Bob Latta: “I thank the gentlelady for yielding and a couple of your earlier points, you know, you were talking about pay here in…”

“I thank the gentlelady for yielding and a couple of your earlier points, you know, you were talking about pay here in Washington. I've got a bill that hasn't had any hearings, and what that bill says is that there are no COLAs anymore for Congress. If you think you deserve a pay raise, then you should introduce a piece of legislation saying that, and what this bill would do is say no more COLAs, period. We wouldn't have a 1-year freeze or a 2-year freeze; this bill would say no more COLAs. Again, going back to what you said on that interest on that debt, and I mentioned a little bit earlier about going back to the early 1980s, with that 21.5 percent interest rate that people experienced. I was first starting to practice law that year, and I'll never forget, we had to do land contracts. And what a land contract, of course, is, say you want to buy my house, well, you couldn't go to the bank and get a loan because you couldn't borrow any money. So I would have to, as the owner of the home, would sell you the house. We would have a contract that you pay me the principal and interest over about a 3-year period of time, and hopefully, at the end of that 3 years, then you would find a bank that you could go out to and get a loan from. We don't want to see this go back, like I said, to where we had 21.5 percent interest. We don't want to go back to have some businesses out there at over 26 percent.…”