July 29, 2011.  This measure immediately increases the debt limit by $900 billion with conditional provision for an additional $1.6 trillion, yet is unlikely to achieve savings sufficient to prevent a downgrade of the nation’s credit rating.  It increases spending authority by a half trillion dollars above the House Budget Act and postpones any significant reductions in anticipated spending for years into the future.  The immediate impact for FY 2012 is to reduce spending $22 billion, or 2/3 of one percent after a 28 percent increase over the last three years.  Even this modest reduction is unlikely due to provisions that exempt mandatory spending, emergency spending (determined by majority vote of the Congress) and spending on the “Global War on Terror.”  The provision requiring a balanced budget amendment be sent to the states is undefined and unenforceable.  The House has already passed legislation that would place the nation’s finances back on the path to solvency and if the Senate is unwilling to concur, it should return the bill to the House with amendments so that conference process can work while there is still time.  Click for Extended Vote Note.

S. 627, "Budget Control Act of 2011," was voted on by the House of Representative on July 29, 2011.  Congressman McClintock voted NO.

Column, Washington Times:  Imagine a family that earns $50,000 a year but is spending more than $88,000 with a credit card balance of $330,000.  The discussions around the kitchen table are likely to be a little tense.

Proportionally, that’s where Washington’s finances are today, and that’s why the national discussion is a little tense, too.

Even these figures belie the magnitude of the fiscal crisis.  Shutting down the entire federal government and firing every federal employee is no longer enough to balance the budget.  Mandatory spending – mainly entitlements – consumes more than the government takes in. 

Fortunately, revenues vastly exceed debt payments, so threats of an actual default are so much flimflam.  The President has both the legal authority and Constitutional obligation to prioritize payments to prevent a default.  The problem is that a lot of other bills would go unpaid, causing a downgrade to the nation’s triple-A credit, forcing up interest costs, wiping out all of the savings now on the table and jacking up everything from mortgage interest costs to family credit card rates.

But avoiding a downgrade will take more than just raising the debt limit.  Without a credible plan to place the Treasury back on the path to fiscal solvency – which Standard and Poors defines as reducing the deficit by $4 trillion over the next decade -- the nation’s credit will be downgraded no matter what happens with the debt limit.

So what to do?

The President wants to raise taxes on “corporate jets” and “millionaires and billionaires.”  But the awful truth is that there aren’t enough corporate jets or millionaires and billionaires to make more than a dent in these numbers.

That’s why the President has actually proposed raising taxes on those earning $200,000 per year ($250,000 for couples).  These are families who are already paying more than half of all income taxes, many of whom are struggling to keep up with upside-down mortgages while putting kids through college without financial aid.  Worse, over 80 percent of small businesses’ net income would be subject to the president’s “millionaires and billionaires” tax at a time when we’re depending on them to produce 2/3 of the new jobs that people desperately need.

The folly of the Left’s tax nostrums is to assume that high taxes are the path to prosperity and an antidote to deficits.  They are neither.

As Adam Smith warned, raising taxes in a recession makes as much sense as a shopkeeper raising prices in a sales slump.  New revenues are needed, but the healthy way is to remove the burdens that government has placed on the economy and produce those revenues through economic growth.  Prosperity is the only true source of revenue.

Nor are taxes an antidote to deficits.  In fact, they’re close cousins: a deficit is simply a future tax.  Both are driven by spending.  It’s no coincidence that while annual spending increased by $1.2 trillion in the last five years, the annual deficit increased by $1.4 trillion.  It’s the spending, stupid.

So how do we reduce spending when promised entitlements are pushing the nation to bankruptcy?  A family grappling with a problem as big as the federal government’s would rapidly come to several conclusions.

First, it’s going to need a work-out plan, starting with a family budget.   In March, the House passed the first Federal budget since 2009.  It would ultimately balance the budget and pay off the debt.  The Senate tore it up.

