Floor Statements

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate proceed to the consideration of S. Res. 318, which was submitted earlier today.

Mr. President, I further ask that the resolution be agreed to, the motion to reconsider be laid upon the table, with no intervening action or debate, and any statements be printed in the Record.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate now proceed to the consideration of S. Res. 319, which was submitted earlier today.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the resolution be agreed to, the preamble be agreed to, and the motions to reconsider be laid upon the table.

I ask unanimous consent that when the Senate completes its business today, it adjourn until 9:30 a.m. on Thursday, November 10, 2011; that following the prayer and pledge, the Journal of proceedings be approved to date, the morning hour be deemed expired, and the time for the two leaders be reserved for their use later in the day; that following any leader remarks, the Senate be in a period of morning business until 10 a.m., with

Senators permitted to speak therein for up to 10 minutes each, with the time equally divided and controlled between the two leaders or their designees; and that following morning business, the Senate proceed to the consideration of the motion to proceed to S.J. Res. 27, under the previous order.

Mr. President, there will be two rollcall votes around noon tomorrow on motions to proceed to the joint resolutions of disapproval regarding net neutrality and cross-border air pollution.

There will be an additional four rollcall votes around 2:30 p.m. in relation to H.R. 647, the 3 Percent Withholding Repeal and Jobs Act, with the veterans jobs amendment, and the motion to proceed to H.R. 2354, the Energy and Water appropriations bill. Senators should be aware we may get consent to begin the second series of votes earlier.

Mr. President, if there is no further business to come before the Senate, I ask unanimous consent that it adjourn under the previous order.

Mr. President, today I wish to recognize the sesquicentennial of the 17 original counties created by the Colorado Territorial Legislature in 1861. These counties celebrate this significant milestone today, November 1, 2011.

Congress established Colorado Territory on February 28, 1861, and the territory's first legislative assembly convened on September 9, 1861.

The 17 original counties--Arapahoe, Boulder, Clear Creek, Costilla, Douglas, El Paso, Fremont, Gilpin, Guadalupe, shortly thereafter renamed Conejos, Huerfano, Jefferson, Lake, Larimer, Park, Pueblo, Summit, and Weld counties were established by the territorial legislature within the present boundaries of the State of Colorado.

From the snow-covered mountains of Summit County to the farm lands of the San Luis Valley, these original counties established the foundation from which the most beautiful State in our country grew and developed.

Colorado became the 38th State of the Union on August 1, 1876, under President Ulysses S. Grant, and became known as the Centennial State.

Over the past 150 years, counties had their boundaries revised, new counties were created, and some were abolished, and today, the State of Colorado has 64 counties, each one with its own unique history, geography, and cultural heritage.

I take this time today to congratulate Colorado on the 150th anniversary of our State's first 17 counties and to recognize all of Colorado's 64 counties for their vital contributions to our great State.

As we welcome this milestone in the history of Colorado, we can no doubt look forward to another promising and prosperous 150 years.

Mr. President, I have never done this in the 2\1/2\ years I have been in the Senate. I have not been here a long time, and I have spent a lot of time complaining about the way this place works. But I had to come to the floor to implore the Senator from Kentucky to reconsider his objection. I do it not because I have a perspective on this as a Senator; I do it because I had the honor of serving as the superintendent of the public schools in Denver for 4 years of my life and have dedicated years of my life but, more importantly, seen the dedication of the people who are working in our schools.

The Senator speaks of the tragedy of this process. I will tell you what a tragedy is. A tragedy is that only 9 of 100 children living in poverty in this country, in 2011, can expect to get a college degree-- that is a tragedy; the fact that when I became superintendent in the Denver public schools, on the 10th grade math test, there were 33 African-American students proficient on that test and 61 Latinos proficient on that test--the test that, if we are honest with ourselves, which we are not, measures a junior high school standard of mathematical proficiency in Europe. That is a tragedy. It is a tragedy that there are people working in our schools right now, at 11:15 a.m. in Colorado, doing the best they can to serve our kids, and we think a 2-hour meeting is too long. That is a tragedy.

I would not have drafted the bill exactly the way it has been drafted. The chairman knows that. He and I even have disagreements about some of the things in this bill. But finally, after 2\1/2\ years, there is a bipartisan piece of legislation in front of the committee that is having the benefit of the work of the Senators who are there, and we are told that meeting for 2 hours is too long.

The Senator has every right to make his objection under the Senate rules, which the Presiding Officer has observed may need some updating. But I think if you ask yourself, why is it that we have a 12-percent approval rating, which is going down, it is because of this kind of thing.

I actually look forward to hearing the amendments of the Senator from Kentucky. I wanted to know what they were. As the chairman mentioned, there are 146 amendments that have been filed. I have some I have filed--only three or four. The Senator from Kentucky has 74 of the 140 amendments.

In the 2 hours we met today, we considered three amendments or voted on three. We were debating a Republican amendment, and I was very interested in what Senator Isakson had to say when our meeting came to an end. If we are going to do this in 2-hour increments, my math--I am proficient in math, thank goodness--is that it would take 60 days to do this in 2-hour increments.

