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TAKE TWO: THE PRESIDENT’S PROPOSAL TO

STIMULATE THE ECONOMY AND CREATE JOBS

HEARING

BEFORE THE

SUBCOMMITTEE ON REGULATORY AFFAIRS,

STIMULUS OVERSIGHT AND GOVERNMENT

SPENDING

OF THE

COMMITTEE ON OVERSIGHT

AND GOVERNMENT REFORM

HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES

ONE HUNDRED TWELFTH CONGRESS

FIRST SESSION

SEPTEMBER 13, 2011

Serial No. 112–78

Printed for the use of the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform

(

Available via the World Wide Web: http://www.fdsys.gov

http://www.house.gov/reform
(II)

COMMITTEE ON OVERSIGHT AND GOVERNMENT REFORM

DARRELL E. ISSA, California, Chairman

DAN BURTON, Indiana

JOHN L. MICA, Florida

TODD RUSSELL PLATTS, Pennsylvania

MICHAEL R. TURNER, Ohio

PATRICK T. MCHENRY, North Carolina

JIM JORDAN, Ohio

JASON CHAFFETZ, Utah

CONNIE MACK, Florida

TIM WALBERG, Michigan

JAMES LANKFORD, Oklahoma

JUSTIN AMASH, Michigan

ANN MARIE BUERKLE, New York

PAUL A. GOSAR, Arizona

RAU ́ L R. LABRADOR, Idaho

PATRICK MEEHAN, Pennsylvania

SCOTT DESJARLAIS, Tennessee

JOE WALSH, Illinois

TREY GOWDY, South Carolina

DENNIS A. ROSS, Florida

FRANK C. GUINTA, New Hampshire

BLAKE FARENTHOLD, Texas

MIKE KELLY, Pennsylvania

ELIJAH E. CUMMINGS, Maryland, Ranking

Minority Member

EDOLPHUS TOWNS, New York

CAROLYN B. MALONEY, New York

ELEANOR HOLMES NORTON, District of

Columbia

DENNIS J. KUCINICH, Ohio

JOHN F. TIERNEY, Massachusetts

WM. LACY CLAY, Missouri

STEPHEN F. LYNCH, Massachusetts

JIM COOPER, Tennessee

GERALD E. CONNOLLY, Virginia

MIKE QUIGLEY, Illinois

DANNY K. DAVIS, Illinois

BRUCE L. BRALEY, Iowa

PETER WELCH, Vermont

JOHN A. YARMUTH, Kentucky

CHRISTOPHER S. MURPHY, Connecticut

JACKIE SPEIER, California

LAWRENCE J. BRADY, Staff Director

JOHN D. CUADERES, Deputy Staff Director

ROBERT BORDEN, General Counsel

LINDA A. GOOD, Chief Clerk

DAVID RAPALLO, Minority Staff Director

SUBCOMMITTEE ON REGULATORY AFFAIRS, STIMULUS OVERSIGHT AND GOVERNMENT

SPENDING

JIM JORDAN, Ohio, Chairman

ANN MARIE BUERKLE, New York, Vice

Chairwoman

CONNIE MACK, Florida

RAU ́ L R. LABRADOR, Idaho

SCOTT DESJARLAIS, Tennessee

FRANK C. GUINTA, New Hampshire

MIKE KELLY, Pennsylvania

DENNIS J. KUCINICH, Ohio, Ranking

Minority Member

JIM COOPER, Tennessee

JACKIE SPEIER, California

BRUCE L. BRALEY, Iowa
(III)

C O N T E N T S

Page

Hearing held on September 13, 2011 ..................................................................... 1

Statement of:

Taylor, John, Mary and Robert Raymond professor of economics, Stanford

University and George P. Shultz senior fellow, economics, Hoover Institution; Diana Furchtgott-Roth, senior fellow, Manhattan Institute;

Heather Boushey, senior economist, Center for American Progress;

Peter Schiff, CEO, Euro Pacific Capital, Inc.; and Brink Lindsey, senior

scholar, Kauffman Foundation .................................................................... 26

Boushey, Heather ...................................................................................... 49

Furchtgott-Roth, Diana ............................................................................. 33

Lindsey, Brink ........................................................................................... 72

Schiff, Peter ............................................................................................... 64

Taylor, John ............................................................................................... 26

Letters, statements, etc., submitted for the record by:

Boushey, Heather, senior economist, Center for American Progress, prepared statement of ........................................................................................ 51

Furchtgott-Roth, Diana, senior fellow, Manhattan Institute, prepared

statement of ................................................................................................... 35

Kucinich, Hon. Dennis J., a Representative in Congress from the State

of Ohio:

Article dated May 17, 2011 ...................................................................... 7

Article dated May 18, 2011 ...................................................................... 4

CBO report entitled, ‘‘Estimated Impact of the American Recovery

and Reinvestment Act on Employment and Economic Output from

April 2011 Through June 2011 ............................................................. 10

Information concerning mainstream economists .................................... 100

Lindsey, Brink, senior scholar, Kauffman Foundation, prepared statement of ........................................................................................................... 74

Schiff, Peter, CEO, Euro Pacific Capital, Inc., prepared statement of ........ 66

Taylor, John, Mary and Robert Raymond professor of economics, Stanford

University and George P. Shultz senior fellow, economics, Hoover Institution, prepared statement of ...................................................................... 28

(1)

TAKE TWO: THE PRESIDENT’S PROPOSAL TO

STIMULATE THE ECONOMY AND CREATE

JOBS

TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 13, 2011

HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES,

SUBCOMMITTEE ON REGULATORY AFFAIRS, STIMULUS

OVERSIGHT AND GOVERNMENT SPENDING,

COMMITTEE ON OVERSIGHT AND GOVERNMENT REFORM,

Washington, DC.

The subcommittee met, pursuant to notice, at 10:07 a.m. in room

2154, Rayburn House Office Building, Hon. Jim Jordan (chairman

of the subcommittee) presiding.

Present: Representatives Jordan, Issa, Buerkle, DesJarlais,

Kelly, Kucinich, and Cummings.

Staff present: Robert Borden, general counsel; Will L. Boyington,

staff assistant; Molly Boyl, parliamentarian; Adam P. Fromm, director of Member services and committee operations; Linda Good,

chief clerk; Tyler Grimm, professional staff member; Christopher

Hixon, deputy chief counsel, oversight; Justin LoFranco, press assistant; Mark D. Marin, senior professional staff member; Becca

Watkins, deputy press secretary; Jaron Bourke, minority director of

administration; Lisa Cody, minority investigator; Kevin Corbin, minority staff assistant; Ashley Etienne, minority director of communications; Jennifer Hoffman, minority press secretary; Adam

Koshkin, minority staff assistant; Lucinda Lessley, minority policy

director; and Ellen Zeng, minority counsel.

Mr. JORDAN. The committee will come to order.

Today’s hearing is on the President’s job stimulus package that

was just delivered to Congress yesterday.

We will start with an opening statement from the Chair and

then from our friend and ranking member, Mr. Kucinich, then get

right into testimony.

In early 2009, President Obama sold the stimulus as a solution

to the recession and skyrocketing unemployment. The President

worked with House and Senate Democrats to pass the stimulus as

quickly as possible, promising that the unemployment rate would

not go above 8 percent once the bill was passed.

The administration assailed critics by claiming there was a consensus amongst economists that a massive spending bill was in the

country’s best interest. The President and others claimed the stimulus would create 3 to 4 million new jobs. Yet, over two and a half

years later, 1.7 million fewer Americans have jobs at a cost of $825

billion to taxpayers. The unemployment rate has climbed above 8
2

percent, as we all know. It was 8 percent the month the President

signed the stimulus and stayed above that point ever since.

Currently, only 55 percent of Americans have full-time jobs and

25 million Americans are unemployed or cannot find full-time jobs.

That is more than twice the population of the State the ranking

member and I come from. Last month, the U.S. economy had zero

job growth, the first month that has happened since the Second

World War.

No matter how you look at the stimulus, it has simply failed to

live up to the administration’s promises. However, President

Obama has never admitted any failure. Instead, he has continued

to mislead the American people by praising the benefits of the

stimulus package and at times, has claimed ‘‘it worked exactly as

we anticipated.’’ Now the President wants more. Last Thursday, he announced he wanted a new $447 billion stimulus package. The President claimed that this new American Jobs

Act will ‘‘provide a jolt to an economy that has stalled,’’ almost the

exact same language Vice President Biden used to describe the

2009 stimulus when he said it would provide a ‘‘necessary jolt to

our economy.’’

We all know that the first stimulus did not provide that jolt but

the similarities between 2009 and 2011 go beyond the administration’s rhetoric. The Stimulus Part II contains many of the same

spending priorities that failed to create jobs under the first one,

throwing hundreds of billions of dollars in tax money around at ill

advised projects that did not create jobs the first time and will not

create jobs under a second so-called stimulus bill.

We need an honest discussion about our economy and not just

rhetoric. Millions of unemployed Americans are depending on it.

Before we consider the President’s second package, we must examine the results of the first one to learn from them and to prevent

ourselves from making the same mistakes.

I have said many times, if big government spending was going

to get us out of this mess, for goodness sakes, we should have been

out of it a long time ago. That is all the government has done for

the last 3 years. You can even take that back to the previous administration to some degree. This administration has obviously

taken it to a whole new level and as the facts point out, it does

not work.

Instead of rushing to pass additional spending, we need to ensure that any new legislation is carefully crafted and actually facilitates job creation. Today’s hearing brings together economic and

financial experts from a wide array of backgrounds to discuss this

so-called second stimulus. I hope this hearing will bring to bear

what we have learned over the past several years and how we can

move forward to create an environment favorable to job creation

and economic growth, one that is conducive to job creation and not

an impediment to that fact.

With that, I now recognize my good friend, the distinguished

Member from Ohio, Mr. Kucinich.

Mr. KUCINICH. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman.

The most recent figures paint a stark picture of the U.S. economy. Employers did not add any jobs in August and only 35,000

jobs were added over the last 3 months. Unemployment remains at
3

9.1 percent and although the economy added 2.4 million private

sector jobs between February 2010 and July 2011, these gains were

partially offset by the loss of 402,000 public sector jobs at the State

and local level during the same period.

The problem we are facing is growth is too slow. The Economic

Policy Institute just released a report that found there are approximately 11.1 million fewer jobs than needed and 6.8 million fewer

jobs than when the recession started. To bring down the unemployment rate and to stay even with the adult population growth, our

economy should be creating 400,000 jobs per month. As the EPI report notes, over the last 6 months, the economy has added only an

average of 144,000 jobs each month. In August, most private sector

jobs added were in social services or health care.

Mr. Chairman, I have several documents I would like to put into

the record by unanimous consent. The first is the Paul Krugman

analysis. Chairman Issa issued a staff report claiming that the entire stimulus failed. One of the key assertions in this report is that

the stimulus somehow destroyed a million jobs. To support this

conclusion, Chairman Issa’s staff report cites a single study, one

study, an analysis issued in May 2011 by researchers at Ohio State

University. Unfortunately, this study has been widely discredited

by economists because of its flawed methodology.

The first document I would like to enter into the record is an

analysis by economist and Nobel laureate Paul Krugman called

‘‘Stupid Stimulus Tricks.’’

Mr. JORDAN. Without objection.

[The information referred to follows:]
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Mr. KUCINICH. I just want to cite one paragraph. It says, ‘‘So

here is another the stimulus didn’t work paper making the rounds

and as usual being seized upon by people who have no idea what

the issues are with this kind of estimation. The instruments, variables used to correct for possible two-way causation are weak and

dubious. The best interpretation is that the authors tried something that happened to give the results they wanted, then stopped

looking. Really, this isn’t the sort of thing worth wasting time

over.’’

The second analysis I want to be made part of the official record

is an analysis by Dean Baker. This is an analysis that also faults

the methodology of the Ohio State University report.

Mr. JORDAN. Without objection.

[The information referred to follows:]
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Mr. KUCINICH. I just want to quote a paragraph in there that

says, ‘‘With an exercise like this,’’ talking about the report, ‘‘you always have to worry about the problem of cherry picking. For this

reason, you usually want to run your regressions a variety of different ways to show the results do not depend on some arbitrary

specification. It doesn’t look like they’ve done this or at least they

didn’t show much evidence of such robust tests in their paper.’’

Finally, the CBO report, I ask unanimous consent that this be

entered into the record.

Mr. JORDAN. Without objection.

[The information referred to follows:]
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Mr. KUCINICH. This CBO report is cited in the very first footnote

of Chairman Issa’s staff report but the staff report omits the key

passage from the CBO report that undercuts the entire argument

that the stimulus failed. To the contrary, the CBO report says the

stimulus worked. It says this, ‘‘CBO estimates that the ARRA’s

policies had the following effects in the second quarter of the calendar year 2011 compared with what would have occurred otherwise.’’ Here is what they cite.

