Joe Donnelly: “Thank you, Mr. Ross. Mr. Speaker, it is a great honor to have the chance to speak here again in the House. Almost $9…”

“Thank you, Mr. Ross. Mr. Speaker, it is a great honor to have the chance to speak here again in the House. Almost $9 trillion in debt. I just came back from a month in my district, as Mr. Ross had indicated, going to see constituent after constituent, talking about issues of critical importance to them. And I met a good friend of mine named Jim Fleming from LaPorte, Indiana. And Jim's company makes defense aerospace products. And he said, Joe, we try everything we can. We employ hundreds of people. We work extraordinarily hard. And, Joe, we get beat out by China on bid after bid. Not even competitive with our prices but below our cost of production. And, Joe, what saddens me so much, Mr. Fleming said, is that we have over $1 trillion in debt to China. So I know when it is time for you to stand up, it is only made more difficult because of the debt that we have, a debt that we assumed because it was easier to do than to make the hard choices like the PAYGO system that we put in. We look at Iraq now. We have lost $12 billion that came in in currency in a plane, shrink wrapped, Mr. Davis, on pallets, never to be seen again once it came off of that plane. Think of what $12 billion could have done in help creating the Hoosier Heartland Highway in my district. We paid a gentleman Ahmed Chalabi and his group, the Iraqi National Congress, $300,000 every month for information that they basically made up in the back room over a Coca-Cola.”