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Media Coverage

Sacbee.com

Rep. Dan Lungren

Health care changes

• “President Bush did some outstanding things in our response to 9/11. We are safe today because of his leadership. He didn’t do a good job with respect to our spending in the nation. We reached a consensus in the nation and in Congress that we didn’t have to worry about spending. The problem is you steal from your children and grandchildren.”
• “We have tremendous challenges before us in this country and with our federal government. We are in danger of continuing on the wrong direction. The way the American people have responded since August…we can right this ship.”
• The U.S.A. has the “best system in the world” with 400,000 foreigners a year coming to the country to get treated. “If you have cancer, you have the greatest chance of survival in this country compared to any other place.” The chance of dying from a heart attack once a patient gets to the hospital has decreased from 30-40 percent in 1960 to 6 percent today.
• Health costs can be controlled by using market forces, making the system more transparent, allowing people and businesses to buy insurance from across state lines, let small business associations create pools to have negotiating power and to spread the risk to bring costs down. 

Threat from Iran

• Referring to President Obama’s decision to curtail the anti-missile deployments in Eastern Europe and elsewhere: With news that Iran is further along in refining uranium and has tested missile delivery systems, “I don’t understand the president pulling back when we have a madman heading Iran who said he will wipe Israel off the earth.”
• He supported President Reagan’s proposal for an anti-ballistic missile system that would stop missiles at the beginning of their journey. “Frankly, the security of the U.S. is at risk. This single issue is as important to the survival of our nation as any other issue…We have…to make sure the nation we turn over to our children and grand children is at least as good as the ones our (parents) turned over to us.”
  

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Rep. Tom McClintock

Skyrocketing deficit & inflation threat

• In 40 years, there’s only been four years when the nation didn’t have a national deficit—and that was during the Clinton administration (and a Republican Congress). The Bush years “were catastrophic” in terms of deficit spending. The worst was when deficit spending equaled 3 percent of the gross domestic product. 
• This year, there was a “quantum leap” in deficit spending and it now equals 14 percent of GDP—which is also equal to all of the debt the nation has incurred from the first day of the George Washington presidency to the last day of George Bush’s. And the deficit is scheduled to double in the next five years and triple in 10 years—under the budget signed this year.
• “If you live beyond your means today, you will live below your means tomorrow. The deficit is robbing us of our future economic prosperity.”
• The current monetary policy is just as frightening. There are too many dollars chasing too few goods. We’re not seeing inflation yet—the concern is in the next 12 months; there will be an increase. Commodity prices are going up; gold prices are going up. “Within 12 months, we will be seeing devastating inflation.”

Worrisome legislation

• Waiting Senate approval is the cap-and-trade bill to reduce carbon emissions, which will create a “catastrophic” situation that will potentially place a tax on an “infinitely” large number of domestic products. “What turned the recession in 1929 into a depression in the 1930s was the Smoot-Hawley tariff act that put a tax on 20,000 imported products. The cap-and-trade dwarfs Smoot-Hawley.
• The effects of this kind of legislation can be seen here in California with the passage of the AB 32 carbon reduction legislation. The state’s unemployment rate through January 2007 mirrored the nations—but then it radically diverged upward. “You can’t blame the national economy” but need to look at something more specific to explain—and that’s when AB 32 took effect. The law radically restricts CO2 emissions and that affects every sector of our economy. 
• The proposed health care reform will take “enormous taxes” to support it. Proposed tax on incomes of $250,000 or more will hit small businesses that are Subchapter S corporations and are barely holding on as it is.
• “We have seen worse times then these,” with double digit unemployment and inflation and the military decimated. “Those were indeed dark times for our country but the American people engaged a few years later, and it was indeed morning time in America.”