Well, your point, to my friend from California, is that manufacturing matters and having jobs in America matters, that, you know, if we make it in America, we will make it in America. Our focus should be on providing good jobs here with…
Well, your point, to my friend from California, is that manufacturing matters and having jobs in America matters, that, you know, if we make it in America, we will make it in America. Our focus should be on providing good jobs here with good infrastructure, whether that's education, highways, transit, energy, in this country so that, for ourselves, our kids, our grandkids, there's a prosperous future.
But the Republicans completely missed that entire approach, and I liken it to this. Everybody says let's look at this as if it's family and a family has to tighten its belt sometime. No question about it, but let's really look at what's occurred here and talk about the country as a family, because we are all in this together. You know, sometimes we can do something by ourselves, but most of the time we're in this together.
So what's happened here, let's look at it, is at the beginning of this century, back in 2001, 2002, the country took a voluntary pay cut. When the tax cuts under Bush came down, the country took a voluntary pay cut. So then the next thing that happens is, besides taking a voluntary pay cut, that family or that person goes out and he builds two houses. We went to war twice in the Middle East to the tune of who knows how much money, but at least $1 trillion. So now we've taken a pay cut. We are building two houses----
Which are two wars, and all of a sudden the breadwinner has a heart attack. And that's what happened in the fall of 2008 when we had the financial crash. So no income or lower income and lots of hospital bills. And those hospital bills came in the form of unemployment insurance, COBRA for health insurance, and all sorts of things designed to keep the country moving forward despite the financial crash.
So now, just as the person begins to recover, the breadwinner recovers from the heart attack and is starting to earn a salary again. Hospital bills start dropping, but you still have hospital bills to pay. My friends on the Republican side of the aisle said, Wait a second. We should pay them all right now.
No question that they have to be paid, but you've also got to get healthy. And just as we're starting to add jobs in this country, just as people are starting to get back to work, my friends on the Republican side of the aisle want to blame the debt of this country not on the voluntary pay cut, the tax cuts, not on the two wars, not on the financial crash. They want to blame it on Head Start. They want to blame it on energy efficiency. They want to blame it on education.
Those are the kinds of things that make the patients stronger and healthier and this Nation stronger and healthier so that we can have jobs here, so that we can build things here, so that we can have a prosperous future for ourselves and our kids.
And my friends on the Republican side of the aisle are so misdirected on this that it's scary, and Americans should really sit up and take notice that their future is really being put to the test by the approach that the Republicans want to take to balancing our budget and to building our future.
With that, I would return the conversation to my friend from California.
And to that point, the financial heart attack that this country suffered and the world suffered, now the country starts to get back on its feet. Under Barack Obama, on March 9 of 2009, 2 years ago, the President had been in office for 1 month, we hit the bottom of the stock market. It had fallen some 6,000 points in the last months of George Bush. Since President Obama came into office, the stock market has gained 6,000 points. Almost 2 years ago to the day, the stock market reversed itself under his leadership.
Now, part of that is we put some police back on Wall Street, not in an excessive way, but in a way to make sure that investors and people dealing with the financial industry were getting a fair shake. And confidence has been restored to some degree in the financial industry.
Now my Republican friends, that's another place they want to cut. Let's take the cops back off the beat both on Wall Street as well as all across the country. Again, a very wrong-headed move to build the future of this Nation.
I would like to do just one other family analogy if I could. So we've had this tremendous fall. The family has got to manage its expenses. It needs to get its income up, and it needs to manage the expense side. So what we have is, say, okay, we got Aunt Maude, she's in a nursing home. We've got Nephew Joey, he's in a preschool down the street, and we've got Uncle Rex who is an oil company executive. And we've been helping all of them. We've been helping Aunt Maude. We've been helping Nephew Joey. And we've been helping Uncle Rex.
Well, under the Republican approach, they want to kick Aunt Maude out of the nursing home. They want to make sure there's no preschool for Nephew Joey, but they want to keep sending the check to Uncle Rex.
We're all in this together. If we want to manage this deficit, if we want to pay down the debt, we are all in this together. And the approach that they've taken just doesn't make sense.
Nephew Joey.
Uncle Rex.
Would the gentleman yield?
So I just say to my friend from California, just going back to my analogy, or my metaphor, of voluntary pay cut and then all of a sudden you're building two houses after you just took a voluntary pay cut, being the two wars, but the good news, but there still is much work to go, is that the war in Iraq, we had 150,000 people there. Under the Obama administration, that's been drawn down to about 50 and is shrinking, we're saving already $100 billion a year there alone. Obviously, you've got to look at Afghanistan and a continued drawdown because that's money that could go towards not increasing the debt, but ultimately reducing the debt.
The other thing is that the best way to shrink the deficit, just in that same analogy I was giving, is to put people back to work. The more people that are working, the better off we are. We are in this together. That's the whole point of this. This country's motto is ``e pluribus unum,'' from many one. We're in this together. Big guys, those guys making a lot of money, God bless them. The little guys who are working their fannies off, God bless them. We are in this together. And the only way we deal with problems in this Nation is when we deal with them together.
And this country is a great Nation. We will solve these problems. There will always be problems in the future, and we just take them one at a time as they come. We can do this. We will do
this. We will have a prosperous future for all of us. But we've got some work to do right now.
And my plea to my friends on the Republican side of the aisle is don't cut off the Nation's nose to spite its face. We can take care of these responsibilities and pay these bills. That's what America does. It pays its bills. We need to do it in a sensible way and not cut out the future and the opportunity that so many Americans get from their education, from the infrastructure that needs to be rebuilt, and from making things here in this country.
Would the gentleman yield one more time?
On that point, you raise a great point. Here we are finally making some real progress on energy efficiency and renewable energy, and we know that you have to have the whole menu of ways to power this country. It's oil and gas; it's going to be carbon-based fuels; it's going to be nuclear; it's going to be renewable energy and energy efficiency. But under my Republican colleagues' plans, we are going to go right back to where we were as we start to see gasoline starting to go through the roof. So we are always going to be at the whim of importing oil.
I mean, I feel like sometimes my friends on the Republican side of the aisle, their mantra is: Let's export jobs and import oil. It's just wrong. It's wrong for this Nation. It's wrong for the future, for our future, and for our kids. We really have to be focusing on that. This Nation needs to come together because we can build that better future together and not just doing some of the I think knee-jerk things that the Republican Party has requested of the Congress. It is bad for America. It goes way too far, and I know we can do better.