[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 159 (2013), Part 3]
[House]
[Pages 3643-3648]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




    CONGRESSIONAL PROGRESSIVE CAUCUS UNVEILS THE BACK TO WORK BUDGET

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of 
January 3, 2013, the gentleman from Wisconsin (Mr. Pocan) is recognized 
for 60 minutes as the designee of the minority leader.
  Mr. POCAN. Mr. Speaker, I rise today on behalf of the Congressional 
Progressive Caucus to repeat and enhance our calls made by our 
colleagues today to talk about the budget introduced by the House 
Republicans.
  We have a number of members of the Progressive Caucus who will be 
addressing various components of the budget. I will start out with one 
of the freshman Members from the great State of California (Mr. 
Takano).
  I yield to the gentleman from California.
  Mr. TAKANO. I'd like to thank my friend, the gentleman from 
Wisconsin, for yielding the time this evening.
  Earlier today, I was joined by 22 of my fellow freshman Democrats in 
sending a letter to the distinguished gentleman from Wisconsin (Mr. 
Ryan) requesting specifics for his 2014 budget.

                              {time}  1750

  As freshman Members, we had hoped Mr. Ryan's budget provided areas 
where both parties, Democrats and Republicans, could find common 
ground. Instead, what was presented was a document that was vague. How 
can we begin to negotiate when we don't even know what we're 
negotiating? And where Mr. Ryan is specific, it's in areas that he 
knows that Democrats won't agree.
  Ezra Klein of The Washington Post described Mr. Ryan's so-called 
``Path to Prosperity'' in the following ways:

       He cuts deep into spending on health care for the poor and 
     some combination of education, infrastructure, research, 
     public safety and low-income families. The Affordable Care 
     Act's Medicare cuts remain, but the military is spared, as is 
     Social Security. There's a vague individual tax reform plan 
     that leaves only two brackets--10 percent and 25 percent--and 
     will require either huge, deficit busting tax cuts or 
     increasing taxes on poor and middle class households, as well 
     as a vague corporate tax reform plan that lowers the rate 
     from 35 to 25 percent.

  After reading Mr. Ryan's budget, I find this document bears a 
striking resemblance to the tactics used by the Romney campaign: 
Promise massive tax cuts but don't provide any specifics on how to pay 
for them. This is surprising since Mr. Ryan is considered a ``serious'' 
policy maker.
  My colleagues who joined me today don't expect to agree with 
everything in Mr. Ryan's budget. But as we detailed in our letter 
today, we hope to find areas of common ground so that our country can 
move forward. Only then can we begin to tackle the fiscal challenges 
facing our Nation.
  Mr. POCAN. I would like to thank the gentleman from California. As a 
member of the Budget Committee that marked up the bill yesterday, we 
had spent the entire day considering the budget proposal that was 
introduced by our Republican colleagues. From the beginning, it was 
clear that the budget represented little more than recycled policies 
that have already been rejected by the American people and unrealistic 
proposals that will never occur.
  We had an opportunity in committee to focus on areas where Democrats 
and Republicans could come together to grow our economy and responsibly 
reduce our deficit. Instead, we were given a budget that is based on 
math gimmicks and absurd assumptions, assumptions like trying to keep 
the savings from the Affordable Care Act while repealing its benefits. 
Well, that has about as much credibility as if we had said in the 
budget we should hire leprechauns to grab pots of gold at the

[[Page 3644]]

