[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 154 (2008), Part 1]
[Senate]
[Pages 1023-1026]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                           ECONOMIC STIMULUS

  Mr. BROWN. Last night we heard a vision that the President of the 
United States was standing in the Chamber of the House of 
Representatives speaking to all of us. He talked about how best to 
proceed during times of clear economic crisis, job loss, health care, 
energy costs soaring, threats to our domestic safety nets, and a war in 
Iraq with no end in sight.
  When news media people asked me what I thought about the speech, one 
of the things I said was I wished the President could have sat in on 
some of the meetings that I had as I traveled Ohio in the last year, my 
State. I had about 80 roundtable meetings of 15, 20, 25 people in a 
community where for an hour and a half I would ask them questions about 
their communities, about their problems. In every corner of the State, 
I heard from veterans and first responders, from farmers, from people 
running small businesses, from teachers, from students, from community 
leaders, from mothers and fathers. I wish the President had been able 
to hear some of this because people clearly want to hear their 
Government is finally committed to change and to fighting for the 
middle class.
  They want to hear that the economic policies of the last 7 years, 
policies that have failed them, are a thing of the past and we have a 
new direction. They want to hear about a plan to finally bring back 
good-paying jobs, lower our health care and energy coasts, secure our 
safety nets, and end the war in Iraq.
  For Ohioans, the future is about change. Let's say you are driving 
down the road. You notice that the signs, mile markers, exit signs, 
billboards as huge as houses are telling you that you are going in the 
wrong direction: Signs saying wages stagnating, signs saying U.S. jobs 
being shipped overseas, a housing crisis deepening, health care costs 
soaring, increased dependance on foreign oil, product safety unsure, no 
end to the war in Iraq. The longer you stay on the road, the worse 
things get.
  So you hit the gas pedal and head further down that road. If you 
drive down the road, the wrong road, long enough, does it become the 
right one? Of course not. You do not proudly log more miles on the 
wrong road. You change direction.
  If there is one thing you can say about the administration and its 
supporters in Congress it is that they are consistent. They 
consistently answer to the wealthiest Americans and to the largest 
corporations and pay lipservice to the rest of the population.
  Think about last night. The President said 116 million people--if we 
extend the tax cuts, 116 million people will get tax cuts averaging 
$1,800 a person.
  Does the President really say--does that really say what the tax cuts 
mean? It is a very small number of people getting huge tax cuts, and 
tens and tens and tens of millions of Americans are getting almost 
nothing.
  Does he say it that way? Does he tell the American people that is 
what it is? Of course not. He says the average American will average 
$1,800 from the tax cuts. Simply, that is very misleading. We have seen 
that on tax policy over and over and over in this administration.
  Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, I wonder if the Senator would yield for a 
question.
  Mr. BROWN. I will yield to the Senator.
  Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, I was going to inquire of the Senator from

[[Page 1024]]

