February 2, 2008

U.S. Senator Johnny Isakson (R-GA)
Speech on the Latest News from Washington
Henry County Chamber of Commerce

Thank you very much. I’ve never had a musical interlude like that. I should warn you, you should never stand up before a senator speaks, because it may not be that good. I promised Pastor Rose that I would be as quick as possible. You know, I have never had an admonition in the opening prayer before to brief. But I take the Lord’s work seriously and I know his messengers have good connections.

It’s a delight to be with you tonight. Outgoing Chairman Lindsey McGarity, I want to congratulate you on a great service to your community. The second happiest day of my life was when I was elected Chairman of the Cobb County Chamber of Commerce, and the happiest day of my life was the day I gave it up. So, I know tonight for you is a celebration, but to you and your wife, and to the commitment you’ve made, congratulations. To my, almost now, lifelong friend, Kay Pippin, who does a tremendous job for the Henry County Chamber of Commerce and has done so much for education, it’s great to be with you, all the members of the board. Senator Douglas was recently named one of the five legislators of the year by the Chamber, congratulations to you. Ms. Davenport, to you. Mr. Emmanuel Jones, who I was with about three or four weeks ago in Savannah, Georgia, to you. Representative Davis it’s nice to see you. Jason Harper, I can’t tell you how great it is to see you, and what a great job you and the members of the Board of Commissioners do for this county. Superintendent Parrish, the members of the Board of Education, to all the mayors, members of the water authority, and anybody else I forgot it’s great to be with you tonight. I’m honored to be in Henry County.

I will be brief but I think there are some important things that we should talk about. And when you talk to a chamber of commerce, the most important thing you should talk about is commerce, is economic activity, and is business. This is a thriving, dynamic community, one of the most outstanding communities in the state of Georgia. But all of us recognize that times are getting a little bit tougher, particularly because of the sub-prime problems in the marketplace, because of the credit crunch, because of the rising number of foreclosures, and the resulting dominoes that begin to fall – just like when Home Depot announces that it’s going to lay off five hundred of their people. And so as a member of the United States Congress, in particular the United States Senate, as a former Chamber chairman, and as a businessman for 33 years I want to talk briefly about the economy, and what government should do and what it shouldn’t do.

First of all, government should recognize the strength of the free enterprise system, and we shouldn’t mess it up. But it also should recognize that the government should empower the free enterprise system. In 2001, we proved it through the tax code when we put in bonus depreciation, advanced expensing, and lowered the tax on investment, like dividends, and capitol gains. We had the largest growth in federal revenues in history. Now that we’re entering an uncertain time, an unsettled time, we should use the same type of treatments to energize the economy and target them for where the problems are.

The problem is in particular single family housing. And I’ve introduced, in the Congress of the United States, a piece of legislature that is not a new idea, and is not original with Johnny Isakson. In 1975 as a real estate broker in Atlanta, Georgia, we were going through an equally difficult time as we’re seeing today. In fact, it was probably a lot worse. There was a three year supply of houses on the market, and nobody was buying. It was a product of the same thing we have today: easy credit with sloppy underwriting, which basically was the sub-prime problem. President Ford and a Democratic Congress came together, passed a $2,000 tax credit that contracted to purchase and own and occupy one of those standing houses.

In the course of 11 months, the United States reduced its housing oversupply from three years to one year. Subcontractors, tradesman, builders, developers, appliance salesmen, carpenters; everybody else came back into business. We came out of a very difficult economic time in a short period of time, and prosperity returned.

I am advocating the same thing in Washington, D.C., just repeat what we did in 1975 when it worked, and change only a couple of things. One is instead of a $2,000 credit, as it was 36 years ago, make it a $15,000 credit, $5,000 a year over three tax years. So anybody that buys a standing, unsold new house, permitted before September 1st of last year, a house that has been foreclosed on and is in an REO category in a bank, lender bank, or any other lending institution, and any house that is pending foreclosure, and make that tax credit available for only one year window to stimulate people to go out in the marketplace, absorb those houses that have been foreclosed on and those that will be, and get the housing market moving again.

Henry County is a prime example of somewhere where something like that could greatly reduce the stress and the pressure that you currently have on our economy. We’re pushing for it and I hope it’s going to be successful because I think that it’s the one thing we can do to empower the private sector to do what government cannot do by itself.

