House Proceeding 03-02-10 on Mar 2nd, 2010 :: 2:19:19 to 2:39:19
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2:19:15 to 2:19:19( Edit History Discussion )
Speech By: Steve King

2:19:15 to 2:19:20( Edit History Discussion )

Steve King: taxpayers' money, according to the populist caucus, we would like to put a significant tax

2:19:20 to 2:19:54( Edit History Discussion )
Speech By: Steven Kagen

2:19:21 to 2:19:44( Edit History Discussion )

Steven Kagen: on that bonus and use that revenue and put it back into the american economy to generate small business activity through the s.b.a. put it back into people's hands. we want to, and we do believe that people are more important than profits, that we should in fact reward work rather than wealth. if i understand the transfer

2:19:45 to 2:19:56( Edit History Discussion )

Steven Kagen: tax on wall street speculators, it's 1/4 of one penny being traded on nanosecond trades. this is not a fee or transfer

2:19:55 to 2:20:09( Edit History Discussion )
Speech By: Steve King

2:19:57 to 2:20:09( Edit History Discussion )

Steve King: tax placed on those speculating for the long-term investment. it's going to exclude any tax favored retirement accounts, any h.s.a., health savings account, education savings account, and would exclude the

2:20:10 to 2:20:19( Edit History Discussion )
Speech By: Steven Kagen

2:20:10 to 2:20:20( Edit History Discussion )

Steven Kagen: firs $100,000 of you are your income generated from your investment in america's future on our american exchange. some people push back against

2:20:20 to 2:20:44( Edit History Discussion )
Speech By: Steve King

2:20:21 to 2:20:43( Edit History Discussion )

Steve King: the wall street transfer fee by saying people will trade overseas. in london, the most active trading floor in the world, they do have a transfer fee that's twice what we're suggesting. so again, the idea is that w want to use the tax code to reward people for their good activity and most especially we want to use existing structures like our community banks, credit unions and regional

2:20:44 to 2:20:44( Edit History Discussion )

Steve King: banks to find the financing and

2:20:45 to 2:21:04( Edit History Discussion )

Steven Kagen: credit necessary for small businesses once again to have access to the credit they need to generate the economic activity and generate the jobs. don't think for a minute that the federal or state government can employee you and work our way through this recession with government sponsored jobs. we can't do that. so it's the to set up a system wherein

2:20:45 to 2:21:04( Edit History Discussion )
Speech By: Steven Kagen

2:21:05 to 2:21:09( Edit History Discussion )

Steve King: you're rewarded for your work rather than your wealth and by focusing on our transportation

2:21:05 to 2:21:09( Edit History Discussion )
Speech By: Steve King

2:21:10 to 2:21:15( Edit History Discussion )

Steven Kagen: infrastructure needs we can begin to generate millions and millions of jobs to do just that we want people to stay in

2:21:10 to 2:21:15( Edit History Discussion )
Speech By: Steven Kagen

2:21:16 to 2:21:37( Edit History Discussion )

Bruce Braley: their own homes once again rather than have this foreclosure cris come back and bite us. mr. braley: i appreciate the observations. i want to engage a couple of my colleagues in a conversation about behavior modification on wall street. i'll start with my friend from vermont because he served on the oversight and government reform committee in the last

2:21:20 to 2:23:50( Edit History Discussion )
Speech By: Bruce Braley

2:21:38 to 2:21:59( Edit History Discussion )

Bruce Braley: congress when he we had the hearing with the c.e.o.'s of a.i.g., trying to explain why they stood by and watched as their london financial services division drove this economy off a cliff by engaging in excess and speculative trading and high-risk credit default swaps and complex derivatives.