Ohio if he found, as I did last night, it very unusual to have the 
entire State of the Union Address talking about the economic 
difficulties in our country and the need for a stimulus plan and so on 
without ever mentioning the real root causes at all of what has put us 
in this position: For example, a $700 billion, going to an $800 
billion-a-year trade deficit; a fiscal policy budget deficit that is 
going to require us to borrow $600 billion in this fiscal year, just 
that combination is $1.3 trillion in red ink, 10 percent of our GDP in 
1 year.
  You know, the fact is, everyone in the world, including American 
citizens, look at that and understand that is so far off the track 
there is no way that works.
  I support a stimulus package. I think it is fine to do for 
psychological purposes. But I am wondering if the Senator from Ohio 
wonders, as I do, why the President does not even seem to recognize the 
underlying causes of the economic difficulty in our country.
  Mr. BROWN. I appreciate the comments from the Senator from North 
Dakota, who understands probably better than anybody in this body what 
this trade deficit means, what this trade policy means. And what is 
amazing is the President does not look at the $800 billion trade 
deficit.
  When I came to the Congress in 1992, it was $38 billion. Now it is 
over $800 billion.
  The President's father once said $1 billion in trade deficits 
translates into the loss of 13,000 jobs. Now it is $800 billion, and 
the President did not address that. But what he did say is: Let's do 
more of this. He said: We need a trade agreement with Columbia, we need 
a trade agreement with Panama, we need a trade agreement with South 
Korea. And it just makes me incredulous that the President cannot look 
at what has happened and say: Wait a second, let's do a timeout. Let's 
do no further trade agreements. Let's go back, as the Senator from 
North Dakota, Mr. Dorgan, has suggested, and let's have benchmarks. 
Let's look at what NAFTA did to our country, look at what CAFTA has 
done to our country, look at what trade with China has done to the 
middle class.
  The President totally missed that. At the same time, the President 
said: Let's do more tax cuts for the wealthiest 1 percent at the 
expense of the middle class and drive up these budget deficits. So we 
have trade deficits of $800 billion, plus we have budget deficits of 
about $1 billion a day. And that is fundamentally the biggest problem 
with our economy, as you suggest.
  Mr. DORGAN. I agree with that analysis. I sat in that Chamber last 
evening. A joint session is always a wonderful privilege, to hear the 
President give the State of the Union Address. I was thinking, everyone 
is sitting here in dark suits and pretty well dressed up for a big 
occasion. Not one person in that Chamber is going to have their job 
lost because it was shipped overseas someplace in search of cheap 
labor. Nobody in this Chamber, nobody in the Senate has ever lost their 
job because somebody decided to outsource it to China for 30 cents an 
hour labor.
  A lot of working people have to come home at the end of the day and 
say: Honey, I was given notice today. I lost my job because they found 
somebody halfway around the world who will do it for 20 cents an hour. 
They told me I can't compete with that. Our family can't live on that.
  Just talking about the trade piece of this, the President completely 
ignores that. There ought to be a summit meeting at this point, if you 
have $1.3 trillion of red ink in 1 year. They say the budget deficit is 
only $300 billion, $275 billion. It is not. Take a look at the budget 
policy and find out how much we are going to increase the debt in this 
year. The debt is going to increase by $600 billion on the budget side 
and $700 to $800 billion on the trade side. That is $1.3 trillion off 
the track in one single year, 10 percent of our economic output. The 
fact is, that is unsustainable and is going to run this country's 
economy into a ditch. If we are going fix it, we have to diagnose it. 
This President hasn't come close to even acknowledging the difficulty 
on those two issues, fiscal policy and trade policy, let alone the 
issue of the scandal of the subprime loan which is regulators falling 
asleep or unbelievable hedge fund speculation outside of the view of 
regulators because they don't want to be regulated.
  Would the Senator from Ohio agree that these are the underlying 
causes of concern about this economy?
  Mr. BROWN. Absolutely. I remember back in the early 1990s, we were 
concerned about the twin deficits, the trade deficit and the budget 
deficit. We had a budget deficit then of about $300 billion a year and 
a trade deficit, as the Presiding Officer knows--who joined me in 
voting against NAFTA a decade ago--of under $100 billion. We considered 
that a serious problem. Today, President Bush doesn't recognize that 
this trade deficit means anything. To the contrary, he says, it seems 
to be working. Let's do more of it.
  Again, I go back to what his father said, that a billion dollars in 
trade deficit translates into 13,000 lost jobs. You can see how it 
does. Because a billion dollars in trade deficit means we are buying a 
billion dollars, we are importing a billion dollars more than we are 
selling, and that means we are manufacturing less because we are not 
making it ourselves. If we manufacture less, it means thousands of 
Ohioans or North Dakotans or New Jerseyans are finding they are not 
working at $12 or $15 or $20 an hour. If those plants lay off workers, 
communities get less tax dollars, police, firemen and teachers are laid 
off. It undercuts the economic vitality of the community and the public 
safety. It undercuts the ability of our schools to educate our 
children. It is clearly a downward spiral that is only accelerated when 
we pass a trade agreement with Colombia and with Peru and Panama and 
another trade agreement with South Korea.
  Mr. DORGAN. The fact is, it is not something I enjoy doing, to talk 
about the difficulties. I would like to talk about the opportunities 
for this country. We will not get to the opportunities until we decide 
we are going to start taking care of some things here at home.
  This President, in this past fiscal year, the one we are in right 
now, sent us a request for $196 billion of emergency money and said: I 
want it put on top of the debt. Don't pay for it. Add it to the debt. 
That is $16 billion a month, $4 billion a week for Iraq and 
Afghanistan, to replenish the military accounts for that purpose. Now 
we are told he is going to send another $70 billion on top of that. 
That takes us to close to three-quarters of a trillion that will have 
been spent, none of it paid for, all of it requested by this President 
as an emergency so it didn't have to be paid for. You look at that and 
you say to yourself: We have so much that needs doing, including not 
just on the budget side getting our act together but on the trade side, 
standing up for our country's interests, demanding fair trade, and, on 
the investment side, investing in infrastructure, all these things.
  Last night it was almost as if the President was oblivious to the 
fundamental causes of the economic difficulty. This is a great economic 
engine we have, but the fact is, it needs some work. It doesn't need 
somebody to polish it with a rag and hum a nice tune. It needs real 
work to get this engine going again. The American people are 
innovative, great workers. It is an inspired country in which we live. 
That is why we have progressed the way we have over 200 years. But the 
American people need something to work with. We need to invest in 
working people. We need to have faith in working people. Instead what 
we have done is pulled the rug out from under working families.
  I have used so many examples in the Senate, and my friend from Ohio 
knows all of them because a good number of them come from the State of 
Ohio, Huffy bicycles and Etch A Sketch and so many examples, all those 
jobs now in China that used to be in Ohio.
  One of my favorites is to talk about Fig Newton cookies. The National 
Biscuit Company, NABISCO, took Fig Newton cookies from New Jersey to 
Mexico. Why? They could find somebody who would shovel fig paste 
apparently at a much lower cost than it cost

