On the recordNovember 2, 2011
I want to thank the gentleman from Virginia for yielding me this time and for your leadership here in the Congress year after year over the years to see that we've come to this point where we again can have a vote in these Chambers about the condition of our country and about living within our means. As I talk about the balanced budget amendment, I want to also address what happened here on the House floor and what was said here on the House floor in the last hour. They used the term ``foolish'' several times. I want to describe how foolish what they said is. Not enough dollars exist in the top 1 percent of taxpayers in this country to possibly address the debt situation we face, to possibly address our economy. There are not enough baseball players. There are not enough football coaches. There are not enough Oprah Winfreys. There are not even enough Warren Buffetts. Even if you taxed 100 percent of everything they made and assume two things, that they wouldn't leave the country and that they would continue to produce, there aren't enough of them to solve this country's fiscal problems. So when people come here to the House floor or talk anywhere else in this Nation about how the rich aren't paying their fair share, by definition, they are going to come after the middle class. They are going to come after your property, those of us who live in the middle class. Our property being our dollars, which aren't theirs, which aren't the government's. They're ours.…
