[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 151 (2005), Part 13]
[House]
[Pages 17656-17661]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                         STATE OF U.S. ECONOMY

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of 
January 4, 2005, the gentlewoman from New York (Mrs. Maloney) is 
recognized for 30 minutes as the designee of the minority leader.
  Mrs. MALONEY. Mr. Speaker, there has been a great deal of happy talk 
lately from the Bush administration and its supporters about the state 
of the American economy. To hear them tell it, you would think that 
some kind of supply-side miracle has taken place in the past few months 
and that the economy is now performing so well that jobs are plentiful, 
workers are well paid, that the budget deficit is being slashed in 
half, and that the trade deficit, which happens to be the largest in 
history, is nothing to worry about.

                              {time}  2300

  Of course nothing could be further from the truth, and all we have to 
do is go out and talk to our constituents to know that. Tonight my 
colleagues and I want to set the record straight on the economic 
policies of the Bush administration.
  We want to look at the real record of job creation, the continued 
presence of unemployment, the failure of wages to keep up with 
inflation, and the widening disparity between the haves and the have-
nots which is tremendously troubling. We will document how ordinary 
workers have been shortchanged in this economy, which has gone through 
the most protracted job slump since the Great Depression.
  This chart summarizes the point well. The Bush administration has the 
worst job creation record of any administration back to Herbert Hoover. 
This chart shows the average rate of job creation by this 
administration. For most of his term, President Bush was the only 
President since President Hoover to actually lose jobs. Now he is at 
least in positive territory, but with a very anemic job growth of just 
0.2 percent per year. Compare that with the 2.4 percent annual job 
growth under President Clinton, which is more than 10 times greater. 
Compare this from the Clinton administration back to the Hoover 
administration.
  The Bush administration and its supporters will not take 
responsibility for the failure of their policies. Instead they keep 
saying the same thing over and over again: tax cuts. But the Bush 
administration's economic program has not created an economy that works 
for America's ordinary citizens, and they have mortgaged our future.
  Responsible analysts have shown that the Bush tax cuts were poorly 
designed for generating jobs and putting people back to work in the 
wake of the 2001 recession. They had very low ``bang for the buck'' in 
terms of job stimulus in the short run, but they were so massive, they 
created a legacy of large budget deficits and mounting debt that will 
be a drag on the economy in the long run.
  President Bush has squandered the hard-won fiscal discipline achieved 
in the 1990s. He inherited a 10-year budget surplus of $5.6 trillion 
and turned it into a stream of deficits. This chart shows what has 
happened so far. This chart shows that when President Bush took office, 
the Congressional Budget Office was projecting that the budget surplus 
of $236 billion in 2000 would grow to over $433 billion in 2005. In 
fact, the latest projection from the administration is that the budget 
will have a deficit of $333 billion this year.
  In their mid-session review, the administration proclaimed this a 
major improvement because they had projected an even larger deficit in 
their January budget. But $333 billion is still the third largest 
deficit in the history of our country and a far cry from the $435 
billion surplus that was being projected at the start of the Bush 
administration.

[[Page 17657]]