Second, that family’s going to have to review its spending and pull out everything that it can do without.  The House has begun that process but has a long way to go.  The Senate frets over losing the “Cowboy Poetry Festival.” 

Finally, it’s going to have to renegotiate any promises it has made but just can’t keep.  And that’s the biggest budget challenge, because an entire generation of Americans has made retirement plans based on those promises. 

For example, an average couple earning $89,000 and retiring in 2011 will have paid $110,000 into Medicare and will consume $350,000.  Is anyone really surprised the system is collapsing? 

Paul Ryan has done the nation a great service by offering an alternative that stops provider flight and guarantees seniors the choice of the health care plan that best meets their own needs, underwritten by a solvent Medicare system in a manner that provides higher support to those who are sicker, poorer and older.

Facing grim financial reality after decades of profligacy is a difficult, time-consuming and thoroughly unpleasant process.  But there’s an infinitely worse alternative.

Just ask the Greeks.

# # #

Congressman Tom McClintock represents California's 4th Congressional District, and he is a member of the House Budget Committee. 

This column was published in the Washington Times on July 28, 2011.  
 

On June 26th, a roadside bomb in Jalula, Iraq claimed the life of a young man from Oroville, California.  He was Army Staff Sergeant Russell Jeremiah Proctor, age 25  Full Remarks
 

Mr. Speaker:  On June 26th, a roadside bomb in Jalula, Iraq claimed the life of a young man from Oroville, California.  He was Army Staff Sergeant Russell Jeremiah Proctor, age 25, on his third tour of combat duty. 

He was laid to rest last week in solemn ceremonies in California.  Sgt. Proctor leaves behind a grieving widow, a devastated family, and a nine-month old son who will know his father only by reputation.

And it is reputation that I want to speak of today.  I never met Sgt. Proctor.  I, too, know him only by reputation. 

It is a reputation commemorated by – among other decorations – two Army Commendation Medals, two Army Achievement Medals, two Army Good Conduct Medals, the National Defense Service Medal, the Iraqi Campaign Medal with Bronze Service Star, the Global War on Terrorism Service Medal, two Overseas Service Ribbons, a Combat Action Badge, the Bronze Star and the Purple Heart.

It is a reputation memorialized by those who knew him best: the men he served with.  “He was a leader among leaders” said one, “His drive to be the best motivated all of us to reach our potential.”  Another said, “He led from the front.  He inspired everyone around him to better themselves.” 

Perhaps the most poignant was this simple post:  “My son was killed with (Sergeant) Proctor.  (Private First Class) Dylan Johnson and the rest of the soldiers in the unit all looked up to Russell for leadership and guidance. They are both heroes to me as well.”  It is signed, “A grieving Dad.”

I had the honor to speak last week with Sgt. Proctor’s widow, Soila.  She’s also active duty Army; they met while serving at Fort Hood.  She was deployed in the same Forward Operating Base as Russell – they were billeted together and she was nearby when he was killed.  I cannot begin to imagine the hell that she has been through.  And yet, having endured all this, she plans to continue her service to our Country in the U.S. Army. 

Mr. Speaker, James Michener’s question thunders down on us at such moments: where do we get such people?  I don’t have an answer to that question.  As I talked with Soila last Monday, I was struck by the transcendent nobility that accompanies her grief. 

Perhaps a more pertinent question is what would our country do without such people as Sgt. Proctor – or the nine generations of Americans who have preceded him in the defense of our nation.  General Patton was right when he observed that “It is foolish and wrong to mourn the men who died.  Rather we should thank God that such men lived.”

And so, Mr. Speaker, I rise today for exactly that purpose – to thank God that Russell Proctor lived.  And to pray that his infant son, Ezekiel, grows up in a nation made safer by his sacrifice – and a nation that will never forget not only what we owe to those who Lincoln once called “the loved and lost,” but what we owe to the families who so personally bear that loss. 

