[Congressional Record Volume 158, Number 18 (Friday, February 3, 2012)]
[House]
[Pages H470-H473]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                              JOB CREATION

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of 
January 5, 2011, the gentleman from Massachusetts (Mr. Frank) is 
recognized for 60 minutes as the designee of the minority leader.
  Mr. FRANK of Massachusetts. Mr. Speaker, preliminarily, I'm here to 
discuss today's very encouraging jobs report.
  I am struck. The previous speaker said he would never engage in 
expenditures on a credit card when we were already deeply in debt on 
behalf of his family. I note that he was not a Member of the Congress 
when this Congress voted to go to war in Iraq, for example, and also in 
Afghanistan. I voted for the war in Afghanistan. I thought the war in 
Iraq was a terrible mistake and still do.
  All of us who voted to go to war in Afghanistan were voting to go 
into further debt. War is very expensive. We don't want to send our 
young people into battle--and some of our middle-aged people--without 
the best possible equipment. So I thought we had to go to war in 
Afghanistan in self-defense.
  I thought the war in Iraq was a terrible error. The majority of my 
colleagues, including virtually every Republican, voted to do that.
  So this principle that you don't vote to spend money when you don't 
have it is apparently, for some, a fairly flexible one. In fact, not 
only did the majority at that time under President Bush vote to go into 
two wars, they did it while voting for several large tax cuts. So they 
were exacerbating that very difficulty.
  As I said, I voted to go to war in Afghanistan. I was prepared to 
vote for some revenues to pay for it.
  Mostly, though, I want to talk today about the very encouraging 
report we got today about the economy.
  We are in the early stages of recovery. It's not going nearly fast 
enough. What is now clear is that the recession that President Obama 
inherited from the previous administration in 2009 when he took office 
was deeper than people realized at the time. It was clearly the worst 
economic downturn since the Great Depression; and, in many ways, it was 
more disabling in the sense of the interconnections, although overall 
it was not.
  President Obama and others underestimated the depths of that 
recession. Many of us did. So the recovery has been slower than it 
should have been in the interests of the American people.
  But the fact is, very clearly, it is underway. I want to talk about 
that, and I want to talk about what's retarding it.
  One of the interesting things today was the jobs number: 257,000 
private sector jobs created, a very significant number. Enough, if it 
is a pattern, that can continuously cut into the unemployment figure. 
But it was accompanied by a 14,000 job reduction in public sector 
employment; and that, unfortunately, is a pattern.
  If you go back to the worst of the recession, the end of 2009--
remember President Obama comes in in early 2009. We did pass an 
economic recovery package which clearly, by virtually every economist's 
acknowledgment, improved the situation. It didn't cure it. It didn't do 
as much to reduce the rate as had been hoped because the deficit in the 
economy was deeper.
  But since that end of 2009 when things began to turn around after we 
had passed an economic recovery program that began to help, after a 
Federal Reserve under a Bush appointee, Ben Bernanke, reappointed by 
President Obama, continued its stimulative efforts, here's what 
happened basically since the last months of 2009 and the beginning of 
2010:
  We have had, in this economy, in the 2-year period, the creation in 
the private sector of 3.663 million jobs, approximately. You can't be 
exact. But over 3.6 million jobs. Unfortunately, during the same time 
period, a couple months earlier, public sector employment has declined 
by more than 550,000 jobs. In other words, if the public sector had 
simply been allowed to stay even, if there hadn't been firings of 
firefighters and people who shovel the snow and clean the streets and 
maintain the parks and teach young people and preserve law and order, 
if we hadn't fired police officers, public works employees, municipal 
engineers, teachers, sanitary workers, if we hadn't required them to be 
fired by a perverse set of Federal budget policies that had that 
negative impact on the municipalities, we would have had a half a 
million more jobs.