They raised the real gross domestic product by between 0.8 percent and 2.5 percent; they lowered the unemployment rate by between 0.5 percent and 1.6 percentage point; they increased the

number of people employed by between 1 million and 2.9 million;

and increased the number of full-time equivalent jobs by 1.4 million to 4 million. The CBO report makes exactly the opposite point

as the chairman’s staff report.

The reason I brought this to the committee’s attention is that

there are errors in the staff report and they could cause people to

be misled. I don’t want to belabor the point but I think it is important that the committee is apprised of this so that in our deliberations, we can consider this additional information.

As the Chair knows, I am not someone who is a reflexive supporter of the administration. I don’t think the stimulus went far

enough, but it did do something and I wanted to make sure that

was put in the record.

I thank the gentleman for his time.

Mr. JORDAN. I thank the ranking member.

It is the practice of this committee to swear in all witnesses, so

if you will all stand and raise your right hands.

[Witnesses sworn.]

Mr. JORDAN. Let the record reflect that the witnesses answered

in the affirmative.

In order to allow time for discussion, please limit your testimony

to 5 minutes and your entire written testimony will be made a part

of the record.

I want to introduce our panel. First, we have Professor John Taylor, the Mary and Robert Raymond professor of economics at Stanford University and the George P. Shultz senior fellow in economics

at the Hoover Institution. Thank you, Mr. Taylor, for being with us

again.

We have Ms. Diana Furchtgott-Roth, senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research. Thank you for being with us

this morning.

We have Dr. Heather Boushey, a senior economist at the Center

for American Progress. Thank you for joining us as well.

We also have Mr. Peter Schiff, chief executive officer of Euro Pacific Capital and Mr. Brink Lindsey, senior scholar at the

Kauffman Foundation. Thank you both for being with us this

morning.

We will go right down the list and start with Mr. Taylor. Each

of you has 5 minutes, so fire away.
26

STATEMENTS OF JOHN TAYLOR, MARY AND ROBERT RAYMOND PROFESSOR OF ECONOMICS, STANFORD UNIVERSITY

AND GEORGE P. SHULTZ SENIOR FELLOW, ECONOMICS,

HOOVER INSTITUTION; DIANA FURCHTGOTT-ROTH, SENIOR

FELLOW, MANHATTAN INSTITUTE; HEATHER BOUSHEY, SENIOR ECONOMIST, CENTER FOR AMERICAN PROGRESS;

PETER SCHIFF, CEO, EURO PACIFIC CAPITAL, INC.; AND

BRINK LINDSEY, SENIOR SCHOLAR, KAUFFMAN FOUNDATION

STATEMENT OF JOHN TAYLOR

Mr. TAYLOR. Thank you, Mr. Chairman and members of the committee, for holding this hearing, which is very important.

As both you and the ranking member indicated, unemployment

is tragically high at this point. Also, as you both indicated, the reason for that is economic growth is so low. Businesses are not starting up enough, they are expanding enough and they are not hiring

enough to reduce unemployment from these very high levels.

In my view, based on my studies and others, I think the fiscal

policy response to this so far have been largely ineffective. They

may have even made things worse. They have largely been in the

form of temporary, targeted interventions rather than comprehensive economic strategy. Economic growth in this recovery has been

2.4 percent, almost not a recovery at all. That compares to 6.5 percent in the recovery from the last deep recession. In 1983–1984,

that recovery had a growth of 6.5 percent. I have a chart in my testimony which shows the striking difference.

I do think we need a new economic policy, one that focuses on

sustained higher growth. Unfortunately, the proposal the President

announced last week is really more of the same as what we have

had in the last few years, temporary, targeted programs and now

even with permanent tax increases down the road.

It is much like the 2009 stimulus when you look at it—307 billion of the 447 billion are temporary reductions in tax payments.

We did that in 2009. It didn’t work. When I look at where the

money went and it is very important not to just use regressions,

not just to use models, but look where the money went. When I

look at where the money went, it largely stayed in peoples’ pockets,

they didn’t spend it, it didn’t jump start consumption or the economy.

When we look back at previous episodes like this, these temporary interventions, you see the same thing. In 1975, President

Ford signed one of these. His own council of economic advisorers

said it didn’t work effectively, concluding after that, ‘‘Tax reduction

should be permanent rather than in the form of temporary rebates.’’ Then it was tried in 1977, the same thing, the same assessment.

Fortunately, we had a couple of decades where we didn’t do these

things and economic growth was strong. In 2001, we had one, and

in 2008 and 2009. The record is very clear, these do not work effectively.

$140 billion of the $477 billion is in the form of grants to State

and local governments and other entities to increase spending. This

also we tried in the 2009 stimulus. I looked at this in detail, looked
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at where the money went. It didn’t work. These State and local

governments largely put these funds in their coffers and you see

very little impact on infrastructure. In fact, it went down.

We also have experiences in the past in 1977 and 1978. President

Carter had a jobs oriented program like this, a public works program where money was sent to the States and the same thing happened. We should learn from these experiences, don’t keep trying

these things.

Some say it would have been worse and Mr. Kucinich referred

to some of these studies. They are based on models, people simulate models, they say it will work in advance, they simulate the

same models to show it worked after the fact. It is no new information. They are not looking at where the money went. I hope people

recognize that.

From my point of view, more of these kinds of policies will not

effectively lower unemployment. I think they are a mistake. A

much better approach is to lay out a lasting, permanent economic

strategy. I would build on the Budget Control Act which was

signed this summer that makes some progress. It doesn’t go all the

way but if it brings spending down further, I would bring it to levels just of 2007 as a shared GDP. What is so hard about that? If

you do that, you can do it without increasing taxes, with tax reform

that is revenue neutral and allow for regulatory reform or monetary reform as well. To me, that is the best, most promising way

to reduce unemployment, to get this economy going, much more effective than more temporary, targeted interventions which we have

seen do not work.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

[The prepared statement of Mr. Taylor follows:]
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Mr. JORDAN. Thank you.

Ms. Furchtgott-Roth.

STATEMENT OF DIANA FURCHTGOTT-ROTH

Ms. FURCHTGOTT-ROTH. Thank you very much for giving me the

opportunity to testify today. I would like to submit my written testimony for the record.

I agree with everything Professor Taylor said and I don’t want

to repeat what he said. I would like to move on to the later parts

of my testimony.

One of the thing we are doing increasingly in the United States

is making it harder for employers to hire workers. We run the risk

of getting back to a normal GDP growth path about 2.5 to 3 percent a year but still having employers choose to hire fewer workers

than they did previously. I would like to go through a few reasons

for that.

One is the new health care tax that is going to take place in

2014. Starting from 2014, employers who don’t have the right kind

of health insurance will have to pay $2,000 per worker per year.

Employers who do have the right kind of health insurance but

whose workers have low incomes and the premiums are higher

than 9.5 percent of the worker’s household income will have to pay

$3,000 per worker per year.

This imposes a great disincentive to hiring, moving from 49 to

50 workers after the subtraction for the 30 workers that are exempt, the cost of business, $40,000 a year. You can see that many

businesses are planning ahead. The administration says this tax

only takes effect in 2014, so it doesn’t matter but businesses do

plan ahead.

The tax also affects franchises which are groups of firms. If you

are running a McDonald’s, for example, and it is part of a franchise

of half a dozen McDonald’s, then your number of workers would

very well exceed 49 and you might be competing against another

small independent firm with just 49 workers, you would be at a

competitive disadvantage.

Interestingly enough, the tax doesn’t apply to part-time workers.

The incentive would be for the employers to reduce the hours of

their full-time workers and hire more part-time workers. If you

hire two part-time workers instead of one full-time worker, you are

exempt from the tax. This isn’t the kind of incentive we want to

give employers.

Also, apart from health care, there are different regulations that

make it increasingly difficult to hire. President Obama admitted

this when he put a hold on the ozone regulation. He did that the

week before last saying this is not the right time for such a regulation.

I went to the unified spring regulatory agenda at

www.reginfo.gov and I counted the number of EPA regulations.

There are 308 regulations in process. That means there are still

307 that are moving forward. This doesn’t even count the 36 completed regulations, completed actions. These might seem small. If

you are an employer, say a farmer, there is a regulation that is

going to tell you how you have to feed your cattle and how you

have to dispose of the manure. If you sell pesticides, there is a reg-
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ulation that says what kind of pesticide labeling you have to put

on this. They seem small perhaps to you and me, but to these employers, they are a big impediment for doing business. The EPA

also has major regulations on utilities, boilers, farm dust, greenhouse gases.

Moving on to the Labor Department, the EPA would still allow

coal production, we just wouldn’t be able to use it in our power

plants. We would be allowed to ship it to China, but the Labor Department has regulations on coal dust that would prevent us even

from mining the coal and getting it out of the ground and shipping

it to China for them to use. Again, this affects geographic areas

that are already very much hurt in our recession.

The National Labor Relations Board, in its charges against Boeing for opening a second plant in South Carolina, is sending a

chilling effect to any employer, especially those who want to locate

in the more unionized States. Any manufacturing candidates thinking of perhaps opening a plant on the border, just across the border

in Michigan or Ohio, is thinking if I open this plant, then if I want

to open a second one maybe in Alabama, I won’t be allowed to do

that so maybe I should open the first one further south.

General Electric moved its GE headquarters to China. They

didn’t get any problem from the NLRB. The message goes, if you

offshore your work, you are fine. If you open a second plant here

in the United States, we are going to cause problems.

Finally, in the last 9 seconds, I would like to mention that we

need to do more in terms of importing entrepreneurs. Senators

Kerry and Lugar have proposed a bill that would allow more visas

for employers abroad who want to create jobs here, entrepreneurs.

If they create jobs, after 5 years we give them a green card. This

is the kind of costless reform we need to be considering.

Thank you so much for allowing me to testify.

[The prepared statement of Ms. Furchtgott-Roth follows:]
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Mr. JORDAN. Thank you.

Dr. Boushey.

STATEMENT OF HEATHER BOUSHEY

Dr. BOUSHEY. Thank you, Chairman Jordan and Ranking Member Kucinich, for inviting me to testify today.

My name is Heather Boushey and I am senior economist at the

Center for American Progress, Action Fund.

The American Jobs Act includes proposals that will create jobs

by investing in infrastructure, putting teachers back in schools, targeting tax cuts toward small businesses and helping the unemployed. Independent economic forecasters say the plan will boost

growth and employment. I provide details on this in my written

testimony.

Presidents and Congresses of all political stripes, including the

Bush administration, have embraced short term, temporary fiscal

expansion to create jobs in times of labor market weakness. An empirically grounded body of literature documents the effectiveness of

fiscal expansion and again, I document that in my testimony.

Denying that there was any impact of fiscal expansion in recent

years is an ideological, not empirically based stance. The American

Jobs Act builds on what we know we works to get people back to

work—investments in infrastructure, both human and physical

capital, will put people to work now and yield lasting benefits for

the economy.

These investments should raise U.S. economic output by about $220 billion above what it would otherwise be. It will prevent up

to 280,000 teacher layoffs and keep police officers and firefighters

on the job. It will modernize and upgrade our school infrastructure,

community colleges and invest immediately in highway, highway

safety, transit, passenger rail and aviation.

This is much needed spending. The accumulated backlog of de- ferred maintenance and repair in schools is at least $270 billion.

The American Society of Civil Engineers estimates that we need to

spend at least $2.2 trillion over the next 5 years just to repair our

crumbling infrastructure.

Increased investments in infrastructure have saved or created

1.1 million jobs in the construction industry and 400,000 jobs in

manufacturing through this spring. Almost all of these jobs were

in the private sector. Upgrading roads, bridges and other basic infrastructure not only creates jobs but lowers the cost of doing business and paves the way for businesses, small, medium and large,

to be more competitive. They put people to work earning good, middle class incomes which expands the consumer base for businesses.

The American Jobs Act also cuts payroll taxes and provides a tax

holiday on new hires, but focuses these tax cuts on small businesses. In 2010, 50 House Republicans co-sponsored similar legislation. Tax cuts are an effective way to boost the economy when demand is low although the multipliers are smaller than for other expenditures such as unemployment benefits and infrastructure investments.

The American Jobs Act will help the long term unemployed. Unemployment benefits kept an average of 1.6 million American

workers in jobs every quarter during the recession. During the past
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40 years, Congress has not once allowed benefits for the long term

unemployed to expire when the unemployment rate was above 7.2

percent and as already noted, that is 1.9 points lower than it is

today.

The American Jobs Act will also provide every worker with a payroll tax cut. The typical household earning less than $50,000

will receive about $1,500. This is paid for by limiting itemized deductions and certain exemptions for high income families, taxing

investment fund managers’ income as ordinary income, eliminating

certain oil and gas industry tax breaks and changing the corporate

depreciation rules. This is a good set of pay-fors.

