Job Losses

Floor Speech

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, I do not intend to speak long. I know we are getting ready to wrap up. I will not interfere with that. But I did not want the day to end without a reminder of the concern that H.R. 1 and the significant, serious cuts it imposes will produce significant, serious job losses. That is not something being manufactured on our side of the aisle. It comes from careful analysis from very neutral forums.

Many people will have seen this graphic already. Chairman Bernanke of the Federal Reserve is one of the observers who has looked at the bill and said it will cut significant jobs. I believe his testimony was that it was not trivial, that it would be hundreds of thousands of jobs. Economist Mark Zandi has advised Republicans and Democrats. He is a neutral, independent economist. He has calculated that the GOP plan would cost 700,000 jobs. When we consider the good news that we have just heard of job growth in the past reporting period, which was, I believe, around 170,000 jobs--less than 200 anyway--the idea of wiping out 700,000 jobs acquires a real scale and a real significance.

Finally, at the bottom is Goldman Sachs. Goldman Sachs is no great friend of the Democratic Party. It is a group of financial advisers and investors who look at data as dispassionately as possible, because if they are wrong, they don't make money. Goldman Sachs has estimated that the spending cuts will hurt economic growth. My memory is, they estimated it would be 2 percentage points off of our economic growth. When we consider that our economic growth is under 3 percent right now, if we take two of the percents out, we are basically getting pretty close to flat-lining the American economy. So prudence dictates that we go about the necessary adjustments to get rid of our debt and our deficit in a way that does not snuff out the gradually emerging recovery.

In my State of Rhode Island, we have just gone from 11.5 percent unemployment down to 11.3 percent. It is still pretty darn serious out there. While clearly things appear to have bottomed out and started to go in the right direction, nothing prevents what everybody calls the double dip. Things such as the gas crisis we are experiencing now have been discussed as potentially creating a double dip. To knock out hundreds of thousands of jobs, to knock 2 full percentage points out of growth out of a ratio that is not much over 3 percent is a very big hit to the economy. It may be wiser to allow the economic recovery to continue a little bit further, as the Bowles-Simpson group recommended, that you couldn't snuff out the recovery early. Let the blaze catch a little more. Let it get going, and then we can move into these areas.

I will come to the floor later to talk about not just prudence but also fairness. There are two issues we need to address as we face up to our debt and deficit challenge. We have to do it prudently. We also should do it fairly. The way the House does it does not meet the standard either of prudence or fairness. On prudence, I think we have pretty strong agreement when Ben Bernanke and Mark Zandi and Goldman Sachs all talk about significant job losses as a result, and fairness is a topic for another day.

I yield the floor.

Source