A chaplain who brought the dread news to the family wrote a commentary over the fourth of July weekend – a weekend filled with barbecues, picnics and fireworks -- in which he noted the grief of that family amidst all the frivolity around them.  And he noted that at age 25, Russell Proctor will never again celebrate a birthday, take his son fishing or hug his wife.

Sgt. Russell Proctor and all those who preceded him since the first shots on Lexington Green believed enough in our country and what it stands for to sacrifice all those precious years of love and life and joy so that we -- their fellow Americans -- could enjoy those same blessings of liberty in safety and security – including a baby boy named Ezekiel whose Dad won’t be there to take him fishing or hug him or celebrate birthdays with him. 

Ezekiel, if you should someday stumble upon these words, I hope you will know that, like you, many of us knew your Dad only by reputation. 

And we stood in awe of him.

# # #

Remarks delivered in the House Chamber, Washington, D.C.  July 21, 2011.

This vote stands as a defining moment in this crisis.  Every rating agency has warned that an increase in the debt limit without a credible plan to balance the budget will damage our nation’s credit.  Full Remarks

This vote stands as a defining moment in this crisis.  Every rating agency has warned that an increase in the debt limit without a credible plan to balance the budget will damage our nation’s credit.  Worse, fiscal experts warn that without such a plan, we risk a sovereign debt crisis within just a few years.

This measure gives the President his $2.4 trillion debt increase to pay for the bills that he and the Congress have recklessly racked up.  But it also calls for a constitutionally enforceable work-out plan to place our nation back on the course of fiscal solvency, the centerpiece of which is the balanced budget amendment that has been proposed in one form or another since the birth of our Constitution and that 49 other states have adopted. 

The Gentleman from Maryland reminds us that only a few states have both a balanced budget requirement and a 2/3 vote for tax increases.  California is one of them.

California’s deficits – as bad as they are – have been proportionally roughly half the size that the federal government has run.  These budget protections work – maybe not perfectly – but they do work.

And when California also had a real spending limit – as this measure calls for – California enjoyed an era of balanced budgets, prudent reserves, no tax increases, and steady economic growth. 

# # #

House Floor remarks by Congressman Tom McClintock, July 19, 2011.
 

This amendment would save roughly ten percent from this appropriations bill, or $3 ¼ billion, by getting the federal government out of the energy subsidy business.   Full Remarks

M. Chairman:  This amendment saves $166 million by relieving taxpayers of having to subsidize another year of handouts to the solar industry. 

Solar power is not a new technology.  Photo-voltaic electricity generation was invented by Edmund Becquerel in 1839 – more than 170 years ago.

And in more than 170 years of continuing research and development and technological advancement – not to mention untold billions of taxpayer subsidies – we have not yet been able to invent a MORE EXPENSIVE way to generate electricity.

Yet we’re perfectly comfortable telling our constituents that we’re taking another $166 million from their families this year to throw at this 19th Century technology for no particular reason than it makes us feel good.

Not only is this the most expensive way we have ever invented to generate electricity, it also adds nothing to our baseline power. 

Our electricity systems operate on an integrated grid, meaning that we have to constantly match the power going onto the grid with that coming off.  And since there’s no way to predict when a cloud passing over a solar array will immediately drop the output to zero, we have to construct an equal amount of reliable conventional power to back it up at a moment’s notice. 

In other words, for every kilowatt of solar power we add to the grid, we also have to pay to add an additional kilowatt of backup power.

If this technology was truly on the verge of a breakthrough – it would be the hottest thing on NASDAQ right now – and investors would be tripping over themselves to get a piece of the action. 

They are not.  And we have no right to take our constituents’ money and put it into yet another losing proposition.

We’re told the solar industry is making great strides in the marketplace.  That’s true.  But it is making those strides not on its own merit, but solely because we are hiding its true costs from consumers through massive tax subsidies that we’re borrowing from the Chinese. 

It is true that if you hand over $166 million of taxpayer money to certain solar corporations – those corporations will do very well financially.  But their government-funded windfall comes at the expense not only of the hard-working Americans who are the source of this largess – it comes at the expense of our ability to generate the most energy for the lowest price.

