Recovery Rebates and Economic Stimulus for the American People

Floor Speech

RECOVERY REBATES AND ECONOMIC STIMULUS FOR THE AMERICAN PEOPLE ACT OF 2008 -- (House of Representatives - January 29, 2008)

Ms. PELOSI. I thank the gentleman for his kind and generous remarks. I especially thank him for his tremendous leadership, because under his leadership we are able today to vote on something that is relevant to the lives of the American people.

I commend Leader BOEHNER for his leadership as well. It has been a privilege to work in a bipartisan way to help relieve the pain of the American people.

For a long time now, homemakers, homeowners, and hard workers across America have known that there is a problem in our economy. They've had a hard time making ends meet, living paycheck to paycheck, with rising costs for gasoline, for groceries, for health care, you name it. American families felt this pain early on, and they knew that our economy was facing perhaps a serious downturn, but a downturn nonetheless.

On December 7, actually, I remember because my seventh grandbaby was born that day, Thomas Vincent, on December 7 we had a meeting, a bipartisan meeting with leaders from the business community, economists, leaders of industry, of labor, the academic community, people representing workers in the diversity of our country, and we talked about what we could do to head off a serious downturn in our economy. We knew from that meeting that it would have to be timely, that we would need to act quickly; that it would have to be targeted, that it would put money in the pockets of hardworking Americans who would immediately spend the money to meet their needs, inject demand into the economy to help create jobs; and it had to be temporary. The tax incentives in the package would have to be such that they would have to be acted upon in this calendar year so that the full impact could be felt for job creation and stimulus to the economy. Previous stimulus packages have not had that. They had a 2-year period of time in which the incentives would work, and therefore they lost impact. Previous stimulus packages did not have a cap on who received the rebate, or the tax cut as Mr. Bachus calls it. And so, therefore, a lot of money went into the hands of people who never really spent it and injected it back into the economy.

But this is timely. We're acting very quickly, not hastily, but quickly and firmly in a disciplined way on a package that has as its one criterion for anything that's in the package, is it stimulus, is it stimulus, and does it meet the test of enabling us to move in a timely fashion, targeted and temporary.

I was pleased that, working with my colleague, Mr. Boehner, and with the administration under the leadership of Secretary Paulson, that we were able to come to terms on how we would proceed. We could only do that because of the extraordinary respect in which Mr. Rangel is held, and Mr. McCrery, and them working cooperatively as they have for a while. We could only include in the package those features that related to the subprime crisis because of the extraordinary reputation of the distinguished chairman of the Financial Services Committee, Mr. Frank, understanding the terms under which we wanted to proceed, and respecting his expertise in those areas and those of Mr. Bachus as well. So, this has been bipartisan in terms of committee, in terms of working together over time, and bipartisan in terms of the leadership working together a short time frame, benefiting from the work that had gone before us.

It's important in this package to have a level of discipline, because one of the features that the economists, business leaders, labor leaders, et cetera, had told us in the course of all these discussions is you don't want to do anything in a stimulus package that will hinder your ability to act in a recovery.

So, it's important that this bill not get overloaded. I have a full agenda of things I would like to have in the package, but we have to contain the price, and in doing so, you have to establish your priorities. And the priority we had was to put $28 billion in the hands of 35 million families who had never received a rebate or a child tax credit before, and to do it quickly. That was our priority. Because if you do, to do that, again, is true stimulus. All the other things, while worthy and important, again, we made a decision, because that's where we could find our common ground. But if we heap too much on top of that package, it will then take us deeply into debt.

And PAYGO is important to us. And while in recession the PAYGO law allows for us to take certain initiatives, you don't want to abuse that by again adding to the deficit for items in the package that are not strictly timely, temporary, targeted or stimulus.

So, I think we have a good product here. It's all a compromise. It's all about decisions and priorities that have to be established. But it also speaks to the fact that we really do, hopefully, we need to work in a bipartisan way, to have a very aggressive initiative for job creation in our country. And we've already laid the framework for that in a bipartisan way. We've had overwhelming votes in this Congress, for example, on SCHIP, expanding health care to many more children in America. Health care needs health-trained professionals at every aspect of the delivery of health care. So, it creates good-paying jobs in America when you expand health care accessibility to Americans.

Education, innovation, all of those are about keeping us competitive, keeping us number one; again, creating good-paying jobs in America so that we prevail in the global marketplace.

And we talk about infrastructure, that we must have a package for rebuilding our roads, our highways, mass transit, taking initiatives for new projects as well, creating good-paying jobs in America. And global warming. We, as a generation and as a Congress, will be judged by posterity as to how we deal with the issue of a global climate crisis. This affords for us a whole new world of job opportunity where we're all on the ground floor, largely, where we go into urban America and our inner cities or we go into rural America and create good-paying green jobs that are new.

It's about being entrepreneurial about this, to thinking in new and different ways about how our decisions have to be seen in the light of ``do they create good-paying jobs in America.''

So, again, while we stand ready to present a stimulus, if need be, we want to, in the long term, not that long term but longer term than a stimulus, create jobs to avoid such a downturn and, in any event, raise the living standard of the American people. And so, whether it's about this rebate and
what it means to these hardworking Americans who are facing rising costs and need help to live paycheck to paycheck, and I'm telling you, that's not just the working poor, that is the middle class in America. This is a middle-class tax rebate bill. We call it the Recovery, Rebate and Economic Stimulus for the American People Act. It targets the middle class and those who aspire to it. And for that same middle class, we must have an ongoing aggressive initiative for job creation so that across the board America's families have the confidence that they need. Because in a downturn, what you need is confidence. You need consumer confidence. You need confidence in the markets. And as Mr. Rangel always tells me, a message of confidence is given to the American people when Members of Congress can work with the administration in a bipartisan way to put the American people first.

So, I thank you, Mr. Chairman, and I thank Mr. Frank, Mr. Rangel, Mr. McCrery, and Mr. Bachus, and to my colleagues, Mr. Serrano, Ms. Velázquez, and Charlie Rangel, again, for all their leadership in terms of the territories, which is a very important part of this legislation.

I think it's a good day for us here. And let's hope that the Senate will take its lead from us and be disciplined, focused, fiscally responsible, and act in a timely, temporary, and targeted way on behalf of meeting the needs of the American people.

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