Full-Year Continuing Appropriations Act, 2011
Floor Speech
BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT
Mr. President, this debate today is all about jobs. The House Republican budget which we will soon be voting on in this body will destroy 700,000 American jobs. That is the estimate put forward by Mark Zandi, who advised John McCain's Presidential campaign and now works for the nonpartisan Moody's Group.
That sort of estimate is not just a voice in the wilderness, it is repeated by major group after major group. Ben Bernanke, Chairman of the Fed, said last week the plan would cost ``a couple hundred thousand jobs.'' Goldman Sachs analyst Alec Phillips put forth an estimate that said ``this House job-killing plan will reduce, in the second and third quarters of the next year, the economy of the United States by 1.5 to 2 percentage points.''
What is 2 percent of a $15 trillion economy? It is $300 billion.
Whether you view it in terms of the gross domestic product or you view it in terms of the number of jobs of Americans taken away by the job-killing Republican plan, this bill, H.R. 1, that we will be voting on later today, is a disaster.
I want us to focus on this number because I can tell you, folks back home in Oregon want to create jobs. They want us to put America back to work. They don't want to have a plan put forward that continues to pay enormous bonuses to the billionaires of Wall Street and creates enormous special tax bonuses for the billionaires who are making their tax returns while taking out this huge economic meltdown on working people.
Let's review how this all came to pass. You will recall that during the second Bush administration there was a plan to launch two foreign wars and not pay for them, and then proceed to create Medicare Part D and not pay for it, and then to give bonus tax breaks to millionaires and billionaires and not pay for it, and reverse an enormous annual surplus and turn it into an enormous annual deficit and, in the process, produce a very tiny, modest expansion, in which working people actually lost ground. That expansion all went to the very top.
That was just the beginning, before my colleagues across the aisle decided they are going to deregulate retail mortgages in order to ramp up predatory mortgages, produce a huge balloon in the real estate market, deregulate Wall Street so they could proceed to securitize those mortgages and have those blow up in financial institutions across America and have the economy melt down in 2008-2009. That is how we got where we are right now.
Rather than take on a plan that creates jobs in America, the plan is to eliminate 700,000 jobs across this country.
Let's be clear. There is a tremendous amount we can do to reduce the deficit. A plan was put forward a few weeks ago in which we get rid of those bonus breaks for those who are in the top 2 percent of this country. It saves about $250 billion a year in real hard cash. The plan has been put forward to get rid of the tax breaks for the oil and gas industry which was doing very well and is doing even better now with the oil market speculators driving it up to over $100 a barrel. These things actually close the deficit. They do not destroy the economy. They actually create the sort of plan that can create jobs across this Nation and put people back to work and invest in the future of our Nation rather than saying--after we blew up the economy--let's make working people do even worse.
I am going to summarize by saying embedded in H.R. 1 is attack after attack. For example, taking on preventive health care, preventive health care for women across this country by taking out title X.
How about the attack on homeless veterans? I go throughout my State and folks say: A lot of our sons and daughters are coming home from Iraq and Afghanistan and we need to support them in the transition back home. It is very difficult, there is a lot of post-traumatic stress. Instead of supporting them, my colleagues across the aisle have produced a plan that says let's take away that support for housing for the homeless, housing for veterans.
I could go on because the list is so long and the attacks are so many. But that option, while it does only a modest amount in the short term to affect the deficit, proceeds to have devastating results on the economy. And what will happen when the economy will collapse again, a double-dip recession courtesy of H.R. 1? Then the debt goes back up, so it is a loss on both fronts. We need a responsible plan to reduce the deficit, not a plan to bomb the economy on the heads of our working Americans.
BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT
Source