Overall federal spending has gone way up every year. That is why we are in such a deep hole now. This year, the Congress is finally starting — possibly too late — to slow the big increase in spending.  But on May 24, the Congressional Quarterly Today publication, which goes to all members, had a headline, which read “Big Cuts Proposed to Farm Spending.” The actual chart, however, showed that the bill written about in the story — the Agricultural Appropriations bill — was going from $125.2 billion to about $125.5 billion, an actual increase of $283 million or 0.2 percent.  Big cut my foot.

Huge debt

USA Today reported in early June that the federal government now has at least $62 trillion in unfunded future liabilities. This debt comes out to almost $574,000 for every family.  Yet every group or organization that sends people from Tennessee to see me is not only unwilling for its funds to be cut, they want increases. It is the same for every member of Congress from every State.  Yet if we do not make very large cuts, in every department, and very soon, the nation is going to face problems worse than any it has ever faced.

Dodd-Frank

The Dodd-Frank financial regulatory act will drive 1,000 small    banks out of existence by the end of this decade according to the American Bankers Association.  It was passed in reaction to Wall Street abuses by some giant companies but it created approximately 5,000 rules and regulations that have been extremely costly and burdensome for small companies.  And the bill did nothing to reform Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the government corporations that were largely responsible for the problems we had in the first place.

Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke said that the Dodd-Frank bill had stifled credit and growth and not enough consideration had been given to its cost.  It has certainly prolonged our recession, and CNN reported on June 8 that 48 percent of the people believe we will have another great depression within the next 12 months.  Even many who did not go this far nonetheless had a negative view of the economy.

U.S. Rep. John Duncan represents Tennessee’s 2nd District.  He has been named among the five most fiscally conservative members of Congress by the National Taxpayers Union and is one of the few members of Congress to receive the Citizens Against Government Waste’s  Super Hero Award.  Duncan can be reached in his Washington, D.C. office at (202)225-5435.

Editor’s Note — The following are three speeches made by Rep. Duncan on the House floor during November 2009.

Government is the reason for expensive health care

Before the federal government got heavily into health care in the mid-sixties, medical care was cheap and affordable for almost everyone. Doctors even commonly made house calls. We took what was a very minor problem for very few people and turned it into a major problem for everyone.

The people want medical care that is less expensive and less bureaucratic. The bill that we will apparently vote on later this week is 1,990 pages of bureaucratic gobbledygook. It will make health care even more expensive and even more bureaucratic. As Senator Joe Lieberman said on “Face the Nation,” this bill, “will actually hurt the economic recovery and our long-term financial situation.”

The pattern seems to be that the federal government makes a problem so bad that the only solution people can see is for the government to take it all over. But a famous man once wrote that there is a simple solution to every human problem, one that is neat, plausible and wrong. This bill is the socialist approach, and all it will do over the long haul is make a bad situation even worse.

Afghanistan not worth one more American life

Madam Speaker, this morning I was honored to go with five other Members, three Democrats and three Republicans, to have breakfast at the Pentagon with Secretary of Defense Robert Gates. The Secretary is a kind man and this was a very nice thing for him to do. I have great respect for Secretary Gates.

The purpose of the breakfast was to discuss the situation in Afghanistan. When I got this invitation, I wondered if I should go, since I have been very much opposed to our war there. However, I decided that the only right and fair thing to do was to go listen to what he had to say.

Unfortunately, I still believe that what we are doing in Afghanistan is a horrendous waste that we cannot afford. I also believe that Afghanistan is no realistic threat to us, unless our war there continues to anger so many people around the world.

George C. Wilson, military columnist for Congress Daily, wrote recently: “The American military’s mission to pacify the 40,000 tiny villages in Afghanistan will look like mission impossible, especially if our bombings keep killing Afghan civilians and infuriating the ones who survive.”

General Petraeus said this summer we should not forget that Afghanistan has been known as the “graveyard of empires.”