end of rainbows and count that as revenue. It is simply not realistic.
  As a small business owner and as a former cochair of the Wisconsin 
joint committee on finance, I've worked on budgets for years and years. 
We used to spend 8 hours a day, 3 days a week for 4 months making sure 
that each and every detail meant something in a budget because a budget 
is a statement of our values, where do we stand as a country, or, in 
that case, as the State of Wisconsin.
  Unfortunately, we didn't take the time to make those tough choices 
with the budget that was presented to us. Instead, we were given a 
budget that balances the budget on the backs of seniors and working 
class families. It's not a tough choice. It's a reckless and 
irresponsible choice.
  Our budget should reflect our values, and the GOP budget does not 
reflect Wisconsin's values. And I don't believe it reflects the values 
of middle class families across the country.
  Mr. Speaker, the type of choices that we were given from the 
Republicans in presenting their budget included things from keeping the 
sequester in place that you heard earlier have had terrible effects 
across the country and will continue to in the coming months of this 
current budget, like turning Medicare into a voucher system, a system 
that breaks the promise to the American people that we've had about 
Medicare for so long.
  It includes trillions in undisclosed spending cuts with absolutely no 
information on where they'll come from other than eventually they're 
going to come from the middle class through losing some of the current 
proposals that we have in place in the law. Ultimately, all these will 
harm our economic growth and stunt the positive gains we've made in the 
economy just as recently as last month.
  In fact, the Economic Policy Institute has found that the GOP Ryan 
budget released yesterday would result in 2 million fewer jobs next 
year alone. It would decrease our gross domestic product by 1.7 percent 
and stall our Nation's economic recovery.
  What the budget does, and we can tell this in my State of Wisconsin 
and across the country, is, one, it keeps the sequester in place. And 
we've already been told that could cost 750,000 jobs nationwide, 
including 36,000 in my State of Wisconsin. The budget would turn the 
Medicare program into a voucher program, forcing 873,753 Wisconsin 
seniors out of the traditional Medicare plan when the conversion 
happens and breaking the promise that kept the link to increasing costs 
and having increasing funds that go with it. Finally, it would increase 
tax breaks for the very wealthy and big businesses but cost middle 
class families $2,000 annually in new taxes.
  We must remember the biggest threat to our long-term economic 
security at this time is not the deficit; it's our economy. It's about 
jobs. It's the 12 million people that are unemployed in this country. 
We need to be making investments in American workers, in American 
ingenuity, in education, research and development, and infrastructure, 
and that's what will get the people of America back to work.
  We have a budget that does just that, and I'm proud to support the 
Congressional Progressive Caucus' Back to Work Budget. The Back to Work 
Budget invests in America's future because the best way to reduce our 
long-term deficit is to put America back to work, get people back 
working and get people into jobs.
  Just last week, the Congressional Budget Office released a report 
finding that half of the deficit in 2013 and three-quarters of the 
deficit in 2014 will be due to economic weakness. That means people 
being unemployed or underemployed and paying less in revenue rather 
than structural budget policies like defense spending, entitlement 
spending, or overall tax policy.
  So the very problem we're facing is that people aren't working and 
aren't able to pay taxes and guide the economy like we need to. If 
they're doing that, we would make up three-quarters of the deficit in 
the next budget year alone.
  Plain and simple, we need to get the American people back to work, 
and the Back to Work Budget does that by targeting a goal of 5 percent 
unemployment through investments in infrastructure, education, hiring 
back laid-off teachers, aid to States, rehiring police, firefighters, 
and other public employees, investing in a public works jobs program, 
and giving tax credits to companies that create jobs in America instead 
of the tax breaks that are still under the Republican budget that help 
companies that send jobs overseas.
  So I'm hopeful that as this budget process moves forward, we can turn 
our attention back to job growth as our budget does and not backwards 
to the rejected policies of the past.
  I would like to share a few stories that I've collected from my 
district from constituents who have written us about the budget, about 
the sequester that continues in the Republican budget, as well as the 
budget proposals in front of us. Let me read one from a reverend in 
Beloit, Wisconsin. Beloit, Wisconsin, is in Rock County, and the 
chairman of the Budget Committee, Representative Ryan, and I split Rock 
County right down the middle. So these are people that we both talk to 
on a regular basis.
  This is a reverend in Beloit who had been diagnosed with lung cancer. 
This is what he writes:

       This morning, I was reading more about the cuts coming on 
     March 1. One of the areas that could be cut is cancer 
     research, to the tune of $250 million. This is frightening to 
     me. I'm married with two girls, ages 8 and 4. Three years 
     ago, I was diagnosed with a rare form of nonsmoker's lung 
     cancer. I went through chemo and radiation, and we thought we 
     got it all. Last year, we discovered the cancer was back and 
     in my bones. So I started a new pill. Within 2 months, all of 
     the spots are gone, and I'm in remission. It is because of 
     the funding for cancer research that I am alive today and my 
     girls have their father. I have been told that the cancer 
     will eventually build an immunity to my pill, so there are a 
     number of other medications in trial now. If the funding is 
     cut, my next miracle pill may not be there. I heard that 
     these cuts could set back cancer research 5 years. Please, do 
     what you can to make sure these cuts don't happen and people 
     like me can beat back this nasty disease.

  That's just from one constituent in my district from a county that 
just happens to be shared by the person who authored the budget that 
keeps these sequester cuts and these cuts to research in place.

                              {time}  1800

  Let me read one more, and then I'm going to introduce one of my 
colleagues, the cochair of the Progressive Caucus.
  This is from a mother in Evansville, Wisconsin, also in Rock County, 
the county that I share with the chairman of the Budget Committee, Mr. 
Ryan. This was received back at the end of February:

       My son-in-law will be laid off next week due to the 
     sequester. This is extremely difficult for his family.
       My daughter works for the State and has not had a raise in 
     years, and pays more for her health insurance and retirement 
     since all the State's woes are blamed on State employees and 
     teachers. Her cut in pay is deep.
       Our family will not be buying a house or a car, going out 
     to dinner or purchasing anything from any local entrepreneur 
     due to these issues. Does this help the economy? Nope. It's 
     time to fix this so that the little people are not being 
     harmed the most.

