[Congressional Record Volume 157, Number 103 (Tuesday, July 12, 2011)]
[House]
[Pages H4861-H4862]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                              {time}  1100
                          JOBS AND THE ECONOMY

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. The Chair recognizes the gentleman from 
Arizona (Mr. Quayle) for 5 minutes.
  Mr. QUAYLE. Madam Speaker, last Friday's jobs report was incredibly 
disappointing. We only added 18,000 jobs to the U.S. economy. Our 
unemployment rate went up to 9.2 percent. Not to mention the fact that 
we had a downgrade, a revision, of last month's, of May's job report to 
only 25,000 jobs. The deeper you go into that jobs report, the worse it 
gets, because for those who are underemployed, that's about 16 percent 
to 17 percent of the United States population, and that is not even 
including the 250,000 people who went off the rolls of the unemployed 
because they just stopped looking for work.
  We've been talking about jobs for a long time. You hear it all the 
time in

[[Page H4862]]

the halls of Congress. But what have we done? The House has passed a 
number of bills that would immediately open up a marketplace for job 
creation and job growth, but unfortunately our friends on the other 
side of the Capitol in the Senate have done nothing to advance these 
pieces of legislation. And it's not like they've had anything to do. I 
mean, they haven't even passed a budget in over 800 days. So I would 
ask our friends in the Senate to start to push these pro-growth 
economic policies so we can get Americans back to work.
  But it's not just our friends on the other side of the Capitol who 
are holding us back. It's the administration who has pursued policies 
that have hurt job creation and economic growth. To be a good manager, 
to be a good executive, you have to be able to do two things well: One 
is to be able to analyze and pinpoint a problem, and the second part is 
to find a solution for that problem. Unfortunately, we have an 
administration that doesn't even do the first part well. They actually 
pinpoint problems that don't exist, or problems that aren't problems at 
all, so you can't even get to a solution that will get Americans back 
to work.
  Let me give you a couple of examples of this. Recently, the President 
said that one of the problems we have with job creation is with ATMs 
and kiosks at our airports. I didn't know about the scourge of ATMs and 
kiosks, but apparently those are what are holding back our job 
creators. This is called innovation. This is called efficiency.
  It reminds me of a story of when the famed economist Milton Friedman 
went to China. He was witnessing some excavation for a canal, and there 
were thousands of people who were digging with shovels. Milton Friedman 
asked: Why aren't you guys using bulldozers or excavators, those things 
that will make this more efficient?
  The Chinese officials said: Then we couldn't put these people to 
work.
  To that, Milton Friedman responded: Why don't you give them spoons?
  Innovation and efficiency make our economy stronger, they're net job 
creators, so we should be going after what is really holding our 
country and is really holding back economic growth, and that is the 
NLRB who is attacking American companies who want to create American 
jobs. That is the EPA, who is going after numerous pieces of regulation 
that will in the near term kill jobs, in the medium term kill jobs, and 
in the long term kill jobs. We should be going after the FTC who is now 
going after Captain Crunch and Tony the Tiger. Those sorts of things 
are the ones that are holding our country back and holding back 
economic growth. We should be looking at those burdensome regulations 
and removing that and letting our entrepreneurs and our job creators 
unleash the ingenuity that they have within them.
  There is one area of agreement that I do have with the President, and 
that is with the free trade agreements. The free trade agreements with 
South Korea, Colombia and Panama need to be passed through the House. 
But we've got to agree on something. They have been sitting on the 
President's desk since he has been in office. I urge the President to 
send those free trade agreements without any additional spending 
attached to them, because those are job creators. For every billion 
dollars worth of exports, it is 10,000 jobs here at home.
  So I really hope the administration starts to pinpoint and look at 
the real problems that our country is facing so we can get America back 
to work and we can lead to more economic growth and prosperity, because 
it starts with the American worker.

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