing and this supply and demand, as if it is going to come down and drop upon us and be in perfect order, is why in the world did my colleagues on the other side of the aisle continue to vote for $18.6 billion in subsidies to the oil companies? At $40 billion in profits for one oil company alone last year, over $100 billion in profits for the three major oil companies, they haven't got it figured out how to run their business to make a profit without the subsidies?

And what is at stake here is this isn't about class warfare. This isn't about, as the previous speaker from Michigan talked about, not being a friend of the oil companies or being their enemies. The fact of the matter is they have an unfair advantage on a unlevel playing field. If my wind generation and my cellulosic ethanol producers could get the same amount of subsidies driven back into research and development that we are putting into oil and natural gas exploration, I guarantee you we would compete on that.

I guarantee you we would have renewable energy sources that would take several things away. One is the dependence on foreign oil. That driver or that magnet of conflict around the world would be taken out of the equation. We would also start to create rural jobs and rural green collar jobs that would respur the economy.

This President and this energy policy that has created these prices that have been on a steady upward climb also took an economy that went from a manufacturing base and a base of middle class workers, who could figure it out. And this is all they are asking for. They go to work, they work hard at their job, they make the right decisions, they work 40 hours a week, maybe a little overtime.

Here is what they are asking for. All they want in return is the ability to have a home, the ability to have transportation to get to and from their job and maybe partake in their recreational activities. They would like to have health care for themselves and their children that is affordable and they can go when it is needed. And they would like to get to the point
where perhaps they could save enough money to send their children to college to ensure
their future.

The American people aren't demanding a lot. They are not asking for a lot.

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.

I wanted to just talk about a couple of things here, too. One of the things that is most striking to me is, is the President's and the rhetoric that happens on this House floor, that disconnect again with the American public, that disconnect of what a person is going through. And you can tell them all of these facts, all of these figures, all of the things that are out there, and they will still come back to the reality as it affects their life.

And I want to talk to you, as many of us saw, just for a minute, Mr. Speaker, as many of us were predicting for several years, they felt the fragileness in this economy, they felt they were saving less, they felt costs were going up, they saw that the ability to get their children to college getting further and further out of their reach. We saw policies that when those people of my generation had the opportunity to go to college, fully 80 percent was on the idea of Pell Grants and different types of grants, 20 percent in the forms of loans. We have almost exactly reversed that. And then we took those loans from being low-interest government guaranteed loans to being government guaranteed loans to private lenders with high interest rates. We have absolutely not made an investment in the future a priority.

And when you hear people talk about the so-called tax cuts, I ask everyone out there to see if, since 2001 and President Bush's tax cuts, are you better off? Have they fulfilled their promise? Have they filled your pockets with wealth? Have your streets gotten better? Have your schools become more productive? Has everything gone exactly the way they told you they would do? Because the bottom line in this country is, we have seen the single largest shift of wealth to the smallest percentage at the top than we have seen since the 1920s. We have the greatest disparity from those in the middle class and those in the top 1 percent than we have seen in the past 100 years.

The policies that were put into place did exactly what they were supposed to do: They shifted that wealth. And in the ideology, and I don't deny that my friends across the aisle believe this, those people in their benevolence were going to reinvest it all, creating great jobs here, and spurring the American dream.

The problem was this: They found out that they could invest in manufacturing jobs in places that didn't have worker standards, that didn't have environmental standards, that didn't care if there was lead in the toys. And, as they invested in those countries, their profits rose, and the jobs in America, according to I guess Adam Smith, the invisible hand pulled them and grabbed them to China. And when they couldn't do it in China anymore, they pulled them and grabbed them to Vietnam. And when they couldn't do it in Vietnam, they pulled them to Bangladesh.

I am unsure where they will go next, but I can tell you this, there is a lot of people sitting throughout the Midwest through Ohio and Michigan that sure wish some of those jobs were here. And they are not asking for a fortune, they are asking for a living wage. Well, that living wage, and every time we ask for it: That is going to hurt business, that is going to hurt the profits.

The bottom line on this is, this country was founded and predicated and was so successful because the middle class was successful. We are the most productive people in the world. Our productivity of workers in America is at an all-time high.

Now, the question I ask is, how can that be and real wages are decreasing? How that can be when their buying power has decreased? Unless something is fundamentally wrong with the economy? But if you ask President Bush, all is peachy clean. There are a couple quotes here, I don't know if it would be fair, but it sounds an awful lot like Hoover in the 1930s.

But here he was on October 17. Here was the economic news: The Commerce Department reports that housing starts in September fell to the lowest levels in over a decade and a half.