  I'm not talking about the public sector increasing. If the public 
sector had simply been allowed to stay even, if this Congress had not 
sent money to build Afghanistan--futilely, in my judgment--if it hadn't 
wasted money on a war in Iraq that never should have begun and kept 
that money home and we could have had more police officers and 
firefighters and teachers and public works employees working here in 
our country, then the unemployment rate would be below 8 percent today.
  This is exactly the opposite of what my Republican colleagues claim. 
Oh, the public sector, they say, is strangling the private sector. No. 
The truth is exactly the opposite. The private sector has increased, 
not yet at the rate we had hoped; although, if the private sector can 
continue to add 250,000-plus jobs a month, then we will. That's 3 
million jobs a year. That will substantially reduce unemployment to the 
point which is where we should be, if we can persuade our Republican 
colleagues to stop forcing the cities and counties and States to lay 
off important public employees.
  I got an anguished letter the other day from the mayor of the City of 
Fall River, Massachusetts, about a great addiction program, the Stanley 
Street treatment program, in his town. He wanted to know why they were 
cut off from the $1.4 million they had gotten to deal with addiction. 
The answer is this Congress voted out the whole program. I couldn't be 
their advocate and say, look, this is a good program, give them money 
because I was told by the agency about, you know, We know it's a good 
program. You Give us money. We can't give out money when you voted 
against it.
  That money is in Kandahar. That money is in Basra. If it were doing 
any good over there, I would feel better about it. But we are spending 
money futilely overseas in wars, one of which shouldn't have started 
and one of which should have started--and, by the way, should end.
  By the way, I heard my colleague, the previous speaker, talk about 
spending too much. In fact, one of the major criticisms the Republican 
Party now has, certainly their Presidential candidates and many here in 
the Congress, is not that the President is spending too much but that 
he is spending too little. They've criticized him for withdrawing our 
troops from Iraq, even though it was on a timetable President Bush had 
set forward. They want more troops in Iraq. Nothing is more expensive 
than keeping troops in a near combat situation; and that's right, 
because

[[Page H471]]

you don't send people into combat without doing everything you can to 
protect them.
  There are people who are criticizing the decision of beginning to 
reduce the troops in Afghanistan. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan at 
their height were costing $150 billion a year over and above the 
regular military budget. I cannot think of anything less consistent 
than to argue that, a, we should be reducing the deficit and, b, we 
should be continuing to spend money not just on military activity but 
on nation building in Afghanistan and Iraq.
  Let's go back to the job situation. There were 3.6 million private 
sector jobs created in 2 years.
  By the way, that has been reflected in the economy.

