The American People Know What The Bottom Line Is

Floor Speech

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Mr. MURPHY of Connecticut. Thank you very much, Mr. Klein, and I always enjoy hearing our friend from Minnesota speak on the floor.

Mr. Klein, let me talk about one small business in particular. Let me talk about Angelo's Deli in New Britain, Connecticut. Angelo's has been serving the people of New Britain, where my great-grandparents came to work decades ago, for 60 or 70 years. Now, Angelo doesn't own the place anymore.

Now, for the last 20 years, it's been owned by a guy by the name of Joe Tropea. Joe is not a political guy, doesn't get involved in political fights very often; but he sees as clearly as any business owner out there--small, medium, or large--what's happening to this economy.

Joe's holding on. He's doing all right. But he's having to cut back hours. He's starting to think about layoffs. This is a business that has been doing business in New Britain for decades, for decades, and is feeling the crunch right now along with everybody else.

Now, why is that? Well, sometimes when people think of Connecticut, they just think of the big houses along the coast where all of the investment bankers, folks coming back and forth from New York live.

Well, in New Britain, Connecticut, before this recession began, our employment rate was 11 percent. It was 11 percent to start. It's up to about 12 or 13 percent right now. Why? Because as Ms. Sutton has talked about so many times on this floor, we have allowed the kind of jobs that built up New Britain, Connecticut, and Waterbury, Connecticut, and Meriden, Connecticut, to filter out of this country because for the last 8 years in particular, we have had no strategy to try to build our manufacturing base in this country. We were weak already before we lurched into this economic downturn. Jobs have been really hard to come by for a long time in New Britain. Now it's getting to a crisis point.

And the folks that have been coming in for weeks and weeks and years and years to Angelo's Market aren't coming in any longer. The folks who used to come in for a sandwich every couple of weeks are now coming in once every month. The people who used to come in every day are now coming in one day a week. And this story can be told over and over and over again.

And so the important parts of this bill to Joe Tropea and Angelo's Market are the parts that start inspiring consumer confidence again.

Now, we may not know all of the keys to unlock consumer confidence, but we know that if we start putting money back in people's pockets--and the right people's pockets--we can start to make them feel good about spending again. That's why 30, 40 percent of the stimulus bill is dedicated to tax cuts but targeted tax cuts to middle class families and to small businesses like Angelo's Market.

That is part of what is going to start getting people to spend again, start getting people to walk into places like Angelo's Market again and get this economy moving again.

A lot of attention has been given to this spending provision of the bill or that spending provision of the bill. Those are important parts. But a large part of this bill is dedicated to putting money back into the pockets of hard working Americans for them to begin to feel the confidence in this economy that's been lacking for too long.

But what also matters to Joe is getting jobs to people of New Britain. Nobody's going to come in and spend money in his business or anybody else's business in New Britain if the unemployment rate in that city continues to lurch upward to 14 and 15 percent.

So that's why the 4 million jobs that are preserved or created in this bill are so critical to Joe and the thousands of other business owners in my district.

And it's also why he cares about the provisions of this stimulus bill that apply to State government because right around the corner from Joe is the Connecticut Works Office, the arm of the State government that retrains and trains workers for the next economy.

If the State of Connecticut continues to face a $6 billion 2-year budget deficit, as it does, it is going to be forced to cut jobs at our worker training programs, to eviscerate the very safety net that's going to help people who are losing jobs find new ones. It makes absolutely no sense to take money away from States that they're going to use to try to train and retrain workers as this economy transforms itself.

So Joe and other small business owners like him look to what the Republicans are proposing as an alternative. And when they look to this retread of Bush economics, when they look to the alternatives sponsored by the Republicans, which, in essence, seems to amount to an excuse to simply perpetuate the policy of the Bush administration where tax cuts seem to be the exclusive domain of the people at the upper 1 or 2 percent of the income echelon, he knows that does nothing for him. He knows that for the businesses that line West Main Street in New Britain, that that policy hasn't worked for the last 10 years, and it is not going to get us out of this recession. It's not going to get people coming back into his shop. It's not going to create jobs again.

As President Obama has said over and over again, we cannot use this economic recession as an excuse to go back to the policies that have not worked up until now.

So I think it's incumbent upon all of us to spend our time, as we try to chart a course forward, spend time in those small businesses that are trying to survive, that are trying to figure out a way forward.

The tax cuts in this bill for middle class families, the money to go help States keep that safety net strong, and the 4 million jobs that will be created or saved are instrumental to our economy at large, but are important to small business owners like my friend Joe across this country.

So I thank my friend from Florida for bringing us together today. I think you're hearing different versions of the same story. To borrow Ms. Sutton's words, it's jobs, it's jobs, it's jobs.

Ultimately what gets people feeling good about this economy, back spending again, is a sense of security about their own job and the knowledge that their neighbors and their friends and their families are going to have their jobs preserved as well.

This stimulus bill gets us there. It is not the salvation, but it puts us on that road.

I thank Mr. Klein very much for giving us the time this afternoon

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Source