Do you know why people are fed up with this place? It is because they do not think the debate we are having is about them. They think the debate we are having is about us. And do you know what. They are right about that.

The teachers all across my State, all across the district I worked in, want us to lift this burden from them--in my view, the biggest Federal overreach ever in domestic policy. That is what the bill does, not for ideological reasons but to help respond to the voices of our teachers, respond to the voices of our superintendents, respond to the voices of our parents who are sick and tired of the almost comical but to them painful measures of annual, yearly progress--the idea that we are going to label all our schools ``failing'' by 2014 because we have a completely made-up accountability standard in Washington, DC.

This bill does away with that. It does not do it in exactly the way I would want to do it, left to my own devices, but it does it in a way that can get bipartisan support in the Senate. I mean this broadly. I am not saying it in this case. When people see the political games that are being played, when they see people who are unwilling to work together, and they are killing themselves to deliver for our kids, I am not sure there is anything more backhanded we could do.

So I would beg the Senator from Kentucky to let us have the hearing, the committee meeting. Let us consider his amendments. I and all the rest--today's conversation was one of the first--I regret saying this-- one of the first substantive conversations I have had in a committee hearing since I have been here.

I thank the chairman and I thank the ranking member for creating a context where that can happen. Let's have the conversation. I would be happy to meet 24 hours a day to talk about this subject with the Senator from Kentucky--24 hours a day, every day. Because if we care about the widening gap between rich and poor in this country, we cannot sustain anything remotely approaching our----

I will in 1 second--anything remotely approaching our claim to be a land of opportunity when 9 out of 100 children born in poverty can graduate with a college degree, when 91 out of 100 children who are unfortunate enough to be born poor are constrained to the margin of our democracy, the margin of our economy. I will stop here.

But to be clear about it, there are 100 seats in the Senate. When I walk into this room, I think about what if the 100 people who were here were children living in poverty in the United States. Here is how many would have a college degree. That chair. That chair. That chair. These four chairs and this one. That is it. The rest of this Chamber would be occupied by people who did not have the benefit of a college degree.

Yes.

I would like to say to the Senator from North Carolina, before he leaves the floor, that I am well aware of his longstanding commitment to education issues and to the kids in this country. I have no doubt of that, and I hope he didn't take anything I said to suggest that. I actually think the two of us probably share a lot of agreement on what we ought to be doing.

My issue is simply--and as I said about the Senator from Kentucky, he has every right to do this--that, as my colleague and other members of the committee, I want to engage in a debate on the bill. I want to consider the amendments of my colleagues and to offer my own.

I am painfully aware, having been in a school system, that Congress was supposed to reauthorize this bill in 2007. It is now 4 years later, and because of our own fecklessness, our own inability to get anything done, every single year teachers and parents and principals keep having to put up with what is the crudest accountability system I could imagine. The only thing cruder than the accountability system was the response of big school districts, such as the one I used to work in, to that accountability as people tried to comply with well-intentioned but incredibly poorly thought-through laws and regulations from Washington, DC. I don't want these schools to have to endure 1 more year of this meaningless accountability, where we are comparing this year's fourth graders to last year's fourth graders and telling ourselves that actually makes a difference.

There is a lot of good work being done in our States right now around standards--elevating them--so we quit fooling ourselves about whether we are meeting international norms when it comes to our kids. There is a lot of great work being done in Colorado and other States that have come along creating a growth model that we--not we but moms and dads and teachers and principals--can actually track how this group of fifth graders did compared to how they did as fourth graders and how they did as third graders and then compare them to similarly situated kids across the country. That makes all the sense in the world compared to what we currently have.

I sat out there in absolute despair wondering why this town was so mean to our teachers and to our kids. Isn't it a bare minimum that the Congress could reauthorize the legislation when they were supposed to-- in 2007? Yet now we find ourselves here.

I thought the Senator from North Carolina was very eloquent this morning and today on the floor as well and I appreciated the points he made. My objection is a narrow one, which is the idea that the right way to approach reauthorizing No Child Left Behind, the right way to approach trying to fix this situation is to create a bunch of procedural barriers that don't allow us to have a substantive discussion about it.

I agree completely with what the Senator from North Carolina said 1 minute ago. There is a reason we have not a 15-percent approval rating but a 12-percent approval rating. There is a reason. I think we should come together in a bipartisan way and reauthorize this bill, get rid of AYP, and do some of the important things in this legislation. Then I hope the Senator would look at one of my amendments, because one of my amendments has his pharmacist in mind, if only we could get to a discussion of the merits of this bill.

I see the Senator from Kentucky has left the floor, but I would just say that my only objective in coming down here today was simply to implore him to withdraw that objection. Knowing it is his right to object, I can't think of why he would do it if he wanted to change the trajectory of the work from the Federal level.

I thank the Senator from North Carolina and the Senator from Minnesota and I yield the floor.

