Posted on 07/23/2010 8:30:02 AM PDT by Congressman Tom McClintock
Debate on HR 4213 Remarks by Representative Tom McClintock House Chamber, Washington, D.C. July 22, 2010
M. Speaker:
Anyone who has experienced firsthand the quiet panic that stalks every waking hour of an unemployed family knows how frightening and debilitating is chronic unemployment. You watch your savings evaporate, you see your children going without the material things their friends enjoy, and you count down the months or even weeks until you won’t be able to make that crucial rent or house payment.
That unemployment check is a lifeline in such times, and I fully appreciate and understand how desperately an unemployed family is looking to the security of getting 99 weeks of such checks.
But I can’t go along with this for a simple reason: The only way out of this nightmare of unemployment for these families is a job.
Speaker Pelosi has said that the most important thing we could do to create jobs is to extend unemployment benefits to 99 weeks, because the unemployed would spend this money and stimulate the economy.
This analysis completely ignores the harsh and glaring fact that before this money can be put back into the economy, it must first be taken out of that same economy. We will have to take $34 billion more out of the economy in order to finance these extra benefits through November. In fact, this is the eighth such extension, totalling $120 billion – meaning over $1,600 from the pocket of an average family of four.
And since we don’t have that money, we’ll have to borrow it from exactly the same capital pool that would otherwise have been loaned to businesses seeking to expand jobs or to homebuyers seeking to re-enter the housing market or to consumers seeking to make consumer purchases – and remember that 2/3 of economic growth depends upon consumer spending.
But that money now won’t be there to loan for jobs and homes and economic growth.
This is $34 billion of relief to the unemployed that they desperately need and that I desperately wish we could responsibly extend. But to do so would also mean $34 billion of fewer jobs. It means perpetuating this never-ending nightmare of unemployment for these families and, indeed, throwing more families into that nightmare.
We’ve been told for several years now – by both Presidents Bush and Obama – that stimulus spending would help the economy. But it hasn’t. And there’s a reason it hasn’t: Government cannot inject a single dollar into the economy that it first hasn’t taken out of that same economy. Government cannot provide a dollar of temporary relief to the unemployed without first removing a dollar of permanent relief for the unemployed – a job.
The talking point du jour from the other side is, “Republicans have no problems giving tax breaks to the wealthy but won’t extend a lifeline to the unemployed.” Once again, they just don’t get it. Milton Friedman once observed that spending IS the effective level of taxation. Spending can only be paid for in two ways – current taxes or future taxes. High taxes and deficits are just the symptoms. The problem is the spending – and this is a spending bill.
On May 9, 1939 – after nearly a decade of unemployment checks and stimulus spending – and with unemployment at 17.2 percent – Franklin Roosevelt’s Secretary of the Treasury, Henry Morgenthau, made this stunning admission during a meeting with Democratic Members of the House Ways and Means Committee. He said: “No gentlemen, 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, and if I am wrong as far as I am concerned, somebody else can have my job. I want to see this country prosperous. 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 ... I say after eight years of this Administration we have just as much unemployment as when we started ... And an enormous debt to boot!"
M. Speaker, let us heed the lessons of history before we totally destroy our economy. Perpetual unemployment checks put these desperate families farther and farther away from the only thing that can truly end their suffering – a real job. That’s a fact nobody wants to face around here – but until we do, chronic unemployment will continue to stalk the land, and God forbid that a few years from now another Democratic Secretary of Treasury will have to make the same admission as Henry Morgenthau did 71 years ago
Good for you Congressman!
My question as someone who is unemployed is why do Republicans suddenly worry about “off-setting” when they never did under Bush?
They passed TARP with no demand for off-setting.
Aid to Haiti earlier this year with no demand for off-setting.
And on and on.......
It simply looks bad, and I say this as a Republican.
The democrats want high unemployment because it leads to dependency on government which in turn leads to control.
It was a sad day when the people of California by-passed Tom Mclintock for governor in favor of Hollywood muscleman Arnold “The Terminator” Schwarzennager.
Where was all the fuss about the internationalista banksters who stole all the bread from the truck?
And why all the energy now to bicker over crumbs?
