[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 157 (2011), Part 8]
[House]
[Pages 10864-10865]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




            CHRONIC UNEMPLOYMENT IS BIGGEST AMERICAN PROBLEM

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. The Chair recognizes the gentleman from 
Oregon (Mr. DeFazio) for 5 minutes.
  Mr. DeFAZIO. Madam Speaker, we are in the 10th year of the Bush tax 
cuts and the third year of the Obama tax cuts. Taxes today are at the 
lowest percentage of our national economy since 1950; and, of course, 
that preexists a few things like Medicare, homeland security, massive 
spending on wars overseas, et cetera.
  Yet last Friday, with this very, very light tax burden, we had the 
official unemployment numbers. They were horrible. But guess what. The 
reality is worse than the numbers. There are about 20 million people, 
not 16 million people, unemployed, looking for work, or underemployed. 
So I guess all we need to do is cut taxes more and cut spending and we 
will have an economic boom. Yes, we will have a boom, like the boom of 
an imploding economy.

[[Page 10865]]

Just like the last 10 years, the worst job creation since the Great 
Depression under this theory that tax cuts solve every problem.
  Now the President's response on Friday was, not surprisingly, 
continue tax cuts. The new one he has adopted is the Social Security 
tax holiday. But don't worry, we will make Social Security whole. If we 
cut their income, we've got to make the trust fund whole. We'll borrow 
$110 billion from China. We'll put it into the Social Security trust 
fund and everybody will get $15 or $20 a week, and that'll solve the 
problems of this economy. Of course, it doesn't do much for the people 
who aren't working, and it's not going to create jobs. That's his big 
solution.
  Number two solution: more job-killing free trade agreements. Oh, 
that's great.
  Patent reform. Yeah, maybe some day.
  And then at the very end, oh, we should have a little bitty 
infrastructure bank. Okay. Great.
  Now, the Republicans on Thursday, they preceded all this and one-
upped him. They proposed that the United States of America, with 
crumbling highways, falling-down bridges, and obsolete transit systems, 
cut investment in infrastructure by 35 percent. So the construction 
industry that has today 16 percent unemployment, under the Republican 
plan, 25 percent unemployment. That's great. That's going to work, too. 
Oh, yes, and more tax cuts.
  You know, we lack the will around here to address our Nation's 
greatest problems, not the means. Chronic unemployment is the greatest 
problem in this country. If we solve chronic unemployment, a quarter of 
the deficit goes away because those people aren't collecting 
unemployment benefits, food stamps and other things they need just to 
survive, and they are working and paying taxes.
  Now, how about canceling some of these stupid tax cuts, particularly 
the Social Security tax holiday? Let's not borrow $110 billion from 
China for people to dribble way in $20-a-week payments. Let's take that 
$110 billion and build things in America with American workers and buy 
American requirements.

                              {time}  1010

  We could put 4 million or 5 million people to work. Let's cancel the 
tax cuts for people earning over $200,000 a year--the job creators--who 
are pretty undertaxed right now and who have record savings and wealth. 
If they contributed a little bit, that would be about another 1 million 
jobs if we put that $23 billion a year into investments in 
infrastructure. These aren't just construction jobs. They're 
engineering jobs; they're manufacturing jobs; they're small business 
suppliers. We need an investment-driven recovery. For too long, we've 
been trying under both Bush and under Obama to have a borrowed money, 
consumption-driven recovery.
  Ain't going to work. Not good long term.
  Instead of indebting our kids and giving them nothing but current 
consumption, let's have something that's investment-driven that will 
provide benefits for generations to come with a 21st century 
infrastructure for this country.

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