Unemployment Compensation Extension Act of 2010

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Ms. KAPTUR. I thank the kind chairman, Mr. McDermott, for yielding me the 2 minutes.

Sometimes when they say gentlewoman, I don't feel so gentle on the subject of unemployment. And in fact, I rise in strong support of this bill, which is long overdue because of the delays in the other Chamber. And I want to thank Chairman McDermott for his extraordinary leadership and our Speaker for bringing this bill forward.

All the economic studies show that in fact direct consumer spending that results from the expenditure of unemployment checks on basics--paying for food, paying your mortgage so you don't lose your home, making your car payment on that old jalopy you use to go to work--that, in fact, this creates the largest bang inside our economy to move it up than any investment we can make other than in infrastructure investment, where we are employing people building bridges, building roads, some of the things that people on the other side of the aisle are making fun of.

It's no fun to go over a bridge that collapses. We saw that in Minnesota. These are issues that in a great Nation you take care of. In Ohio, we need unemployment compensation right now. We're one of the platforms that manufactures and grows jobs immediately to hold this country up. And our people, 100,000 of them, still remain out of work and utterly dependent on these benefits. They will be affected directly by the extension of these benefits. Indeed, Ohio has a total of between 600,000 and a million people who are unemployed, working in part-time jobs, or they have fallen out of the workforce through no fault of their own.

The Obama administration will have created more jobs by the end of August than the Bush administration did in the whole 8 years that it sat in office and did nothing except create more war and more unemployment and more outsourcing of jobs. I find my colleagues on the other side of the aisle out of touch--I can't even explain them. We don't live in the same world.

I respect people who go to work every day. I respect those who get injured on the job. I respect those farmers who are out in the fields right now harvesting crops. I respect those who work for them. I respect the people who work in our auto plants. I respect the people working in hundred-degree weather up on bridges around my district right now trying to fix things up and hold things together until a better day comes.

So the least we can do is return to them the money they already paid in, that their employers already paid in, that they already earned. They earned it. I say to the gentleman I support this bill a thousand percent. Ohioans are waiting for their unemployment checks. But most of all, they want to go back to work.

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