Tax Relief, Unemployment Insurance Reauthorization, and Job Creation Act of 2010

Floor Speech

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Mr. WELCH. We have been awarded 45 minutes to state our objections to this bill. And it is essentially this: Too much debt, too few jobs, too much risk to Social Security.

Our lead speaker is the member from Illinois (Mr. Jackson).

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Mr. WELCH. Mr. Chairman, with all the back and forth, what we really have before us are two problems facing America.

One is too few jobs: 9.8 percent of Americans who want work are out of work--15 million people. Millions more are so discouraged that they are the underemployed. We have got to find a way to put them back to work.

The second problem we have is too much debt. Without going into the history of how we went from a record surplus to a record deficit, we went from the Clinton tax rates to the Bush tax rates. We went from a surplus of 20 million jobs created to 8 million jobs lost. We have a debt now that is approaching $14 trillion, and with the passage of this bill, we will be approaching $15 trillion.

The question for us to the American people is:

If we are going to borrow a dollar for any reason, will there be a job bang for that dollar borrowed?

That dollar borrowed is coming from China. What this legislation will do is literally ask the American middle class to borrow $200 billion to pay for tax cuts for the wealthiest families. This is not an objection to people being wealthy, as has been said. They can be generous, and they can create jobs. It is about whether that dollar borrowed will produce a job for an out-of-work American--and it won't.

There are other alternatives to what is before us. We should not be borrowing money that won't be productive. What we should do is a very simple alternative that hasn't even been considered:

We can extend the middle class tax cuts, as President Obama wants to, but we can stop it at $250,000. We can invest the savings in deficit reduction and half in infrastructure development. We can, as Mr. Frank said, provide a $250 one-time payment to the folks on Social Security, who haven't had a COLA increase in 2 years. We can have a piece of legislation that will borrow less, reduce the deficit, and create more jobs.

Our responsibility, fundamentally, is to the American middle class. One of the reasons they so fear this debt is because they know, at the end of the day, they will have to repay it--their sons, their daughters. The bondholders will be okay, but the middle class will pay.

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