Gilbert Gutknecht

Sarajevo. I was in Sarajevo 10 years ago, and at that time the city was essentially in, the center city, essentially rubble. Many buildings had large pockmarks. Some of them are still there. Many, though, have been fixed; and it now is a…

I am going to close up here. If you have any closing thoughts, Chairman Hoekstra, go ahead. Then I am going to close up and yield it back here in just a few minutes.

I mentioned earlier, we also need to say thank you and kudos to the families. You cannot help but think about what the families in North Dakota must feel every day. I am sure they do not know all that that group does in terms of going out…

The concussion of it and what it did to those heavy vehicles, it is amazing that they have only had one KIA. Again, let me join you in sharing our sympathies to that family and that unit, because they were obviously a very close knit unit…

We will always remember the North Dakota boys. Especially one young man, I think his name was Lynch. He had been involved in four of these explosions. And, yes, it is true the equipment they have is specially designed to sort of take the…

They have been up performing surgery since 2 o'clock in the morning. I mentioned that Dr. Mike Yaszmenski from Mayo Clinic, he did not take the credit for it, but the story that we were all standing there when they pinned the Purple Heart…

Exactly. And not only are you a potential target, your family is a potential target. Most of us at one time in our political lives have had some goofball who has issued some kind of a death threat against us. Usually we don't even take it…

Let me say, and I talked to the speaker today and I know you are working on this as well, one of the things we would like to do is invite at least a dozen of them to the United States. We may smile about our meetings with the…

I think you said it exactly right. When I left, there was progress. I was looking for progress. I think it is a three-legged stool. I think you have to have military or security progress.

Exactly. That is where I really was disappointed. I thought Baghdad would be much more secure than what we saw or learned about it. But you have to have military security progress, and you have to have economic progress, and you have to…

I would only close by saying that financial literacy clearly is an idea whose time has come. I thank the authors for bringing it forward. I urge all Members to support the adoption of House Resolution 148.

And they demand less of the government. So this is an issue whose time has come. It seems to me that we have a responsibility as Members of Congress to go out and tell this story. And if we do our job of telling the story, as Jefferson…

A fan. Yes, that is it. The difference between a fan and a fanatic is that a fanatic cannot change their mind and will not change the subject. I have almost become a fanatic on this issue because this is something that, if you think it…

But some of our friends think that we have to have these people pay lots of taxes because that is a good thing. What we are sort of saying is, well, we have to pay a certain amount of taxes, but at the end of the day if they pay more in…

So there are only four things that people can do with their money if you think about it. They can either spend it, they can save it, they can pay taxes, or they can give it away. Those are the only four things they can do.

Exactly, and when they save it and invest it, it creates more jobs, more economic opportunity for the people at the lower end of the spectrum. Right?

35 million Americans, and this is the point I want to make. Anybody who has ever been bit by the AMT will never forget this. One of the most beautiful things about what you are talking about, and I want to thank both of you, is that under…

I agree with you. If we can get people to just think in those terms, all of sudden they are going to be say, well, let us have this right now. Why have we waited. Why do we have this unbelievable system that I have to go down to my…

So in other words, a farmer that goes down to buy another tractor that today is $150,000, embedded in the cost of the tractor is maybe 22 percent tax or 25 percent tax. So in other words, if you take that out of the price of that tractor…

Now, the other argument that we hear sometimes is from people who buy expensive machinery and, frankly, we have a lot of those people in my district. They are called farmers. Every so often they go out and buy a new tractor, and that new…

So that average family when they go out to buy a home would be able to buy more home. And when you take away the cost of all the accountants and everything that goes with the IRS system today, that home would actually be less expensive.

Another nice spring day in Minnesota or Georgia or Iowa. That is an amazing thing because many Americans dread the idea of April 15 coming around. They dread it for a lot of reasons. Not only the amount of money they have to spend, but…

Would not have to keep a receipt, would not have to worry how much they paid the dentist, how much they paid the doctor, how much they gave to their church. All of those things would simply go away. I know a lot of people, and the…

And we have got to get people to think beyond the first thing that they see and they say, oh, my gosh, you mean I would have to pay a 23 percent sales tax on everything I buy? Well, stop and think about it. What would happen is at every…