The economy does not have a supply side problem. Since December 2008, the non-financial corporate sector has seen profits rise by

over 100 percent. They are holding almost $1.9 trillion in cash, the

highest level since the fourth quarter of 1959. Recent regulatory

changes are also not the reason for today’s high unemployment.

Let’s go back to basics. As the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission

found, it was a lack of regulation that was a key factor in creating

today’s economic crisis and putting 14 million people out of work.

The problem is demand. The collapse of the housing bubble

drained trillions from our economy, followed by a financial crisis

which has left 14 million people unemployed, meaning that households quite simply have less to spend. There is less money flowing

through our economy.

As Bill Gross, founder and Chief Investment Officer of the

world’s largest bond fund, PIMCO, said recently, ‘‘We need to create a demand for labor. The private sector is not going to do it.’’

The question before this committee is, how will bringing down government spending increase growth when already interest rates are

at record lows and we have trillions that have been taken out of

the economy because of the collapse of the housing bubble. Quite

simply, it won’t.

The National Federal of independent businesses, which represents small business owners, reported in August, as it has each

month since mid-2009, that it is weak sales that is the problem.

There are clear steps we can take to create jobs and the American

Jobs Act is a real step forward.

Thank you for your time.

[The prepared statement of Dr. Boushey follows:]
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Mr. JORDAN. Thank you.

Mr. Schiff.

STATEMENT OF PETER SCHIFF

Mr. SCHIFF. Thank you. My name is Peter Schiff. I guess you can

say I am in the economic and financial gloom and doom business.

Thanks to this body, President Obama, and the Federal Reserve,

business is booming.

I would rather profit from America’s success rather than her failure, which is the reason I am here today. We have some serious

structural problems underlying the U.S. economy and we cannot

solve them until we understand them.

As a Nation, we have borrowed and spent our way into a gigantic

ditch. We are not going to get out of the ditch by digging it deeper.

We have to reverse the mistakes of the past, not repeat them. Government stimulus will never grow this economy. It will never create jobs. It is the equivalent of trying to put out a fire by pouring

gasoline on it.

We have to understand that the housing bubble, the financial crisis of 2008, two events I predicted and warned about, were the consequences of government stimulus. We stimulated our way into this

problem, we are not going to stimulate our way out. In fact, the

stimulus is actually a sedative. The stimulus is preventing the free

market from unraveling the problems that years of bad monetary

and fiscal policy have created. We don’t need more spending, we

need the opposite of spending. We need under consumption. What

the economy lacks is savings, investment, production.

If we try to preserve the jobs of the bubble economy with more

reckless money printing, borrowing and government spending, all

we are going to succeed in doing is preventing the restructuring we

need and preventing more productive jobs from ever coming into

existence.

I want to talk specifically about jobs. I am an employer. I employ

about 150 people. I would probably employ 1,000 more if it weren’t

for government regulations that have inhibited my ability to hire

and grow my business and have forced me to move portions of my

business overseas in order to escape the regulatory burden here.

The question is, why do I hire people, where are these jobs coming from? Jobs in a free market come from two things. They come

from profits or the profit motive and they come from capital. You

need both to create jobs. In a free market, there are going to be

jobs and if there aren’t enough jobs, Congress has to ask what are

we doing to inhibit this process. How are we preventing jobs that

would normally be here from coming into existence?

In order for me to hire somebody, I have to be able to make a

profit. That means the person I hire has to deliver to me more

value than the cost of employing them. The cost of employing them

is not just the wages I pay them, but all the mandatory benefits,

the taxes and more importantly, the legal liability that I incur

when I hire somebody.

In fact, one of the riskiest things you can do in America is to hire

somebody. Because of that reason, because of all the liability from

government, from lawsuits, that you have put on employers, most

small businesses’ main concern is how not to hire people. How can
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I grow my business and hire as few people as possible, that is not

something that happens in the market. That is something that

happens as a consequence of government.

The other thing you need to create jobs in addition to profit is

capital. People work for me because I have capital. I have tools

that my employees lack. They come to work, I give them an office,

I give them secretarial support, I give them computers, I give them

leads, I give them brand. I give them all sorts of things, but where

does capital come from? It comes from savings, from under consumption. Either I have to save it myself or I have to borrow it

from somebody else.

There is no money to borrow because it is all going to government or something that government guarantees like education or

home mortgages. There is no credit available for small businesses.

It is actually a paradox but what we need is higher interest rates.

Higher interest rates encourage savings. These low interest rates

are of no benefit to typical businesses.

Yes, it benefits government. Government can borrow all this

money from the bond market. Some of the major corporations have

access to cheap money. Wall Street can gamble with it, but small

businesses can’t sell bonds. They need to borrow money and there

is no savings available. There is nothing there, so businesses can’t

get capital and there is no incentive to hire because the costs are

too high.

You are looking at somebody who was actually fined—I am happy to talk from my experience—$15,000 by security regulators

because I hired too many people. Because I hired too many people,

I incurred over $500,000 in legal bills defending myself because I

hired too many people.

Because I hired too many people, I have been in a hiring freeze

ordered by regulators for 3 years. They will not let me hire people,

they will not let me open new offices, despite the fact that I was

dying to do it. I had plenty of demand, my business was growing,

unfortunately, thanks to what you guys were doing, but regulators

prohibited me from doing this.

There are all sorts of ways that rules and regulations have inhibited my business. In fact, it is now so expensive, I started my securities firm in 1996, there is no way I could have started that firm

today. I have an entire compliance department and it costs me millions of dollars a year just to stay in business just to comply with

rules and regulations that are not doing anything to protect my

customers.

[The prepared statement of Mr. Schiff follows:]
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Mr. JORDAN. Thank you, Mr. Schiff. We appreciate that.

Mr. Lindsey.

STATEMENT OF BRINK LINDSEY

Mr. LINDSEY. Mr. Chairman, members of the subcommittee,

thank you very much for the opportunity to appear at today’s hearing.

Everyone knows that the current employment situation is dire.

What is less well known is the roots of our present jobs crisis go

deeper than the great recession that began in 2008. The share of

adult Americans who are employed peaked at an all time high of

64.4 percent back in 2000, 11 years ago, and never recovered since.

In 2007, before the financial crisis of 2008 and the ensuing recession, the employment to population ratio had fallen down to 63 percent. It now stands at 58 percent, the lowest level since 1983.

For public policy to be effective in dealing with this grim situation, it needs to be based on a clear understanding of where jobs

come from. On that question, research from the Kauffman Foundation, my employer, leaves no doubt new firms are the main engine

of job creation in this country. Specifically, from 1977 to 2005,

there were only 7 years in which existing firms created more jobs

than they destroyed. The bottom line is simple, without startups,

there would be no net job creation in the United States.

Additional Kauffman Foundation research reveals that the engine of new jobs began sputtering before the great recession. Census data show that the number of new employer businesses created

annually began falling in 2006, dropping 27 percent by 2009.

Meanwhile, the average number of employees for new firms has

been trending gradually downward since 1998 and the pace of job

growth at new firms during the first 5 years has been slowing since

1994.

The timing of deteriorating employment situations suggests the

problem is structural, not merely cyclical. Structural problems call

for structural solutions, not temporary stimulus but permanent policy changes.

Specifically, the ultimate answer to restoring prosperity and vigorous job growth lies in policy reforms that create a favorable environment for the creation and growth of new businesses. Barriers to

entrepreneurship need to be identified and systematically dismantled. This conclusion is further supported by my own research into

the growth challenges confronting not only the United States but

all advanced countries operating at the technological frontier.

My findings regarding what I call frontier economics can be summarized as follows, the available sources of growth and the policy

requirements of growth change over time with a country’s advancing economic development. What may work at one stage of development won’t work in another. In particular, as countries get richer,

they become ever more heavily dependent on homegrown innovation as opposed to merely expanding existing opportunities or borrowing good ideas from abroad in order to keep the growth machine humming.

Since new firms play a vital role in the innovation process, that

means that removing barriers to entrepreneurship becomes increasingly important to maintaining economic dynamism and pros-
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perity. In an effort to identify the kinds of policy reforms needed

to reduce structural barriers to entrepreneurship and job creation,

the Kauffman Foundation unveiled in July of this year a series of

legislative proposals that we call the Startup Act of 2011.

Let me review the major elements of this plan: an entrepreneur

visa along the lines of the revised Lugar Startup Visa Act; green

cards for foreign students that receive so-called STEM degrees, degrees in science, technology, engineering and mathematics; exemption from capital gains taxation for investments in startups held for

at least 5 years; 100 percent exclusion from corporate income tax

for qualified small businesses on their first year of taxable profit;

followed by a 50 percent exclusion over the next 2 years; allowing

shareholders of companies with market valuations under $1 billion

to opt out of Sarbanes-Oxley requirements since those requirements are supposed to protect shareholders, then we think shareholders should be able to have a say as to whether they want that

protection or not; higher fees for better, faster service at the Patent

and Trademark Office to clear the backlog at the PTO, I believe

that provision is included in the patent reform legislation now

nearing completion; mandate that all Federal research grants to

universities be conditioned on universities affording their faculty

members the ability to choose their own licensing agents rather

than having to rely as they do at present on their own university’s

technology licensing office; institute a requirement that all major

regulatory rules sunset automatically after 10 years; subject all

proposed and existing major regulatory rules to uniform cost benefit analysis; and institute monitoring of the business climate in

States and localities along the lines of what the World Bank’s doing

business report does for different countries.

The proposals contained in the Startup Act can represent a kind

of greatest hits collection from a far broader set of promising reform ideas. Some of these other ideas can be found in a book published this year by the Kauffman Foundation entitled, ‘‘Rules for

Growth.’’ A great deal of additional work will need to be done beyond these proposals, but in the current crisis, first steps are urgently needed. We believe the proposals put forward in this Startup Act would make excellent first steps toward restoring job creation and prosperity.

Thank you.

[The prepared statement of Mr. Lindsey follows:]
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Mr. JORDAN. Thank you, Mr. Lindsey.

Mr. Schiff, your testimony actually reminded me of a comment

a friend of mine made to me several years ago, 5 or 6 years ago,

actually, him and his brother. The older one said to me, Jim, I love

being in business, I hate being an employer. I hate being an employer because of all the stuff you make us do, and he pointed right

at me, talking about government.

It is not that Mike doesn’t like people or want to hire them, it

is just he said exactly, may be not as eloquently as you put it, but

exactly what you said—all the regulatory things that government

makes him do is what makes it so tough for people to hire.

I think Dr. Boushey talked about $1.9 trillion that companies are

sitting on and they are sitting on this I believe as sure as I am sitting here for exactly the reason that Ms. Furchtgott-Roth talked

about, they are looking at what is coming. There is no definitive

answer on health care and we are not going to get one maybe 14

months, maybe the next election. There is no definitive answer on

what is ultimately going to happen, so they know they have to hold

some money for that.

I would make this case, and this is what I want you to comment

on, this idea that the spending, the deficits we are running, piling

up the debt we are piling up, the job creators out there deep down

understand they are probably going to have to pay for that too. At

some point, that has to be paid off. I would argue that may be more

than anything is the biggest uncertainty they face. I think there is

a huge link between the spending and the failure to create jobs.

Talking about the spending and then also the regulatory issue.

Senator Johnson has a bill which simply says no more, no more

new regulation, stop the damage where it is. I want your thoughts

on that, plus this link between the spending and job creation. We

will start with Professor Taylor and go done the line.

Mr. TAYLOR. I think a moratorium on new regulation would help

a lot, absolutely. You heard the testimony here that confirms that

and I have seen it myself. Firms are sitting on a huge amount of

cash. Not all of them have it but a large number do, so that would

remove a lot of uncertainty.

The second part of your question, I do think the debt and the uncertainty about how it is resolved creates uncertainty. Will there be

a tax increase? Will there be inflation? Will there be deflation?

There is just a huge amount of uncertainty. By outlining a coherent

strategy to deal with that debt that is credible would be the best

stimulus I can think of.

Mr. JORDAN. The one word I have heard more than anything else

over the last 3 years relative to our economic situation and the lack

of growth is uncertainty. I fail to be convinced how so-called temporary fixes alleviates the underlying uncertainty.

Mr. TAYLOR. I think it makes it worse. Even the people who use

these models to say it is going to boost the economy, always emphasize it is short term. It is not a fixing growth. Even if it works,

as some of them say—which I don’t believe it will—they predict a

few months from now, we will be back in the same dismal place.

That is what the models are saying.

Mr. JORDAN. Thank you.
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Ms. FURCHTGOTT-ROTH. Yes, I think a moratorium on new regulations would be very helpful also, a hold on all existing regulations

that are right now going through the Notice of Proposed Rule and

Comment. I would add to include those.

I would add to the uncertainty, not just over the debt, but also

over taxes. You recall that in December, we went through a whole

discussion, debate as to what to do with taxes. Finally, they were

kept at the current level for the next 2 years. In every speech,

President Obama says he wants to raise them. He just proposed

raising them yesterday in the bill he sent to Congress.