Time to start eliminating bloated federal agencies that regulate business out of the country and produce nothing but debt.
I liken it taking water out of one end of a swimming pool then dumping it in the other end and expecting the water level to rise.
Dead wrong. Nothing stimulates the economy like creating wealth. MS Pelosi obviously thinks the economy is stimulated by stealing wealth.
A lone voice in Washington who “gets it.”
Here's the video of the same speech.
Thank you, Congressman
Time to dust off the Tom McClintock ping
PING!
It's been a sadder seven years living with the Austrian Trojan Horse.
Thanks for the ping CCG!
.
It’s a good thing Republicans were standing up to Bush in 2003 for extensions. Oh wait, they passed them fine post 9/11.
And it’s a good thing they were such spending averse the whole time they were in total control. Oh....
Give all the bread to the bankers and wall street. The crumbs are now just too much to part with.
This hysteria over $34b is the stupidest thing I’ve seen politicians do for awhile. The GOP needs to get OFF this bandwagon quick becaus look like, and are, such hypocrites on this subject at this point.
Please direct your press releases to a wire service, drop the title, join us as Tom and contribute to advancing conservatism at the grass roots.
This hysteria over $34b is the stupidest thing I’ve seen politicians do for awhile. The GOP needs to get OFF this bandwagon quick becaus look like, and are, such hypocrites on this subject at this point.
I agree. This whole communist takeover was made possible by anti-American RINO policies. My comments below from April are pretty much the same as they have been for the past decade. RINOs have been Stuck-on-Stupid for much longer than that.
Economic Collapse is a Direct Result of the Quest for Free and Cheap Labor
Thursday, April 29, 2010 at 12:24am
The collapse of our economy is a direct result of the quest for free and cheap labor at every level of the payscales. The various bubbles (tech, real estate, interest, and derivitaves bubbles) were attempts to avoid the collapse, and to continue to suck the residual wealth from citizens.
The anti-American Open Borders movement and the massive work visa frauds were intended to prop up the various bubbles long enough for the elitist quislings to maximize their theft of residual wealth from American citizens.
You cannot maintain an economy that is 70% driven by consumer spending, while simultaneously waging economic warfare against those consumers, as the Democrats and RINOs have done for the past two decades or more.
The USA is still importing 140,000 visa workers per month to displace American citizens from their jobs. 5,000 illegal invaders per day (200,000 per month) are still crossing our southern border to displace American citizens from their jobs.
More than 20 million American citizens are currently unemployed and underemployed. New college and high school graduates are unable to get jobs, primarily because more than 40 million foreign workers and illegal invaders are in the USA working under either fraudulent work visas or as illegal employees.
We can put these American citizens back to work by securing the borders against illegal invasion, suspending work visa programs, cutting taxes, cutting our bloated governments at every level, reviving American manufacturing and other production, and drilling and mining for our own energy resources.
To accomplish the above, we all need to recognize and repudiate anti-American politicians, whether from the communist Democrat side or from the gutless, nutless RINO camp. This 2010 primary season, it is imperative to replace RINOs with solid pro-American constitutional conservatives.
This November, it is imperative to vote against the communist Democrats and send them into retirement in record numbers. We must have the numbers in the House and Senate to defund and stop this communist destruction of the USA.
It's not rocket science: Close the damn border, and suspend ALL visa work programs immediately.
"Waaaaa, if we close the borders and suspend ALL work visas, then all our companies will just move overseas." Yada, yada, yada ...
So, let them. And then tariff everything they import back to the USA 100% for the next 40 or 100 years.
"But waaaaaa, Smoot-Hawley, yada, yada, yada ..."
Smoot-Hawley went into effect AFTER the globalists (of that day) had collapsed the economy.
"But waaaaaa, foreign-owned temp service companies supply 437% of slave labor used by companies within the USA, yada, yada, yada ..."
So, tax them at a gazillion percent and drive them back to the mud-hut third world cesspools where they belong.
Submit a bill that would allow American companies to contract directly with American workers, without any threats from the IRS against either the contract workers or against the companies.
This would effectively and immediately eliminate the blood-sucking temp agencies and recruiting firms that have been leeching one third to three forths of income produced by the actual working people in our economy.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.