Perhaps it is human nature that the more we invest in our mistakes, the less willing we are to admit them.  But with the mistakes of the last 30 years now contributing to the bankruptcy of our country and the impoverishment of our people, perhaps it is time to tell not only the solar industry – but every part of the energy sector – get off the public dole, compete on your merit, and restore to consumers the accurate and unadulterated price signals they need to make rational choices in the marketplace.

# # #

This amendment to H.R. 2354 (Energy and Water Appropriations Act) was offered by Congressman McClintock on the House Floor on July 11, 2011. 

M. Chairman:  This amendment would save roughly ten percent from this appropriations bill, or $3 ¼ billion, by getting the federal government out of the energy subsidy business.

       For more than 30 years, the Department of Energy has squandered billions of dollars subsidizing research and development that no private investor would touch – with the promise it would make our nation energy independent.  Every year we have spent untold billions on these programs and every year we’ve become more dependent on foreign oil.

       We are now running a deficit that threatens to bankrupt our country, and this requires us to cast a critical eye on every expenditure that has failed to achieve its objectives.  And none has failed so spectacularly as the Department of Energy’s subsidy of energy research which has left us billions of dollars poorer and stuck with mediocre technologies that only survive on a lifeline of public subsidies.

       The opposition will attempt to depict this amendment as a Luddite reaction to “green technology.”

       It is exactly the opposite.  By stopping the government from doling out dollars to politically favored industries – by stopping it from picking winners and losers among emerging technologies competing for capital – we restore the natural flow of that capital toward those that are the most economically viable and technologically feasible.

       For example, this amendment cuts funding to the Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy Program, which functions as an R&D department for every solar, biomass, geothermal and wind energy company in the country.  

       We’re not funding the most viable research in these technologies.  Private capital beats a path to the door of viable technology.  These expenditures are for research considered so dubious that no private investor in his right mind would risk his own capital.  And yet this Congress has been more than willing to risk our constituents’ capital in the form of their tax dollars.  And it shouldn’t surprise us that those investments have not paid off.

       This misallocation of resources not only destroys jobs in productive ventures in order to create jobs in subsidized ones, it ends up reducing our energy potential instead of expanding it and destroying wealth instead of creating it. 

       Politicians love to appear at ribbon cuttings and issue self-congratulatory press releases at government-supported “alternative energy” businesses, but fall strangely silent when asked to actually account for the billions of our dollars they’ve wasted.  

       The best thing we did for shale oil and gas technology was to have gotten the government out of the business of funding it.

       Guess what happened?  Once we got the government out, it took the productive sector just a few years to develop remarkable new drilling techniques that have unleashed a cornucopia of American energy into the market.  Is there really a question as to which of these models actually work?

       This appropriations act proposes to spend $200 million for vehicle technology research.  Isn’t that what auto manufacturers should do, and used to do, with their own capital?  And if they are not willing to risk their own capital, what right has this Congress to risk our constituents’ earnings?

       These amendments move the government out of all sectors of subsidizing research – biomass, nuclear, solar, wind, fossil fuels – all across the board.

       Does that mean that research and development will stop on all these technologies?  On the contrary.  It means that all of the distortions that government intervention has made in the energy sector can be corrected, and that private capital can once again flow freely to those technologies that offer the greatest return at the lowest cost.

       Thirty years of government energy subsidies promised to reduce our dependence on foreign oil, and yet our dependence has become vastly greater.

       All we have done is to squander billions of dollars of our nation’s treasure and distorted and impeded the natural flow of investment dollars that could have produced far greater returns in viable technology.  

       We are left with a bankrupt and energy deficient and dependent nation while propping up a few politically well-connected interests producing ethanol and solar panels at a staggering expense – an expense we have hidden from consumers with their own tax dollars.

