Stimulus Package
Floor Speech
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Mr. DURBIN. Mr. President, I have been listening to the criticisms of the recovery and reinvestment plan from the other side of the aisle, and I have tried to put them into categories so I can address them and consider them. The first complaint appears to be that this is an $800 billion stimulus package which will add to our deficit.
There is no question about the premise. The facts are right. It is $800 billion, and it will add to our deficit. But I find it interesting that the Republicans who are criticizing this come from the same party which, over the last 8 years, saw America's national debt double from $5 trillion to $10 trillion and they went along with all of it. When the President wanted a war and did not want to pay for it, which added to the debt of the country, they voted for it. The final cost was about $800 billion, and it is still accumulating. When the President wanted tax cuts in the midst of a weak economy, which added to the deficit--and cuts that went primarily to the wealthiest people--his Republican Party supported him and no questions asked.
In fact, the argument for many years was that deficits don't matter, when President Bush was in the White House, during that 8-year period of time. Now deficits do matter. It is an accumulated debt of America. It has a lot of negative impact on our economy. But for a party which ignored this reality for so many years to come and tell us now, in the midst of the worst economic crisis in modern times, that we have to be so careful of the deficit we cannot address this economic crisis, is a little hard to take. That is the first point.
The second point is they criticize this package for costing too much, when in fact on two separate occasions Republican Senators offered amendments to this package which added to the costs dramatically. In the Senate Finance Committee, the Republican Senator from Iowa offered an amendment that added $70 billion in cost to this package. It passed with the support of both parties, I will add. At the end of the day, the package cost $70 billion more, and the Senator from Iowa said he couldn't vote for the final work product because it was too expensive. He had authored an amendment that added $70 billion in cost and then said he couldn't vote for the package because it was too expensive.
Another Senator, from Georgia, added an amendment on the floor--I thought it was a thoughtful amendment--that added in cost $11 billion to $30 billion, by some estimates, to give incentives for people to buy homes. It makes sense. We need help in the housing market. Yet this added expense on the bill, this added amendment, which we adopted, could not win that Senator's support. He too was critical of the final product: It cost too much.
So it is hard to follow why so many Republican Senators are criticizing the President's attempt to get this economy back and moving forward, because they are saying it cost too much, when they introduced and passed amendments which added to the cost of the package. It doesn't follow.
And the third point, made by the Republican leader, who came to the floor today and criticized the compromise--the final bill here that we will consider probably tomorrow night--said they cut back on some of the tax cuts for working families.
It is true. The President's original proposal was $500 for individuals, I think it was up to $70,000 or $80,000 in income, and $1,000 for families. Then when we had to cut back in the cost of the overall bill to win the support of several Republican Senators, the President offered to make a cutback in that area. So when we try to cut back in the cost of the bill to win Republican support, we are criticized for those cutbacks; and when the bill comes to the committee, or to the floor, Republican Senators add amendments that add cost to the bill and then tell us it costs too much. It is hard to follow their logic. I can't.
I am glad that it appears, with our fingers crossed, that there will be at least 60 Senators tomorrow when we vote on this bill that will do something about the state of our economy. This President has inherited the worst economic crisis of any President since Franklin Roosevelt's in 1933. This situation is terrible. It is no Great Depression, thank goodness, but it is terrible. We have lost jobs all over America--500,000 jobs in the month of December--and 36,000 of them, incidentally, in my home State of Illinois. That is 1,200 jobs a day we have lost in my State in December, I am afraid a like number in the month of January, and there is no end in sight.
The President has stepped up and said: We cannot let the American economy slide into this spiral that is going to create so much hardship for workers losing their jobs and businesses closing. We have to do something. We need a solution. We can't stand back and watch the parade go by. We have to step in and try to stop the negative impact of this economic crisis.
Most Americans--in fact, the overwhelming majority of Americans--believe the President is right in trying to solve this problem. He has said, and they understand, this may not be a 100-percent solution. At the end of the day, we may need to do more or something different. But the alternative is to do nothing, and that seems to be the position of many Senators who are opposing this. They want to wait. They want to wait and see if this economy gets better or they want to return to the old-time religion. What is the old-time religion? It is what we tried last April. When the economy was softening, President George W. Bush came to us and said: I know the solution. I know how to get us out of this problem. It is a tax cut.
