[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 157 (2011), Part 9]
[Senate]
[Pages 12981-12983]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                         CONTROL OF THE ECONOMY

  Mr. McCONNELL. Mr. President, it is good to see my friend the 
majority leader. I agree with him that I think we can make some 
significant progress in the next few weeks on some issues on which both 
sides have largely agreed. However, there are other things where 
clearly there remains differences among us.

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  As lawmakers return to Washington this week, every one of us, I am 
sure, is aware of the fact that many Americans are not only frustrated 
with the state of our economy but also with the state of their 
government. I don't think any one of us is under any illusion that the 
American people were particularly eager to see us come back. And who 
could blame them? After 2\1/2\ years of being told that Washington had 
the answer to everything from the high cost of health care to high 
unemployment, people have every reason to be skeptical. For more than 
2\1/2\ years under the administration, Americans have been hearing 
about the wonders government spending would do for our economy and 
about the dangerous consequences of failing to apply bold solutions to 
big problems. And what has it gotten them? As Washington has grown 
bigger and bigger, Americans have continued to lose jobs. The national 
debt has exploded literally out of sight. And for the first time in our 
history, America's once pristine credit rating has been downgraded by a 
major rating agency. The average length of unemployment recently 
surpassed 40 weeks for the first time ever, and just last week we 
learned that in the month of August not a single new job was created in 
this country--not one. But here is the bottom line. In the 2\1/2\ years 
since President Obama signed his signature jobs bill--the so-called 
stimulus--there are 1.7 million fewer jobs in our country.
  Statistics such as these help us to understand the dimensions of the 
economic challenges so many Americans continue to face. But most people 
don't need to read the morning papers or wait for the monthly jobs 
report to know they are struggling. And no amount of speeches, however 
carefully crafted to appeal to the anxieties of the moment, will 
convince them that some politician here in Washington, from the 
President on down, has the solution. The truth is, President Obama did 
more for jobs last week by reversing himself on a single government-
imposed regulation than he has done in all the speeches he has given 
put together.
  At this point, I think most people have safely concluded that the 
problem with our economy isn't that Washington is doing too little but 
that Washington is doing too much already. That is why in the coming 
weeks and months many of us will continue to press for an entirely new 
approach, one that puts individuals and businesses at the center of our 
recovery instead of Washington, one that clears away the redtape and 
the regulatory overreach, one that lifts the cloud of uncertainty that 
has been holding job creators back and enables the American people to 
move our economy in the direction they want instead of having it 
dictated to them from above by the President.
  It is time for an approach that is based on the simple principle that 
if the American people are going to have control of their own destiny, 
they need to have more control of their economy. They have seen where 
consolidating every economic decision in Washington has gotten us. They 
see that folks in Washington seem to be doing just fine. Millions of 
Americans may have lost their homes over the past few years, millions 
more may owe more on their homes than those homes are worth, but home 
values here in Washington are going up--going up. Countless Americans 
outside of Washington may have seen their savings dry up or have been 
forced to decide between making a car repair or a tuition payment, but 
you would never know that here. As countless economic tragedies 
unfolded in homes across the country over the past few years, the 
Washington metropolitan area was working on a new distinction: the 
highest median income in America--the highest median income in America 
right here in Washington. I assure you, these folks aren't getting rich 
off of farming. While most of the rest of the country continues to 
