Date: 2003-11-05
Speaker: MARIO DIAZ-BALART (republican)
Chamber: H
State: Flor

ida. Mr. Speaker. I am here today to speak about an issue that is a huge priority for the Republican majority in this House. and also. Mr. Speaker. a huge priority for the President of the United States. and that is the United States of Americas economy and where we are with our economy right now. Ever since I got elected. which. as you know. Mr. Speaker. has not been a long time. time and time again I have heard from our dear friends in the Democratic Party how the tax cuts that the President of the United States was pushing for and that this Congress approved were not working. and they were not going to work. Mr. Speaker. They were impossibilities. They could never work. They were not based on any sound policy. And the quotes go on and on and on. how again there is just no way that it was going to work. because it was irresponsible. because it was ludicrous. because it did not make sense. because. I even heard some people say. because you hurt government when you take governments money away. Think about that. I actually heard that. I am paraphrasing it. but I heard a statement just like that on the floor of the House. It is going to hurt government to take that money. governments money. away. by giving It In tax cuts. by giving iaway governments money in tax cuts. Mr. Speaker. We clearly have some serious differences with our friends in the other party. One of the main differences. Mr. Speaker. is a pretty basic realization. and that is this. that every single dollar that we are dealing with here. every single dollar that we debate on this floor. every single dollar that this government spends. Mr. Speaker. is not the governments money. it is money that the government takes from the hardworking American taxpayer. It is their money. It is their money that we are spending. It is not the governments money. Yet. when the President and this Congress said we have to incentivize this economy. because the President was not happy with how the economy is going. he felt and we felt. the majority. that we had to do better. we had to do a better job to make sure that more Americans had jobs. Mr. Speaker. that every American that wants a job should be able to find one. so this President had a very ambitious program to incentivize the economy. I repeat. we heard every single possible statement that you could possibly hear as to how it was not going to work. Let me read a couple of quotes. I am not going to bore you with all the quotes. you have heard them before. For example. the gentleman from Hawaii said. "This is not reasonable. This is haphazard and this is reckless." I love this one. The gentleman from Maryland stated. "The tax cut program did not work." Mr. Speaker. let me just see if I understood this. He said that the tax cut program. i.e.. taking less money from the taxpayer. the government taking a little bit less of the taxpayers hardearned money. he said would not work and did not work to incentivize this economy. But you know what happened. Mr. Speaker. After all the rhetoric was stated on the floor of this House and in committee and in the Committee on the Budget and many other committees. after all that rhetoric. something very interesting happened. Mr. Speaker. The economic numbers came in. and what did those economic numbers show? Did they show that the tax cuts that the President proposed and that the majority of this Congress worked so hard to pass. did those economic numbers show that the tax cuts did not work? Oh. no. Mr. Speaker. Let me say. and I know the American people have heard a lot about this recently. because even some friends in the press have had to admit now that it is working. that the tax cuts are working. that taking less money from the hardworking American taxpayer is doing what the President said it was going to do. and it was going to incentivize the economy. Let me just read you some numbers. Gross domestic product. the GDP. increased from an annual rate of 3.3 percent in the second quarter due to the tax cuts to a rate of 7.2 percent in the third quarter. the highest rate of growth in almost two decades. There has been. Mr. Speaker. and I do not know if you have heard it. a lot of chewing. a lot of good friends on the Democratic side chewing their words. eating their words. because the facts are here. It is working. Let me give you a couple other statistics. Spending on big ticket items like cars and the such increased by an unbelievable 26.9 percent in the third quarter. 26.9 percent in the third quarter. If you listen carefully. you will hear it. more chewing. more chewing of their words. because. remember. these were the tax cuts that were not going to work. These were the tax cuts that were not going to incentivize the economy. 26.9 percent on big ticket items in this quarter. Consumer spending. Mr. Speaker. on nondurables. like food and clothing. increased by 7.9 percent. the best since 1976. And the chewing continues. The chewing by the Members of that side of the aisle continues. eating those words when they said no. taking more money from the people is what we need to do. raising taxes is what we need to do to incentivize the economy. and. again. doing what this President said we needed to do and what the majority of this Congress wanted to do and got passed was not going to work. But the numbers. Mr. Speaker. do not lie. Here they are. Mr. Speaker. business spending on equipment and software increased by 15.4 percent. the largest increase since the first quarter of the Year 2000. Listen to the chewing. Listen to the chewing. more words on that side of the aisle being eaten. because they said it was not going to work. Again. I repeat. what they said we had to do was increase taxes on the American people. As a matter of fact. the members of the Democratic Party proposed 25 increases in taxes this year alone. Between this Chamber and the other Chamber. 25 times they proposed increasing the American taxpayers burden. They proposed raising the taxes on the hardworking Americans. to send it up to D.C.. because tax cuts were not going to work. were not going to incentivize the economy. Mr. Speaker. homeownership rates. which is something that I think is so crucial. was up to 68.4 percent in the third quarter. the largest ever. the largest homeownership rate ever. And the initial weekly jobless claims data continues to improve. Mr. Speaker. Look. one does not have to be a rocket scientist to understand that one needs to have a better economy to get more jobs. Ifewe do not have a better economy. we are not going to get more jobs. So it is not rocket science that we are starting to see that the weekly jobless claim data continues to improve. For the past 4 weeks. jobless claims have been below 400.000. Still too many. but again. because of this Presidents leadership. because of the leadership of the majority of this House. Mr. Speaker. because this House. along with the President. decided to take less money from the hardworking American taxpayers. the economy is starting to rebound. and it is doing so in a way that many people said was imppssible. Many people. Mr. Speaker. I repeat. who are now. I can hear it. I can almost hear in the background. eating their words. Consumer confidence is up 4.1 points from previous months. Again. Mr. Speaker. this is the issue. and the crux of the issue is twofold. Number one. it is not the governments money. it is the peoples money. When we let the people keep a little bit more of their money. Mr. Speaker. that is not a gift. Government is not giving those people anything. Mr. Speaker. government is taking a little bit less of the peoples money so that they can spend it on their children. on their kids education. on savings. on whatever they want. because it is their money. It is their money to start with. And on top of that. what happens is that the economy begins to grow and the GDP begins to grow. So. Mr. Speaker. I have a number of dear friends and colleagues who are joining me here today. and if I could. I would like to yield to the gentleman from Texas . He has done an incredible Job in the time that he has been elected as one of the foundIng members of the Washington Waste Watchers. a man who has shown incredible leadership fighting waste. fraud. and abuse.