[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 157 (2011), Part 3]
[Senate]
[Pages 3649-3650]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                               JOB LOSSES

  Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, I do not intend to speak long. I know 
we are getting ready to wrap up. I will not interfere with that. But I 
did not want the day to end without a reminder of the concern that H.R. 
1 and the significant, serious cuts it imposes will produce 
significant, serious job losses. That is not something being 
manufactured on our side of the aisle. It comes from careful analysis 
from very neutral forums.
  Many people will have seen this graphic already. Chairman Bernanke of 
the Federal Reserve is one of the observers who has looked at the bill 
and said it will cut significant jobs. I believe his testimony was that 
it was not trivial, that it would be hundreds of thousands of jobs. 
Economist Mark Zandi has advised Republicans and Democrats. He is a 
neutral, independent economist. He has calculated that the GOP plan 
would cost 700,000 jobs. When we consider the good news that we have 
just heard of job growth in the past reporting period, which was, I 
believe, around 170,000 jobs--less than 200 anyway--the idea of wiping 
out 700,000 jobs acquires a real scale and a real significance.
  Finally, at the bottom is Goldman Sachs. Goldman Sachs is no great 
friend of the Democratic Party. It is a

[[Page 3650]]

group of financial advisers and investors who look at data as 
dispassionately as possible, because if they are wrong, they don't make 
money. Goldman Sachs has estimated that the spending cuts will hurt 
economic growth. My memory is, they estimated it would be 2 percentage 
points off of our economic growth. When we consider that our economic 
growth is under 3 percent right now, if we take two of the percents 
out, we are basically getting pretty close to flat-lining the American 
economy. So prudence dictates that we go about the necessary 
adjustments to get rid of our debt and our deficit in a way that does 
not snuff out the gradually emerging recovery.
  In my State of Rhode Island, we have just gone from 11.5 percent 
unemployment down to 11.3 percent. It is still pretty darn serious out 
there. While clearly things appear to have bottomed out and started to 
go in the right direction, nothing prevents what everybody calls the 
double dip. Things such as the gas crisis we are experiencing now have 
been discussed as potentially creating a double dip. To knock out 
hundreds of thousands of jobs, to knock 2 full percentage points out of 
growth out of a ratio that is not much over 3 percent is a very big hit 
to the economy. It may be wiser to allow the economic recovery to 
continue a little bit further, as the Bowles-Simpson group recommended, 
that you couldn't snuff out the recovery early. Let the blaze catch a 
little more. Let it get going, and then we can move into these areas.
  I will come to the floor later to talk about not just prudence but 
also fairness. There are two issues we need to address as we face up to 
our debt and deficit challenge. We have to do it prudently. We also 
should do it fairly. The way the House does it does not meet the 
standard either of prudence or fairness. On prudence, I think we have 
pretty strong agreement when Ben Bernanke and Mark Zandi and Goldman 
Sachs all talk about significant job losses as a result, and fairness 
is a topic for another day.
  I yield the floor.

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