  The administration is portraying a future of declining deficits over 
the next few years, but that is not what responsible analysts say. They 
observe instead that special factors were probably the reason for the 
jump in revenue this year, and they point out how much is left out of 
the budget projections, including the ongoing cost of the war in Iraq 
and Afghanistan and a fix for the alternative minimum tax.
  We have become a Nation of debtors, relying on the rest of the world 
to finance our budget deficits and the rest of our excessive spending.
  Last year we had to finance a record current account deficit of $668 
billion, and that deficit was even larger at an annual rate in the 
first quarter reaching 6.4 percent of our gross national product.
  Foreign governments are holding large quantities of our public debt, 
putting us at risk of a major international financial crisis if they 
should decide that the benefits of holding dollars are no longer worth 
the risk.
  Mr. Speaker, our future prosperity depends on increasing our national 
savings and making wise investments. It depends on being ready for the 
retirement of the baby boom generation and the pressure we know that 
will be put on the budget. But how is the Bush administration preparing 
us for this future? With more deficits and more debt. They want to make 
the tax cuts that have gotten us into part of this mess permanent, and 
they have a plan for privatizing Social Security that would cut 
benefits substantially and add even more to our debt. We need a better 
plan.
  Mr. Speaker, in the remainder of our time, we will look more closely 
at the realities of this economy and the failures of the current 
economic policies, including the weak labor market that continues to be 
a major characteristic of the Bush administration economy.
  Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentlewoman from California (Ms. Loretta 
Sanchez), an economist by training.
  Ms. LORETTA SANCHEZ of California. Mr. Speaker, I thank the 
gentlewoman from New York (Mrs. Maloney) for putting together this 
Special Order.
  I think the chart that was just up is a very important chart to talk 
about. A lot of people ask me what is the most important thing you are 
worried about when you go to sleep at night. They know that I sit on 
the Committee on Armed Services and the Committee on Homeland Security. 
I tell them the problem is the debt and the deficits that we are 
creating in Washington, D.C. because they will come back to haunt each 
and every family in this United States.
  The chart there shows that when President Bush took office we were 
running a surplus, a surplus in the annual budget that we had, in other 
words, our annual spending plan. President Clinton had structured our 
taxes in such a way that he brought down the deficit from earlier 
years, and we were in a surplus. We were collecting more taxes than we 
were spending in a year, which allowed us to take those additional 
taxes and bring down the debt, the actual debt that this country 
carried.
  But what happened when President Bush came into office? He began to 
change that around because spending went up and we collected fewer 
taxes. We have given three large packages of tax cuts in the time that 
President Bush has been in office. His own controller has said that the 
reason we are running deficits, 70 percent of that is due to the fact 
that we just do not collect taxes. We do not collect enough taxes to 
pay for the programs that we are spending on an annual basis. So 70 
percent is due to the fact of those tax cuts. And those tax cuts, quite 
frankly, were not even very good; they are haphazard. They were used to 
buy votes and to make everybody think they had gotten a tax cut, but 
when you look at the tax packages and what has happened to us as a 
Nation in order to invest in our future, they were very poorly written 
and really do not do very much for our overall economy.
  But this deficit problem that we see on this chart, every year we are 
spending more than the moneys we are taking in in Washington, D.C. That 
is a problem because it adds to our debt. It is a problem because this 
just keeps growing and growing. Our debt is now over $7 trillion, and 
no one seems to mind here in Washington, D.C.
  We can give you tax cuts, we can spend $1.5 billion a week on a war 
in Iraq, and everything will be fine. When will that happen? Who will 
pay this debt? Well, sooner rather than later we will, my generation. 
And then when we cannot get to it, our children. After our children, 
our grandchildren. This is a major problem for us. The reason it is a 
problem is because unless you invest in your country for the future, 
you are going to become disadvantaged economically compared to the rest 
of the world. What do I mean by that?

                              {time}  2310

  Every week that we spend $1.5 billion in Iraq, we get nothing back in 
return, not one little dime on that investment. Meanwhile, we do not 
invest in education, we do not invest in a health care system, we do 
not invest in telecommunications, we cannot even pass a transportation 
bill in this town, we do not invest in new technology. When you do not 
invest in those things that make you more productive, sooner or later 
the Chinese and people from India and other places will be smarter, 
will be better equipped, and will be better able to take over the 
global economy.
  We are not investing in our children. We are not investing in 
ourselves. We are not retraining those people who have lost jobs. We 
are not helping them. We are not building the next new thing. We are 
not putting enough money into research because we are not taking in the 
money at the Federal level because of those tax cuts and because we are 
spending it on a war that is bringing nothing, no rate of return back 
to us.
  Mrs. MALONEY. I thank the gentlewoman for her comments.
  The great American jobs machine, which created over 20 million net 
new jobs under President Clinton, has been sputtering under President 
Bush. We are only just emerging from the most protracted job slump 
since the 1930s. Job creation is still sluggish. There continues to be 
substantial hidden unemployment. Wages are not keeping up with 
inflation, and there is a widening gulf between the haves and the have-
nots. The benefits of the economic recovery are showing up in the 
bottom line of companies, but not in the paychecks of American workers.
  Let us look at job creation. Last month there were 1.1 million more 
jobs on nonfarm payrolls than there were when President Bush took 
office in January of 2001. That is a paltry pace of job creation of 
just 20,000 jobs per month, 2/10 of 1 percent per year. That is the 
slowest pace of job creation under any President in over 70 years.
  Leaving aside job creation in the government sector, there were just 
161,000 more private sector jobs on U.S. payrolls last month than there 
were when President Bush took office. Within the private sector, 
manufacturing was particularly hard hit, with payrolls declining by 2.8 
million manufacturing jobs between 2001 and 2005. That is 2.8 million 
manufacturing jobs lost. The job slump associated with the recession 
that began in March 2001 has been the most protracted job slump since 
at least the end of World War II. We only have consistent data back 
that far. But, in fact, one would have to go back to the 1930s to find 
a worse job slump.
  As you can see in this chart, which focuses on the period after the 
end of World War II and shows the percentage change in employment after 
the start of a recession, job losses typically stop about a year after 
the onset of a recession, and employment begins to increase after about 
15 months. Within 2 years, employment surpasses its prerecession level 
and is expanding at a healthy pace.
  The most recent job slump has been dramatically different from that 
pattern and even more protracted than the so-called ``jobless 
recovery'' following the 1990-1991 recession. In the latest recession, 
which began in March 2001, job losses continued until May 2003, more 
than 2 years after the start of the recession. It was not until January 
2005, nearly 4 years later, that payroll employment finally climbed out 
of the hole created by the recession.