Even though Congress said taxes were going to remain the same,

no, the President is sending a completely different message.

Mr. JORDAN. Nine months later, we are changing already. There

is a proposal to change that.

Ms. FURCHTGOTT-ROTH. Yes, that is right. In every speech he

has, he says millionaires and billionaires should pay more by which

he means people earning over $200,000 a year in his specific proposals.

Mr. JORDAN. Thank you.

Dr. Boushey.

Dr. BOUSHEY. I want to make three quick points. First, on the

issue of regulations, I think we need to be very careful that we are

very specific about what we are talking about. In today’s New York

Times, for example, there was an article about whether or not the

FDA would regulate new forms of e coli in our hamburgers. That

creates a level playing field so every producer knows it, everyone

else needs to make sure they are not allowing hazardous foods,

that is an important regulation and certainly it costs businesses

money, but that is important for consumer health. I don’t know

when I see that hamburger what is in inside of it. That is critical,

so there is sort of blanket regulatory stuff and we need to dig down

deep into that.

Second, we had an over 8 percent drop in GDP because of the

crisis. That is a massive hole to fill. I concur with my colleagues

over here that it may have been that the housing bubble had an

elevated level of demand flowing through the economy because of

the housing bubble but that doesn’t change the fact that when you

pull it out of the economy you have a gapping hole and that has

left 14 million people out of work.

It is that hole that government spending, is the only entity, right

now can fill unless we are going to dramatically increase our experts.

Very quickly, my third point around this uncertainty question.

Certainly there is always uncertainty in an economy, but I think

we should have been asking ourselves in the early 2000’s how we

were going to pay for the massive tax cuts that we did when we

were also having to unfunded wars. I didn’t hear as much discussion around that then but those are the kinds of questions we

should have been asking and a part of why we are here today.

Mr. JORDAN. Mr. Schiff.

Mr. SCHIFF. First of all, demand doesn’t come from government

spending; inflation comes from government spending. Demand

comes from supply. You can’t consume something that isn’t produced. We have to make things first.
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As far as regulations are concerned, certainly we need to stop piling new regulations on top of the existing regulations. More importantly, we have to start repealing a lot of the rules and regulations

that are already in place. There are millions of Americans unemployed. How do we increase the demand for labor. It is simple. You

bring down the cost of labor. Regulations substantially increase the

cost of employing people and as a result, fewer people are employed.

There are simple things you can do from getting rid of the minimum wage law, which you can do this afternoon, which would create millions of jobs and more importantly, help people get trained

for much higher paying jobs in the future. Right now, they are

never going to get jobs.

The regulations that increase labor costs and that subject employers to all sorts of lawsuits if they don’t create jobs in precisely

the manner that some bureaucrat thinks they should be created

you have to level the playing field between employers and employees. You can’t lose your rights because you hire somebody. You

can’t give workers some kind of special privilege and then call it

worker’s rights. Workers don’t have special rights because they get

a job. Everybody has individual rights and you shouldn’t lose them

because you hire somebody.

Mr. JORDAN. Mr. Lindsey, can you be brief because we want to

get to Mr. Cummings.

Mr. LINDSEY. I sympathize with the idea of a regulatory moratorium, but I would point out that too is another temporary fix. That

moratorium won’t last forever, nor should it. What we need is a

permanent change in the regulatory process. A couple of the proposals in our Startup Act go to that.

First is cost benefit analysis instituted uniformly for all major

new rules and second, even more importantly, 10 year sunset provisions for all major regulatory rules so they have to be reapproved

and not just go on forever.

Mr. JORDAN. Now I want to go to the ranking member of the full

committee, the gentleman from Maryland, Mr. Cummings. You

may have some extra time. I apologize.

Mr. CUMMINGS. Thank you very much.

In a day and age when China is spending 9 percent of their GDP

on infrastructure, we are spending less than half of a percent. In

Maryland in my district in the State of Maryland, about every half

a hour a pothole is opening up. In other words, the pipes burst. We

have bridges in disrepair. President Obama is about to go to Ohio

and talk about 95 bridges that are in disrepair.

At some point, there is no one in this room who, if you had a

house, you would repair it and maintain it because if you don’t

maintain it, it will fall apart from the inside. It seems to me that

the portion of the American Jobs Act that addresses infrastructure

is so very, very, very important.

It makes no sense if you are riding down a road, like the bridge

in Minnesota, on your way home from work, kids in the backseat

in one of the greatest countries in the world and the damn bridge

collapses. At some point, we need to say, wait a minute, let us get

this right. China is about to build 100 airports and we are spend-
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ing less than half a percent on our infrastructure, something is

wrong.

The thing that gets me is we seem to go to the ring around the

roses thing. Folks say don’t tax the rich in a recession but still the

very people who have worked for this committee will probably end

up taking a 10 percent pay cut. They say, what about them in a

recession, what about the secretary who is only making $50,000

who wrote some of the thing we are asking this morning. What

about her and her two kids?

Then we say, uncertainty. That is the thing we just went through

creating some of the greatest uncertainty that could exist. We saw

that. People look at us like we were fools and they were totally disgusted. They said, they can’t even get it together to pay the debts

we have already made, not the debts that are coming but the debts

we have already made. We saw what Standard and Poor’s did.

The other thing I guess concerns me is when we talk about regulations, it is interesting we act like President Obama’s administration was the only administration that created regulations. He has

only been in office 21⁄2 years. Most of these regulations were created over the years, so now we say, let us take away the regulations.

Let me tell you what worries me. I used to be an employer of a

small law firm. One of the things that worries me is that we give

the tax cuts to business who are not hiring; we look out for the

banks who are not lending; if we cut out the regulations making

it possible for business to make even more money—and by the way,

there is no guarantee when you get rid of the regulations that it

is going to lead to them hiring more people, even if they are saving

money because the issue still becomes uncertainty, so we go to ring

around the roses.

At some point, we have to say wait a minute, let us get off this

merry go round and begin to create jobs for people. When they look

at this, when they hear this, the people in my district, I can hear

them now. If they are watching, when I get home tonight, they will

say, Cummings, they don’t get it. They don’t get that I was not able

to pay for my kids’ tennis shoes when they got ready to go to junior

high school. They don’t get that I am losing my house.

In some way, we have to figure out how do we come together to

begin to address these issues. I just think there are solutions but

when people say, government doesn’t need to play much of a role—

government does have a role. Private business has a role. All of us

know that 70 percent of GDP is dependent on consumer confidence.

I keep hearing about regulations. I have said in this committee—

and you have probably heard me say it, Mr. Schiff, and thank you

for coming back to us again—that when I was in high school, I

used to work at Bethlehem Steel. When I would go to Bethlehem

Steel during the summer to work, when you came out if you blew

your nose in a half hour of being on the premises, black stuff came

out in your mucous.

I think we need to be careful with regulations and we need to

keep in mind why we have regulations. They are to protect the

health, welfare and safety of Americans, of our children. I don’t

want my child to have to go to Bethlehem Steel—if it was still in

existence—and when he blew his nose, stuff comes out like what
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happened to me 40 years ago. I don’t want that. We are better than

that.

I just think there is some kind of way that government does have

a role. I think repairing our infrastructure is extremely important.

I think that will spur on folks working. I see it in the neighborhoods. You can say what you want about the stimulus bill, but I

can bring in a room full of people who will tell you if it were not

for the stimulus bill, they would not have had jobs. I know that it

has an effect. I think any stimulus type of action needs to be carefully planned and I think it needs to be very targeted, but it has

a role.

Then business needs to do something for us, the businesses that

have benefited tremendously from Americans when the times were

good, may be they need to say, it is time for us to start doing some

things too and staying here in this country and making it in America, as Steny Hoyer says.

Dr. Boushey, would you comment on what I just said? I only

have 20 some seconds.

Dr. BOUSHEY. You made some very eloquent points. One thing

about infrastructure that we fail to talk about is how much it benefits small, medium and large businesses in America. You talked

about the importance for jobs and infrastructure investments and

keeping up with China.

I think about the small business owner across the street from me

who runs a restaurant and over the past few years, the water main

has broken three times, so each time his business closes and he

talks about how hard it is. Now because of recovery dollars, they

are out there repairing those pipes, giving us new pipes. They are

a hundred years old here in the District of Columbia. That is fantastic. That is exactly what we need to be doing so he can be competitive and so America can compete in the 21st Century economy.

I think it is exactly what we need to be thinking about.

Mr. CUMMINGS. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Mr. JORDAN. Before going to the ranking member, I have one

question that I think Mr. Cummings raised.

Professor, did S&P downgrade the bond rating of the United

States of America, in your judgment, because we had a vigorous debate in Congress about what should happen relative to the debt

ceiling or did they down grade us because the deal that was put

together didn’t address the gravity of the problem?

Mr. TAYLOR. They mentioned the ongoing accumulation of debt

they saw coming down the road and that had not been changed

enough by the budget deal. People think they commented on the

way the budget was put together. I think it represents an accomplishment, that something was done. Something actually was done

compared to the first budget that the President submitted in February of this year, there is a substantial change in direction from

that deal. So I think there is some positive there, but I think S&P

was looking at the fact they wanted more.

Mr. JORDAN. Ms. Furchtgott-Roth, if you could briefly comment.

Was it the vigorous debate that caused the downgrade or was it the

deal put together and the lack of real spending reductions and savings?
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Ms. FURCHTGOTT-ROTH. Before the downgrade, they said they wanted to see $4 trillion in debt reduction over the next 10 years.

That was under discussion at some part of the process but then it

fell by the wayside. If they had had the $4 trillion in debt reduction, then my impression is they would not have done the downgrade.

I agree that infrastructure spending is very important. It does

not mean that is necessarily a role for the government. In Europe,

there are many examples of roads and bridges being leased to the

private sector over a period of years and they do the repairs themselves.

Mr. JORDAN. Dr. Boushey, real quickly, which is it, vigorous debate or the deal itself?

Dr. BOUSHEY. I think it was both but I also want to note these

are the folks who weren’t able to call the housing bubble and did

not sufficiently downgrade many of the firms that led to the financial crisis.

Mr. JORDAN. Nevertheless, it is the first time in 70 years the

U.S. bond rating was downgraded.

Dr. BOUSHEY. It certainly was, but other people say similar

things.

Mr. JORDAN. You say it is both. Which one had more weight on

their decision?

Dr. BOUSHEY. In their view, in their statements, it was what

Diana Furchtgott-Roth said, about them wanting a bigger deal.

Mr. JORDAN. Think about what the deal was, a $14 trillion debt;

we raise it $2.4 trillion; we got $21 billion in savings the first year.

I always tell folks you have to put it in family terms. A kid gets

a credit card, runs the bill up to $14,000 and says that is not

enough. Goes to the bank, the bank says, we will give you $2,400

more but you have to promise us over the course of the next year,

in your budget, that you plan on spending, you will spend $21 less

than you planned on spending. That was the deal.

I would argue Standard & Poor’s downgraded us because the

lack of the deal, the agreement addressing how serious this situation is. To insinuate that it was because Congress had a vigorous

debate, I thought that was what we were supposed to do in Congress.

Dr. BOUSHEY. Congress is certainly supposed to have a vigorous

debate. Part of the puzzle though was this Congress refused to put

raising taxes, especially on the wealthy, as a part of that package.

That would have been an important way to get to the goal that

S&P wanted.

Mr. JORDAN. And an important way to tax the people who create

jobs too.

Dr. BOUSHEY. And that caused the crisis.

Mr. JORDAN. The good doctor from Tennessee next and then the

ranking member.

Mr. SCHIFF. It was definitely the deal, not the discussion. With

due respect, I did call the financial bubble and I criticized S&P and

Moody’s and Fitch at the time for putting AAA ratings on bonds

I knew were going to go to zero. In my opinion, S&P didn’t downgrade the United States far enough. That is the problem.

I would love to address some of Mr. Cummings’ points.
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Mr. JORDAN. Make it quick because I want to get to the ranking

member.

Mr. SCHIFF. He made so many points, but you are right about

one thing. The bad regulation didn’t start under Obama. We have

a lot of regulations that need to be undone. It is not just the intent.

I don’t argue that in some cases the intent of the regulation is

good; the problem is the consequences are the exact opposite of the

intent.

Infrastructure spending doesn’t stimulate the economy; it drains

the economy of resources. Infrastructure only helps in the long run

when you finish the project if it raises the productivity of the Nation. In the meantime, we are too broke. China can put in these

airports because they are rich. We are broke.

Before we can afford to improve the infrastructure, we need to

have more serious restructuring of our economy. We have to start

making stuff. We need more factories before we can start figuring

out how to make our roads prettier.

Mr. JORDAN. Mr. Lindsey, real quick, was it the debate or the

deal?

Mr. LINDSEY. I can’t speak for S&P, I don’t work there and

wasn’t privy to all their deliberations.