                              {time}  1340

  On March 9, 2009, then-Speaker Pelosi, Mr. Speaker, convened a 
meeting in which we talked about things we thought we should do for the 
financial sector. It was the beginning of our efforts to do financial 
reform.
  I know the Republicans think that financial reform is a terrible 
idea; that, apparently, we should have derivatives unregulated. We 
shouldn't have an independent consumer bureau.
  We should continue the practice whereby people can make loans to 
people who shouldn't get them and then sell those loans to other people 
so they had no interest in whether or not they were repaid. Because we 
began our financial reform efforts in March of 2009, and we were told 
it was terrible for the financial industry.
  The Dow Jones Industrial Average on March 9 was 6,500. By March 9, 
now 3 years later, it will very likely be double what it was then. The 
Dow Jones Industrial Average will have doubled in the aftermath of the 
passage of the economic Recovery Act, the financial reform bill, even 
the health bill.
  Maybe I don't claim that we did it, but we certainly didn't retard 
it. So in that time period, 3.6 million jobs were created. At the end 
of the Bush administration, of course, we were into very substantial 
job loss. In the very first months of the Obama administration and the 
last months of the Bush administration, job losses in the hundreds of 
thousands a month. Now we have begun to turn that around.
  And again, let's stress if it hadn't been for Federal budget policies 
forced by this Congress and by others in the Congress who were 
reluctant to do the right thing, if States and cities had simply been 
allowed to keep their current level, in other words, if we had had 
increases in the private sector and held steady over a 3-year period in 
the public sector, we'd have half a million more jobs in America today 
and probably more because these things have some multiplier effect.
  And clearly unemployment would be below 8 percent. It has dropped to 
8.3. By the way, when unemployment went down to 8.9 and 8.7, the 
critics of the President said, oh, that's just because the labor force 
has dropped. Well, the labor force went up in this past month, 
according to the statistics.
  More people were encouraged to look for jobs. And with more people 
looking for jobs, we still had a drop to 8.3 percent in the 
unemployment numbers.
  Now, that is an example of the wrong-headedness of the very 
conservative approach of the economy. Yes, we have a deficit. It is a 
very large deficit, much of it incurred because of the policies of 
President Bush supported by Republican majorities in Congress. I'm told 
I didn't read it, but the bill we passed yesterday said that the tax 
cuts under George Bush did not add to the deficit.
  That is Marxist reasoning, Chico Marxist reasoning. It reminds me of 
the time in one of the movies where Groucho caught Chico red-handed and 
Chico, denying that he had done it, said, Who are you going to believe, 
me or your own eyes?
  Bills that passed cut government revenues by hundreds of billions of 
dollars, and it didn't add to the deficit. Of course it did and it 
added to the deficits at the same time we were incurring further 
deficits by going to war. I didn't vote for the war in Iraq. I voted 
for the war in Afghanistan, but I have for some time now thought we 
should withdraw entirely.
  It is the Republicans at the Presidential level and in the Congress 
who are resisting that we spend more.
  We have begun to reduce defense spending. The President made a very 
radical decision. He said that after the late forties when we sent 
troops to Western Europe and Central Europe to keep Joe Stalin, a 
vicious, brutal murderer from invading central and Western Europe--
countries that had been left devastated by World War II--that having 
done that in 1948 and '49, it was time to withdraw them.
  Well, according to my Republican friends, that's a terrible mistake. 
They want to keep those troops in Western Europe. That would be good 
for the economies of Europe, and they need them these days, but it's 
terrible for the United States. The heads of the military said, you 
know what, we can take these troops out of Europe and retire them.
  That doesn't mean you fire them. I was glad to see General Odierno 
say we will not dismiss anyone who signed up to serve this country. We 
are grateful for them, and they should be allowed to serve out fully 
what they did and get the full veterans benefit that a grateful Nation 
owes them. But with the turnover in the military in ordinary 
circumstances, you can reach a reduction fairly soon by simply not 
hiring new people.
  Now, I will add that there is another great inconsistency on my 
Republican colleagues' point. When I debate with them whether or not we 
should cut spending for firefighters or public-works employees, whether 
we should provide money to build highways, whether we should do things 
where the Federal Government provides funds that I believe are job 
creating, they tell me you can look it up in all of the debates that 
we've had here, that government spending doesn't create jobs.
  They deny that the government spending money can create jobs, with 
one wonderful exception. Apparently that doesn't apply to military 
spending because when it comes to reducing military spending, they have 
all become the most devoted followers of John Maynard Keynes. They 
sound like the New Dealers at their most urgent and ardent.
  The military to them is the world's great public works project. 
Obviously, it has other functions; but when we talk about reducing the 
military, all of a sudden government spending is a great fount of job 
creation. Well, the fact is that when you reduce military spending, you 
can cut back on jobs in the near term as you can in other areas.
  I do believe that cutting military spending can result in less job 
reduction than, for instance, cutting the right kind of medical 
spending. Yes, we should have comparisons of this, but I'm talking now 
just about the sheer hypocrisy of arguing that government 
spending cannot create jobs and then turning around and invoking 
government spending as a part of the military.

  In fact, as these numbers show, our having four States and cities to 
cut back--and by the way the reason States and cities have cut back is 
not simply that we haven't given them Federal funds, which I believe in 
a proper approach of this system we should. That was the radical 
program of revenue sharing, it was called, in Community Development 
Block Grants, which was first put forward by that--I never thought 
terribly radical--Richard Nixon in the seventies.
  But the fact is that the national economic crisis has hit with 
particular impact on cities and States, especially since it manifests 
itself in low-housing prices. Of all the levels of government in this 
country--local, State and Federal--it's the local governments that rely 
most heavily on the property tax.
  So when property is devalued, as it has been by factors far beyond 
the control of any city, the city's revenues suffer. And so it's a 
combination of their natural revenue base suffering as a national 
policy because of the denial of funding on programs that have existed 
since Richard Nixon, that they have had to lay off over half a million 
people.
  And because they've laid off half a million people, instead of there 
being a net 3.6 million increase in jobs in the last couple of years, 
it's 3.1 million. And 550,000 jobs would be better than 3 percent on 
the unemployment figures. It would reduce unemployment. And here is, of 
course, the great mistake the conservative ideology makes and you're 
seeing it in Europe as well.

