[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 150 (2004), Part 13]
[Senate]
[Pages 17010-17011]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                              JOB CREATION

  Mr. DAYTON. Mr. President, I have the greatest respect for the 
majority leader, and I agree with him on many subjects, but earlier 
tonight he had some pretty harsh words for some of the economic 
statements that I and others of my colleagues have been making in 
recent weeks. He called them ``canards'' which is a nice sounding word 
but means they are false statements.
  I feel compelled to rise and present what I think is a better version 
of the facts which, as we can see, are very different. The majority 
leader, as I understood his argument, was saying the new jobs that are 
now being created in the economy are better paying on average than the 
average of other jobs that were in existence in the year 2003. But that 
misses the essential point, which is that most of those newly created 
jobs pay less and offer lower benefits than the over 2.5 million jobs 
lost during the first 2\1/2\ years of the Bush administration. Most of 
those jobs were good-paying manufacturing jobs, and most of them have 
not come back. Many of them have been transferred to other countries 
with lower wages and no standards. They are not coming back at all.
  Those are the jobs that the unemployed workers of America are now 
finding and that are paying on average thousands of dollars less than 
the jobs those workers held before the recession began in March of 
2001. They are among the millions of Americans whose incomes have 
fallen, who used to have jobs with health insurance but now don't.
  I quote from an editorial in today's New York Times in part which 
states:

       From three different vantage points . . . the same basic 
     picture emerges: While there has been an increase in job 
     creation over the past four months--an unusually belated and 
     anemic spurt by historical standards--the bulk of the 
     activity has been at the low end of the quality spectrum. The 
     Great American Job Machine is not even close to generating 
     the surge of the high-powered jobs that is

[[Page 17011]]

     typically the driving force behind greater incomes and 
     consumer demand.
       This puts households under enormous pressure. Desperate to 
     maintain lifestyles, they have turned to far riskier sources 
     of support. Reliance on tax cuts has led to record budget 
     deficits, and borrowing against homes has led to record 
     household debt. These trends are dangerous and unsustainable, 
     and they pose a serious risk to economic recovery.
       We hear repeatedly that the employment disconnect is all 
     about productivity--that America needs to hire fewer workers 
     because the ones already working are more efficient. This may 
     well be true, but there is a more compelling explanation: 
     global labor arbitrage. Under unrelenting pressure to cut 
     costs, American companies are now replacing high-wage workers 
     here with like-quality, low-wage workers abroad.
       It was only a matter of time before the globalization of 
     work affected the United States labor market. The character 
     and quality of American job creation is changing before our 
     very eyes. Which poses the most important question of all: 
     what are we going to do about it?

  That is a subject which both of our major party candidates for 
President this year need to address--what are we going to do about it?
  The response of President Bush and his economic apologists thus far 
is to deny even the reality. Fortunately, we have their own earlier 
predictions by which to measure today's economic facts.
  In May of 2003, the President's own Council of Economic Advisers 
stated that his what was then called jobs and growth plan of more 
deficit-driving tax cuts for the rich and the super-rich would result 
in the creation, they said, of 5.5 million new jobs by the end of this 
year. Congress passed the President's plan, and it took effect in July 
of 2003. The actual number of jobs created in the past 12 months is 
over 2.2 million fewer jobs than the President's Council of Economic 
Advisers forecast. In fact, the job creation in this country has failed 
to meet the President's forecasts in 10 of the last 12 months.
  Once again, the administration trots out their favorite apologist, 
Chairman Greenspan, whose salary now should be paid by the President's 
reelect committee rather than the American taxpayers, who preached 
fiscal responsibility for 8 years to President Clinton's administration 
and to the Congress at that time and was instrumental in creating a 
balanced Federal budget in the year 2000, after taking out the Social 
Security trust fund--the first time in 40 years that the budget of the 
Federal Government, the operating accounts were balanced. He then 
turned around and has acquiesced with every tax cut that has been 
passed and which has led to the deficits that now exceed over $500 
billion a year and which the nonpartisan Concord Coalition, chaired by 
former Republican Senator Rudman, has called the most reckless fiscal 
policy in this Nation's history.
  Mr. Greenspan, who acquiesced in those, now comes forward and says 
the tax cuts prevented a deeper recession. In part, he is probably 
correct that the child tax credit, which certainly passed here with 
overwhelming bipartisan support, and the 10-percent bracket had those 
benefits, but certainly nobody could say eliminating the estate tax in 
2010 was a force in either dampening the recession or speeding our 
recovery, nor did making the top tax brackets for the rich and the 
super-rich even lower, according to most economists, result in that 
kind of economic stimulus. In fact, the Federal Reserve's own 
econometric forecast states that public spending is a better multiplier 
for jobs and economic growth than the tax cuts.
  He has gone farther in the last day to say the reason we have lower 
paying jobs in America is now because American workers are not well 
enough educated. It is pretty hard to understand how the educational 
quality of the American workforce could change from what it was prior 
to the recession when employment had expanded at a robust pace for 
almost 8 years to where it is less than 3 years later. In fact, the 
reality is that many American workers are overeducated for the jobs 
that are available, as the New York Times editorial and other economic 
analyses have attested. We are not providing the jobs in this economy 
that people need with the talents they have. We are not providing the 
jobs people need to maintain the standards of living they enjoyed 
before. And we are not providing enough jobs for the unemployed and 
underemployed people of this country. That is the reality, not a 
canard.
  I thank the Chair, and I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Kentucky.

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