[Congressional Record Volume 156, Number 157 (Friday, December 3, 2010)]
[Senate]
[Pages S8454-S8468]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                         UNEMPLOYMENT INSURANCE

  Mr. FRANKEN. Mr. President, I rise to speak about extending tax cuts 
to all Americans on income up to $250,000.
  I was presiding this Monday when one of my friends on the other side 
of the aisle was speaking on the floor, and he said with great 
conviction: ``We need to do everything to see that the deficit does not 
increase.'' Now, less than a week later, he will vote to increase the 
deficit by $700 billion. That is an impressive reversal, don't you 
think?
  Many of my colleagues on the other side ran for reelection this fall 
saying

[[Page S8455]]

that the deficit is a cancer, that we owe it to our children and 
grandchildren to cut the deficit. Well, to them I say: Congratulations 
because for one of the first votes after returning to Washington, you 
are going to vote to put over $9,300 more debt on the head of every 
child in America. Way to go. And what is that for? To give an average 
tax cut of $100,000 to Americans making over $1 million a year.
  My friends, on this subject, have been saying to us: Haven't you 
learned the lesson of the election? I do not recall permanent tax cuts 
for millionaires being on any ballot. In fact, let's take a look at the 
exit polls conducted by Edison Research, the exclusive provider of the 
national election exit polls for all of the major TV networks and the 
Associated Press. In their poll, they found that roughly 60 percent of 
Americans wanted to end tax cuts for income over $250,000. More 
recently, a Quinnipiac poll said that only 35 percent of Americans 
wanted the Bush tax cuts extended for those with incomes over $250,000.
  Of course the American people feel this way. They know what has been 
happening over the last 20 years in this country. According to the 
Economic Policy Institute, during the past 20 years, 56 percent of all 
income growth went to the top 1 percent of households. Even more 
unbelievably, a third of all income growth went to just the top one-
tenth of 1 percent. The wealthy have done extremely well for themselves 
over the past 20 years. Unfortunately, this is why the middle class has 
done decidedly worse. When we adjust for inflation, the median 
household income actually declined over the last decade. During those 
years, while the rich were getting richer, the rest of working America 
was struggling to keep up. We have been growing apart. The American 
people know this.
  Now, working Americans are forced to listen to Republicans as they 
demand that everyone needs to share in the pain; we are all in this 
together.
  The IRS published a study analyzing the tax returns of the wealthiest 
400 Americans. Want to take a guess at what their average effective tax 
rate was? Just over 16.5 percent. Is that sharing the pain? Are they 
sharing the pain just like everybody else?
  Frankly, I am a little tired of being lectured to by my friends on 
the other side of the aisle on the deficit. We all know Bill Clinton 
inherited the largest deficit in history from George H.W. Bush and then 
handed George W. Bush the largest surplus in history. Then George W. 
Bush nearly doubled the national debt and also handed Barack Obama the 
largest deficit in history. Of course, my friends controlled the 
Congress for most of those Bush years.
  Today, we are talking about how to get our economy going and keep 
deficits down at the same time, while what we are discussing right now 
is whether to restore the Clinton marginal tax rate on the very 
wealthiest of Americans. I remember that when he raised the tax rate on 
the top 2 percent, Republicans said that would kill the economy. Newt 
Gingrich--remember him--on August 5, 1993, said:

       I believe this will lead to a recession next year. This is 
     the Democrat machine's recession, and each one of them will 
     be held personally accountable.

  Senator Phil Gramm--remember him--said:

       The Clinton plan is a one-way ticket to recession. This 
     plan does not reduce the deficit . . . but it raises it and 
     puts people out of work.

  Governor-elect John Kasich said:

       This plan will not work. If it was to work, then I would 
     have to become a Democrat.

  Congratulations, Ohio, on electing a Democratic Governor.
  Mr. President, 22.7 million jobs and a giant surplus later, George W. 
Bush waltzes into office and says: Hey, we are running a surplus. The 
people deserve a tax cut.
  Let's recall what he said about his tax cut. He said over and over 
again:

       By far, the vast majority of the help goes to those at the 
     bottom end of the economic ladder.

  Wow. That sounds like the bottom got the vast majority of the tax 
cuts, doesn't it? They didn't. Actually, the bottom 60 percent of 
Americans got just 14.7 percent of the Bush tax cuts. The top 1 percent 
got 29.5 percent of the tax cuts, which is exactly double. Let me 
repeat that. The top 1 percent got double of what the bottom 60 percent 
got.
  The results of this new policy? Massive deficits. Only 1 million new 
jobs over the 8 years of the Bush Presidency, compared to 22.7 million 
during Clinton's 8 years. My friends in the minority want to go back to 
that discredited economic policy.
  The figleaf here is small business. They attack us and say that not 
cutting taxes on the richest Americans will hurt small business. Well, 
it seems that, to my friends, some small businesses are more important 
than others. Why did they block us for months on passing the Small 
Business Jobs Act, which gave tax cuts to small businesses and created 
a $30 billion line of credit for small businesses on Main Street? Why 
did they oppose the HIRE Act, which gave large tax cuts to small 
businesses to encourage them to hire unemployed workers? Well, it seems 
these aren't the small businesses my friends are so concerned about. 
When you and I think about small businesses, we picture the mom-and-pop 
grocer down the street somewhere in Oregon or Minnesota or maybe a 
hardware store or a small precision manufacturing operation--we have a 
lot of those in Minnesota. We probably think of them as small 
businesses because they are small. They probably have a few employees, 
one location, and make a modest but comfortable living doing it.
  Republicans are trying to scare us into believing that the grocer and 
the hardware store owners will shutter their doors and fire people if 
we return the top two tax brackets to previous levels. But that is 
simply not the case.
  In reality, only 3 percent of small businesses will be affected by 
this change. Yet you will hear Republicans tout that these top 3 
percent of businesses make up 50 percent of the total small business 
income. That tells you one important thing--that those 3 percent of 
small businesses aren't truly small businesses. Only under the 
broadest, most arbitrary of definitions are these businesses small.
  When many of my friends on the other side of the aisle talk about 
small businesses, they are including anybody who uses a flowthrough 
business entity--so an S corp or a partnership. They are not defining a 
small business by size, profits or the number of people they employ. 
They are defining it on a technicality.
  Under their definition, Bechtel, the fifth largest company in the 
United States, is a small business. The Koch brothers, who run a 
petroleum company with nearly $100 billion in annual revenue, are 
considered a small business. They are worth about $16 billion each. Law 
firm partners and Wall Street bond traders are considered small 
businesses.
  So Republicans are using the mom-and-pop grocery store to defend the 
continuation of these tax cuts. In reality, the only people they are 
helping are the Bechtels and the Kochs of the world and maybe Derek 
Jeter, Inc.--he deserves every dollar he gets--and Mel Gibson, Inc.--
maybe he has had a bad year--and other likely ``small business'' 
beneficiaries.
  At the same time that Republicans are demanding unpaid-for tax cuts 
for the Koch brothers, they are insisting we pay for a continuation of 
the emergency unemployment insurance program. They want to pay for it, 
even though unemployment benefits have been shown to be an extremely 
effective stimulus--in fact, one of the most effective stimulus 
measures. Why? Because when unemployed workers get their checks for a 
couple hundred dollars, they go to their local mom-and-pop grocery 
store and buy food. They spend that money right away in their 
communities in real small businesses.
  It is the holidays. Can they afford to buy a small Christmas present 
for their kids? I am worried that there are those among us who would 
say: No, no presents.
  The Republicans say these unemployment benefits are too expensive. 
They demand that these benefits must be paid for. But tax cuts for the 
richest people in America--no need to pay for those. Adding $700 
billion to the deficit--or actually $830 billion when factoring in 
extra interest payments--that is no problem. I hear my friends on the 
other side say we are going to have to make some hard choices. I agree. 
The deficit is a problem. Getting it under control will take shared 
sacrifice.

[[Page S8456]]

  There are a lot of Minnesotans who have to make hard choices now. 
Maybe it means giving up a second car or no summer camp for the kids. 
Some communities in Minnesota have had to go to a 4-day school week 
because there just isn't the money there.
  Some Minnesotans have been even harder hit. Their unemployment 
insurance was cut off earlier this week because of us. They have a lot 
of hard choices right now. Where are they going to live if they can't 
pay their mortgage or their rent? Choices: food or medicine or heat. 
How do I give my kids anything resembling a Christmas?
  These are people who lost their jobs and desperately want to find 
work, but we can't pass unemployment insurance for them unless it is 
paid for. But for the owners of Bechtel or PricewaterhouseCoopers--yes, 
PricewaterhouseCoopers is a small business too--the sky is the limit.
  I am Jewish. I don't know the New Testament all that well, but I do 
know Matthew, which says:

       Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of 
     my brethren, you did for me.

  I went to a union hall not long ago for the building trades. A 
carpenter came up to me--a big, strong guy with rough hands, big 
calloused hands--with tears in his eyes. He had just a little bit of 
work here and there over the last 18 months. He said to me: I never 
took unemployment insurance before. I hate it. But if it weren't for my 
unemployment insurance, I wouldn't be in my house.
  Making tough choices means doing one thing and not another. Right 
now, we are faced with that choice. If we can't agree to help people 
such as that carpenter and his family by continuing emergency 
unemployment benefits, how can we live with ourselves? How can we think 
we are doing our jobs?
  The choice before us is clear this holiday season: Lend a hand to 
those who simply can't get by without the help or give $100,000 in 
average tax cuts to people making over $1 million.
  Where are our values? What are we doing here? It is almost Christmas. 
We will be leaving to spend time with our families. We have jobs; we 
have great jobs. I think this is the greatest job--trying to make 
people's lives better back in Minnesota. That is my job.
  I ask my colleagues this: What are we doing here?
  I yield the floor.
  The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. The Senator from New York.
  Mr. SCHUMER. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that immediately 
upon my finishing, the Senator from Utah be recognized.
  The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. Without objection, it is so 
ordered.
  Mr. SCHUMER. Mr. President, I rise as well to speak about the single 
most important issue facing the American people today, and that is the 
state of the economy.
  Let's consider three facts and lay them side by side. First, over the 
last decade, even though the economy was growing modestly, middle-class 
incomes declined for the first time since World War II. The average 
middle-class family, which had always seen things get better and 
better, did not from 2001 to 2010.
  By the way, this did not just occur during the recession which began 
in 2008. It was constant throughout this decade. The great American 
dream, what is it? I submit it is very simple. Not everyone wants to 
try to become rich, and everyone knows they are not going to become 
rich, but they certainly know one thing: In America, the odds are very 
high you will be doing better 10 years from now than you are doing 
today. And the odds are even higher your kids will do even better than 
you. When incomes decline over a decade, that American dream burns a 
little less brightly for people and the whole tenor of America changes 
and we see the kind of anger we have seen, which is not typical of this 
great land of ours with its amazing people. That is unusual.
  So, first of all, middle-class incomes have gone down.
  Secondly, in the last decade, one group did very, very well--the 
highest in income among us, the millionaires and billionaires. God 
bless them. Their taxes went down, down, down over the last decade 
because of the Bush era tax cuts, but their incomes went up, up, up. 
They did great.
  Thirdly, over the last decade, while all of this was happening, our 
deficit got out of control. When we began this decade in 2001 there was 
a $250 billion surplus. We hadn't had that in decades. It was wonderful 
and it helped fuel the economy because small businesspeople and large 
businesspeople would borrow knowing that interest rates would stay low. 
Interest rates are often a greater cost to them than taxes. But when 
President Bush departed 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue at the end of 2008, he 
left behind a deficit of $1 trillion. Some of that was due to the war 
in Iraq, where our brave soldiers defended us, and Afghanistan as well, 
and a little more of it was due to new programs the President authored, 
including a prescription drug benefit for senior citizens. But most of 
it was due to the fact that he cut taxes on the wealthy.
  Our colleagues on the other side of the aisle say we have to keep the 
Bush tax cuts, particularly those for the wealthy. Well, was the last 
decade a great success? Not for the middle class. No. Their incomes 
went down. Not for job growth because that was smaller than before. So 
when we had the Clinton era level of taxes in the 1990s, all of America 
and job creation and the middle class, in terms of income, did better 
than with these tax cuts which began in 2001. So this cry that we need 
these tax cuts for prosperity doesn't fit with history. It may fit with 
a particular ideology, but it doesn't fit with history.
  Who on Earth would want to extend a failed economic program that 
didn't help the middle class--the backbone of America, the place I come 
from and always fight for? Who would want to extend this failed 
economic program? I will tell you who. Every single 1 of my 42 
colleagues on the other side of the aisle is marching in lockstep 
saying please extend this failed economic program. Why? It seems to me 
what they hold out for is tax cuts for the millionaires. In fact, they 
are so committed to extending the failed economic program of the Bush 
years, they are willing to hold hostage the middle-class tax cuts, 
which we all agree we should have, until they can give a giant tax 
break to millionaires and billionaires.
  That defies economic logic. The well-off--the people for whom my 
colleagues in the minority are fighting--aren't going to spend their 
tax break and get the economy moving. They are not going to rush to 
JCPenney and buy that warm winter coat they have been waiting to buy. 
They are not going to go out to the Barnside Diner and buy a nice prime 
rib dinner. They can afford all that already. They can afford it 7 days 
a week, 52 weeks a year.
  I want to say something about these millionaires and billionaires. 
God bless them. We are not mad at them for having done well. We admire 
them. We all wish we were like them, as successful as they were. God 
bless them. All we are saying is they do not need another $400,000 or 
$4 million at this time when there are so many other more important 
needs.
  I want to reiterate that. I have nothing against the wealthy. I don't 
like it when we knock them. I think they are great. I respect them. I 
admire their achievements. There are lots of them in New York who 
started with nothing and worked their way up. I think it is great. Some 
of them inherited their wealth, that is true, and they seem to have 
even more a sense of entitlement than the ones who made it themselves, 
oftentimes, but many more live the American Dream through their own 
great ingenuity. They pulled themselves up the economic ladder by their 
bootstraps. But I have to tell you something. When I talk to them, at 
least those who are wealthy in my home State of New York--even many 
Republicans--they say: You know what. For the good of the country, I 
don't need this kind of tax break. If we put it to deficit reduction, 
most of them say: I would be for it. Not all of them say that. 
Certainly not the hard right people who seem to have the party on the 
other side in the palm of their hands, who say: I made my $10 million 
and don't you dare touch a nickel of it. But most--most--say: Chuck, I 
can afford to pay a bit more. I have nothing against returning to the 
Clinton rates, as long as, they say--and this is a reasonable caveat--
the money goes to a good purpose: making our schools better, improving 
our infrastructure and, above all, they say, decreasing the deficit.
  That is what the amendment I will offer tomorrow would do. The other

