Commerce, Justice, Science, and Related Agencies Appropriations Act, 2010--Continued

Floor Speech

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Mr. SCHUMER. Mr. President, I rise today to speak about two issues. First, the jobs bill and the provision that Senator Hatch and I worked on that helped break the partisan logjam, and also the need for the Senate to take up and pass up to $25 billion in FMAP assistance to the States. First, the jobs portion.

During our break, I traveled all around my State from Cheektowaga to Oswego, from Syracuse to Poughkeepsie, from Long Island to New York City. In each place, I talked with people who had lost their jobs. It was heartbreaking. These are people who are looking desperately to find work.

One of the sadder points of this recession is, of course, its depth. It is deeper than all but one recession we have had since World War II. But, second, it seems to affect people at all income levels. If you are poor, if you are middle class, even if you are upper middle class, you can lose your job. Perhaps most painful of all, the amount of time that people are out of work is much longer than previous recessions. In other words, in previous recessions, you would lose your job, it would be horrible, but you would say to yourself: In 3 or 4 months, I can find a new job quite easily. That has not happened.

In fact, I met people such as a woman in Rochester who worked for a major firm in human resources. She is about 50. She does not have a family, but her job was her life. She was told she had to leave a year and a half ago. She has been looking and looking. Her salary was in the low six figures. She was a very talented person upon meeting her. No work. No job.

I met somebody who came from a blue-collar background. The family had no education. He climbed his way to the top of the tool-and-die industry. He was making a good living. He has six children and a wife who stayed home because when you have six kids, it is not easy to work. He was laid off about a year ago. Again, he has been looking and looking, first with his high skills in his industry, and then he kept looking lower and lower and lower on the pay scale, to no avail. No job. I could repeat this story over and over.

I can see why the people of Massachusetts voted the way they did. I did not agree with it, but I understand it. In my judgment, what they were saying was simple. If you look at the exit polls, about 50 percent of the people in Massachusetts supported the President's health care bill and an equal number against it. But, overwhelmingly, they were saying to us, whether they were for the bill or against it, focus on issue No. 1, jobs--jobs, the economy, helping the middle class stretch that paycheck so they can make ends meet.

That is why I think Senator Reid, our majority leader, was so wise to put together the bill he did, the HIRE Act. That is why he reached out to those across the aisle, as did I. That is why I am pleased this vital legislation--hardly a panacea; it is not going to cure all our problems--looks as though it will move forward late this afternoon or this evening.

I am very proud--we are all proud--that we have bipartisan support. I believe the vote later on will be even more bipartisan than the vote to move forward on the bill yesterday. Bipartisan victories such as this have been few and far between. But this could be the start of something good. I hope the bipartisanship will not end with this afternoon's vote.

Unemployment, of course, is not simply a blue State problem or a red State problem; it is an everywhere problem. It will take more than one party's solutions to solve it. So if there is only one issue that we can find common ground on this year, let it be jobs.

We all know unemployment, which is hovering just below 10 percent, is unacceptably high. When you hear the number 10 percent, it is an abstract figure. But if you are a husband or wife, a son or daughter who is out of work, or one in your family is out of work, unemployment is 100 percent.

As the economy shows signs of life, unfortunately millions of Americans remain out of work, struggling to make ends meet with savings and unemployment benefits. There are more than 15 million unemployed Americans. That is not even counting those who have stopped looking for work. There are more than 6 million people who have been out of work for 6 or more months. Each one has a story, a life, usually a family, such as the woman from Rochester I mentioned.

When I go to sleep at night, I sometimes think of the people I talked with last week while we were on break and about their pain at losing their job and their quest to find a new one.

Unfortunately, despite their efforts, most of them have not found work.

This recession is unlike anything we have seen since the 1930s. It has created immeasurable hardship and heartache for tens of millions of American families. It doesn't matter if you are in a red State or a blue State. If you are unemployed, you want a job.

