[Congressional Record Volume 159, Number 123 (Wednesday, September 18, 2013)]
[Senate]
[Pages S6549-S6550]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                              THE ECONOMY

  Mr. CORNYN. Mr. President, as you know, today marks the fifth 
anniversary of the 2008 financial panic which threw our country into a 
severe recession and the worst economic crisis this country has had 
since the 1930s. It has been 5 years since Lehman Brothers collapsed. 
It has been 5 years since the Federal Government seized full control of 
Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. It has been 5 years since Washington bailed 
out AIG, the giant insurance company.
  In the weeks and months following the events of September 2008, 
Members of both parties agreed that one of the most important things we 
could do is to fix the idea of too big to fail when it came to some of 
the largest financial institutions in America. Too big to fail--so the 
only alternative was for taxpayers to bail them out.
  We wanted to end it. Five years later, I wish I could say we had 
succeeded. I wish I could say that too big to fail was a thing of the 
past. Unfortunately, the very law that was passed by our Democratic 
friends, primarily, that was supposed to end too big to fail actually 
codified it, actually made it more certain to occur because it gave 
Federal regulators the power to identify something called systemically 
important institutions. Doesn't that sound suspiciously like too big to 
fail if you are systemically important financial institutions?
  We have already seen that systemically important firms enjoy huge 
funding advantages over smaller competitors, primarily community 
bankers in places such as my State, mostly because of the perception 
that these large companies enjoy a government bailout guarantee. In 
other words, their cost of doing business is lower because people 
actually perceive they have a Federal Government backstop available to 
bail them out if they get into trouble--not so for small credit unions, 
community bankers in places such as my State and around the country.
  In other words, Dodd-Frank, rather than weakening this concept, 
actually strengthened the de facto partnership between Washington, DC, 
and New York, and primarily Wall Street. That is the exact opposite of 
what I think the American people thought was happening and certainly 
the opposite of what they were demanding since 2008. It is exactly the 
opposite of what our financial system needs in order to operate more 
safely and to avoid taxpayer bailouts such as we saw following 2008.
  This is just another reason the U.S. economy continues to slog along, 
with the weakest recovery and the longest period of high unemployment 
since the Great Depression of the 1930s. Nearly 38 percent of America's 
unemployed have been jobless for more than 6 months. Let me say that 
again. Nearly 38 percent of Americans unemployed have been jobless for 
more than 6 months.
  Those are tragic statistics because we all know that the longer 
someone is unemployed, the harder it is for them to get back into a job 
because they lose skills, they become less competitive in the labor 
markets.
  The only reason unemployment rates actually fell was not because the 
economy was getting strong enough to create new jobs, but it was 
because fewer and fewer people actually were looking for work. More and 
more people actually gave up. All one has to do is go on the Internet 
and look at the Bureau of Labor Statistics under something called the 
labor participation rate, and we can see that the percentage of people 
actually looking for work has declined to the lowest point in about 30 
years or so.
  A recent study concludes that America is still 8.3 million jobs away 
from a full economic recovery--8.3 million Americans out of work who 
need to be back at work in order for us to get back on track.
  Is it any wonder that a Pew Research Center poll indicated that 52 
percent of people feel as though our job situation has hardly recovered 
at all since the great recession? Fifty-two percent think things have 
not gotten that much better.
  Nevertheless, there seems to be this divide, this gulf between 
perception in Washington among the political elites and on Main Street. 
For example, in an ABC News broadcast this past weekend, President 
Obama said that since he took office, America has witnessed ``progress 
across the board.'' I guess ``progress'' is a relative term.
  But since the official end of the recession in June 2008, median 
household income has declined by nearly $2,500. Average working 
families have $2,500 less to spend, so, of course, they do not feel as 
though we have had a recovery. They do not feel as though things have 
gotten better across the board, such as the President. Of course, that 
is before we even account for inflation. When we adjust the numbers to 
reflect the increase in consumer prices, the drop in median household 
income has been significantly larger than the $2,500 I just mentioned.

[[Page S6550]]