2:22:00 to 2:22:20( Edit History Discussion )

Bruce Braley: one of the things we learned in that hearing from the economic experts who study those high-risk investments was that long before any ofs came to congress, congress was confronted with the issue of how we provide some type of oversilingt of this highly complex and evolving

2:22:21 to 2:22:41( Edit History Discussion )

Bruce Braley: marketplace which at that time in the late 1990's was a small fraction of the $100 trillion marketplace it has become. but what was most shocking to me as they testified was that they said, when congress was trying to decide what are these products, in a way they'r like an insurance product because

2:22:42 to 2:23:02( Edit History Discussion )

Bruce Braley: they're an agreement to pay upon a contingent future event. but they're really not insurance because otherwise we could regulate them through the state insurance commissioners. so then they said, well, these are kind of like stock trading, and so we can have this regulated by the securities and exchange commission. but it's really not a stock

2:23:03 to 2:23:25( Edit History Discussion )

Bruce Braley: transaction. so what is it? ability 10% of these produs, those experts testified, if you remember, mr. welch, were real insurance products. and these economists testified, the other 90% were pure gambling. people trying to make money by turning over transactions,

2:23:26 to 2:23:47( Edit History Discussion )

Bruce Braley: betting that at some point when those commitments came due they'd be able to generate a profit without adding anything of value other than risk and a possible payment in the future. so why is it necessary when we're talking about ending excessive speculation to get to the very core, not only of how you do that with a tax policy

2:23:48 to 2:23:51( Edit History Discussion )

Bruce Braley: and with a transfer fee but also how you deal with the

2:23:52 to 2:24:12( Edit History Discussion )

Peter Welch: financial oversight of the marketplace to make sure this never happens again. mr. welch: i appreciate that. what it's about is whether banking is about an activity that's lending money to businesses, small businesses, families to buy their first home, or it's going to be a mechanism for financial speculation.

2:23:55 to 2:28:05( Edit History Discussion )
Speech By: Peter Welch

2:24:13 to 2:24:35( Edit History Discussion )

Peter Welch: it's two totally different models. i want to take up on what you wereaying. we need a banking system. we need a strong banking system. we need local bankers who actually engage in their community, can make judgments about who is good for a loan. i want to give an example of the local bank in the wall

2:24:36 to 2:24:57( Edit History Discussion )

Peter Welch: street operation. in vermont, whave a small bank, the people's bank, the president of the bank, ring manahan, his desk is -- ric manahan, his desk is in the entry of the bank. you walk in, see the teller windows thrarks vestibule area, a public area, his desk is there.

2:24:58 to 2:25:18( Edit History Discussion )

Peter Welch: people do not have a hard time asking rick what's going on. he knows the folks in his community. in his bank, his board of director, they see a good day work when at the end of the day they've been able to authorize a loan to a local siness, might be a retailers, might be a construction company, knowing that that business is going to use that money to help create a local job.

2:25:19 to 2:25:39( Edit History Discussion )

Peter Welch: or it's the young family getting started and they've got a make a tough underwriting decision but they know that family and know they'll do their level best to be good for it. at the end of the day, the house has been sold, the family has a new place to live and they go home and they sleep pretty good at night knowing they make a -- made a

2:25:40 to 2:26:00( Edit History Discussion )

Peter Welch: contribution to the community. another model, one of our most esteemed wall street banks is goldman sachs. they have the best and the brightest of folks doing the work there. but here's one of the things they did. it was very successful for them making money. they bought a mortgage origination company in the south.

2:26:01 to 2:26:22( Edit History Discussion )

Peter Welch: they hired 26 30-year-old young people to go out and income on doors and sell mortgages, subprime mortgages -- mortgages people couldn't afford and didn't need. they brought those mortgages back to new york and bundled them into products that they sold. but before they sold them, they got the best and brightest m.b.a.'s to knock on the doors of the rating agencies an

2:26:23 to 2:26:45( Edit History Discussion )

Peter Welch: persuade the agencies that these toxic instruments were triple-a. then they went to their sales department and had them contact trusted investors, pension funds, and said, we've got some triple-a products here, you ought to be to the buy them, it's a good return for our your pensioner. they sold them. then they went to the trading

2:26:46 to 2:27:07( Edit History Discussion )

