Continuing Extension Act Of 2010 - Motion To Proceed - Continued

Floor Speech

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Mr. MERKLEY. Mr. President, I join my colleagues in talking about the challenge that is faced by America's working families. Back home in Oregon, our economy has been hit pretty hard. We have a timber industry, and when you aren't building houses across the country, then you can't sell lumber. So we have mills going out of business across the State of Oregon and a lot of people unemployed--a lot of unemployed people who would be working in the woods cutting down the trees as well as working in the mills. Then we have the challenge of our manufacturing industry that has been hit pretty hard too. We build a lot of RVs and light planes, and those products aren't selling too well in this recession. We have a fruit industry and we have a Christmas tree industry. We ship a lot of that overseas, but the foreign demand is down, and domestic demand is down as well. We have those Mexican tariffs that have been applied to Christmas trees and fruit as well, which has had a pretty strong impact.

You pile up all of this on a State that is on the Pacific Rim and add to that the fact that the entire Pacific Rim economy is depressed, and you have a State that not so long ago was second in the Nation only to Michigan in terms of unemployment.

Well, things have improved a little in Oregon. We are no longer second worst, partly because many other States have continued to get worse. We are at about 11 percent. That is just about twice the unemployment we had not so long ago. That is a lot of struggling families. Unemployment is a program that helps keep the economy in gear during a difficult recession. It helps break the headlong rush into a depression. It helps families stabilize while they are looking for a job.

Unemployment compensation is not a sweet deal. You don't get paid a great deal with unemployment but maybe just enough to get by so your house isn't one more foreclosed property; so you are not one more family on the street, wondering where you are going to live; so there isn't one more set of children whose schooling has been disrupted and their path in life has been disrupted and as a parent you wonder how it will impact them down the road. This is about us watching out for each other here in America.

I can tell you it has been very frustrating to me to watch Members of this body during the last two administrations decide to do things in which they said: You know what, we are going to give away the Treasury to the wealthiest Americans, and we are not going to have any way of paying for it because we just to want give away money to the wealthy. So the wealthy are doing very well in America. But what about the workers in our Nation? The average compensation for a working family plateaued the year I graduated from high school--1974. During the 36 years since, working families have been earning the same amount. Yet the productivity of our Nation has gone up enormously. Where did all that wealth go?

All that wealth went to the wealthiest Americans. Then my colleagues across the aisle are going to stand up tonight and self-righteously proclaim we should not do this without paying.

The PRESIDING OFFICER. The time of the majority has expired.

Mr. MERKLEY. We need to extend this unemployment for working families, not kick them when they are down.

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