Providing for Consideration of Senate Amendment to House Amendment to Senate Amendment to H.R. 4213, Unemployment Compensation Extension Act of 2010
Floor Speech
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Mr. McCLINTOCK. I thank the gen tle lady for yielding.
I would say in response that, yes, George W. Bush was responsible for what was then the worst debt in the Nation. That was a terrible public policy, and I make no apologies for it. But it needs to be pointed out that this administration and this Congress in just 2 years have run up as much debt as the irresponsible Bush administration did in all 8 years combined. Yes, that was irresponsible fiscal policy. Why in the world would you want to exacerbate and continue that bad policy? Republicans have learned their lesson. It appears that lesson has not yet been learned on the other side of the aisle.
Mr. Speaker, anyone who has experienced firsthand the quiet panic that stalks every waking hour of an unemployed family knows how frightening and debilitating is chronic unemployment. You watch your savings evaporate, you watch your children going without the material things that their friends enjoy, and you count down the months or even days until you won't be able to make that crucial rent or house payment.
That unemployment check is a lifeline in such times, and I fully appreciate and understand how desperately an unemployed family is looking to the security of getting 99 weeks of such checks, but I can't go along with this for a simple reason: The only way out of this nightmare of unemployment for these families is a job.
Speaker Pelosi and others have said the most important thing we can do to create jobs is to extend unemployment benefits to 99 weeks because the unemployed would spend this money and stimulate the economy. Well, this analysis completely ignores the harsh and glaring fact that, before this money can be put back into the economy, it must first be taken out of the very same economy.
We will have to take $34 billion more out of the economy in order to finance these extra benefits through November. In fact, this is the eighth such extension, totaling $120 billion. That means over $1,600 from the pocket of an average family of four in America. Since we don't have that money, we will have to borrow it from exactly the same capital pool that would otherwise have been available to loan to businesses seeking to expand jobs or to home buyers seeking to reenter the housing market or to consumers seeking to make consumer purchases.
Remember, two-thirds of economic growth depend upon consumer spending, but that money now won't be there to loan for jobs and homes and economic growth. This is $34 billion of relief to the unemployed that they desperately need and that I desperately wish we could responsibly extend, but to do so would also mean $34 billion of fewer jobs. It would mean perpetuating this never-ending nightmare of unemployment for these families and, indeed, throwing more families into that nightmare.
We have been told for several years now by Presidents Bush and Obama that stimulus spending would help the economy, but it hasn't, and there is a reason it hasn't. Government cannot inject a single dollar into the economy that it has not first taken out of that very same economy. Government cannot provide a dollar of temporary relief to the unemployed without first removing a dollar of permanent relief for the unemployed--namely, a job.
The talking point du jour from the other side is, well, the Republicans have no problems giving tax breaks to the wealthy but won't extend a lifeline to the unemployed. Well, once again, they just don't get it.
Milton Friedman once observed that spending is the effective rate of taxation. Spending can only be paid for in two ways--either by current taxes or by future taxes to retire borrowing. High taxes and deficits are just the symptom. The problem is the spending, and this is a spending bill.
On May 9 of 1939, after nearly a decade of unemployment checks and stimulus spending and with unemployment at 17.2 percent, Franklin Roosevelt's Secretary of the Treasury, Henry Morgenthau, made this stunning admission during a meeting with Democratic members of the House Ways and Means Committee:
He said, No, gentlemen. We have tried spending money. We are spending more than we have ever spent before, and it does not work. I have just one interest, and if I am wrong, as far as I am concerned, somebody else can have my job. I want to see this country prosperous. I want to see people get a job. I want to see people get enough to eat. We have never made good on our promises. I say, after 8 years of this administration, we have just as much unemployment as when we started and an enormous debt to boot.
Mr. Speaker, let us heed the lessons of history before we totally destroy our economy. Perpetual unemployment checks put these desperate families farther and farther away from the only thing that can truly end their suffering--a real job. That is a fact nobody around here wants to face, but until we do, chronic unemployment will continue to stalk the land, and God forbid, a few years from now, another Democratic Treasury Secretary will have to make the same admission as Henry Morgenthau did 71 years ago.
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