America's Financial Crisis

Floor Speech

AMERICA'S FINANCIAL CRISIS -- (House of Representatives - January 28, 2009)

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Mr. CASSIDY. You know, I was just kind of sitting in my office, kind of sitting there staring at the Capitol dome, kind of frustrated. And I came to Washington--I'm a freshman, this is my first talk--and I came not to oppose what Democrats do automatically because they're Democrats, I came to try and do something good for my country.

And the remarkable thing is there is an incredible amount of agreement between the two parties. We agree the economy is in trouble. We agree that the government can do something to make it better. We agree that tax cuts and infrastructure can create jobs. And I'm sitting there thinking, man, we've got so much we agree on, why don't we just pull it together and pass a bill? And yet, where we disagree is whether or not discretionary spending--you know, stuff that doesn't create jobs, but folks want to get it--whether that should be included in the bill.

And so I'm sitting there thinking, wait a second, we can consider that in a spending bill, why do we have to put it in this? And as a Republican, I have to say that I don't think we should, and I don't think we should for at least three reasons. First, we said we're going to have a bill that creates jobs, and this is about discretionary spending. The second thing that just kind of disturbs me, as you have spoken about so----

Mr. AKIN. Congressman Cassidy, I think you're going pretty quickly here, and I think there may be some that aren't catching the implications of what you're saying.

What you're saying is, this bill is not really stimulus at all, it's simply putting more money into things that we normally budget anyway. Is that what you're saying?

Mr. CASSIDY. You know what this bill is like? When my wife sends me to Wal-Mart and tells me to buy bread and milk, and instead of coming home with bread and milk, I come home with CDs, I come home with DVD players, and I come home with all this stuff that actually I've had my eye on for a long time. And when she finally sends me to Wal-Mart, I get to get what I want. And yet, really what's important to my family is that I come home with bread and milk.

Mr. AKIN. Excuse me to the gentleman. The parallel then would be, what we should be coming home with is not bread and milk, but jobs for the economy; is that right?

Mr. CASSIDY. Exactly. And we should not be running up our credit card bill to get the DVD player and the iPod and that other stuff that is purely discretionary. You know, we have a credit card debt here which we're eventually going to have to address.

And so, there are three reasons why I don't think we should do this. One, we said we're going to do a job bill and we're doing something more than that. Two, there's going to be a $1.2 trillion price tag on much of which is not related to job stimulation. And you know what the third thing is? I'm 50 years old, but I'm still kind of a young idealist. I thought those people at home heard ``a change you can believe in'' and ``yes, we can,'' and they thought that this was a new era of politics. And yet, if I may point out to the gentleman, it almost seems as if we've taken those two phrases, which hold so much promise, and we're making them out to be nothing but cheap political slogans. We say we're going to give you a job bill, and instead we give you a discretionary spending bill. We say we're going for jobs, and instead we go for that which is--maybe important, but certainly not related to job creation.

Mr. AKIN. Could I reclaim my time on that point?

One of the things that you might think of is, if you're talking about jobs, one thing that might occur to you is that, depending on what you call a small business, 50 percent of the jobs are companies that have less than 100 employees, or if you consider a small company bigger than that, 80 percent of the jobs in America are small business. So wouldn't you think, if you were really coming home--using your analogy with the bread and the milk, if you're really coming home with jobs for America, don't you think you would have some provision in there for particularly small businesses? And yet this bill, for every dollar in there for small businesses they've got $4 for seeding and sodding the Capital Mall. That seems like a weird set of priorities. And I see your analogy to the DVDs, and I would yield back to my good friend from Louisiana.

Mr. CASSIDY. Yes. I think that, again, what we agree on is that tax cuts--particularly for individuals and small businesses--infrastructure, that can create jobs. If we could just focus on that, we would have a bipartisan bill that all of America could sign onto, and no one would wake up and suddenly feel like there's been a bait and switch; rather, they would say this is what we asked for, this is what we've been given, now let's see the benefit.

And as a personal observation of my very first speech, I would ask that we, as both parties, give the American people what we truly said we would as opposed to something which is more than we said we are.

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