[Congressional Record Volume 159, Number 23 (Wednesday, February 13, 2013)]
[Senate]
[Pages S665-S666]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
A CASE OF AMNESIA
Mr. CORNYN. Madam President, after listening to President Obama's
State of the Union speech last night, I was left scratching my head.
Essentially, the President wants us to pretend the last 4 years never
happened. He wants us to pretend his economic policies have delivered a
strong recovery from the recession of 2008; he wants us to pretend his
administration has made real progress on reducing the national debt;
and he wants us to pretend that more taxes, more spending, and more
debt are the key to middle-class prosperity. In other words, the
President is hoping we all have a case of amnesia.
He wants us to forget about $5.8 trillion in new debt that was racked
up during his first term--$5.8 trillion. He wants us to forget our
gross national debt is now larger than our entire economy--100 percent
of our gross domestic product. He wants us to forget the debt is
projected to grow even further, to $26 trillion, by 2023; and he wants
us to forget his health care bill will increase taxes by $1 trillion
over the next 10 years. He wants us to forget America's credit rating
has been downgraded for the first time in our history.
He also wants us to forget we have been suffering through the weakest
economic recovery since the Great Depression, as well as the highest,
longest period of high unemployment since the Great Depression.
He wants us to forget that nearly 4 out of every 10 unemployed
Americans have been jobless for at least 6 months. He wants us to
forget that the average family median income has fallen by nearly
$2,500 since the official end of the recession. He wants us to forget
that the cost of health insurance for the average American family has
increased by more than $2,300. And he wants us to forget that as part
of the fiscal cliff negotiation, the payroll tax went back up, taking
an additional bite out of the check of middle-class workers.
Last night President Obama said we should ask ourselves three
questions every day--those of us with the privilege of serving here in
the Nation's Capital in the Congress and in the administration. He
said: No. 1, how do we attract more jobs to our shores? No. 2, how do
we equip people with the skills they need in order to get those jobs?
And No. 3, how do we make sure hard work leads to a decent living? I
may have my differences with President Obama on a number of policies,
but I actually think those are really good questions.
If the President is truly serious about finding the answers to those
questions, this may not surprise my colleagues, but he need look only
to the model reflected in my home State of Texas.
I ask unanimous consent to have printed in the Record an article
entitled ``The Texas Growth Machine'' at the end of my remarks.
The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. Without objection, it is so
ordered.
(See exhibit 1.)
Mr. CORNYN. The fact is our State relies on a simple economic model
the Federal Government could emulate if it would like to have similar
positive results: lower taxes, limited government, sensible
regulations, and progrowth energy policies.
I know the occupant of the chair comes from a State that I believe is
the second largest producer of oil and gas in the country--second only
to Texas--and I know the Presiding Officer has seen the economic engine
that is created when we unleash our potential when it comes to our
energy resources. These are policies that recently helped Texas turn a
$5 billion deficit during the recession into an $8.8 billion surplus.
These are the policies that made our State a robust engine of job
creation that is attracting Americans from all across the country. The
total number of jobs in Texas since 1995 has grown at the rate of 32
percent. When we compare that with the rate of growth of jobs in
America nationwide, we see it is 12 percent--32 percent to 12 percent.
That is not an accident.
Texas is also a leader in the creation of high-paying jobs. Between
2002 and 2012, our State accounted for close to one-third of all U.S.
private sector job growth in industries that pay more than 150 percent
of the average wage, even though we have only 8 percent of America's
total population.
Last night the President talked about, How do we get middle-class
wages up? His prescription was an increase in the minimum wage, but I
say why don't we look at ways to achieve a maximum wage by creating
private sector, high-paying, good jobs, as we have been successful in
doing in Texas and as a few other States have done as well.
After 4 years of trillion-dollar deficits and historically high
unemployment--right now our unemployment rate is roughly 7.9 percent,
but that doesn't really account for all of the people who have since
given up looking for work, and it is estimated that more than 20
million Americans either are out of work or they are working part time
when they would like to work full time, but they can't find those kinds
of jobs.
I believe it is time for the President and this Congress to try a new
approach. The great thing about our system of government--of shared
sovereignty between the States and the National Government--is that we
have essentially laboratories of democracy all around our country where
we can try different things to see what works and what does not work. I
only hope the President and Congress will look at those places around
the country where the policies actually work in creating jobs and
economic growth.
I believe it is time for the President to embrace policies that will
encourage private entrepreneurship, private sector job creation, income
growth, and greater domestic energy production. In short, it is time
for him to embrace the Texas model.
Exhibit 1
The Texas Growth Machine
(By Wendell Cox)
The American economy has had little to cheer about since
the 2008 financial meltdown and the resulting recession.
Recovery has been feeble, and many states continue to
struggle. One bright spot in the general gloom, however, is
Texas, which began shining long before 2008. Not only has
Texas created jobs at a stunning rate; it has also--pace
critics like the New York Times's Paul Krugman--created lots
of good jobs. Indeed, the rest of the nation could turn to
the Lone Star State as a model for dynamic growth, as a close
look at employment data shows.