struggle, Washington is booming. And that is not the kind of change 
people voted for 3 years ago.
  So before we get into the details about what many of us believe will 
succeed in reigniting the economy outside of Washington, we need to be 
clear about what hasn't because while I have no doubt that the 
President will propose many things on Thursday night that when looked 
at individually sound pretty good or that he will call them all 
bipartisan, I am equally certain that, taken as a whole, they will 
represent more of the same failed approach that has only made things 
worse over the past few years and resulted in fewer jobs than when we 
started.
  Over the weekend, the President tested a few of the lines I expect we 
will hear on Thursday. His central message, evidently, is that anyone 
who doesn't rubberstamp his economic agenda is putting politics above 
country.
  Well, with all due respect, Mr. President, there is a much simpler 
reason for opposing your economic proposals that has nothing whatsoever 
to do with politics, and it is this: They don't work.
  We can trace these failures to the President's very first days in 
office. One of the first things he did upon assuming office was to 
direct Congress to send him the stimulus. Here was one of the single 
most expensive pieces of legislation Congress has ever approved. The 
interest payments alone were projected to cost an average of $100 
million a day. This was the President's way of jump-starting an agenda 
that, in his words, ``began with jobs.'' The agenda, he said, began 
with jobs, and he knew some of us were skeptical it would work. That is 
why shortly after it became law he asked if he could come up to Capitol 
Hill and use his very first speech to a joint session of Congress to 
explain exactly what it would achieve. Here is what the President told 
us. The stimulus, he said, would save or create 3.5 million jobs--3.5 
million jobs, he said--and ultimately that is how he will measure its 
success, on whether it created jobs. To reassure those of us who 
thought government couldn't be counted on to spend this kind of money 
wisely, he insisted that anyone who received it would be held strictly 
accountable.
  Then he said something some people may have forgotten: He said the 
stimulus was just a first step. The primary purpose of the stimulus, he 
said, was to help the economy in the short term. But the only way to 
fully restore America's economic strength, he told us then, was through 
a 10-year budget that would reach into all areas of the economy that 
the stimulus did not.
  Just like the stimulus, the unifying theme of the President's budget 
was more government. And once again, he felt in selling it that he 
needed to speak to the skeptics first. Here is what he said about that. 
The goal of the budget, he said, wasn't to replace private enterprise 
but to catalyze it, not to stifle business but to create the conditions 
for entrepreneurs and businesses to adapt and thrive. Well, how did 
that work out? As government continued to grow, the economy sputtered, 
and it is still sputtering. Yet the President wants to know why the 
people are resistant to his economic proposals. He says they must be 
motivated by politics.
  A stimulus bill aimed at creating jobs was followed by a period where 
we lost 1.7 million jobs. The inspector general who was appointed to 
oversee distribution of the stimulus funds reports that he received 
more than 7,000 complaints of wrongdoing. More than 1,500 of those 
complaints have triggered investigations. Just last week, one of the 
companies the President personally vouched for as a shining example of 
how stimulus dollars would work announced it was laying off more than 
1,000 workers and filing for chapter 11 bankruptcy. And it wasn't the 
first. But still, according to the President, anyone who opposes this 
agenda is playing partisan games.
  Well, the President can attempt to blame our economic problems all he 
wants on his political adversaries or his predecessors or natural 
disasters. But at the end of the day, he is the one, as he himself 
said, who is responsible for what happens on his watch, and that 
includes the epic failure of a bill he himself touted as the key to our 
recovery.
  By any measure, including his own, the stimulus and the economic 
principles it was built on have been a failure, and that is the reason 
so many

