[Congressional Record Volume 150, Number 29 (Tuesday, March 9, 2004)]
[House]
[Pages H896-H897]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                TAX CUTS AND THE LATEST EMPLOYMENT DATA

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the 
gentleman from Oregon (Mr. DeFazio) is recognized for 5 minutes.
  Mr. DeFAZIO. Mr. Speaker, on Friday the government announced its 
latest employment data. Unfortunately, the news for working Americans 
or Americans trying to find jobs was really bad. 21,000 jobs nationally 
were created. Now, remember, of course, it was

[[Page H897]]

just 2 weeks ago that the President's principal economic advisor Mr. 
Mankiw, the same person who says it is good to export jobs, it helps 
the economy, predicted that the Bush tax cuts would produce 200,000 
jobs a month. Of course, the President's former economic advisor, who 
was a little bit too honest about the cost of the war in Iraq, Mr. 
Lindsey, predicted the same thing last year and the jobs did not 
materialize.
  Well, we are in the same situation now. They predicted 200,000. 
21,000 were created. Now, were these jobs created because of tax cuts? 
Well, actually, no, because the 21,000 jobs that were created were 
government jobs. They were State and local government jobs. So the tax 
cuts had absolutely no impact on stimulating those governments to hire 
more people. That is for certain.
  So, we now have 8.2 million unemployed Americans, 4.4 million 
Americans involuntarily working part-time. They would like to work 
full-time. They need to work full-time. They cannot find full-time 
work.
  Three million private sector jobs have been lost since the beginning 
of the Bush 43 administration. That is the worst job creation or 
destruction record since Herbert Hoover in the 1920s. 3,000 
manufacturing jobs lost last month, 2.8 million lost since the 
beginning of the Bush administration. But just today, the President was 
saying he is a radical free trader. There is nothing but free trade. 
The alternative to absolute free trade and exporting our jobs and our 
industrial and manufacturing base and impoverishing the working people 
of America is protectionism or isolationism.
  Well, there is a pretty big ground between those two things. Some 
managed trade, something that would bring jobs or keep jobs of value 
here in America, might maintain our industrial and manufacturing and IT 
infrastructure, might not be a bad idea. But not to this President. His 
chief economic advisor says job exports are great. Yeah, they make a 
few people a lot of money: Corporate CEOs, some stockholders, but they 
sure do put a lot of Americans out of work and hollow out the wealth of 
this country long term.
  Now, we saw the unemployment rate stay at 5.6 percent. Sounds pretty 
good except the reason it stayed there is because 392,000 people gave 
up looking for work. There is no prospect for them out there. So guess 
what? In the great world of George Bush and Mr. Mankiw, they do not 
count anymore. Americans who are unemployed who would like to work, but 
who are totally discouraged and give up looking for work, they do not 
count as unemployed in their world. This is pretty strange.
  But the President says he has a solution to make his tax cuts 
permanent. That is, these unbelievably expensive tax cuts that would 
take place after the year 2010, now all the tax cuts he has already had 
which have put the country into the deepest fiscal hole in our history, 
are not creating the jobs. His free trade policy is not creating the 
jobs. He wants more free trade, he wants more tax cuts.
  Maybe it is time to think about real investments, investments in 
infrastructure. You create 47,500 jobs with every billion dollars you 
spend on roads, bridges, and highways. We have bridges and roads 
crumbling across America. But what has the President and the White 
House doing? They are stonewalling the highway bill. The highway bill 
has expired. And nothing is happening because they will not agree on an 
adequate bill. They say oh, no, we want a low-ball bill. We do not 
believe that building roads, bridges, and highways creates jobs.
  No, it does not create jobs overseas, like Mr. Mankiw thinks are 
great, it does not make investors rich. It does not give them tax 
benefits. But it puts a heck of a lot of the people in the construction 
industry to work, and a whole lot of small businesses to work and a 
whole lot of communities with some wealth and money flowing through 
those communities, that would do something for this country. That would 
put people back to work.
  He will not even extend unemployment benefits for those who cannot 
find work but want it. He says we cannot afford it. There are $17 
billion in the unemployment trust fund, paid in by employers and 
employees sitting there. He does not even have to borrow the money. He 
is borrowing the money for tax cuts for rich people. He does not even 
have to borrow the money to extend unemployment benefits for those 
Americans who want and cannot find work. He just has to authorize 
spending down some of the trust fund.
  That trust fund this year is actually going to grow. It is going to 
grow. Of course, the money will be borrowed and given away in tax cuts 
to wealthy which will put people to work, he says, but it does not.
  Now, just one last point on these tax cuts. One of the things he is 
really pushing for is a permanent extension of estates worth more than 
$5 million from any taxation. He says that will really put people back 
to work in this country. That would be after 2010. That costs $80 
billion a year. Money drained out of the rest of the economy, drained 
from other taxpayers and Social Security to benefit a very, very small 
percentage.
  This is voodoo economics at its worst, as his dad would have said.

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