From my own perspective, the combination of an utterly

unsustainable fiscal situation and a political process that does not

look it is terribly serious about coming to grips with it, merited an

alarm bell.

Mr. CUMMINGS. Fifteen seconds.

Mr. JORDAN. Fifteen seconds for the ranking member.

Mr. CUMMINGS. Let me just say this. I have read this fifty million times. Their concern was that there were Members of Congress

that were going around talking about not raising the debt ceiling.

That was one of their major concerns and saying, we don’t have to

do that.

Mr. SCHIFF. That is what you should have done. If you didn’t

raise the debt ceiling, then we could have cut spending. You said

we were paying our bills. We don’t pay our bills by going deeper

into debt. That is avoiding paying our bills and guaranteeing eventual default.

Mr. JORDAN. The gentleman from Tennessee is recognized.

Dr. DESJARLAIS. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

I was one of those guys going around saying we shouldn’t raise

the debt ceiling without significant cuts. We saw what happened

because we didn’t get significant cuts. I am all in favor of rebuilding our infrastructure and making our bridges safe. We had a

bridge in Minnesota that collapsed years ago and that has become

the poster child for our failing infrastructure. We have millions of

bridges that work just fine.

The point is what I don’t get is how we are going to pay for this.

We continue to borrow and spend money. We have a Stimulus II

coming up that we need to talk about here a bit to see if it is feasible and how it is going to be paid for, but I do agree with Mr.

Cummings that it doesn’t really matter where these regulations

came from, the fact is there are two darned many.

In the American Jobs Tour and my stops across Tennessee, the

number one complaint and impediment to job growth, according to
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the 30-plus industries I visited, is we need to get government out

of the way. We are simply not doing that with this. We are looking

at 219 new regulations by this President costing over $38 billion

and this new proposed plan is going to show an increase of 10,000

new regulators a year. Certainly that doesn’t seem to be solving the

problems they were set out to do.

As far as paying for this, Dr. Boushey said that it is time to increase taxes on the rich or we going to back into this spread the

wealth mentality to get ourselves out of the problem. How exactly

do you think that is going to solve the problem and as far as the

taxes on the rich and removal of the deduction in the charitable

contribution area, can you comment on that and how you think

that is going to solve the problem?

Dr. BOUSHEY. As many of us have discussed today, we clearly

have a long term deficit problem, we have a gap, we have a challenge there. One of the things we have seen over the past few decades is America has become a fairly low tax country. One of the

things we have done is extended these tax cuts on the wealthiest.

Dr. DESJARLAIS. Let me interrupt. Do we tax too little or do we

spend too much as a government? Look at our deficit.

Dr. BOUSHEY. Exactly. Relative to other countries, we are a relative low tax country and we are not a relative high spender.

Dr. DESJARLAIS. Are we a high spending country or not?

Dr. BOUSHEY. No, not relative to our GDP and relative to other

countries.

Dr. DESJARLAIS. How did we get in this mess?

Dr. BOUSHEY. I would be more than happy after this to send you

a series of charts that document this.

Dr. DESJARLAIS. Do you think closing the loophole on charitable

contributions is going to hurt charities?

Dr. BOUSHEY. That is only for wealthy families and I think over

the long run, no.

Dr. DESJARLAIS. Wealthy families over what amount, $250,000?

Dr. BOUSHEY. Two hundred fifty thousand dollars.

Dr. DESJARLAIS. That is a wealthy family. Who do you think

gives the most to charities?

Dr. BOUSHEY. It is a wealthy family and those are families in the

very top of the U.S. income distribution. Those are families that

have benefited from economic growth over the past few decades

while other families have not, so they have benefited more from the

2000’s, more during the 1980’s, more during the 1990’s than middle

class and lower income families, so asking them to pay their fair

share does seem like an appropriate place. If we are all focused on

closing that deficit, it has to come from somewhere. It can’t come

from families that have not seen income gains.

Dr. DESJARLAIS. Mr. Schiff, do you have a comment on that?

Mr. SCHIFF. As Dr. Boushey, what percentage of my income do

you think the government should take? What would be fair?

Dr. BOUSHEY. I am not going to give you a number here.

Mr. SCHIFF. Just guess. What do you think would be fair? You

say I am not paying enough taxes, how high should my taxes be.

What percentage of my income should be taken away from me by

the government?

Dr. BOUSHEY. We have a progressive income tax structure.
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Mr. SCHIFF. What do you think—half, 60 percent, 70 percent?

Dr. DESJARLAIS. Taxing the rich is a great idea until the rich run

out of money.

Mr. Chairman, let us shift gears for a second because this is

going to go on forever.

Ms. Boushey, do you feel that government jobs create revenue?

I think you said the Stimulus I, the majority of jobs created were

private sector jobs. Do public jobs create revenue or do they just

cost the taxpayers money?

Dr. BOUSHEY. Recovery dollars that go into communities to say

build a bridge, you hire engineers typically in the private sector,

some in the public, some in the private; you hire contractors; you

hire people that do concrete. You hire a lot of folks in the private

sector and then that has spillover effects, so if you hire that person

who has the concrete, they have more money and spend it in their

communities. That is how those private sector jobs are created,

both directly and indirectly.

Dr. DESJARLAIS. Mr. Schiff, do you feel that is a good return on

your investment, to spend those tax dollars that way? What is your

chance of making a profit?

Mr. SCHIFF. First, I want to point out that 99 percent of my income is taxed at the marginal rate, so the marginal rate is my rate.

If the Federal Government is taking 35 percent of my income, and

another 3 percent for Medicare, that is 38 percent and the State

of Connecticut almost 7 percent, over 45 percent of my income is

in tax before I pay any property taxes, sales tax or anything else.

If you raise my taxes much more, that is it. I am done. I am already moving businesses to Singapore, moving businesses to the

Caribbean to try to go to lower tax jurisdictions. We are not a low

tax country. We are a high tax country and we are a much higher

tax country than we used to be in the past by far.

Dr. DESJARLAIS. I am out of time but I am going to close with

the fact that we continue to spend money at an unprecedented

rate. As Mr. Cummings said, I think people were very shocked at

the debt ceiling debate. My stance, and at least what I gathered

from the people from Tennessee, is they are shocked that we once

again increase our debt ceiling by $2.4 trillion and weighed it over

cuts over 10 years that they don’t have any faith is going to happen. I would say the shock and outrage with what happened up

here was more the fact that we allowed this to happen, that we

once again spent our children and grandchildren’s money.

I yield back.

Mr. JORDAN. Thank you.

The gentleman from Pennsylvania, Mr. Kelly.

Mr. KELLY. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Professor Taylor, you are obviously a student of history and I do

believe you don’t study history, you don’t repeat it. Let me read a

quote: ‘‘We have tried spending money. We are spending more than

we have ever spent before and it does not work and I have just one

interest. Now, if I am wrong, somebody else can have my job. I

want to see this country prosper, I want to see people get a job,

I want to see people get enough to eat. We have never made good

on our promises and I say, after 8 years of this administration, we

have just as much unemployment as when we started and an enor-
88

mous debt to boot.’’ That is Henry Morgenthau who was the Secretary of Treasury under Franklin D. Roosevelt.

We haven’t had 8 years of this administration, but as the chairman spoke, and being a small businessman myself, we keep talking

about the uncertainty is what is keeping people on the sideline. I

would say it is just the opposite. It is the certainty that under this

administration’s policies, we have no way in heck to dig ourselves

out of this debt.

I am a firm believer that you have to kill more than you eat, or

you can’t stay. I am trying to understand how in the world with

these policies that we are enacting, with no remedial only punitive

actions against people and small business people, how in the world

are we encouraging these people to hire people. Mr. Schiff, I feel

your pain.

We talk about China and what China is doing. China is not borrowing 42 cents on every dollar it spends. It is not as clear and

transparent a society as we would like it to be. All these things are

important, all these things are fun to talk about but the reality of

this is the trajectory we are on right now is totally unsustainable.

Standard & Poor’s was not wrong.

If you want to see what is wrong, go back to Fannie Mae and

Freddie Mac, when you tell banks you have to lend money to people who no way in heck can pay it back, but you have to do it anyway.

When I bought my first house, the first question I was asked by

the lender was how much money do you have to put down. I said,

$10,000 and I was told, you can buy a $30,000 house. Flip it to

now, how much do you have to put down? Nothing. Then buy anything you want, we will underwrite it.

Doctor, we talked about stimulus in the past under President

Bush. I had friends that just couldn’t wait to get that check from

President Bush. In your opinion, what do people do with this

money they get back? Do they put it back into the economy? What

do they do with it?

Mr. TAYLOR. They largely saved it, they largely kept it in their

pockets. We have seen this time and time again. That is why it is

so frustrating to hear this proposal. We tried this in 1975 under

President Ford. Soon after it was done, his own Council of Economic Advisors looked at it and said it didn’t work. Don’t do this

again.

President Carter in 1977, the same thing and after that was

done, his economic advisors said it didn’t work. Then fortunately

we had a couple of decades where we didn’t do these things. In

2001, we had one. I looked at that myself. It didn’t work. Now 2009

is gigantic and we are proposing it again. Why don’t we learn that

these temporary interventions don’t work and I think they are

counter productive for many of the reasons you are saying.

Mr. KELLY. I agree. Mr. Schiff, I have also tried to borrow money

and I will tell you right now, the problem with lenders is they are

scared to death because there is legislation passed with no rules.

Banks, and I am talking about the smaller banks, and I have come

to believe that if you are too big to fail, you are also too small to

survive, when collateral used to be what we worked on but there
89

is uncertainty as to what your collateral is going to be worth, when

covenants change quarterly, it is very difficult to run a business.

I think when you don’t have policies that transcend the next administration but don’t go to 5 and 10 year plans, when you see a

shift because of an election, that doesn’t add any certainty to the

way the economy is going to be stabilized. I have to borrow a lot

of money for my business to work, but when you can’t borrow it,

when the regulations become too overburdening, it makes it difficult for lenders to give it to you, it is bothersome to me.

It is very important that people understand. This isn’t easy, what

we are doing. It is very difficult and government has it harder for

us.

Mr. SCHIFF. It takes two to tango. You can only borrow if somebody is saving. There has to be a lender on the other side of that

transaction. There has to be something in it for the lender. You

have to have higher interest rates. The problem is the banks are

just getting money from the Federal Reserve and buying treasuries

with it. That is not going to grow the economy, that is going to

grow the government but meanwhile, these monetary policies are

stifling the savings that we need to grow the economy.

Mr. Cummings pointed out when people get a stimulus job, he

can see those jobs. Yes, you can always see the jobs government

creates. We don’t see the jobs they destroy to create those jobs. All

the government can do is rearrange the resources. It doesn’t create

any wealth. The problem is the jobs or the wealth that gets destroyed is more productive than whatever the government replaces

it with. On balance, the country is poorer as a result of that.

The fact that we send out a stimulus check is not going to stimulate the economy. If an American buys some more products that

were made in China, how does that help our economy. It runs up

the trade deficit and now we have to go deeper into debt to spend

that stimulus check. All of that is counter productive.

We are going to continue to repeat those mistakes, to keep

throwing gasoline on this fire until we incinerate the entire country.

Mr. KELLY. Thank you.

I yield back, Mr. Chairman.

Mr. JORDAN. Thank you, Mr. Kelly.

Now I yield to the gentlelady from New York, Ms. Buerkle.

Ms. BUERKLE. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Thank you all for

being here today.

Many of us came to Congress early this year to really address

the unemployment issues in our Nation and to get this economy

back on track. The biggest reason for doing that was what we had

seen 2 years prior in this administration, this government overreach, this Keynesian economics where we think we can spend

money to create jobs doesn’t work.

I have spent the last several months in my district talking to the

businesses because those small businesses are what make upstate

New York tick. Upstate New York has taken such a hit. You mentioned manufacturing jobs. We used to have Carrier, we used to

have Crucible Steel, we had General Electric back then. We have

lost those manufacturing jobs. We have lost those industries.
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I go around and talk to all these small businesses and without

exception, what I hear from them is get the government out of our

way. We comply with these regulations, we spend the money to

comply and before we know it, the regulations have changed. They

continue to change the rules which is what Mr. Kelly mentioned.

They continue to create an environment of uncertainty.

I guess the question for all of us, because we all want to address

this issue, is what are we going to do about this. How are we going

to get the government out of the way. My own personal belief is

if they would just rewind and get rid of these regulations, just get

out the way and just be silent, I think we would all be better off.

I would like to hear from you, and I will start with Professor

Taylor, what is your vision. I can’t agree with much, although I

haven’t seen the specifics of this bill, I just know that the last stimulus of close to $1 trillion failed. I have listened and talked to my

city and county governments and so many of them used that money

to plug holes in their budgets. That wasn’t want that money was

supposed to be used for. It was not used at all, I don’t think for

what it should have been used for. We have proven that doesn’t

work. What would work in your estimation?