Peter Welch: room, they said, these are junk. how do we know? we sold them and they bet short against instruments they sold long that would not happen at people's trust in vermont. they couldn't imagine doing that, selling something that wasn't worth investing in. they couldn't do it. and i know that every single one of us, republican and

2:27:08 to 2:27:28( Edit History Discussion )

Peter Welch: democrat have local bankers who have met that standard, where the goal is to serve the community and they know that their responsibility with this trust this after the -- that they have of depositor money is to put it to good work to build the economy. wall street has a different, they have a different point of view. not that they're not necessary,

2:27:29 to 2:27:50( Edit History Discussion )

Peter Welch: they obviously are, but when they are helpful, they see that the work that they do should be in service of the work that main street does. and you know, that's why with the reforms we must implement, whether it's a bonus tax a consumer products safety commission, whether it's

2:27:51 to 2:28:06( Edit History Discussion )

Peter Welch: tightening up on lending regulations, derivative trading, all of that the bottom line is really very simple. is the banking system going to be there to serve us or are we going to be there to serve the financial engineering of the banking system?

2:28:07 to 2:28:27( Edit History Discussion )

Ron Klein: that's the question that this congress faces and america wants an answer to it. i yield back. mr. bay braley: we are just about out of time. i'm going to ask my friend from ohio for closing comments, especially on this critical issue that affects the middle class homeowners, the mortgage foreclosure crisis. >> we all know that home

2:28:10 to 2:29:25( Edit History Discussion )
Speech By: Ron Klein

2:28:28 to 2:28:48( Edit History Discussion )

Ron Klein: owrship in the united states is crucial. it's crucial for people knowing where they plan -- when they plant their investment they're working hard to make sure they have a place to live. but the same description that mr. welch just gave us about banking practices, in some cases resulted in a, unfortunately a

2:28:49 to 2:29:09( Edit History Discussion )

Ron Klein: whole lot of people getting in way over their heads, a whole lot of lending that shouldn't have been lent in the first place, and the foreclosure situation is really bad in many places. i witnessed something over the weekend in west palm beach. there was a -- in the west palm beach convention center, a group came into town and said, we're going to bring together the

2:29:10 to 2:29:26( Edit History Discussion )

Ron Klein: lenders who in many cases have not been answering their phone, the line is busy or people haven't been getting answers, along with people who are having problems, they can't make their mortgage payments. and the not like they're totally out of it. they may have had a job that was earning $50,000 a year and they

2:29:27 to 2:29:47( Edit History Discussion )

lost it but now they're earning $35,000 or maybe there's a two-income household but they can't make ends meet. they want to stay there and we as americans want them to stay there if they can. we don't want abandonedouses. at this event over the weekend, it was running for five days, 24 hours a day, and all the major lenders were there except for

2:29:48 to 2:30:08( Edit History Discussion )

one, really interesting, 5,500 people were in this building at one time, i've never seen anything like this, and they had the lenders sitting across the table here to here and they were actually ironing out one after another, one guy had an 11% mortgage, it s reduced to 5.5%, his payments from $2,100 to $1,300.

2:30:09 to 2:30:29( Edit History Discussion )

i asked him, with your reduced income, you can make do? he said, yes, i'm keeping my house, i'm sleeping tonight. my children know they have a place, a roof over their head tonight. well, this has been frustrating, but help is on the way. help is on the way. i think this is a very -- the model's been created, it's working in different parts of the country but i'm really gratified to see that some people in south florida were

2:30:30 to 2:30:50( Edit History Discussion )

ven that opportunity. a lot more to work through in all of our communities but i'm starting to see some success and that's part of how our recovery is going to happen. by putting the necessary pressure for people to get together and make this work. and that's why the blueprint for recovery we've been talking about that the populist caucus has put forward, real solutions. mr. braley: concrete solutions

2:30:51 to 2:31:11( Edit History Discussion )

that are going to help us get out of this mess. by ending speculation on wall street, making sure we have a fair compensation system f the people who have gotten us into this mess and spurring job creation with things like the wall street bonus tax act, the national infrastructure development act, the make wall street pay for the restoration of main street act and the buy american improvement act.

