Homeowner Flood Insurance Affordability Act of 2013 -- Motion to Proceed

Floor Speech

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Mr. THUNE. Madam President, tonight the President of the United States will come before the Congress and make his State of the Union Address. That is an annual ritual we go through around here every year, and I have been through State of the Union speeches through multiple administrations. I sort of liken them to somebody making New Year's resolutions at the beginning of the new year, filled with lots of rhetoric and promises, most of which get left on the cutting-room floor when the speech concludes. But that being said, it is something that gives the President an opportunity to lay out his agenda for the coming year.

Rumor has it that this year the President's speech is going to focus on income inequality and economic opportunity. Well, that is good to hear because these last 5 years of the Obama administration have been devastating to Americans who are trying to advance economically.

Nobody can deny that the President inherited a difficult economic situation. I think we would all concede that at the very outset. But he has had now 5 years, going on 6, to make things better. Unfortunately, he has not made much progress.

For the majority of Americans, things do not look much better today than they did 5 years ago. The economy still is not working; unemployment remains at historic recession-level highs; income inequality is at the highest point literally in 86 years; household income has dropped by nearly $4,000 since the President took office.

I would like to quote from a piece that was published on Sunday. It said this:

The last five years have been cataclysmic. ..... The average income of the top 1 percent of earners increased about 31.4 percent from 2009 to 2012, while wages for the other 99 percent essentially stood still. The proportion of economic gains going to the very wealthy under the Obama administration is greater than it was under Mr. Bush.

Those are not Republican talking points. That is from a column published in the New York Times. The column goes on to state:

The rich-poor gap in the United States is now greater than in any other industrialized country. Upward mobility, a staple of the American Dream, is eroding compared with more than a few nations.

That again is from the New York Times.

Whether the author intended it that way, it is a pretty damning indictment of the economic policies of the past 5 years.

So I am glad to hear that the President is planning to focus on income inequality and economic opportunity tonight. These statistics make it very clear just how important it is we have that discussion right now. And they also make it clear we cannot continue the economic policies of the past 5 years because these policies have clearly failed.

The President has tried throwing taxpayer money at the problem--witness the failed trillion-dollar stimulus bill. He has tried economic bandaids that attempt to alleviate some of the symptoms of economic stagnation without doing anything to address the cause. Neither of those strategies has been successful in doing the one thing that will turn our economy around; that is, creating full-time, well-paying jobs for the American people.

Extending unemployment benefits or offering food stamps may provide short-term relief, but no government assistance is going to provide a stable, secure, prosperous future like a good job will. Real long-term economic security and prosperity comes when families have access to stable well-paying jobs, with the potential for advancement.

If we really want to help Americans, if we really want to get our economy growing, that is where our focus needs to be: creating the kind of environment where job creation can flourish. That means making it easier and less expensive for businesses--particularly small businesses, which create a majority of the jobs in this country--to expand and hire new workers.

Unfortunately, the President has spent much of his Presidency making it more difficult. ObamaCare, for example, saddled businesses with a host of new taxes and regulations that have made it difficult or in some cases impossible for businesses to hire new employees.

CBS reported in December that--and I quote--``Nearly half of U.S. companies said they are reluctant to hire full-time employees because of the [ObamaCare] law.'' That is not how you want businesses to feel if you are looking to encourage them to grow and create jobs.

So I am hoping that this evening the President will turn away from the policies that have made nearly half of U.S. companies too worried to hire new full-time employees and turn toward policies that will enable real job creation in our economy.

According to his advisors, the President wants 2014 to be a year of action. Republicans could not agree more, and there are a number of actions we think the President can take, and I hope he will announce them tonight.

One thing Republicans and Democrats agree on, and would like the President to do, is grant immediate approval of the Keystone pipeline. According to the President's own State Department, the Keystone pipeline would support 42,000 jobs that would provide $2 billion--$2 billion--in wages and earnings without taxpayers having to spend a dime. All that is required for the creation of these jobs is the President's approval, which he has inexplicably delayed now for 5 years, despite numerous reports testifying to the benefits of the project and its low environmental impact.

