Health care reform, solar power and the highway reauthorization bill
Editor’s Note — The following are three speeches made by Rep. Duncan on the House floor during October 2009.
Health care reform
Mr. Speaker, Robert Samuelson is a long-time economics columnist for The Washington Post. He is considered to be a very middle-of-the-road writer, neither liberal nor conservative.
In yesterday’s Post, he wrote a column entitled, “Public Plan Mirage.” Mr. Samuelson wrote that the public option “is mostly an exercise in political avoidance: It pretends to control costs and improve access to quality care when it doesn’t.”
He wrote that it is a mirage because it uses “free market rhetoric to expand government power” and added that the public plan “would probably doom today’s private insurance.”
The so-called opt-out provision is a mirage, too, because it does not allow people to opt out of paying for the program. No state could really opt out, because its citizens would then be paying medical bills for people in other states without receiving any benefits in return.
Medicare and Medicaid have both cost about 10 times more than was predicted. This new health care plan will also cost many times more than is predicted now. We simply cannot afford it.
Solar power
I thank the gentlewoman from North Carolina for yielding me this time.
Mr. Speaker, I rise in opposition to this rule and to the underlying multibillion-dollar waste that the rule brings to the floor.
Later today, I am sure the House will approve overwhelmingly this very wasteful $2.2 billion subsidy for the solar power industry and for the solar bureaucracy, but we should be remembering that our national debt will soon pass $12 trillion in just a few days. Solar energy has received massive subsidies, with very little progress, ever since the Carter administration. In fact, it has turned into little more than a jobs boondoggle for bureaucrats. As the gentleman from California just showed us in a story from The Wall Street Journal, in 1978, there was a claim that solar energy — by the year 2000 — would make up 20 percent of our energy needs.
After all of this time and after all of this money, however, solar energy makes up far less than 1 percent of the total of U.S. energy. In fact, it is just 1 percent of the 7 percent that renewable energy provides this country. That is such a small figure that I can’t even figure out exactly what 1 percent of 7 percent is. It’s hard to get that small. The Department of Energy has received at least $1.2 billion for this research just since fiscal 2000, not counting what other departments and agencies have spent on this.
I am not against solar energy in any way, but it is way past time for this industry to stand on its own. The demand for solar energy will go up much faster if the industry is weaned off of Federal money and if it is forced to put out a better, more efficient and less expensive product. This is called free enterprise. Some people may have heard of it. The taxpayers simply cannot afford to keep funding a very wasteful program just because it is politically correct or fashionable to do so. This is a multibillion-dollar waste, and it should be defeated.
As someone told me last week, it is easy to run as Santa Claus, but it is almost impossible to run against Santa Claus.
I urge the defeat of this legislation.
Highway bill reauthorization
Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from Florida for yielding me this time.
First of all, I want to say that I certainly agree with and support the comments that he made on this legislation a few moments ago. I find myself in the same position, and I certainly want to thank him for the great leadership he has given me in his position as the ranking member of the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee. I want to commend our great chairman, Chairman Oberstar, because all of us, Chairman Oberstar, Mr. Mica, myself, Chairman DeFazio of our subcommittee, we all would like to stop these extensions. Nobody wants a three-month extension or any kind of extension. What we all want is to pass a major reauthorization bill.
I am in my 21st year in the Congress. I have been here for all of the major highway bills since I first was elected in 1988, and those bills have always passed with overwhelming margins and strong bipartisan support on both sides of the aisle, almost unanimous support.
Today, what you have, you have the Chamber of Commerce wanting a bill, you have the National Association of Manufacturers wanting a bill, you have the American Trucking Association wanting a bill, you have labor groups wanting a bill. I could give a whole long speech just naming all the different groups and people across this country that want a bill who say that we need it, especially with the economy in the situation it is in now.
So it is unfortunate that we have to talk about a three-month extension or a six-month extension. What we really need to be talking about is a strong, bipartisan highway reauthorization bill to help get this country moving once again and do all of the projects that have been getting backed up and are causing problems and delays all over this country.