As far as the economic stimulus package that is proposed by the President and the House, I am a member of the Senate and the President is calling us to pass it. You know I will support it as long as we fix the flaw dealing with paying tax credits back, or tax payments back, to undocumented or illegal aliens, I don’t think the American people think that’s a very good idea. And that slipped through the House without a lot of forethought. Basically the House has proposed an economic stimulus that would put $300 to $1,200 in the pocket of most families, certainly all middle income, middle class families in America. It will expand both expensing and appreciation for small business. And it will raise the loan limits for Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and FHA to help those people who are in the market pre-finance at levels compatible with the price of housing today. That’s an important step, but I do think the tax credit proposal I mentioned earlier is the key catalyst to get the number of buyers back in the market place.

One thing I learned years ago, and learned from my father, and he used to always tell me that recessions are in that six inches between your ears; if you think things are bad, they’re bad. If you talk about them being bad, they’re gonna get worse. You stop spending your money; your neighbor’s going to do the same thing, and next thing you know you’re going to have a self-fulfilling situation. So for all of us in the Chamber of Commerce business, it is important to remember how prosperous and how fortunate we are to live in the greatest state in the United States of America, and for each of you, one of the finest counties you could ever live in. Henry County continues to show great signs. I was talking to Kay about how sales tax collections would parallel last year’s collections, even during a time when people say the economy is going down. That bodes well for Henry County, that bodes well for this Chamber, and it’s a credit for this Chamber of Commerce and what it does for the business community.

Secondly, as a member of the United States Senate, when your sons and daughters are deployed in harm’s way in a far off land, I think it would be irresponsible of me to not spend a minute on the circumstances in the war in Iraq and the greater war on terror. And I’ll tell you this, I’ve just returned from Iraq. About three weeks ago I spent about two days in Baghdad and Kurdistan.

Every January, I’ve gone to Iraq since we’ve begun deploying troops, and I’ve gone for a very important reason: I believe everything people tell me, and I also believe in verifying things when our sons and daughters are in harm’s way. I wanted to see the progress of the surge and the progress of the Iraqi people. And I have to tell you it’s quite remarkable.

The other four years that I’ve been there I’ve flown into the international airport in Baghdad, and then been put in an Apache helicopter and fly at low levels, avoiding ground fire and things like that to enter the Green Zone in Baghdad and never got out.

This year I drove in from the airport to downtown Baghdad in a Chevy Suburban just like you might drive on I-75. I did have a bullet proof vest on, which you don’t need on I-75, but, it’s a whole lot better. The last four years I went, when it got to be 5 p.m., 30 minutes before sundown, they got us on an airplane out of Iraq; they wouldn’t let us spend the night. I spent the night in downtown Baghdad, on the ground.

The next day went into Baghdad twice and went out with a Rifle Patrol to a mall, their definition of a mall, not ours, in Ghazaliya, a sub-area community of Baghdad. 18 of the 20 shops that were closed had been reopened. Refugees were coming back from Jordan, reclaiming their houses, and moving back in. I went with the U.S. Army Colonel who was making the loans and grants to fledging Iraqi businesses between $500 and $2,500 to restart their businesses. And I sat on a box, in a bakery, who’s windows were all shot out, and had bread and coffee with an Iraqi family that have come back, used their $500 loan from the United States to buy a generator, so they can have reliable electricity in the bakery and have begun again their life back home in Iraq.

The war is not over and the battle is not over, and when you’re fighting terrorism and an insurgency like we have seen there and in Afghanistan, it is never over, you must always be vigilant. We have accomplished, in my opinion, what we set out to do, which was give the Iraqi people a chance for their fledging democracy and their own military to protect their people and for it to be a democracy in a very dangerous part of the world.

We met with the Iraqi leaders who told us that in a week they would pass the Debathification Law, and in a week they did. We met with their equivalent John Douglas of their Industry Committee and their Parliament that’s finishing their work on a hydrocarbon law, which will take the revenues from their petroleum, and will divide it three ways: a third to manage the cost of the central government, a third to support the local government and provinces much like counties that we have in Georgia, and a third in terms of the dividend check back to the citizens of Iraq, exactly like the United States of America did when we bought Alaska. We guaranteed the Native Indians, who are Eskimos, that they would get a dividend from the resources of their country. They sill get checks today, and believe me, in that part of the world, if they go from seeing their leaders taking the revenues, living in palaces, and living in posh circumstances, and turn around a see a government that’s giving them an equity check in their nation’s greatest resource, you won’t see them turning their back on the democracy. You’ll see that democracy growing and flourishing. So the sacrifice our young men and women is paying a dividend.

