[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 159 (2013), Part 10]
[Senate]
[Pages 14555-14557]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                          AFFORDABLE CARE ACT

  Mr. SESSIONS. Madam President, I want to share some remarks about the 
comments. I want to say Senator Boxer is a great advocate and does a 
good job as chair of our Committee on the Environment and Public Works. 
Pretty much we have had unanimous votes on bills that came out, 
Republicans and Democrats voting unanimously on the bills that came 
out. Sometimes we have differences and we fight over them, but a lot of 
times things are getting done around here.
  But I will just say it is not actually fully correct to say the 
Republicans opposed the President's health care bill, the Affordable 
Care Act, ObamaCare. The American people opposed it by huge numbers. 
They, through an election, a remarkable election, and in some very 
close wins, found themselves with 60 votes in the Senate of the United 
States. They had a majority in the House, and they decided to move this 
bill. They shut out Republicans, moved a partisan bill, and they got it 
through--even when Scott Brown, if you remember, was running for the 
Senate in Massachusetts to fill the late Senator Kennedy's seat. He 
promised he would be the vote that would deny the 60 votes and stop 
this bill, and he won in Massachusetts. But he couldn't get here 
quickly enough. They were able to get the bill passed before he got 
here to kill it.
  This has never been a popular bill and the polling number shows it is 
even less popular today than it was when they rammed it through. So 
this is not a little bitty matter. It threatens our Republic, I think, 
in a lot of different ways. I have talked about that earlier. But I 
would say--to understand the dynamics on the floor of the Senate--you 
have to understand that the majority leader, having gotten his bill 
passed on Christmas Eve 2009, after all kinds of maneuvers to get that 
accomplished, has protected it from any further debate and discussion. 
He has blocked any ability to bring up the legislation and to be able 
to amend it and fix some of the obvious flaws in it. One of the top 
drafters, the Senate Democratic chairman of the Finance Committee, has 
called it a train wreck, and it at least needs reform. It really cannot 
succeed in its present form. Senator Reid has blocked any effort to 
bring up a bill and fix it. The American people might find that hard to 
believe, but I will repeat it: Since that time there have been numerous 
efforts on behalf of Members from this side to call up amendments and 
call up legislation to alter, amend, and replace the ObamaCare 
legislation.
  He has utilized parliamentarian maneuvers, filling the tree, to block 
that. It cannot continue. This is about to become a law. It is going to 
hammer the American economy. It is already hammering the economy. The 
American people don't want it, and we are not going to go silent. So 
this is the beginning of the fight.
  Senator Cruz--maybe people can disagree with his tactics--but he 
drove and raised the issue. We need to keep talking about it; we just 
do. It is time for this Congress to listen to the voice of the American 
people.
  Senator Boxer is a good person, and she said President Bush had $1 
trillion deficits and President Obama has reduced them in half. The 
highest deficit President Bush ever had in the 8 years he served as 
President was $487 billion, which is a lot of money--too much. The year 
before, it was $168 billion.
  When President Obama took office, what was the first thing that was 
passed within weeks? A $1 trillion stimulus bill to supposedly 
stimulate the economy, but the money went out to government agencies 
and departments, and it had no stimulus impact at all. It was $1 
trillion--every penny of which was borrowed. That year the deficit went 
up well over $1 trillion. The next year it was well over $1 trillion, 
the next year well over $1 trillion, and the next year well over $1 
trillion.
  In the first 4 years of President Obama's leadership, we had the 
highest deficits ever recorded in America. It is a stunning event, and 
he fought every day--and there were fights on the floor--to spend more 
and borrow more.
  Some of his advisers would say: The reason this economy isn't growing 
so well is because we didn't borrow and spend enough. We didn't have 
enough. We should have created more debt and should have spent more. It 
has resulted to this date in the lowest rebound economically from a 
recession since World War II, and we are not doing well in that regard.
  It is absolutely not so that President Obama bears no responsibility 
for the unprecedented debt that he has run up during this time. He is 
still advocating for $1 trillion more in spending above the Budget 
Control Act levels that he agreed to in the summer of 2011. He wants to 
spend $1 trillion more than what he signed as an agreement to raise the 
debt ceiling.
  I know he didn't want to, but Congress said: We are going to cut back 
on your credit card. Now we are going to raise the debt ceiling $2 
trillion, as you said you need, but we demand that you reduce the 
growth of spending over 10 years by $2 trillion.
  We were projected to have spending growth to $10 trillion over the 
current rate of spending, which is about $3.6 trillion a year. We were 
going to increase it by a total of $10 trillion. Under BCA, if we 
adhere to it, we would increase it by $8 trillion, not $10 trillion. 
That is not going to bankrupt America. There is no reason we can't run 
this government by growing the spending by $8 trillion instead of $10 
trillion. So it is unbelievable that we make that point.
  I know the budget balanced in the last years of the 1990s, and 
President Clinton proudly claims credit for that, and he was a part of 
it. But I haven't forgotten that the Republican House was in a constant 
battle over Democratic President Clinton's spending levels, and there 
was actually a fairly long shutdown of the government to contain the 
growth of spending, and it resulted in a balanced budget. That is how 
it happened. There was credit enough to go to both sides of that.
  We need health care reform. It needs to be smartly and effectively 
done. We can improve health care in our country, but it does not have 
to tank the American economy, and that is what has been happening in 
recent days. I was going to talk about that, without much reference to 
ObamaCare and the health care bill--which is a negative factor of 
economic growth of very large proportions--but I just followed my 
friend and able colleague, Senator Boxer, and I wanted to share those 
points.
  Last Thursday I delivered the first in a series of speeches looking 
at the state of our economy. I directed my staff on the Budget 
Committee--I am the ranking Republican there--to specifically analyze 
conditions facing working Americans so I could share those findings 
directly with the Members of the Senate. Both parties need to focus 
their efforts on defending working Americans from policies--Washington 
policies too often--that damage their financial well-being. It is 
happening. Last week I discussed the falling incomes and social 
challenges eroding the security of the middle class. Today I will focus 
on the jobless recovery and the general problem of unemployment.
  Few things matter more to a working family than the pace of the 
economy, especially after a hard recession. If on the one hand, it is a 
rapid, strong recovery, jobs will return quickly, people will return to 
the workforce, and a great deal of social suffering will be averted.