Well, if you have been around Congress for a while, you know that when it comes to the Republican Party, the answer to every challenge, every issue, every circumstance is a tax cut. We have a surplus. Is the economy booming? Cut taxes. Do we have problems. Is the economy cratering? Cut taxes. Well, tax cuts do have value, but in certain circumstances they may not work effectively. And we found out last April that our $150 billion package--and I think that was the number--that President Bush asked for, enacted by the Democratic Congress, didn't work. I believe it was $300 to individuals and $600 to families. It may have helped an individual family put some money in savings or pay off a credit card, but at the end of the day, when you step back and look at the big picture--the macroeconomic picture--it didn't work. The economy continued to slide downhill.
So the magic elixir of tax cuts, which we hear consistently from the Republican side, even during this crisis, is one that has been tried and failed.
We included tax cuts in this package in an effort to try to win over some Republican votes. It didn't work very well. We got no Republican support in the House and only three Republican Senators who stepped up in the Senate and said they would support it.
What we are trying here is something that is dramatically different; not just tax cuts for working families, which they need, but injecting money into the economy. Why do we need to have the government spending money in this economy? Because Americans are not spending enough of their own money. We anticipate that this year Americans will spend about $1 trillion less on goods and services than they ordinarily would.
We have a gross domestic product of about $14 trillion a year. Well, that is about 7 or 8 percent of it that won't be spent this year. And when you cut back in that much spending, when people are not buying the things they buy--refrigerators and cars and homes and clothing, and all the rest--jobs are lost, businesses contract, and our recession gets deeper. So the President said: Let's put this money into a stimulus or recovery package that will inject new life into this economy and try to get it moving forward again.
It turns out economists--conservatives, liberals, most economists--have said it is worth a try. Historically, it has worked; we should do it now. And the President went further. He said that our goal will be creating or saving 3 1/2 million jobs over the next 2 years. That is an ambitious goal, and I hope we can reach it.
I know those on the other side criticize it. They say: You know what, when you take the total cost of this bill and divide it into the number of jobs, it is a fantastic amount of money for each job. But they have forgotten one basic thing: That new worker in Illinois or in Iowa is not only going to get a paycheck, that worker is going to spend the paycheck. And when the worker spends the paycheck downtown, the people who work at that shop have a job, too. And the people who work at the shop with the job take a paycheck home, and they will go to another shop and spend the paycheck.
It moves through the economy over and over again. So to argue that we are spending so much money for a single job overlooks the obvious, overlooks Economics 101. I think I learned this in Georgetown in one of the first classes. It is called the multiplier. That says if I go out and spend a dollar at shop, then maybe 80 cents of that is going to be spent by a worker there, and on and on. So the dollar may turn out to be worth a lot more in terms of the economic activity.
That is the President's goal, to create enough jobs and save enough jobs to breathe life into this economy to start people moving forward again with confidence in making purchases. That is the bottom line.
It also provides, this bill we are going to consider tomorrow, 40 percent in direct relief to working and middle-class families. I talked about the President's tax cuts. He focuses on the working and middle-class families. I think it is the right thing to do. It is about $400 an individual, $800 for a family. That will give them a helping hand.
It also doubles the renewable energy generating capacity of our country over 3 years. Is there anyone who doubts the President's position that if we are going to have a strong economy over a long term we need to have more
energy independence, we need to have more renewable sustainable sources of energy right here in our country? This bill, this stimulus package, invests in energy for America's future--good energy, reliable energy, energy that we do not have to bargain with OPEC to have in future years to build our economy.
It invests $29 billion in the Clean Energy Finance Authority and renewable tax credits. This is a way to encourage the renewable energy sector. In my State of Illinois, in the State of Iowa and a lot of other States, you see the wind turbines when you drive down the highway. In one section of central Illinois are 240 wind turbines that will generate enough clean electricity to supply the electricity needs of Bloomington-Normal, a large--at least by Illinois downstate standards--metropolitan area. More and more of these need to be built. Solar panels, using wind energy, geothermal sources, all of these are clean, thoughtful, homegrown, and make us less dependent on energy sources from overseas.
There is also a dramatic investment, $150 billion, in infrastructure. Infrastructure is a generic word that does not paint a very specific picture. We are talking about roads and bridges and highways. We are talking about making certain that what we have in our State and States across the Nation is in good repair and safe, and is expanding opportunities for the economy to grow by building these roads and bridges for the future. It is money well spent, as far as I am concerned.
And health care, too. The first casualty for unemployed workers is usually health insurance, so we want to help the families facing unemployment with the costs of health insurance. That to me is money well spent. These families need the peace of mind to know that if somebody gets sick they have a doctor they can go to and a medical bill that at least will get a helping hand to be paid.