[[Page 12983]]

people are skeptical of the President's economic proposals. They don't 
work as advertised. Now, the President, of course, doesn't want to 
acknowledge it, and I understand that. It is hard to admit when you 
have been wrong. But in other, more subtle ways, the administration has 
acknowledged the fundamental flaws in its approach to the economy. The 
only reason the President agreed to keep taxes from going up last 
December, for instance, was that he knew it would lead to even more job 
loss. The only problem with this proposal and others like it, of 
course, is they are temporary, which only perpetuates the uncertainty 
that has kept so many businesses, large and small, from making 
investments in new products and new workers over the past few years. 
Businesses actually do not want shots in the arm or quick fixes. They 
want to know what the landscape will look like a few years down the 
road. And, until now, that is not something the President has been 
willing to do. He has not been able to bring himself to let go of 
government's grip--which brings me back to a different approach which 
some of us have been proposing for some time now, and which the White 
House continues to resist. Simply put, we think Washington should take 
a little break from the massive spending programs the President likes 
to refer to as ``bold'' solutions. Quite frankly, we are not very good 
at them, and anyone who thinks otherwise has not been paying very much 
attention to Washington over the past few years.
  No one believes government doesn't have a role to play. Of course it 
does. But it is not the center of the universe and it should stop 
pretending to be the center of the universe. What we need is a shift in 
thinking when it comes to thinking about how government's role in the 
economy should work. We need to shift the center of gravity away from 
Washington and back to the innovators and entrepreneurs, the engineers 
and the shop floor managers who will be at the heart of our recovery. 
We need to be serious about it.
  The President is forever eager to embrace big proposals whenever 
government is at the helm, but when it comes to doing the kinds of 
things job creators want, he is suddenly quite timid. He will agree to 
a tax cut as long as it is temporary. He will agree to reverse a job-
killing regulation, but only if he knows he has gotten dozens of other 
doozies in the pipeline right behind it. We need to do a lot better 
than that. We need the President to be as bold about liberating job 
creators as he has been about shackling them. I mean, you do not lift a 
single regulation and suddenly claim to be Margaret Thatcher. The 
Environmental Protection Agency alone has dozens of other new rules in 
progress. The Labor Department has dozens of rules of its own in 
progress. The administration's proposed utility standards would 
increase costs for every family and business in America. One of these 
new standards, for boiler emissions, would endanger literally tens of 
thousands of jobs. New rules for cement plants would strike a blow 
right at the heart of our manufacturing and building sectors. New rules 
regulating coal ash would endanger thousands of jobs.
  Then there is the ObamaCare bill, which has to be counted as one of 
the most far-reaching and comprehensive single sources of government 
regulation ever devised. Though this bill has still not yet taken 
effect, the myriad of rules that will be imposed on every American have 
been written as we speak, and so far those regulations already run to 
nearly 10,000 pages.
  Republicans will spend the next weeks and months arguing in favor of 
a robust legislative agenda aimed at blocking or repealing some of the 
most pernicious rules and regulations so business can breathe again and 
begin to hire, and the American worker, not Washington, can help this 
economy get moving again.
  Putting the American people back in charge of our economy also means 
reforming the Tax Code and that is why, over the next weeks and months, 
Republicans will continue to make the case that Washington should get 
out of the business of picking winners and losers. We should strive to 
become more competitive by lowering the tax rate on American job 
creators that right now ranks as the second highest in the developed 
world, and we should level the playing field with America's competitors 
overseas by approving the three free trade agreements with Colombia, 
Panama, and South Korea that have been languishing on the President's 
desk for nearly 3 years. The President himself acknowledges that these 
trade pacts will help create tens of thousands of jobs right here at 
home by vastly expanding the market for U.S. goods. He should send them 
to Congress today so we can finally ratify them.
  Another thing we can do is reform the budget process. There is no 
good reason that nearly three-fourths of government spending is on auto 
pilot and that last year's spending levels should automatically carry 
over into the next, regardless of whether they are effective or 
affordable.
  We need to continue to make the case for a balanced budget amendment. 
Budget reform is an essential part of getting Washington to live within 
its means. It needs to be a top priority.
  None of these ideas are groundbreaking and they certainly should not 
be controversial. They are just common sense. Most importantly, they 
are rooted in a respect for the independence, the wisdom, and the 
power, as another U.S. President once put it, ``of a free people and 
the efficiency of free institutions.''
  The President who spoke those words did so during another period of 
sluggish growth and high unemployment and the solution he proposed, not 
only for the sake of the domestic economy but also for the preservation 
of America's influence in the wider world, focused not unlike the one I 
have outlined here on alleviating the heavy burdens government had 
imposed on both individuals and businesses.
  This is what he further said: ``The final and best means of 
strengthening demand among consumers and businesses is to reduce the 
burden on private income and the deterrents to private initiative which 
are imposed by [the] . . . tax system.''
  ``Such an approach,'' he continued, ``would lead to a new interest in 
taking risks, increasing productivity, and the creation of new jobs and 
new products for long-term economic growth.'' I would only add that the 
same approach President Kennedy outlined with these words in 1962 is 
worth trying again today.
  We have tried President Obama's approach. It has failed. It is time 
for something new. The new approach we are suggesting is not aimed at 
pleasing any party or constituency. It is aimed at nothing more than 
giving back to the American people the tools they need to do the work 
Washington has not been able to do on its own. Once we do that, once we 
come together and agree to turn the keys of this economy back to the 
American men and women who actually drive it, I have no doubt that much 
of the acrimony that has marked our dealings here over the past several 
months will fade away.
  Even more importantly, though, we will have done something good for 
the country and for the millions of Americans who are looking for 
Washington not so much to do more but for the first time in a long time 
to do less so they can finally do what it takes to get this economy 
moving again.
  I yield the floor.

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