[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 155 (2009), Part 20]
[House]
[Page 27134]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                           A GRIM ACCOUNTING

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the 
gentleman from California (Mr. McClintock) is recognized for 5 minutes.
  Mr. McCLINTOCK. Mr. Speaker, this week, the House passed H.R. 3548, 
which extends unemployment benefits in States with high unemployment 
rates, and it continues and expands the popular tax credit to encourage 
home buyers into the market.
  Mr. Speaker, I know these are very popular programs, but I believe 
that they are taking us in exactly the wrong direction. By increasing 
taxes to finance these programs, the government is placing increasing 
burdens on the economy which I believe are actually making the 
recession worse.
  I am concerned that, by raising taxes, we end up making more people 
unemployed, and I believe that, by paying people to buy homes, we are 
creating yet another housing bubble that will continue to drain the 
resources of our Nation until it bursts. Let me walk through both of 
those concerns.
  Under this bill, unemployed workers in States like my home State of 
California can draw up to 99 weeks of unemployment benefits--almost 2 
full years. Now, I realize the quiet panic that haunts every waking and 
sleeping moment of unemployed families as they wonder from one day to 
the next how they're going to get by. I've known that feeling myself.
  Yet there is a reason that California suffers one of the highest 
unemployment rates in the Nation. It has one of the highest tax and 
regulatory burdens in the Nation. Business and investment and the jobs 
that they create flee such hostile environments and seek out less 
expensive and less burdensome places. One needs only to watch the 
domestic migration within our own Nation from high-tax, high-regulated 
States to low-tax, low-regulated States to see this happening right now 
before our very eyes.
  According to the Congressional Budget Office, this bill imposes a net 
tax increase of $2.5 billion on our economy at a time when we can least 
afford it. It contributes to a self-defeating paradox: higher 
unemployment in order to help the unemployed. Yet we all know that the 
only antidote to unemployment is a genuine job.
  It's true. Family breadwinners can see the additional unemployment 
checks in their hands, and they feel the immediate relief. That's why 
this bill is so popular. What they don't see are the jobs that could 
have ended their agony but that have now disappeared in order to pay 
the higher taxes to support those unemployment checks. It is a vicious, 
downward spiral that the supporters of this bill have already tacitly 
acknowledged when they admitted that they will have to return before 
the end of the year to extend the program yet again.
  Simply stated, we cannot help the unemployed by creating more of 
them, yet that's exactly what programs like this are doing. We can see 
it in the steadily increasing unemployment figures despite record 
amounts of government spending and borrowing.
  The second part of this bill is equally popular, and it is equally 
delusional. It extends and expands tax credits for home buyers to buy 
homes that they otherwise could not afford. Have we learned nothing 
from the past year of economic hardship? We all know that the catalyst 
for the current recession was a housing bubble that was created by 
government policies that encouraged lenders to make loans and borrowers 
to take loans to buy homes that everybody knew they couldn't afford.
  What's our response now? We are going right back into that same 
market and are creating another bubble by, once again, encouraging home 
buyers to purchase homes that they otherwise couldn't afford. We're 
doing this just weeks after watching how the Cash for Clunkers program 
created the same artificial bubble in the automobile market, a bubble 
that came crashing down as soon as that program ended.
  A society in which the government extracts billions of dollars from 
its economy in order to pay people to buy stuff they can't afford has a 
rendezvous with a grim accounting, and the longer these programs 
continue, the grimmer that accounting will be.

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