Concurrent Resolution on the Budget for Fiscal Year 2021

Floor Speech

I want to begin by recognizing Chairman Yarmuth, whose leadership of the Budget Committee is so routinely remarkable that we take it for granted.

The budget resolution we are voting on today will set us on a path to defeating the virus and providing urgent relief for millions of Americans.

It is a big moment for this country, and this Chamber and Chairman Yarmuth have handled it with characteristic skill and grace.

I also want to thank Speaker Pelosi for her extraordinary leadership, guiding the House through all the challenges since this pandemic began and now bringing up legislation that is urgently needed and will ultimately sustain millions of Americans during this crisis.

President Biden has called for a package that meets the moment, and Speaker Pelosi has laid out a path that gets us there. The Speaker has guided this Chamber brilliantly as we passed the Cares Act; provided additional support to families and businesses in the spring and fall; and now, as we begin the expeditious process to beat the virus, get the American people the relief they need and deserve.

I am honored that she has asked me to lead the Joint Economic Committee this Congress as our country recovers and rebuilds. I look forward to partnering with my colleagues on both sides of the aisle on the full range of economic challenges and opportunities before us. There is so much work to do.

This legislation will save American lives and give tens of millions of Americans the help they need.

Mr. Speaker, I am a businessman. One of my favorite ideas is: Don't show me your values; don't tell me your values; just show me your calendar.

Well, budgets are a statement of values. If you want to know what a person or a party really believes, look at how they allocate their resources. Show me your budget.

Four years ago, the Republicans held the White House, the Senate, and the House of Representatives. Their signature legislation was a $1.9 trillion tax cut bill, which overwhelmingly favored the wealthy, the top 10 percent. That was a statement of their values.

Today, Democrats have the responsibility of governing, with Joe Biden in the White House and majorities in the House and Senate. We declare different values. The most important value is to save American lives. The second most important value is to restore American prosperity.

The budget resolution we consider today is a critical first step to achieving both overarching goals. We have to act quickly because those aren't the only overwhelming goals that we are facing.

Climate change. Secretary Yellen, in her confirmation hearing, called climate change an existential threat facing the globe. She is right, and we can't waste any more time. Temperatures are rising. Glaciers are melting. The frequency of forest fires is increasing, as is the frequency of once-in-a-hundred-year storms. Carbon emissions are out of control.

Soon, scientists say, we will reach a point of no return. Many believe we may already be there, and it doesn't help that the previous administration spent 4 years pretending that climate change didn't exist.

And infrastructure: Despite years of ``infrastructure weeks,'' we haven't moved the ball on infrastructure at all.

This harms our country in countless ways, not the least of which it makes the United States less competitive around the world. Bad for business, bad for consumers, harmful to the next generation.

Our roads are filled with potholes. Our bridges are falling down. Broadband doesn't reach millions of Americans and is priced out of reach for millions more. And on and on.

We have the opportunity to build back better a more equitable, inclusive, sustainable, and green economy. But we need policies that are aligned with the priorities and the needs of middle-class families, not geared toward the wealthy and the well connected.

This budget resolution reflects deeply held American values, preserving lives and health, and creating prosperity for every American. It reflects who we are, all Americans, and it deserves our complete support.

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Mr. BEYER. Mr. Speaker, I have a quick response to my dear friend from Arizona. While we acknowledge that many of the States actually had increased revenues last year, virtually no locality did. I represent Northern Virginia, a fairly wealthy part, yet every one of our local governments is getting creamed. We had 1.3 million job losses in State and local government in 2020. That is not nothing.

House.

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Mr. BEYER. Mr. Speaker, let me just point out that we are not throwing away our chance to work with Republicans. We would love to have a bipartisan bill, but if it's not possible, we have to have this reconciliation process in place because it takes weeks to unfold.

Mr. Speaker, we are in a deep hole. To build back better, we have to crush the virus, as Speaker Pelosi so beautifully captured. But make no mistake, the COVID-19 pandemic has plunged us into a very, very big hole.

Last week, we got the advance--or first--report on 2020 GDP, and it was ugly. The economy shrank by 3.5 percent last year, the worst economic performance since 1946. Very few of us were even born the last time our economy declined by this much. Let me say it again, the U.S. economy is the weakest it has been since the end of World War II.

It could have been worse. It could have been much worse but for the actions we took in a bipartisan way in this Congress. We passed the CARES Act in May, and instead of the 5.6 percent decline the CBO had forecast, we only got 3\1/2\ percent. Just imagine if the Senate had taken up the Heroes Act that we passed. Unemployment insurance alone, which was strengthened with the $600 supplemental payment and the creation of pandemic unemployment assistance, accounted for more than $550 billion in personal income in 2020. These payments were a lifeline to individuals, and they bolstered the economy.

