Thank you, and I appreciate your leading this hour. Just last week, the President stood just behind where you're standing and addressed this Congress--bipartisan, bicameral, Senators and House Members--and laid out a plan to fix this…
Thank you, and I appreciate your leading this hour.
Just last week, the President stood just behind where you're standing and addressed this Congress--bipartisan, bicameral, Senators and House Members--and laid out a plan to fix this economy. Pass this bill, he said. And we need to pass the bill. The President and his team have put a lot of work into it. People want jobs. They want to work.
In my district, there are more unemployed. Every weekend when I go out in my district, people come up to me and tell me they are either looking for a job, have lost their job and are looking for a job. We need to find ways to put those people to work. We are working on ways to make schools better. Building infrastructure which is so important to Memphis, Tennessee, where we have rails, roads, rivers, and runways, the distribution center of America, is so important. And if you put the money in infrastructure, which this plan plans on, Make It In America, if you do infrastructure, it's got to be made in America. You can't export those jobs overseas, and you put people to work immediately. What they are building are avenues that make commerce move and work.
Federal Express moves more packages around the world than any other American company, and Memphis International Airport is the largest American cargo airport in the world. We create jobs by putting money into infrastructure. Teachers, policemen, and firefighters, 3 million kept their jobs because of the recovery bill that we passed that did successfully help this country stay out of a great depression.
Sometimes, Mr. Garamendi, I'm amazed at the rhetoric that you hear from some people, particularly from the other side, who blithely tell people that the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act was $770 billion that didn't make a difference. The fact is that 40 percent of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, so as to pass the Senate where we needed Senator Collins' and Senator Snowe's votes, were the Republican endorsed and loved tax cuts. How can they talk out of both sides of their mouth and say that a bill, 40 percent of which--which means over $300 billion of tax
cuts--didn't do any good, because now all they talk about is tax cuts.
But when the President of the United States proposes and the Congress with him in a bipartisan effort passes tax cuts--and I'm not sure that the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act was bipartisan. That was strictly Democrats. But when we passed tax cuts with a few Republicans in the Senate, in their minds, it didn't create any jobs. But when they propose tax cuts, this is Christopher Columbus' new way to find the New World. Well, it's hypocritical.
We need to support our President because he is the President. There isn't a red America and a blue America. There is, as he said in his speech at the 2004 Democratic Convention, the United States of America. People need to understand that. We need to be here for that red, white, and blue flag, for this country, to put this country back to work, to keep it as the most competitive country in the world so we don't fall behind China and India in engineering and science, and coming up with programs that give our children an opportunity to be able to fill the jobs of the 21st century--the green jobs that the President has proposed that are the jobs of the 21st century, and the technology jobs that we haven't done a good enough job in filling, giving money to colleges to do the research for industry to create jobs.
In our caucus yesterday, we had Joseph Stiglitz, a Nobel Prize winning economist. I read Krugman a lot, a Nobel Prize winning economist. Both say basically the same thing: The austerity programs proposed by the other side don't work. They've used them in Japan; didn't work. Greece, England, didn't work--unless you're in the upper 1 percent. If you wear a crown and you're the queen or the prince or the leaders of whatever, it works. But in this country, we don't have that kind of royalty, but we're starting to have a separate society with the upper 1 percent who the Republican Party won't raise their taxes no matter what, and the rest.
The President is right. We need to think about the whole country. We need to come together as a United States of America, not a red, a blue, a Democrat or Republican, and create jobs. The President's plan, over half of it, is tax cuts.
Our colleagues on the other side of the aisle say we can go for what we like there even though they said it didn't work when the President and the Democrats passed it in the Recovery Act, but they can't go for the infrastructure jobs that, of course, help businesses--trucking businesses, the airline industry, and the transportation industry. Automobiles and trucks have to have highways. So we need to pass this.
I support the President. I took an oath to do what I could to make this country better. We need to come together now because this is a crisis time.
We've got lots of warehouses. They're full of goods ready to go on Federal Express planes and service the rest of this Nation. It all starts in Memphis, Tennessee, and goes out from there.
Some of that, too.
Well, just the whole prospect. Jobs are so important. I was thinking back about Stiglitz. I think you were there at the caucus. He and Krugman say the same thing, that there's several ways you can get yourself out of this deficit. He went back into a little bit of history about how during the Clinton years we had a big deficit from the Reagan-Bush years and that President Clinton, with a bill that was passed in this Congress with all Democrat votes in about 1994, I think, put us on a road to balance the budget, and got us a surplus. It got us a surplus by the time President Clinton left office.
Stiglitz said, which is so true--it's a factoid--the surplus was lost because of two wars, one of which was a volunteer war, not related to 9/11--Iraq--and Afghanistan, that were both passed through these Congresses, which were Republican-controlled, Republican Congresses, without being funded. Then the Bush tax cuts giving the wealthiest people the largest tax cuts and contributing to the largest disparity in wealth that we've ever had in this Nation.
Now, the wealthy can only spend so much. There are only so many Chanel purses a woman can buy. There are only so many Rolex watches a guy can have, but we are losing a middle class. Then we put all this wealth through these tax cuts on the richest, making their tax rates the lowest since the 1950s, and then extended it for 2 years, the inheritance tax, to where the wealthy get to keep more and more in perpetuity.