[[Page 17658]]

  The administration seems to think that it is evidence of a strong 
economic recovery that payroll employment has increased in every month 
since May 2003, but the pace of job creation over that period has been 
just 148,000 jobs per month. This is not the kind of job creation that 
you would expect in a strong economic recovery. In fact, it is only a 
little bit faster than the amount of job creation that is needed just 
to keep pace with normal growth in the labor force. We have to have 
between 125,000 to 150,000 new jobs created to just keep pace with the 
number of workers going into the labor force.
  Compare this experience with the 1990s the long economic expansion of 
the 1990s under President Clinton, it was common to see job gains of 
200,000 to 300,000 and, in some cases, 400,000 jobs per month. But 
months with job gains of 200,000 or more have been few and far between 
in this business cycle recovery. In May, 104,000 jobs were added and in 
June, 146,000 were added. These are not strong numbers because, as I 
said, we have to create between 125,000 and 150,000 new jobs just to 
keep pace with the new young workers moving into the job market.
  The expansion of the 1990s started slowly, but the jobless recovery 
following the 1990-1991 recession pales in comparison with the 
prolonged job slump we experienced after the 2001 recession. At this 
point in the recovery from the 1990-1991 recession, the economy had 
created over 4 million more jobs than we have seen in this recovery.
  Contrary to administration claims about the success of their policies 
in stimulating the economy and producing jobs, the facts tell a very 
different story about the Bush economic record on job creation. 
President Bush has the worst job creation record of any President since 
Herbert Hoover, and the economy under President Bush has struggled to 
escape from what has been by far the most prolonged job slump in the 
postwar period.
  I yield to the distinguished gentlewoman from California for further 
comments on this issue.
  Ms. LORETTA SANCHEZ of California. In fact, the Bush administration 
does try to paint things rosy, but we have to admit, you can feel it 
out there. You can feel it in towns. You know it. You can feel it 
within your family. During the Clinton years, everybody was making 
money. People had jobs. They had good jobs. We could see the economy 
expanding.
  As an economist, I will tell you that in business school we learned 
that there are ups and there are downs in the economy. They are called 
cycles. A typical business cycle lasts 12 to 14 months. With Clinton in 
office, it lasted 8 years. There was a reason. He took the hard steps 
to bring in the money to pay down the debt of the United States. People 
realized that financially our house was in order, and it was sound, and 
it was getting sounder. But with Bush, it is completely the opposite. 
That is one of the reasons why we have an anemic job creation going on.
  And other figures that they throw out, oh, unemployment is down. Let 
me tell you why unemployment would be down. After a while when you 
cannot find a job and you stop looking for a job because there is just 
not a job to be had in town, you come off the unemployment rolls, you 
are not considered unemployed anymore. You are just left. You are not 
in the figures. If you used to have a job that paid $25 an hour and had 
vacation time and had a pension, had health care paid, and you look and 
you look and you look for that job, but there is not a job to be had 
like that, and you are losing your home because you cannot pay your 
mortgage, and your kids need to be fed, and the only job you can get is 
to go down to McDonald's or something and get a minimum wage job, that 
happens, guess what, you are no longer unemployed. You are no longer 
unemployed.
  That is why when they say unemployment is going down, what they mean 
is people are underemployed. They are taking whatever job they can 
find, without pensions, without medical health care for their families. 
These are not the same jobs that they used to have, that we used to 
have. That is why we feel it. We feel it in America. We know. Our gut 
tells us things are not as good today as they were back then under the 
Democrats.