[[Page S8457]]

side of the aisle wants you to believe the average American 
overwhelmingly supports tax breaks for millionaires. I have heard it. 
They say: The election--haven't you Democrats heard about the election? 
Well, I was running this year. I happened to get 65, 66 percent of the 
vote. I got a lot of votes from Republicans, a lot of votes from 
Independents, and I talked to a lot of angry people. I saw a lot of tea 
party people. None of them said to me: Make sure you keep tax breaks 
for the millionaires. They may have said shrink the government; they 
may have said repeal health care. That is true. But none, none said: 
Keep the tax breaks for millionaires and billionaires.
  Here is a poll that reflects that, and it is not by some Democratic 
Party organization or some Republican Party organization but by CBS, a 
nonpartisan poll. The poll yesterday said only 26 percent of Americans 
support millionaire tax breaks--26 percent. Now you may say: Well, that 
is just the Democrats. Oh, no. Only 25 percent of Independents say keep 
the tax breaks for millionaires--those swing voters who are the ones 
who created a lot of new Republican seats and caused us to lose a lot 
of Democratic seats. Even on the Republican side, 46 percent--only 46 
percent--supported millionaire tax breaks.
  So this idea that the election was a mandate to cut taxes on 
millionaires and billionaires--you know, I didn't only run in New York, 
but I worked closely with many of my colleagues in many parts of the 
country--the Northeast, Midwest, Southwest--and none of them reported 
any hue and cry to keep tax breaks for millionaires--none. That is not 
what the election said.
  Now maybe the money of some of those millionaires helped create ads 
on other issues that helped win the election for these folks but not 
the issue itself. So we need to get our economy humming on all 
cylinders again, and it is true we need to stimulate demand.
  Mark Zandi, an economist who is as well-respected on the right, as 
well as the left--I believe he was Senator McCain's chief economic 
adviser when he ran his campaign--said every dollar spent on tax breaks 
for the millionaires generates 32 cents of economic activity. Those of 
us who believe in economic efficiency, which I do, know that doesn't 
work. Let me give a contrast. Every dollar spent on unemployment 
benefits generates $1.61 in economic activity.

  So if you care about getting the economy going, you are going to be 
for increasing unemployment benefits quicker than tax breaks for 
millionaires. According to Mark Zandi, most every economist--even those 
on the right--doesn't believe that is false. UI benefits are 400 
percent more stimulative than tax breaks for the wealthy according to 
Mr. Zandi.
  Yet on Wednesday, when my esteemed and effective colleague from Ohio, 
Senator Sherrod Brown, came to the floor and asked unanimous consent 
for just a 1-year reauthorization for unemployment benefits, the other 
side objected. As the Senator from Minnesota said when he was speaking 
on the Senate floor a few minutes ago, the anomaly is that the 
Republican Party is saying we don't have to pay for tax breaks for the 
millionaires but we have to pay for an increase in unemployment 
benefits. What kind of logic is that?
  The middle class is worried. They are worried about how they are 
going to stretch that paycheck. They are worried about how they are 
going to make that mortgage payment. They are worried about how they 
are going to keep that job. In this recession, middle-class people are 
more unemployed than ever before. Most recessions in the past had two 
differences: One, they mainly affected the poorest people and the 
working-class people who made the lowest salaries. This one has gone 
way up into the middle class and the upper middle class. I have met 
hundreds of these people as I have traveled through my State, and they 
are out of work for a lot longer. It is no longer 3 weeks or even 3 
months but 6 months, 9 months, a year. We just heard the unemployment 
rate went up, under these Bush tax cuts, to 9.8 percent.
  We are trying to offer solutions that bring the unemployment rate 
down. We are trying to offer solutions that focus on the middle class, 
while our Republican colleagues are busy defending the wonderful people 
who made a lot of money but don't need the help.
  After Senator Brown offered his bill to reauthorize unemployment 
insurance, Senator Udall of New Mexico asked for consent to take up and 
pass a bill to extend the highly successful Building Start Program. 
That gave tax incentives so construction workers could build buildings 
that were energy efficient--150,000 good-paying jobs. They objected.
  Next came Senator Stabenow from Michigan, a real leader in the fight 
for job creation. She came to the floor with a bill to give tax breaks 
to manufacturers. We need manufacturing, not only in her State of 
Michigan but in my State of New York--particularly upstate. 
Conservative estimates said the bill would create 40,000 private sector 
jobs. Again, the Republicans objected.
  Then I offered a bill myself--and I am glad my colleague from Utah is 
here because this was a bipartisan bill. It was a tax cut for business 
called the HIRE Act. It said if you hire somebody who is unemployed 60 
days, you don't have to pay the payroll tax for this year. It is 
expiring. I wanted to extend it. Objection.
  The bill had passed with bipartisan support. But the point is to get 
tax breaks for the millionaires they would even object to a bipartisan 
bill that gave a tax break to businesses that would employ people. What 
kind of logic is that?
  One final point as I conclude, and that is about the deficit. The 
deficit, as I mentioned, is huge. But let me just say the Bush tax cuts 
and particularly those for the millionaires and billionaires add a huge 
amount to the deficit, and we do not hear a peep about it from the 
other side. They care about the deficit, but $300 billion that it would 
cost to give these tax breaks to millionaires and billionaires, that is 
OK. Please.
  Over the next year, I am going to be up here reminding my colleagues 
when they say we cannot pay for help to our schools so they can hire a 
science teacher who might create the genius that would create a new 
industry that would create new jobs, when they say we cannot have money 
to repair a road or a sewer project that would create good-paying jobs 
because it would increase the deficit, I am going to remind each and 
every one of them that they said, when they gave tax breaks to 
millionaires, the deficit didn't count. Just remember that.
  And, of course, they say these tax breaks for millionaires and 
billionaires are tax breaks for small business. My good colleague--
someone who looks very much like the Presiding Officer, the Senator 
from Minnesota, who was seated over there a few minutes ago--talked 
about that.
  My dad was a small businessman. He had a little exterminating 
business. It wasn't very successful. I know how he suffered through it. 
He knows these tax breaks are not for a business like his--or the dry 
cleaner or the restaurant or any of these other businesses. They are 
not for any at all because we are not talking about corporate tax cuts. 
They are for very wealthy people, some of whom you have mentioned.
  I know my colleague from Utah has been patiently waiting, so I am not 
going to talk about all the small business stuff, but I just want to 
remind people about this plan. Under the President Bush tax breaks for 
millionaires, here is what would happen. Under the plan my colleagues 
across the aisle are supporting, people who make $1 million would get a 
$43,000 break per year; people who make $10 million would get a 
$400,000 break per year; people who make $100 million would get a 
$3,800,000 break per year. The average middle-class family making 
$60,000 would get $2,500. We want to get that middle-class family its 
break. We will give the same amount to these folks, they will get a 
break, no more and no less, than the middle-class family. But we don't 
believe these breaks, where we have so many other needs and a huge 
deficit to boot, are called for.
  We will be debating that all day today, all tomorrow morning until 
10:30--but also for the rest of the next 2 years.
  Again, I repeat, don't talk to us about deficit reduction, folks, if 
you are willing to put this whopping hole for deficits for tax breaks 
for the millionaires and billionaires. Don't come

[[Page S8458]]