[[Page 14556]]

  If, on the other hand, it is a slow recovery, then businesses don't 
create many new jobs, wages stagnate or fall, as they have been doing, 
and families continue to borrow from their savings to pay their bills. 
Life is spent wondering and worrying about the future.
  We live today in the slowest economic recovery--they called it an 
economic recovery--since the end of World War II. No recovery from a 
recession since the end of World War II has been as slow as this one. 
Not counting the Great Recession, we have had 11 recessions since 1945. 
All had faster, stronger recoveries than this one--with all of them we 
bounced back quicker.
  How slow is this economic recovery? Well, it has been nearly 6 years 
since the recession began in December of 2007. We still have not 
returned to the number of jobs we had 6 years ago. We haven't come back 
to the number of people working that we had 6 years ago. We are 
1,988,000 jobs--almost 2 million--short of the 146,273,000 jobs we had 
when the recession began. This is not good.
  Let's compare that with the other two bad postwar recessions: the 
contractions of 1973 through 1975 and 1981 and 1982--serious 
recessions. The recession of 1973 lasted 16 months. The recession of 
the 1981 collapse lasted 16 months, and the recession of 2007 lasted 
until June of 2009, or 18 months.
  Working people were hit hard by these two earlier recessions. The 
unemployment rate rose to 9 percent in 1975 and 10.8 percent in 1982. 
The highest monthly unemployment rate for the Great Recession of 2007 
to 2009 was 10 percent. Our unemployment rate didn't hit as high as 
1982. There is not much difference in the severity and length of these 
recessions. They were pretty similar.
  Even so, total jobs had recovered by 25 months after the start of the 
1973 recession and by 28 months after the recovery from the 1981 
recession. It has been 70 months, however, since the start of the 2007 
recession, and employment has not yet recovered.
  Lost hours of work is another and even better way to gauge the 
failure of the current recovery. It is not simply the number of jobs in 
the economy but the number of hours worked that strongly influences the 
pace of economic activity.
  In the fourth quarter of 2007, just as the recession was starting, 
Americans worked about 236 billion hours--that is a lot of hours. We 
still have not returned to that level.
  In the third quarter of 2013, this last quarter, the Labor Department 
estimated Americans still only worked 232 billion hours. That is a 
shortfall of 3.5 billion hours. This decline is greater per worker 
since the population of available workers has increased by 9 million. 
So we have got 9 million more workers and a decline in the number of 
hours worked, and it is still well below what the number was in 2007. 
This is not the kind of recovery we need to be looking for.
  Still another way to show the slowness of this recovery is to measure 
how much higher GDP--the economy today--is compared to the start of the 
recession. It turns out that economic output is 4.4 percent higher. 
Compare this with the 1973 and 1981 recessions. By this time after the 
1973 recession, GDP was 17.9 percent higher, and GDP after the 1981 
recession by this time was 20 percent higher. That is, the economy was 
20 percent bigger by this time after the 1981 recovery.
  Our current economy is only 4.4 percent larger. The 1981 economic 
gains were five times as great as this.
  These are the top line numbers. What do they mean to real people? 
Below this surface we find extensive economic suffering throughout our 
Nation. There are 25 percent more discouraged workers today--988,000 
versus 793,000--than there were in June of 2009 when the recession 
ended. We had 366,000 discouraged workers when the recession started in 
2007, which means we have had an increase of 172 percent in this sad 
number in 6 years.
  One of the most stunning developments of this recovery has been the 
decline in the labor force participation rate. This is a fundamental 
indicator of the breadth and depth of a recovery and of economic 
growth. Today 58.7 percent of the noninstitutionalized population 16 
years of age and older is working--58.7 percent today. In 2007 that 
number stood at 62.7 percent. The current rate of labor force 
participation is the lowest this Nation has seen since 1978. The 
percentage of the population working today in the age group of workers 
is the lowest it has been since 1978, and it is not getting better.
  This decline is due to two factors: increased unemployment, and labor 
force dropouts--discouraged people who are no longer even looking for 
work.
  How many people are we talking about? If the same percentage of the 
population was working today as was working in 2007, we would have 
154,089,000 workers. Since we currently only have 144,285,000 people 
working, it appears that 9,804,000 people are out of the labor force--9 
million normally expected to be working are out of the labor force.
  When they are out of the labor force, it does not show up in the 
unemployment rate. It is only people who are actually applying for jobs 
who show up in the unemployment rate. So the unemployment rate we see 
today hides the real depth of the unemployment problem we have in 
America.