                              {time}  2320

  Mrs. MALONEY. Mr. Speaker, reclaiming my time, I thank my colleague 
for her comments. And one of the things that we have talked about that 
is very troubling to her and me besides the sluggish job growth and the 
hidden unemployment which she talked about, the third most disturbing 
development in the labor market is the widening disparity in earnings 
between the haves and the have-nots. It is fundamentally unfair, and 
democracy works better when there are not huge differences between our 
people. And as Chairman Greenspan has testified before Congress many 
times his concern about this widening distance, he has argued that it 
tears at the very social fabric of our Nation.
  And let me illustrate this with a few facts. The Bureau of Labor 
Statistics publishes data on the usual weekly earnings of full-time 
workers at different points on the wage ladder, and the chart shows 
that after adjusting for inflation, the usual weekly earnings at the 
exact middle of the distribution, real median usual weekly earnings, 
grew a paltry .2 percent per year from the fourth quarter of 2000 to 
the fourth quarter of 2004. That contrasts with the healthy 1.7 percent 
per year in the previous 4 years under President Clinton. In other 
words, the typical worker, whose earnings grew substantially faster 
than inflation in the late 1990s, has seen the earnings growth grind to 
a halt during the first 4 years of the Bush administration. The typical 
worker's earnings barely kept up with inflation.
  Worse than the overall stagnation in earnings is the widening 
disparity of earnings between high earners and low earners. If we look 
at those same data on usual weekly earnings of full-time workers, but 
instead of just looking at the middle, we look at the top and bottom as 
well, we see a disturbing pattern. In this chart, the blue bars show 
growth in the Clinton years. Yes. There was very good growth at the 
very top of the distribution, but there was likewise substantial growth 
in the middle and at the bottom as well.
  Compare that with the red bars showing the changes during the first 4 
years of the Bush administration. Real earnings at the bottom of the 
distribution, the 10th percentile, actually fell at an average annual 
rate of .3 percent per year in President Bush's first term, while those 
at the top, the 90th percentile, rose the most, almost 1 percent per 
year. In other words, the earnings that lagged farthest behind for 
inflation under President Bush were those people with the lowest 
earnings to begin with, while the earnings that grew the fastest, 
faster even than inflation, were those for people at the highest 
earnings to begin with.
  Finally, we come to the most disturbing trend of all. Things have 
been getting worse, not better, recently. During the period when the 
economy has finally started creating jobs, earnings have not been 
keeping up with inflation. In the past year, the only earnings that 
grew faster than inflation were those of people at the very top. 
Everyone else saw their cost of living grow faster than their earnings. 
And when we look at the facts of what is happening to most workers, it 
is hard to accept the President's argument that his tax cuts have 
worked to create better jobs and higher wages. That is not what we see 
when we look at this data.
  It is very troubling to the people, and it is very troubling, I would 
say, to the future of this country. It is not good for anyone, whether 
they are at the top or bottom, to have this wage gap growing and this 
disparity growing in our Nation. It is an extremely troubling trend.
  I yield to the gentlewoman from California.
  Ms. LINDA T. SANCHEZ of California. Mr. Speaker, I believe that this 
chart really tells a great picture. We look at these blue bars. We 
start on one side and we see people who make the least amount of money, 
and we go across the way to people who are very

[[Page 17659]]

