Commerce, Justice, Science, and Related Agencies Appropriations Act, 2010
Floor Speech
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Mr. SCHUMER. Mr. President, I rise in support of the legislation before us and the motion to waive the point of order.
This is a good day for American workers, for Congress is focusing on what they have asked us to focus on. Congress is focusing on what the American people want us to focus on, which is jobs, jobs, jobs, and Congress will act in a bipartisan way. So this is a break, in several ways, from the past. One, we are focusing on jobs and the economy. That is what we should be doing. Second, we are doing it in a bipartisan way.
The bill before us focuses on private sector jobs. It has four pieces. Each is lean. Each is directed at private sector jobs. Each will give the economy a certain lift. Last quarter, we had growth of 5.9 percent. That sounds great, but that 5.9 percent growth resulted in no new jobs being created. In fact, it resulted in a continued loss of jobs, admittedly less of a loss than in the past.
Our job is to take that growth and translate it into jobs for the American people, plain and simple, and that is what we are doing with this HIRE Act. At the center of it is a bipartisan piece of legislation: a payroll tax holiday for 1 year for any new worker hired who has been unemployed for 60 days, authored by the Senator from Utah, Mr. Hatch, and myself. It is the bipartisan glue which hopefully will stick with us as we move forward on our jobs agenda because this is just the first--certainly not the last--piece of legislation we will put forward in relation to jobs. If we don't create jobs, the economy will not move forward. If we don't create jobs, the American people, American business, and American labor could lose the optimism that has been part of this country since its founding. When you lose that optimism, you lose dollars and cents economically because businesses don't spend, workers don't prepare for the future, people get disconsolate.
So this legislation is admittedly modest and focused and will go far beyond what the specific legislation does because it will show the American people, it will show American business, large and small, it will show American workers Congress is focused on what they want us to focus on and that we will continue to work on our jobs agenda until jobs start growing, until people are being paid decent wages, until the economy roars back on a long and stable trajectory, which can only be done if employment goes up and underemployment goes down.
I reserve the remainder of my time.
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Mr. SCHUMER. Mr. President, I will support the motion to waive the point of order. I believe I have 1 minute left.
The world is topsy-turvy. My Republican colleagues are opposing a tax cut to businesses, large and small, that hire people. This is exactly what we should do. We don't want to be saying to workers we can't help them find a job. There are shades of Herbert Hoover in what my colleague is saying, and I don't think many of my colleagues on either side of the aisle would support that.
Let me say this about the budget point of order. The Joint Tax Committee, which we all respect, says these provisions are budget neutral.
We have found a way to hire workers, help businesses with tax cuts to hire them, and keep it budget neutral. Yet there is still opposition. When will it end? When will the bipartisan kind of feeling in this body return? This is a bipartisan measure that lives by many of the tenets the party on the other side has stood for, for decades.
Mr. President, is there any time remaining?
The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. The Senator's time has expired.
Mr. SCHUMER. Mr. President, pursuant to section 904 of the Congressional Budget Act of 1974, the waiver provisions of applicable budget resolutions, and section (4)(g)(3) of the Statutory Pay-As-You-Go Act of 2010, I move to waive all applicable sections of those acts and applicable budget resolutions for purposes of the pending amendment, and I ask for the yeas and nays.
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