Tax Extenders Act of 2009

Floor Speech

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Mr. HOYER. I thank the chairman for yielding.

I want to thank Chairman Levin. Chairman Levin has worked, along with his staff, Janice Mays, the staff director and other members of an extraordinary staff, around the clock. And I am sure Mr. Camp would say his Republican staff has worked around the clock, too. We thank all of them for the work that they do. I thank Mr. Levin for his leadership, for his focus, and his tenaciousness in bringing us to this point.

Let me make a couple of observations before I speak pointedly about the bill. First of all, ladies and gentlemen of this House, the public understands that there is no bipartisanship in this House. All Republicans are going to vote against this bill, my presumption is. Maybe I am wrong. I hope I am wrong. But my presumption is they'll vote to a person against this bill.

They have voted almost to a person against every bill that we have passed over the last 16 months to try to bring this economy back from the extraordinarily deep recession, the deepest that we have had in 75 years, resulting from the economic policies that they put in place when they were exclusively in control.

Yet they come to the floor and talk about deficits. Democrats of course, when we controlled the Presidency, created one of the highest surpluses, and indeed the only administration that had a net surplus after 8 years, the Clinton administration. The Republicans will say, yes, but for 6 of those years we controlled the Congress. And my response is, yes, and for 12 of the years you controlled the Congress, and 6 of those under a Republican President, George Bush.

Unfortunately, every year that I have been here serving with a Republican President, every year without exception, we have had large deficits. Every year. However, under Bill Clinton we had the only 4 surplus years that I have been here. We had 4 surplus years as a result of an economic program that was adopted. Again, it was adopted exclusively by Democrats. No Republican voted for that in 1993 either in the House or in the Senate.

So we created surpluses. We got the economy moving. And then my friend on the other side talks about jobs; we should have had hearings about job creation. Frankly, the worst period of job creation in the last 30 years was the 8 years of the Bush administration. Without exception the worst. Stark example: the Clinton administration, 216,000 jobs created per month; the Bush administration, 11,000 jobs per month. That's 205,000 jobs per month, over 2 million per year.

That is why, of course, because of that disastrous economic performance, we fell into this extraordinary ditch that we have tried to pull ourselves out of. And we are coming out of it. That's the good news, Mr. and Mrs. America, my colleagues. We are coming out of it. It's slow, it's not as fast as we would like, but it's successful.

Now, I give you an interesting fact: over the last 4 months of an economic program, the Recovery Act and other jobs bills that we passed, we have created 573,000 jobs in the last 4 months. All positive months.

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