rich and making lots of money. And the blue bars are during Clinton's 
time, and what they say about ``a high tide raises all boats,'' we can 
see that. See the blue. They all grow up.
  The red represents the Bush years. The one under, the negative 
growth, are the poor people, the people who make the least amount of 
money. And the big red bar on the other end, those are the people who 
make the most money on an annual basis. Look at that. So that is what 
Bush has done. He has rewarded those who make the most money by 
increasing what they are making, and those households that make less 
money actually are losing ground.
  But we do not have to look at a chart like that. We can see it every 
day. What is the biggest disparity that we have between those who have 
great jobs and those who have minimum-wage jobs? One of the major 
things is education, for example. Those who have a better education, 
they are probably, probably, going to make more money.
  So what has Bush done during these years? If we look at this budget 
that he proposed this year, cutting moneys to community colleges, a 
place where people who have lost their jobs can go and get new skills, 
get retrained, the money is not there anymore. Places for immigrants 
who want to learn English at night, for example, cannot get into those 
classes anymore. The Republicans are trying to cut the student loan 
program, a way in which people, people who do not have money, are able 
to go and finance an education. I know because I had student loans, 
Pell grants. Those are the out, and scholarships that we give to people 
who want to go get a higher education, he managed to raise it by only 
$100. Think about that. Tuition going crazy at colleges and 
universities. Anybody who has got teenage kids and is looking at this 
can see the trend: $100, that is the increase that the President says 
is going to fix everything.
  But the biggest disparity that has happened from this President is 
the fact that he put in a signature package called No Child Left Behind 
where he was going to look and measure how our kids were doing in our 
kindergarten through 12th-grade system, and if they were not doing 
well, if they were below the level where they should be, we were going 
to tutor them, get more people in to help them, take extra care of 
these kids so we can bring them up to the average where they were 
supposed to be. Guess what? Nine billion dollars short. In other words, 
he passed the program, but he forgot to fund it. And then people wonder 
what is wrong with education?
  We are not investing in one of the most important things we have to 
do, and that is to get our people up, to make them scientists and 
mathematicians. Go to the universities. Go to the universities and look 
and see who is teaching our math and science classes. They are 
foreigners. And then take a look at who is in the class. They, too, are 
foreigners. And it used to be that these foreigners stayed in the 
United States, and they became Americans, and they helped us to make 
the new, new things and the new industries and the new technology, but 
now our very own companies are getting them and sending them back to 
India or China or wherever they come from, and they are competing 
against us.
  Mrs. MALONEY. Mr. Speaker, reclaiming my time, the gentlewoman has 
pointed out a good fact there.
  But let us talk a little bit now about the American jobs machine, 
which brought the unemployment rate down under President Clinton.
  The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. Price of Georgia). Under the Speaker's 
announced policy, the gentlewoman is recognized for an additional 30 
minutes.
  Mrs. MALONEY. Mr. Speaker, the great American jobs machine, which 
brought the unemployment rate down under President Clinton from 7.5 
percent in 1992 to 4 percent in 2000, has been sputtering under 
President Bush. We are only just emerging from really the worst job 
slump since the 1903s, and job creation is still sluggish. There 
continues to be substantial hidden unemployment. Wages are not keeping 
up with inflation, and there is a widening disparity, as we talked 
about, in wages and incomes.

                              {time}  2330

  The benefits of the economic recovery are showing up in the bottom 
line of companies, but it is not showing up in the pocketbooks of 
American workers.
  Let us look at hidden unemployment. The good news is that the 
official unemployment rate has come down from its high of 6.3 percent 
in June of 2003 to 5 percent this last month. The very bad news is that 
a 5 percent unemployment rate is still nearly a percentage point higher 
than it was when President Bush took office.
  But, it is worse than that, because there is an additional hidden 
unemployment. People have not come back into the labor force the way 
they usually do in an economic recovery. Last month, 7.5 million people 
were officially counted as unemployed, 1.5 million more people than 
were unemployed when President Bush took office in January of 2001.
  To be counted as unemployed, a person must be actively looking for 
work, but in a weak labor market, there can be considerable hidden 
unemployment and underemployment if people who want to work have been 
discouraged from looking for work, and if people who want to work full-
time can only find a part-time job. In a typical business cycle 
recovery, people come back into the labor force as the prospects of 
finding a job improve but, this time, the labor force participation 
rate has remained depressed, compared with what it was in the start of 
the recession.
  Last month, 5.2 million people who were not in the labor force said 
they wanted a job. About 1.6 million of these are considered 
``marginally attached'' to the labor force because they have searched 
for work in the past year and are available for work, but they are not 
counted in the official unemployment rate, because they did not search 
for work recently enough. In addition to people who are not in the 
labor force but say they want a job, 4.5 million people were working 
part-time in June because of the weak economy. They wanted full-time 
work, but they were not able to find it.
  The official unemployment rate was 5 percent in June. The Bureau of 
Labor Statistics estimates that if marginally attached workers were 
included, the unemployment rate would have been 6 percent, and if those 
working part-time for economic reasons were also included, it would 
have been 9 percent. A new study by Katherine Bradbury of the Federal 
Reserve of Boston reaches similar conclusions: labor force 
participation has not rebounded in this recovery the way it usually 
does, and the unemployment rate would be 1 to 3 percentage points 
higher if those missing participants were in the labor force.
  Mr. Speaker, the President and his supporters seem to think that a 5 
percent unemployment rate shows the success of their economic policies 
in creating jobs, but the facts tell a very different story. Employers 
are not hiring as though they believe the economy is strong, and 
potential workers are staying out of the labor force. The unemployment 
rate is still almost a percentage point higher than it was when 
President Bush took office, and there is considerable hidden 
unemployment. Employers are not hiring as though they believe the 
economy is strong, and potential workers are staying out of the labor 
force.
  So these numbers are not strong, and I ask my colleague if she would 
like to elaborate.
  Ms. LORETTA SANCHEZ of California. Well, almost everywhere you look 
in the economy, if you really understand what is going on, the numbers 
are not strong; the numbers just are not strong. Again, one of the 
things we need to do as a country is to invest in our people and invest 
in our country, make ourselves economically strong, because other 
countries are doing it. China is investing. They are not spending $1.5 
billion a week in Iraq. They are investing in their people, they are 
building their water systems, their sewer systems, their transportation

