Date: 2010-07-13
Speaker: WASSERMAN SCHULTZ (democrat)
Chamber: H

Madam Speaker. its a privilege to join my colleagues on the floor this evening to talk about the future of our economy and the new direction that we. the Democrats. are moving this country since taking over the Congress. We will plan to spend the next 45 minutes to an hour talking about where weve been and where we are at this point and the opportunities that we have to continue to go. My colleagues and I will talk about the progress that weve made and the efforts that weve employed to try to create jobs and turn the economy around. We feel really excited about the accomplishments that weve made thus far. We have only to look back to the month before President Obama took office in January of 2009 to see at that point the economy having bled 700.000plus jobs. Fastforward to June. now July of 2010. and we are now adding. on average. between 125.000 and 200.000 jobs per month. And those are private sector jobs. We also have the addition of publicsector jobs through the census. But consistently month after month. particularly starting at the beginning of this year. the economy has consistently added private sector jobs. and that is incredibly important. We know that the way were going to continue to turn our economy around. the key to our economic revival. is through job creation. We can attribute much of the success and much of the turnaround that has occurred thus far to our passage of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act last February. We know that the $787 billion stimulus package that we passed injected badly needed resources into the economy. But. Madam Speaker. it also injected badly needed capital in the form of tax cuts for the middle class and for working families. and thats something that doesnt get talked about enough. We do talk a whole lot about job creation. but one of the keys to job creation. we know. is stimulating the economy through tax cuts targeted towards the middle class. working families. and small businesses. We have really endeavored to make sure that weve struck a careful balance and the right balance between stimulating the economy by injecting the badly needed resources and also generating the tax cuts that we know are the lifeblood of so many small businesses. for them to have the capital available to be able to make the investments that they need in the infrastructure of their businesses so that they can have the wherewithal to add new hires and create more jobs. And thats something that. if you compare and contrast the priorities of the previous administration to the priorities of the Obama administration and our leadership under Speaker PELOSI and the Democratic leadership here in the House of Representatives. the priorities back in the Bush era were. again. a return to the trickledown theory of economics. that if you focus tax cuts and if you focus all of your attention on the wealthiest Americans. on the largest corporations. then somehow that largess will flow downward through the economy and. you know. "rising tides lift all boats." Except in this case. we know that that policy sunk the boats and. instead. we capsized a whole lot of small businesses in the water. and now we have been engaged in a really significant effort to try to right those ships and get the economy back on track. Were excited about the progress that weve made. but we also recognize that we have a long way to go. There are a number of things that we are going to want to focus on tonight. Lets just look at the weekly economic update just in the last week and in the last month. If you look at employment. the private sector in the month of June created an additional 83.000 jobs. and the unemployment rate continues to fall. It fell to 9.5 percent. Thats the sixth straight month of job growth in the private sector. and the fall in total unemployment reflected a decrease in our temporary census jobs. We added 9.000 manufacturing jobs in June. and that is the 11th month in a row that we have added manufacturing jobs. So the progress that were making is evident. We need to be able to continue that progress and not get too timid or gunshy while we balance our priorities and make sure that we can focus on getting the jobs done. The June jobs report was another reminder of just how far weve come since last year and how much work remains to be done to stop the free fall. The President and Congress took strong and immediate steps in the Recovery Act and put those people back to work after 22 straight months of job loss before President Obama took office. We now have seen our economy create private sector jobs for the last 6 months in a row. and we need to make sure that we can continue that recovery. Were moving in the right direction. We know its not fast enough. but thats why President Obama is fighting for additional steps to speed up the recovery and keep the economy growing. And he and we have made clear that creating jobs is our top priority. Another priority. for example. in a State like mine. in my home State of Florida. particularly in south Florida. is making sure that we can get lending kickstarted again and make sure that folks who are struggling to be able to make their mortgage payments and remain in their homes still have the ability to do that. We have been very focused. and the administration has been very focused on creating programs that will help keep people in their homes. that will give banks and banking institutions the opportunity to work with homeowners so that we dont see masses of individuals out on the street and continue the flood of housing that has become available on the market as a result. So we have a lot of things to think about. I am joined tonight by several of my colleagues. the first of which is my colleague from Houston. Texas. who has been a longtime Member. focuses on the needs of her district like a laser beam. and has talked quite a bit about the need for job growth. She is struggling in her community. as a fellow Gulf Coast Stater. dealing with the aftermath of the BP oil spill. my good friend. Congresswoman SHEILA JACKSON LEE.