[[Page 1025]]

to pay somebody to shovel fig paste in New Jersey. If you want to buy 
some Mexican food, buy Fig Newton cookies, made in Mexico, still called 
the National Biscuit Company, except it isn't so national anymore. Now 
they are made in Mexico.
  That is one example of a hundred, a thousand, a million we could give 
and have. It is the question of whether this country is going to stand 
up for its workers and whether we are going to have the courage not 
just to stand up for workers in fair trade agreements but whether we 
are also going to put on track fiscal policy, trade policy, regulatory 
authority in a way that gives people confidence about the future of 
this economy and jobs and opportunity.
  Mr. BROWN. When I hear Senator Dorgan talk about this, I think about 
20 years from now, 15 years from now. We are going to look back on this 
time, and we will think: What were they thinking when they changed the 
laws to allow so many cheap imports from China, made by workers in 
unsafe conditions, sending products back, toxic toys to our children's 
bedrooms and contaminated food into our kitchens and pantries? We are 
going to look back 20 years from now and think: Why did we dismantle 
our industrial base, jeopardizing our national security, the security 
of our family farms in North Dakota and Ohio and small businesses and 
manufacturers in New Jersey and all over the country? We are going to 
look back and think: Why did we let corporations lobby this Congress so 
that they changed the rules so that it made sense for these companies, 
in terms of their bottom line, in terms of their profits, to go to 
China instead of manufacturing in Galion or Toledo or Youngstown, OH?
  Imagine instead if we as a nation decided we were going to have a 
Marshall plan or go to the Moon kind of plan on alternative energy, 
that we changed our trade law and our tax law and we began through 
biomass, through production of wind turbines and solar panels. Imagine 
if we set out to remake our energy policy and our country's industrial 
base by changing trade law, by changing tax law. We clearly still do 
the best R&D in the world on all kinds of scientific research and 
medical research. But so often we do the R&D here, which is good for 
the economy and good for creating jobs, but then most of the production 
is shipped offshore. So what good is that for our country, when we 
develop the research, we do the research and development and then send 
it offshore?
  The Senator mentioned the Ohio Art Company. That sort of tells the 
story. It is a company in northwest Ohio right in the corner where 
Indiana and Ohio intersect with Michigan. They make something that most 
of us knew as children called Etch A Sketch. About 7 or 8 years ago--I 
was in Bryan a couple months ago talking to an executive of Ohio Art 
Company. Seven or eight years ago a major U.S. retailer went to them 
and said: We want to sell your product in our stores for less money, 
for under $10. The only option that Ohio Art Company had was to stop 
most of its production in Ohio and move its production overseas. Every 
job that was moved to China meant less money for the Bryan Police 
Department, less money for the Williams County government, less money 
for public schools, less money paid into Medicare, less money paid into 
Social Security. It made us poor as a nation. At the same time, those 
products moved to China. But it lifted the living standards there 
because wages are so low. The Chinese wink and nod at best at any kind 
of environmental rules or worker safety rules. We have done little to 
lift up.
  Senator Dorgan and I want more trade but a different set of rules. 
Instead of lifting workers up so Mexican workers would be buying 
American products and we would be buying Mexican products back and 
forth the way we should trade, and their living standards would go up, 
they would have good environmental and worker safety standards, their 
wages would rise. That is what happened with the 50 States in the 
United States. As companies moved around the United States to the 
South, eventually their wages went up and we began to enrich all 
sections of the country.
  We are not doing that with China. We are not doing that with our 
trade policy. That is why I was so disappointed that last night the 
President said: We want a new trade agreement with Colombia. We want 
one with South Korea. We want one with Panama. Instead of going in the 
right direction, we are changing our trade policy and moving in a 
different direction.
  Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, the Senator and I are working on a piece 
of legislation we intend to introduce that would establish benchmarks 
for trade agreements. We had a $1.5 billion trade surplus with Mexico. 
We did a trade agreement. Guess what. We turned that surplus into a 
huge deficit, a giant deficit, $60 billion to $70 billion a year. So we 
turned a surplus into a deficit, shipped a lot of U.S. jobs to Mexico. 
What we need is a trade agreement with benchmarks and accountability. 
Is this trade agreement meeting the objectives we developed for our 
country? After all, we are stewards of our country. We want our country 
to do well. Yes, we want to lift others. We want to it be a more 
prosperous world. But first we want this country to do well.
  Wouldn't it be the height of irony, an unbelievable perversion, if we 
passed a ``stimulus package,'' and we borrow the money from China to 
put money in the hands of American families who can take it to Wal-Mart 
and buy a Radio Flyer little red wagon made in China. We borrow the 
money from China, give to it an American consumer who goes to Wal-Mart 
to buy a Chinese wagon. I say Radio Flyer because that is one of those 
great American brands. Almost every child in this country has hooked a 
ride on a Radio Flyer, either theirs or their neighbor's. Do you know 
how Radio Flyer got its name? It was an immigrant who came to Chicago, 
IL, and decided to start trying to make some wagons. He made a few of 
them. Everybody liked them. He was a guy who came to our country and 
was so pleased with being able to come to our country. He liked two 
things. He loved airplanes and somehow he liked Marconi and the radio. 
So he decided he was going to put Radio Flyer on the side of the little 
red wagon, and it began. For 110 years, they built Radio Flyer little 
red wagons in America, the dream of this immigrant innovator. They 
don't make them here anymore. They are all made in China. They closed 
their doors, went in search of cheap labor.
  It is interesting that when we talk about this, some will listen and 
say: The guy from Ohio, the fellow from North Dakota, they don't get 
it. They are a bunch of xenophobic isolationist stooges who can't see 
over the horizon. It is a global economy. Get over it.
  It is a global economy. But the rules have not kept pace with 
galloping globalization. The result is pushing down standards in the 
United States, moving jobs from the United States overseas, a 
hemorrhaging trade deficit that is dangerous for our country's 
interests, $2 billion a day every day that we import more than we 
export. The largest export from the United States by volume is 
wastepaper to Asia. Think of that.
  My point is simple. I appreciate the work the Senator from Ohio and 
others have done on this issue. We have to put this country on track. I 
am for trade and plenty of it. But I demand and insist that we stand up 
for this country's interests and demand fair trade. We have to bring 
this trade deficit down. That is putting dramatic amounts of money in 
the hands of the Chinese and Japanese and others. Don't be surprised 
when you open the paper to find out what they have purchased next, one 
of our major investment banking companies, you name it.
  We to have fix this. I know the Senator from Ohio came here with a 
statement and I interrupted him, but what I wanted to do was to say, I 
was very surprised last night to sit in the State of the Union Address 
and hear talk about a stimulus and hear talk about the economy and not 
even hear one whisper about the real vulnerabilities of this economy--a 
trade deficit out of control, reckless fiscal policy, combined with 
adding $1.3 trillion in debt,