Madam President, I am here today to talk a little bit about the state of our economy. I have spent the summer and early fall traveling around the beautiful State of Colorado, having townhall meetings and listening to people who mostly start the conversations by saying: What is wrong with you people in Washington? Why can't you work together to actually get anything done there?

They are short of slogans these days, and they are desperate for us to turn this economy around. They know what the consequences have been of living in a country that for the first time in its history has had median family income falling, at a time when their cost of health insurance has been skyrocketing, their cost of higher education is going through the roof.

I thought the Wall Street Journal captured this in a way that I have been unable to. In a very vivid way, on the front page a couple weeks ago, there was an article that was entitled: ``As Middle Class Shrinks, P&G''--that is Procter & Gamble--``Aims High and Low.'' That article is about one of the most iconic middle-class brands imaginable, Procter & Gamble.

Ninety-eight percent of the households in this country have a product in their house that is produced by Procter & Gamble: Crest toothpaste, Head & Shoulders shampoo, Tide water detergent, Pampers diapers, Bounty paper towels. The list goes on: Duracell batteries, Mr. Clean, Pepto- Bismol, Pringles potato chips--stuff that did not even exist before there was a middle class in this country to buy it.

That is the great brand of Procter & Gamble, and it is still a great brand. But this article is about how they are changing their business model to reflect the current economic realities and economic realities they believe are actually going to persist for some time.

I will quote from the article, Madam President, which I ask unanimous consent to have printed in the Record.

I quote:

P&G's profits boomed with the increasing affluence of

middle-class households in the post-World War II economy.

The story I was just telling.

The article starts out by saying:

For generations, Procter & Gamble Co.'s growth strategy was

focused on developing household staples for the vast American

middle class.

Now, P&G executives say many of its former middle-market

shoppers are trading down to lower-priced goods--widening the

pools of have and have-not consumers at the expense of the

middle. . . .

P&G isn't the only company adjusting its business. A wide

swath of American companies is convinced that the consumer

market is bifurcating into high and low ends and eroding in

the middle. They have begun to alter the way they research,

develop and market their products.

In other words, they have begun to alter their business plan with the assumption that the middle class is evaporating in this country and that their growth markets are the very richest among us, on the one hand, and the very poorest among us, on the other hand.

Let me close on this part by reading near the end of this story:

To monitor the evolving American consumer market, P&G

executives study the Gini index, a widely accepted measure of

income equality that ranges from zero . . . to one. . . . In

2009, the most recent calculation available, [there was] a

20% rise in income disparity over the past 40 years. . . .

Here is the next quote:

``We now have a Gini index similar to the Philippines and

Mexico--you'd never have imagined that,'' says Phyllis

Jackson, P&G's vice president of consumer market knowledge

for North America. ``I don't think we've typically thought

about America as a country with big income gaps to this

extent.''

I do not think that is the way we have thought about America either because that is not what America has been for generation after generation, decade after decade, going back to the founding of this country.

Why do I come to the floor to talk about this? It is because the debate in this place is becoming more and more unmoored from the facts, and people need to be reminded, I think, here--not in Colorado--but here about what the problem is we are actually trying to solve.

Here, as shown on this chart, is our current economic challenge. The top line is our productivity index, going back to 1992, that blue line. You will notice it fell slightly during the recession, and then it took off again like a rocket. Why? Because firms all over the country were having to figure out how to do what they were doing, produce what they were producing, with fewer people in order to survive in this recession. The combination of competing in a global economic environment, which was not even present remotely in the way it is today in the 1980s, required us to be more productive. The technological revolution this country has spawned and led has allowed us to become more productive.

You can see from this green line--which is gross domestic product-- our economy actually has started to come back. We are about two-thirds of the way back to where we were before this recession started. But what my families are feeling in Colorado and what the Presiding Officer's families are probably feeling in Missouri is in these other two lines. This line represents median family income which, as I said earlier, continues to drop, for the first time in our country's history, in the last 20 years. What that means is people are earning $4,000 and $5,000 less in real income at the end of the decade than they were at the beginning of the decade. Although I guess I should point out here, as well, that during the time median family income was falling, average family income went up, reflecting the widening gap between rich and poor in this country and reflecting a diminishing middle class.

This line is unemployment. It does not take a genius to figure out that when the green line crosses again and our GDP is where it was before we even had this recession--and it will--we do not have an answer for people who have been dislocated as a consequence of our economy becoming more efficient and more productive. These jobs are going to be created not by legacy firms from the last century but by businesses that are going to be started tomorrow and the week after that and the week after that.

Rather than having a partisan debate here in Washington, we should be having a bipartisan discussion about how to change our Tax Code and change our regulatory code to make it easier--not harder--for small businesses to be created and to compete and to make sure we are creating jobs here in the United States that are actually lifting median family income rather than driving it downward.

