The Economy

Floor Speech

Ms. WASSERMAN SCHULTZ. Mr. Speaker, first, before she departs the Chamber, let me just say what an absolute pleasure it was to travel to the Middle East with the gentlelady from Wyoming. Mrs. Lummis was a pleasure to have as a companion. She was inquisitive. The purpose of that trip was particularly to bring Members who had not been to Israel before so that we could learn about the importance, not just strategically, the importance of Israel in terms of its relative location to its neighbors so that Members like Mrs. Lummis could see and understand just how important it is that we continue to be supportive of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state.

Everyone I know that travels to Israel comes back a stronger supporter and a stronger pro-Israel advocate; and I commend you, Mrs. Lummis, for doing just that. It was an absolute pleasure. We began a friendship that I know will continue many years into the future, so thank you very much.

With that, Mr. Speaker, I am thrilled to be joined

by my colleague, the gentleman from New York (Mr. Tonko), this evening. We're going to spend some time talking about our economy and talking about the evolution of our economy. There certainly has been some ebb and flow in that regard, but we are here tonight to talk about the success that we have had in turning the economy around and beginning to see progress. Inch by inch, month after month, there is more and more progress as we move forward.

This evening I want to highlight, Mr. Tonko, the fact that if you look back--and I know we have a chart on this which I would love to go get in a minute--but if you look back to just before President Obama took office in January, at that point, for the months leading up to his inauguration, we were bleeding, the United States was bleeding 700,000-plus jobs a month, and we weren't able to stanch those losses. The Bush administration handed President Obama the largest deficit in history, and one which they created after being handed a significant surplus from President Clinton.

And to have to deal with the amount of problems that our economy was facing when President Obama was inaugurated was astonishing and appalling, Mr. Tonko, because to have been left a mess and to have the economy driven off a cliff as it was was just absolutely irresponsible and it was avoidable.

It was avoidable because during the Bush administration, instead of focusing exclusively on the wealthy and having a tax-cutting policy that was focused exclusively and irresponsibly on the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans, instead what should have been done is there should have been a focus like there has been every single month since President Obama took office; there should have been a focus on broadening that tax-cutting policy and focusing on targeting tax cuts for the middle class. That wasn't done, and so the economy essentially was careening out of control.

Now you fast forward to a year and a half after he first took office, you fast forward to a little more than a year after we passed the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, which invested $787 billion into our economy to jump-start the economy, to create jobs, to provide 98 percent of taxpayers in this country a tax cut. Where you had the wealthiest 1 percent get tax cuts under the previous administration, 98 percent of Americans got a tax cut last year. And we actually have the lowest tax rate now that we've ever had. It is just really amazing the way things have been turned around, and we should be very proud of that.

Today, in terms of job creation, from bleeding 700,000-plus jobs, we are now adding an average of 200,000 jobs a month since the beginning of this year. That is a really incredible accomplishment. I'm going to toss it to you in a second and go get those charts so we can have an illustration of what we're talking about, but we have a lot to be proud of. We have a long way to go. I mean, granted, we certainly aren't out of the woods yet, but we have turned things around and are beginning to see that in the economic indicators that I know we will talk about tonight. So it is a pleasure to be with you this evening.

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Ms. WASSERMAN SCHULTZ. Thank you very much.

First of all, let me just say that it has been such a breath of fresh air. I know Speaker Pelosi likes to say that each new Congress breathes in new life from the trenches, new people who have just come from having their fingers on the pulses of their communities. Both of you, Mrs. Dahlkemper and Mr. Tonko, reflect that statement really to a T. I know that you're in your districts, constantly working hard to make sure you can come up here and can fight for the things that the people in your districts care about.

Particularly, I know I never tire of hearing you talk over and over about how important it is that we restore that manufacturing base and that we be supportive of an economy that makes sure that we can make things again. I have heard that refrain from you and from your industrial, you know, rust belt colleagues for many months now, and now we are seeing the fruits of that effort with the increase in manufacturing.

Also, it is really exciting that you can actually point back, Mr. Tonko, to a point in time and to a policy decision that we made, to a vote that we cast, which made a difference. I mean it's hard, you know, to gauge sometimes whether or not what we are doing is working, you know, whether a policy decision has had the desired outcome, but you can see. I mean the proof is in the pudding. I mean here are retail sales that Mrs. Dahlkemper just talked about. Now let's just look at consumer confidence in general, because the consumer confidence numbers did just come out, as you talked about.