Last year, Congress took bold steps to bring our economy back from the brink of collapse, and GDP growth in the last quarter was as high as 5.7 percent. The purpose of the provision Senator Hatch and I have introduced is to take that growth and translate it into jobs because while the economy grew at a very rapid clip--5.7 percent--hardly a job was created. That is a problem because we cannot continue to grow at that rate unless people start going back to work. Until the unemployment rate drops significantly, Congress must do more to help families across the country who are desperately struggling to find work, and this bill is a step in the right direction.

Last year, I believe Congress was right not to add a jobs tax credit to the stimulus package. Economists told us that with the economy shrinking and losing 700,000 jobs a month when the President took office, our focus had to be on stimulating demand. But now that the economy is beginning to grow--at the very worst is flat--a tax credit is what is needed because there are companies that have seen sales blip up and they are wondering whether to hire that additional worker. The Schumer-Hatch tax credit may push them over the edge and they may say: OK, I will hire somebody. Then, instead of the vicious cycle of downward employment we have seen, a virtuous cycle will begin. That company will hire a worker, that worker will go to the stores and buy things, those stores may hire another worker and more money circulates in the economy and we start moving upward as opposed to downward.

After reviewing the criticisms of past tax credit proposals, Senator Hatch and I set out to develop an idea that would address some of the past concerns while honing in on the problem we are trying to solve, which is persistently high and long-term unemployment. I felt we needed a solution that was simple, immediate, focused, fiscally responsible, and potentially bipartisan. That is what our proposal does.

Let me talk about each word. It is simple. Small business, we know, is the job growth engine in America. But if you tell a small businessperson they have to fill out 40 pages or even hire an accountant before they get a tax credit, they are going to say: Forget about it. But this is immediate. Again, if you tell a small businessperson: Yes, you will get a tax credit, but it will be a year from April when your tax returns come in, they are not going to do it.

Our proposal is immediate. The minute the worker is hired, the benefit begins. As I said, it is simple: All the employer must do is show that the person they are hiring has been unemployed for 60 days--and that is easy to do because they can show 60 days of unemployment benefits--and that is that.

Third, our program is fiscally responsible. It is not a big, huge bureaucracy. It is not a new government agency. The money goes directly to the small business that makes the new hire, and that is why it has bang for the buck. It is estimated that if 3 million people were hired by this credit, it would cost about $15 billion. Mr. President, $15 billion sounds like a lot of money, but compared to the stimulus--again, for a different purpose a year ago when the economy was collapsing--the cost of ours is about one-sixtieth, and dollar for dollar it will be focused on jobs.

So it meets all these criteria. It will focus like a laser on the unemployed and will create jobs right away at a reasonable cost. In this day when communication is so important, it can be explained in a single sentence. Any private sector employer that hires a worker who has been unemployed for 60 days will not have to pay payroll taxes on that worker for the rest of the year. That is it. Nothing else. It explains the whole program from start to finish. By the way, if the employer keeps that worker for at least a year, they will receive an additional $1,000 tax credit.

Our plan is good for business and good for workers. The more a business pays a worker, the bigger benefit they get. Many of the previous programs were aimed, understandably, at workers at the lower income level. But these days, when you have people in our State who make $60,000, $80,000, $100,000 or $120,000 a year and who can't find work, they will benefit by the same percentage as somebody at the lower end of the spectrum. The sooner the employer hires, the bigger the break because it lasts this year. The employer doesn't pay taxes and the benefits go immediately into the business's cashflow. Unlike other proposals, there is no waiting to receive a tax credit. The employer doesn't pay the taxes to the government in the first place.

Obviously, employers decide to hire workers when it makes business sense. If your sales are declining, no tax incentive is going to encourage you to hire somebody. But we are now finding--at this stage of this Nation's incipient and all-too-small recovery--that many businesses, large and small, are finding orders are beginning to rise, sales beginning to increase. It is those businesses that our tax credit is aimed at. This proposal may give them the push they need to add a few workers or hire them a few months sooner than they otherwise might. Either would be a good thing.

I don't wish to delude my colleagues, and I know Senator Hatch, the coauthor of this proposal, would agree, that this provision is not a panacea. There are other proposals Congress could, should, and must consider to aid job creation, but I look forward to considering those ideas in the weeks to come. In the meantime, we ought to take advantage of the bipartisan camaraderie, which I hope lasts, and move this proposal forward.