Here are President Bush's words: When you got more houses than you got more buyers, the prices tend to go down and we are just going to have to work through the issue. I am not a forecaster, but I can tell people that I feel good about many of the economic indicators here in the United States.

The subprime crisis was right on top of our heads, and yet we are hearing this type of rhetoric. It is not based in reality, it is not based on the people who were already behind in their mortgage payments. It is not based and behind some of those exotic investment vehicles that were going to come crashing down. It is not that we didn't see that the Bear Stearns thing was on the horizon. Most people did, including his former Fed Secretary in Alan Greenspan. But, nope, it didn't bother the President. It doesn't matter the people here who for 6 years rubber-stamped every single piece of legislation written by K Street by the lobbyists and sent down here. Everything that was done behind closed door by Ken Lay, by Jeff Skilling, by the rest of them, sent down here, voted on against the objection by the minority party, our party at that time, that, you are heading for disaster, do not do this. Oh, no, no. We will create jobs, we will create wealth, we will create energy.

Now, all of a sudden, we have a slim majority in the House, we are equal over in the Senate, and the President vetoes anything that we utter over here. Now all of a sudden all of this is the responsibility here.

Well, I have one thing to say. The American people, come November, don't care what side of the aisle you are on, they care about, what are you going to do about it?

Here are a couple more from the President.

December 17, former Fed Chairman Greenspan, as I was just saying, suggested a tax break or other government help for home owners facing the mortgage crunch.

Here is what the President said: This economy is pretty good. There are definitely some storm clouds and concerns, but the underpinnings are good, just fine.

February 28, reports show that new home sales in January fell to the lowest level in 13 years, and orders for big ticket items such as cars and refrigerators slumped dramatically.

Well, I don't think we are headed into a recession, but no question we are in a slowdown.

And then, just yesterday: No recession. No recession.

The bottom line on this is, you have got your head stuck in the sand for so long, you tell yourself for so long that these policies are going to work. The American public again, as I said, doesn't care what the economists say. The American public and the average person that is out there, middle-class worker, doesn't care what the exact number of foreclosed homes are. They don't care about the derivatives in these exotic vehicles that were created on the subprime. They don't necessarily care where the oil is coming from or where the energy is coming from. What they know is they have got to get to work in the morning, and that takes gas. And that job is not paying any more. It might not be there tomorrow. They are not saving enough.

And I heard the person before me speaking on this floor talking about how great this oil investment is in the 401(K). Well, I should probably get some of his advice, because mine like many others in this country showed a downturn last year because of all of the other drops in stocks and investment vehicles.

So, Mr. Speaker, we have opportunities, there is no doubt. This country does, as the President said, have the underpinnings to perform better than any economy in the world. But the one thing the President fails to realize is the most important underpinning of that economy is middle-class American workers, the ones who for 12 years of Republican rule, 6 years of total rule by this ideology have suffered and seen their quality of life decrease dramatically.

The good news is, it is starting to change. College is becoming more affordable under the new Democratic Congress, gas prices will start to be adjusted as we start to put research dollars in to moving towards cellulosic ethanol, fast growing poplar trees, switch grass, things that are out there that we can get to. These are the types of things that are going to happen. Our manufacturers in Detroit have already caught on. We are seeing hybrid vehicles now that you can actually buy. We are starting to see Detroit want to compete again. And, guess what? Where was that invisible hand? Where was that market when we were creating cars that got 15 miles to the gallon? When they start competing with everybody else in the world, we will start being able to get to where we need to go.

This is an economy that can come back from this, but it will not come back with special interest policies that care nothing about what happens to the middle class, care nothing about the everyday things that people are going through.

And the last thing I would say on this is, when I listen to what President Bush says, it reminds me of the time, and I think about this, when his father went to the supermarket about 2 decades ago. And I remember this very clearly, I was in high school, and it was a big story on the news because the first President Bush was fascinated that they had scanners to scan the price. Now, every American in the country had seen that since the early 1970s. They had seen them in their local supermarkets for a long time. But the President was flabbergasted that that would happen.

My suggestion would be, there is a Safeway not far, the one I shop at down here, that the President get out there. He can take some security down there and he can go through there, and he can start to see what people are going through. On the way back, he needs to fill up. And then he might want to swing by and check the tuition costs at a university, even a State-run school. And then he would start to understand, saying things like: This economy is fine and that it is a little bit bumpy.

