American Jobs And Closing Tax Loopholes Act Of 2010

Floor Speech

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Mr. MERKLEY. Mr. President, during the debate, I had a chance to sit in the chair for a while and listen to one of my colleagues from across the aisle. In the space of just a short period of time, that colleague turned this into a debate about courage, about integrity, about character, and about easy versus hard choices. In other words, he took all of his time to use attacks on those who do not share his version of economic policy and where our country should go. Rather than making the arguments, he made the personal attacks.

He also said something that struck me as right-on, which is that often when people are using personal attacks, they are trying to camouflage and only give half the story and trying to set up a straw man. That is certainly accurate.

What is the real debate we are having on the floor? Well, on one side, there is the argument--an argument I would weigh in favor of--that says we need to put this economy back on track, put families to work, and that it is through jobs for American families, and that we will restore the financial foundations not only of families but of our communities and of our Nation as a whole.

There are certain key things we can do now to accomplish that. Those things include helping our school districts create a bridge through this recession so we don't see thousands of teachers being laid off. There is a provision to assist our school districts in the Defense supplemental bill we will have in the Senate in the near future.

Second, we can assist families who are unemployed through no fault of their own and help them create a bridge through this recession.

Third, we can help our small businesses create jobs because there is a dysfunction right now in which our community banks that best understand Main Street are at their leverage limits and therefore cannot make additional loans. Indeed, the Chairman of the Federal Reserve was speaking to this challenge in the Capitol just an hour ago--the systemic dysfunction in which capital is hung up and unavailable to our small businesses. It is our small businesses that, by utilizing that capital, can seize economic opportunity and put people back to work. It is a good strategy to enable those funds to be available to small businesses and help recapitalize community banks. It makes money for the Treasury. The CBO estimated it will make $1 billion for the Treasury. It does it by enabling $300 billion in liquidity to small businesses. The CBO estimate of the funds that come back to the Treasury doesn't include the revenue created by families who are put back to work and pay income taxes or by small businesses that are more successful and pay more in business taxes.

So it is a win-win. We create a path by supporting our States through funds for education, and we create a path through this recession by helping families who are unemployed because the economy is in such a mess. We create a path out of this recession by creating jobs for American families by supporting our small businesses through our community banks. That is one version of how we can go forward.

My colleague across the aisle has a different version. The different version is--and this is the leadership of the Republican side that has been talking about this all this week. Their version is, no, instead of helping families, small businesses, and schools, we want to extend the Bush tax cuts to the wealthiest Americans. That is the path out of this recession, say my colleagues across the aisle.

There is a fundamental difference of economic strategy involved. What is striking to me is that we have a lot of information about the strategy being proposed by my colleagues across the aisle because this was the Bush Presidency strategy. We tried it. We found out that when you give away the National Treasury to the wealthiest Americans, you drive this Nation into debt. In fact, under the Bush administration, we doubled our national debt.

Under the very idea and plan for which my colleagues across the aisle are advocating, we drove this Nation's economy into the ground. To counteract that, the Bush administration said: Let's deregulate the banks and Wall Street and make everything move a little faster, and maybe consumers will spend a little more and banks will take more risk, and we will take away all the lane markers and the traffic signals in our financial system, and, by golly, somehow we will make this economy flourish.

Do you know what. They built a house of cards. It was a house of cards built on predatory mortgages and the securitization of those mortgages, with extraordinary leverage of up to 40 to 1 under that deregulation. That house of cards came down, and that house crashed on the American family, and that American family lost their savings for retirement. Families in my State lost their jobs, and the unemployment rate is huge. The families lost the health care that went with their jobs. Well, that is not a very pretty picture. But my colleagues, who brought us that Bush economic nightmare that crashed on the heads of the American families, are coming to this floor and saying: We want more of the same.

Earlier, my colleague across the aisle characterized that strategy as the ``tough'' choice, while he characterized the strategy of helping American families and small businesses and schools as an ``easy'' choice. Well, let's try to set these pejoratives or characterizations aside and just say that they are different choices--one, the revival of the Bush strategy, which is something like the summer sequel to a cheap horror story that wrecks the economy of the United States. That strategy is sitting as a potential idea and threat to our Nation.

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Mr. MERKLEY. Mr. President, I note that there are a couple of issues raised that really are false issues. One is in regard to the debt. My colleagues across the aisle are proposing a massive increase of the debt by extending the Bush tax cuts, and they are saying that helping those who are unemployed through no fault of their own is an increase to the debt. This is coming from the same folks who brought us the Bush policy, the ones who doubled our national debt during the Bush administration and created the house of cards that crashed down upon the American families over the last 2 years.

So it is not about debt. When it comes to our children--and I hate to see the abuse of this argument--sound economic policy is the right thing. If we put families to work, those families are far healthier, those families have a foundation, they have a future, and they recognize there is a horizon that is brighter. They recognize they will be able to move forward to create opportunity for their children. That is the foundation of a successful family. But giveaways to the wealthiest at the expense of helping families is wrong for our children. If you don't put people back to work, you don't create an economic revival, you don't create revenues in the Treasury, and therefore you don't create the ability to pay down that debt.

So do we want the Bush policy 2, the nightmare that doubled our debt, or do we want the investment in families and education that we had under the Clinton administration and that we have under the Obama administration, which will put money back into the Treasury? I think the choice is clear: Let's shore up small businesses and our families, let's shore up education, let's put this economy back on track, and let's put people to work, and in so doing we will address and resolve the issue of the deficit.

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