Congressional Quarterly reported on Sept. 17 that members of both parties were, “fretting openly about a lack of progress in the conflict.”

As much as Americans love our troops, we need to realize that the Defense Department is not just a military organization. It is also the world’s largest bureaucracy. Every gigantic bureaucracy always wants to expand its mission and frequently exaggerates its challenges so it can get more money and personnel.

The Taliban guerillas have almost no money, and a top U.N. anti-terrorism official said recently that al-Qaida is having, “difficulty in maintaining credibility.”

National defense is the most legitimate function of our federal government. However, that does not mean Congress should automatically or blindly approve the Pentagon’s every request or never criticize its waste.

Much of what we are doing in Afghanistan is of a civic, charitable or governmental nature, like building schools and teaching agribusiness. But the Defense Department should not be the “Department of Foreign Aid,” or much of our military primarily a very large version of the Peace Corps.

In March, the president promised a “dramatic increase” in our effort in Afghanistan, including “agricultural specialists and educators, engineers and lawyers.” Why, when we are $12 trillion in debt, are we spending mega-billions in Afghanistan doing practically everything for them? We are spending money we do not have on a very unnecessary war and jeopardizing our own future in the process.

Many people think that all conservatives support this war. Well, I believe that there are many millions of conservatives who do not and who want us to bring our troops home, the sooner the better. In fact, this war goes very much against traditional conservatism.

When I was in high school, I worked as a bag boy at an A&P grocery store making $1.10 an hour. I sent my first paycheck, $19 and some cents, as a contribution to the Barry Goldwater campaign. I am still one of the most conservative members of Congress. But this war has required huge deficit spending, almost half a trillion in war and war-related costs for Afghanistan. Fiscal conservatives should be the people most upset about this. This war has spent mega-billions in foreign aid, because probably at least half of what we have done and are doing there is of a civic or charitable nature. Traditional conservatives have been the strongest opponents of massive foreign aid.

We went into the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan under U.N. resolutions, yet conservatives have traditionally been the biggest critics of the U.N. Conservatives have traditionally been the biggest opponents of world government because it is too elitist and arrogant and too far removed from control by the people. We should not now support what is essentially world government just because it is being run by our military.

I am a veteran and I am very pro military, but I am for national defense, not international defense. I know that the leaders of Afghanistan want us to keep spending hundreds of billions there, but we cannot afford it. We cannot afford it economically, and as far as I am concerned, it is not worth one more American life.

I know that when leaders of the Defense Department and the State Department and the National Security Council all get together in their meetings, that all of the pressures are on getting involved or staying involved in just about every military, political or ethnic dispute all around the world. I know that they want to be considered as great world statesmen, but eight years in Afghanistan is not only enough, it is far too long. It is time, Madam Speaker, to come home. It is time to start putting our own people and our own country first once again.

NYC terror trials defy all logic

People all over the nation are upset and angry about five of the Guantanamo terrorists being scheduled for trial in New York.

This is happening only because President Obama issued an executive order in the early days of his administration stopping the military tribunal process.

The Congress — both House and Senate — voted by large margins in 2006 to try these terrorists by military tribunals.

This could have been done in Guantanamo.

But President Obama overruled Congress by his executive order, and the Defense and Justice Departments then started the process of bringing the terrorists to trial in this country.

This will result in very large legal and security expenses that would not have been necessary if these men were tried at Guantanamo.

To try all these terrorists here — the first five and others later — creates a very unnecessary security risk for untold numbers of people.

I hope President Obama will listen to the outcry of the American people and not continue to insist that all these terrorists be tried in the United States.

The families of our victims deserve better.

U.S. Rep. John Duncan represents Tennessee’s 2nd District.  He has been named among the five most fiscally conservative members of Congress by the National Taxpayers Union and is one of the few members of Congress to receive the Citizens Against Government Waste’s  Super Hero Award.  Duncan can be reached in his Washington, D.C. office at (202)225-5435.

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.