  Now I'd like to yield some time to my colleague from Minneapolis, the 
cochair of the Progressive Caucus and one of the authors of our budget 
plan for the Progressive Caucus, Representative Keith Ellison.
  Mr. ELLISON. Let me thank you, Congressman Pocan.
  One of the great things about this 113th Congress is that you and a 
number of other awesome new Members have joined us to really lend your 
creativity or expertise to advocating for the American people, the 
American working man and woman. You hail from the great State of 
Wisconsin, which is where I think collective bargaining began.
  Am I right about that?
  Mr. POCAN. Absolutely, Representative Ellison. We are very proud to 
be not only the creator of collective bargaining, but I believe also 
unemployment compensation and other great provisions for workers across 
America.
  Mr. ELLISON. Congressman, you come from a State, ``Fighting Bob'' La

[[Page 3645]]

Follette. We all know about his wonderful legacy.
  And we all love Tammy Baldwin. When she told us she was running for 
the Senate, we didn't know how anybody could fulfill her tremendous 
legacy, but you've walked into this building, and you have stepped up 
right away. So I just want to the say thank you for the work that 
you're doing.
  Just if I may take a few moments to talk about the Back to Work 
Budget.
  There will be all kinds of budgets being discussed. The Republican 
budget authored by Congressman Ryan has already been the subject of a 
lot of conversation.
  I would submit, Mr. Speaker, that the real criteria that we should 
use to evaluate a budget is how well it puts people back to work, and 
that's why we have the Back to Work Budget. The Back to Work Budget is 
about--guess what--putting people back to work.
  Our budget is not an austerity budget. In our budget, we don't try to 
compete with how many people we can lay off and how many programs we 
can shut down. We say to the American people, We don't have a debt 
crisis. We have a debt problem in the out-years, but we don't have a 
debt crisis. Do you know what kind of crisis we've got? A job crisis. 
You know what? We've got to fix it.
  In 1976 when we passed the Humphrey-Hawkins Full Employment Act, 
Americans regarded it as a national outrage that we had 6.3 percent 
unemployment. We have 7.7 percent now. That's way better than at the 
height of the recession. I remember in January of 2009, we were losing 
700,000 jobs a month, and we're now adding them. But we are not adding 
them nearly fast enough.
  I think that a lot of credit goes around due to the fact that we've 
had 36 months of positive job growth, but we don't have enough yet. So 
I think we need a budget that reflects the national priority of putting 
people back to work.
  Mr. Speaker, as the people will stand back and say, well, is this 
budget good or is this budget bad? I'm hearing so much from the talking 
heads on television. I think, Mr. Speaker, the people need to ask 
themselves a very simple question: Does this budget put people back to 
work or not?
  Congressman Ryan's budget, the Republican budget, according to the 
Congressional Budget Office, is going to lay off a lot of people. 
According to the Economic Policy Institute, it would be 2 million 
people in 2014. That's a lot of people. We don't need to be laying 
people off. We need to be hiring them.
  So I want to turn back to you, Mr. Pocan, because I don't want to 
just talk the whole time. But I do want to say, the Back to Work Budget 
is a budget that puts Americans back to work, and I think that's a good 
thing.
  In a moment, we can talk about one of my constituents.
  Mr. POCAN. Thank you, Representative Ellison.
  When you talked about the 2 million jobs that we'll lose in 2014 
alone and the loss of the gross domestic product, there is no question 
that these are the challenges we're facing with the budget before us.
  What we didn't mention is that the only folks who are really going to 
benefit are the most wealthy. Under the plan that's been released by 
the Republicans, they're changing the tax rates and lowering it for 
those who make the most money; and the trillions that it's going to 
cost to make up for that is going to have to come from somewhere, but 
it's not outlined in the budget.
  What does that mean they're going to have to go after? They're going 
to have to go after the very tax breaks that the middle class rely on. 
That means your mortgage interest tax deduction could be on the 
chopping line under the Republican version of the budget. The largest 
investment that the middle class ever make in their lifetime is their 
home, and the fact that we help incentivize that investment so that 
people live in strong neighborhoods and safe communities could be on 
the chopping line. The very fact that you could take away the 
employer's ability to deduct some of their health care costs could be 
on the chopping line. The child tax credit, for people who have 
children who have an opportunity to get back to work but need to have 
their children cared for, helps 25 million people across the country, 
including military families, that could be on the chopping line.
  What they're silent about in the Republican budget is that they keep 
the deduction for corporate jets and they keep the subsidy to oil 
companies and they keep a number of deductions that do not benefit the 
middle class.
  It's not just the jobs, Mr. Speaker, that are costs in the version of 
the budget, the 2 million jobs next year alone on top of the jobs we 
are losing through the sequester that we are facing right now, but it's 
this inequity in the tax system that is once again going to benefit the 
most wealthy at the expense of the many.
  Another thing that I think is worthwhile mentioning as we are talking 
about middle class families is what is going to happen to Medicare.
  My mother is 84 years old. In fact, she lives in the district in 
Wisconsin of the chairman of the committee. She is one of those 
countless seniors that cut pills in half because they couldn't afford 
to be able to afford medication at the time when she was trying to get 
by at 84 with a limited income.
  It's those sorts of things, if we change that into a voucher program 
and we don't keep up that Medicare promise that people will have money 
to keep up with health care costs, that go away. Seniors will pay 
thousands more in the future because of the change by breaking that 
Medicare promise. That's not even talking about the Medicaid changes, 
Mr. Speaker.
  There are so many changes that will cost middle class families that 
we need to make sure we have a more sound version, and that more sound 
version that the Progressive Caucus puts forward is the Back to Work 
Budget.
  The Back to Work Budget will invest right now on getting people back 
into the marketplace and able to have a living and able to work and be 
able to pay taxes. When you have more people paying taxes, as we have 
already shown, three-quarters of the deficit in the next year will be 
due to unemployment and underemployment. By getting people back to 
work, that is the single best way to address the deficit.
  With that, I'd like to yield a little time back to my colleague from 
Minneapolis, Mr. Ellison.
  Mr. ELLISON. Again, Congressman Pocan, thank you for your truly 
spoken words.
  I just want to tell a few folks a couple of things. One is there is 
an alternative to Congressman Ryan's budget and that of the 
Republicans, and it's called the Back to Work Budget. There's going to 
be a Democratic Caucus budget, which I'm sure will put Americans back 
to work, too. But so far, in terms of the ones that have been released, 
the Back to Work Budget is the right budget. Ezra Klein says so. If 
folks want to look at Ezra Klein's recent column today, he says this is 
the right budget. Look at Jared Bernstein. He's thumbs-up on the Back 
to Work Budget. If you want to see economists and noted journalists who 
really scrutinize this stuff, evaluate the budgets, they'll tell you 
about the Back to Work Budget.
  What I'd like to do for a moment, though, is to tell you about a 
constituent, Mr. Mark Krey. Mark Krey asked me to share his story. It 
goes like this:

       I'm a special education paraprofessional at Heritage Middle 
     School. I live in St. Paul, Minnesota.

  That's Mark right there.

       Last year, we had an average of 28 kids per class in middle 
     school. This year, it's up to 35 kids.

                              {time}  1810

       That is like a big jump.
       If a class has special education students, the teacher gets 
     a special education paraprofessional like me to help, so then 
     you have 35 students with two adults in the classroom. That's 
     just not the way to educate our future Americans. Our class 
     sizes keep going up, and the services are going down. More 
     budget cuts would be devastating to my school district and to 
     schools across the country. My coworkers and I would face 
     furloughs and layoffs, and the kids we serve would lose out 
     on the quality education they need to be future leaders.


[[Page 3646]]


  I want to thank Mark Krey for caring about kids with special 
education needs and also for caring, not just about the individual kid, 
but about the system in which the kid's going to school. We can't just 
keep on dis-investing in kids like this, Mr. Speaker. We've got to 
throw the shoulder behind these kids, not abandon them.
  One of the fundamental differences between Republicans and Democrats 
and the Back to Work Budget versus the Ryan budget is that, look, the 
Republicans, I don't doubt their compassion. They care about people, 
and they donate to charities; but it seems like they don't believe that 
government can help anyone. They think, oh, government can't do any 
good. Just cut it and cut it because it can't do any good.
  That's absolutely wrong. All you've got to do is ask a teacher like 
Mark Krey, who every day teaches kids who have learning disabilities 
and who could be awesome, but if their budgets are cut and if there are 
tons of kids in the classroom, they really can't.
  The Back to Work Budget recognizes a central truth, which is that, 
yes, it's the private sector that is a very important part of our 
American culture and part of our American way of life, but it's also 
the public sector and the mixed economy working together that helps 
Americans succeed.
  The Back to Work Budget says we're going to rebuild infrastructure, 
get rid of those crumbling bridges and roads, put in some energy grids, 
fix our wastewater treatment, put in some transit, put in some high-
speed rail. We're going to do that. Then we're also going to engage the 
private sector with the Make Work Pay credit. Then we're going to do 
things like help support local heroes like Mark Krey, who is a 
paraprofessional in the education sector, but also cops. In my home 
State of Minnesota, we're going to have a cut, because of the 
sequester, of $200,000. This is money that we use to train police 
officers to be better and more effective and to serve the public 
better, and we're not going to have that.
  I'm not here to put my friends on the other side of the aisle down. 
I'm here to say they've got another vision of America, and that vision 
of America is that government can't help people and that government 
can't do anything right. They're wrong. The interstate highway system, 
hey, that's government. The interstate highway is government. There are 
police who walk the beat and make sure that the shopkeeper's stuff is 
not ripped off. That's government. So this whole thing about, oh, 
government is always wrong is wrong, and it's time for the American 
people to say responsive government does great things for the American 
people, along with the private sector, and we need to stop this free 
market extremism.
  With that, I'm going to yield back to the gentleman from Wisconsin. 
I'm going to be around a little more. I know we've been joined by the 
gentleman from Florida. I am very happy to have him back in Congress 
after a 2-year hiatus. He was awesome then and he is awesome now, so 
I'll be listening carefully.
  Mr. POCAN. I would like to thank the gentleman from Minnesota.
  As you said, we've heard from Representative Takano from California, 
from yourself and myself from the heartland, and now we have one of the 
most solid Progressives in the U.S. House, a Representative from the 
Orlando, Florida, area, Representative Alan Grayson, to whom I yield my 
time.
  Mr. GRAYSON. Thank you very much. I appreciate that. I want to share 
something with the Representative from Wisconsin and with the Chair.
  We labor here under an awful barrier, and that barrier is this: we 
are required to actually be original. I sometimes am unable to carry 
that burden, and I found something this Saturday that I think was so 
important, so well written, so profound that I am going to yield to an 
article that I read on Saturday in the Huffington Post, written by 
Jason Linkins and Zach Carter, called ``Dow Jones Hits `Record High' 
Thanks to Strong Performances from Smoke, Mirrors Sectors.'' I'd like 
to share that with the gentleman from Wisconsin, the Chair, and with 
anyone else who just might happen to be listening right now.
  The article reads as follows:

       This week, amid the hullabaloo over President Barack 
     Obama's Deficit Dinner Diplomacy and Senator Rand Paul's 13-
     hour filibuster-cum-dissertation on drone strikes and civil 
     liberties, financial news-watchers touted a milestone in 
     their lives of Market Worship. We speak, of course, of the 
     Dow Jones Industrial Average, which on Tuesday hit an ``all-
     time high'' of 14,253. The good times rolled steadily on 
     through the week, and the Dow closed Friday at 14,397.
       Of course, the notion that these were ``record'' highs was 
     not, strictly speaking, true. As Jeff Cox at CNBC pointed 
     out, ``In inflation-adjusted dollars, the Dow would need to 
     hit 15,731 to break the record.'' Nevertheless, the exciting 
     new ordinal number sitting on the stock market index set off 
     a chorus of hallelujahs. After all, this was the highest mark 
     it had hit since October 2007. (Of course, if we recall 
     correctly, that was right around the time that all of our 
     more recent tragic economic events began to occur.)
       The fluctuations of the Dow are typically pored over by the 
     media in the same way that ancient oracles pieced through the 
     entrails of birds, seeking for whatever path might lead to 
     the most prosperity. And in the world of politics, partisans 
     on both sides are quick to point to the Dow as generic 
     confirmation that their policies are working as long as the 
     story suits their narrative anyway.
       And these narratives can get wild and weird and wooly 
     quickly. Seemingly within moments of the Dow's peak, ``Dow 
     36,000'' author James Glassman was on the pages of Bloomberg 
     View, taking credit for this and crowing about how his old, 
     failed predictions were well on the way to coming true.
       Of course, as Jonathan Chait points out, Glassman has to 
     toss out the entire underlying thesis of ``Dow 36,000.'' (He 
     and coauthor Kevin Hassett theorized that the stock market, 
     circa 1999, was being so undervalued that it would have been 
     at 36,000 in the days ahead of the massive tech-bubble burst 
     as opposed to theorizing that ``someday, maybe the Dow would 
     hit 36,000. Probably. You know, just watch'') in order to 
     claim vindication now.
       Former Reagan domestic policy adviser Bruce Bartlett just 
     called Glassman a ``nitwit'' and left it at that.
       All of which leads to an obvious point: although we 
     recognize that the long-term trend of the stock market is 
     that it has an overall upward trajectory--punctuated in 
     snapshots by the susurrations of the greed/fear cycle--it is 
     nevertheless catnip for a lot of wild-eyed prognosticators, 
     and the over-reliance of using the stock market as evidence 
     of economic recovery, or the proof of economic fundamentals, 
     is acute.
       So what does it say about the Dow that it could hit this 
     dizzying new height--impressive by any measure in any era, 
     post-crash or otherwise--at a time when the overall global 
     economic outlook is so dismal and the domestic recovery is 
     barely felt by the citizens who sacrificed their capital to 
     save the world from calamity?
       It says that we should be gravely concerned. It says that 
     we have a two-tiered economy, one where profits flow and 
     another where risks lurk. It says that a lot of people are 
     being left behind, and if October 2007 is any guide, it says 
     that this display of prosperity may simply be an illusion.
       The distribution of the stock market's largesse has been 
     the most un-egalitarian aspect of American economics for 
     years. A full 50 percent of all capital gains go not to the 
     richest 1 percent of Americans, but to the richest 0.1 
     percent, according to The Washington Post.
       But the stock market's persistent upward climb since the 
     spring of 2009 has revealed another massive disparity: the 
     multinational corporate machinery that generates stock gains 
     has become unmoored from the economic reality in which the 
     majority of Americans live and die.
       The Dow hit its peak this week amid a host of gloomy global 
     economic forecasts. Back in January, the World Bank ``sharply 
     reduced its estimate of global economic growth in 2013, 
     projecting that the downturn in Europe and the United States' 
     fiscal problems will continue to weigh on investment and 
     spending.'' The World Bank's take on U.S. growth was 
     similarly dismal--its 1.9 percent forecast for the coming 
     year was less than the most pessimistic estimates of our own 
     Federal Reserve.