to us and say this program for this school or this road or this small 
business incentive should not be passed because of the deficit but it 
is OK to give the breaks to these folks.
  More people last night tuned in to watch the reruns of ``Matlock'' on 
TV Land than would benefit from the Republican proposal. I haven't seen 
``Matlock'' in a long time. I am sure those people who watched it had a 
good time, but it wasn't many of them. But it was more of them than the 
millionaires and billionaires who would get this break. They are a 
powerful group. God bless them. They should not have the kind of power 
they have, to have good people on the other side of the aisle tie 
themselves in a knot to prevent all kinds of important things from 
happening until they get their break.
  I yield the floor.
  Mr. REID. Mr. President, I have been in touch with Senator McConnell, 
and he knows I am asking this consent agreement. I ask unanimous 
consent that at 10:30 a.m. tomorrow morning, December 4, the Senate 
proceed to vote on the motion to invoke cloture on the Reid motion to 
concur with the House amendment to the Senate amendment to H.R. 4853 
with the Baucus amendment No. 4727, with the time from 8:30 a.m. to 
10:30 a.m. equally divided between the leaders or their designees.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
  Mr. REID. Mr. President, this is a time that virtually no one is 
happy with. Someone wanted it late, someone wanted it early. As I 
indicated to Lula Davis, we just split the baby in half. This is the 
best we can do. Make as many people happy as we can. We are coming in 
at 8:30, which is unusual on a Saturday morning, but people who live 
certainly east of the Mississippi, they can go some ways--it is 
difficult for those of us who live west of the Mississippi to go 
anyplace, but at least some people will be able to have an afternoon at 
home or in their States with this agreement that has just been 
approved.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Franken). The Senator from Utah.
  Mr. HATCH. Mr. President, I always enjoy listening to my colleague 
from New York. He is one of the brightest people in this body, he is 
one of the toughest, and he has been a very dear friend all these 
years.
  I might mention that the Schumer-Hatch bill is now law, a bipartisan 
bill we did put through. That was a good step in the right direction as 
far as gaining jobs.
  I would also like to point out that 56 percent of all capital gains 
that create jobs are paid for by people who earn over $500,000 a year.
  I also would care to point out that I absolutely guarantee to 
everybody watching us today what would happen if there were these tax 
increases. I think the distinguished Senator knows his suggestion polls 
very well. Is that the reason we should do it? No. But I guarantee, and 
I do not think anybody could doubt this guarantee, that if his approach 
wins, the Democrats will take every dime of that and spend it. In fact, 
the President's budget spends more toward the end than it does now--I 
mean a lot more. That is one of the problems.
  We know a good 50 percent of small businesses would be affected. They 
are the ones who create jobs--25 percent of the employees and about 50 
percent of small businesses would be affected if we do what the 
Democrats would like to do.
  Be that as it may, those are some of the differences. But I am going 
to explain why at the last minute this Congress--after the upheaval 
that happened during the election--this Congress cannot seem to get 
together during a time of economic distress and put over these tax 
reliefs that were started in 2001-2003--that we cannot do that and at 
the last minute to come in and want to change the game again and do 
that at a time when we have the economic difficulty and problems we 
have. It is more of the same.
  Over the last few days Americans watching C-SPAN would have seen a 
lot of speeches about widespread tax hikes that will arrive with the 
new year. Many of my friends on the other side deployed several 
attacks. C-SPAN viewers probably were not surprised the attacks were 
exclusively aimed at those on this side.
  I will not get into correcting the record any more than I have on all 
of that misinformation right now. I would like to focus on two themes 
we heard. We heard them over and over. The first theme was repeated 
many times. It was this: Republicans are accused of holding hostage tax 
relief for middle-income taxpayers. The second theme took some 
creativity. If you listen to our friends on the other side you would 
think they had hired a psychic or mind reader, that somehow this mind 
reader had successfully read the minds of 42 Republican Senators.
  Our friends spoke as if they had determined the motives of 42 
Republican Senators. Perhaps not surprisingly, the motive ascribed was 
not very favorable. Republicans' alleged hostage taking was described 
as solely motivated by a desire to cut taxes for high-income people.
  If our friends in the Democratic leadership hired a mind reader, I 
advise them to seek a refund because it did not work. You have been 
had, my friends. You didn't need a mind reader. You need not come to 
the floor and spend all day ascribing motives to your colleagues on 
this side.
  The record is clear today. It has been clear for a decade that the 
tax relief program has been in effect. Actions speak louder than words. 
Votes speak louder than talking points or press releases.
  When first passed over 9\1/2\ years ago, nearly all of the Republican 
conference supported the bipartisan tax relief plan. Roughly one-fourth 
of the Democratic caucus supported the plan.
  Because of the opposition of the Democratic leadership, efforts to 
make these policies permanent law were rebuffed. Check the record. 
During the years of the Republican majority, the Democratic leadership 
opposed efforts to make the widely applicable tax relief measures 
permanent. Those efforts were also opposed by the other side.
  What is even more revealing is the record since the Democratic 
leadership assumed control of the Congress almost 4 years ago. A few 
moments ago, I said actions speak louder than words. Votes speak louder 
than speeches. After obstructing permanent tax relief in the minority, 
what did our friends in the Democratic leadership do when they gained 
power? Let's take a look.
  I have a series of charts. The Democrats have taken power. These 
charts chronicle the record of the Democratic leadership on this time-
sensitive matter. The first chart chronicles the first year of the new 
Democratic Party majority. The year is 2007. The Democrats took power 
on January 4, 2007. You will see it circled on the chart right here. 
That is January 4. Look at the rest of the year in 2007. Think about 
it. No action was taken on the tax hikes that come down in less than 1 
month. No action, none, nothing, zilch.
  Let's take a look at 2008. This chart is pretty simple. Take a look. 
It is completely blank other than the calendar on there. No action, 
nothing, none, zilch.
  Here is a chart for 2009. It is an important chart as well. There 
were big changes in Washington. Democrats gained a large majority, 60 
votes in the Senate. It was basically a filibuster-proof body. That is 
circled here on January 6.
  President Obama takes office on January 20, right here. It is circled 
right there. You can see it. A little over 3 months later an event 
occurred that many on our side of the aisle will not forget. The senior 
Senator from Pennsylvania crossed the aisle to give Democrats a 
filibuster-proof majority. Let me just point to that third circle right 
here.
  Nothing happens for the rest of the year, not a doggone thing 
happened for the rest of the year. We had a larger Democratic majority 
sworn in; President Obama was sworn in.
  Then my dear colleague Senator Specter decided he wanted to be a 
Democrat, and he switched parties. That got 60 votes in the Senate. 
Nothing happens for the rest of the year, nothing else happens.
  On December 3, 2009, 1 year ago, the House Democratic leadership 
passes a long-term death tax reform. That is right here on December 3. 
This represents a milestone. Almost 3 years into their majority, one 
portion of the congressional Democratic leadership took comprehensive 
action on one piece of the 2001 tax relief expiring provisions.

[[Page S8459]]

  Let's take a look at 2010. It is the fourth year congressional 
Democrats have controlled both bodies, abjectly controlled them, in 
this decade. The House-passed death tax reform was placed on the Senate 
calendar on January 20, 2010. When Senator Scott Brown was sworn in on 
February 4, the Democratic majority fell, if that word is appropriate, 
to 59 majority votes. What has happened for the balance of this year? 
What action has the Democratic leadership taken as the big tax hikes 
approached? With the economy slumbering and a big tax hike coming, what 
actions has the Democratic leadership in both Houses taken? With the 
Nation's job creators, America's small businesses, expressing pessimism 
about the business environment and a looming tax hike on the horizon, 
what actions has the Democratic Party leadership taken? With 
unemployment announced today at 9.8 percent and a big tax hike coming, 
what action has the Democratic Party leadership taken over these last 4 
years?
  By the way, this latest data indicates that the unemployment rate is 
going the wrong way; that is, upward. It is going up again. More 
Americans are out of work. I remind my friends in the Democratic 
leadership to pay close attention to this data. It should concentrate 
the mind on policies to counter the problems at hand rather than 
politics.
  With a big tax hike less than 1 month away and this horrible economic 
data arriving this morning, what action has the Democratic Party 
leadership taken and the Democratic leadership in the Senate? Let's 
take a look. Over the past several months, Republican Senators have 
come to the floor to urge our friends in the Democratic leadership to 
address a time-sensitive topic. I am referring to a package of 
unfinished tax legislative business.
  I am on the Finance Committee. I sit right next to our ranking 
member, Senator Grassley. I expect to take over as ranking member in 
January. Ranking Member Grassley and I used this chart in a colloquy a 
couple of weeks ago. Here is our checklist chart. The only piece of 
legislation the Senate has considered is one small but important piece 
of unfinished tax legislative business. It is what we call tax 
extenders--something we almost automatically have passed in the past.
  Unfortunately, the Democratic Party leadership in the Senate and 
House scuttled a bipartisan agreement between Chairman Baucus and 
Ranking Member Grassley about 10 months ago. After we put it right out 
of the Democratic-controlled Finance Committee, they basically canceled 
it. That includes the research and development tax credit that helps 
our high-tech world to remain competitive, to mention one.
  The reason I mention that is because it is something almost everybody 
wants. It is one of the glues that bind everything together. Over this 
whole year after we put that tax extender bill out, look where we are.
  Unfortunately, the Democratic leadership scuttled the bipartisan 
agreement between Chairman Baucus and Ranking Member Grassley about 10 
months ago. After that, a partisan strategy was pursued by our friends 
on the other side. Not surprisingly, it failed several times. I will 
give them a checkmark on the chart for doing the minimum. My friends in 
the Democratic leadership did at least bring up a bill.
  As the chart shows, the tax extenders--right here--which are overdue 
by almost 1 year, are not alone. There are three other major areas of 
unfinished business, and there are others as well. But I decided to 
talk about these.
  One area Senator Grassley and I discussed at length a couple weeks 
ago applies to millions of middle-income families this year. It is the 
2010 alternative minimum tax. Another area is the death tax. In less 
than 1 month from now, the number of States to be hit by the death tax 
will shoot dramatically upward. Small businesses and family farms are 
going to be lost unless we do something about it. But here we are in 
the last few weeks of this session. They haven't done a doggone thing 
on the AMT patch. The House did something on death tax reform, but we 
have done nothing. Both bodies have done nothing. And they have done 
absolutely nothing on these tax hikes. When compared with the Lincoln-
Kyl compromise on death tax reform, the number of taxable estates will 
be 10 times higher. In the case of family farms, it will be 13 times as 
high.
  The third area is the 2001 and 2003 tax rate cuts. As important as 
extenders, the AMT patch, and the death tax are, the impact of this tax 
package down here is monolithic in comparison. I am referring to the 
marginal income tax rate reductions that are current law until the end 
of this month. I am also referring to family tax relief. Both pieces 
were the core of the bipartisan tax relief enacted in 2001 and 2003.
  For an example of the importance of this package, we need look no 
further than a typical family of four. For a family of four earning 
$50,000 of income, the tax hike they face will be $2,136. In this slow-
growth environment, who among us thinks it makes sense to hike this 
family's taxes by almost $200 a month? That is where we are. Unless we 
can get this all done by the other side cooperating, it seems to me, a 
family earning $50,000 is going to be socked an extra $2,136.
  Contrast the record I have laid out with the two attacks directed at 
Republicans over the last 2 days. Just tell me, how could we possibly 
have held hostage any bill with the votes the Democrats have had over 
the last 4 years? The folks taking these partisan shots have had almost 
4 years with an overwhelming majority in both the House and the Senate 
to deal with a massive tax hike set to kick in in less than a month 
now. Republicans have not controlled the House for 4 solid years. For 
almost 2 years, the other side has ruled with one of the most robust 
majorities in modern times. The motives of the minority in the House 
hardly ever solely determine the fate of any bill there. It is likewise 
in the Senate. A filibuster-proof majority has a lot of power. A 
majority that is slightly less than filibuster proof needs to work with 
the other side. That is the way the Senate has always worked.
  Even if we Republicans were to decide to filibuster, how could we 
have filibustered something that doesn't exist? Look at all those prior 
charts. Not one doggone thing done. It is something that has not 
existed for almost 4 years of Democratic Party control of both Houses 
of Congress. Go back through the record. In the 4 years of majority 
rule, show me the Senate Democratic leadership bill that Republicans 
could obstruct. There hasn't been any.
  Yesterday, finally the dam of inaction broke, but it broke on the 
House side. House Democratic leadership sent a bill late in the second 
week of this lameduck session. The bill does not prevent a tax hike on 
virtually every American taxpayer. But what kind of action is the House 
bill? It is political action, pure and simple. It is political. Look no 
further than the statements of the bill's authors, the House Democratic 
leadership. We can view that bill as an expression of partisan 
sentiment in the House Democratic caucus. It will not become law, and 
we all know it.
  It is up to the Obama administration and Senate Democratic leadership 
to work with Republicans. The aim should be a bipartisan transaction or 
deal, if you want to call it that. Real legislating on these time-
sensitive tax hike prevention issues is long past due.
  What kind of actions are the American people receiving from the 
Senate Democratic leadership? The majority leader has used his 
procedural power to jam Republicans. He has a right to do that. But it 
has been consistent. Call a bill up, fill up the parliamentary tree, 
prevent any and all amendments in the greatest deliberative body in the 
world, and then try to ram it through. I have to say that these tactics 
also jam any Democrats who might differ with the Democratic 
leadership's scheme. And there are some who do. The sum and substance 
of the Democratic leadership procedural jam is to guarantee that we 
will waste yet more procedural and more precious time. If Members don't 
believe me, ask the congressional press corps outside the Chamber.
  Taking a bet on a successful legislative outcome of the two jammed 
votes would not be a good wager. It could be akin to accepting an offer 
to sell the Brooklyn Bridge from a fast-talking New Yorker. No one is 
fooled by this move by the Senate Democratic leadership. I challenge 
any of my friends on the other side to show me the votes.
  How will the actions of the Democratic leadership advance the ball if

[[Page S8460]]

the two votes are designed to fail? Sure, maybe from their perspective 
there is some cheap political benefit to the Democratic leadership and 
Democratic Party staging these jammed votes. As one member of the 
Democratic leadership implied yesterday, maybe there will be some 
campaign material produced. Is that what this is all about? Is that 
what the greatest deliberative body in the world is all about in the 
last few weeks of this session when this country is in the fiscal 
problem it is in?
  I ask my friends to step back and take another look at the political 
calculation they may be making. The American people are angry. I have 
held seven townhall meetings in the last few months, plus two tele-
townhall meetings. The American people are very angry. The American 
people know it has taken almost 4 years for our friends in the 
Democratic leadership in both the House and Senate to address this 
looming tax hike. They have had monumental majorities that would have 
enabled them to put just about anything through that they wanted, such 
as the looming tax hike they all knew about when they took power long 
ago. Is it really worth running through this political charade with a 
couple of partisan votes and campaign commercials that may be used 2 
years from now? Is it really that important?
  I ask my friends in the Democratic leadership and the Democratic side 
to consider the political calculation further. Especially consider it 
when these two partisan jam votes fail. If they want to keep playing 
politics with a big tax hike on virtually every American, what will 
they say when we hit the last day of this calendar right here? Will 
they say: Too bad, American families. Will they say: Too bad, small 
business folks. Will they say: Jamming the other side with partisan 
votes was our foremost goal. What will they say after wasting the hard-
working taxpayers' time and money on these jam votes?
  Let's go to the partisan allegation that it is not helpful to the 
goal of a bipartisan deal. It is the second theme to which I 
referred. Many on the other side ascribed to Republicans a motive to 
take whatever action necessary solely to provide tax relief for high-
income taxpayers. Now, let's be clear. Senate Republicans and Democrats 
both want to prevent tax hikes on middle-income families. The only 
difference is Senate Republicans want to do more.