[[Page S666]]
The first thing to point out is that Texan job creation has
far outpaced the national average. The number of jobs in
Texas has grown by a truly impressive 31.5 percent since
1995, compared with just 12 percent nationwide, according to
Bureau of Labor Statistics data. Texas has also lapped
California, an important economic rival and the only state
with a larger population. The Texas employment situation
after the financial crisis was far less spectacular, of
course, with the number of jobs growing just 2.4 percent from
2009 through 2011. But that was still six times the anemic
0.4 percent growth rate of the overall American economy.
The National Establishment Time-Series (NETS) Database,
which provides detailed information on job creation and loss
for firms headquartered in each state, can tell us more about
Texas's employment growth. NETS data are divided into two
periods--the first from 1995 to 2002, the second from 2002 to
2009. During the 2002-09 period, small businesses of fewer
than ten employees were the Texas employment engine, adding
nearly 800,000 new jobs; of those, about three-quarters were
in firms with two to nine employees. Larger Texas companies--
those with 500 or more employees--lost a significant number
of jobs over this span, and medium-size firms likewise
shrank, trends that also showed up on the national level.
Bureau of Labor Statistics data shows that many of the new
Texas jobs paid well. Indeed, Texas did comparatively better
than the rest of the United States from 2002 through 2011.
For industries paying over 150 percent of the average
American wage, Texas could claim 216,000 extra jobs; the rest
of the country added 495,000. In other words, the Lone Star
State, with 8 percent of the U.S. population, created nearly
a third of the country's highest-paying positions. Texas also
added 49,000 positions paying 125 percent to 150 percent of
the U.S. average; the rest of the country lost 174,000 jobs
in that category. Two sectors in which Texas employment did
particularly well during the same period were natural-
resource extraction (in fact, the state gained 80 percent of
all new jobs in the country in that field) and professional,
scientific, and technical positions. Both job categories
boast average wages far higher than the national overall
average. As happens whenever an economy grows, Texas also
added hundreds of thousands of positions in food services,
health care, and other lower-paid fields, in addition to the
more lucrative jobs. Texas did lose 10,000 construction jobs,
but that was a modest downturn, in light of the massive
national slowdown in building caused by the crisis of 2008.
Vital to the economic health of Texas is that people are
moving to its cities in droves. In 2011, Houston surpassed
Philadelphia in population and became the country's fifth-
biggest metropolitan region, with 6.1 million people. Dallas-
Fort Worth, with 6.5 million, was already the country's
fourth-biggest. The two cities trail only New York City, Los
Angeles, and Chicago, marking the first time that a single
state has had two metros in the country's top five since the
Census Bureau began designating these areas a century ago.
Meanwhile, of all metropolitan areas in the country with more
than 1 million residents, the fastest-growing from 2010 to
2011 was Austin.
Though the national downturn has slowed job creation in
Texas's cities, they're still adding jobs, sometimes briskly,
unlike many other American metropolitan regions. Austin's
strong information-technology sector and government-related
work (the city is Texas's state capital) helped propel 4.3
percent job growth from 2009 through 2011 (and 15.3 percent
growth from 2002 through 2009). The number of jobs in
McAllen, which benefits from increased trade with Mexico
under the North American Free Trade Agreement, grew 3.7
percent. Job growth in economically diverse Houston has
matched or exceeded the state rate since 1995.
What accounts for the resilience of the Texas economy,
which has outperformed the rest of the country not only over
the long term but during the Great Recession as well? A pro-
business climate has unquestionably been a substantial
advantage. In its annual ranking of business environments,
Chief Executive has named Texas the most growth-friendly
state for eight years in a row. (California has been last for
the same eight years.) The reasons included low taxes and
sensible regulations; a high-quality workforce (Texas ranked
second only to Utah in that category in 2012); and a pleasant
living environment (an eighth-place finish, slightly below
sixth-place Florida but, perhaps surprisingly, far better
than 28th-place California).
Part of the explanation for the high living-environment
score is doubtless Texas's low cost of living. In 2011, the
U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis put Texas's ``regional price
parity,'' a measurement of the price level of goods in an
area, at 97.1, a bit lower than the national level of 100 and
far lower than the California level of 114.8. Adjusted for
cost of living, Texas's per-capita income is higher than
California's and nearly as high as New York's. Factor in
state and local taxes, and Texas pulls ahead of New York.
More than three-quarters of the cost-of-living difference
between Texas and California can be explained by housing
costs. Texas mostly dodged the real-estate bubble of the
2000s: the affordability of houses in large metro areas
spiked in America as a whole but rose only modestly in Texas.
A major reason that Texas real estate is so affordable is
that the state lacks the draconian land-use restrictions that
drive California housing prices into the stratosphere. The
affordable housing attracts both people and businesses. Since
2000, 1 million more people have moved to Texas from other
states than have left.
All these considerations suggest that Texas is poised for
further growth. And a final reason for Texans to be
optimistic is that a major expansion of the Panama Canal will
be completed in 2014. That could bolster the Lone Star
State's success by rerouting Asian commerce from West Coast
ports to Texas alternatives, which are closer to the nation's
major markets.
Mr. CORNYN. With that, Madam President, I yield the floor.
I suggest the absence of a quorum.
The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. The clerk will call the roll.
The assistant legislative clerk proceeded to call the roll.
Mr. DURBIN. Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that the order
for the quorum call be rescinded.
The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. Without objection, it is so
ordered.
Mr. DURBIN. Madam President, I ask unanimous consent to speak as in
morning business.
The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. Without objection, it is so
ordered.
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