The middle class is disappearing in this country. Jobs are being shipped overseas. Taxes stay high on them. They're living paycheck to paycheck. They've got their children in school. Pell Grants are in danger. They almost
were reduced in the last month or two, but we salvaged them in the final bill. People are having trouble making ends meet, and the middle class has got to be there to be a consumer group. If you don't have consumers, you can't have an economy to service people who are making goods and services. You've got to have a customer. We're losing the customer base.
We can ship all the jobs we want off to Southeast Asia and China, where they don't pay any salaries and don't give any benefits; but those people aren't our market, and if our people can't buy goods, then we're not going to have any manufacturing base and the opportunity to make it in America.
So we've got to build up the middle class. We've got to produce jobs, and we've got to see to it that the middle class is given priority and not the richest 1 percent.
The President's plan, which is so great, is it's all paid for. It's paid for. But paid for by a tax that's appropriate for the people who can afford it.
Tell us how we can deal with that and keep this as a paid-for program.
Out of six adults--think about that--one out of six adults. Now this body of which I am extremely proud to be a Member is not representative of America. Because if it were, one out of six, or 74 people, would be earning $22,000 a year or less for a family of four. So that doesn't happen. One out of five children in this country is now living in poverty--they're in my district--and people can't get along without having a job.
How about the hedge fund guys? There's another Steve Cohen. There's the one in New York that's got all the money, the hedge fund guy, billions and billions of dollars.
What does he pay on his income?
And that shouldn't exist. That's absurd. There's another Steve Cohen, the magician, and apparently he had something to do with the Tax Code when they took care of the other Steve Cohen.
You mention on there--I looked at your chart--education. Part of the American Jobs Act is to rebuild our schools and to go to work and make them structurally sound and also energy efficient. When you look at labor, it's work. The labor movement has been attacked all over this country, and it's labor who's created the middle class and seen to it they got good jobs and opportunities and wages and benefits.
In my community, we just had a grocery store taken over by a large national grocery store. A grocery store from another city had come in and taken over some local owners. One man worked there for 44 years. He'd been making $9.85 an hour and working 40 hours a week. They came in and said, You can work 16 hours. You'll get $7.50 an hour. You won't get your benefits that you had accumulated, and you'll go to another store. He quit. They did a lot of employees that way.
What happened yesterday? Help inform me. Because I heard this, and it's difficult to believe: Bank of America, did they make something like $7 billion last year? And how many people did they lay off yesterday?
So how does that jibe with what we hear from the other side about just trust business to hire people, that the jobs come from business and the private sector?
They're making $7.8 billion. They benefited from the TARP--a President Bush/Secretary Paulson plan that I supported in a bipartisan manner that kept Bank of America alive. I think they're on the hook, maybe, since some Federal recent action considering their loans and all. But $7 billion, and
they're laying off 30,000 to 40,000 people? Those people are going to need unemployment benefits, and it's not because they don't want a job. They've been put out.
A lot of qualified people who can do jobs and are intelligent don't have jobs because they are not there. But the people at the top are making more money than ever. They're eating at Masa in New York. They're eating the $500 dinner at the Japanese restaurant and not thinking twice about it, and they're firing people right and left. The limousines are still moving. The wealthy are still doing whatever they've been doing. They've got their jets--not the football team-- their private jets. They're living great, but the American Dream is disappearing. The American Dream disappeared for my grocery workers. It's disappearing for Bank of America employees. It's disappearing for a lot of people.
Thank you, Mr. Garamendi.
Every weekend I'm home--and the weeks that I'm home, because we're home many weeks now, this Congress doesn't work them very much. We spend a lot of time at home. And that's a beautiful thing for us, but not a great thing for America because we need to be here, working on trying to get a jobs bill passed, which hasn't been introduced by the majority yet.
But Professor Stiglitz talked about the causes of the loss of the surplus that President Clinton and the Democratic Congress got in the late part of the 20th century. It was the two wars--voted for by this Congress, supported by President Bush, the Bush tax cuts--passed by this Congress, proposed by President Bush; and Medicare part D, President Bush's Medicare plan to take care of the insurance companies. That's what did it. Those were the causes.
Professor Stiglitz, and he has a lady that works with him--I think her name is Linda Bilmes--they've studied what it's going to cost in America in the years to come with the veterans. Now, the ones we can employ, we need to employ. But 1 to 2 percent are going to come back disabled, and they're going to need veteran services and they're going to need money for the rest of their lives. So these wars, particularly the Iraq war--President Bush and the Republican Congress' war--is going to cost this country for another 70 years, at minimum; and we need to be prepared for that.
We need to come together. And there's no question that when Professor Stiglitz said, when you can borrow money at like 1 or 2 percent and make a greater percentage on it, this is the time that you borrow because rates are so low. And the top people in economics say this whole idea of the austerity and the cut is wrong. What does it do? It helps the wealthy because they're immune to it. The benefit for the low-cost labor they get overseas and the salaries they get here, they get great tax rates, helps them.
But what else does it help? It helps what Senator McConnell said was the number one job of this Congress the first day after President Obama was elected, to defeat President Obama. That's what Senator Mitch McConnell said was the number one priority that he had. He's a focused man. I admire him for the fact that he gets an issue and he stays on it and he's focused. And he thought that and thinks that when he works on the debt ceiling, when he works on the deficit, when he works on the American Jobs Act. It's all about one thing--not employing Americans, but taking two Americans, Barack Obama and Joe Biden, and making them unemployed. That's not appropriate.
Pass the bill.
I just thank you, Mr. Garamendi, for the leadership and for putting this hour together and allowing me to join you. And let's say it together. Pass the bill.