Losing your home is not bumpy. Not being able to go to college is not bumpy. Not having a retirement account that you can retire with dignity is not bumpy. That is a fundamental failure of leadership. It is a fundamental failure to have a national economic policy that benefits the vast majority. And, as Justice Brandeis so clearly told us at one point is, you can have a wonderfully strong democracy or you can have the concentration of wealth in the hands of few, but you cannot have both. Well, we tried their way. I would like to go back to having the wonderful democracy.

With that, Mr. Speaker, I thank you for the opportunity to speak on this great floor. I thank you to give a different interpretation of what is happening in America.

Mr. Speaker, the issue before us is not just another public policy issue, it's a matter of life or death for 54 million Americans suffering the ravages of mental health and for 22 million Americans suffering from chemical addiction.

Last year alone, 300,000 people were denied access to addiction treatment, most had health insurance, and 33,000 people committed suicide from untreated depression. Over 150,000 of our fellow Americans died as a direct result of chemical addiction.

On top of the tragic loss of lives, Mr. Speaker, untreated addiction and mental illness cost our economy over $550 billion last year. According to the Wall Street Journal, untreated depression alone cost our businesses $70 billion in lost productivity last year.

So it's ludicrous for the opponents to come here and argue that parity will cost businesses $1.5 billion, as my friend from Washington, member of the Rules Committee, did. If you don't believe the Wall Street Journal, certainly those on our side of the aisle, what do you believe? Cost businesses $70 billion, just depression, untreated depression alone.

Mr. Speaker, all the empirical data, including all the actuarial studies, show that equity for mental health and addiction treatment will save literally billions of dollars nationally. At the same time, it will not raise premiums more than two-tenths of 1 percent, according to the Congressional Budget Office. That's our own CBO numbers. So, I don't know where these people are getting these numbers, these inflated cost figures. Pulling them out of thin air is the only thing I can surmise.

The CBO says it will not raise premiums more than two-tenths of 1 percent. In other words, for the price of a cheap cup of coffee per month, several million Americans in health plans can receive treatment for chemical addiction and mental illness. And it's unfortunate, Mr. Speaker, that some opponents of this legislation have misrepresented the costs of enacting parity.

[Time: 18:15]


Mr. Speaker, I'm alive and sober today only because of the access I had to treatment back on July 31, 1981, when I woke up in a jail cell in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. I'm living proof that treatment works and recovery is real.

But far too many people in our country don't have the same access to treatment that I had and other Members of Congress have also had. A major barrier for thousands of Americans is insurance discrimination against people in health plans who need treatment for mental illness or chemical addiction.

The legislation that my friend from Rhode Island, PATRICK KENNEDY, who has worked tirelessly on this legislation, who arranged for all 14 field hearings, who has been a real champion, this legislation that we have authored will end the discrimination by prohibiting health insurers from placing discriminatory restrictions on treatment for people with mental illness or addiction. In other words, no more inflatable deductibles or copayments that don't apply to physical diseases. No more limited
treatment stays that don't apply to physical diseases. No more discrimination against people with mental illness or chemical addiction.

The Paul Wellstone Mental Health and Addiction Equity Act simply provides equal treatment for diseases of the brain and the body. This legislation provides people in health plans with the same exact coverage that we as Members of Congress have and other Federal employees as well.

By the way, some of the exaggeration, some of the red herrings as to the use of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual IV are just beyond belief. The red herrings presented by opponents, caffeine addiction, sibling rivalry, jet lag, would not be subject to treatment because insurance plans can use ``medical necessity'' requirements. So let's not use bogus red herring arguments. Let's come with intellectually honest arguments if you're against this legislation.

Also, the DSM-IV is used for Medicare, Medicaid, and veterans health care. I wonder how many of you can go home and say, look, it's good enough [Page: H1298]
for Members of Congress but it's not good enough for you, constituents. I don't think anybody in this body would dare do that nor should we. If it's good enough for Members of Congress, it's good enough for the American people.

Mr. Speaker, PATRICK KENNEDY and I have traveled the country from one end to the other, holding 14 field hearings. We've heard literally hundreds of stories of human suffering, broken families, tragic deaths, shattered dreams all because of insurance companies not providing access to adequate treatment for mental illness and addiction. I don't have time, Mr. Speaker, to recite some of these horror stories, but PATRICK and I could share hundreds and hundreds of horror stories caused
by discrimination in treatment for mentally ill and addicted people that we heard in these 14 States.

Mr. Speaker, it's time to end the discrimination against people who need treatment for mental illness and addiction. It's time to prohibit health insurers from placing discriminatory barriers to treatment. It's time to pass the Paul Wellstone Mental Health and Addiction Equity Act. The American people, Mr. Speaker, cannot wait any longer.