SEN. GRASSLEY HOLDS A NEWS TELECONFERENCE
FEBRUARY 5, 2009
SPEAKER: SEN. CHARLES E. GRASSLEY, R-IOWA
[*]
MODERATOR: Senator, you're on the line with Jeff Blankman with KCIM Radio in Carroll and Rick Patrie with the Eldora Herald Ledger.
GRASSLEY: OK. Good to have you both with us. I'm a little remote from you as well as my staff because I'm in the cloakroom off the Senate floor because I'm managing the stimulus bill for Republicans. So that's why -- I'll be able to spend my full ten minutes with you, though.
MODERATOR: And, Senator, when we wrap up here, I'll call you right back for your 12:30. OK?
GRASSLEY: OK. Thank you.
MODERATOR: The following is an unrehearsed interview with Iowa Senator Chuck Grassley speaking to you live from Washington. Participating in today's public affairs program are Jeff Blankman with KCIM Radio in Carroll and Rick Patrie with the Eldora Herald Ledger in Eldora.
The first question will be from Jeff Blankman.
QUESTION: Senator Grassley, there's been a lot of talk about the stimulus bill needing to be trimmed from the nearly $900 billion it's being reported at right now. What do you feel needs to be trimmed, and what do you feel will be trimmed from this stimulus bill?
GRASSLEY: Well, I'm going to answer your question in a very generic way. I can also say that the size of the bill doesn't bother me as much as what I'm going say about answering your question.
The bill you can divide into three parts. One, tax provisions that we changed to encourage investment or consumer spending. Most of those tax provisions will do good and are things that I can back both for investment as well as consumer spending. And investment is the most important because you create jobs for the long term.
And, secondly, would be money that is specifically stimulus. In other words, money that can be spent for projects that maybe money is not available for but they're ready to go, whether it's state or local, county or city, or even federal government. If they're ready to go and people are unemployed and getting that money out there and creating jobs right now, would have a beneficial impact on the economy, and that would be spent in the next two years.
The problem is there is a third part. And it's a spending part, not a stimulus part or not a tax part. And the spending part is using the stimulus bill as an excuse to get a lot of things done that maybe wouldn't otherwise get done. Or if they were going to be done -- and there's a lot of things that I put in the spending category that I think, you know, I could live with, maybe even propose, but they ought to be thoughtfully done through the regular appropriation process which takes months or at least weeks and sometimes months throughout the spring and summer as you pass appropriation bills and not be done in two weeks through this bill.
So my answer to your question is: Cut all the spending out, keep the stimulus, do almost as much stimulus as you want to do and can do in two years, and keep the tax provisions. And what that adds up to, it would add up to a lot less than $900 billion. But whatever it adds up to doesn't bother me as much as what's in the $900 billion bill that's going to obligate us for the next 50 years as opposed to the next two years.
QUESTION: OK. This is Rick Patrie with the Eldora paper.
GRASSLEY: Sure. Thank you.
QUESTION: And I guess this would probably be a generic answer, too. But a lot of the concerns you seem to hear from people out here have more to do with the financial system, at least, have more to do with the fact that nobody seems to know how bad situation is, how much bad debt is out there, so on and so forth.
Do you -- are you folks getting any feel for that at all?
GRASSLEY: Well, I suppose -- well, the answer is a little bit, and as time goes on, a little bit more. But if you look at this being a situation that really started a year or two ago and really didn't hit the fan until September, if you'd asked me this question a year ago, I would have said, well, the -- Secretary Paulson says we're just about at the end of it now.
Well, it was just starting then.
QUESTION: Uh-huh.
GRASSLEY: And we don't have an entire handle on it. In fact, the best people that Obama has put in place like economists like Dr. Summers, as an example, who used to be secretary of treasury for Clinton and a Harvard professor and a respected professor, being a full professor at age 29 if you want to go by how smart he is.
QUESTION: Hmm.
GRASSLEY: And maybe being smart isn't the only thing you need in this determination. But he -- they're sitting down right now to decide on the second tranche of TARP money -- that's it the bailout for the banks or the bailout for the housing -- just exactly how that ought to be used. And I'll bet you if you were interviewing him, he would try to talk maybe a little more solidly than I do because it's necessary to not make people more cynical. But I think if he was being honest with you, they don't know exact the what to do. They're going to try -- they know what Secretary Paulson did didn't work, so they're going to try to do something else.