[[Page H472]]

  By the way, I don't think it's an accident that in America President 
Obama has resisted this notion that we should make even further and 
further cuts domestically. I do acknowledge that my colleagues are big 
spenders when it comes to Iraq, Afghanistan, bases in Europe and other 
military expenditures, much less useful, I think, for our economy.
  But in Europe, they have been falling on recently the notion of 
austerity. As today's numbers make clear, we have a way to go in our 
economy, and we need to work to cooperate to keep this economic 
recovery going and get it more vigorous. Of all the major developed 
economies in the world, the American economy is doing the best. 
Obviously, the developing ones--India, China--starting from a lower 
base, they are doing better. But if you look at the major 
industrialized Nation, we are doing better because we have resisted a 
sense of austerity.
  Now, sometimes intelligence requires an ability to make distinctions 
that are beyond some people. Yes, we have a deficit, and we have to 
reduce the deficit. But at the same time, we have a serious 
unemployment problem which is getting less serious. It's still serious, 
but 8.3 percent is better than 8.9 percent or 9.1 percent. And 7.9 
percent would have been even better if they hadn't forced cities and 
States to lay off cops and public-works employers and teachers and 
firefighters.
  But what we need to be able to do is to work on both of these. In the 
near term, some stimulative activity to deal with the unemployment 
situation is a good thing. This is not a time to choke off this 
recovery. But precisely because we are in the early stages of recovery, 
we can, if we do the right thing in the near term, begin with the end 
of this current year, start cutting back on the deficit.
  Now, it's interesting, by the way, that one of the ways you do that 
will be to continue to reduce military spending, along with other 
things. But what do my Republican colleagues say? Oh, no, you can't 
reduce another penny of military spending.
  One of the things I've been told, by the way, is that we've hollowed 
out the military in past years. I wrote to Secretary of Defense Panetta 
who, to my surprise, claimed that after the end of the Cold War we had 
hollowed out the military. I was surprised because Leon Panetta was the 
Budget Director during that period after the Cold War under Clinton. 
So, apparently, this was a confession that he himself had hollowed out 
the military, but I don't think we did.