We lost huge amounts of ground in the spring when second quarter GDP declined at a record 31.4 percent rate. That 4 percent in the fourth quarter helped, but not nearly enough to get us out of the hole.

As Fed chair Powell and others have made clear, the risk isn't doing too much. The risk is doing too little. This budget resolution before us recognizes that reality and uses it as a starting point.

I would agree with all of those economists who say go target, go big, and go targeted. In fact, that is what Joe Biden has said again and again.

I think his speech on the American Recovery Act was extraordinarily targeted, and while this budget reconciliation bill is the big picture, we all know that by the time we pass those individual budgets, they will be targeted at the most granular level.

And to my friend, Mr. Estes, with whom I serve on Ways and Means, I am glad that Kansas is doing well. I don't know the answer to this, but I would go back and see how it is going in Wichita and some of those local governments.

I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from Rhode Island (Mr. Cicilline), one of the leaders in so many different ways of the U.S. House of Representatives, the former mayor of Providence.

Mr. Speaker, I would first like to welcome our new colleague from Texas to the floor. An excellent speech.

I yield 1\1/2\ minutes to the gentleman from California (Mr. Peters), a member of the Joint Economic Committee and a distinguished businessperson in his own right.
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Mr. BEYER. Mr. Speaker, to my new friend from Texas, I would point out that Texas and California and New York--two of the bluest States around--are all net exporters of Federal dollars mostly to red States.

Now, it tends to be the blue States who are helping out the red States in terms of our Federal allocations. I would also like to compliment the ranking member on the Joint Economic Committee for his optimism in having a 5-year-old daughter.

Mr. Speaker, I would like to yield 1 minute to the gentlewoman from Michigan (Ms. Tlaib), the distinguished Member who spent her life lifting people out of poverty.

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Mr. BEYER. Mr. Speaker, last summer, when Donald Trump was pressuring governors to ignore the advice of health experts and reopen their economies, he was predicting we would lead to a ``V-shaped'' recovery, in which the recovery would be as steep as the catastrophic decline.

Others predicted a ``U-shaped'' recovery, a more drawn-out version of the ``V.'' And even others predicted a ``W-shaped'' recovery, an uptick, followed by another drop due to a probable second wave of the coronavirus, and then hopeful improvement. Even Ian Bremmer talked about a scalloped recovery.

Mr. Speaker, there has been recovery, but with two big caveats. It has been a ``K-shaped'' recovery. It has come at the cost of over 440,000 American lives.

As the Trump administration pressured States to relax measures needed to control the coronavirus, the virus exploded. And this does have incredibly long-term cost on families, on generations in the economy.

But this ``K-shaped'' recovery, which has really come into vogue right now, is some are doing quite well and some are doing pretty poorly. High-income workers have been able to work from home and save record amounts of cash--I think a 33 percent savings rate in the second quarter.

The savings rate has gone through the roof because the paychecks, the stock gains, have kept coming in for those folks; but they can't spend it on restaurants or movies or travel, flights, entertainment.

American billionaires picked up $1.9 trillion in net worth in 2020. Just the increase in billionaires' net worth alone would pay for this package. The personal savings rate more than doubled in 2020. Housing prices climbed 10 percent in the last year. Stock market went up about 15 percent in the midst of the crisis. But, remember, the wealthiest 10 percent own 84 percent of the stocks. So they walked away with a vast majority of the stock gains last year, as they do every year.

These factors probably explained why households of more than $75,000 in income saved their $600 payments from December rather than spent them, as revealed in recent Opportunity Insights' data.

On the other side of the coin, low-wage workers have seen unemployment drop by 20 to 25 percent, and the unemployment rates for Black and Hispanic workers exceeds 9 percent. The rich have gotten richer. The poor have gotten poorer. And the American Dream has become ever-less attainable for too many Americans. A ``K-shaped'' recovery is unacceptable.

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Mr. BEYER. Mr. Speaker, to add to my friend's charts, let me point out that the Congressional Budget Office has estimated, without additional resources, investment into the economy, it will take until 2024--3 more years--just to get back to where we were at the prepandemic level 1 year ago.

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Mr. BEYER. Mr. Speaker, I had the great honor of attending the Arlington funeral service for Capitol Police Officer Brian Sicknick. It was moving and very sad, eloquent. I only bring this up because I was transported with my friend, Ralph Norman of South Carolina, to the cemetery and back with two Capitol Police Officers who were talking about how much they love their job but how exhausted they were at ages 40 and late 20s.

I asked them, ``What is your job?''

They said, ``We are security for the Speaker.''

And she is indefatigable, tireless, works around the clock, and, to my mind, is the best Speaker America has ever had.