                              {time}  1820

       There's no end in sight for the austerity orgy that's 
     exacerbating Eurozone pain, despite the fact that the EU 
     projects that their economy, ``which generates nearly a fifth 
     of global output, will shrink 0.3 percent in 2013.'' 
     (Analysts are currently divided on whether or not China is 
     also experiencing a slowdown at the moment as well.)
       Closer to home, we received a gentle boost from this 
     month's employment numbers: 236,000 jobs were created this 
     past month, pending after-the-fact revisions in the months to 
     come, which is closer to the ideal in terms of keeping ahead 
     of labor market

[[Page 3647]]

     growth and finally digging out of the post-crash hole. The 
     overall unemployment rate has subsequently dropped to 7.7 
     percent. But these numbers can mask a bevy of problems. As 
     Matt Yglesias points out, the situation for the long-term 
     unemployed is becoming a bona fide crisis that calls for 
     ``targeted interventions.''
       And even if the unemployment number continues to drop, 
     there's a real concern over what sort of jobs are being added 
     back to the economy. Will they be the quality jobs that put 
     those entering those jobs and reentering those jobs into the 
     labor force on a sustainable path to household prosperity? Or 
     is everyone heading to a future of toil in Amazon shipping 
     warehouses? It's worth being fretful, because many of those 
     who will be entering the job market for the first time will 
     be carrying student loans out of a period of sky-high college 
     tuition, which taken as a whole may form the backbone of the 
     next great financial crisis.
       Even as the economy has tipped and trended in the direction 
     of what we might normally call--nominally call--``recovery,'' 
     the answer to the question ``Who has recovered?'' reveals 
     some stark contrast.
       As the University of California, Berkeley economics 
     professor Emmanuel Saez calculated, losses in average family 
     income during the Great Recession were felt across the board. 
     Average real income per family declined by 17 percent. And 
     the top income earners took it on the chin a little harder. 
     As the bottom 99 percent experienced a 12 percent drop in 
     average income, the uppermost percentile's income fell by 36 
     percent. As Saez reports, ``The sharp fall in top incomes is 
     explained primarily by the collapse of realized capital gains 
     due to the stock market crash.''
       Of course, the top 1 percent, nevertheless, were largely 
     sheltered from the stresses that afflicted the most 
     vulnerable, as you would expect. What you, perhaps, didn't 
     expect was how the recovery distributed itself across the 
     same groups.
       From 2009 to 2011, average real income per family grew 
     modestly by 1.7 percent, but the gains were very uneven. Top 
     1 percent incomes grew by 11.2 percent while bottom 99 
     percent incomes shrunk by 0.4 percent. Hence, the top 1 
     percent captured not 100 percent, but 121 percent of the 
     income gains in the first 2 years of the recovery. From 2009 
     to 2010, the top 1 percent grew fast and then stagnated from 
     2010 to 2011. The bottom 99 percent stagnated both from 2009 
     to 2010 and from 2010 to 2011. In 2012, the top 1 percent 
     income will likely surge due to booming stock prices, as well 
     as the re-timing of income to avoid the higher 2013 top tax 
     rates. The bottom 99 percent will likely grow much more 
     modestly than top incomes from 2011 to 2012.
       This suggests that the Great Recession has only depressed 
     top income shares temporarily and will not undo any of the 
     dramatic increase in top income shares that has taken place 
     since the 1970s.
       Much of the economic recovery is simply an increase in the 
     value of financial assets--stocks and bonds. And most people 
     just don't own stocks. In 2011, only 21 percent of American 
     adults even had a 401(k) retirement account, according to a 
     HuffPost analysis of data from the Investment Company 
     Institute. Only 52 percent of all adults older than 65 
     receive money from financial assets at all, with half of that 
     set receiving less than $1,260 a year, according to the 
     Pension Rights Center.
       Growth that everyone relies on, like that of home values 
     and wages, has been sluggish. At the end of 2012, the S&P/
     Case-Shiller Home Price Indices were roughly where they were 
     at the beginning of 2009 (which was roughly where they were 
     in the fall of 2003).
       And even as the stock market hits this celebrated peak, the 
     wages that average Americans are bringing home to, you know, 
     ``put food on their family,'' as George W. Bush famously 
     said, those are plunging into a trough, despite measurable 
     gains in overall productivity.
       In fact, as Robert Reich points out, the way those 
     productivity gains are being achieved leaves out workers 
     altogether, and they are coming about as a result of actions 
     taken by policymakers:
       ``Corporations have been investing in technology rather 
     than their workers. They get tax credits and deductions for 
     such investments. They get no such tax benefits for improving 
     the skills of their employees. As a result, corporations can 
     now do more with fewer people on their payrolls. That means 
     higher profits.''
       Reich adds:
       ``Joblessness all but eliminates the bargaining power of 
     most workers, allowing corporations to keep wages low. Public 
     policies that might otherwise reduce unemployment, a new WPA 
     or CCC to hire the long-term unemployed, major investments in 
     the Nation's crumbling infrastructure, have been rejected in 
     favor of austerity economics. This also means higher profits, 
     at least in the short run.''
       In other words, the labor force is being squeezed for the 
     very last drop of productivity, because employers know that 
     they're holding all the cards. If the economy were 
     approaching full employment, discontented or overworked 
     employees would have options and leverage. Right now, they 
     don't. If you've got a job, you need to hang on to it for 
     dear life. That's an environment for scraping out survival, 
     not the economic mobility we rightly celebrate during boom 
     years.
       Another thing to keep in mind is that the Dow is hitting 
     this peak at a time when everyone in the world knows that the 
     debate over sequestration--whose cuts have awesome recession-
     generating powers--has gone into vapor-lock, with the GOP 
     refusing to compromise on raising revenues, through the very 
     tax reform proposals that formed the basis of the party's 
     recent Presidential campaign.
       Everyone has been warned about the consequences of 
     sequestration. It's just that corporate America currently has 
     the fortunate position of being able to greet the news with a 
     shrug, as The New York Times reported this week:
       ``With $85 billion in automatic cuts taking effect between 
     now and September 30 as part of the so-called Federal budget 
     sequestration, some experts warn that economic growth will be 
     reduced by at least half a percentage point. But although 
     experts estimate that sequestration could cost the country 
     about 700,000 jobs, Wall Street does not expect the cuts to 
     substantially reduce corporate profits, or seriously threaten 
     the recent rally in the stock markets.''
       ``It's minimal,'' said Savita Subramanian, head of United 
     States equity and quantitative strategy at Bank of America 
     Merrill Lynch. Overall, the sequester could reduce earnings 
     at the biggest companies by just over 1 percent, she said, 
     adding, ``the market wants more austerity.''
       Well, if that's true, the market is going to love the dire, 
     short-term consequences that the sequestration is going to 
     bring to many Americans closer to the ground level of the 
     economy. Reich rounds up those who will be hit hardest and 
     most immediately. One hundred and twenty-five thousand people 
     are going to lose their rental subsidies. Ten thousand more 
     will be cut off from similar subsidies intended to assist 
     Americans living in rural areas. One hundred thousand people 
     face getting kicked out of emergency homeless shelters, and 
     cuts are coming to unemployment insurance, title I education 
     programs, Head Start, and antihunger subsidies.
       It's not like those who bid on the stock market can't grasp 
     the looming disaster. They're just completely unconcerned. As 
     you may recall, the market didn't exactly take to its 
     fainting couch as the so-called ``fiscal cliff'' loomed, 
     either, despite dire warnings of a market spasm.

