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Mr. BLUNT. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for yielding. And let
me say to start with that I am in complete agreement, as approximately
407 of our Members-plus will be with the gentleman from Texas, the
gentleman from Tennessee, and the gentleman from Illinois. I appreciate
the work Mr. Gordon and Mr. Hall have done to get this bill to the
floor. In fact, Missouri State University, right
next to my home in Springfield, has a leading project going on
in nanotechnology. I think it is important. I was one of those 407 people
that voted for this bill last year. I expect a vote for this bill today.
And as Mr. Cohen earlier said, as a Member of the minority, I want to
talk about what we're not doing on the floor today. I want to talk
about the fact that somewhere, while we're out here debating a bill
where we'll spend $1 million a year that's already passed the House
last year, 407-6, somewhere in this building--and that's significant
because I don't know where it is and I don't think the Republican
conferees, all two of them, know either--somewhere in this building,
meetings are going on to decide how we spend $800 billion.
For $800 billion, if I could use the analogy that Mr. Hall used, if
the thickness of this paper is 100,000 nanometers, the thickness of
this paper is 100,000 nanometers, if you stacked these pieces of paper
one on top of each other, 27\1/2\ feet high, you'd be at 800 billion
nanometers. So if pieces of paper represented $100,000,
you'd have to be 27\1/2\ feet high to be to $800 billion. This is a
huge amount of money. And later, if greater experts than me at nanotechnology
figure out that it's only 26 feet, it's still a lot of money.
It's $800 billion. Last year when we worked together on a stimulus
package--not the case this year--we said, the Speaker said, I said,
others said, a stimulus package has to be timely, it has to be targeted,
it has to be temporary. And I'd advance the idea that this
is none of those. It's certainly not timely. Alice Rivlin said the
other day--this is the former budget director for President Clinton--no
more than one out of ten of these dollars can be spent this year.
There are some other estimates that, well, maybe it's as high as
two out of ten. So my question is, why are we spending the
other 80 or 90 percent as if it was a stimulus package as opposed to
just something somebody in this building wants to do and in fact is going
to do for a long time which comes to targeted.
I'd also suggest that more than anything else, this bill is a
collection of what the new majority has wanted to do for a decade. I
believe I could go through the debates of the House over the last 10
years and find virtually every single thing in this bill having been
proposed some time during the last 10 years and we didn't do it because
sometimes because the majority thought it was a bad idea, often because
the majority at that time, the other side, my side, thought we just
simply couldn't afford it. And temporary? The last dollar to be spent
in that bill wherever it's being developed is spent in 2019. Not timely,
not temporary, not targeted. And if you're measuring it in money,
lots of nanometers of money. In fact, the bill that we think we
saw earlier the size of, the total cost per page of that bill was over
$7 million. The total cost per word, rather, was $7 million. The total
cost per page was $1.2 billion.
One thing the Congress will do in all likelihood this week is set a
record that won't be challenged for a long time in how fast we can
spend how much money. We're going to make nanotechnology look like it's
an old science compared to the new technology of spending money.
So while we're debating this bill that absolutely will pass, that
there is virtually unanimous agreement on, some group of people in the
majority of the House and Senate is deciding what that big bill is
going to look like. And believe me, most of us will have no idea what's
in it the day we vote for it. It will be impossible to know, and only
over the next 6 months when the American people find out what's in that
bill, will Members of Congress begin to wish that they had not voted
for the bill today and taken the time this kind of spending deserves.