Accomplishments of President Obama and the 111th Congress
BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT
Mr. HEINRICH. Thank you. It's a pleasure to be here.
Madam Speaker, I just wanted to return to sort of where we were a couple of years ago when several of us who are joining you here tonight were running for Congress for the very first time. Mr. Tonko from New York, for example, another mechanical engineer, has only been around here for what is it, 14 months now, 16 months now? And Mrs. Dahlkemper from Pennsylvania as well, the gen tle lady from Pennsylvania, we didn't run on passing the Recovery Act. None of us went to Congress because we were hoping to pass a Recovery Act. We did what was necessary to be responsible to clean up the mess that we were left with.
You can take the example of how the United States and this Congress has responded to this recession versus how a country like Japan, when it got into its last big recession, responded. They did too little too late, and as a result, they were left with 10 years of recession, a decade of job-killing recession, a decade of reduced tax revenues, when their competitiveness in the world was dramatically reduced because they weren't willing to stand up and to lead and do what was right.
So we passed the Recovery Act. And when you want to look back at history and judge what happened with this Recovery Act, as a mechanical engineer, rather than just listening to the rhetoric, I think it's very critical that we look at the data. And as you have shown here tonight, when you look at, well, let's take the stock market, for example. This graph shows what has happened with our investments over the end of the Bush administration and the beginning of the Obama administration and the leadership that this Congress showed.
It's incredibly important to realize that this isn't about Wall Street. This is about the people in my home State of New Mexico who are relying on their investments for their retirement. It is about the people who have their retirement accounts tied up in investments and their annual and monthly incomes. Whether or not they get to do anything besides pay the mortgage is dependent on the value in those accounts. And we saw a precipitous decline that took real wealth out of the pockets of people all across this country as trillions of dollars of wealth literally disappeared in a matter of months from our constituents.
After the Recovery Act was passed and the many other pieces of legislation that we passed to try and recover this economy, we have seen an increase in that value that you just can't argue with the data, between 10,000 and 11,000 in the Dow for the last month.
BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT
Mr. HEINRICH. Thank you. And I think that's a perfect example.
You know, facts are stubborn things, and when you show these graphs, they don't lie. They tell a story of an economy out of control and how we have been able to turn that around and move it back in the right direction. And I think when you talk about the Recovery Act, it's important to realize that an enormous portion of the Recovery Act was about taxes as well.
If you look at the rhetoric versus the data on the whole issue of taxes, you see a very different story than the one you might hear in some of the national media or see on a placard at a Tea Party rally for that matter.
The USA today talked about how, Mr. Tonko, if you would be so kind as to hold this up, a headline, ``Tax bills in 2009 at the lowest level since 1950.'' We passed an enormous tax relief package as part of the Recovery Act so that people would have those hard-earned dollars in their pockets and put them to work for our Nation. And if you look at how much support we had to do that from our colleagues on the other side of the aisle, it was nonexistent, if you look at the work that we did for the homebuyer tax credit, which was absolutely critical to bringing back our housing market and construction jobs in this country.
I met a man named Julian Gomez who works in construction in Albuquerque, and he lost his job because of this recession. And he's back today swinging a hammer at New Life Homes, building homes in Albuquerque because of the financing that the Recovery Act made possible.
So I think it's incredibly important that we look at the facts versus the rhetoric.
BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT
Mr. HEINRICH. Will the gentleman yield?
I know the gentleman from New York, Mr. Tonko, knows a great deal about this whole issue of energy security and of creating a new energy economy. And when we passed the Recovery Act, we made this single biggest investment in changing our economy to a clean energy economy ever in the history of this country.
And I saw it directly. I went out to a company called Ktech that's at the Sandia Science and Tech Park in my district, and they are using Recovery Act grants to figure out new ways to store energy and to seam together a new grid that includes putting renewables into the system, unique storage devices, and how to manage all of
that so that our entire grid is more secure and so that we can put people back to work in those new energy technologies.
And I'd yield back to Mr. Tonko or Ms. Wasserman Schultz.
BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT
Mr. HEINRICH. Once again, I think you're painting this picture of contrast of leadership. And the important question here is asking whose side are you on. And our colleagues on the other side are busy protecting BP and making sure that we have a BP bailout, to make sure that their damage cap doesn't get raised. And we're passing legislation like the Recovery Act that invests directly not only in renewable energy, but in energy efficiency to make us more and more energy independent as a Nation.
And I remember in asking whose side am I on, I spent some time at a gentleman's home just a couple months ago named Juan DeLeon whose house is being retrofitted with some of these Recovery Act loans to put insulation in the roof, to have high-efficiency appliances. And for someone who is low income, fixed income, in retirement, they literally see their bills change in a way that gives them economic freedom and independence for the first time. You know, we're standing up for homeowners like that. Retirees. People who've worked their whole life but who are throwing away huge amounts of money every month on their energy bills, and our colleagues on the other side are standing up for corporations like BP.
BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT
Mr. HEINRICH. And as you mentioned, we have a long way to go. We are just getting started trying to rebuild after 8 years of disastrous policies, the recession the likes of which we haven't seen since the Great Depression. But if we can stay on this path, if we can continue to grow these job numbers like the strong job numbers that we saw in March and April; if that trend can continue for the rest of 2010, we would see more jobs created in 2010 than the entire Bush administration, the entire 8 years of the Bush administration. And that is where we need to be headed as a Nation.
We need to keep seeing that line of wealth in the average American family going up, up, up, not going down the way it did continuously during the Bush administration. And it really is about that contrast of responsible leadership versus policies that continue to put our Nation at a competitive disadvantage, not only our families, but versus countries around the world.
BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT
Mr. HEINRICH. Well, I think we should show that one graph of jobs one more time before we wrap up here tonight, because there's nothing more important than, one, as you said, just the facts, ma'am, and actually looking at data and not rhetoric; and, two, nothing's more important than jobs. We've seen our stock market recover.
We've seen housing starts come back and those kinds of indicators, but what really matters to the American people are jobs; and that precipitous decline that we saw in the run-up to this horrible recession and the irresponsible activity that we saw within housing finance markets and within Wall Street and the reversal with the Recovery Act and new policies put in place by this Congress to jump-start manufacturing again, to jump-start real jobs where we design it in the United States, we build it in the United States, we install it in the United States, and we put more people back to work, and watching that line go up and up to where now we're finally adding jobs at the kind of rates that we need to turn our entire country around.
BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT
Source