Conference Report on H.R. 3630, Middle Class Tax Relief and Job Creation Act of 2012
Floor Speech
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Mr. HOYER. Madam Speaker, I yield myself 5 minutes.
I have taken the unusual process of claiming time in opposition to this bill. I have done so so I would have sufficient time to place in context the bill that we're considering. I do not rise to necessarily defeat this bill. I'm going to vote against this bill. I'm for almost all of this bill. What we are funding this bill with was unnecessary, unfair, and ought to be rejected.
I want to say at the outset that my friend Mr. Camp and I had a very positive discussion. I believe that Mr. Camp and I could have reached an agreement, which would have put me in support of this legislation. We didn't get there. We tried late in the game, and we didn't get there. I regret that. I think Mr. Camp tried.
I know that everybody on my side would have supported the agreement that Mr. Van Hollen and I put forward. That agreement would say, as the current agreement, that the only individuals paying for this bill out of 315 million Americans are the 2 million civilian workers who work for us, who work for all of us, who day after day, week after week, month after month make sure that we give services to the people of the United States, protect the United States, ensure that our food is safe, ensure that we have FBI agents on the job, make sure that at the Defense Intelligence Agency we know what other people are doing. These are all our civilian employees, highly skilled, highly trained, highly educated, and, yes, highly motivated. Every day they give outstanding service to the people of the United States. We talk here and we pass laws here, but none of that talk and none of those laws makes a difference unless somebody implements what we say and the policies that we set.
This Congress is on the path to being the most anti-Federal worker Congress that I've served in. I'm going to place that in context for you, which is why I wanted the time.
What is the context we find ourselves in? First of all, we have a very struggling economy. The good news is the economy is coming back, but not fast enough. We need to create more jobs, expand opportunities, and make sure that the American Dream is alive for all working Americans, working Americans like our Federal employees, working Americans like the folks at GM who have just done very well, working Americans who work in the hardware store, the grocery store, the gasoline station, hardworking Americans. And we don't have enough jobs for them. As a result, we have high unemployment.
I congratulate my friend from Michigan (Mr. Levin) for his leadership in making sure that the unemployment provision in this bill is sufficient to try to reach those folks and make sure they don't fall off the ledge. We walked away from them in December. I'm glad that we're not walking away from them today.
We also have, as all of us know, a struggling economy; and, therefore, we put into effect giving $1,000 more to each and every worker. Now, many of your leaders did not support this 2 percent reduction, and I understand that. I won't go into their names. Some are in the Chamber. But the fact of the matter is, it puts an additional $1,000 into average working Americans' pockets--people who pay FICA, that is, people who are making less than $106,000. That's an important thing for us to do to try to keep this economy growing. I'm for that. I was for it in December. I'm for it in February. I'm glad that we're going to have consensus on that today.
In addition to that, we are playing a silly little game with the doctors and with Medicare patients; and this silly little game pretends that we're going to extend SGR for 10 months. That's baloney, and everybody knows it. We're going to continue to extend SGR over and over and over again. We should have done it permanently in this bill. We should have done it last year and in the last Congress, the Congress in which I was the majority leader. We should have done that.
The SPEAKER pro tempore. The time of the gentleman has expired.
Mr. HOYER. I yield myself 2 additional minutes.
So with respect to SGR, ladies and gentlemen, we're playing a game, and the doctors all over this country and the Medicare recipients all over this country know we're playing a game. We're giving them no certainty, no confidence that, come this September, October, November, we won't have another one of these silly little debates.
Now we also, in that context, have a deep deficit and debt that confronts this Nation that we have to deal with. And we had two commissions that said we had to deal with it. One was Bowles-Simpson--my friend from California (Mr. Becerra), who sits in the Chamber here with me, sat on that commission--the other was Domenici-Rivlin. And we've had others, including the Gang of Six in the United States Senate. And all of them had as a premise that we needed to deal with the fiscal problem that confronts us. And the other premise was all of us need to contribute to that solution. All of us.
Now what do we see that's being proposed in this Congress, partially in this bill, but only partially in this bill? We have either on the floor proposed or passed over the last 2 years--listen to this, ladies and gentlemen--we are about to cut or propose to cut $134 billion out of our Federal employees over the next 10 years. Nobody else in this bill--not a millionaire, not a billionaire, not a carried-interest beneficiary, not an oil company--nobody in this bill, other than Federal employees, is asked to pay.
I understand we have hospital cuts. By the way, how do we have $5 billion of that? Because we just increased by 1 year the cut that they know they got. It's the same for some other things. No individual, other than a Federal employee, is asked to take a cut in this bill.
The SPEAKER pro tempore. The time of the gentleman has again expired.
Mr. HOYER. I yield myself 2 additional minutes.
Now, you will say to me, Oh, it's future Federal employees, so it doesn't really matter. That's $15 billion of the $134 billion that has been proposed. They've already paid $60 billion, $60 billion. And by the way, your side of the aisle is not going to give them that 0.5 percent that the President asked for, so that will be $30 billion. So in 3 years--Mr. and Mrs. America ought to know, Madam Speaker--Federal employees will have paid $90 billion in contributions to help bring this deficit down. And by the way, Federal employees, as a percentage of our population, are down by a third over the last 20 years. It's not that the bureaucracy has grown. Yes, our population has grown. We are trying to serve them. They are down by a third in numbers.
