U.S. Representative Tom McClintock today announced he will hold a meeting with constituents on November 30 in Truckee. 

When:  Monday, November 30, 2009 

1:00 PM

Where:

Truckee Town Council Chambers

10183 Truckee Airport Road
 

House Chamber, Washington D.C.  November 7, 2009.  M. Speaker:  The question before us comes to this: will Congress force American families to surrender control of their health care to the federal bureaucracy?

There’s nothing optional about this law – the word “shall” appears 3,400 times in it – each time backed by the full force of the government. 

You shall only get your health care through the government exchange.

You shall only select among the healthcare plans that the government czar has approved for you, whether they fit your family’s needs or not.

You shall buy a government-approved plan and pay for every government-imposed mandate in it through higher premiums, lower wages or higher taxes – and you’ll face steep fines and even federal prison if you decline to do so.

You “Shall” 3,400 times.

Whenever such a system is imposed, the result is always the same: massive cost overruns followed by a brutal rationing of care.

Instead of destroying everything that’s good about American health care, shouldn’t we first repair what’s wrong?

Primum non nocere – first, do no harm.
 

House Chamber, Washington, D.C. 

 November 6, 2009

M. Speaker:

This week the House passed HR 3548 that extends unemployment benefits in states with unemployment rates over 8 ½ percent for an additional 13 weeks.  The measure also continues the popular $8,000 tax credit for first time homebuyers and adds a new $6,500 tax credit for homebuyers who are currently homeowners.

M. Speaker, I know these are very popular programs, but I believe that they are taking us in exactly the wrong direction.  By increasing taxes to finance these programs, the government is placing increasing burdens on the economy that I believe is actually making the recession worse.  By raising taxes to help the unemployed, it makes more unemployed.  And by paying people to buy homes, it is creating yet another housing bubble that will continue to drain the resources of our nation until it bursts.

Let me walk through both of these concerns.

Under this bill, unemployed workers in states like my home state of California can draw up to 99 weeks of unemployment benefits – almost two full years.  I realize the quiet panic that accompanies every waking and sleeping moment of unemployed families as they wonder from one day to the next how they’re going to get by.  But the only way out of that nightmare is genuine employment.

There’s a reason that California suffers one of the highest unemployment rates in the nation: it has one of the highest tax and regulatory burdens in the nation.  Business and investment and the jobs they create flee such hostile environments and seek out less expensive and less burdensome harbors.   One need only watch the domestic migration within our own nation to see this happening right now.

According to the Congressional Budget Office, this bill imposes a net tax increase of $2 ½ billion on our economy at a time when it can least afford it.  That means higher unemployment. 

Family breadwinners can see the additional unemployment checks in their hands, and that’s why this bill is so popular.  But what they can’t see are the jobs that could have ended their agony, but that have now disappeared in order to pay the higher taxes to support those unemployment checks. 

It is a vicious downward spiral that the supporters of the bill have already tacitly acknowledged when they admitted that they’ll have to return before the end of the year to extend the bill yet again. 

Simply stated, we cannot help the unemployed by creating more of them.

The second part of this bill is equally popular and it is equally delusional.  It extends and expands tax credits for homebuyers to buy homes they otherwise couldn’t afford. 

Have we learned nothing from the past year of economic hardship?  The catalyst for the current recession was a housing bubble created when government policies encouraged housing lenders and borrowers to make and take loans to buy homes that everybody knew those borrowers couldn’t afford.

What’s our response?  It is to provide additional tax money to encourage homebuyers to purchase homes that they otherwise couldn’t afford.  And we’re doing this just weeks after watching how the “Cash for Clunkers” program created the same artificial bubble in the automobile market that came crashing down as soon as that program ended.

A society in which billions of dollars are extracted from its economy by its government in order to pay people to buy stuff they can’t afford has a rendezvous with a grim accounting.   And the longer these programs continue, the grimmer that accounting will be.