[[Page 17660]]

systems, their telecommunications systems; they are making themselves 
stronger. That is what countries do in order to bring up their standard 
of living.
  Now, I have already told my colleagues that we are really not putting 
the money into education. Even the chairman of the Federal Reserve 
Board, Chairman Greenspan, said the other day in front of our economic 
committee, after everything he said and we had all kinds of questions, 
all kinds of things to say, and he kept coming back to the same thing: 
there is a problem in education in the United States, and if we do not 
fix education, nothing else matters. That is what he said to us, pretty 
much over and over: nothing else matters. It is productivity.
  So we are not investing in education, we have not been able to pass a 
transportation bill to put people to work in their own communities, 
building their transportation systems so they can be more productive, 
so they do not spend as much time in traffic, for example, and those 
are good-paying jobs. Those are good-paying jobs that spin off other 
jobs, but we are not doing it from here. Why? Because we are sending 
the money out. Meanwhile, we are talking about building schools in Iraq 
and building transportation systems in Iraq, and building water systems 
in Iraq, but we are really not doing it here in the United States. We 
are not putting the money where we need to have it put. And, let me 
also add that we have another major problem, and that is called the 
trade deficit. The trade deficit.
  Just earlier this year, when the tariffs came off of textiles with 
respect to China, our trade deficit went crazy against that country. 
And it will continue so until we figure out how to invest in ourselves, 
how to invest in our country, how to collect the taxes and pay down our 
debt, bring down the deficit every year, so that people will begin to 
believe us again, that we understand how to run a financially sound 
household here.
  I am sure that the gentleman from New York is probably going to talk 
a little bit about the statistics with respect to trade and what that 
is doing to us.
  Mrs. MALONEY. Mr. Speaker, I really want to point out that the 
President and his supporters are trying to make the case that the 
economy is thriving and that their policies are responsible. But when 
we look at the facts that we have pointed out tonight, we see instead 
that American workers are still waiting to see the benefits of the 
economic recovery in their paychecks, and that we have large and 
unsustainable budgets and trade deficits.
  In fact, this administration has set a number of records, only the 
problem is, they are the wrong records. They have raised the debt 
ceiling 3 times so that now, we have a staggering debt of over $7.6 
trillion. This is the largest debt in the history of our country, and 
that breaks down to each American's share being over $26,000. That is 
what we are giving to our children and our grandchildren.
  And, as was said earlier, the trade deficit is again another record, 
only the wrong kind of record; another record of over $619 billion, the 
largest in the history of this country, and growing. And, we have a 
staggering deficit of over $333 billion.
  I remember when I ran for office back in 1992, the country had a 
deficit of $250 billion, and everybody said it was the worst they have 
ever seen. If I had told them, ``vote for me, I am going to go to 
Congress, I am going to work with the democratic Congress to pay off 
that deficit, and in a number of years you are going to see a huge 
surplus,'' they would have said, well, she is a nice little girl, but 
she does not know what she is talking about.
  But that is exactly what we did. We came to Congress with President 
Clinton, we paid down that deficit, and he left office with a surplus, 
a huge surplus. That is what the Bush administration inherited. And 
what have they given us? They have given us a staggering deficit, a 
staggering trade deficit, and the largest debt in the history of our 
Nation. What kind of legacy is that?
  Mr. Speaker, I say to my colleagues that on top of this burden that 
they are putting on our children and our grandchildren, they now plan 
to privatize part of Social Security that would also add to the debt 
without increasing our national savings. And, according to Chairman 
Greenspan, this privatization that they proposed for Social Security 
would not do one inch of help to help the solvency of the Social 
Security plan. It does not help the solvency; it just adds to the 
staggering debt.

