Summers i worked construction with my dad. Had it not been for pell grants, financial aid, Student Loans at low Interest Rates, i could not have gone to stanford. We have to do what we can. The best way to do well abroad is to do well at home. If we are strong domestically, we can be strong abroad. Your point is well taken. We are a country for a reason. Hopefully by our example and with our assistance, we can help others do it well also. Right now, especially since were barely coming back from that deep recession, its time to really make sure that we take care of folks in america who work very hard to build this country. I dont think we will ever shirk our responsibility around the world, i do think we need to be very smart about how we do things. Whether it is iraq or people who come to our border, we have to do this the smart way. We dont want to give the wrong impression of what we are trying to do whether it is an iraq war kids at the border. Thank you for your question. Before hunter, let me pick out a couple more. Its pretty random, right . Ok, so the next three after hunter, liz amsten . I always seem to pick you. Jesse borden and then luis perez. Presente . Ok, in the back. Hunter, go right ahead. I listened to your little presentation on the economy with your graph and everything. This thing about the 800 billion bailout, i think people are a little tired of these stories. The economy is not recovering. The bailout was not necessary. It did not work. The country is in a mess. What i would like to ask is if you look at china, chinas economy is booming. They want people to think all that china is doing is building a housing bubble or something that theyre building infrastructure, highways, railroads. They are mining helium. A lot of americans dont know what thats about but it is fusion energy. Obama is shutting down our space program. Why dont you demand that obama get the hell out of there . We need a president like the kennedy who says were going to go to the moon and do things big again. If we had a driver like kennedy to land a man on the mountain, we could change education, industry. Thats how to get the economy going. Alexander hamilton knew how to finance industry. I would urge you to study this. You have opposed glasssteagall. We should have passed that instead of bailing out the banks. Hunter youve raised some good points. Again, try to be concise. I apologize. These are Great Questions and i wish i could dive in and talk about it because thats what makes this job interesting. That is a recovery. As robust as it should be . Absolutely not. On that bailout for wall street, i voted against it. I do believe we needed to do something. I just dont believe because it gave too much at the banks when they decided to take mortgages all over the country in slice and dice into little pieces and combine them and make them into stock so it takes real estate whereas before the bank used to lend you money and they would hold that mortgage and you would pay on it. For the life of the mortgage, you have the same lender because the bank held at. So long as you were paying, they were ok because they were getting good interest off of you. Someone on wall street got clever. What if we took all of these mortgages and packaged them together and now instead of one mortgage for 500,000 it is 1000 mortgages . You cut it up and you say, wall street, sell this little piece of that package for x amount of money because it is backed by 1000 mortgages. And thats what wall street did. It took all of these mortgages, some good, some horrendous, and it sold them out there in the market. When people started saying they could not pay because Interest Rates have gone up, they realize their houses were not worth what they thought it they could not make the payments anymore. The banks could not pay on that stock anymore because they were not getting the money. Thats what led to the crash and thats why you saw all of these homes just plummet so quickly. All of the paper was bad. All of the mortgages were terrible. The stock backed up by the mortgages was even worse. I said to the president , then president bush, and my democratic leadership, if you want me to vote to give 800 billion to the folks who essentially helped maneuver this crash, i want to make sure the money will get down to the people, the decent people who are trying to buy a home. The market was crazy. I was looking to help my grandparents buy a small house in eagle rock. 679,000 for a two bedroom, one bath house. A lot of people bought thinking thats what the market was today. These are not people saying they were making 30 grand a year and there were a lot of them, too, which is what really led to the downfall. The money was all going to the banks. There are a lot of people who said i have a mortgage valued higher than what my home is valued at that i made commitments on going to continue to pay my mortgage. Even if i sold my house i would not get enough money. To me, those people were being very responsible hoping with time the value of the home would catch up to the mortgage. To me, we should help them. Youre paying that mortgage at 7 Interest Rate . Guess what, let me let you refinance. You still have to pay on the value of the mortgage but at a lower Interest Rate so let me save you money on the interest and the banks would not renegotiate. They would not renegotiate because they could not. Why . They no longer on the mortgage because they had sold at off to the stock market in 1000 little pieces. They had to get all of the owners of the mortgage to sign off on the renegotiated rate and they couldnt. Why am i going to give the bank for money, this 800 billion . They are not going to do anything to help the homeowner who wants to be responsible. How do i know we are going to get repaid . We ultimately did recoup that money but in 2008, there was no guarantee, no mandate they had to pay back. Banks are always going to make money. I wanted to see two provisions, one to help the homeowner and a guarantee that banks would pay back every cent of the 800 billion. In terms of going to the moon and mining, the president is doing everything he can to get us to renewable energy. Im with him