                              {time}  1830

       That's what carting off 121 percent of an economic recovery 
     will do for a person safely ensconced atop the income ladder.
       Fittingly, even as the sequestration's hammer is poised to 
     come down, The Wall Street Journal reports that the market 
     for luxury goods is booming. The newspaper characterizes this 
     as evidence of economic robustness, connecting ``the economy 
     has bounced back from recession'' to ``as a result, wealthy 
     Americans are spending freely on expensive clothing, 
     accessories, jewelry and beauty products.''
       The Wall Street Journal quotes HSBC luxury-goods analyst 
     Antoine Belge thusly: ``Trends in luxury consumption in the 
     United States have continued to outperform overall consumer 
     trends.'' This is actually evidence that you and most people 
     you know are getting left far behind in the post-crash 
     economy.
       The average participant in the overall American economy 
     isn't fooled by any of this. They well know what Matt 
     Phillips pointed out at Quartz, that household incomes 
     ``haven't gone anywhere but down.'' As Phillips relates, 
     ``Real median U.S. household income--that's ``real'' as in 
     ``adjusted for inflation''--was $50,054 in 2011, the most 
     recent data available from the U.S. Census Bureau. That's 8 
     percent lower than the 2007 peak of $54,489.''
       He goes on to show that consumer expectations strike a 
     serious contrast from the mood within the Dow Jones revival 
     tent.
       We are led then, inevitably, to a conclusion that we all 
     feel but no one says aloud.

  And, by the way, that's my job, to say all the things that we all 
feel but no one says aloud.

       The American middle class, in other words, no longer lives 
     in a financial economy. But the gold-standard economic 
     metrics that we hold out as the key measurements of 
     prosperity, the economy of Wall Street, of gross domestic 
     product figures, of the Dow Jones Industrial Average, is 
     purely, purely financial.
       For the time being, you can assume that you and everyone 
     you care about is screwed. Congratulations.

  Mr. POCAN. Thank you to the gentleman from Florida. Thank you for so 
eloquently talking about the problems of austerity and this budget that 
is the path to austerity, to continued austerity in this country.
  One of the statistics I think that's really worth mentioning, and 
this is from the Congressional Budget Office, is that from 1979 to 
2007, the top 1 percent of income earners grew 278 percent, or about 
$973,000 per household. In