Mr. TAYLOR. The new proposal is much the same, so I don’t see

how that could work based on what I have looked at myself which

corresponds to your observations. What would work is a comprehensive, economic strategy to offset what has recently been

done. We raised the government spending as the shared GDP from

19.6 percent in 2007 to 23.8 percent now. We are making a small

bit of headway on that but it needs to come back to 2000 levels as

a share of GDP. Then we wouldn’t have to have a tax increase that

everybody is worried about, we could have some revenue neutral

tax reform which would boost the economy and then we could proceed with the regulatory issues and I think some of the monetary

issues that are also a drag on the economy.

It is really a comprehensive strategy. I think it could build on the

Budget Control Act which obviously didn’t go all the way or not far

enough even. You have a nucleus to work on and I think it is quite

doable. Why can’t the Federal Government spend as a share of

GDP what it did in the year 2007? That is all we need to do in

order to avoid tax increases, to have a good tax reform and stimulate the economy.

Ms. BUERKLE. I do want to comment and I had this thought as

Dr. Boushey was speaking. This is really what concerns me with

these tax increases. Many of my small businesses have said my

margin is about 2 percent. By the time my taxes go up, I go over

the edge. That is my biggest concern and $200,000–$250,000, those

are the small business owners who file Subchapter S. It has nothing to do with families who are wealthy. These are a lot of small

businesses who look good on paper but their net income is not anywhere near $200,000.

My concern is what you said about these people who have profited, now we need to go back and tax them and increase their

taxes. Since when does the United States of America punish success. That is the fundamental. We reward hard work. Our system

is one that if you take risks and work hard, you succeed and you

should be able to succeed without being penalized. That is my con-
91

cern with this message about we are going to raise taxes on these

people who have done so well. They didn’t steal that money, they

worked hard for that money. I think it is very important that this

class warfare thing really concerns me, if you could comment on

that.

Dr. BOUSHEY. Yes. I want to make three quick points because I

know we don’t have much time.

First, I was happy to see that the President’s plan, when it does

its payroll taxes, targets them at small businesses. That is an incredibly important thing.

Second, on the tax revenue raisers, those are cutting loopholes,

many of whom are focused on families but I want to make one note

about the small business owners. This is net income, net of expenses. When you say $250,000, that is over what someone is making net of their expenses. These are folks doing really well and for

the most part, many of those S Corps are going to be very much

at the high end, sort of your lawyer firms, things like this. These

are people who could afford it.

The last thing is one of the key pieces of the President’s proposal

for the pay for is to tax hedge fund managers at the same rate that

me and most Americans who work for a living are taxed. Right now

they are taxed much less than we are and that is the biggest chunk

of change in terms of these increases in taxes. That was the specific piece I think we should be focusing on.

Ms. BUERKLE. Thank you. I yield back, Mr. Chairman.

Mr. JORDAN. Dr. Boushey, if these tax loopholes were so bad, so

terrible, so needed, why didn’t the previous Congress just 10

months ago take care of them then? You could go back a little over

a year ago, there was even a super majority in the Senate. If they

were so bad, so needed, why didn’t they take care of them then?

Dr. BOUSHEY. That is an excellent question and I think one that

Congress itself should think about. I can’t speak for what this Congress does and doesn’t do.

Mr. JORDAN. Were you talking to them? Were you telling them

to do it back then?

Dr. BOUSHEY. Certainly and many of the things on the table are

things we were talking about.

Mr. JORDAN. You couldn’t get it done with the super majority in

the Senate?

Dr. BOUSHEY. I don’t work for Congress, sir. Certainly this taxing

of hedge fund managers is something people have talked about for

quite some time, that they should be taxed at the same rate as everyone else who works for a living, not at a much, much lower rate.

Mr. JORDAN. I am going to pick up where Ms. Buerkle left off.

One of the thing we thought this debt ceiling debate made sense

was a proposal we put forward we thought was starting to break

through with the American. We called it cut, cap and balance, cut

spending in a bigger way the first year, not just $21 billion, over

$110–$111 billion, cap it as a percentage of our economy, Professor

Taylor, to get it back in line where it has historically been around

the 20 percent range of GDP, and then build toward a balanced

budget amendment. We thought that made sense. We were willing

to raise the debt ceiling if we put that kind of plan in place because

we thought that wasn’t some deal, that was actually a solution.
92

We also understand the importance for growth. I would argue we

need something like cut, cap, balance and grow. Tell me what the

tax reform part of a growth component would look like. I want to

start with Ms. Furchtgott-Roth first.

In the town halls I had in August, one of the things that came

through loud and clear is Americans inherently want fairness in

the tax system. I think two things bug Americans, and appropriately so. They want fairness in the true sense of the word, not

fairness the way the left defines it as tax people who make money,

tax them more, but fairness in the true sense of the word.

They don’t like the idea that 46 percent of Americans don’t pay

income taxes. We understand they are paying payroll taxes if they

are working. They don’t like that fact and Americans don’t like the

fact that GE doesn’t pay taxes the second quarter. They think that

is ridiculous as well. They want some fairness component, a simplified component to the tax package, but tell me what you think

that looks like, the tax reform in a growth concept that we need.

Ms. FURCHTGOTT-ROTH. What we need to do is get rid of the

loopholes and lower the rates, similar to what we did in 1986 and

there was many years as you will recall of growth and employment

growth after that. That makes the tax system more fair, makes it

simpler and it is a win-win situation. I would suggest a revenue

neutral manner of getting rid of the loopholes and lowering the

rate so we would end up with the same amount of revenue as we

did before. Then with a more efficient economy, you would be pulling in more amounts of tax revenue.

Mr. JORDAN. Would you advocate a flat tax, lower the rates, keep

multiple brackets or move to fewer brackets? What would you advocate on the income side?

Ms. FURCHTGOTT-ROTH. My ideal would be a flat tax and may be

two other brackets.

Mr. JORDAN. You would be for lowering the corporate rate?

Ms. FURCHTGOTT-ROTH. I would also be for lowering the corporate rate in a revenue neutral manner as before taking away the

loopholes.

Mr. JORDAN. What about repatriation, bringing back dollars?

Ms. FURCHTGOTT-ROTH. I would be very much in favor of repatriation. There are trillions of dollars abroad.

Mr. JORDAN. Professor Taylor, would you agree that kind of approach is what is needed for growth?

Mr. TAYLOR. Absolutely. Tax reform, which is revenue neutral,

should be the goal and that will increase economic growth because

those lower marginal tax rates are lower and creates more incentive. You generate the same amount of revenue. Also, that would

generate more revenue because we’d have more growth.

Revenue neutral tax reform, and we have gotten away from that.

People are now talking about tax reform to mean we can now tax

more, so we can spend more. That is not tax reform as I have come

to know the term over the years.

Mr. JORDAN. Mr. Lindsey and Mr. Schiff.

Mr. SCHIFF. Ideally, you would abolish corporate tax completely.

Corporations don’t pay the taxes, their shareholders pay the taxes.

Tax them at the shareholder level. The employees pay the taxes

when they get paid, but ideally, we would have no income tax, we
93

would have no payroll tax. If the Federal Government needs revenue, let it raise it through a national sales tax. It would be much

more conducive to tax people when they spend their wealth, not

when they accumulate it.

Mr. JORDAN. I agree with all that.

Mr. SCHIFF. The argument is always if we only tax spending, the

rich don’t spend all their money. Precisely, the money they don’t

spend is what grows the economy. That is what produces jobs. If

they are not spending the money, it is benefiting everybody but the

rich. The rich enjoy their wealth when they spend, so that is a

much better time to tax it.

As far as your budget plan, I think Congress is much under estimating how much time we have to deal with this crisis. I think

there is a sovereign debt crisis and a currency crisis coming to this

country soon, may be even before the next election. That will be far

more catastrophic to our economy than what happened in 2008.

Mr. JORDAN. Well said. The window of time to fix this is closing

very rapidly and it under scores how serious it is.

Mr. Lindsey and then I will move on to my Ranking Member.

Mr. LINDSEY. I generally agree with what has been said here on

the tax reform side. I am in favor of a tax system that is as neutral

as possible, the economic activity rather than trying to maneuver

people like rats in a maze to do whatever the flavor of the month

is.

As far as a corporate income tax, in a perfect world it wouldn’t

exist because we have a double taxation. Generally, we should be

shifting the tax system away from taxing good things like work and

savings and should be shifting it to focus on consumption.

Mr. JORDAN. The gentleman from Maryland.

Mr. CUMMINGS. Dr. Boushey, I think you mentioned earlier that

the percentage of GDP with regard to taxes is lower now than it

has been in a good while, is that right?

Dr. BOUSHEY. Yes. Right now we have had tax cuts because of

the Recovery Act, yes, but it is also lower than most other OECD

countries and other economically developed countries, the share of

GDP.

Mr. CUMMINGS. To make sure I understand this, of GDP, we are

paying less taxes, percentage of GDP, than we have in a long time,

in history or what?

Dr. BOUSHEY. In quite a while. I don’t have the exact number at

the top of my tongue but I am happy to get that to you. I can’t remember exactly what the year is.

Mr. CUMMINGS. But it is low?

Dr. BOUSHEY. Yes.

Mr. CUMMINGS. Of course we have had two wars, we had the prescription drug program and they weren’t paid for and at the same

time, we were reducing taxes, is that right?

Dr. BOUSHEY. We reduced taxes sharply in early 2000 and did

not reduce our expenditures commensurate with the lower taxes

and it did not lead to the kind of rebound in economic growth that

would make those taxes ‘‘pay for themselves.’’

If I could make one more point on that, in fact, after those tax

cuts, you saw the economic recovery of the 2000’s was the weakest

in the post World War II era in terms of growth and investment,
94

employment gains and was the only economic recovery since the

end of World War II where families ended the recovery in 2007

with less income on average, the median family, than they had in

the year 2000.

Mr. CUMMINGS. Most top economists are saying that the President’s American Jobs Act will boost the economy and create jobs.

Mark Zandi, chief economist for Moody’s, is forecasting a 1.9 million job boost and a 2 percent lift for GDP if the President’s package is passed as proposed.

Allen Sinai, chief economist of Decision Economics, states, ‘‘Payroll tax cuts are very powerful. They provide a boost to direct income and in turn, spending, which is important to growth.’’

This 2 percent tax cut, Mr. Schiff, you are in agreement with

that? You are in disagreement with that?

Mr. SCHIFF. I think the deficits that will be created to finance

that tax cut will do more damage to undermine this economy and

destroy jobs than any benefit we will get from the extra income

being spent.

Mr. CUMMINGS. When the President says that basically borrowing the words of my Republican friends that we should not be

increasing taxes during a recession, but when it comes to these

taxes, do you agree with that, first of all? In other words, when it

came to the millionaires and billionaires, my Republican friends

were singing from the same hymn book, they were singing loud and

clear, in a recession, you do not raise taxes. The President said the

other night, we want to make sure these folks continue to get this

extra $1,500 or whatever it is, in their paychecks.

Mr. SCHIFF. The problem is the damage the government does to

the economy is not limited to taxation. It is spending. It is what

the government is spending that is damaging the economy. If we

run deficits instead of taxes, we actually do more damage. Deficit

spending is more detrimental to the economy than taxation. What

we need to do is dramatically reduce government spending. That

is the only stimulus that will work.

Mr. CUMMINGS. I think we need to do both. I don’t think there

is any Member of Congress that does not believe that we need to

do both. Dr. Boushey, what is your opinion on that?

Dr. BOUSHEY. It is hard to understand how government spending.

Mr. CUMMINGS. I am sorry, Dr. Boushey. I like to give people

their titles like President Obama.

Dr. BOUSHEY. Thank you, Congressman Cummings.

It is hard to image that right now when interest rates are at historic lows, when people still want to buy U.S. treasuries, when we

have this massive unmet need in terms of both infrastructure but

all of the massive layoffs that have happened in education around

America because of the State and local budget crunches, that using

government dollars right now, it is hard to understand how that

is not easy for us to do because we can afford it and that doesn’t

help our economy.

Having children in school rooms in places across the country

with 40 children is not good for America’s future, it is not good for

America’s work force. We can do something to fix that. We can bor-
95

row at historic low rates and pay it back as the economy gets back

on track.

I would like to take issue with one thing Mr. Schiff said earlier

which is that America can’t afford it. America remains one of the

richest countries on the planet. To say that we cannot afford to

make these investments right now when our economy needs it most

and get 14 million people back to work is quite frankly absurd. We

can afford it. It is how we are using our resources.

Mr. SCHIFF. We can’t afford it and the problem is interest rates are low now, they are not going to stay low. We have a $15 trillion

national debt financed with treasury bills. It is the same mistake

people made who were taking out subprime mortgages. What is

going to happen rates are at 5 or 10 percent, what is going to happen when interest on the national debt consumes 100 percent of

Federal tax receipts? That can happen in just a few years.

Interest rates got to 20 percent in 1980. What happens if they

go there again?