This is what has happened to manufacturing in the United States since 2001. I invite anybody to look on our Web site if they want to look at these charts themselves or use them in their own meetings. But this top line is our manufacturing output. You can see that has been rising. This other line, going back from 2001 to today, is manufacturing employment. Output rising; employment falling.

People in my State know we did not get here yesterday. This has been happening to them for the last decade or so. They want us to be responsive to that.

This is the median family income chart: In 1999, median family income was roughly $53,000. In 2010, it was $49,000--a $4,000 drop in real dollars since 1999; a 7.1-percent decrease. People are coming to me and saying: Michael--they may not know it is a 7.1-percent decrease, but they know they are earning less. They know that 10 years ago when they set out to save for college for their 8-year-old, they were expecting to be earning more at the end of the decade. Now their kids are going to school, and they are saying: I can't afford it. Tuition has skyrocketed. I can't send my kid to the best school they got into. What a waste.

I would ask you, Madam President, whether any of us think we can afford another decade like that at the beginning of this new century. If we consume a fifth of the 21st century driving American middle-class income down, we are going to have a very tough time recognizing ourselves.

This next chart is something that is not noted by many, but I used to be a school superintendent, so I have an interest in our education. This chart shows unemployment during this recession based on educational attainment. The worst it ever got for folks with a college degree in this country was 4.5 percent during this recession. For people who had less than a high school diploma, it was 15 percent. For people with a high school degree, it was around 12 percent.

Here is what else we have done over the last 10 years. This chart shows our poverty rate in this country.

This is why we have to move past the politics and into a substantive conversation about where we want to take this country as Republicans and Democrats together. These lines are people who are Republicans and Democrats and Independents, who are seeing their income driven down, who are seeing their wealth destroyed, and expect us to at least be able to have a civil conversation about it on the floor of the Senate.

Did you know that poverty has increased by 46 percent since the year 2000 in the United States of America? There are 46 million people in our country of 300-and-some million that live in poverty today. Thirty- five percent of them are kids. Two percent of the children in the United States today are living in poverty. One-fifth of the children in our country are living in poverty.

As I mentioned earlier, this has not affected everybody the same in our economy. This is the average income growth for the top 1 percent of income earners in the United States. This is the top 5 percent. This is the top 10 percent. And it seems almost insane to describe it this way, but the bottom 90 percent, 9 out of 10 income earners--9 out of 10 income earners--this is what has happened to their income since 1967 in real dollars, inflation-adjusted dollars. It has been absolutely stuck and flat at the bottom of this curve, all of which leads me to show the most disturbing slide of all, which I know is hard to read. But let me tell you what it says--and you can find it on the Web site.

It says we have not seen this level of income inequality in the United States of America since 1928. That is the last time that the so- called bottom 90 percent of earners--9 out of 10 earners--earned roughly 45 percent of the income in the country. Here in 1928, and here in 2011. I do not think our democracy can sustain itself with another decade or two of numbers such as this. We have to do better.

The bottom 90 percent of earners, as I mentioned a minute ago, are Republicans and they are Democrats, they are Independent voters, and they expect their government to work together. We cannot create their jobs, but we can create the conditions under which we can create high- paying jobs in the United States that are lifting family incomes rather than driving them down. That is what we should be debating in Washington.

Like you, Madam President, I have a deep concern about the fiscal condition of the country. We have $1.5 trillion of deficit, and we have $15 trillion of debt, and we do not have the apparent will to address that problem. We can address that problem. We should be adopting the kind of policies that were recommended by the bipartisan commission, Bowles-Simpson, that together combines to take $4 trillion out of our deficit situation over the next 10 years.

They did it by asking everybody to have a share in the sacrifice. We should be debating that on the floor of the Senate. We should be supporting the work that the Gang of 6 has tried to do, not just because it will help us with our fiscal situation, which is critical, but because it will help us with our jobs situation.

There is $2.3 trillion of cash, by some estimates, sitting on the balance sheets of America's corporations that is not being invested now because people are deeply worried that they cannot predict what interest rate environment we are going to be in because we cannot get our fiscal house in order and because the government is financing its debt on short-term paper, which easily could rise. Every rise in our interest rate will add $1.3 trillion to the debt over the next 10 years.

These are the facts. I have a list of what we could be doing today. I will not dwell on it. We could be reforming and simplifying our Tax Code. We could be adopting a long-term research and development strategy. We could be investing, as Republicans and Democrats have done for decades if not centuries, in our infrastructure. We could bring our public education system into the 21st century, which would matter a lot not just to our middle-class kids but to kids living in poverty as well.

Did you know that today, if you are a child born in poverty--whether you are rural or urban, it does not matter--your chances of getting a college degree are 9 in 100--9 in 100--which means that the day you are born, if you are among those 100 kids, out of the shoots 91 of you are consigned to the margins of the democracy, the margins of our economy.

If we do not change the way we educate our kids, and even if we do not care from their point of view what the implications of that are-- and I deeply do care about that as the father of three little girls. I think everybody should have an opportunity to graduate from high school, go on to college and succeed. Even if you did not care from that perspective, look at what happens if you do not have an education in the 21st-century economy. Look at the unemployment rates people are having to suffer through if they do not have a high school degree or a college degree compared to if they do have a degree. That is not going to change.