When I was named ranking member on the Water and Power Sub-Committee in July, I noted that up until the last generation, the purpose of federal water and power policy was to create an abundance of both.  And I noted that in recent years, abundance has been replaced with the rationing of shortages as the principal objective of federal policy. 

 I warned that: “The result is increasingly expensive water and power that is now affecting our prosperity as a nation.  We’re no longer looking at cost-benefit analyses of which projects make economic sense and which do not.  Instead, practicality has been replaced by an entirely new ideological filter: those projects that ration or manage shortage are considered worthy regardless of feasibility or cost – and projects that produce abundance are to be discouraged regardless of their economic benefits or simple common sense.”

Today’s hearing illustrates this difference of policy dramatically. 

Although the stated goal of this hearing is to relieve gridlock, the underlying agenda is to promote a so-called “green transmission system” – meaning facilities that limit transmission to sources that the majority finds ideologically pleasing – principally wind and solar – and that exclude electricity the majority finds ideologically displeasing – principally hydroelectric, coal, and nuclear. 

Never mind that wind and solar are the two most expensive ways we have yet invented to generate electricity.  Never mind that hydroelectric, coal and nuclear are the least expensive – and two of those (hydroelectric and nuclear) produce exactly ZERO air emissions.

Thus, the sub-committees charged with the responsibility of producing abundant power for the United States will spend much of this hearing seriously discussing setting up an entirely duplicative transmission system solely for ideologically preferred sources of electricity and to the exclusion of all others.

But even this discussion becomes academic in the face of obstruction and opposition by the environmental left – both in Congress and in the Courts – to federally designated transmission corridors that will help bring more energy to our electricity grid.   

At a time when our nation needs to build 32,000 miles of lines over the next five years, we cannot afford to block energy generation and transmission projects because they aren’t socially acceptable in San Francisco or the West Coast. 

If you want to see where all this leads, look to California, whose consumers now pay the highest electricity prices in the continental United States. 

In 1970, California produced 62% of its energy.  By 2006, it imported 62% of its energy.

Three years ago, the city of Truckee was about to sign a long-term contract for electricity purchased from a new, state-of-the-art, EPA-approved coal-fired power plant in Utah.  It was forced to abandon this contract because the power was not ideologically acceptable -- even to be imported.  The replacement power now costs Truckee consumers nearly twice as much.

If this folly is imposed nationally, it will have disastrous consequences to the economy and to the quality of life of the people of our nation for generations to come.

Finally, I need to note that the environmental left has not only devastated California’s once-abundant energy capacity, it has produced an unprecedented water crisis by the deliberate diversion of 200 billion gallons of water from Central Valley agriculture for the enjoyment and prosperity of the Delta Smelt.  

I have been told that this is the last Water and Power Subcommittee hearing for this year.  That’s bad news for  40,000 unemployed San Joaquin Valley workers who have urgently asked Congress to turn the Delta pumps back on.   It is also bad news for families across America who will see their grocery prices rise as a result of the destruction of a half-million acres of the most fertile and productive agricultural land in the nation.

I asked last week if we could hear directly in the field from all those impacted by the policy of this government,   I have yet to receive a reply.  Nevertheless, we appear to have plenty of time today to talk about  “greening” our grid.  

There’s certainly no need to wonder why many people believe this Congress is disconnected from realty.

 

What’s at Stake
House Chamber, Washington, D.C.
November 3, 2009

M. Speaker:

What do Americans lose if Nancy Pelosi succeeds in taking over health care?

We’ll lose the freedom to shop around for the policy that best meets our own needs. 

Under her bill, we’re forced to purchase our insurance through a government run exchange.  We’re forced to purchase only those policies that meet all the requirements set by the new health czar or be fined for failing to do so.  And we’re forced to pay for all the cost overruns through higher premiums or higher future taxes. 

Where does all this lead?  In 1993, the government started a public option for student loans, but only a fraction of the public opted in. So last month, the House voted to give the government monopoly control over all student loans.

That’s about to happen to your health care unless 40 “Blue Dog” Democrats decide to stop them.  You need to call them today.