Mr. CUMMINGS. Madam Chair, I see my time is up, but I just

want 15 seconds to say this. One of the things we have to do is invest in people. If you have kids, one of the greatest threats to our

national security is our failure to properly educate every single one

of our children. That is the greatest threat. If we have to spend

now to educate our children so they can take over this world, innovate, create jobs and do the right thing, fine.

At the rate we are going, if we are not careful, we will implode

from the inside because we are not doing all the things we need

to do now.

Mr. SCHIFF. The problem is we are spending and not educating.

We don’t need more spending on education. We are spending too

much and the kids are not getting educated. We need more on the

job training. Unfortunately, we have too many kids going to college

on government grants that has bid the price into the stratosphere

and we have all these kids graduating with huge mortgages and no

houses and no marketable skills.

Mr. CUMMINGS. I am saddened by those comments.

Mr. SCHIFF. I am saddened by what those programs have done

to our young people.

Ms. BUERKLE [presiding]. Thank you, Mr. Cummings.

I yield to the gentleman from Pennsylvania, Mr. Kelly.

Mr. KELLY. Thank you, Madam Chair.

Mr. Schiff, because I believe you are on to something, for those

that did not experience this, I remember very vividly because I

paid 1 percent over prime for my floor plan costs, so in the early

1980’s when prime was around 21 percent, which people say is not

possible, it is, and in the artificially low rates that we are working

with today, any type of an idea or scenario of what could happen

when these rates that are being artificially low at least until the

election there is going to be a low prime rate, but when it rises to

what it should be, market value, the effect it is going to have on

businesses?

Mr. SCHIFF. The problem, the artificially low interest rates right

now are one of the main problems that the economy has. I think

we are pursuing those rates to prop up insolvent banks, to necessitate the government bubble, the borrowing from the Federal Gov-
96

ernment. When interest rates ultimately rise, the banks you guys

bailed out, they are all going to fail again because they are insolvent. They are only kept afloat by the cheap money from the Fed.

Their portfolios are loaded with low yielding, long term mortgages

and government bonds and when interest rates go up, the value of

those assets will collapse.

They have to go up because eventually the dollar will sink so

much, prices will rise so much, nobody will lend us money. The dollar won’t be the reserve currency. Right now it is kind of benefiting

from the fact that there are problems in other parts of the world

but look at the price of gold. It is at $1,900 a ounce for a reason.

It is going up because of all the inflation that we are creating now

and all the inflation we are going to have to create in order to keep

interest rates at these low levels.

The only way to solve our problems is to let interest rates go up

and they are going to go way up. Then what are we going to do?

If we keep inflating this bubble, if we let the national debt get to

$20 trillion and then rates go to 10 or 20 percent, what people are

saying now is exactly what they said during the real estate bubble.

People used to tell me, Peter, you are crazy, real estate prices will

never fall. Now we know what happened. People are now saying

the same thing with interest rates. We don’t have to worry because

interest rates will never rise, they will stay low forever. They

won’t.

Mr. KELLY. You are right. The only thing we know for sure is

they are not going to rise before the next election.

Mr. SCHIFF. We don’t know that for sure. They are going to try

everything they can to prevent.

Mr. KELLY. The other thing that is going to happen is if we print

money that isn’t backed by anything, our lenders are going to say

at some point, you are paying me back with money that isn’t worth

what I lent you.

Mr. SCHIFF. We are destroying the value of our money and that

is why prices are rising. Oil prices aren’t going up. In fact, Ron

Paul pointed out in his last debate, you can buy a gallon of gasoline

for a dime as long as you have a dime that was minted before 1965.

It is because our money is being debased by the Federal Reserve.

That is what is happening. Prices aren’t going anywhere. The value

of our money is declining and it is going to lose a lot more value

in a very short period of time if we continue these policies.

Mr. KELLY. Under the President’s new plan, there is a $4,000 incentive for hiring people who have been unemployed for long periods of time. For somebody like yourself who is an employer and

somebody like myself who is an employer, who interviews people,

are we picking winners and losers as to who it we are going to

hire?

Mr. SCHIFF. Absolutely. In fact, this is another example of things

that are going to backfire. The government is proposing a plan to

make it illegal for employers to discriminate against people who

have been unemployed for more than 6 months. The effect is going

to be that nobody is going to interview anybody who has been unemployed for more than 6 months because they don’t want to risk

a lawsuit.
97

If somebody was going to hire somebody anyway, they will try to

interview people who have been unemployed for about 5 months,

so they can start them at the 6-months so they can get the tax

credit but it is simply going to shift jobs away from people who are

newly unemployed or long term unemployed to people who have

been unemployed for a specific period of time.

I think the most it is going to do is influence minimum wage. I

said earlier that we should abolish the minimum wage. That

$4,000 tax credit temporarily substantially reduces the minimum

wage for a 6-month period of time. I think on the margin, you will

create some minimum wage type jobs on a temporary basis but it

is not going to be any kind of great stimulus. As I said, the deficits

we will generate to finance the tax cuts will destroy more jobs than

those tax cuts create.

Mr. KELLY. I would agree with you on a lot of these things. It

is totally bizarre to me that the people we expect to do the most

lifting are the people that we put the most burden on and continue

to overburden them with regulations that really don’t, in the long

run cost benefit analysis, doesn’t play out.

I am not saying they weren’t good intentions to start with but

when you look at what has happened and it makes it so difficult

on those people who are absolutely being depended upon to lift that

load, it is bizarre to me that anybody could look at this logically

and think this is a plan that makes sense when in the history of

the world, we don’t have any data that would suggest that is possible.

Thanks so much for being here. I yield back.

Ms. BUERKLE. Thank you, Mr. Kelly.

I now recognize Mr. Kucinich.

Mr. KUCINICH. Thank you very much.

Mr. Schiff, you made a very strong case about cutting government spending. Does that include the Pentagon and ending the

wars in Iraq and Afghanistan?

Mr. SCHIFF. Absolutely, it includes that.

Mr. KUCINICH. Ms. Furchtgott-Roth, in your written testimony to

this committee, you make an assertion that I wanted to review.

You stated, ‘‘The Acting General Counsel of the NLRB wants to

stop the Boeing Co., which has a backlog of over 800 Dreamliner

aircraft on order from using its new aircraft manufacturing plant

in South Carolina to build Dreamliners.’’ That is on page 5 of your

testimony?

Ms. FURCHTGOTT-ROTH. Yes.

Mr. KUCINICH. Are you aware that the NLRB has not sought, as

a remedy, that Boeing can’t produce its products in South Carolina? The acting general counsel’s complaint against Boeing says

that as long as Boeing’s decisions are not made for illegal motives,

it can have its work done in South Carolina. I want to quote from

the NLRB complaint. ‘‘Other than as set forth in paragraph 13(a)

above, the relief requested by the Acting General Counsel does not

seek to prohibit Respondent,’’ talking about Boeing, ‘‘from making

non-discriminatory decisions with respect to where work will be

performed, including non-discriminatory decisions with respect to

work at its North Charleston, South Carolina facility.’’
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Madam, are you aware that the case brought by the NLRB’s acting general counsel against Boeing is about work that was illegally

taken away to retaliate against workers for engaging in acts that

are protected under Federal law? The remedy is that the work that

was transferred must be performed in Washington, not that Boeing

cannot produce planes in South Carolina or any other State. Are

you aware of that?

Ms. FURCHTGOTT-ROTH. Boeing did not close its plant in Washington State, it did not lay off any workers in Washington State;

it just needs an additional plant.

Mr. KUCINICH. You made a claim that want to see how you back

it up. You said that the NLRB wants to stop the Boeing Co. from

using its new aircraft manufacturing plant in South Carolina.

Ms. FURCHTGOTT-ROTH. To build Dreamliners.

Mr. KUCINICH. To build Dreamliners. Where is the proof of that?

Do you have any proof of that at all? I take that as your answer.

I think when you come to this committee and start making claims,

you had better back them up.

I want to move on in the 2-minutes I have left.

Ms. FURCHTGOTT-ROTH. I spoke to the general counsel of Boeing,

Mr. Kilberg, and this is the information I got from him. If that is

incorrect, I would be glad to send a correction.

Mr. KUCINICH. You had better check with him. He didn’t prepare

you well.

I want to go on now. In the past, there was bipartisan support

for increased government spending during economic turndowns. In

January 2008, Congress passed an Economic Stimulus Act which

injected over $150 billion into the economy. There were 165 Republicans who supported it and President Bush signed it. In the spring

of 2008, Congress extended benefits for long term unemployed with

the support of 182 Republicans and President Bush signed it.

There is widespread agreement among economists that economic

growth and job creation during this economic downturn will only

occur with fiscal stimulus from the government. That is not just my

view; it is the view of Joseph Stiglitz who is a professor of economics at Columbia, a Nobel Prize winner in economics, former chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors under President Clinton,

and former chief economist for the World Bank. It is also the view

of Bruce Bartlett, a conservative economist who held senior policy

roles in the Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations and

also argues that the Federal Government could increase aggregate

spending by directly employing workers or funding public works

projects.

Mr. Taylor, in your written testimony, which I was pleased to be

here for, you seemed to dismiss this perspective. Do you agree with

Bruce Bartlett and Joseph Stiglitz about the positive role that government spending can bring to stimulate the economy?

Mr. TAYLOR. Based on my empirical work of what actually happened, when you look at the data, no, I don’t agree. Mr. Cummings

mentioned Zandi. These people have these models which they simulate; it is their models of the economy and they simulate them

and the models say, this is going to work. Then they do it after the

case, they simulate the same model and say it did work.
99

What I have tried to do, and others have tried to do, is look at

the money, look at where it went and when we do that, we don’t

see these impacts. You might look at a particular project may be

in my State of California and there is a sign next to it that says,

ARRA, most likely that was going to be done anyway and they

used different financing for it. That is what we found.

With respect to the idea that most top economists think these

things work, I disagree. Gary Becker, also a Nobel Prize winner,

wrote a column recently disagreeing with this and Edward Prescott. So the notion that most economists think these things work,

Milton Friedman, won a Nobel Prize; Franco Modigliani won a

Nobel Prize to show these kind of short run things don’t work.

Mr. KUCINICH. I appreciate your answer and my time has expired, Professor, but what I would like to do with unanimous consent is to place in the record this summary of economists who support the American Jobs Act who talk about the value of government spending.

Ms. BUERKLE. Without objection.

[The information referred to follows:]
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101
102
103
104

Mr. KUCINICH. Thank you very much.

Ms. BUERKLE. Thank you, Mr. Kucinich.

I want to pick up where Mr. Kucinich left off and that is with

regards to these economic theories and what works and what

doesn’t work. Professor Taylor, if you want to finish up and then

just move down the panel, there seems to be disagreement and I

would like to hear your perspectives on what works and what

doesn’t work.

Mr. TAYLOR. We could learn from history about what works. For

example, in the recovery from the last deep recession we had in the

years 1983–1984, we had economic growth that averaged 6.5 percent. We didn’t have one of these short term stimulus things at

that point. We had a permanent tax reform, a permanent reduction

in tax rates. There is no comparison. Unemployment came down

rapidly, job growth grew unlike what is happening now. You can

go back to other periods, the 1970’s, and more recently and see the

same thing.

To me, when people study these carefully, they come to the conclusion that the shorter term, temporary, and I would add targeted

to that, policies don’t work. What works are these more permanent,

more lasting policies. That is what we need so much if we are going

to get the unemployment rate down.

The unemployment rate is high because economic growth is low

and even the forecasters who say this is going to work, predict economic growth will come back down again after a short term boost.

I don’t even see the boost but even if you get a boost, it doesn’t deal

with the problem. We need to get unemployment down to where it

was before the recession, not just to have a spurt of growth and

then we are back into the same situation.

Ms. BUERKLE. I see we have been joined by our chairman, so I

will yield my time to the chairman of Oversight and Government

Reform, Mr. Issa.

Mr. ISSA. I appreciate it, Madam Chair. I was watching this in

the back between other meetings and wanted to come out and show

the special interest that I have in the subject, so no questions, but

please continue.

Ms. BUERKLE. Thank you very much.

Ms. Furchtgott-Roth, I think we are up to you.

Ms. FURCHTGOTT-ROTH. Just to build on what Professor Taylor

was saying, with which I agree, there is the famous joke, what do

you believe, me or your own eyes. We had an unemployment rate

of 7.3 percent in January 2009; it is 9.1 percent. At that time,

about 22 percent in January 2009 of the unemployed were long

term unemployed, 6 months or more. Now it is 45 percent. The

teen unemployment rate has gone up; the African-American unemployment rate has gone up. We can see that this isn’t working. We

do need to take a different tact.

I would say fundamental tax reform offers the best chance of immediate economic growth, together with reform of regulation. I

have written about regulations that were passed during Republican

administrations and how those should be revoked also. One that I

have written about is the incandescent light bulb ban which was

part of the Energy Security Act of 2007 and GE closed its last light
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bulb incandescent light bulb plant in West Virginia. We need to

take a thorough look at these kinds of regulations.