The last time we were creating jobs in this country we created roughly 5.3 million for people with a college degree, 3.5 million for people with something north of a high school diploma. No new jobs for people with a high school degree, and we lost jobs for high school dropouts.

So if you care about the strength and success of the American economy, if you care about maintaining the mantle of the land of opportunity, if you care about the idea that the job of one generation is to put another generation into a position to succeed and contribute in the economy and the democracy, you need to care about what we are doing with our education system.

We could be talking about that. We could be doing regulatory review to make sure we have a process to get rid of old regulations that do not make sense and put in ones that do. I know in Colorado we have a huge interest in ending our reliance on foreign oil. Everywhere I go people talk about that. Everywhere I go people wonder whether it would not be better to have an energy policy that created energy independence for this country instead of having one--or a lack of one may be a better way of saying it--that forces us to shift billions of dollars a week to the Persian Gulf for the privilege of buying their oil because we do not have a policy.

We could be thinking about advanced manufacturing. We could be eliminating the technology gap. We could be modernizing the FDA. There is no shortage of things we can do if we come together to do it.

I see my colleague from Oregon is here, so I will wrap up in 1 minute. But in order to be able to get to any of that, in order to get to any of that, we have to knock off the political games and actually start working together around this place.

Two days ago there was an article in the Washington Post--I think it was--that said that the United States Congress has a 14-percent approval rating, and the joke around here is, well, who in the world are those 14 percent who think we are doing a good job? But it is not a joke. This is serious. There is a reason our approval rating is in the basement. It is because instead of working on the things that actually would drive productivity in this country, would drive job creation in this country, would most importantly drive median family income up instead of down, we are fighting with each other.

I want to go back to Colorado and have an answer for the people in my townhalls who could care less--could care less--whether I am a Democrat or I am a Republican and just want me to do my job. The ones who are doing their jobs want me to do my job. The ones who do not have jobs want me to do my job. They want all of us to do our jobs.

I know there are people of goodwill on both sides of the aisle that if given the chance will work together to do

this. The last thing I will say is this, and then I will stop. The rest of the world is not waiting for us to get our act together. The rest of the world is not waiting for us to decide whether we are going to have another debate that leads to us blowing up the credit rating of the United States. They are not waiting for us to decide whether we want to sacrifice for the first time the full faith and credit of the United States of America. They are not waiting for us to decide whether we are going to invest in 21st-century manufacturing.

My colleague from Ohio just showed up. He talked about that. They are not waiting for us to decide whether we are going to let them own the 21st-century energy economy. They are going right ahead, and so our failure to act has consequences. I believe it is time for us to come together--even though we are in a political season, even though we have a Presidential campaign--and do our work on behalf of the American people and the people of my State of Colorado.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, today I honor the life and memory of a prominent tribal leader and dedicated public servant in my home State of Colorado. The Honorable Ernest House Sr. served more than 30 years in tribal leadership, including four terms as tribal chairman of the Ute Mountain Ute Tribe in southwest Colorado. He was first elected to the Ute Mountain Ute Tribal Council in 1979 and elected chairman in 1982. Throughout his long tenure as a tribal council member and chairman, he actively and effectively worked for the betterment of the Ute Mountain Ute Tribe.

Mr. House Sr. was an unassuming, yet forceful leader on many issues important to the people of his tribe, including natural resources development, law enforcement and support for tribal business enterprises. His leadership on water issues helped to complete the critical Dolores and Animas-La Plata water projects in southwest Colorado that benefited not only his tribe, but also the entire region. He was a strong

advocate for keeping the Ute Mountain Tribal Park in pristine and undeveloped condition.

As the grandson of Chief Jack House, the last traditional chief of the Ute Mountain Ute Tribe, Ernest House Sr. was raised from a young age to be a leader of his tribe. And he proved himself equal to the task. In his years of leadership, he was widely respected for his ability to bring people together and get results for his tribe and the greater Four Corners community. Ernest House Sr. worked his entire life to move his tribe forward while still maintaining its traditional tribal identity and heritage. He urged young Native people to be proud of their tribal heritage.

Mr. House Sr. also served his country in the Army National Guard, the Signal Corps, and the Special Forces.

I ask you to join me in honoring the life and legacy of Mr. Ernest House Sr., a visionary leader who was dedicated to serving his tribe, his community, Indian country, the State of Colorado, and our country. My thoughts and prayers are with his family and the entire Ute Mountain Ute Tribe at this time of loss.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

Mr. President, I went back to the office and I saw my senior Senator sitting here at this late hour and I wanted to come down and keep him company. So I am glad to be here with you tonight, proud to be from the West tonight with two great Senators from Wyoming remembering Malcolm Wallop's service in this body. It was wonderful to hear their remembrances of him. I am glad we were here to share that being from the West.