Now, I know something about Federal employee pay. I represent 60,000 Federal employees. And you could say, Well, Hoyer is up there defending his people. You would be right. You would be very right. But most of the Federal employees don't live in the Washington metropolitan area. They live in your districts, all over this country, serving your farmers, serving your drugstores, serving everything that you do.
Do I think it's the private sector that makes this country great? Absolutely. Do I believe they need an energized, high-morale, highly educated Federal workforce as their partner? I do. And you will not have that, ladies and gentlemen, if we keep along this path of every time we come to a bill that's a little bit of trouble, the pay-for is to reach into the Federal employees' pockets. They're pretty much going to say, I'm not with you any longer.
And I want to tell you: in terms of recruiting and retaining, you will not do it. Forty percent of the Federal workforce, ladies and gentlemen, can retire in the next 5 years.
The SPEAKER pro tempore. The time of the gentleman has again expired.
Mr. HOYER. I yield myself 1 additional minute.
Ladies and gentlemen, you are going to be able to recruit those folks only if you have a competitive workforce.
Let me give you a figure that you might find interesting. There are 33,300 employees at Goldman Sachs. Average salary, ladies and gentlemen: $367,057, the average salary of 33,300 people. You won't be able to compete. You won't be able to get NSA employees, as opposed to Siemens or Microsoft or some of those other corporations, many of which are in Ms. Eshoo's district. You won't be able to recruit them, and you won't retain them to have the best and the brightest defending America and making America the strongest and greatest country on Earth. Do you want America to be an exceptional country? Then you'd better have the best civil service on Earth, as well as the best private sector.
The SPEAKER pro tempore. The time of the gentleman has again expired.
Mr. HOYER. I yield myself 1 additional minute.
Ladies and gentlemen, I don't know whether most of you know this. I saw a gentleman from Florida who's been here for a couple of months pontificate that I didn't know anything outside of the Beltway.
I was the sponsor of the Federal Employee Pay Comparability Act. And George Bush Sr. signed that act, and we worked with his OMB to get it. And what does it say? Federal employees cannot get a raise unless the private sector gets a raise. We're precluded from getting a raise unless the private sector gets a raise. And what does it further say? That the private sector--which is the economic cost index, by the way, in case you want to know exactly what the statistic is--says, we're going to take a half a point less.
So what have you done in this bill, unnecessarily? Because you're going to freeze their salary for a third year in a row. Bowles-Simpson said do it for three. But Bowles-Simpson said, Everybody ought to share, everybody. We ought to get $1 trillion in revenues, $1 trillion in cuts. Everybody.
The SPEAKER pro tempore. The time of the gentleman has again expired.
Mr. HOYER. I yield myself 1 additional minute.
But nobody but Federal employees, nobody is targeted in this bill other than Federal employees. You can tell I'm angry about that because that's not fair, and that's not how you ought to treat our employees, America's employees. America's public servants, we call them. We ought to stop dissing them. We ought to stop demagoguing them. We ought to stop using ``bureaucrat'' as an epithet. America needs them.
I will have some other things to say in a few minutes, Madam Speaker. But we ought not walk away from our Federal employees any more than we ought to walk away from those 160 million people who need this tax cut or walk away from those 2.4 million who need that unemployment insurance or walk away, as we have, from the doctors who need certainty, long term--not for 10 months, but long term.
I reserve the balance of my time.
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Mr. HOYER. I thank my friend the Speaker. I'm glad that he's in the chair. He and I have worked together because we understand what needs to be done in order to meet the fiscal crisis that confronts our country. All of us need to participate--not just our Federal employees, but all of us.
In the short term, we need to do what this bill does:
160 million people will get an extra thousand dollars that hopefully will help build our economy, create jobs, and expand opportunity for our people;
The unemployed will make sure that they've had that safety net that is critical for them and their families;
The doctors will have a short period of time to have some confidence that they will be compensated to serve Medicare patients over the next 10 months.
The only people asked to pay for that, as I said before, are Federal employees. That is why I took this 20 minutes, to say to each and every one of us in this House, first of all, Federal employees ought not to be the piggy bank out of which you pretend that we're going to be able to pay the deficit. That's wrong. It's not been recommended by any of our groups.
I've had the opportunity of working with Mr. Camp, who, in my view, is a very conscientious Member of this body. I'm glad that he's the leader. Actually, I wish Mr. Levin were the leader, because he's of my party. But since my party is not in control, I'm glad that Mr. Camp leads it, a reasonable person.
Ladies and gentlemen of this House, America must know that we all need to contribute. The Federal employee has paid $60 billion over the last 24 months, over the next 10 years already. This year, they will have their pay reduced from what the law requires another $30 billion. That's $90 billion. Forget about this bill. Forget about the highway bill which says $44 billion in additional reduction in benefits. It's $134 billion that's on the table. It hasn't passed, but it's on the table.
Let us, as conscientious Members of this Congress, as representatives of our people, come together and have a plan that does not require nickel-and-diming of Federal employees, nickel-and-diming of doctors, nickel-and-diming of Medicare patients, and nickel-and-diming of America. Let us come together and do what America knows what needs to be done.
I yield back the balance of my time.
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