  On this side, in this slow-growth environment, we do not want to 
raise taxes on anyone right now. Yesterday, I discussed some of the 
reasons for preventing any tax hikes, even preventing the so-called 
millionaires' tax hike. It is a hit on small businesses, and we all 
know it. It is a hit on the after-tax rate of return on investment. 
This so-called millionaires' tax hike will slow the flow of the 
lifeblood of business--capital.
  Let's be clear. On our side, we want, just as much as the Democrats 
want, to protect middle-income taxpayers from a tax hike. Nearly every 
Republican in 2001 supported it then, tried to make it permanent, and 
we support it now.
  You need look no further than our leader's bill. It is right there in 
the bill. On our side, we want more of these middle-income taxpayers to 
keep their jobs. We want a business and investment environment that 
reduces the punishingly high unemployment rate of close to 10 percent 
now. That does not even talk about the underemployment rate which is a 
little more than 18 percent when you include people who do not even 
want to look for a job anymore and those who have given up.
  Almost 4 years ago, in the 2006 election, the American people 
provided the Democratic Party leadership with control of the Congress. 
In the 2008 election, almost 2 years ago, the American people provided 
the Democratic leadership with the largest majorities in more than a 
generation. They also provided the Democratic leadership with a 
President of their party.
  The Democratic leadership spent the period of 2001 to 2006 thwarting 
efforts to make the bipartisan tax relief of 2001 and 2003 permanent. 
Upon assuming control, they spent almost 4 years with no legislation, 
as you can see on this chart, to make permanent or even extend the 
marginal rate cuts and family tax relief packages. No Senate 
legislative action, no Senate committee and floor action, no Senate 
action until this late lameduck session partisan jam vote.
  The Senate Democratic leadership needs to engage. Engagement is 
defined as a constructive activity with the goal of changing the law. 
Engagement is not defined as repeating a dead-end partisan process like 
we have seen with the extenders bill--something we should have passed 
long ago and we were willing to. Time-sensitive tax legislative 
business should go through the regular order process. It is too late 
for that now, as you all know, as we all know.
  It is too late for partisan stunts. The American people need action. 
Actions speak louder than words. It is too risky for all of our 
constituents to aim for partisan stunts. The clock is ticking, and soon 
this calendar, in this year right here--this whole calendar--will be 
history.
  Well, the Americans deserve real legislative action. As I have said, 
it is one thing to come on the Senate floor now and try to raise the 
thresholds and so forth at this late date. But the fact is, small 
businesses are mainly partnerships, sub S corporations, entities where 
the income comes to the small businessperson who, in most cases, if 
they want their business to grow, puts a lot of that income back into 
creating jobs and opportunities.
  I have even heard the phony argument over the years that, well, it is 
only 3 percent of small businesses. Well, that 3 percent is 750,000 
businesses that create 70 percent of the jobs in this society.
  I would like to see jobs recreated. I would like to see us do the 
things we are here to do. I would like to have the White House--they 
have brilliant people in the White House, brilliant people, not one of 
whom, to my knowledge, has been constructive in his or her lifetime in 
creating private sector jobs. They are great at creating public sector 
jobs, as we have all seen over the last couple years, as Federal jobs 
have jumped dramatically. But hardly anybody down there even knows how 
to create a private sector job.
  I do not want to be mean to the President or anybody else. These are 
brilliant people. Maybe there is something there that they can come up 
with. But they sure as heck are not helping us get through this end of 
session in a way that will create jobs.
  I hope our negotiators on both sides will wake up and realize we have 
to do what is right for this country, and we have to do some things 
that will help small businesses in this country create jobs. At a time 
when unemployment has now jumped to 9.8 percent, with the 
underemployment rate over 18 percent the last time I checked, it seems 
to me the worst thing we could possibly do is mess it all up with tax 
increases against anybody.
  I personally have suggested that since Republicans want this tax 
relief of 2001 and 2003 to be permanent, since we have wanted that, and 
the Democrats have wanted only those at $200,000 and $250,000--below 
those figures--to have the tax relief, and they want their so-called 
middle-class tax rates to be permanent--which we would keep going 
because we believe as much in middle-class tax relief as they do--in 
fact, I think actually more--it seems to me we ought to get together 
and we ought to at least give this economy a chance over the next 2 or 
3 years, as much as I would like to make this statute permanent, and 
give us a chance to be able to regenerate jobs in this society in ways 
that make sense.
  Keep in mind, when we start talking about the so-called millionaires' 
tax, we are talking about 56 percent of all capital gains rates paid by 
people, many of whom are small businesspeople who will create jobs if 
we can get rid of the uncertainty that, I have to say, has been 
continuous over the last 4 years, and certainly over the last 2 years.
  I just hope we can get together. I hope nobody will construe my 
remarks as trying to pick on anybody. I do not want to do that. I just 
want to make these points because I think they are relevant, they are 
truthful, and, frankly, it is time we get together and get these 
problems solved.
  I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Rhode Island.
  Mr. REED. Mr. President, first, let me thank my colleague from South 
Dakota, Senator Thune, for allowing me to precede him.

[[Page S8461]]

  Mr. President, I come to the Senate floor this morning to urge my 
colleagues--all of us--to move very quickly to pass tax relief for 
middle-income Americans. We have a crisis in this country: a crisis of 
jobs, a crisis of income for middle-class families. One of the ironies 
is I was here in 2001 when the Bush tax cuts were proposed. One of the 
major premises of those tax cuts was, well, this is going to free up 
the engine of job creation. It is going to result in such economic 
growth that our surplus--and at that time we had a surplus--is going to 
be sustained, if not increased.
  The record is that we have seen the worst private sector job creation 
in this decade since pre-World War II. We have seen the incomes of 
middle-class Americans stagnate, while we have seen the incomes of the 
very richest expand dramatically.
  One of the phenomena that was taking place at the end of the 1990s 
and in 2000 and was a function of several things--first, tough tax 
votes by Democrats alone in 1993 to begin to balance the budget; 
second, Federal Reserve policy that recognized those tough votes and 
was appropriate in terms of providing an adequate interest rate level; 
and the third was something, frankly, we did not even recognize: the 
explosion of information technology in terms of how it made us more 
productive--but those three factors together led us to the year 2000, 
to a situation where we had a surplus. We had unemployment rates that 
were very low, particularly relative to today.
  Then the Bush administration came in and decided tax cuts, 
particularly tax cuts for the upper income Americans--because that was 
the implicit argument, that they create the jobs--if you give those tax 
cuts to the wealthy, they will create the jobs. Well, we have had 10 
years of real experience, and that has not worked.
  There are other factors that intervened. We have had two wars we 
chose not to pay for, increasing the deficit; we vastly expanded 
entitlements--not reforming them really but expanding them--through 
Part D of the Medicare Program, which was also unpaid for.
  Now we are looking at the worst economic performance we have seen 
since the 1930s. We need to do two hugely challenging missions: First, 
we have to grow jobs. We have to continue to sustain demand. That is 
why in that context a tax cut for middle-income Americans makes some 
sense now. I did not think the package of tax cuts made any sense in 
2001. I voted against it. I think we should have stuck with the hard-
won surplus, investing in the country. Or if we were going to provide 
tax relief, give it to the middle class, give it through a reduction in 
payroll taxes that will encourage more employment, give it in a way 
where it is targeted to those people who are struggling with jobs, with 
college tuition. That was not the choice that was made though. I think 
that choice back in 2001 was the incorrect choice.

  But now we have another choice, and this choice--again, mission 1: 
How do we keep this demand going? How do we sustain it? There is a 
strong argument to provide a continuation of the middle-class tax cuts.
  But the next mission is, how do we rein in this deficit? That 
requires tough choices. To me, the idea of withholding further income 
tax breaks for the wealthiest Americans, that is something that in 
terms of deficit reduction is probably a lot easier to do--and, 
frankly, there is nothing easy to do around here these days--but a lot 
easier to do than some of the glib discussion or claims that we will 
just reform Medicare, or we will reform this entitlement, or we will 
cut this defense program, et cetera. All of that may have to be done, 
but ask yourselves: If we cannot do this, how likely will we be able to 
take on even tougher issues that confront us?
  So I think this is a defining moment in terms of our continuation of 
supporting working families, expanding the economy, growing jobs in 
America, and also taking at least a small step to begin to deal with 
the deficit. We know the addition of these tax breaks for the 
wealthiest--and let me put the tax issue in context. We have a 
progressive tax system. People who make a lot of money will enjoy all 
the tax reductions that stay in place for middle Americans. They will 
not enjoy the tax cuts that were imposed by the Bush administration for 
the wealthiest. That cost to the Nation over 10 years will be $700 
billion of additional deficit.
  We are already in a hole, and we are going to dig ourselves much 
deeper. We can decide--and I hope we do--to continue to try to provide 
support to middle-income Americans, and at the same time achieve that 
other objective which must be dealt with: somehow trying to get a 
handle on the deficit--a deficit that the President inherited, along 
with an unemployment rate that was unacceptable. Progress has been 
made, not enough progress in terms of employment, and we have to keep 
up the effort.
  So this is an issue of providing support for working Americans and 
beginning the long-term difficult task of getting the deficit under 
control. It is a difficult task. I was here in 1992 and 1993 and 1994 
when it was done--and it was a difficult, arduous task.
  The bill that Chairman Baucus is offering today will also extend the 
Making Work Pay tax credit that gives all working Americans a $400 tax 
cut in their paycheck through 2011--again, to encourage work in the 
United States. It will make the child tax credit permanent. It cuts 
taxes for families paying college tuition, State and local sales tax, 
and property taxes. All of that is aimed at working families, our 
constituents. It also cuts taxes for business research and development, 
other programs that are going to help, we believe, stimulate job 
creation. These are very important.

  At the crux of it, though, is this decision to support working 
Americans, middle-income Americans. Again, there is a tendency in these 
kinds of debates to be stereotypical and to misunderstand. People who 
have been very successful in the country and make a lot of money work 
awfully hard, but I use the term to refer to those middle-income 
Americans who are working very hard, facing real challenges, and don't 
have the same kind of support they just had, if you will, 2 or 3 or 4 
or 5 years ago to fall back on.
  There is another aspect of this legislation that is pending before 
us. One point I wish to make is that there is a national housing trust 
fund that was discussed being included. That is not included, and I 
hope we can include it. That is another program that is going to help 
put people to work, and I hope we can do that.
  Then, of course, there is the other aspect of the Baucus bill; that 
is, the emergency unemployment compensation. We just received a report 
from the Council of Economic Advisers, and they have pointed out that 
this program has helped 14 million unemployed workers as of October 
2010, and at that time, there were nearly 5 million unemployed workers 
benefitting from these programs each week--5 million Americans. These 
people were working. They got caught up in this recession. This is, for 
many of them, the only constant source of support they have now as they 
look for work.
  We have seen this benefit not just the recipients but their families. 
In fact, there has been an estimate of about 40 million people--spouses 
and 10.5 million children--who have depended in part on getting these 
unemployment benefits.
  It has also been able to maintain employment. There is an estimate 
that 800,000 jobs have been maintained and created because of this 
unemployment compensation. That is because when someone gets their 
check, they do not usually toss it aside; they cash it. They go to the 
grocery store. They go to the gas station. They go to places they have 
to go. They put a little tuition down if they have to pay tuition on a 
child's education because they desperately need these funds. So in that 
regard, it creates and sustains jobs.
  We are in danger, frankly, of seeing this UI program terminated. I 
think we have to continue it. I think it will add immensely to the 
efforts under way to help middle-income Americans. The average benefit 
is about $300 a week. That is certainly not an inducement to say: I 
don't need to look for work; I want to spend the rest of my life making 
$300 a week. The program provides up to 99 weeks of benefits. There is 
no attempt to extend it, but it would be the same 99 weeks people were 
able to benefit from 2 years ago. So I think we have to do that. That 
is part of this debate also. I would hate to see that the only thing we 
do at the end of this day is pass tax cuts and not also include 
unemployment compensation.

