[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 155 (2009), Part 13]
[House]
[Pages 17662-17663]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                       STIMULUS BILL NOT WORKING

  (Mr. PENCE asked and was given permission to address the House for 1 
minute and to revise and extend his remarks.)
  Mr. PENCE. Will Rogers once said: The opposite of progress is 
Congress. Watching the debate on the floor today, I start to get a 
better idea about what he meant.
  At a time when our country is facing the worst recession in a quarter 
of a century, the Democrat majority here in Congress just got done 
passing a national energy tax that will raise the cost of utilities for 
every American household. And now they're down here on the floor 
talking about raising taxes for a government takeover of health 
insurance. All the while, millions of

[[Page 17663]]

Americans are out of work, hundreds of thousands of Americans continue 
to lose their jobs every month.
  Now, when this trillion-dollar stimulus bill was passed in February, 
we were told that it would create jobs immediately. It would hold 
unemployment below 8 percent. Well, unemployment is now 9.5 percent. 
It's the worst in 26 years.
  Almost 2 million people have lost their jobs since the so-called 
stimulus bill passed. And yet, the President just said, It's done its 
job. This weekend, he said the stimulus was ``working exactly as we 
anticipated.''
  With all due respect to the President of the United States and my 
Democrat colleagues, the stimulus bill is not working. And the American 
people know it. The American people deserve a recovery plan that will 
create real jobs and real recovery--and that's fiscal discipline in 
Washington, D.C., and tax relief for working families, small 
businesses, and family farms.

                          ____________________