The American People Know What The Bottom Line Is

Floor Speech

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Mr. COURTNEY. Thank you, Congressman Klein. Thank you for organizing this colloquy which we are, as a Congress, on the verge of one of the, I think, biggest votes of the 111th Congress. And it's important that I think we take the time to spend a few minutes to explain why the stakes are so high and what, in fact, the proposal is before us because there's a lot of bad information out there.

First of all, just to follow up on your point, This is not a normal downturn, a normal business recession. As the chart that you just showed demonstrates, the drop-off in terms of job losses in this economy and the velocity with which it's happened is something that again we have not seen as a Nation, certainly at least since the Great Depression.

Just using as a quick snapshot in the State of Connecticut, I talked to some companies which have experienced downturns in the past. Pratt and Whitney has had layoffs because the commercial aircraft market has certainly shrunk in recent months as the economy has closed down. The insurance industry has had layoffs as business has fallen off.

But I was talking the other day to a guy who is in charge of a trash collection agency, which trash tends to be sort of recession proof. He's never had a layoff in the time that his family has owned this trash hauling business that goes back decades. They just laid off 15 folks there because the volume of trash that's actually being generated in the State of Connecticut has turned down, something that he has never seen before.

The price for commodities, in terms of aluminum scrap metal, some of the other scrap that they normally, newspaper scrap that they usually resell on the market, has completely collapsed because the price for those commodities, again, has just vanished.

We have seen in the casino industry, again, an industry in Connecticut with the large tribal casinos that we have, Foxwoods casino and Mohigan Sun, again, the first layoffs since those casinos ever opened. Mohigan Sun cancelled an $800 million expansion last September.

The construction trade industry in Eastern Connecticut has completely fallen apart. Electricians, sheet metal workers, carpenters, the construction trades all across the board, are home basically barely getting by collecting on benefits.

So, given that situation that we're seeing on the private sector, this pullback that's happening, causing, again, contraction that never has been seen before all across the board, we're seeing local governments and State governments as a result feeling the ripple effect of shrinking State budgets and layoffs of teachers at every single school district, certainly in my area and I'm sure at other members.

We have a decision to make as a country about whether or not we are going to use the Federal Government's purchasing power to step in and stop this precipitous decline and keep us from falling into a further downward spiral.

Now, let's be clear because we just heard a bunch of criticisms about whether or not the government is capable of making wise choices about spending and actually creating jobs. Well, the fact of the matter is, every single day in the American economy, the Federal Government is spending money and creating work. In the defense industry, again, you can go across the board.

And the gentleman from Texas who just spoke, we could go through his district, I'm sure, and certainly his portion of Texas, and look at military spending that's going on every single day and that people are collecting pay checks, whether they're building aircraft or military weapons for the Army and our ground forces, or whether they're just employing actually military personnel.

Certainly, in Connecticut where we make nuclear submarines, we build aircraft at Pratt and Whitney, the F-22, we build Blackhawk helicopters. There are people this morning working two and three shifts that are going to work because of the customer that the Federal Government acts as to make sure that they have work every single day.

Every school district, every health care institution receives Federal funds that really determine whether or not the doors stay open.

So what President Obama is doing is using existing programs, existing formulas, whether it's Title I, special education, whether it's aid to States through Medicaid programs, which we know work because they've been in place for decades. But what he's doing is boosting the spending back to States so that we, in fact, will not allow the total collapse, both in the public sector and the private sector as this economy continues in its downward spiral.

And frankly, in the next day or so, this Congress is going to have a choice before it. A ``yes'' vote will be a ``yes'' vote for jobs. A ``no'' vote, which is the do-nothing Herbert Hoover approach to an economic crisis that we have before it will basically condemn millions of Americans to further joblessness, to extended unemployment and a loser strategy in terms of whether or not this country, this great Nation is going to be capable of leading the world out of a global recession.

And I think the President has put forward a balanced proposal, using both tax relief and spending programs and State fiscal assistance to ensure that we are not going to allow this mess which he inherited to become any longer and any more prolonged for working families and middle class families than we have the tools and the capability of turning around.

So that's the choice that's before us. We can act, we can save jobs, or we can do nothing and follow the failed policies of the last 8 years of the Bush administration that got us into this mess to begin with.

And someone who is from a State that's been hard hit as well, from Kentucky, is here to, I think, again, share his thoughts and his perspective from his corner of America, Congressman Yarmuth.

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Mr. COURTNEY. Madam Speaker, we have a few minutes left in Mr. Klein's hour that he's allotted for discussing the Economic Recovery and Reinvestment Act, and I think a lot of the speakers who have already had a chance to weigh in are going to kind of give their final closing arguments.

Again, we are hours away from the decision that's before this country, about whether or not to support President Obama's effort to turn this economy around, and I think it's so important, again, for the facts really to have an opportunity to be heard before that vote takes place.

Back in Connecticut, the head of The Carpenters Union, Chuck Appleby, once said at a hearing we had the other day on the need for infrastructure investment that the best social program is a job. A job provides people with wages. A good job provides people with wages and benefits, but even more importantly, it gives people dignity and confidence in themselves and their future, and that's what's missing right now.

We have seen an economy that's lost 3.6 million jobs in the last 13 months, and people are just hunkering down and pulling back because of a legitimate fear about not knowing where the future is headed and whether or not that future has a place for them. And President Obama gets that, and that's why this measure is aimed directly at stopping that hemorrhaging and making sure that we inject not just investment but also confidence back into the American economy.

I'd like to yield again for his final comments to the gentleman from Kentucky (Mr. Yarmuth).

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