I wish to thank a number of people who helped. At the top of the list is Chairman Baucus. When Senator Hatch and I--both members of his committee, the Finance Committee--brought him the proposal, he thought it was a good idea and helped champion it. I wish to thank Leader Reid, who jumped right at the opportunity to pass the proposal. I wish to recognize Senator Casey and Senator Gillibrand, my colleague, for the hard work they put into an alternative tax credit idea, which could end up complementing, not replacing, our idea. Finally, last but certainly not least, I wish to thank my colleague, Senator Hatch, as well as Senator Grassley, who worked with us on this proposal to refine it and make it possible to pass, which I believe we will do shortly.

I wish to turn the subject to another pressing issue; that is, the pressing issue of State fiscal relief. While our top priority is putting unemployed Americans back to work, nothing we do on job creation will be truly effective unless we also stop the bleeding caused by State and local budget cuts across the Nation. We cannot, with one hand, incentivize private sector employment while, on the other hand, through inaction, force State and local governments to lay off thousands of firefighters, teachers, health care providers, and other public servants.

Right now, States face the steepest ever dropoff in revenues. My State of New York and so many of the localities I have visited--from large major cities such as New York City and Buffalo, to the smaller towns and villages--are desperate for help. If they do not receive it, they are going to have to lay off thousands and thousands of workers. In the city of New York, they are talking about laying off teachers. That is hurting our seed corn. The number of police officers, at a time of crime and terrorist threats, is declining. That hurts our economy as well as our localities.

New York is not alone. From California to Arizona, to Alabama, to
Maine, and to Mississippi, State Governors have laid out proposals that will unfortunately eliminate jobs and cut critical services in the coming months. In fact, it is estimated, if there is no help, State and local governments will have to lay off 1 million workers--something we can ill afford at a time of this incipient recovery. The cuts couldn't come at a worse time for our fledgling economy. States will be forced to make massive layoffs and they will be cornered into raising taxes on hard-working, middle-class Americans at a time when families can't afford to take another hit and at a time when taking money out of the economy makes no sense at all. It oftentimes makes no sense but now more particularly.

Last week, the Nation's Governors nearly unanimously endorsed a 6-month emergency extension of FMAP, the Federal Medicaid Assistance Program, which would send up to $25 billion to the States. They know firsthand that job losses in their States would have been much more severe were it not for the significant relief Congress provided for them in last year's stimulus package, particularly through the FMAP program. I know our economy is growing, but out in the States it sure doesn't feel like a recovery yet. Cutting off this assistance now, as the stimulus expires, would be like pulling the rug from under the States just as they are maybe beginning to turn the corner.

I was an ardent supporter of the Recovery Act's FMAP aid because, plain and simple, it saves jobs, and I argued for it then. I am especially proud to have authored a provision that ensured a stream of funding that went directly to county governments. In my State, the Medicaid burden, much of it--too much of it--falls on localities. If we were just to give Albany the money--not just the Albany share but the county share--the counties and New York City might never see that money ever again. So I was able to--with the help of Leader Reid and Chairman Baucus--write a provision into law that said the locality gets its share directly, and I am urging the Senate to include this language in a new emergency extension as well.

We cannot afford to delay any longer. This economic downturn didn't come with an end-of-the-year deadline. This critical aid to States shouldn't either. So I hope that in the next jobs bill we pass FMAP is a vital part, and I hope, just as with the provision Senator Hatch and I put together, it will get broad bipartisan support. I believe an overwhelming majority of Governors--Democratic and Republican--have already signed a letter urging that that happen, and I hope we will get people from both sides of the aisle to make sure the next jobs bill contains a healthy and robust FMAP extension. The House has already passed it. It is up to us.

We have much yet to do on the job front, but our efforts will be undermined if our Nation's Governors are forced to lay off workers and raise property taxes. We need to plug the holes in the dam so our recovery efforts are not washed away. We need to put this great Nation back on a path to prosperity by passing the tax credit Senator Hatch and I have offered and then by moving forward and making sure FMAP is extended for at least another 6 months.

Mr. President, I yield the floor, and I suggest the absence of a quorum.

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