       Our energy policy over the last thirty years simply proves that Thomas Jefferson was right when he observed, “were we directed from Washington when to sow and when to reap, we should soon want bread.”  For thirty years, we have been directed from Washington how to develop our energy.   It should surprise no one that we now lack energy.

 # # #

This amendment to H.R. 2354 (Energy and Water Appropriation Act) was offered by Congressman McClintock and supported by the Republican Study Committee (RSC). 
 

Mr. Chairman:  For more than three months, our nation has been amidst a quiet constitutional crisis Full Remarks.

July 7, 2011

Mr. Chairman:  For more than three months, our nation has been amidst a quiet constitutional crisis that carries immense implications.

The Gentleman from Florida is sadly mistaken to dismiss this as a meaningless philosophical discussion.  This issue strikes at the very heart of our Constitutional form of government.

On March 19th, completely without Congressional authorization, the President ordered an unprovoked attack against Libya.

In doing so, he crossed a very bright line placed in the Constitution specifically to prevent so momentous and fatal a decision as war from being made by a single individual.

The American Founders were explicit on this point.  For centuries, European monarchs had plunged their nations into bloody and debilitating wars on whim and the Founders wanted to protect the American Republic from that fate. 

James Madison explained why this way:

“In no part of the constitution is more wisdom to be found, than in the clause which confides the question of war or peace to the legislature, and not to the executive department…the trust and the temptation would be too great for any one man…War is in fact the true nurse of executive aggrandizement.  In war a physical force is to be created and it is the executive will which is to direct it.  In war, the public treasures are to be unlocked, and it is the executive hand which is to dispense them.  In war, the honours and emoluments of office are to be multiplied, and it is the executive patronage under which they are to be enjoyed…Those who are to conduct a war cannot in the nature of things, be proper or safe judges whether a war ought to be commenced, continued, or concluded.”

The president has tried to justify this act in a variety of ways: that bombing another country is not really an act of war; that there wasn’t time to consult Congress (only the United Nations Security Council); and that it was a morally justifiable humanitarian act.

Never was there a greater provocation or clearer moral justification for war than the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.  And never was there a more activist president than Franklin Roosevelt. 

Yet, within 24 hours of that attack, President Roosevelt appeared before a joint session of Congress in this very hall.  He clearly recognized that as commander in chief his authority only extended to ordering “that all measures be taken for our defense.”  He recognized that under our Constitution, anything more required an act of Congress, which he sought and obtained.

The unprovoked attack on Libya was not authorized by this Congress, and is accordingly unconstitutional and illegal.

Indeed, two weeks ago, the House considered a resolution authorizing a war with Libya and it rejected that measure by nearly a three to one margin.  It then considered a second measure to authorize acts of war against Libya just short of actual combat.  It rejected that measure as well.

The precedent being established right now by the President’s deliberate defiance of the Constitution and the clear will of Congress has profound implications for our nation’s future. 

If this act is allowed to stand unchallenged, it means that the checks and balances painstakingly built into the Constitution on the supreme question of war and peace have been rendered meaningless.

Weeks ago, the House voted to deny authorization for the use of funds for the war on Libya effective October 1.  This amendment simply follows through on that decision in the actual appropriations act.

Frankly, we need to do more than that.  Clearly one of the conditions for increasing the debt limit must be to assure that no funds – either borrowed or raised – in the current budget or the next – should be used to continue to support this illegal act.   

And we need to remember that a war, once started, cannot always be turned off by an appropriations act.  Once we have attacked another country without provocation, we have created an aggrieved belligerent that now has cause to pursue that war regardless of what Congress later decides.

That’s why this precedent is so dangerous and why the President’s actions are so devastating to our very form of government.  And that’s why we need to speak clearly and unequivocally at every opportunity through measures like this offered today by the Gentlemen from Michigan and Ohio.

House Floor remarks by Congressman Tom McClintock in support of the Amash/ Kucinich Amendment to HR 2219 (Department of Defense Appropriations Act).  The amendment would deny authorization for the use of funds for the war on Libya.