Similar to the Presiding Officer, I spent most of August in our beautiful State--the most beautiful State in the United States, if I do say so myself--in townhall meetings, mostly in red parts of the State, but in red and blue parts of the State. They do not actually think of themselves that way, but that is how Washington would talk about it.

In the townhalls, I always start the same way. I say: Ask any question you have. Bring any criticism you have. I tell them I was an urban school superintendent for almost 4 years, it is impossible to hurt my feelings. It was beaten out of me a long time ago. Then we have a conversation.

This time, every single meeting started with somebody saying: What is wrong with you guys? Why can't you work this out in Washington, DC? We are struggling in the worst economy we have had since the Great Depression, and what we see are a lot of political games being played back there.

That is the version of the conversation I have heard now for 2\1/2\ years in our State.

Then, one of the things we get into at the very beginning is the fact that this is not a garden-variety recession that we are just coming out of. This is the first time--this last decade, not just this recession, the last decade--the first time in this country's history when median family income actually declined instead of going up.

Generation after generation after generation of Americans saw their income rise. Median family income is sort of shorthand for middle-class family income in this country. It is the backbone of this country, and it has fallen for the first time in a decade, as the cost of health insurance doubled on the people who live in Colorado, and the cost of higher education went up by 60 percent.

People are saying: Michael, I have been at my job for this whole decade and I am earning less at the end of the decade than I was at the beginning of the decade. My costs of not ``nice to haves,'' my costs of critical things to move my family ahead to create stability for me and my small business--such as health care, such as higher education--have done nothing but skyrocket.

I am going to show you some numbers that are pretty scary that came out this week from the Census Bureau that reflect, in numbers, what I am talking about and reflect how profound the structural issues are that we face in our economy, structural that do not fit on the back of a bumper sticker or a political slogan or during a debate at night on the television set.

This week's Wall Street Journal, on Monday, had an article on the front page with the headline that reads as follows: ``As Middle Class Shrinks, P&G Aims High and Low.'' P&G is Procter & Gamble. There is not a more iconic brand in our country's history when it comes to the middle class than Procter & Gamble.

Here are some of the things they make: Crest toothpaste; Head & Shoulders shampoo; Tide detergent; Pamper's diapers--I am glad to be out of those in my house, by the way--Bounty paper towels; Downy fabric softener, Scope mouthwash; Duracell batteries; Charmin toilet paper; Bounce fabric softener--nobody needed fabric softener before there was a middle class in this country, but they make it--Mr. Clean; Pepto Bismol; Pringles; Swiffer brooms and dusters--we have that in our closet--Old Spice deodorant; Nyquil cough syrup; Puffs tissues; Ivory soap; Covergirl makeup.

That is what Procter & Gamble makes. That is what they sold to the great middle class in this country for decades. Here is this article that says Procter & Gamble aims high and low.

I ask unanimous consent that the article be printed in the Record.

I wanted to read a few excerpts from it because I think it is instructive about what we are doing.

P&G's profits boomed with the increasing affluence of

middle-class households in the post-World War II economy. As

masses of housewives set up their new suburban homes, P&G

marketers pledged that Tide detergent delivered cleaner

clothes, Mr. Clean made floors shinier and Crest toothpaste

fought off more cavities. In the decades since, new features

like fragrances or ingredient and packaging enhancements kept

P&G's growth robust.

What is happening now? For generations Proctor & Gamble's growth strategy was focused on developing household staples for the vast American middle class. Now, P&G executives say many of its former middle-market shoppers are trading down to lower priced goods--widening the pools of have and have-not consumers at the expense of the middle. That has forced P&G, which estimates it has at least one product--and you heard the list, so this won't be surprising in 98 percent of American households--to fundamentally change the way it develops and sells its goods.

For the first time in 38 years, for example, the company launched a new dish soap in the United States at a bargain price. P&G's rollout of Gain Dish Soap says a lot about the health of the middle class. The world's largest maker of consumer products is now betting that the squeeze on middle America will be long lasting.

If you needed any example of what our families are struggling with in Colorado every single day, here is a business plan that is modeled on a perpetually shrinking middle class by a company whose whole business model in their history was based on a rising middle class.

I will skip the next one in the interest of time. I will go right to the end. I want to show some numbers. This was the conclusion of the article:

To monitor the evolving American consumer market, P&G

executives study the Gini index, a widely accepted measure of

income inequality that ranges from zero, when everyone earns

the same amount, to one when all income goes to only one

person. In 2009, the most recent calculation available, the

Gini coefficient totaled 0.468, a 20 percent rise in income

disparity over the past 40 years, according to the U.S.

Census Bureau. ``We now have a Gini index similar to the

Philippines and Mexico--you'd never have imagined that,''

says Phyllis Jackson, P&G's Vice President of consumer market

knowledge for North America. ``I don't think we typically

thought about America as a country with big income gaps to

this extent.''