going toward solar wind and all of the Different Energy sources that are clean. You can see what happens when you rely on petroleum. When iraq goes haywire, our prices at the pump go haywire. We should not be dependent nor do i think we should have to wait to extract, suck the shale out of canada, and let them use a pipeline going through america to go to the shipping ports in louisiana so they can ship the oil to china and other countries abroad never leaving a bit of oil for the u. S. To use. They want to use american soil for the pipe so if some terrorist hits it, we suffer the consequence but all of the oil gets sold abroad with not a bit of it for the u. S. I dont think we need to go to the moon to be innovative in what we do. I think the president is trying in that regard so, hunter, i would disagree. The bailout was not the best way to do things, but i will admit even though i voted against it that it did help stop the hemorrhaging. I want to see peaks in job creation as big as the valleys. That would be a true, robust recovery. They cannot just be modest income jobs. There is more money parked on the sideline by Corporate America today, over 1 trillion, in cash that they are waiting to see where to put it, where to invest. We could jumpstart the middle class if we did this the right way. Lets go to the next question. Liz, you are on. I would like to point out that of those negative job losses, most of the increases are minimum wage. You are not seeing the recovery where the guy who lost a job is getting a job back who paid the same as the job he lost. Its tough. A lot of problems in 2008 and subsequent were caused by wall street and the banks. Where do you stand on putting forward a policy to nationalize banks that take money from the government in the future because they are too big to fail . How about setting up public banks like in north dakota . How about supporting elizabeth warrens suggestion on allowing the post office to be a bank for basic Banking Services . This will really help the consumer. As i keep trying to say, the engine of our economy has been, is, and will be for quite some time the middle of america. Rich folks could only buy so many yachts, right . It is middle class america that buys the new clothes washer. Son, daughter, i will give you the seven or eightyearold car and i will get myself that little brandnew vehicle. Those are things that turn the economy. While the middle class has some disposable income, it does not have enough that it could just the hogwild. The other two demographics, rich or poor, they could only stimulate the economy so much. Middle class, you get them going, we are in good shape. In the 1950s when all of those servicemen and women came back up to world war ii, they needed something to do. We did the g. I. Bill and we got them educated. Then when eisenhower was president he said we would never face a situation where we were not prepared. Were going to build a highway system connect the nest every part of the country so we could never be caught offguard. Guess what . A lot of Road Construction workers went to work. My dad. He was busy with highway 5, 99. He had worked all the time except for when it rained. He was not making a whole lot as a laborer. Yet a sixthgrade education and he got paid about 14 per hour with benefits stable enough for nine months that he could take care of us. As i said, i got to go to college because of that. How many Road Construction workers do you know could send their kids to Stanford University . Thats the difficulty. We have to get to the point where we honor the middle class. We look at them for what they are, the jewel. It is the largest segment of america. If we make them feel like they can afford to get that clothes washer, Interest Rates will go up and thats ok because i can afford to get the car now that i need. Thats what keeps the economy going. In terms of how you handle the banks, i want to be a little realistic. Im not happy with the big banks. I told you i voted against the bailout. Even though people would say to me, xavier, you are endangering the economy, the banks always get what it needs at the end of the day. The odds are always stacked against you if you go to court against the lender. The creditor has you by the neck. To me, the banks dont have a right to control our lives but theyre very important because we see what happens when they would not lend. When they are afraid of the economy, when the banks get a cold, we get the flu. We dont need banks that get so big and so loose with their cash not their cash, your cash that we cannot control. We need to make sure they do not go hog wild. They were essentially in vegas on wall street with your money. They should not get to do that. If we could put restraints on them, the banks did not even know how much value they had and some of the stocks they had purchased. They were betting against themselves, these hedge bets. They would put money down and had spent some of their investments were going to lose. If they did lose on the investments, they are ok because they had to do against the loss. Its crazy. I agree we need to do something with is why we have credit unions. Its why we started savings and loans. We have to have a Financial System that works for everyone especially Small Businesses. Without the line of credit emma it makes it very tough. Let me go on to the next question. Jesse, luis, and im being told we are pretty much out of time. 10 or 15 minutes away. I will pick a few more names before i go to you, luis. Where are you . Im here with a group but im also a constituent of yours. I live in mount washington. I have a short time and followed by a question. Our group, we continue to advocate for comprehensive Immigration Reform but we also understand in light of the fact that it is a civil system that some of the reform can come in changes in policies and procedures. Immigration should not be a punitive decision but one that makes it possible for all people to comply with the law. What i want to ask you is we would like to get more detail, if possible, about what may be coming in terms of administrative relief. Ive said this before and youre probably read, seen, and heard