                              {time}  2340

  And on top of this, they proposed cuts to traditional Social Security 
benefits that would undermine the economic security of future retirees. 
And I say to my colleagues, this is not the legacy that I want to leave 
to my children or to my grandchildren. It is a burden that will have a 
huge impact on their quality of life.
  That concludes my remarks.
  Ms. LORETTA SANCHEZ of California. I will just say that the whole 
issue of Social Security, by the way, pension plans that many of our 
retirees are on or believe that they are going to be on in a few years, 
are really due to be lost under the Bush administration.
  Some of the policies that they have and some of the ideas that they 
have of really the security, the financial security, of people is 
really up for grabs with this administration with some of the ideas 
that they have, but that is another night. We can talk about what they 
plan to do to the American people on another night.
  I want to finish off by saying, you know, again, we feel it. You feel 
it. We feel the difference between what we experienced under President 
Clinton and what we are experiencing under President Bush.
  President Bush would have you believe it is because 9/11 happened, 
and because the terrorists are after us, and because we are now having 
to spend money in the war. And he is trying to tell you that that is 
why we have this malaise going on in our economy.
  I have got news for you. That has very little to do with it. It has 
to do with the priorities of where you put your money. The priorities 
should be in investing in America. The priorities should be in trade 
because we are in a global economy, but in fair trade, not free trade, 
in fair trade with countries who will not have slave labor competing 
against us, the American workers.
  It is about people who hold to promises, if we have trademarks, if we 
have copyrights, if we have intellectual property. If we spend the 
money to make a software system, it should not be pirated and copied 
the next day over in China and then back in our markets to compete 
against us. But other countries do that, and we sit here as an 
administration and they do nothing. They do nothing.
  So they have forgotten to fund education; they are cutting it back, 
in fact. We have not even begun to get into the whole idea of health 
care. If you are not a healthy country, you are not going to be a 
productive country. We have not talked about investing in technology 
and transportation and in telecommunication. Those are all issues that 
are important for us. But these issues of not understanding and not 
standing up to other countries who are mistreating us when we trade is 
another reason why this trade deficit is against us, and that in return 
hurts us economically and builds this debt and this deficit.
  But one of the biggest reasons why we have deficits and why we are 
adding to the debt is because again this President has told us that we 
can go to war, that we can do everything, that we should continue to 
spend, that we do not need to save as a country, and that somehow or 
another everything is going to work out, oh, and by the way, we do not 
have to pay taxes. That is his message. Well, we are smart people. 
Americans, we are smart people. We understand what is going on.
  The answer is we need to begin to change this, and we need to get our 
financial house in order. And I thank the gentlewoman for having taken 
the time tonight to discuss some of these issues.

[[Page 17661]]


  Mrs. MALONEY. Well, I thank the gentlewoman for her comments. And I 
would just like to conclude by noting that this Monday was President 
Clinton's birthday. And I authored a resolution congratulating him on 
his birthday, which emphasized his strong economic program for this 
country.
  Although many of my colleagues or some of my colleagues may not agree 
with all of his policies, the facts speak for themselves. He inherited 
a deficit; he left office with a surplus. And while he was putting our 
economic house in order, we balanced our budget, and we invested also 
in child care, in health care, in education and helped the people in 
our country.
  During the Clinton years there was a very important economic factor, 
that the distance between the haves and the have-nots came closer 
together. In other words, everyone prospered, which is good for the 
Nation. It is not good for only one segment to prosper and others to 
fall behind. That really could destroy the social fabric of this 
country. It is very disturbing to me.
  So I wish that we would return to really the financial policies that 
we had under President Clinton where we balanced our budget, we 
invested in our people, in education, and health care, and we had a 
surplus. Yet under this administration the surplus is gone, and we have 
a staggering debt, the largest in our history. This is not the legacy 
that I want to leave to my children.

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