I don't think we typically thought about America that way either. It is not who we purport to be or who we are

going to be. In order to put us on a path that will actually produce a rising middle class again, instead of a division among the very wealthy at the top and the poorest of the citizens at the bottom, we are going to have to come together on some pretty serious choices.

I know there have been some who argue that this is all a problem that is caused by too many regulations, and I am the first to say we should only have the regulations that we need. Some say the threat of any revenue--even at a time when we are collecting less revenue as a percent of our economy than we have over the last 30 years--some are saying any revenue is choking off this recovery.

Let me show you something very surprising. This is high-tech Senate stuff. Here are some lines on a chart. I know people probably cannot see the detail at home. They can get it on the Web site. This blue line, from 1992 to 2010, which is about 20 years, represents what is called the productivity index. It shows that we have become far more productive as an economy over the last 20 years. It is not surprising that we have, and we have because we have had a technological revolution that has made us more productive.

See at the very end where the recession is, look what happened to the productivity index during our recession--because with every single month that went by we were losing jobs; American business was doing what they had to do, which was figure out how to get through the recession and get to the other end; how to ring out every efficiency they could, how to make themselves as productive as they could. They did and they have. We are much more productive today than we were here.

The green line is our gross domestic product, our Nation's economy per capita, the amount of money per person that our economy is generating. Here is an amazing fact. This is where we were before the recession. This is where we are today. Our economy is the same size today as it was before we went into the recession. We are producing about the same economic output as a nation that we were producing before we went into this downturn. I was shocked when I learned this number.

But look at this. Here is our employment level. Here is our employment level today. We have 14 million people unemployed, but we are producing about the same as we were before we went into this horrible recession.

That is a structural unemployment problem. That is not a problem that will be solved by slogans, and it is not going to be a problem that is solved by companies that have become much more efficient at what they do. It is going to be solved by companies that will be started tomorrow and the day after tomorrow--small businesses, venture-backed firms, people who are inventing the technology of the 21st century, the products and services of the 21st century, not the products and services of the 20th century. That is the only way we are going to put these people back to work. We could be investing in infrastructure too; that would help.

This line is median family income, which is what I started this conversation with. This is a terrible story. It is not just a sad story, it is a terrible story. That is that line for median family income. It was over $53,000 in 1999. It is $49,000 today. It is almost $4,000 less in real dollars in a decade.

I could have brought in another slide which shows that this trend has actually been going on a little longer than that. Think about that. It means half of the families in 1999 were earning less than $53,000, and half were earning more than $53,000. Today half are earning less than $49,000 and half are earning more than that.

These are folks who have done absolutely everything that anybody ever asked them to do. But I don't care whether you are a family or a business, it makes it very hard for you to make ends meet if that is the slope that you are on. I argue that we cannot consume one more decade of this new century, with economic policies that are leading us here, and expect to have a vibrant middle class. I want to be in an economy where Procter & Gamble has to change their business model to catch up with a rising middle class, not be in a position that they are in today where they believe they have to bet on a falling middle class.

Sure.

Exactly.

I thank the Senator from New York. He is right about that. What he will see on another slide--not tonight--is that we were already on this decline. This is not news to people living in our States. It is not news to people trying to figure out how to make ends meet week by week. This is not news to them. It is not news to the people who came to my townhalls and said they cannot afford to send their kids to the best schools. They sent their first kid to the fancy school, but they cannot send their second kid there. They are upset that we are not getting done what we ought to be getting done.

What we see on this other chart is that this decline was happening already because the economy wasn't lifting all boats, and it was widening in equality terribly. I have things tonight that talk about that. Then the recession accelerated that decline. They lost 2.3 percent of median family income in the recession, which is more than any of the previous recessions, going back to the Great Depression. So that is how tough this is.

The Senator is right. If we keep doing what we have done for the decade that led us into this recession, if we go back to those policies and readopt those policies, and that is where we end up, we will continue to see this slide.

I thank the Senator from New York. This gives a sense of the widening inequality that has happened. This is average income, which is different from median income. The amazing thing is, while middle-class income has been falling, and it fell throughout this 10 years, average income actually went up because a few people at the very top of the economy did incredibly well over this period of time. They have done incredibly well. This is the very top 1 percent of our earners who went from here to up here.

The top 1 percent saw that, and here is everybody else. This red line is 90 percent of the people in America. Their average income was flat from 1967 to 2006. That is 90 percent of the people who live in the United States. It is hard to see how people can get ahead under circumstances like that.

It is no wonder that we have these alarming numbers this week from the Census Bureau which show there are 46.2 million Americans now living in poverty. That is a 46-percent increase since 2000. I had to look to make sure I was reading that right. Since 2000, when 31 million people were in poverty, it has gone up to 46 million people in poverty today, and 22 percent of the children in the United States of America tonight are living in poverty. Over one-fifth of the children living in the United States tonight are living in poverty. And, by the way, as a former superintendent of the Denver public schools, I can tell you we are not doing ourselves any favors when the chances of a child living in poverty in this country graduating from college are roughly 9 in 100, which is what their chances are today. Ninety-one out of one hundred poor kids in the country can't expect to get a college degree; can't expect to be anywhere but on the margin of our democracy or our economy. I wonder what effect that will have on our median family income going forward.