[[Page S8462]]

  I think we have to have a middle-class tax cut, but we also have to 
have unemployment compensation benefits extended. I don't have to tell 
anyone in this room that the unemployment rate is too high everywhere. 
In my State, it seems to hover between 10 and 12 percent. We have never 
withheld emergency unemployment benefits nationally as long as the 
unemployment rate was above 7.2 percent. Republican administrations, 
Democratic Congresses; Democratic administrations, Republican 
Congresses--in every combination, we have always understood that this 
program needs to be renewed.
  So I have heard other proposals such as, let's do this, but let's 
offset it by unobligated funds. But these unobligated funds could 
include many things. For example, they could include a border fence in 
Arizona and California because there are funds there that are 
unobligated. Now, I ask some of my colleagues on both sides of the 
aisle, is that what they intend? Border Patrol stations in Texas, 
Arizona, California, and Washington. Construction of Coast Guard ships 
and planes and the National Security Cutter built in Mississippi. Then 
there are cyber security investments to secure Federal information 
systems. We have just been briefed on the profound and deleterious 
impact of the WikiLeaks. We have a lot of work to do to improve our 
security systems. Are those unobligated funds coming out of that 
program? Homelessness assistance grants that go to help people who, in 
many respects, are homeless because of a combination of factors: They 
have lost their jobs; they have different problems. So, literally, are 
we borrowing from Peter to pay Paul? Are we telling someone they can't 
get Section 8 housing because we paid someone else's unemployment 
benefits?
  So the proposal to pay for this by unobligated expenditures might 
have some rhetorical appeal, but I ask, what are these expenditures? If 
we are so committed to being clean and transparent about what we are 
doing here, then list them out: We are going to cut funds for border 
fence, Border Patrol stations, the Coast Guard. This is how we are 
paying for it. Otherwise, I think, frankly, we should go ahead and pass 
this as we have always done--as emergency spending--because it has a 
stimulative effect. For every dollar of unemployment compensation, 
there is estimated to be $1.90 of economic activity. It goes right back 
to the obvious, simple point we all grasp: When that check comes in, it 
is not tossed aside. It is cashed immediately for grocery store 
visits--all of those things are done. It gets the economy moving.
  We are at a crisis, at a critical point. We have 10 years of 
experience that, despite all the rhetoric, tax cuts that go to the 
wealthiest Americans probably don't contribute directly and immediately 
to jobs in the United States. We can save not only working Americans by 
giving them a little help in their tax check, but we can begin the 
long, difficult struggle of going from a deficit to a surplus. I have 
done it once. It is not easy.
  Frankly, I think the choice before us in the next 6 or 7 months will 
look a lot clearer and more graphically in favor of the position we are 
advancing than some of the proposals that are floating around in terms 
of programs such as Medicare and defense spending, et cetera. All of 
them have to be looked at. But if we can't do this, I think a lot of 
Americans and people around the globe are going to start asking the 
question: Do they have the political capacity to make the difficult 
choices that are necessary?
  A final point. Many of my colleagues say, and I think with great 
insight, that the real judge of some of our economic policies is the 
marketplace, the people who buy our Treasury securities. I wonder if 
they see us as literally unable to make this choice between stimulus 
for the middle-income Americans through tax cuts but saving $700 
billion. We can't make that choice? I wonder what that is going to do 
to their confidence in our ability to make tough choices down the road, 
the confidence that keeps them buying Treasury securities. We should 
think about that.
  I urge passage of the proposals we have before us that would provide 
a middle-income tax credit while saving money and preserving further 
deficit spending under the Republican proposal.
  I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from South Dakota.
  Mr. THUNE. Mr. President, I wish to acknowledge the remarks made 
earlier by my colleague from Utah whom I thought did a nice job of 
providing a history lesson for Members of the Senate about the past 
several years of tax policy and why we are where we are today. I don't 
think there is anybody here in this Chamber or any Senator from any 
State who doesn't acknowledge that we have a big problem right now with 
9.8 percent unemployment.
  We have a lot of things on which we agree in the Senate. We have a 
lot of things on which we disagree. I think the one thing we agree on 
is that 9.8 percent unemployment is unacceptable. I think the thing we 
disagree on is how we get that unemployment rate down. How do we create 
jobs? How do we get people in this country back to work?
  There has been a lot of discussion about various issues that might be 
dealt with here in the Senate before the end of the year, most of which 
don't deal with this fundamental issue. The fundamental issue that is 
important to most Americans--and I have heard many of my colleagues get 
up and talk about people who are hurting. They are hurting.
  We are going into a holiday season with a lot of people unemployed, 
and with the numbers that came out this morning, that number got worse. 
We have more people unemployed, more people hurting economically. Yet 
in the waning days of this legislative session before the holiday break 
and before a new Congress gets seated next year, we have had discussion 
and motions about the DREAM Act. We had motions about don't ask, don't 
tell. We talked a lot about getting the START treaty done before next 
year. There has been discussion about this Public Safety Unionization 
Act. I think all of these things are probably important to certain 
Members of the Senate but none of which are as important to the 
American people as the point I just mentioned; that is, 9.8 percent 
unemployment.

  People are hurting. People have lost jobs in this country. That is 
the fundamental point that I think drove voters out to the polls in 
November. They want the Congress to focus exclusively on fixing this 
economy and getting people back to work. Yet we came back here in 
December and spent 7 days here in the Senate on a food safety bill--not 
that that is not an important issue. It is an important issue, but is 
it as important as dealing with this number I just mentioned--9.8 
percent unemployment?
  The irony about the food safety bill is that after we spent 7 days on 
it, we had a little snafu. It went over to the House of Representatives 
and somebody blue-slipped it, which is something they have the 
prerogative to do, because it turns out there were revenue increases in 
that bill, and revenue measures have to originate in the House of 
Representatives. So that bill, for all intents and purposes, is dead 
for the rest of this Congress.
  So we spent 7 days here in the Senate on the food safety bill. Now we 
are talking about doing something on unemployment, which is something 
we should have been talking about. We all knew that the deadline was 
coming and that it was ahead of us. We have these tax rate increases 
that occur on January 1 of this year, which is something we should have 
been focused on. It is not any secret that, as the Senator from Utah 
pointed out, the tax laws we have today have been the tax laws now for 
the better part of a decade. So if we knew they were going to expire on 
December 31 of this year, that wasn't a secret. Many of us here have 
been advocating for some time for a permanent extension of those tax 
rates, but that wasn't acted on. There weren't opportunities--or at 
least the Democratic leadership, since they have been in charge here, 
has had no appetite to deal with doing something about a permanent 
extension of those tax policies. We have had tax extenders we have been 
talking about for the last year, but nothing has happened. We had tax 
policies that expired on December 31 of last year which haven't been 
extended yet. We have a whole bunch more in addition to the 2001 and 
2003 tax laws that expire at the end of this year, all of

[[Page S8463]]

which impact some sector of our economy and most of which are very 
important to job creation. Yet for the better part of this year, what 
we talked about were issues that arguably the other side wanted to put 
before the Senate.
  We had a stimulus bill which borrowed $1 trillion from our children 
and grandchildren which supposedly was going to keep unemployment under 
8 percent. We all know that obviously didn't work. We had a massive 
expansion of health care, which is going to spend, when it is fully 
implemented, $2.5 trillion. We have had debate about financial services 
reform. I am not saying that any of these are unimportant issues. All 
of them involve new spending, creation of new government, new 
bureaucracies, and at the same time ignored what I think is the 
fundamental issue, which is jobs and the economy. That is what we have 
heard repeatedly.
  Now, the reason I think so many people turned out at the polls in 
November was because they were very concerned about what has been 
happening in Washington, and they wanted to come out and protest the 
policies that were coming out of Washington, DC, because they thought 
they were counterproductive in terms of the ultimate goal of creating 
jobs and expanding the economy and getting people back to work. Yet we 
didn't have a discussion during the entire lead-up, runup to the 
elections about getting these, with the exception of efforts on our 
side to get amendments on the floor, about these expiring tax rates.
  We do have taxes going up on January 1 on income, on capital gains, 
on dividends, on estates. You can go right down the list. There isn't 
anything in any sector of our economy that isn't going to experience 
higher taxes on January 1.
  In fact, it was interesting. This was a U.S. News and World Report 
article from yesterday, a story in there that said:

       Failure by Congress to extend the Bush tax cuts, especially 
     locking in the 15 percent capital gains tax rate, will spark 
     a stock market sell off starting December 15 as investors 
     move to lock in gains at a lower rate than the 20 percent it 
     would jump to next year, warn analysts.

  It goes on to say:

       ``Capital gains tax rate will increase from 15 to 20 
     percent if the tax cuts are not extended. The last time the 
     capital gains tax rate increased--on January 1, 1987, from 20 
     to 28 percent--investors realized their gains at the lower 
     tax rate,'' said Daniel Clifton, a Washington partner at 
     Strategas Research Partners. ``We would expect a similar 
     effect this time around as investors see the tax rate going 
     up and choose to realize gains and incur the [lower] 15 
     percent tax.
       In a memo to clients, [this particular firm] says that the 
     date most clients are focused on is December 15 for a deal in 
     Congress before beginning to sell. One reason: Many stock 
     options expire that day and investors have to act.
       . . . Fixing this issue next year will not negate these 
     negative impacts.