I grieve the loss of every Georgia solider. I grieve the loss of every solider from the United States of America, and the 15 percent of those who died who aren’t U.S. citizens, who fought for us and have been fighting for us. But the sacrifice they made like those of every generation who have gone before them on every continent on the face of this Earth, still is for the same thing that America has always stood for: not to colonize, not to capture, and not to defeat, but to empower another nation and another people to be able to enjoy the basic freedoms and liberties that our Founding Fathers granted to us over 200 years ago. America is still the greatest nation in the world, and it is because of the young men and women, our sons and daughters, who fight in harm’s way on behalf of peace, liberty, and freedom and the right to self-determination. God bless our troops and our country.

Because of the admonition from the pastor, I’m gonna wrap this thing up by talking quickly about two things of interest to your county. One, Jason does a tremendous job and the Chamber does a tremendous job of working with us to try to prioritize appropriations for Henry County and your communities. And we are well aware, as a member of the Environment and Public Works Subcommittee that oversees transportation, on which I am the Ranking Member, which means I am the highest-ranking minority member on the Subcommittee of Infrastructure on the EPW which oversees the allocation of highway money; we are acutely aware of the congestion on I-75, and I-675. I’ve driven through Henry County enough to know that there is a congestion problem at the local level and we are working with the County Commission and with your Chamber to find every way we can to prioritize those. I think in the last budget year, and I know earmarks are bad word, but when you got them for a community you’re talking to who needed them, you’ve got to brag about them. We got $700,000 for Jason and the Commission this year and we’ll continue to work on a high prioritization of the roads and transportation issues in this area.

I will tell you however, that we’ve got to do it in the macro sense, not the micro sense. We’re at a changing time in this country in terms of transportation. Our revenues system is broken. Automobiles and trucks are getting more miles to the gallon, people are using more of the roads and surface transportation and paying less for it because they’re not consuming as much gas. The old motor fuel tax per gallon just doesn’t work.

We’ve got to think outside the box. We’ve also got to think intermodal. There is no reason why, in high traffic quarters, we can’t take advantage of both light and heavy rail to make sure that people move smoothly and effectively. I’ve worked hard on with the Southeastern coalition, the states of Virginia, South Carolina, North Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, and the District of Colombia, and the feasibility study will be finished next year, to put in a high speed rail line from Birmingham to Atlanta to Raleigh to Charlotte to Richmond to Washington. Those are the maximum number of stops. Make it high speed just like Boston to Washington run which I have traveled on three or four times a year. The estimates are we could take fifteen percent of the traffic off of I-85 between Atlanta to Charlotte. If we can do that, that is a good utilization of federal investment.

And if we can change the paradigm to go from the current subsidized Amtrak model to the aviation model where government finances the infrastructure and the private sector delivers the service. Have you ever thought of the difference between railroads and airlines? The difference is this: you subsidize everything in the railroad, in the airline, you and I as taxpayers pay for the runways at Hartsfield and the infrastructure at Hartsfield; but Delta, American, and all the other airlines risk capitol and try and be competitive in business to deliver the service to move people from one city to another.

In my judgment, that is the way to look to transportation in the future to see to it, that all modes of transportation are funded properly and work in the competitive free enterprise system, the way we’ve known as business people, it works best.

My last concluding remarks on education are simply this: the most important resource we have is our children. When I chaired the State Board of Education, I used to end every speech saying this, “Our children are the message you and I send to a time we will never see.” And I dedicated most of my public life, as Kay knows, to try and further and improve public education. I think parents should be able to choose private, public, or profiler schools, but I think that elected officials need to ensure that the public school is the best choice. ‘No Child Left Behind’ did work, and I appreciate Lindsay mentioning it. Our poorest children, our Title I children, our most disadvantaged children have improved like they have never improved before. But we have a ways to go, and it’s going to take investment and commitment.

I will continue to do in Washington what I have been doing since I’ve gotten here, and that’s work to invest in our children, because when you invest in your children, you’re investing in the future and the betterment of the country, and I pledge to you I will never stop that.

It’s a very special privilege to be in Henry County. I have an awful lot of friends in the room and if I started to acknowledge all of them, I’d talk all night. There are a couple of people I want to end my speech with, and that’s Claire and Alex Cromwell. We have been friends for almost a century and neither one of us wishing we could say it was that long. We were in each other’s wedding. Alex and Claire are my oldest son’s godparents. They are outstanding citizens to this community. You have chosen both of them as ‘Citizen of the Year’ at one time or another, so for me to come to Henry County and be able to have dinner with Alex and Claire and 358 of their dearest friends, it’s an absolute treat. Alex and Claire, it’s great to be with you.

And lastly, as a member of the United States Senate, I walk into that chamber knowing I owe the opportunity and the privilege of serving to you, the people of Georgia. I am grateful for what you have given me the chance to do, and I work everyday to pay back dividends to you for giving me the privilege to serve in the greatest government on the face of the earth. God bless all of you.