This is the last slide, because I know the hour is late, and it is one that was in the Washington Post. I am not going to bother to describe the details, but you can find it on the Web site and it is worth looking at. It is worth looking at.

This red line--and it is the only thing I will talk about from this slide--shows what the bottom 90 percent--and it seems ridiculous to talk about the bottom 90 percent--what the 90 percent of earners in this country earned as a percentage of the income that everybody earned in the United States from before the 1920s to today, essentially. For the vast majority of time or some majority of time in the period from World War II--the end of World War II--until the present, the bottom 90 percent of earners earned roughly 70 percent of the income in the United States--a majority of the income, 70 percent of the income--for a long time. Now they are earning roughly 50 percent. The bottom 90 percent is earning roughly 50 percent of the income. That means, by the way, the other 10 percent are earning roughly 50 percent of the income. That is how it is distributed. It is a unique moment in the country's history, actually, uniquely unbalanced. In fact, we have to go back to 1928--the year before the market crashed, the year before Black Friday, the year before our financial markets collapsed and put us into the Great Depression--to find income disparity that looks like the income disparity we face today.

In my view, the 20th century represented a period in this country's history of limitless opportunity, limitless economic growth, limitless educational attainment. Our democracy succeeded in generating an economy that gave everybody a fighting chance. Maybe a definition of whether we are giving people a fighting chance is whether middle-class income is rising or falling. Now we are in a period where it is falling and we find ourselves in the position of producing the same domestic product we were producing before this recession with 14 million more people unemployed.

The economists tell us we have recovered, that we are in a recovery. The technical definition is that we are in a recovery because the technical definition is based on whether GDP is growing. That is a very cruel definition of recovery for the 14 million people who are unemployed. It is a very cruel definition of recovery for a middle class that is getting wiped out because median family income is falling.

Look, the people who live in Colorado, notwithstanding all of this, are optimistic. They are optimistic about their communities and they are optimistic about their families. It gets tougher and tougher, but they rise to the occasion. And you know what. That is what they are asking us to do. They are asking us to knock off the political games that seem to be only about Washington and seem to have nothing to do with the challenges they face.

Today was a good day here. I was pleased. It has been a long time. I was pleased to join my senior Senator and about 30 other Democrats and Republicans at an event to say it is time for us to think big about solving this country's fiscal challenges and that we are anxious to work together to do it. We are anxious to create a comprehensive plan to deal with it. We should be taking exactly the same approach on jobs.

Getting our fiscal house in order is incredibly important to encourage and inspire confidence in our markets and confidence in our businesses and confidence in our local economies. But our work won't stop there. We need to reinvent our Tax Code so it is driving innovation and driving a rising middle class. We need to reimagine our regulatory code so it is doing the same. We need to educate the children in this country so they can take on the jobs of the 21st century, because the jobs of the 20th century are not coming back. We will be waiting in vain for those jobs to come back.

The people in my meetings back in Colorado are demanding--that is the right way to say it, they are demanding--we work together. Our State is a third Republican, a third Independent, and a third Democrat, but they are Coloradans before any of that, and they are Americans maybe even before that, and it is time for us to meet their standard.

Tonight we had votes on the reauthorization of FEMA--our emergency agency--to respond to the incredible tragedies that have happened around the country. It got 62 votes and we were able to pass it. We had a vote on the transportation extension, the FAA reauthorization, and I think the vote was 92 to 6, with Democrats and Republicans moving this country forward. That is what we have to do in order to get this economy going again. The people in Colorado today are saying: We want more of that and less of the bickering, more problem solving and less finger pointing. My hope is that on an occasion such as today, when we actually have made some progress, no matter how limited, it may give us the chance to move forward together.

Mr. President, I appreciate the Chair's endurance and allowing me to speak on the floor tonight.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate proceed to executive session to consider the following nomination: Calendar No. 358; that the nomination be confirmed; the motion to reconsider be considered made and laid upon the table, with no intervening action or debate; that no further motions be in order to the nomination; that any related statements be printed in the Record; that the President be immediately notified of the Senate's action and the Senate then resume legislative session.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate now proceed to the consideration of S. Res. 269, which was submitted earlier today.

I ask unanimous consent that the resolution be agreed to, the preamble be agreed to, and the motion to reconsider be laid upon the table.

Mr. President, I understand there is a bill at the desk, and I ask for its first reading.

I now ask for a second reading, and in order to place the bill on the calendar under the provisions of rule XIV, I object to my own request.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that when the Senate completes its business today, it adjourn until 10 a.m. on Friday, September 16; that following the prayer and pledge, the Journal of proceedings be approved to date, the morning hour be deemed expired, and the time for the two leaders be reserved for their use later in the day; that following any leader remarks, the Senate be in a period of morning business, with Senators permitted to speak therein for up to 10 minutes each.