There is $25 billion for school construction--no, not for new buildings but modernizing schools. If you bring energy efficiency to a school, it is going to reduce the cost to the school district and to the property taxpayers who sustain that district.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator's time has expired.
Mr. DURBIN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent for an additional 5 minutes.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
Mr. DURBIN. In addition to that, we are going to try to make sure this bill moves us forward when it comes to health care. One of the things we need to do in America, which we have done in the Veterans' Administration, is start putting medical records on computers. The importance of that is obvious to anyone who has visited a modern hospital. You know if a doctor has access to all of your medical records on computer, or a nurse, that they are more likely to make a better diagnosis, come up with better treatment, save money in the process and have a safer outcome. So if we are going to move toward a health care system ready for this century, we need to bring the Internet into the hospital room and into the hospital setting. This bill makes the investment to do that. It is a critically important investment and it is the starting point I think in moving toward the health care system we need to provide for Americans.
There will be critics. Many of them want to do nothing, let the economy solve its own problems. But most of them are not students of history. The last President facing a major economic crisis, who said let's ride it out, was Herbert Hoover. Herbert Hoover, a Republican President during the Great Depression, said things will get better, the economy will cure itself, the market is a miracle. Guess what happened. More and more people lost jobs, more businesses failed, the stock market cratered and Franklin Roosevelt rode to the rescue.
We have to understand that standing back and watching this economy crater is unacceptable. This President was elected last November 4 to bring real change to this town in the way we do business and real change to this economy so we have a fighting chance for excellence in the 21st century. I think he has the right approach.
Let me add another element. There is a big section of this bill that demands accountability. All of us, whether we voted for or against President Bush's attempts to help the economy--all of us were frustrated at the end of the day that so few dollars could be accounted for. We gave them $350 billion. At the end of the day we wanted an accounting--those who voted for it and for the taxpayers. We couldn't get it. We still don't know what happened to the money.
This bill is different. This bill not only is going to provide inspectors general in each of the departments to watch the money as it is being spent, accountability through the States and through the local units of government, but Web sites as well for taxpayers to follow the course of this bill. It is a new level of openness and transparency we have not seen before and it is long overdue. I am glad it is there. I think that kind of openness is what the American taxpayers want to see, too.
They want solutions, they do not want political squabbling. They want to have people working together here rather than like in the House of Representatives, where no Republicans would even support the idea of a stimulus package. They want accountability, transparency--so they know their Federal tax dollars are being spent wisely--and they want honesty too. This President has been honest from the beginning and he said: I believe this will work. The best minds in the economy tell me this will work. If it does not, we are going to try something that does. We are going to be honest with you about the outcome here.
That is the best we can ask from our leaders, that they give it their best effort, good-faith efforts to solve our problems and be honest with us if they do not succeed. We need to succeed. There is too much at stake here.
I have seen it in Illinois. We have seen it all across this country. This particular proposal for Illinois is one I am excited about, creating or saving 148,000 jobs over the next 2 years. We need it. As I mentioned, we lost 36,000 jobs in December. We need to do something to stop this outflow of jobs.
A making work pay tax cut of up to $800 will affect about 5 million workers and their families in my State; 156,000 families are going to be eligible for an American opportunity tax credit, which makes college affordable. When I talk to college presidents, they tell me: I am worried. Kids are coming into the dean's office and saying: Dad's business is going down or Mom lost her job. I may not be able to finish here.
Let's give these families a helping hand, a tax credit so these kids can stay in school. If these young people end up dropping out of school with a mountain of student loans and no degree, that's the worst possible outcome. This will help us avoid it.
An additional $100 a month in unemployment insurance for those who lost their job doesn't sound like much to most families, but for these folks $100 means an awful lot.
We are providing funding sufficient to modernize 412 schools in Illinois so our children have the labs and classrooms and libraries and energy efficiency they need.
We are doubling the renewable energy generating capacity. I think there will be more wind turbines that will be installed in my State. There will be some happy farmers renting their plots of land for that and some communities that will have cleaner energy sources.
This is a bill that looks forward. To those looking in the rearview mirror of what we tried last year and want to try it again--we gave them their chance and it didn't work. It is worth a try now. I am glad three Republican Senators stepped forward and said they are willing to give this President a chance. It shows the kind of bipartisan cooperation we need more of.
I hope at the end of the day even more will vote for this and I hope the next time we debate an important issue on the floor that more Senators from both sides of the aisle will come together to solve the problems the American people face and do the job they sent us here to do.
I yield the floor.
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