  If they say we are going to put this off until next year, a lot of 
folks will say: I don't trust these guys; they haven't done anything 
with this yet. They are going to sell off, and that could have a very 
destructive impact on the market and on many people's gains and things 
that have been acquired this year, stocks and investments. It is 
unclear how bad the selloff would be, it says. But it could wipe out 
all of this year's gains.
  That is one reason out of many that we need to act to address this 
important issue before the end of the year. It is fair to say, as well, 
that contrary to what has been espoused by the other side about people 
getting tax cuts, a lot of people are going to get tax increases. This 
has been tax law for the better part of a decade. A lot of it was put 
into effect in 2001 and some in 2003. So these tax cuts we have in 
effect today on capital gains dividends, marginal income tax rates have 
been in effect for many years now. What we are going to experience on 
January 1 is not a tax cut but a tax increase on a lot of people in our 
economy.
  The argument was made throughout the course of the year that we need 
to allow the tax cuts to expire for people above $250,000. Of course, 
we pointed out that half of all small business income would be taxed at 
a higher rate if we allow those to expire for people above $250,000, 
and 25 percent of the workforce would be impacted. I think that was a 
view that was shared by the American public.
  There was a CNN poll that I have here that was done in September, 
where 60 percent of Americans said all the tax cuts put in effect many 
years ago ought to be extended for everybody. I think that was a view 
shared by people when they voted during the election.
  I remember campaigning for people across this country--Senate 
candidates and House candidates--and this was a landslide election, a 
watershed election, by American standards. If we look at the number of 
new Members in the House, I think Republicans have 83 or 87 new 
Members, and there are a number of new Senators. In all of those 
campaigns, and in all of the advertising I saw, in all of the speeches 
I heard from candidates in traveling around the country, I didn't hear 
any of them say: I want you guys to go back, when you get to 
Washington, and deal with this food safety issue or we want you to pass 
the DREAM Act. I didn't hear anybody say: We want you to go back and 
address this issue of don't ask, don't tell. I didn't hear anybody say: 
We want you to go back and pass the START treaty.
  These are all important issues. But, remember, that is not what the 
American people are concerned about. Certainly, these are important, 
but not the most important we should concern ourselves with, which is 
the 9.8 percent unemployment rate and the fact that a lot of people are 
hurting and don't have jobs in this country. I think the issue of 
extending unemployment benefits, which will be dealt with--and for how 
long, I am not sure--is, is it paid for? I believe it should be; some 
don't. In any case, I think that will be dealt with.
  That is a symptom; that is not the cause. The cause for people 
hurting in this country is that we have policies in place that are 
making it more difficult for small businesses to create jobs.
  The best solution for the American people is a job, to get people 
back to work. Raising taxes has never been a way of creating jobs. Now, 
the $250,000 threshold I think the other side concluded was not good 
politics. So it has been tested and polled, and that is a losing issue. 
It does impact so many small businesses.
  So the latest version is to raise that to $1 million, and that is a 
vote we are going to have sometime tomorrow.
  The fundamental point I am making is, I think the American people 
understand that to grow the economy, expand the economy, and create 
jobs, we have to incentivize the job creators to create jobs. We can't 
do that by raising their taxes. We can't do it by passing new 
regulations and making it more difficult and costly for them to do 
business. That is basically what this whole past year has been about. 
My counterparts on the other side have attacked Republicans on the 
floor for the situation we are in, saying: Republicans are blocking us 
from dealing with all these important issues.
  We did send a letter this week, signed by all 42 Republicans, and the 
letter was simple. The message was this: Yes, we think there are a few 
days left in this legislative session, and we ought to use those days 
to focus on the things the American people care about. Notwithstanding 
any of the polls we are taking today, the best poll was election day. 
What people voted on on election day was jobs, the economy, reducing 
spending, and debt. The letter we put forward said let's focus on the 
tax issue and get that resolved. It is so important to our economy and 
it provides certainty for job creators to create jobs. Let's focus on 
funding the government and dealing with this issue of spending.
  Those are the two most important issues, as I think was expressed at 
the ballot box by people across this country this year. Then, if you 
want to move to other issues, fine. We had 42 Republicans who said 
that. I think that is perfectly appropriate and in accordance with what 
the American people want us to do.
  As I said earlier, we spent 7 days on food safety, which is arguably 
an important issue. I am not discounting that. That was 7 days spent on 
a piece of legislation that went to the House, was blue-slipped, and is 
not going to become law this year. We lost 7 days that we could have 
been talking about getting tax rates down for middle-income taxpayers 
and investors. We could have dealt with the issue of the death tax 
because on January 1 the exemption for the death tax comes down

[[Page S8464]]

to $1 million, and the top rate goes up to 55 percent.
  I have heard repeatedly from farmers, ranchers, and small businesses 
in my State the concerns they have about that. What are they going to 
be able to do if they want to pass on their business or their operation 
to the next generation, and if they have a $1 million threshold and 
anything above that, that would be taxed at 55 percent, that means many 
of them will be forced to liquidate their holdings in order to pay the 
IRS. That doesn't seem like a very good way to run a government or 
create jobs in the economy.
  Again, I simply point that out as the reason I think in these waning 
days of this session that Congress should focus on this 9.8-percent 
unemployment rate. The unemployment debate, the debate about 
unemployment benefits which will occur here is a symptom of the high 
unemployment rate. But the cause of the high unemployment rate is the 
fact that the policies coming out of Washington, DC, are not conducive 
to job creation in this country. It doesn't have anything to do with 
these Bush tax rates because, frankly, we saw a lot of economic growth 
in the early part of this decade.
  Since 2008, we have been in a recession. Since 2008 we have had a 
President in the White House and a huge Democratic majority in both 
Houses of Congress which have attempted to address this issue in the 
form of a stimulus bill which added trillions of dollars to the debt 
but didn't reduce unemployment. It created 250,000 new jobs in 
Washington, DC. The food safety bill, according to estimates, would 
create another 17,000 jobs in Washington, DC. So almost anything that 
has been done hasn't created private sector jobs but has created a lot 
of government jobs.

  That is not what people want. They want jobs in the economy. They 
want the small businesses on their Main Streets and in towns and 
communities to be able to invest, be able to hire that new employee, or 
buy that new piece of equipment, add to the productivity of their 
operation in a way that will expand the economy, grow the economy, and 
create jobs for more Americans. I think that was the message of the 
election. I think that is the interest of the American people still. It 
is not on all these other things.
  I understand there is a need sometimes for political parties to check 
the box to say they have done this or tried to do that for a particular 
constituency. That is perhaps what drives the reason we have to have 
votes on some of these other issues. But at the end of the day, it 
comes down to one simple basic fundamental fact: A lot of people are 
unemployed, hurting, and the policies of Washington, DC, are 
contributing to that. I think you can't blame Republicans in the 
Congress where for the last 2 years the Democrats have had huge 
majorities. In the Senate, they have 58 votes now, and they had 60 
votes for 2009. They had 250 votes in the House of Representatives. 
They had the White House. Yet here we are 2 years later and 
unemployment has actually gone up. We have fewer people finding jobs in 
this country and an economy that continues to struggle and Washington, 
DC, that seems more intent on dealing with all these issues that are 
unrelated to the fundamental issue, which is creating jobs and getting 
people back to work.
  Mr. President, I urge my colleagues, as we head into the end of the 
year to stay focused on the issues the American people care about--
jobs, the economy, their ability to pay their bills, and to hopefully 
save a little money for their children's college education. As we head 
into the holiday season, they want to have a good holiday season with 
their families. But this idea that somehow the way we help the American 
people in this country is by focusing on these unrelated issues, and 
talking about things that they at this particular point in time are not 
particularly concerned about, strikes me as missing the point and not 
having gotten the message the voters sent in November of this year.
  Again, I urge my colleagues in these last few days to work on keeping 
taxes low on all Americans, extending the tax relief. It is not a tax 
cut. It will be a tax increase starting January 1 for people across 
this country, including the job creators. We cannot allow that to 
happen for the best interests of the American people.
  I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from New Hampshire is recognized.
  Mrs. SHAHEEN. Mr. President, I am here, like so many of my colleagues 
today, to talk about the situation in which we find ourselves, where 
millions of American families and small businesses, on January 1, are 
going to see a tax increase because the Bush tax cuts are set to 
expire.
  Before I talk on that issue, I heard my colleague from South Dakota 
speaking. I think it is important to point out the differences of 
opinion in some of his remarks because he talked about how great things 
were in the previous decade, in the early years of this decade. But he 
neglected to point out why we are in the situation with this recession: 
because of the financial meltdown, the recession that began in 2007 and 
2008 as the result of so many of the policies of the previous Bush 
administration.
  Unfortunately, if those tax cuts that everybody is talking about were 
going to create so many jobs, we have had them for 10 years, and I want 
to know where the jobs are. I have a lot of people in New Hampshire who 
are unemployed, and they are not benefiting from those tax cuts because 
they haven't created the kinds of jobs my colleague from South Dakota 
is talking about.
  I appreciate the frustration that is there because this recession has 
gone on way too long and been way too deep, and too many people have 
suffered. But the efforts of this Congress, through the American 
Recovery Act to try to stimulate our economy and keep people working 
has been successful. There are construction workers, there are 
teachers, and there are small businesspeople in New Hampshire who are 
working because of the dollars spent under that Recovery Act. The 
estimates are that 3 million people are working now or have been kept 
working because of the dollars in the Recovery Act.
  I just think it is important for us to correct the record a little 
about why we are where we are today and how best we can get this 
economy moving again.
  Like everybody else here, I think tax increases on struggling small 
businesses and on families who are just getting by would be devastating 
to them and to our economy. I understand we have to do something about 
that. But at the same time, we face another growing problem, and I 
don't think we can talk about how we are going to deal with these tax 
cuts without recognizing that we have to look at a long-term plan for 
how we are going to deal with this other growing problem--the problem 
of our national debt.
  Our national debt is now approaching $14 trillion. It is approaching 
that number quickly. In an effort to address the growing debt, I joined 
12 Democrats and 15 Republicans, including my New Hampshire colleague, 
Senator Judd Gregg, in cosponsoring legislation earlier in this 
Congress to establish the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility 
and Reform. Now, although that legislation failed, earlier this week a 
similar debt reduction commission, one appointed by President Obama, 
issued its report. The findings are very sobering. The report indicates 
that we need to take dramatic action to reduce our debt. We need to 
develop a plan for how we are going to do that and we need to do that 
sooner rather than later. This is not a problem we can keep kicking 
down the road and expect it is going to solve itself. But while we are 
developing that plan, we need to look at how we can do everything 
possible to get the economy moving again.

  We need to confront an economy that is still recovering from a deep 
recession. I appreciate, as all my colleagues do, that now is not the 
time to raise taxes on middle-class Americans. Senator Baucus has 
proposed a plan that makes sense. It keeps taxes low on middle-class 
Americans, so it essentially extends middle-class tax cuts, and it also 
makes some smart, targeted tax cuts--tax cuts that can help us lay a 
foundation to create good jobs and grow the economy.
  For example, I am a strong supporter of the research and development 
tax credit. When companies invest in developing new technologies, as 
the R&D tax credit helps them do, they generate

[[Page S8465]]

high-paying jobs and solutions that change our world for the better. 
Investment in R&D plants seeds that will grow our economy and create 
jobs for decades to come. I believe we should make the tax credit 
permanent myself, but I am pleased Senator Baucus's plan extends it for 
at least 2 years.
  The Baucus plan also reauthorizes Federal unemployment benefits, and 
the extension of unemployment benefits is one of the best things we can 
do to help average Americans and stimulate our economy. This money will 
not sit quietly in the accounts of millionaires and billionaires. It 
will get spent immediately at the local grocery store, at the pharmacy, 
at the gas station, and at other small businesses that need that 
spending the most. In fact, economist Mark Zandi, who was a former 
adviser to Senator McCain, has cited unemployment insurance as one of 
the three most effective uses of Federal funding. According to his 
analysis, every dollar we invest today will create $1.61 cents in 
economic growth. That is a good investment in today's economy.
  I think it would be great if we could give everybody a tax cut and 
not worry about the consequences. I would love to do that, but we don't 
have that luxury. Tax cuts for the wealthiest 2 percent in this country 
will cost America $700 billion over the next decade. Let me be clear: I 
don't think we should heap another $700 billion onto our national debt. 
That would be irresponsible. It isn't fair to our children and it isn't 
wise for the economy.
  I think we need to move forward and provide certainty for taxpayers--
everybody agrees with that--and to do that we will have to compromise. 
It takes working together, Democrats and Republicans. So I am also 
willing to vote for Senator Schumer's plan to extend tax cuts for 
everyone except those who make over $1 million a year. I think this is 
important to ensure that we include small businesses that might get hit 
at some level.
  I hope my colleagues on both sides of the aisle will come together; 
that we can negotiate a package that is responsible with taxpayer 
dollars, that stimulates our economy, and that protects middle-class 
Americans. That is what I am hoping to do, and I look forward to 
working with my colleagues on both sides of the aisle as we try and 
develop a compromise that can allow us to move forward.
  I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Iowa.
  Mr. HARKIN. Mr. President, earlier today, I was listening to the 
Senator from Illinois, Mr. Durbin, and he talked about coming over to 
the Senate floor from a meeting over in the Dirksen Building, which he 
said is about a block away, but he said it was like going from the real 
world to a surreal world here in the Senate. As I have listened to some 
of these Senators on the Republican side speak since then, I think 
Senator Durbin is right on the mark.
  What is going on here? Sometimes you have to stop and say: What truly 
is going on here? We have lost touch with what is happening in 
America--to ordinary Americans, to the real middle class. What do we 
have here? We have Republicans who will not do anything until we have a 
tax break for the richest Americans--continue these tax breaks.
  I listened to my friend from South Dakota recently who was just on 
the floor talking about creating jobs and all that kind of stuff. Well, 
we just had the new unemployment figures come out this morning from the 
Labor Department--the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which says 
unemployment rose to 9.8 percent. But that is just the official 
unemployment figure. Actually, if you do a full accounting of payroll 
data, if you take into account the 14.8 million workers who are part 
time, of necessity, because they can't get a full-time job or they are 
discouraged and have left the workforce because they have been looking 
and they are out of work and they have gone past their 99 weeks of 
unemployment compensation, according to Leo Hindery, who is the 
chairman of the Smart Globalization Initiative at the New America 
Foundation, the real unemployment rate is now 18.7 percent--18.7 
percent--and the job gap is not just 7.3 million, it is actually 21.9 
million in real terms--21.9 million people in this country--who are 
either unemployed, underemployed, left the workplace because they are 
discouraged, their unemployment benefits have run out or they basically 
have shifted around and they are not any longer in the workforce. You 
take all that into account and you have 21.9 million people out there 
out of work.
  Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to have printed in the Record 
the study from the Smart Globalization Initiative project.
  There being no objection, the material was ordered to be printed in 
the Record, as follows:

       Friends, In a very disappointing announcement, the Bureau 
     of Labor Statistics (BLS), using its Current Population 
     Survey of non-farm jobs [attachment 2], announced this 
     morning that in November 2010 ``U.S. employers increased 
     (non-farm) payrolls by only 39,000 jobs, with 50,000 private 
     sector jobs added in the month, versus a revised 172,000 
     overall payroll increase in October. The ``official'' 
     unemployment rate rose from 9.6 percent to 9.8 percent.''
       The BLS also noted that there are now 15.1 million 
     unemployed workers and that since the Great Recession began 
     (in December 2007) employment has decreased by 7.3 million.
       The monthly BLS announcement regarding unemployment, 
     however, as we note each month:
       1. Uses only a survey of households rather than much more 
     accurate payroll data;
       2. Excludes changes in employment among the Nation's 11.0 
     million farm and self-employed workers; and, most important,
       3. Does not take into account the 14.8 million workers who 
     are either: (i) ``part-time-of-necessity'' because their 
     hours have been cut back or they are unable to find a full-
     time job (9.0 million); (ii) ``marginally attached'' because 
     while wanting work, they have not searched for it in the past 
     four weeks (2.5 million); or (iii) ``discouraged'' and out of 
     the labor force because they believe no jobs are available 
     (3.3 million).
       Our Summary of U.S. Real Unemployment [attachment 1] makes 
     these three adjustments. It also identifies average weeks 
     unemployed, job openings, and the ``Jobs Gap'' that needs to 
     be filled in order to be at full employment in real terms. 
     With the three adjustments made, in November:
       The number of real unemployed workers in all four 
     categories--BLS ``official'', part-time-of-necessity, 
     marginally attached, and discouraged--increased by 59,000 
     workers to 29.9 million, compared to BLS's November figure of 
     15.1 million. Significant changes this past month in overall 
     real employment included: private sector employment 
     increasing by 50,000 jobs, which included 53,000 more 
     professional and business services jobs; manufacturers 
     shedding 13,000 jobs after shedding a revised 11,000 in 
     October; total government employment declining by 11,000 
     jobs. The continuing loss of manufacturing jobs, for the 
     fourth consecutive month, is of particular concern.
       The real unemployment rate is now 18.7 percent, the same as 
     October's real unemployment rate, compared BLS's dramatically 
     lower ``official'' rate for November of 9.8%.
       The number of real unemployed workers has increased by 13.2 
     million since the start of the recession, and since December 
     2008 it has increased by 5.3 million. By contrast, the 
     economy needs to add around 150,000 new private sector jobs 
     each month simply to keep up with population growth--in 
     November, the increase was only 50,000.
       The Jobs Gap is 21.9 million in real terms.
       (I must note again that some in the national press, notably 
     the New York Times, when commenting on real unemployment, 
     still leave out ``discouraged workers'' despite the fact that 
     this is a huge category and arguably the most effectively 
     unemployed of the four categories. The all-in real 
     unemployment rate of 18.7 percent drops to 17.0 percent if 
     discouraged workers are not included.)
       The average number of weeks unemployed is now at least 33.8 
     and the number of workers unemployed a half year or longer is 
     at least 9.6 million (i.e., BLS's figure of 6.3 mm plus the 
     3.3 mm discouraged workers). When considered together, these 
     two figures--average number of weeks unemployed and number of 
     workers unemployed a half year or longer--are a much better 
     measure of the real employment condition than the more 
     commonly used ``initial jobless claims'' number. Each figure 
     is now unprecedented in modern times.
           Kindest regards,
     Leo Hindery,
       Chairman, US Economy/Smart Globalization Initiative at the 
     New America Foundation.

  Mr. HARKIN. So we have a high unemployment rate, we keep losing jobs, 
and Republicans keep saying we have to extend the tax breaks for the 
wealthy. I hear that in terms of jobs--jobs, jobs, jobs. Well, that is 
interesting, because in 2007, the top 1 percent of all income earners 
in America took home 23\1/2\ percent of all the income in America. So 
let us get that straight. The top 1 percent took home 23\1/2\ percent 
of all the income. In fact, they took home more money than the bottom 
50 percent of income earners

[[Page S8466]]

total in America. Eighty percent of all the increase in income earned 
from 1980 to 2005 has gone to the top 1 percent. In the wake of the 
2008 Wall Street bailout, executives from Goldman Sachs received 
bonuses totaling $13 billion--$13 billion for Goldman Sachs.
  So Republicans keep talking about we have to do more tax breaks for 
the wealthy. Well, after 10 years of tax cuts for the wealthy, where 
are the jobs? We have had this for 10 years--what they are trying to 
extend, the Bush tax cuts, which I never voted for in 2001. So we have 
had them for almost 10 years. If cutting taxes were so good for 
creating jobs, I ask my colleagues: Where are the jobs? Where are they?
  It is that same old trickle-down theory. If only we would give more 
to the top, it will trickle down on everybody else. Well, as one worker 
told me the other day--talking about trickle down--who has been out of 
a job for 2 years: I haven't had a drop. He said: I would settle for a 
heavy dew. One person told me one time--and I will never forget this 
about trickle down--he said: If you have been raised on the farm, you 
understand something very simple. You don't fertilize a crop from the 
top down. You don't fertilize a tree from the top down. You fertilize 
it by putting it at the roots. You want to create jobs in America, you 
don't give it to the wealthiest in America, you start putting things 
down at the bottom.
  If we want to get to the jobs issue in America, we have to start 
talking about what our trade laws are doing and how we are shipping 
more jobs overseas. Let's talk about our educational system and 
educating people into job retraining or rebuilding the manufacturing 
base in America so we can actually manufacture and make things here one 
more time--and I mean new things, not the old things but new things: 
rebuilding our infrastructure, our high-speed networks of 
communications, and make sure we have an infrastructure that is second 
to none in the world. There are a lot of things we can do to spur 
economic growth and jobs, but the worst possible one of all is giving 
tax breaks to the wealthy.
  I haven't even touched on the moral implications of that or the 
justice or fairness issue, and I will, but just on pure economic 
grounds we know tax breaks for the wealthy don't do it. They never have 
and they never will. Yet Republicans keep wanting to do the same thing 
over and over and over again. Someone attributed this to Albert 
Einstein--I don't know if it is true--but whoever it was said: The 
definition of ``insanity `` is doing the same thing over and over and 
over again and expecting a different result. Republicans keep wanting 
to give more tax breaks to the wealthy and expecting that somehow, 
magically, we will have jobs created. Well, we gave all this money to 
Wall Street and to Goldman Sachs and I don't see any jobs out there 
anywhere.
  My friend from South Dakota was talking about the election; that we 
have to listen to the American people. Well, here is a poll that came 
out this morning. Senator Schumer showed this earlier. This is a CBS 
News poll out today which shows that only 26 percent of Americans 
support millionaire tax breaks. Guess what. N ot even a majority of 
Republicans support it. Only 46 percent of Republicans support the 
millionaire tax breaks. So who are my friends on the other side of the 
aisle listening to? Wall Street. They are listening to those who have 
made a lot of money and they do not want to pay their fair share of 
taxes. They are certainly not listening to, I guess, the majority of 
Republicans who say they don't even want the tax breaks for the 
wealthy.

  My friend from South Dakota was talking about the election. We had a 
big election. Republicans got elected to office in larger numbers. That 
is absolutely true. We can't deny that. But what ever happened to the 
election of 2008? It is as if it never happened. Yet 40 million more 
Americans voted in 2008 than voted in 2010. Do you know for whom they 
voted? They voted for Barack Obama. They voted for Democrats. They 
voted for change. They did not vote for more tax breaks for the 
wealthy. They wanted to change the system. That is what we have been 
trying to do for the last couple of years, except that we have had 
intransigence on the part of Republicans in the Senate in the form of 
one filibuster after another. So 40 million more people voted in the 
election of 2008 than voted in 2010. Again, what we need to do is 
change things. We don't need to change things to do more of the same, 
which is what the Republicans want to do.
  I hear my friend--again, I cannot help but refer to this. He said 
that the tax increases never created jobs. That is kind of the way I 
heard it said. I wrote it down here--can't create jobs by raising 
taxes; never happens.
  Frankly, I remember 1993. I was here then, and we had the Clinton 
bill here from President Clinton. It was sometimes called the Clinton 
recovery bill. We had all worked on it here. Did it increase taxes? 
Yes, it did. It increased taxes. Boy, did the Republicans howl. I was 
here. I remember. And all the economists on the other side were saying: 
Oh my gosh, if we pass this, it is going to be terrible.
  I went back and got some of the quotes. My friend from Utah, Senator 
Hatch, said:

       Make no mistake, these higher taxes will cost jobs.

  Senator Burns from Montana said:

       So we are still going to pile up more debt. Most of all, we 
     are going to cost jobs in this country.

  Senator Phil Gramm. This is August 5, 1993:

       I want to predict tonight that if we adopt this bill, the 
     American economy is going to get weaker and not stronger. The 
     deficit 4 years from today will be higher than it is today, 
     and not lower. When all is said and done, people will pay 
     more taxes, the economy will create fewer jobs, the 
     government will spend more money, and the American people 
     will be worse off.

  That is what he said in 1993.
  Do you want me to go on? My friend from Iowa, Senator Grassley, said:

       I really do not think it takes a rocket scientist to know 
     that this bill will cost jobs.

  August 6, 1993.
  Here they were all predicting this. I had a couple more I wanted to 
get in the Record here just to put an emphasis on it.
  Representative Newt Gingrich--oh, yes--Republican of Georgia. On 
August 5, 1993, he said:

       I believe this will lead to a recession next year. This is 
     the Democrat machine's recession, and each of them will be 
     held personally responsible.

  I like this one. Representative John Kasich from Ohio said:

       This plan will not work. If it was to work, then I'd have 
     to become a Democrat.

  If I am not mistaken, former Representative John Kasich was just 
elected Governor of Ohio. I didn't know he ran on the Democratic 
ticket.
  History--read the history of it. You cannot deny it. As we often say 
around here, everyone is entitled to their own beliefs, but not 
everyone is entitled to their own facts, and the facts are very clear. 
After we passed the Clinton bill--with not one Republican vote--the 
economy started to get better, we started to create jobs, we started to 
reduce the deficit. In just 7 years--actually 6 years, a little over 6 
years--we actually got a surplus in our budget--a surplus and a huge 
number of jobs were created with the higher taxes. The last time we had 
a surplus was then. We were on the path of reducing our debt, our 
national debt. We had more jobs. People were working.
  Then George Bush came to office in 2001, and the Republicans looked 
at all this money that was coming in which we were going to use to pay 
down the national debt so our kids would not have a big debt hanging 
over their heads--they looked at all that and said: Oh my gosh, let's 
have a tax cut. And they rammed through a tax cut--they sure did--in 
2001. They rammed through a huge tax cut that to a large extent 
benefitted the wealthiest people in this country. By 2007, the top 1 
percent took home 23.5 percent of all the income and were not paying 
their fair share. But that is what they want to extend. That is what 
the Republicans want to do. They want to continue the Bush tax cut they 
put in 2001 for the wealthy.
  So they took all that money that was coming in that we were going to 
use to pay down the debt so our kids would have a better future, they 
gave it all to the wealthy--not all but a fair amount of it--about 80 
percent to the wealthiest in our country and a few crumbs and stuff to 
others. What did it do? It raised the deficit and put us in deeper debt 
than ever before--all so the wealthy could have a little bit more 
money. This is what they want to continue.