                              {time}  1350

  And I have written him and I have asked others, would anyone please 
come forward and say on this floor of the House, or elsewhere, given 
the argument that we've hollowed out the military, can anyone show me 
one example of where, in the period after the demise of the Soviet 
Union, one of the great things that happened for human history, we 
needed to apply military force and didn't have it?
  President Clinton didn't lack for the appropriate force in southern 
Yugoslavia to accomplish his goals. George Bush, in the immediate end 
of the Cold War, was able to do Iraq, the first President Bush. The 
second President Bush had too much military from my standpoint in terms 
of what he used in going to war in Iraq and Afghanistan at the same 
time.
  So this argument that we've hollowed out the military is nonsense. 
With the reductions that are planned, we will still be, by far, the 
strongest military in the world and well able to defend ourselves.
  And yes, if we're going to reduce the deficit, we have to put cuts in 
a lot of places. We can cut the Social Security that goes to wealthy 
people. I receive Social Security. I'm prepared to vote to have it all 
taxed way. That's an effective way to means test it, not by a 
complicated process at the outset. For those of us who make a certain 
income and we're getting Social Security, give us a 95 percent tax. 
That will work very efficiently.
  I'm prepared to put some constraints on spending domestically on 
programs I like. But exempting the military, as my Republican 
colleagues want, trying to scare the American people by saying that if 
we're only five times as strong as our nearest adversary we'll somehow 
be in danger, that isn't remotely the case. Continuing to maintain a 
full complement of weaponry to defeat the Soviet Union in a cold war 
when it has long since imploded, none of those make sense.
  But here's the point. If we commit ourselves to longer-term deficit 
reduction, then we can, without in any way causing any loss of 
confidence, do the short-term spending that will help us. And, by the 
way, the other area where we should be working to reduce the deficit is 
in taxation.
  One of the controversies we have now is our proposal that many of us 
support to put a surtax on income for people who earn more than $1 
million a year. It's called the millionaire's tax. That's a misleading 
name. You can have $10 million in your estate, in your accounts, and 
still not be earning $1 million a year. We're not talking about people 
who have a million or 2 or 3 or 4. We're talking about people who earn 
$1 million a year in taxable income every year.
  What we've said is every time you earn more than $1 million a year, 
for every thousand in taxable income, after all of your deductions that 
you earned, we're going to tax you $56; $56 per thousand for people who 
are already earning $1 million. It's nonsense to suggest that would in 
any way be disturbing to them or to their spending patterns; but it 
would help us reduce the deficit.
  So yeah, I want to shore up Medicare. I was struck that the previous 
speaker had two complaints about the President: one, that he's spending 
too much money, and, two, that he's not spending enough. He complained 
about cuts in Medicare. In fact, those are not cuts that went to any 
beneficiary or even to the actual providers in the real sense. They 
went to some insurance companies that were getting more than they 
needed.
  But if we will include the military and put constraints elsewhere and 
ask the wealthiest people in this country to pay some taxes--and, by 
the way, this argument that tax increases kill the economy, the last 
time I heard it was when President Clinton asked Congress to raise 
taxes on incomes above $150,000, a far lower figure than we're talking 
about today, even correcting for inflation. He said raise the tax on 
people making $150,000, put the top rate from 36 to 39.6 percent, a 
fairly small increase I thought at the time. And we did it, over the 
objection of the right-wing economists, and they told us it would be 
the end of the economy. In fact, subsequent to that, in the many years 
after that, we had one of the best economic performances of American 
history, not necessarily because we raised taxes, but even though we 
did.
  The fact is that people who thought these arguments, they greatly 
exaggerate the sensitivity of this vast, complex, strong American 
economy to fairly small changes in tax rates. But the point is that we 
have been told before that increasing by a fairly small amount of taxes 
on the very wealthy--and as I said, we were talking then about 150; 
we're talking about a much higher figure today--that's a way to help 
reduce the deficit.
  Constraining the military helps reduce the deficit, and that brings 
me back to the point of these job numbers. Totally contrary to what the 
Republican Presidential candidates are saying when they take time out 
from saying terrible things about each other--but I will give them 
credit, as I listen to the Republican candidates make the most 
devastating, negative, personal attacks on each other, I do have to 
concede that they are almost always right in what they say about each 
other. But when they lay off each other, they make extraordinarily 
negative, excessively denigrating comments about our country, talking 
about how this country is no longer respected in the world, directly 
contrary to all of the evidence, denigrating our economy when we are, 
today, the best performing major developed economy in the world. Still 
not good enough, but it would be better still if the Republicans would 
cooperate with us instead of trying to make things worse.
  250,000 new private sector jobs, including increases in 
manufacturing. And, by the way, Mr. Speaker, a significant part of that 
was because the government intervened, over the objection of the 
Republicans now running for President and many in Congress, to help the 
automobile industry.

[[Page H473]]

  Let me read from yesterday's New York Times. The headline: In a 
Surprise, Car Sales Start New Year Strongly. And it says that American 
and other automobile dealers are doing very well. And then:

  Chrysler ends quarter with $225 million profit. The comeback from 
bankruptcy at Chrysler hit a milestone when the company reported its 
first full year of positive earnings since 2005.
  And it says:
  This was a company that just 3 years ago needed a government bailout 
and a trip through bankruptcy to survive.
  The fact is that the intervention, initiated by President Obama and 
supported by this Congress, particularly our Democratic Members, with 
some Republicans but with most of them opposing it, rescued General 
Motors and Chrysler. General Motors is today the number one automobile 
company in the world. It wouldn't have been if we'd listened to the 
Republicans.
  Manufacturing employment has begun to increase, partly because we've 
gotten these jobs back at Chrysler and General Motors.
  And, by the way, among those that were strongly supportive of the 
intervention was Ford. Ford had been prudent, had borrowed some money 
or had mortgaged itself and had some cash. They didn't need a direct 
participation in the funds that came from the TARP. That hated TARP. 
But they strongly supported it because they knew if General Motors and 
Chrysler weren't able to continue to function, the supply chain in 
America would dry up. That would have cost more jobs, and it would have 
put Ford at a disadvantage.
  So we have a thriving American automobile industry today that's on 
the upswing that we wouldn't have had if we listened to the Republican 
argument that government always is bad. Oh, I make an exception: 
Government is always bad unless it's the military. They impute to the 
military powers beyond what it has, it seems to me.
  I would make the point that our military is a superb instrument, full 
of extraordinary people, and they are very good at doing what a 
military should do--stopping bad things from happening. It is not fair 
to them and unrealistic to expect them to be able to make good things 
happen. Yes, they can stop murderers. But the best armed, the most 
thoughtful young Americans ever assembled aren't going to be able to 
get the Shia and Sunni and the Kurds to like each other; or to bring to 
Afghanistan what it's never been able to get, sadly. I wish we could, 
but we don't do it with American firepower.
  But with the exception of the military, we hear only negatives about 
government. In fact, we have a private sector that has begun to 
connect. We are now at a pace to reduce unemployment to a reasonable 
level. If it hadn't been for the job reductions in the public sector, 
forced by many here, we would be even better off. And, by the way, we 
are talking about people who provide services essential to the quality 
of life, people who pave the streets and shovel the snow and deal with 
the sewage and clean up the parks and police and fire. These are 
essential people. We have half a million less of these people. We're 
not talking about Federal bureaucrats here. These job losses are mostly 
at the State and local levels. We have half a million less of them.
  We have, fortunately, 3.6 million more private employees in this 
period of recovery from the recession. If we had been able to maintain 
the public sector, we would be lower in unemployment. I hope, Mr. 
Speaker, that people will look at this, that they will stop this 
mindless, partisanly motivated trashing of America when we are doing 
better than any other developed economy of any size, even though we are 
held back to some extent by them, that they will instead join with us 
in saying, look, let's understand that we need spending constraints 
across the board, including the military; that the wealthiest people in 
this country, the people running hedge funds can afford to pay a 
regular tax and not get that carried interest boondoggle that is in no 
way an incentive to economic activity but simply makes them richer. I 
understand why they'd rather be richer; although, many of them are, I 
think, public spirited enough to say let's change this.
  Let's put some spending constraints on across the board. Let's raise 
revenues in a way that will not have a negative effect on the economy 
or on the quality of lives of those people paying it, and let's lock in 
that so that in the near term we can stop forcing States and cities to 
lay people off. We can continue the kind of policies that will help put 
some people back to work in the construction industry, such as in 
highways. We can also, I hope, get the people at the Federal Housing 
Finance Administration to stop resisting the administration's effort to 
help with housing.

                              {time}  1400

  If there is cooperation, and if we learn the lessons of the past, we 
can make this economy work.
  I would include one final point, and I will be talking about this 
some more. One of the great successes we have seen in the past few 
years has been the policies under a Bush appointee, Benjamin Bernanke, 
George Bush's chief economic adviser, whom George Bush gave the most 
important economic post in America, Chairman of the Federal Reserve.
  Chairman Bernanke has pushed hard to have the Federal Reserve be a 
constructive force in our economy. People on the right in particular 
were saying it is going to cause terrible inflation. Rarely in American 
history has a flat prediction been more wrong. The quantitative easing, 
and the intervention of the Fed has produced no inflation. It has made 
money for the Federal Government. It hasn't cost us anything. It has 
been very helpful.
  In fact, the Fed has been setting a good example for Europe. One of 
the best things that has happened with regard to Europe lately, as 
perceived by the markets as well as others, is that people noted that 
the European Central Bank was beginning to take some of the lessons 
from the U.S. Federal Reserve and work more like them.
  If we stop harassing the Federal Reserve about the reasonable pro-
expansionary policies it has been following and we stop forcing State 
and local governments from firing people who perform useful services 
and are unfortunately added to the unemployment figure, if we will 
produce Federal funding not to try to mediate a dispute in Iraq but to 
build highways here and to clean up our water systems, and if we will 
ask the wealthiest people in America to give a little bit more, which 
they won't miss but which will help us, then the good day that we had 
today--it was a very good day in the economic news. I noticed even Fox 
News almost begrudgingly had to say, Wow, what a good economic report. 
I give Chris Wallace credit because he cut right through and said that 
when there was someone who wanted to carp.
  There were 250,000 new private sector jobs today. If we can keep that 
up, then maybe the 250,000 private sector jobs will become 300,000, and 
maybe we will add 5,000 or 10,000 public sector jobs that were lost 
where we need cops and firefighters and people to keep our cities 
clean.
  If this Congress, through an ideological rigidity that has been 
proven wrong by the facts, does not interfere, if we are supportive of 
the very sensible program that the President has laid out, 
independently supported by that Bush appointee Mr. Bernanke at the 
Federal Reserve, America will continue to have the best developed 
economy in the world, and we can get the kind of recovery that the 
American people deserve.
  Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

                          ____________________