Pelosi), the Speaker of the House of Representatives.

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Mr. BEYER. Mr. Speaker, may I ask how much time we have remaining.

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Mr. BEYER.
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Mr. BEYER. Mr. Speaker, I am prepared to close.

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Mr. BEYER. Mr. Speaker, how much time do I have remaining?

Mr. Speaker, I want to thank my friend, the ranking member, for this hourlong discussion. I will point out that all those billions and maybe trillions of dollars that apparently are still in coffers, one of the best things we can do is get new management at the executive level who will actually spend the money allocated by Congress, and I think the Senate is working on those confirmations right now.

There is nothing that has the sense of theater about the children in Virginia who are three times as food insecure as they were a year ago. We have millions of Americans out of work. We have this remarkable chart that shows that our unemployment rate hit an official 14.8 percent back in the spring, and we knew that was undercounted by all the people who left the workforce who weren't counted at all. They said it was probably closer to 20 percent, the highest since the Great Depression.

Now, we are formally down to 6.7 percent, but, once again, that is double the pre-pandemic level and doesn't capture the nearly 5 million workers who have given up looking for a job and left the labor force since February. That would push the unemployment rate almost at 10 percent. We cannot afford to be passive.

My friend, Mr. Schweikert, talks about the multiplier factor, and I am a huge fan of the multiplier effect. But the multiplier effect means putting money in the hands of people who will spend it. So we are in defense of our $15 minimum wage. That is money that will go into the hands of people who will spend it that day, that Friday, that weekend.

Alan Blinder and Mark Zandi, two prominent economists, found that fiscal monetary responses in 2008 and 2009 substantially reduced the severity and length of the Great Recession. Our wonderful chairman of the Federal Reserve, Jay Powell, a Republican, has said that monetary policy has gone as far as it can. Interest rates are near zero. It is up to us now, those who control fiscal policy, to make this comeback.

The Hamilton Project found that the Biden proposal would return us to the CBO's pre-pandemic projections after the third quarter of this year, not 2024 which would be where we were without it.

We face a once-in-a-generation challenge: a public health crisis caused a massive economic hit worse than the Great Recession, and responding to either one of these crises, the COVID or the economy, requires a smart, multifaceted, comprehensive approach. It is not a blank-check approach. We have outlined piece by piece by piece how this money would be spent, and we still have much granularity to go. We have don't have the luxury of choosing which crisis we respond to. We have got to overcome both of them to save the lives of hundreds of thousands of Americans and ensure the livelihoods of millions more.

Another luxury we don't have is time. We can't waste months and months and months trying to figure out whether we are actually going to spend that money in those coffers or whether bipartisanship will work. We have to set the structure up so that if reconciliation is necessary--the same reconciliation my Republican friends used on the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act--it is ready to go.

The American people--Democrats, Republicans, Independents, and those who don't fit in any of those groups--want us to take action. Giving shots in people's arms, ramping up testing and tracing, ensuring unemployment benefits don't expire on March 14 and that they are there when they are needed most--I thank the gentleman, by the way, Mr. Schweikert, for piling on automatic stabilizers, almost every economist I know thinks that is a good idea--and helping families put food on the table. This is what Americans want. We need to move now to get our country and our economy back on track, and this budget resolution starts the process.

Today, we are taking a very important step for the American people.

Mr. Speaker, I urge support for the resolution, and I yield back the balance of my time.

Mrs. CAROLYN B. MALONEY of New York. Mr. Speaker, I rise today in strong support of this Budget Resolution.

The pandemic has left millions of Americans hungry, homeless, or unable to make rent and mortgage payments. This resolution would provide critical support that is, quite literally, life or death.

It's a time to make life better for Americans who are hurting, using every tool available to us.

From extending eviction and foreclosure moratoriums, to supporting public transit like the Metropolitan Transportation Authority so my constituents can still get to work and healthcare appointments, we must act holistically.

Upon passage, the Oversight Committee will immediately get to work on one of the most important aspects of this package--providing desperately needed funding for states, local governments, tribes, and territories.

This money will allow these governments to help distribute vaccines, expand testing, keep frontline workers employed, and maintain vital services. It will also keep our economy afloat by allowing states, local governments, tribes, and territories to avoid laying off their employees en masse.

The Committee will include expanded emergency paid leave for federal employees, available for those who need to quarantine, isolate, or need to provide care due to the coronavirus.

We also will include funding for oversight and transparency efforts to ensure every taxpayer dollar included in this package is spent on its intended purpose.

The President's American Rescue plan would deal a decisive blow to this devastating pandemic, providing the resources that our families, communities, and economy need to survive.

We must do everything we can, as fast as we can, to get vaccines in arms, to get resources to struggling communities, and to get Americans back to work.

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