Now, on this stimulus bill, we're going to have a proposal to vote on before we get done that would deal just with the housing portions of it and maybe try to get financing and refinancing and not just on foreclosures -- 4 percent interest rate with 30 percent fixed rate because we feel until we get housing at the bottom, as it bottomed out and it starts back up, that anything else we do isn't going to make much difference.
QUESTION: Uh-huh. OK. Thank you.
QUESTION: Senator Grassley, Jeff Blankman again.
There's been a lot of anger, especially in this area. A story just came out yesterday that Wells Fargo was looking to send a lot of their officials down to Vegas for a very lavish trip, and they had received bailout money. A lot of other businesses, as you know, have given away a lot of money to their -- how do you answer to those people that are upset that a lot of this taxpayer money for bailout money has not gone to help the businesses but have gone to CEOs and gone to pay for trips for officials from those companies?
GRASSLEY: OK. I want to give one answer for all the other banks that got help and are doing that stupid thing that they're doing that they ought to know better. And that's about all I can say.
They just ought to know better. They ought to be ashamed of themselves. And the extent to which they're doing it and they're getting federal money, we ought to take -- do whatever we can to get it back.
Now, in the case of Wells Fargo, I think it's still stupid for them to do it, but I've got to give a little leeway to Wells Fargo. And I'm talking about nationally, not just their Iowa operation. Because their CEO was in a room with Secretary Paulson back in October when Paulson had nine big banks in, including Wells Fargo, and most of those big banks except for Wells Fargo needed money. But Wells Fargo didn't need money, but the secretary of treasury made him take TARP money because they said if you don't, it's going to make the other banks -- the other banks might not do it because they don't want to look less secure than Wells Fargo.
So Wells Fargo had a lot of TARP money forced on them. And -- and -- and it's not -- it's something Wells Fargo didn't want because it took an obligation -- see, the federal government took preferred stock from these banks. And the banks have to pay 5 percent dividend. And Wells Fargo is spending out a few hundred million dollars of the federal treasury that they didn't have to spend.
So, you know, I give a little more leeway to Wells Fargo, but I wish Wells Fargo wouldn't do it because they are getting TARP money. And most people don't know that Wells Fargo didn't need or didn't want to take it.
QUESTION: This is Rick Patrie again.
My question, I guess, was I'm sure that you say that you're managing the Republican side on the stimulus bill, so maybe you're pretty preoccupied. But is there much else going on in Congress right now? Anything significant other than addressing the financial situation?
GRASSLEY: Yes. I would be involved in a bipartisan effort and discussions to get health care reform. As a member of the Agriculture Committee, if I could have been there today, but I couldn't, I would have been asking questions of FDA and of a corporation in Virginia that had this salmonella in their peanut butter. What's wrong with our -- what's wrong with a company like that? But what's wrong with our food inspection system in this country?
And if I could have been at Judiciary this morning, the same time that Agriculture was meeting, the same time I'm on the floor managing the bill, I would have asking some serious questions of an assistant attorney general that's been nominated by President Obama about his attitude towards pornography because he's spent a great deal of his legal time in private practice defending pornography. And do we want a guy like that to be attorney general?
And then lastly, I'm getting a speech prepared next week for Deputy Secretary of Department of Defense Lynn that he should not be in that position, although, I won't be able to stop him, but I am going to go back through four years when he was chief financial officer and he told me he was going to straighten out the financial system so that they weren't writing checks without invoices because they were writing checks without invoices. And he told me he was going to do something about it, and he never did anything about it.
And I thought that guy, when Bush came in, you know, would be gone forever. But here he's popping up again because he and the president's general counsel in the White House, that, were buddies. And this guy -- a second thing about him -- he even got a waiver after President Obama issued an executive order saying that this was going to be the most ethical team that he -- that has ever been put together in restrictions that's put on them. And one of them was they weren't going to hire lobbyists. But there were provisions in it for waivers. And within one or two hours after he signed that, this Lynn got a waiver because he was a big -- he was the chief lobbyist for the biggest defense contractor.
So you can see how the president -- the president doesn't even follow his own ethics standards by giving a waiver. You'd think if might be a waiver for somebody, but would it be to the assistant secretary of defense when you were the biggest lobbyist for the biggest defense contractor?
So those are things I'm working on.
QUESTION: OK. Thank you.
GRASSLEY: I mean, did I answer your question?
QUESTION: Oh, yes.
GRASSLEY: There are other things going on around here.
QUESTION: Uh-huh.
MODERATOR: Thank you, Jeff and Rick, for participating in today's public affairs program. This has been Senator Chuck Grassley reporting to the people of Iowa.
GRASSLEY: Yes. Thank you all very much.
END