about this on the whole immigration issue. You know, its more a political issue more than it is a substantive, mechanical issue how you solve it. The senate four hundred days ago, more than one year ago, back in june of last year, passed a bill that dealt with every aspect of immigration under the law. They went through and looked at this. The proposed tweaks and it was comprehensive. It dealt with the whole issue of Border Security trying to up date, innovate, new ways of doing things are you would not just have to put a whole bunch of bodies on the border trying to do it that way. We have technology to help us address some of these issues. It dealt with the issues of the says whether for family unification or work purposes and it tweaked the system to be smarter Going Forward depending on our needs as a nation. It tweaked the whole system about dealing with people in the work lace. What drives this is at the end of the day, these folks are getting jobs. Why are they getting jobs when they dont have the right to work . There are employers who are hiring them. The legislation dealt with the work lace so you would only match people who have the right to work in the country with people who are going to check to make sure when they hire you they are doing it the right way. It dealt with all of those things. That was the bill. Remarkably it got 68 votes out of 100 in the senate. It was a bipartisan bill and it passed. For 400 days, it has languished in the house because House Republican leadership will not allow us to have a vote on the bill. Many of us proposed and authored a bill that is almost exactly like the senate well although we tweaked it. We cannot get a vote on that though. We need 218 to pass. We have about 200 now. With 18 more members, we could pass that bill. Weve been told by the congressional, the cbo, the nonpartisan neutral referee telling us what bills cost or save to have a sense of what were doing, it would save us close to 1 trillion because it would essentially get rid of some much of the underground economy that so many of these folks live in in the shadows. It would put them in the overt, the public, economy because they could no longer pay them with cash and therefore not pay taxes that go along with it as well. We cannot get a vote on that hill. The president has taken some steps of administrative leave where he can. The president does not pass laws. The constitution says only congress can pass laws. The president has the right to use his discretion on how we execute the laws which is why there is now this lawsuit against the president which is a crazy thing but the house has now sued the president for trying to enforce the laws. I have limited resources on immigration. We have Border Patrol that is four times what it was when i came to congress in the 1990s and doubling in the last 10 years and size. Quite honestly, theyve done a pretty good job in the recession help as well to stem the flow of people coming in the country without documents. There are ways to make it work better. I can only have so much money. Im going to enforce the broken laws, im going to try to do it the best i can. Easy give me resource money to deport them because they are here without documents, let me go after the criminals, the drug dealers, guys trying to do us harm before i go after the kid in school who might be the valedictorian. The president opposed a program called deferred action for children, daca. Kids who were brought into this country usually through their parents when they were very small and have spent most of their life in this country and most of them do not remember the home country they came from. Many have gone on to be valedictorians and many are going to great universities. Rather than go after those folks and trying to hunt them down, let me have down the ones trying to sell drugs to our kids. Hes using his discretion on how to use the resources to deport people in the country without documents. That is the use of executive discretion. The president has said since House Republican leadership has told us last month that they will not pass any immigration legislation for the remainder of the year, the president said ok, i waited in your request to see if the house would pass a bill so we could reconcile differences and get a bill that finally, i statue, fixes the broken immigration system and you are now telling me youre not going to do that . Im going to do what i can within the confines of the law to use my executive discretion to try to implement the law as best i can. The president right now is reviewing what he can do using his executive discretion to make immigration laws worked as best as possible. What might he do . He might try to do some things that diverged or redirect resources away from again going away from the mother trying to buy groceries and go toward the guy trying to recruit someone to be a gang member. When youre going to find disease going to target as much as he can towards those who are trying to do us harm. Its going to be somewhat imprecise. How many people will it help . Its very unclear. How far can it go . He cannot change a lot. He can only enforce the law using his discretion. The program, daca, the Deferred Action Program for these miners who are right now not going to be pursued for deportation is only temporary. They are still subject to deportation. At any moment the program could be canceled. Those kids are now out of luck and they are back again in the deportation line. He cannot change the law but changes how to enforce it. They want to go after the guys trying to do us some harm. Hopefully what will happen is we will pass a law to make it very clear who will earn a chance to stay and who will not. Rather than going after people where if we had passed the law you would have been able to stay, lets focus on those we need to get out of the country as quickly as possible. I took too long. Luis, and before you go we will pick two more names and then we will close for the evening. Estella lopez and, batting cleanup, jim duree . You will be our last question her. Luis, estella, then jim. Good afternoon, congressman. We believe in the rule of law. We do not support weakening