2:31:12 to 2:31:32( Edit History Discussion )

this -- these four commonsense bills will make an enormous impact on the quality of life for middle class families. they also represent true populist policies that are about ilding mh um -- america up, not tearing it down. it's about giving voice to the legitimate concerns of the american people who made this country great and with that i

2:31:33 to 2:31:53( Edit History Discussion )

Steve King: thank my colleagues and i yield back the balance of my time. the speaker pro tempore: the gentleman yields back the balance of his time. under the speaker's announced policy of january 6, 2009, the chair recognizes the gentleman from iowa, mr. king, for 60 minutes. mr. king: thank you, mr. speaker. it's a privilege and hon to b recognized by you to address you on the floor of the house of representatives and having

2:31:45 to 2:46:35( Edit History Discussion )
Speech By: Steve King

2:31:54 to 2:32:16( Edit History Discussion )

Steve King: watched the collection of my colleagues from the other side of the aisle over the last 60 minutes, a lot of subjects were brought up and i think delivered in a professional fashion by my colleagues and i hope they know i'm always open to dialogue if they have things they'd like to exchange with me. i'm here and i have often asked my colleagues to yield and if they should ask me to yield i'm happy to do so.

2:32:17 to 2:32:37( Edit History Discussion )

Steve King: i think it's important to have an exchange dialogue and first we learned last thursday that republicans have a lot of good ideas. we also learned that many of those good ideas are suppressed by the iron-fisted gavel of the house of representatives. and and also as i looked at the -- i'll say the event as it

2:32:38 to 2:32:58( Edit History Discussion )

Steve King: unfolded, mr. speaker, that 6 1/2 hours of discussion that took place last february 25, last thursday, at the blair house, on health care. a number of things came to me. but looking at the at that da -- data was quite interesting. just to boil it down to raw numbers and regular comparison, it was this, that for every two

2:32:59 to 2:33:19( Edit History Discussion )

Steve King: minutes that a republican spoke, the president spoke for an additional two minutes and another democrat spoke for another two minutes. so i was really -- it was really two to one in the time that was used. and as the president said, well, it's ok if he talks a long time, even though the time was very limited to the others that were talking, because after all, he's the president.

2:33:20 to 2:33:40( Edit History Discussion )

Steve King: so the time doesn't charge against him. it's an interesting concept. i think that heretofore has not been uttered by the president of of the united states. in any prious administration. and then another thing that struck me, that appears to have not been mentioned by the pundits or the people that observed this, were the number of times that the president

2:33:41 to 2:34:01( Edit History Discussion )

Steve King: interrupted those who were speaking. now, i can identify with what is is like. i have a number of times in my legislative life run into the situation where there's a limited amount of time to speak and maybe the clock has one minute on it, two minutes on it, five minutes on it or as it does tonight, mr. speaker, it has 60 minutes on it.

2:34:02 to 2:34:22( Edit History Discussion )

Steve King: so you watch the clock and you try to pack as much information into that period of time as you can. and when something happens to break that up and change the rhythm and shorten the time that you have, you have to adjust your methods to press it down into the time that you have left. and i believe that the clock that was set for the members of

2:34:23 to 2:34:44( Edit History Discussion )

Steve King: congress to speak was set at 3 1/2 minutes. i don't know that, i believe that. and i was thinking of the moment that the republican leader in the senate, senator mcconnell, introduced the senator coburn for his 3 1/2 minutes to speak. and i do rember the log on the time.

