Incidentally, let me share with a few of my colleagues why this is sort of this old ideology versus new. The Senator talked about the tired ideology of the past. What is it? Well, I think today Michael Steele, the new chairman of the Republican National Committee, made a statement on behalf of the Republican Party. He said:
For the last 2 weeks, we have been trying to force a massive spending bill through Congress under the guise of economic relief.
Well, we are having votes. This is a democracy. We are not forcing anything. We are trying to get the job done because there is an urgency to getting it done.
But then he says:
The fastest way to help those families is by letting them keep more of the money they earn. Individual empowerment, that is how you stimulate the economy.
That is a big ideological/philosophical difference about how you most rapidly stimulate the economy. Let's think about it for a minute, the individual empowerment. OK, we turn around and we give every family in America the great big tax cut that the Republicans are talking about. Here is what he says: We want to give--the first 16,000 bucks you make, you are going to be taxed at a lower percentage.
Terrific. We lose revenue at the Federal level that we could put into schools, fire, police, education, energy investment, investment in airports, rail, all of those things for which we do not have enough money. But we give it back to the people.
Then he says: They will go out and buy things. They probably will. Some of them may save it. What are they going to buy? Is there a guarantee they are going to go out and buy energy-efficient materials? No. Is there a guarantee they will go out and buy an American car that is a hybrid, that actually does better? No.
They could go out and buy a car made in China or Japan or Germany. That does not help us a lot. Or what if they pay off their credit card bill because it is so big that they need the money to pay the bill? That is just paying for past things already purchased, for services already given. It does not stimulate the economy. Please. And if they do have some money to invest, there is no guarantee they will choose to invest it in the United States of America. They might think it is much better to invest it in some international mutual fund that is investing in a country that has a better economy right now.
So that is a tired old philosophy. That is what we did in the 1980s and many of us opposed it. I voted against that tax cut. You know what. We took the deficit of this country to an unprecedented level, crowding out the private marketplace in terms of borrowing, and we did not invest in the things in which we needed to invest in the country.
Let me share and say to my colleagues that we have a multi-headed crisis we are looking at. This is only one part of the package. I also want to address the question where the Senator from Arizona said this would be a recession way down the road. Well, I disagree with that. We are in a recession now. We have to do everything possible to break out of the reversion.
Now, the Congressional Budget Office has concluded that the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act would ``have an immediate and substantial impact on the U.S. economy, most noticeably in terms of job growth and GDP growth.'' That is the Congressional Budget Office. They say: In our efforts in this bill, our No. 1 priority is to put people back to work. If tomorrow we spend money on a road construction effort so people who go to work at that site will have a job, the people who drive the truck to bring the asphalt and the materials will have a job, the people who supply the materials to those people will suddenly be ordering again. They will pay taxes. They will take home a paycheck over the next year or two and that will begin to change the psychology of what we are looking at here.
You have to spend some money. That is what Franklin Roosevelt did. This situation cries out for it just as powerfully as that did. The CBO report says the recovery package, as reported out of the Senate--I emphasize the Senate, the Senate Appropriations and Finance Committee--would create between 900,000 and 2.4 million new jobs in 2009, this year; between 1.3 and 3.9 million jobs next year; and between 600,000 and 1.9 million jobs in 2011.
These jobs would correspond to an unemployment rate reduction of .5 percent to 1.3 percent in 2009; .6 to 2 percent in 2010; and .3 percent to 1.0 percent in 2011.
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