  Of the 5.7 million who totally dropped out, more retirements and more 
disability than in 2007 explain about two-thirds of those dropouts. 
People went on disability, went on retirement. Many of them went on 
retirement at 62 when it would have been better if they could have had 
a decent job opportunity to work to 65, 66, 70, but they have dropped 
out because they are older workers, perhaps, and were unable to find 
decent work. But it cannot be good for America for millions of people 
to take their Social Security at 62 rather than later, too often 
because no work is available.
  More than 4 million unemployed Americans have been out of work for 
more than 27 weeks--4 million--more than half the year they have been 
unemployed. All told, 11.5 million Americans want to work but cannot 
find jobs.
  The unemployment rate for those between the ages of 16 and 19 who are 
not in school or in the military or in prison stands at 24 percent. So 
teenagers have a very large number, and the number is much higher for 
minority teenagers and young men particularly. This is the highest 
teenage unemployment has ever been this far into a recovery. It is very 
dangerous for our society to have so many young people--especially 
young men whose unemployment rates are even higher than females--out of 
work. This is not good for America.
  We need to have a growing economy that creates jobs, and we don't 
need to be bringing in--under the immigration bill that passed the 
Senate, we don't need to be bringing in twice the number of low-skilled 
workers as we have been doing, as we have a generous immigration 
policy. This bill would double the number of guest workers coming into 
America to take jobs that children need to be doing. They need to be 
working. We don't need teenagers and young people--19, 20, 22, 23--with 
nothing to do month after month, year after year.
  At 13 percent, unemployment among African Americans is about twice 
the national average of 7.4 percent. Unemployment among Hispanics 
stands at 9.4 percent. Unemployment among those with less than a high 
school education is 11 percent. But we want to bring in millions of 
people without high school educations to compete for the few jobs that 
are out there.
  Again, these statistics, as bad as they are, mask the real-life 
implications of the slow economy. These are young careers that have 
failed to launch when they should, marriages perhaps put off until the 
economy improves, families not started until couples can afford 
children--a generation of children that arrive out of wedlock. We have 
retirements taken too early, loss of homes, perhaps; older children at 
home who should be out on their own, and we would normally expect them 
to be working; and lots of part-time, extra jobs at lower pay just to 
make ends meet.
  Indeed, one of the most devastating statistics is the growth in part-
time work instead of full-time work. It is a

[[Page 14557]]

stunning number. We have 5,188,000 fewer full-time jobs today than in 
December of 2007--5 million fewer. That equals a decrease in full-time 
employment of 4.3 percent, even though our population is growing.
  At the same time, part-time employment has grown by 3 million over 
this same time period. That is an increase in part-time jobs of 13 
percent. So make no mistake, the total number of jobs since 2007 is 
down, and for the people who are finding work, the work they find too 
often can only be part time.
  Now 77 percent of the people who got a job since January of this year 
got a part-time job, not a full time job. When we see, colleagues, the 
reports of 190,000 jobs, 200,000 jobs, remember, 77 percent of those 
are part-time jobs. Those numbers hide the reality of the danger in our 
workforce.
  Nearly 90 percent of the increase in part-time work represents people 
who, according to the Labor Department, ``could only find part-time 
work.'' In other words, they would like full-time but could only find 
part-time work. At the end of 2007, this number stood at 1.2 million. 
However, the most recent data shows that this population has grown by 
127 percent to 2,714,000--a 127-percent increase in this number.
  Job growth in the economy since 2007 has been principally in part-
time work. We are becoming a part-time economy.
  The President's health care law, without any doubt--I don't believe 
any economist, even if they try to sugar-coat it the best they could, 
would deny that the President's health care law is playing a major 
factor from the shift from full-time work to part-time work. As we all 
know, part-time workers don't enjoy the same health, retirement, 
vacation, and other benefits as full-time workers do. It is exceedingly 
hard indeed to succeed in this economy and in a career with only a 
part-time job.
  We must recognize one of the biggest contributors to the decline in 
full-time jobs is the health care bill we have been debating. As others 
have observed, it is destroying the 40-hour workweek. That is what a 
union leader said: It is destroying the 40-hour workweek. It is even an 
assault on workers.
  Let me tell my colleagues about one constituent who wrote my office. 
Linda Askew, from Sheffield, AL, wrote in July, asking Congress to do 
something to help. Ms. Askew has a small neighborhood business. She 
employs less than 10 people. According to Ms. Askew:

       We have been here for almost 50 years. We have tried to 
     help our employees have health care for over 10 years now . . 
     . The new premiums are $590 per month for single coverage and 
     $1,520 for family coverage. . . . These costs are almost 
     becoming unbearable for our company. More troubling than 
     that, in the letter--

  she got a letter from her insurance company--

     was that part of the reason for this increase was blamed on a 
     new health care reform fees and taxes that health insurers 
     must pay on behalf of all their groups . . .

  So to reduce the cost of health care in America, the health care bill 
raised taxes on the insurance companies that provide it. It gets passed 
along.
  She continues:

       Small businesses cannot keep up with these increases.

  In the coming days, as I document the conditions facing American 
workers, I will also address the many causes of this economic 
deterioration--and there are many. There are many causes for the 
deterioration in the economy. Republicans and Democrats need to heed 
these problems I have stated, including a decline in wages, beginning 
in 1999 through a different administration.
  The question is, What are we going to do about it, Republicans and 
Democrats? We need to consider these issues and deal with them.
  What we are seeing is immensely troubling. As Washington grows 
larger, Washington grows wealthier and more powerful, American workers 
are being impoverished, sidelined, and marginalized. We see the numbers 
showing that the only area of America that has been showing raised 
growth is Washington. Washington! The government class is being 
enriched at the expense of the middle class. From deficit spending to 
Federal regulation to the immigration bill, Washington is pursuing 
policies that benefit lobbyists, the well-connected, government 
employees, regulators, and bureaucrats, but that are reducing the wages 
and job opportunities for everyday American workers. The numbers are 
clear.
  Both parties need to shut out the special interests, work to develop 
policies that will restore our history of dynamic economic growth--and 
we can do so--growth that benefits all the people of our Nation.
  What is the response we get from the governing class? What do they 
tell us the problem is? On the deficit, what do they say the problem 
is? We haven't spent enough money. It is your problem, American people. 
Just send us more money and we won't have deficits anymore. Trust us. 
Send us more money. The President proposed a $1 trillion tax increase 
in his budget. It was rejected, but that is what he proposed and that 
is what he advocates for. So they want to spend more.
  They believe they can invest. We give the government more money, and 
it is going to invest in the economy and everybody is going to be 
better off. But we have seen that movie. It has been going on for 5 
years, to a degree unprecedented in the history of America. They say, 
Don't worry, borrow and spend. Don't worry about the debt. We can just 
borrow more and spend more and that will stimulate the economy.
  They say we need to regulate more. We need to block more American 
energy and import more, I suppose, from Venezuela, Saudi Arabia, and 
that is going to improve our economy. Really? We are going to drive up 
the cost of energy and coal and that is going to improve jobs in 
America? That is going to help a working person who now has to pay 
$200, $250 a month for his gas bill to commute? That is supposed to be 
good for us?
  All we have heard is more taxes, more regulation, more government, 
more debt. That is the policy we are seeing here. I haven't seen 
anything that has the power to produce the growth and prosperity that 
we need.
  So I say we have to get over this. We have tried this. It is not 
working. These policies have made it worse. We have to get back to 
classical American policies that validate individual responsibility, 
that allow people to progress and make more, that don't drive us to 
import more oil, that don't put regulation by massive numbers all over 
the economy, driving down productivity and driving up costs. That is 
the kind of thing we need to be doing. If we will do that, and if we 
will allow the vitality of the American spirit to flourish and flower 
and get this burden off the backs of our people, I think we will be 
surprised how much better things can be.
  It is a serious crisis. This trend has been going on far too long. We 
can't ignore it. We can't say it is just the recession. We have been 
going along like this since 2007. We have not seen the growth we need. 
The tax and spend and borrow policies haven't worked. It is time for us 
to confront that. I hope my colleagues will.
  I will continue to examine the data we are seeing out there and share 
it with my colleagues and maybe we can surprise ourselves how much good 
we can do in the long run.
  Thank you, Madam President. I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Missouri.

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