Every month for, I think, the last 7 months, we have had consumer confidence on the rise. We have had another jump in consumer confidence. This is a chart that talks about the increase in household wealth and how American household wealth is beginning to recover. $17.5 trillion of household wealth was wiped out under President Bush. Under President Obama, we have already recovered $5 trillion of that household wealth.

When people have their wealth restored, when they have resources again, they start spending money. That's why those retail sale numbers are going up. When you have your wealth restored, you gain more confidence in your ability to make some spending decisions that you might not have made. So, ultimately, we are going in the right direction.

Really, I have to laugh at some of our friends on the other side of the aisle. You know, with the expression "your glass is half full or your glass is half empty,'' that's sort of the determining factor of whether someone is an optimist or a pessimist. I don't even think it's half. I think their glass is just empty. I think they broke the glass, because, to be honest with you, it's really shocking how they can see only gloom and doom with positive economic numbers like this. I mean what is so sad is sometimes I think they wish that this were not the direction that our economy was moving in because, sadly, for so many of our colleagues on the other side of the aisle, it's about regaining power rather than about seeing the American people regain some power, some power in the purse. So I just thought I would point that out.

Before I flip it to you, Mr. Tonko, some really exciting and interesting poll numbers came out this week. In these hours, we like to make sure that we don't just have people taking it from us. I mean, you know, obviously, I'm a Democrat. I'm, you know, supportive of my party's agenda, of our leadership's agenda and of moving the country in a new direction, so we try to talk about third party validators on the House floor.

The ABC News/Washington Post poll was released just this past week, and it showed that Democrats are favored over Republicans to handle the Nation's biggest problems. Six in 10 who were polled are dissatisfied with congressional Republicans' ideas. In terms of the individuals polled, we were supported by a 12-point margin. By a 12-point margin, Americans trust Democrats over Republicans to handle our Nation's biggest problems 44 to 32 percent. That is a pretty significant indicator that Americans are happy with the direction that we are going.

I think no matter what district you go to, whether it's to a progressive district like mine or to a moderate district like Mrs. Dahlkemper's--and you're probably halfway in between Mrs. Dahlkemper's and mine, Mr. Tonko, as far as the philosophical spectrum in your district--our constituents would tell us we are cautiously optimistic, that things are moving in the right direction but that we're not out of the woods yet. You need to keep pushing. You need to keep innovating. You need to keep passing legislation that is going to jump-start and spark this economy and be an engine of job creation. That's what we're keeping our nose to the grindstone on.

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Ms. WASSERMAN SCHULTZ. Since you asked the question rhetorically, I'll actually jump in and answer it with an answer from Mark Zandi, Moody's economist who Mrs. Dahlkemper just referred to.

As to what would have happened without the Recovery Act, without the TARP legislation, and without making sure that we grabbed a hold of the tiller of this economy, what he says would have happened is we absolutely would have sunk into a depression, that literally the policies of President Obama and of the Democratic leadership in the House and the Senate steered our ship of fate away from a depression.

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Ms. WASSERMAN SCHULTZ. You're absolutely right. And I want to jump off what you just talked about, related to the choice that Americans will have. Over the next few months, we are going to get closer and closer to an election, and in November, I think Americans will have a very clear choice. They can go back to the failed policies of the past. They can backslide toward the Bush era, in which we will be in a situation where we will be led by people who think that we should exclusively focus on big business, big corporations, the wealthiest Americans, and that tax-cutting policies should only be targeted towards that group of people and use the whole trickle-down notion that has been proven time and again not to be effective, in fact, proven to be detrimental to the economy.

Or we can continue to move in the direction that the Obama administration and Democratic leaders in the House and Senate have been taking us, which is slow and steady progress so that we can reestablish the balance that we need in our economy, particularly, as you mentioned, the balance in terms of regulation. We allowed the fox to guard the henhouse for 8 long years in industry, particularly in the financial services

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Ms. WASSERMAN SCHULTZ. Mr. Tonko, as the parent of twin fifth-graders, I can tell you that my fifth-graders often scratch their heads and wonder, Mom, what the heck are your colleagues on the other side of the aisle doing? They wonder why they only focus on the most narrow view.