2:34:45 to 2:35:06( Edit History Discussion )

Steve King: and the pretty close to this. senator coburn spoke for a minute and 14 seconds. he was interested -- interrupted by the president of the united states for four minutes and 20 seconds. then he came back and spoke for a little more than a minute and was interrupted again by the president of the united states. and that happened about one more time in that interation. the time then that was left for senator coburn had expired and

2:35:07 to 2:35:28( Edit History Discussion )

Steve King: it was the thought and the concept that was driven by senator coburn was completely split and delaye because the president interrupted and burned up the time and even though they may have reset the stop watch on senator coburn's time, it isn't the same as having three uninterrupted minutes. the president claimed more than that on many occasions

2:35:29 to 2:35:50( Edit History Discussion )

Steve King: throughout the entire day. to where it came down to this, the president spoke as much as either republicans or democrats altogether and he interrupted members of the house and senate, republicans and democrats, without reservation, apparently he believes he's the president of the united states and he can do that.

2:35:51 to 2:36:11( Edit History Discussion )

Steve King: and that may be true on certain occasions and limit. but there is a limit, mr. speaker. and the limit was this, the president of the united states interrupted those who were there to be heard 70 times. 70 times in 6 1/2 hours, a little more than 10 times an hour, and of all those interruptions, he interrupted

2:36:12 to 2:36:35( Edit History Discussion )

Steve King: democrats 20 times, republicans, 50 times. 50 interruptions. and the kind of way that it breaks up the rhythm and the flow of the message that's being delivered and the fashion that i've talked about with senator could he person burn, whom i have not had this discussion with by the way, for all i know he has no objection to the process that was there, but for me, i do, mr. speaker.

2:36:36 to 2:36:56( Edit History Discussion )

Steve King: so it was not possible for a consistent continual flow of could he jent thought to flow through with the president interrupting on 70 different occasions over the course of 6 1/2 hours. it's hard to get to the bottom of something, it's hard to make your point when you're continually interrupted.

2:36:57 to 2:37:19( Edit History Discussion )

Steve King: but i listened to this last hour and i think the gentlemen had an opportunity to make their case and there were plenty of them. as this flowed around, i don't know that there was anytng particularly stunning except i looked at the gentleman from wisconsin's poster that was on this easel just a few minutes ago that showed the jobs that were either created or lost not by the president of the united

2:37:20 to 2:37:42( Edit History Discussion )

Steve King: states, president obama, or president bush but the jobs that were created or lost during their administration which is a far more accurate way to discuss this. and that span was over about a two-year period of time. it would have been hard to see the poster and understand it, i had to walk up closely and analyze it, but it flowed back through 2009 and through 2008 and into december of 2007. the curious thing about that

2:37:43 to 2:38:03( Edit History Discussion )

Steve King: chart which showed an upside down par bolic curve of the bar graphs of jobs lost under those two administrations, it appeared to be about equal, the last year of the bush administration, the first year of the obama administration, the curious part was that on the chart there was only one month where there were actually jobs that increased, that was during the bush

2:38:04 to 2:38:24( Edit History Discussion )

Steve King: administration. and we all know that if you would take that month and then you would go back into 2008 and on into 2007, 2006, 2005, 2004, 2003, 2000, all of the bush years, one would see -- 2002, all of the bush years, one would

2:38:25 to 2:38:49( Edit History Discussion )

Steve King: see there were some up months and off months. here's what happened. these are the real -- the real viewpoint on what happened with our economy that seems to be ignored. now, the gentleman that stood at this particular podium had on his chart that under the bush administration we had two wars,

2:38:50 to 2:39:11( Edit History Discussion )

Steve King: two tax cuts, one drug entitlement and an asterisk for the wall street bailout. well, ok, first i'll bring us up to these two wars, mr. speaker. i can do fairly briefly. that is this. when president bush was elected in the year 2000 after we went through all of the recounts in florida and the supreme court

2:39:12 to 2:39:32( Edit History Discussion )

Steve King: decision and the allegations that the president wasn't an appointed president, not an -- was an appointed president, not an elected president, which no recount or analysis would support, all of the reviews of the elections in florida and everywhere else in the year 2000 support that george bush won that election. it's too bad it was so close, it was too bad we had to have such