Unprecedented Taxing And Spending

Floor Speech

UNPRECEDENTED TAXING AND SPENDING -- (House of Representatives - March 24, 2009)

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Mr. FLEMING. Well, I want to thank the gentlelady from Minnesota. Thank you for your work and leadership, particularly in this area. And by the way, I love watching you speak because I think I can learn a lot of tips from you. So I do appreciate that.

I also want to reflect on my colleague from Georgia that just spoke, a physician, who made a lot of good comments about the tilt that we have right now going towards socialism, certainly liberal socialism at the very least.

You know, it's true, Mr. Speaker, that we've spent in this bill and prior bills over the last 2 months, it's evident that our government is spending too much, taxing too much, and borrowing way too much. Remember, that the Congress just passed a $787 billion stimulus package, $410 billion omnibus appropriations bill loaded with over 9,000 earmarks, and remember, our President promised that he would not support earmarks. Now the administration has unveiled a $3.6 trillion Federal spending plan, a spending plan that the nonpartisan CBO, Congressional Budget Office, has now determined will produce $2.3 trillion of more red ink than the President initially predicted.

I want to turn the camera and the people across America to this picture here and explain really what it is. These are kids in Germany in 1923, and they're stacking what looks like bricks. What they are, in fact, stacking is their currency. That's Deutsche notes right there, and in 1923, the value of the currency in Germany as a result of cranking out money, cranking out money, printing paper to pay back war reparations they couldn't pay back, it made the currency so dilute that it took a wheelbarrow, literally a wheelbarrow of cash just to buy a loaf of bread. That's just how bad inflation can be, and we all know the end of that story. It ended up into Nazi Germany.

I also bring your attention to this. This is, believe it or not, a $10 billion bill. It can be found in Zimbabwe, the same problem, trying to solve their fiscal problems by printing more money. And if you keep printing more, you get a situation like this where a $10 billion bill is required to buy an egg. Yes, Mr. Speaker, that's what this bill will buy. However, that's only a few weeks ago. Today, they have something--in my hand, you can see a $100 trillion bill, believe it or not. And what is it worth? The same value as confetti.

Now, we might think, well, these kind of tragedies cannot happen to us in America. Well, is that true? Just today, the Chinese announced that they do not like our dollar. They feel like that even though they're one of our largest debtors, they no longer trust us in our debt.

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