[[Page 3648]]

contrast, the middle 20 percent grew 25 percent, and the poorest 20 
percent grew 16 percent.
  So the very things that we just heard the gentleman from Florida 
talking about are very real; and that's why the Democrats on the 
committee, when we had a chance to try to amend the Republican path to 
austerity, instead we put out a budget amendment that said we would cap 
no family making $250,000 or less, covering the vast, vast majority of 
Americans, would be held harmless under the proposals presented by the 
Republican budget.
  They would not go along with that amendment because they had to 
protect the tax breaks for corporate jets, and they had to protect the 
tax breaks for oil companies, and they had to protect the other tax 
breaks that they had.
  Now, we brought up that during the Clinton administration the top tax 
rate was at 39 percent, but the economy added 20 million jobs. So at 39 
percent top tax rate, we added 20 million jobs.
  During the Bush administration, we reduced that top rate down to 35 
percent, and yet we lost a half a million jobs. So the argument that 
somehow having a lower top tax rate is going to create jobs is simply a 
myth. We saw that when the Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest were passed 
and we saw no economic recovery. And then when they were reauthorized, 
we still saw no economic recovery.
  But where we did see an economic recovery was when we had the 
stimulus and recovery dollars that came through. And in my State of 
Wisconsin, I was on the Committee on Finance during that time. We had 
to authorize every single dollar that came through in recovery dollars 
in my State. And when we put forward the programs that went and built 
the roads and rebuilt the bridges and built schools, did repairs to 
schools, we had a report by the road building industry and the vertical 
construction industry, not exactly your most progressive organizations, 
that said that 54,000 jobs were saved or created in the State of 
Wisconsin because of those recovery dollars.
  And at the Federal level, in the Budget Committee, the head of the 
Congressional Budget Office, Dr. Elmendorf, I asked him point blank, 
were there jobs created by the recovery, because the same day the 
President gave the State of the Union, the Speaker of this House said 
that no jobs were created from the past recovery. And yet we were told 
by Dr. Elmendorf, from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, 
that up to 3.3 million jobs were saved or created.
  So, again, part of what the Democrats talked about is how could we 
help provide some additional recovery dollars in the Back to Work 
Budget, which would specifically invest in those infrastructure 
projects into our schools, into our police and fire services. So that's 
a little bit about what we talked about down there.
  But one last thing I would like to bring up and talk about that 
happens in the Republican version of the budget that does not happen in 
our version, the Back to Work Budget, the Progressive Caucus Budget, is 
the effect on Medicare.
  Right now, half the people who receive Medicare make $22,000 a year, 
and yet their health care costs are three times that of the average 
person. So some of our folks who are the most low-income seniors, 
who've been relying on the promise that they've paid into their entire 
lives for Medicare, are now having three times the costs of the average 
person, are going to see this new voucher program that, down the road, 
will eventually make them pay more and more immediately, but down the 
road, not keep up with inflation and cause people to make those tough 
choices in a lose-lose proposition, receive less health care or pay 
more for it when you can least afford to.
  That's not fair. That promise that we've had as a Nation through 
Medicare, it's simply not fair to voucherize that program.
  And then when you take the $800 billion in cuts to the Medicaid 
budget, again, that largely goes to seniors in our States, you are 
going to see the access and the ability for senior citizens, especially 
people of modest and middle incomes, diminish because of this budget.
  Now, we agree that the real culprit out there is rising health care 
costs. We have to, in a bipartisan way, address those. But you don't 
address them by balancing the budget on the backs of the people who can 
least afford it, and that's the middle class and the seniors of 
America.
  So when you look at this budget from the Republicans in totality, and 
you look at the cuts to Medicare and the cuts to Medicaid, the 
protection of tax breaks for the most wealthy, for the special 
interests, for companies that outsource jobs overseas, the lack of any 
investment in infrastructure or education, or research and development, 
when you listen to the stories that I've talked about from people from 
my district, from the very same county that Chairman Ryan and I share, 
who talk about devastating impacts of these cuts, we have a budget that 
is misplaced and will affect real people in the middle class.
  I would just like to talk about one final part of the budget that 
really makes it really hard to, on top of all these cuts, think that a 
lot of serious thought went into it, and that's the fact that the 
Republican version of the budget repeals the Affordable Care Act, all 
of the benefits to the public, the millions of people who will gain 
access to health care, but it still takes the revenues brought in by 
the program. And we were told that when we asked questions in 
committee.
  So, on one hand, to take away the program and say you're going to get 
rid of it, and on the other hand, to still take the revenues that are 
brought in by the program makes the budget not a very credible budget. 
And as I've said in committee, and I'll say again, if you're going to 
take those sort of false assumptions and put a budget together, you 
might as well say that we're going to hire leprechauns to take the pots 
of gold at the end of rainbows and count that as revenue, because it's 
about as realistic.
  In the end, the Progressive Caucus is very proud of our Back to Work 
Budget. We are going to invest in infrastructure, we're going to invest 
in public workers, we're going to make sure that we're getting our fair 
share of resources that we need so that government can function to take 
care of the middle class and the people who need it the most. It will 
create 7 million American jobs, reduce unemployment to 5 percent, and 
yet still reduce our deficit by $4.4 trillion.

                              {time}  1840

  It will strengthen Medicare and Medicaid and provide high-quality, 
low-cost medical coverage to millions of Americans. That's what the 
people of the country voted for in November. That's the budget we 
should be putting forward in this country, and that's the budget the 
Progressive Caucus puts out today.
  With that, Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

                          ____________________