  The President says he is concerned about income inequality, about the 
difference between the wealthy and average working families and the 
poor. But the New York Times has reported that the trend of rising 
income inequality ``appears to have accelerated during [this 
President's] administration.'' It has gotten worse. Indeed, according 
to one measure of the income gap, inequality has increased about four 
times faster under President Obama than it did under President George 
W. Bush.
  Of course, America's income gap is mirrored by a yawning unemployment 
gap. Earlier this week, the Associated Press reported that ``the gap in 
employment rates between America's highest- and lowest-income families 
has stretched to its widest levels since officials began tracking the 
data a decade ago.''
  Again, this is happening under a President who said rising income 
inequality is morally wrong, a President who believes rising income 
inequality is holding America's economic recovery back.
  But the problem is not in his diagnosis, it is in his proposed 
remedies, his policies. His proposed remedies for growing inequality 
include more taxes, more spending by the Federal Government, more debt, 
and more regulations. It is symptomatic of the idea that Washington 
knows best. It does not, and we know because of the failed experiments 
over the last 5 years. Of course, if such policies were truly part of 
the solution, inequality would be declining. In other words, if the 
President's proposed solutions of more regulations, more taxes, and 
more Federal spending would work, we would be well on our way to an 
economic recovery, unemployment would be back to historic norms, and 
the economy would be growing. But it is not.
  Then there is the cost of health insurance. This is another one of 
the burdens on particularly small businesses and individuals which are 
keeping the economy stagnant.
  Back in 2008 the President famously promised that premiums for a 
family of four would decrease by about $2,500 if we would just pass his 
signature health care legislation, now known as ObamaCare, the 
Affordable Care Act, but instead the cost has gone up by nearly $2,400 
between 2009 and 2012.
  So we have median household income going down about $2,500, but 
actually the cost of health care, rather than going down, is going up 
by about the same amount. For that matter, the cost problem will only 
get worse once ObamaCare is fully implemented, as we are beginning to 
see as we see what the premiums are like in the individual market for 
people who buy their health care in the exchanges.
  The National Journal found that ``for the vast majority of 
Americans,'' premiums will be higher under ObamaCare. That is pretty 
easy to understand because of the way it has been wired. For example, 
someone has said, it is as though, because of the guaranteed issue 
aspect of ObamaCare, someone can wait until they are sick to buy health 
insurance and the insurance company has to sell it to them. So somebody 
said: That is akin to waiting until your house is on fire before you 
actually buy fire insurance. That is not insurance anymore, and that 
runs up the cost for everybody, as does a phenomenon such as age 
banning, where young people my daughters' age, in their early thirties, 
are going to have to bear the cost of health care for older Americans 
because they cannot charge older Americans any more than three times 
more than what they charge young, healthy people such as my daughters, 
even though their consumption of health care, we know, will not be 
anywhere near that ratio.
  As projected, the President's health care law will cause individual 
insurance premiums to skyrocket all across America, including Texas.
  Policies such as ObamaCare and Dodd-Frank, as I keep hearing from my 
community bankers, have increased the cost of doing business and 
generated enormous uncertainty about the future. I was talking to a 
businessman in Houston just 2 days ago. He said: The thing that is 
holding America back, our economy back, is uncertainty. People don't 
know what their taxes are going to be like, what the regulatory 
environment is going to be like. They don't know about our failure to 
deal with our national debt, now about $17 trillion. As the Fed begins 
to wind down its purchases of our own debt, interest rates start to go 
back up. What is that going to mean?
  It is going to mean we have to pay China and other creditors more 
money for the money they have loaned to us because of that $17 trillion 
debt, and it will simply crowd out our ability to fund other priorities 
such as national security, among others.
  The story of our sluggish recovery is ultimately a story of wasted 
human capital, again another tragedy. It is a story of mothers and 
fathers who cannot find full-time jobs and who are having trouble 
supporting their families. It is a story of college graduates who are 
unemployed, living at home, and drowning in student loan debt.
  As economists Keith Hennessey and Ed Lazear have written, ``The 
severe recession was bad enough, but the slow recovery is doing just as 
much damage to living standards since it is sustained over a longer 
time frame.''
  I would say to our President: If you care about reducing income 
inequality, if you care about saving the American dream, let's try 
something new. You know, the definition of insanity, one pundit said, 
was doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different 
outcome. So let's try something new, because we know the status quo has 
not worked. Instead of piling more burdens on job creators and making 
it harder for Americans to secure full-time employment, let's embrace 
policies that make it easier to create jobs and easier to get full-time 
work. Let's reform our Tax Code so it is progrowth, make it simpler, 
make it fairer, make it more logical, make it more conducive to that 
strong economic growth that is going to create jobs.
  Let's go back to the drawing board on health care and embrace 
sensible patient-centered reforms that will reduce costs and increase 
accessibility. We are never going to change our economic trajectory 
until we change our economic policies. Again, doing the same thing over 
and over again is not going to change the outcome. We need to try 
something new.
  The policies of the past 4\1/2\ years have given us an economy that 
is failing to deliver the kind of job creation and income gains 
Americans want and they need. As the President's own Treasury Secretary 
said this week, ``Too many Americans cannot find work, growth is not 
fast enough, and the very definition of what it means to be middle 
class is being undercut by trends in our economy that must be 
addressed.''
  I could not agree with him more. So isn't it time to try something 
different?
  I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Wyoming.

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