[[Page S8467]]

  As I said, I think the evidence is clear that what they did in 2001 
did not give us jobs, it hurt the economy, and widened the gap in 
America between the top and the bottom even more. It widened the gap 
even more in our country. Now they want to continue that same policy, 
and they say it is going to create jobs. It did not create jobs. We 
have lost jobs because of this.
  I spoke here last evening, and after I spoke, the Senator from Texas 
spoke, and she was talking about who creates jobs in this country. It 
is the wealthy; they get this money and they create jobs. Entrepreneurs 
do create jobs. Most of the jobs and businesses created in this country 
were not created simply by the wealthy; they were created by ingenious 
people who had a good idea, were willing to work hard, gather some 
money together, get investors, and build a business. Most of the new 
jobs in America are not created by the DuPonts or the Rockefellers or 
the people like that; they are created by Steve Jobs and Bill Gates and 
the people like that who did not start with a lot of money, but they 
had a good idea and they were entrepreneurial and went to work and 
started these businesses.
  So create more jobs, get more money to the wealthy? Here is the 
headline in USA Today recently. It said ``Luxury spending is back in 
fashion.'' Then underneath, in small print, it says, ``Jobless still 
aren't buying essentials.'' So I guess what we need to do is give more 
tax breaks to the wealthiest so they can go out--I just read about 
someone the other day going out and buying $2,600 cashmere scarves--
$2,600 for a scarf. I suppose so.
  I was just with a group of unemployed Americans the other day who 
came to Washington. Some have been out of work for over 2 years, all of 
them hoping we can extend the unemployment benefits--which the 
Republicans will not let us do, by the way, and I am going to get to 
that in a second. But I held this up. I thought, ``Luxury spending back 
in fashion.'' I asked those people who are unemployed if they were 
going to be shopping in Tiffany's this year. Maybe you are going to go 
down and buy a little jewel-encrusted broach for your wife or maybe, if 
you are a woman, you will buy one of those diamond-encrusted watches 
for your husband. Oh, I know, you are going to go buy a Lamborghini 
made in Italy or a Mercedes made in Germany. I said to these people: 
Maybe you would like to go down and buy one of those 3D, high-
definition flat screen TVs made in Japan. That is where the money is 
going. The rich are not creating jobs; they are buying $2,600 cashmere 
scarves, and they are going to Tiffany's and buying jewels and buying 
wrist watches that cost $25,000, most of which are not made in America, 
anyway, but are made in some other country.
  If you really want to give tax breaks to businesses, I am all for it 
if it is truly oriented towards businesses employing people in America, 
as long as their products are made in America, as long as they are 
manufactured here and they do not take the money and ship it off to 
some other country. If a business wants to start here and employ people 
here in America, manufacture something here--rebuild the steel industry 
in our country, rebuild manufacturing--I am all for it. I just do not 
believe in giving tax breaks to someone who takes that money and say: 
Guess what, I am going to invest it in a business in Thailand or in 
Germany or in Brazil. That is what they do. You give all that money to 
these wealthy people up on Wall Street and stuff, they can invest that 
money wherever they want, and out it goes, out of the country.
  Since we have such high deficits and we want to get our deficits 
down, we want to create jobs, don't give it to the most wealthy in our 
country; give it to legitimate businesses that either start or expand 
and employ Americans and start making things here in America or put it 
into infrastructure spending, rebuilding the infrastructure of 
America--our highways, bridges, roads, schools, communication systems. 
That will create jobs. That will create jobs.
  They say government spending cannot create jobs. I happen to disagree 
with those who said the stimulus bill did not create jobs. It sure did. 
It put a lot of people to work all over this country, not in government 
jobs but in rebuilding America. When you put money out there and you 
are rebuilding a highway or a bridge in Iowa or in Minnesota, it is 
done by private contractors, private businesses that employ people and 
spend the money here, mostly on products made in America. That is why 
infrastructure spending has such a good multiplier effect. It has a 
multiplier effect because when you build a new school or a new 
classroom or whatever, first of all, the work has to be done here, it 
cannot be shipped off to China. Second, the money is spent here. Third, 
most of the products that go into our infrastructure are still made in 
America. When you think about it, when you build a school, rebuild a 
school, you think about the cement, you think about the bricks, you 
think about the mortar, you think about all the conduits for the 
lighting, heating, ventilation, air-conditioning units, windows, doors, 
and 9 times out of 10, it is made in America. So you get a big 
multiplier effect from that money, and it does indeed create a lot of 
jobs.
  I mentioned just a second go that I was with a group of unemployed 
who had come to Washington to petition their government for a redress 
of their grievances, and their grievances are that they are out of 
work, they are looking for work, and their unemployment benefits have 
just run out.
  We have tried several times here on the floor of the Senate asking 
unanimous consent to extend the unemployment benefits for another year. 
The Republicans have objected every time. And the letter that was sent 
out by the Republican leader the other day said that they are going to 
object to anything passing this floor until they get their tax breaks 
for the wealthy. So they are holding hostage millions of Americans who 
have lost their jobs. Some have been out of work, as I said--I met some 
who have been out of work for over 2 years; some for a year or months. 
For $300 a week--that is about the average in unemployment benefits, 
about $300 a week. They say we cannot afford that. My Republican 
friends say we cannot afford that. But we can afford to give a $100,000 
tax break to the wealthiest Americans. Think about that.
  During this holiday season--I heard my friend from South Dakota say 
that we should wrap up our business so Senators can go home and spend 
our holidays with our families, have a nice holiday season. What about 
those millions of Americans who are out of work and have just had their 
unemployment benefits cut off? What about them? Are they going to have 
a nice Christmas?
  Are they going to have a nice holiday season? The Republicans say no. 
Give the tax breaks to the wealthy first. Well, as I said, Wall Street 
executives got billions of dollars in bonuses--billions. They are 
probably going to have a nice holiday season. They will probably even 
shop at Tiffany's, Saks Fifth Avenue, Neiman Marcus. But how about the 
millions of Americans who are out of work who rely upon unemployment 
benefits, $300 a week, less than the poverty wage, and we are saying: 
No. No, we are not going to extend them during this holiday season.
  The Republicans are holding them hostage. I am sorry. This is 
unconscionable. Have the Republicans lost all sense of fairness? Have 
they lost all sense of justice? Have the Republicans lost all sense of 
what is right and wrong? I mean, they can fight for their tax breaks 
for the wealthy. Fine, that is what they are fighting for. I understand 
that.
  But to say we cannot extend unemployment benefits for people out of 
work because we have not yet given the tax breaks to the wealthy is a 
morale outrage. I ask: Where is our outrage at something like this? 
Where is the President's outrage at this? The President ought to be out 
there saying: This is morally outrageous, that we are going to deny 
unemployment benefits to people during this time of the year 
especially.
  We can have our battles on the tax cuts. We can have those battles, 
but we should not hold hostage the people who are out of work today and 
need unemployment benefits. Some people say: Well, unemployment 
benefits, it makes people lazy.
  Well, as I pointed out the other day in a speech on the floor, when 
eight people look for one job. There is one job for every eight people. 
So you have musical chairs going round and round.

[[Page S8468]]

One person gets it, and you have seven people still unemployed.
  What a lot of people do not even know is that in order to even 
qualify for unemployment benefits, you have to be actively looking for 
work. You cannot sit at home. You have to be actively looking for work. 
A lot of the people I talked to 2 days ago who were here who were 
employed, you hear their stories. They have tried everything. Some have 
gone to different States. They have gone to different communities. They 
have tried everything to find another job.
  I just read a letter from one the other day, a math teacher, has 
three college degrees. She has lost her job. She has tried to find work 
in different States. She has tried everything from McDonald's to 
everything else and cannot find a job.
  By the way, the people who are truly hurting the most in this job 
market right now are people over the age of 50, mostly women. Women 
over the age of 50 who have worked hard, many of them had good jobs. 
Again, I spoke to one on Tuesday who had worked all her life, had a 
very good job. She admitted she was making $70,000 a year, good middle-
class income.
  She lost her job and has been out of work for over a year. She cannot 
find work. She has tried and beat the pavement and looked all over. 
But, you know what, she is in that area between 50 and 60. Very tough. 
Very tough. Yet we will not even extend unemployment benefits for 
people like her.
  Well, as I said, I think it is a moral outrage, and I would hope our 
President would get out there and start saying that. Let the American 
people know how the jobless are being held hostage by the Republicans 
in trying to get their tax breaks for the wealthy.
  So it is been said the Republicans are playing hardball. Well, if 
they are playing hardball for the rich, we ought to play hardball for 
the jobless, too, in this country. They want to play hardball, we ought 
to play hardball. My friend from South Dakota says he would like to get 
out of here and spend Christmas with his family. Would not we all?
  But, I think, rather than identifying with those on Wall Street and 
those who wear suits and ties every day and have a comfortable life 
such as we do, we ought to be identifying with those middle-class 
Americans who are out of work.
  If the Republicans want to play hardball, I think what we ought to 
say is: Look, we are going to stay here every day, we are going to be 
here every day, and every day we are going to ask consent to bring up 
this bill to extend unemployment benefits. If we have to be here on 
Christmas Eve, so be it. If we have to be here on Christmas Day, we 
ought to be here on Christmas Day, if necessary, so the American people 
will get an idea of what is going on in this Senate Chamber, the 
outrageousness of it.
  So, yes, we would all like to spend time with family over the 
holidays. But unless and until we extend the unemployment benefits, at 
least at a minimum, we should not leave this Chamber and see how long 
the Republicans want to hold on to that and how much they want to deny 
people their benefits.
  If 2 million Americans and 10,000 of my fellow Iowans are going to be 
suffering because they will not even be able to put food on the table 
or have a nice holiday season with their families because they are 
unemployed, the least we can do is identify with them. They are not 
going to have a very good holiday season unless we do something and 
take action. So I think we should stay as long as is necessary.
  Lastly, for too long and for too many times, the Republicans have 
used an archaic 19th century procedure called the filibuster to thwart 
the will of the majority of the people in this country, to stop 
legislation, to stop a whole bunch of things, nominations, things they 
even, when we finally get them through, get 99 votes out of 100.
  But they stop them because of a filibuster. Well, that may have been 
OK in the 19th century. It may have been OK in the early part of the 
20th century. But we can no longer live with that. We cannot run a 21st 
century government in a 21st world with an archaic millstone around our 
neck called a filibuster.
  When this body reconvenes in January, we finally have to break the 
shackles of that. We have to break the shackles of that 19th century 
rule, proceeding, where one or two Senators can stop everything. Stop 
it. I quote Vice President Biden who said: No democracy has ever 
survived that needed a supermajority. No democracy.
  Ours cannot survive either if we continue with a supermajority needed 
in the Senate.
  I hope we stay here. I hope we increase the unemployment benefits. We 
will continue the debate on the taxes. I will be supporting, tomorrow 
morning, the vote on continuing the tax benefits for those families 
making $250,000 and less, to extend the tax breaks for that group. I 
will not go higher than $250,0000. I will not vote to extend tax breaks 
for anybody over $250,000.
  Quite frankly, if you make $250,000, you are in the top 7 percent or 
so of income earners in America. So is that the middle class? I think 
that is stretching it. Those making $40,000, $50,000, $60,000, $70,000 
to $80,000 a year are clearly in the middle class. That is the broad 
middle class of America. What are we doing for them? What are we doing 
for them?
  So I will vote to go up to $250,000 but not a cent more than that. 
Quite frankly, I have a hard time even going to $250,000. It ought to 
be less than that. If you want to give more tax breaks to people, 
extend the earned-income tax credit and increase the childcare tax 
credit for working families.
  If you want to do that, now you are talking about helping middle-
class families. Some people say: Well, we have to do something for 
small businesses. I am all for that. But I wish to make sure it really 
goes to small businesses that employ Americans, keep the jobs here, 
manufacture things in America, and do not ship them overseas.
  You do that, I am all for a small business tax break. You bet. So 
that is the debate we should have. But the unemployed and those who 
need unemployment benefits during this holiday season should not be 
held hostage.
  I yield the floor and I suggest the absence of a quorum.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will call the roll.
  The legislative clerk proceeded to call the roll.
  Mr. ALEXANDER. I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum 
call be rescinded.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
  Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, it is good to see the distinguished 
Presiding Officer. He must have been here all day. He was here 
yesterday, and I am glad to see him again.
  Are there limits on my speaking time at the moment?
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. We have a 10-minute grant at this time.
  Mr. ALEXANDER. Will the Chair please let me know when I have consumed 
9 minutes.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Chair will so notify.

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