The President's staff has spent a lot of time over the last week talking about the President's intention of acting without Congress when Congress disagrees with him. Well, here is something the President can legitimately do unilaterally. He has the authority to open the door to these 42,000 jobs, and I hope this evening he will announce his intention of acting on approval of the Keystone pipeline.

Another thing I hope the President will do tonight is encourage the majority leader to take up dozens of jobs bills that have been passed by the House of Representatives. Many of these bills passed the House with bipartisan support and could pass the Senate the same way. There is no good reason why the majority leader has decided to let them languish. Surely we could take up a few of those bills. The President ought to call on his party to pass these bills to get Americans back to work.

In the same spirit, I hope the President will call on his party in the Senate to approve trade promotion authority legislation, which would help create U.S. jobs by giving farmers, ranchers, entrepreneurs, and job creators in this country access to 1 billion new consumers around the globe.

Republicans hope the President will use that phone of his that he keeps talking about to call the majority leader here in the Senate and encourage him to pass trade promotion authority as soon as possible.

Of course, no discussion of relief for middle-class Americans and job creators is complete without discussing ObamaCare, which is putting an intolerable burden on middle-class families and small businesses.

I am not very hopeful that the President is going to announce his intention tonight of working with Congress to repair some of the worst parts of his signature law, but for all Americans' sake, I hope he does.

Around the country, families are reeling under the impact of ObamaCare: higher insurance premiums, higher out-of-pocket costs, reduced access to doctors and hospitals. Meanwhile, businesses are cutting workers' hours, eliminating health care plans, or declining to expand their businesses to protect themselves from ObamaCare's burdensome taxes and regulations.

There is bipartisan support for more than one change to ObamaCare, and there is particularly strong support for repealing the job-killing medical device tax, which is forcing medical device companies to send American jobs overseas.

In March of last year, the Senate voted 79 to 20--79 to 20--against the tax. More than 30 Democrats voted for repeal. If the President is really serious about putting Americans back to work, he will announce his intention of working with Congress to repeal this job-destroying portion of his legislation.

Last month almost 350,000 Americans gave up looking for jobs and dropped out of the labor force altogether. That is 350,000 Americans in 1 month--1 month--who gave up looking for a job.

The labor force participation rate is at its lowest level in 36 years. More than 10 million Americans are looking for work, and nearly 4 million of them have been unemployed for more than 6 months. In fact, if you had the labor participation rate today that we had when the President took office, the unemployment rate today would be about 11 percent.

It is definitely--it is definitely--time for a year of action. It is time to leave behind the economic bandaids of the past 5 years and focus on policies that will not address just the symptoms but the cause of our weak economic growth.

We need to remove the obstacles facing our Nation's job creators so that struggling Americans can finally get back to work. We need to help create a future where every American has the opportunity for a well-paying, full-time job, with the possibility of advancement. You are not going to see that as long as the policies coming out of Washington, DC, and this administration make it more expensive and more difficult to create jobs for the American people.

And you are not going to do anything about income inequality if you drive people's cost of living higher, which is what ObamaCare's premium increases, higher out-of-pocket increases, energy-cost increases--there are new regulations coming out today that are going to put new requirements and regulations on existing coal-fired powerplants that are going to drive electricity costs through the roof for people whom I represent in South Dakota.

Fifty percent of the electricity in South Dakota comes from coal-fired power. We are told the administration is coming out with regulations that are going to apply those same things that apply to new plants to existing coal-fired power. So you are going to have not only new plants that are going to be prevented from being constructed but those that are existing that are going to have to modify their plants at enormous cost, in many cases with technologies that do not exist. All that does is put people out of work and makes it more expensive for middle-class Americans to make ends meet.

If you want to do something about income inequality, provide good-paying jobs for middle-class families in this country. Put policies in place that make it less expensive, less difficult to create those jobs, and then drive down the cost for middle-class Americans rather than raising them--rather than having higher energy costs, higher health care costs, higher this, higher that, all because of policies coming out of Washington.

We can do better. The President has not always shown his eagerness to work with Congress in the past. I am told that tonight he is going to talk about all the things he can do unilaterally. I hope that tonight's State of the Union Address will mark a new start. Republicans are ready to get to work. I hope the President is too. I yield the floor.

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