[[Page 1026]]

10 percent of the GDP in 1 year, and then regulators asleep and 
apparently applauded for being asleep, while we have unregulated hedge 
funds, leveraged transactions, $43 trillion of notional value, 
something most people can't understand, notional value, credit default 
swaps. Sounds like a foreign language. There is $43 trillion of 
notional value out there in credit default swaps. There is a totally 
unregulated hedge fund industry with derivatives.
  There are a lot of things we need to care about and we need to fix. 
The Senator from Ohio is absolutely right in talking about it on the 
floor of the Senate tonight. I deeply appreciate his willingness to let 
me interrupt him for a couple minutes because these are very important 
issues for our country.
  Mr. BROWN. Mr. President, I thank the Senator from North Dakota. He 
told the story about the immigrant who settled in Chicago. That may 
have been a story from a different era, but we still in so many ways 
are a nation of tinkerers and inventors, entrepreneurs and scientists--
a nation that still leads the world in brain power in terms of figuring 
out new products, new ways of doing things, new services. The problem 
is, there has been a disconnect between that and production and job 
growth and job creation.
  That is why the President's speech last night, to me, was so 
disappointing, that he has asked for more tax cuts for the wealthiest 
Americans, tax cuts that, frankly--usually, these tax cuts to the 
wealthiest Americans are at the expense of the middle class. He has 
asked for more trade agreements while our trade deficit explodes year 
after year after year.
  As Senator Dorgan suggested, we know what we need to do as a nation. 
We know what we need to do with tax policy to serve the middle class. 
We know what we need to do with trade policy to serve the middle class.
  Even though the President wants to stay the course, wants to continue 
the same direction, I think there is change afoot in this country. 
People want change. People want to strengthen again the middle class 
and strengthen our communities in New Jersey and Rhode Island--Senator 
Whitehouse is in the Chamber, too--and in my State of Ohio, from Lima 
to Zanesville and from Dayton to Warren.
  I thank you, Mr. President, for your time and again exhort Americans 
to look down the road for a new trade policy, a new tax policy that 
helps to build the middle class.

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