It is already law that we should do a cost benefit analysis of regulations. It is not done. In other words, these agencies are breaking

the law by not performing the cost benefit analysis. One small example, in the Labor Department regulation that required contractors to give affirmative action for veterans, this is going through

the process right now, the cost of taking 1 day of all workers’ time

to inform them of the new regulation was not listed as a cost by

OMB, so they bias the cost and make the calculation look better.

You all should make sure these agencies not only do the cost

benefit analysis which they are already required to do by law, but

that cost such as taking every worker in the plant and not letting

them work for 1 day is included also.

Ms. BUERKLE. Thank you very much.

Dr. Boushey.

Dr. BOUSHEY. You asked what works and I want to make a few

quick points. First of all, we all know that this recession has been

deeper and more protracted. It followed a financial crisis. There is

work by Carmen Reinhart and Rogoff that shows these kinds of recessions tend to be different.

The recession of the early 1980’s that Professor Taylor referred

to was very different from this one. It was caused when the monetary authorities started to raise interest rates because of inflation.

That is how we got to this double digit and then in order to get

down, in order to spur growth, monetary authorities had a huge bit

of wiggle room to lower the interest rate which spurred growth and

at that time, you could have a housing led recovery, which you

typically had in recessions in the United States.

You lower interest rates, people buy houses, they invest in that

kind of investment. You can’t do that now because of the collapse

of the housing bubble. This recession is very, very different in

terms of the recovery and what we need to do.

Second, there is a lot of good research that shows the impact of

stimulus. I have cited a lot of it in my testimony. I am going to

direct you to one piece of research by David Johnson, Jonathan

Parker and Nicholas Souleles that looks that income tax refunds of

2001 and finds that two-thirds of those dollars were spent within

the first two quarters. Money was spent.

There is a lot of research that shows how multipliers work and

how fiscal expenditures in this kind of recession. This was very different from the early 1980’s, and I think we need to be very cognizant of that.

Finally, I have one comment on Ms. Furchtgott-Roth’s point

about cost benefit analysis. We should also make sure we include

the full cost of implementation such as when you have disasters or

calamities, the catastrophic costs like the financial crisis, when you

are thinking about regulation.

Thank you.

Ms. BUERKLE. Thank you.

Professor Taylor, I don’t know if you would like a minute or less

than a minute for rebuttal?

Mr. TAYLOR. Sure. No recovery is the same as others and no recession is the same as others, but 1983–1984 had a very rapid re-
106

covery and also had drags on it. Housing was not the drag but net

exports because the dollar got so high at that point where it

dragged about 2 percent per year negative. Right now housing is

not going anywhere but it is not taking away from growth. Every

recovery has its problems.

What is unique about this one is its broad base. Investment is

down, consumption is down, firms are not hiring. It is across the

board and that is why I think if you look and try to understand

what is going on, you come to these questions about the policy, the

uncertainty that it has caused, the worries about higher taxes, the

worry about inflation and that is why I think the remedy has to

be to fix that, not to try the things that we know didn’t work from

the past.

I can’t emphasize enough that just because you can cite something a Republican voted for in the past doesn’t mean it worked.

President Ford was a Republican. He had a temporary stimulus

program that he voted for and within a year of that, his own Council of Economic Advisors concluded that it didn’t work very well

and recommended it not ever be done again. Again, President

Carter, a Democrat, of course, the same thing, his advisors said, it

didn’t work. We learned that lesson for a couple of decades.

Now we are back to the failed policies of the past. I think it

would be a terrible mistake to do it yet again and that is my concern here.

Ms. BUERKLE. Thank you, Professor Taylor.

Mr. Schiff.

Mr. SCHIFF. Unfortunately Mr. Kucinich left but he made the

point that prior stimuluses had enjoyed bipartisan support. They

didn’t enjoy my support. I opposed them at the time. All of the efforts by government in the past to artificially stimulate the economy have failed. They have worsened the problem.

The recession is actually part of the cure. The recession needs to

be allowed to run its course. The reason we are never going to have

a real recovery is because the government won’t let us have a real

recession. We have serious economic imbalances that I mentioned.

We have an economy that is based on spending borrowed money.

That can’t be. Economies have to be based on savings, investing

and production. We are trying to run an economy upside down. In

order to maintain it, we have to keep interest rates at zero, we

have to run these huge imbalances, we have to import all these

goods that we don’t produce, we have to borrow from the rest of

the world. We have to allow the restructuring to take place.

Until we allow that to happen, we are not going to create jobs,

we are not going to have any real economic growth. We can’t just

keep repeating the mistakes. I know, and this is a political body,

it is very difficult for politicians to level with the American public

about how severe these problems are and how they are the consequence of years and years of mistakes made by Congress and by

the Federal Reserve.

There is a free market cure. It will work if the government gets

out of the way and lets it happen. It is going to be painful. Just

like anyone who has a drug habit, they check into rehab, they will

come out better, but it is not going to work if every time they feel

the withdrawal symptoms, they take another shot of heroin be-
107

cause that is what these stimuluses are, a shot of monetary, fiscal

heroin and it is not going to work and only means that the eventual withdrawal is that much more painful because we have that

much more drugs in the system that have to come out.

Ms. BUERKLE. Thank you very much.

Mr. Lindsey.

Mr. LINDSEY. I share Professor Taylor’s skepticism of counter cyclical fiscal policy. There are plausible theoretical reasons why it

could work but the empirical track record just isn’t very good, here

or in other countries. The proper role of government is to create

stable conditions that are favorable for economic dynamism and

economic growth.

Since our focus here is on jobs, we need to keep in mind that the

job market in this country has been slack for a decade, that the

track record of new business formation and unemployment and

new business has been off trend in recent years well before the recession, so we should be looking at structural issues, not just as

temporary cyclical fixes.

Ms. BUERKLE. Thank you.

I noticed in your testimony you did refer to structural changes

versus cyclical changes. Do you think the administration’s new jobs

plan includes any of those changes?

Mr. LINDSEY. It is overwhelmingly focused on temporary counter

cyclical measures.

Ms. BUERKLE. Thank you.

Mr. Chairman.

Mr. ISSA. I too am sorry that Mr. Kucinich left. One of the flaws

we have in our system is we manage to serve on multiple committees and have multiple obligations.

Mr. Lindsey, I want to follow up first with you and perhaps others on the panel. This morning I spoke with the Northern Virginia

Tech Council, all CEOs, all involved directly or indirectly in high

tech growth in northern Virginia, a great success story to say the

least.

The dialog, which included repatriation of funds and so on,

quickly went into if I gave you the money, where would you invest

it. It did seem like the message I was getting this morning was we

wouldn’t invest it. Basically, we don’t have the kind of stability

that causes us to want to make the investment.

What is it that we should be looking at from this side of the dais

where we have been talking to American job creators through

americanjobcreators.com. We have been hearing from people what

the impediments are to job creation and we want to deal with

those. Those are a given.

What else could we do so that if $1 trillion to $2 trillion came

back in, it would be invested in America and then I have a side

bar question which is, aren’t we focusing on the wrong thing when

we focus on jobs? Shouldn’t we be focusing on efficiencies that

make American jobs competitive in the world, which was the other

subject this morning. Would you comment on that?

Mr. LINDSEY. Ultimately, we don’t spend money in order to create jobs for ourselves. We work so that we can have money to

spend. The purpose, ultimately, of economic activity is consumption

but clearly, our economy is under performing in job creation and
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making use of valuable human resources. Again, this is the

Kauffman Foundation mantra, but if you are serious and interested

in job creation, you must look at who creates jobs. The soul source

of net job creation, the overwhelming source of net job creation in

this country is new businesses, businesses under 5 years old, specifically startups.

What you need to do is look at the kinds of policies that make

it easier for them to get started, easier for them to attract capital,

easier for them to keep their cost of business down by freeing them

from excessively costly regulations, and so forth. In my written testimony, I have a laundry list of pro-entrepreneur policy proposals

that Congress could consider and put into law that would help

push us in the direction of a permanent, not a temporary fix, but

a permanently more favorable business environment.

Mr. ISSA. Ms. Roth, I know you were earlier asked a bit about

NLRB’s activities related to Boeing and so on. Boeing is our largest

exporter, period. If Boeing can produce more aircraft with less

labor, should they be able to do that or should we consider that retaliation if they find ways to use less labor and thus need less

union workers in Everett, Washington? Doesn’t the logic of only

adding 2,000 jobs in Everett being a retaliation because they could

have added 3,000, isn’t the logical next step for NLRB and for the

Federal Government to say, we want you to add 4,000 jobs, you figure out how to do it, rather than spending every day figuring out

how to build a better airplane with less total cost?

Ms. FURCHTGOTT-ROTH. What the National Labor Relations

Board is doing to Boeing is absolutely unprecedented.

Mr. ISSA. I just want to know how far, if we let them take it,

they should be able to take it next? Shouldn’t they be able to just

mandate X amount of new jobs in order not to be considered retaliation?

Ms. FURCHTGOTT-ROTH. No. It is in the benefit of the United

States for companies to be able to choose their locations and to

move from one location to another which, by the way, Boeing did

not. Boeing kept its plant in Washington State. We can just have

a look at the violence in Washington State over the past week from

the longshoremen who are destroying railroad carts and grain to

give some indication of why an employer might prefer to build another plant elsewhere if nothing else for geographic diversity as

well as because of different costs.

This is sending a chilling effect to employers who want to locate

in unionized States. They might very well be stuck there if the

NLRB continues with its current policies of not allowing them to

move. It also puts them at the mercy of strikes. If there is a strike

over some perhaps needless or small issue and that is used in the

future as a rationale for disallowing another plant elsewhere, it

works to the harm of the United States because then companies

just prefer to offshore their manufacturing.

Mr. ISSA. Isn’t there a record of exactly that happening in Germany, for example, even though they had a lot to be said for locating in Germany. For a long time, you couldn’t close an operation

or reduce an operation in Germany and as a result, nobody would

make an investment in Germany unless it was sort of a guaranteed

investment which usually was a government contract.
109

Ms. FURCHTGOTT-ROTH. That is correct. The EU also has rules

against firing workers which makes it very difficult for employers

to take on workers. They know once they have them, they are stuck

with them. In the past, we have benefited from flexible labor markets. We have created vast numbers of jobs. We have had unemployment rates 2 to 3 percentage points lower than Europe. We

have laughed at Germany for its 9 percent unemployment rate and

now it is reversed.

My fellow witness talked about the slack labor market in the earlier part of the last decade but in April 2006, we had a 4.6 percent

unemployment rate. That is not a sign of a slack labor market.

Mr. ISSA. I guess I will ask a closing question. It is rhetorical but

it is important to the way I think and perhaps your comments will

help everyone.

How many of you out of five believe Henry Ford did a service to

America in automating and increasing the productivity at Ford

plants during his tenure in the Model T and Model A?

Ms. FURCHTGOTT-ROTH. He certainly did.

Mr. ISSA. One of the things we can all agree on. Isn’t that part

of the challenge we face today, if you can produce a better product

for less, which also includes less labor, that is how you end up

being a world class creator of jobs? Isn’t that the principle that for

some reason stimulus, simply adding jobs by paying for them, does

the exact opposite of less labor, perhaps, but world class labor that

produces a better product? Mr. Schiff.

Mr. SCHIFF. Absolutely. Henry Ford was famous for paying his

workers $5 a day.

Mr. ISSA. Highest in the world at the time.

Mr. SCHIFF. That was a ounce and a quarter of gold which at today’s exchange rate is $2,500 a week. Ford’s workers were making

$2,500 a week, the equivalent, paying no Federal income tax and

no payroll taxes, there was no minimum wage and no unions. We

paid the highest wages in the world, yet we produced the best quality and least expensive products. How was that possible? That was

because we had the smallest government. We had minimal regulations and low taxes.

If we want to recreate American industry, we have to recreate

that environment. We have to allow businesses to grow and prosper. We have to remove all the road blocks and impediments that

Congress has placed in their path over the years.

Mr. ISSA. Dr. Boushey, you are sort of surrounded here, so I will

give you the last word.

Dr. BOUSHEY. Thank you, Congressman.

I am glad that Mr. Schiff brought up the $5 a day, that was an

important point. The reason Henry Ford did that was to reduce

turnover and to keep highly skilled workers. That certainly tells

you something and it would be great to see more employers taking

that high road strategy today that we don’t see enough here in

America.

Mr. ISSA. Thank you all.

Thank you, Madam Chair.

Ms. BUERKLE. Thank you, Chairman Issa.
110

I would like to thank all of our witnesses for coming today and

taking time out of your busy schedules. We appreciate that very

much.

At this time, this hearing stands adjourned.

[Whereupon, at 12:08 p.m., the subcommittee was adjourned.]

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