This Recession--and Yes, for Many it is Still a Depression--It's Still Hurting So Many, Many People
Floor Speech
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Mr. HUIZENGA of Michigan. Thank you, Chairman Camp, I appreciate that.
I'm a little confused myself. I saw one of our Senate colleagues from New York on television this morning talking about how we needed to pass this 2-month extension, and he would be the first one on an airplane back to Washington, DC., so that we could negotiate a yearlong deal. I'm confused. Why don't we just do that right now. That's what the American people expect. The American people expect us to get this deal done right now and to provide them some certainty for an entire year versus 2 months.
Now, this Monday morning I had a breakfast with my joint Chambers of Commerce in Holland and Zeeland, and we had almost 500 people there. And when I asked the question, who here thinks this 2-month extension is a good idea? Not a single hand went up. I said, okay, maybe I need to ask this a little differently. Who here thinks that this is a dumb idea to do a 2-month extension? Virtually every single hand in that breakfast went up.
The American people are looking for long-term solutions. Employers are looking for long-term solutions. It's called quarterly reports. I'm a small business owner. Oftentimes people have to file quarterly reports. We're not even doing them the service of giving them a full quarter to change their paperwork; we're doing 2 out of 3 months. Now, you want to talk about a burden on small business, I can tell you it is.
It's time for this House to go to work, which we have done. It's time for our Senate colleagues to do the exact same thing. Because guess what? My three employees--Irv, Dirk, and Larry--they're all at work today. Why isn't that good enough for the Senate?
There are two things that fundamentally need to be included in this. First and furthermore is 12 months of certainty. Let's get through that debate of how we are going to offset the costs and how we are going to make sure that this works for the employee, the employer, those with a job and those without a job.
We also need to make sure that we don't lose sight of the Keystone pipeline in here; an immediate 20,000 jobs that can be provided here in the United States, 20,000 jobs that could come to this country and help alleviate the need for these systems, the need for unemployment insurance. And it's the right thing to do.
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