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Ms. WASSERMAN SCHULTZ. Would the gentleman yield on that example? Because let's tell them how they slowed that process down. It's not only that they were not voting for the America COMPETES Act, which by any measure will create literally millions, potentially, of new jobs and definitely tens of thousands of jobs. They added an unrelated, irrelevant pornography amendment to that legislation to try to catch Members on our side of the aisle in a vote for or against pornography. And what they did was they ran an amendment that said that we would vote on whether or not Federal employees would be able to be paid if they viewed pornography on work hours.

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Ms. WASSERMAN SCHULTZ. And add to that, on top of that, the Republicans allowing the PAYGO statute and the PAYGO rules to expire. A big part of the reason--under the budget that was passed by President Clinton, we adopted under a Democratic administration, Democratic leadership a pay-as-you-go rule that said that we're not going to spend more than we take in. I mean, just like people have to do in their own households. And when we came back into the majority, we readopted those rules. And now we have the PAYGO statutes reestablished. And what we need to make sure we continue to do--except for emergency spending, which in an economy that's as dire as this one, we've had a number of different emergency situations.

But making sure that other than emergency situations, we pay for the legislation that we're passing, whether it's including the war costs in the budget and actually having it be real numbers instead of pretending that we don't have an ongoing obligation when it comes to war funding. We included the costs of the Iraq war in the Appropriations Act, in the budget, unlike the Republicans who just pretended year to year that we weren't going to actually have that expense.

So we have been trying to be responsible. We have been trying to make sure that we can get things back on track, and that, like you said, we can establish some parameters. Unfortunately, our colleagues on the other side of the aisle think that government is always an obstacle; government can never be a solution. I don't think government is the be all and end all solution to all of our world's problems either. But government certainly can be part of the solution. Governments can help make sure that we can establish some fairness and some balance and also make sure that there is someone minding the store, that there is not an unchecked industry. We have about 60,000 barrels a day gushing out of the ocean floor right now because no one was paying attention.

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Ms. WASSERMAN SCHULTZ. And we're doing it without our friends on the other side of the aisle, which is really just so incredibly disappointing. I mean, I have seen our leadership reach across the aisle time and again and ask our Republican colleagues to come to the table, sit down. We're not going to agree on everything, but let's sit down and try to hammer out areas of agreement where we can find some common ground. Let's try to pass bipartisan legislation. As you said, we passed health care reform with over 150 amendments that were offered by Republicans, accepted and included into the bill. We had a bipartisan bill without a bipartisan outcome, and that's been their choice repeatedly. They have made a choice, whether to either sit with us and try to work something out--and you know there's times where you have to--look, politics can be a contact sport.

This is a situation where they have different ideas than we do, but I've been in office for 18 years. I spent 12 years in my legislative body. You were in your legislature as well. I have never been in a situation--and I come from a State that is controlled by Republicans for the majority of the time that I have served in office. But I was always able to reach across the aisle and find some common ground. And we were always able to, on many things, pass bipartisan legislation. They have no interest in that.

So the choices that they are making are, I think, going to result in the American people being presented with a choice to either embrace hyperpartisanship, embrace individuals who are bent on power and bent on controlling the direction that this country moves, and only doing it their way, or Members like our Members who have their fingers on the pulse of their communities, who understand intuitively what the needs are in their district, and who aren't reflexively just voting with their party.

I mean, just look at the diversity of our caucus. We have been able to pass some significant legislation: the Recovery Act, the health care reform legislation. We've passed the Credit Cardholders' Bill of Rights. We have some significant pro-consumer economic recovery legislation, and we haven't passed it unanimously out of our caucus. We have a diversity of ideas, but our ideas and our diversity reflect America because some Members are able to be supportive and some Members aren't.

You would think that there would have to be some people on the other side of the aisle that would have the nerve, that would have the backbone to step up and say, You know, I'm going to put aside my quest for power, and I'm going to sit down, and I know we can work something out. And each of us has had private conversations with other colleagues on the other side of the aisle, and they whisper, Debbie, I really wish we could be with you on this. I really agree with you, but you know, my hands are tied. Really? Your hands are tied? I don't see any rope actually binding your hands or a gag binding your mouth. It's sad.

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